Fifty-First State (14 page)

‘Yes,' Jeremy said, producing, for form's sake, a notepad from his pocket. He wasn't sure how to describe Petherbridge, since Wallace had called him his son. Son? Stepson? What?

He asked, ‘What about Alan Petherbridge as a boy?'

‘Away at school,' Wallace told him.

‘In the holidays,' suggested Jeremy.

‘Whining little mother's boy – nose in a book – that's what he was,' declared the old man. ‘Take me to the lavatory – toilet, as they call it here.'

Jeremy flinched. ‘I'll get a nurse.'

‘You won't find one. If you do it won't be a proper nurse. Just a little foreigner who can't speak English. Just wheel me there, will you?'

Jeremy took a deep breath, grasped the handles of the wheelchair and pushed in the direction of Wallace's distorted, pointing hand. He desperately wanted to find a nurse to help him in a task he did not fancy, and at the same time feared that if he did he would be questioned and thrown out. They passed the group of TV watchers, left the room and, Wallace still pointing the way, turned into a small room at the back of the hall. He was relieved to see that the bathroom was large – there was ample room for the wheelchair – and the toilet had been adapted for wheelchair users. He pushed the wheelchair over to the lavatory.

‘Pull me up,' commanded Wallace.

‘Wouldn't it be easier to sit?' said Jeremy.

‘I'm not a girl. Pull me up out of this thing.'

Jeremy was nervous. He felt fairly sure Wallace was not allowed to use the lavatory alone, and for good reasons, and that with a nurse in attendance he would have been made to sit on the toilet to pee. What were the penalties for posing as a journalist in a retirement home and then causing death or injury to a patient? He advanced the wheelchair nearer to the base of the toilet and, standing to one side, pulled Wallace up and out of the wheelchair in what seemed to him to be an impossible manoeuvre. He had been unable to find the brake of the wheelchair so now had to take the whole weight of the man, with one foot wedged behind the rear wheel. With an effort, he got Wallace standing on shaky legs in front of the commode. One distorted hand was on the steel handle beside it. His face contorted with the effort, or perhaps the pain he was in, Wallace grunted, ‘Flies,' looking down.

Silently Jeremy implored, ‘Oh, God. God help me,' and with his free hand reached across Wallace's body and managed to unzip his flies. Jeremy had calculated, with the rapidity of panic, that Wallace was not a man who would allow another man to fiddle about with his penis. He was right. Wallace clumsily produced his organ and pointed it at the toilet bowl while Jeremy, sweating, supported him. A thin stream of urine went into the bowl. ‘That's better,' Wallace said with stagey relief. He put his penis back inside his pants, with a suppressed groan. Jeremy zipped his trouser flies, dreading the moment when, somehow, he would have to ease Wallace down again into the wheelchair.

As he was preparing to do this, Wallace began to speak in the monotonous voice of a solitary man who has spent many painful hours rehearsing his monologue in the dark of night. ‘Broke. Not a penny to my name. I'm a dependent relative. Dependent on that little shit, the weakling. I'd have had it, all of it, if that stupid bitch's husband hadn't left his money to her weak son. Probably thought she'd make a mess of it, which she
would have done. But she didn't tell me, did she, till the ring was on her finger. Hooked – she hooked me – then she told me: ‘I didn't think it mattered'—stupid woman, stupid, stupid woman. Then this arthritis. Now I'm in hell. Hell – a prisoner in torment.'

Jeremy, much shaken and still afraid of losing his balance and allowing Wallace to fall, said, ‘Mr Wallace—' and was interrupted by a woman's voice saying angrily, ‘What's going on in here?' He turned sufficiently to see in the doorway a large woman in nurse's uniform, not one of the small foreigners so loathed by Wallace but a Yorkshirewoman. He was infinitely relieved. He did not care if she had him arrested later, as long as she helped him now. She advanced, pushed down the brake on the wheelchair, pushed Jeremy aside as she took Wallace under the armpit and snapped at him, ‘Let go of that handle.' Wallace released his grip and she deftly got him back in the chair, then turned on Jeremy, ‘Who are you? Don't you know what you just did was criminally dangerous?' Then she looked down at Wallace and said, ‘As for you, you silly old man – words fail me.'

Jeremy said, ‘My name is Jeremy Saunders. I'm a journalist working for—'

‘My arse,' Wallace interrupted.

‘Keep that filthy tongue in your head, Mr Wallace,' the nurse told him.

‘If he's a journalist I'm the Mayor of Scarborough!'

‘Did you talk to anybody before you visited Mr Wallace?' she demanded.

Jeremy said, ‘There wasn't anybody…'

‘What paper?'

‘Paper?' he said. ‘The
Observer.
'

‘Not too sure about it, is he?' Wallace said malignantly.

‘Well – I'm reporting you straight to your editor. Feel lucky I don't take this to the Press Council.'

Bloody hell, thought Jeremy. Gott – you got me into this. You'd better bloody well get me out.

‘And now you'll leave,' she said. ‘Now. Straight away.' She looked down at Wallace again. ‘And as for you, you're going to your room, to bed.' She turned back to Jeremy. ‘Are you still standing there? Do you want to wait while I call the police?'

With Wallace back in the chair, Jeremy began to recover his nerve. He said to the nurse, ‘Don't be ridiculous. This isn't a police matter.'

‘I think you might find it is,' she said. ‘Mr Alan Petherbridge, who'll most likely be the Prime Minister of this country shortly, has given strict instructions. Visitors to Mr Wallace here have to go through his office. If you want to take on a former Home Secretary and future Prime Minister, then be my guest. I'd advise you to clear out, fast as you like.'

Jeremy got out. On the road to Gloucestershire, where he knew he
would find a friendly bed, at his cousin's, the cousin with whom he was in love, he could still hear Wallace's voice echoing round the car. ‘I'm in hell. A prisoner in torment.' He put a CD in the player, then remembered to turn off his recorder.

He played the tape over to Charlotte in her little sitting room above the post office she kept. Charlotte was shaken. ‘How awful,' she said. ‘That stinks. Let's get a drink and go and lie down under the tree.' They went downstairs to the little cluttered garden behind the post office, Charlotte in her nightdress and Jeremy in a T-shirt and boxers. They lay down under the old gnarled apple tree.

‘That poor woman,' said Charlotte.

Jeremy, thinking of the neglected grave in the churchyard at Kirkby Rodney, said, ‘Yes. Poor woman.'

Villa Contadini, Tuscany, Italy. August 28th, 2015. 8 p.m.

A man and a woman sat on the immaculate terrace of a Tuscan hillside villa, looking west over the swelling hills, the red roofs and cupolas, the peaceful landscape of houses, fields and groves. Ahead of them the sun was going down, turning the sky from blue to indigo.

‘I was so close,' said the President of the United States, ‘I thought I'd come on by.' She had just had an audience with the Pope at the Castel Gandolfo.

Security men stood against the sides of the terrace. There would be more in the house and some in the garden below. ‘You're very welcome, ma'am,' said Ray Hollander easily. He was dressed in holiday clothes, chinos, an open-necked shirt, loafers worn without socks. The President was still wearing the blue suit in which she'd met the Pontiff.

‘I guess I just wanted to make sure we're up to speed with this British election we've been bounced into.'

‘Well, that gave us all a shock. But I think we have everything under control. Petherbridge is a very quick and able man and that's helped a lot.'

‘I hope this money isn't going to waste,' said the President.

‘We all hope that.'

‘Because when it's gone, it's gone.'

‘That's understood. But our donors are businessmen. Their attitude is pretty much that they've assessed the situation, they're investing because they judge there are good opportunities there and if, for some reason, the investment doesn't pay off then they won't like it but they'll accept it as one of the normal hazards of doing business.'

This explanation did not reassure the President. Ray Hollander had known it would not. Many of the backers he had approached for funds had been the President's election funders and if they lost their money they would be less generous when the President stood again.

‘It'll be OK,' he told her. ‘Petherbridge has been most cooperative. He's drawing up a list of available sites for development.'

‘What about the Transatlantic Trade Agreement?' the President asked sharply.

‘That's OK, too. He's worked it out with the Treasury.'

‘Can he get it through?'

‘He says so.'

‘Does he know what will happen to him if he lets us down?'

It was growing darker. The President's questioning, suggesting doubts about how he was handling the business he had undertaken, were beginning to affect him. He shouted for the terrace lights to be turned on. A soft glow illuminated the old stones, the plants in terracotta pots and the face of his President. Her face, over not so many years, had ceased to be conventionally attractive, as it had once been; it was now a face of stone, all planes and hollows. The illumination threw a charming light over everything, but emphasized the darkening of the land below them, and the hillsides all around.

‘It's all in place. It will work,' he told her. She expected to hear nothing less but she wouldn't believe it. Nor did he. Not until the results came in. He was conscious of the fact that he had never undertaken such a difficult and risky task. If it failed, if the story came out, he was a ruined man. There would be a Senate investigation, probably a trial. He could face a jail sentence. The President could and would deny knowledge. But if it worked he would be very rich and very powerful – unassailable, too. As if she knew what she had done, the President stood. She banged him between the shoulders with a hand which had recently been in that of the Pope. ‘I know you can do it, Ray,' she told him.

‘Thank you, ma'am,' he said, standing up.

‘We're just doing what Americans do,' she said cheerfully.

‘We're just doing what the English did before,' he added, trying to echo her tone.

‘Sure – they're the guys that showed us how,' she said, and turning on her heel left the terrace, with her guards following.

When Hollander had seen her off he returned to the terrace and sat down, heavily. Lord Haver of Blindon, the twentieth most wealthy man in Great Britain, who had tactfully moved to a room at the front of the house before the President arrived, now came on to the terrace in his wheelchair, pushed by his sturdy manservant.

‘Time for a drink?' he suggested.

‘Good idea. Then dinner,' said Ray Hollander.

‘Don't worry, Ray,' said Haver. ‘I've seen the future and it looks very, very good.'

At Castel Gandolfo, the Italian Pope, a man who had grown up with and was now ever-surrounded by the relics of a mighty empire, which had grown great, then fallen, over two thousand years ago, turned to his chaplain, Monsignor Rossato and said, ‘They're finished.'

Sugden's, Fox Square, London SW1. September 6th, 2015. 10 p.m.

Downstairs, the restaurant was half-full and demanding attention and upstairs William Frith, in his dinner jacket, was having a row with his boss. William had just asked three diners – an MP, his wife and their guest, the CEO of an important engineering firm – to leave the restaurant. ‘Norton was drunk and offensive,' he was saying. ‘He was swearing loudly and disturbing the dining room. He was out of control. What did you expect me to do, Jack? I thought he was working up a head of steam to hit somebody. I had no choice…'

‘You've handled worse, William,' Jack Prentiss said in an even tone. Jack was on the landing of his flat above the restaurant. He wore a purple jacket and had a well-kept hand on a banister. William shot him an angry look. ‘Face it, William,' Prentiss went on. ‘You've been off your game for weeks. This isn't the first fuck-up. There was that complaint about slow service from Lady Jethro, that mess about the laundry, and that fight in the kitchen – now you're hustling a drunk, protesting MP out of the dining room in full view.'

‘So the fucking chefs get into an argument, a woman whose husband left her for a bloke decides to restore her self-esteem in a restaurant, a drunk MP makes a scene… Shit, Jack, how much of this am I supposed to take?'

‘That's enough, William,' Jack Prentiss interrupted. ‘Let's not turn a drama into a crisis. You know I value you but all the arguments and explanations in the world don't change the fact that things are wobbling. Situations you'd once have nipped in the bud go south. I'm on your side – but it can't go on.'

William, enraged, heard him out, then, wordlessly, turned and went downstairs. He went into the staff toilets and splashed water on his face. He washed his hands. He fumed. All very well for Jack Prentiss to sit upstairs at Sugden's, only leaving to attend some auction of old china or an early music concert at a church in Piccadilly. All very well never to soil your lily-white hands, while downstairs the staff fought and the customers drank; then, the minute there was a problem, call him up to the flat like a naughty schoolboy. Jack was a bastard, providing shit pay and lousy hours – for two pins he'd walk straight out. He forced himself to take a few deep breaths and leaned against the wall. Restaurants were
closing, because, he understood, the price of oil was so high now. Other jobs were few and far between. He couldn't walk out now and stick Lucy with the bills and the mortgage.