Fifty-First State (25 page)

‘What's going on?' Grace asked.

‘Marie's upset,' William said. ‘I've called a doctor.'

‘Good,' said Grace.

‘She's in a bad way,'William mumbled. Tears were rolling down Marie's face. Her mouth was slack. Her round face seemed to have lost all form, as if it had melted.

As soon as William put the phone down Joe said, ‘Do you know – I don't think we need the doctor any more, William. Marie's out of the fugue state – that's the dangerous thing – why don't I ring back and cancel him. I'll ring Lucy and ask her—'

‘For Christ's sake, Joe, are you mad?' William exclaimed. ‘She's in the middle of an emergency. There are injured people everywhere!'

The habit of keeping his wife safe from grim reality was so ingrained in Joe that he began to shake his head at William, indicating that he should watch his words.

William cried desperately, ‘Joe – I'm still worried about Lucy. You'd think she was safe enough as a nurse, in a hospital, but how do we know? There are nutters out there. Suppose they picked up one of the bombers with the other casualties. Suppose there's someone in that hospital with a bomb strapped to them. I want to go there and grab Lucy and bring her out, if you really want to know. This is a fucking crisis, Joe, and Marie needs an injection so don't go near the fucking phone or I won't answer for myself.'

When the phone rang again it was Jack Prentiss. ‘William, I hate to ask you, but can you come in? There's no sign of Paul, his phone's not answering, and Jean-Pierre's just called to say he's not coming to work, the city's too dangerous. I've got Sally waiting at table and I'm sous-chefing myself.' But William refused. He was too anxious about Lucy. And he knew that if he left Joe would immediately ring and cancel the doctor's visit. Joe did ring Lucy and William did not try to stop him.
When she finally came to the phone what she said plainly disconcerted her father. He put the phone down, glanced at Marie, sobbing quietly on the sofa, at William sitting on a hard chair in the kitchen doorway as if to be as far from the scene as possible, and went back to sit with his wife.

There was complete silence for half an hour, broken only by the distant wail of emergency vehicles. Joe said, ‘Lucy says, when the doctor comes, can you ring her? She'll get here, if she can.'

William, on his chair, found it an effort to stay awake. He'd been close to a bombing, he'd seen the injured and the dazed, his wife was at the hospital and he was stuck, impotently, in a silent flat with a madwoman and her husband who had become almost as mad as she was over the years. His mind had gone on strike.

An hour later, the doorbell rang and the doctor came in. William caught Lucy on a break and she said she had a police car lined up to bring her home. The doctor, a tired Sri Lankan, talked to Marie, who had spoken ramblingly of her childhood, her desire for the world to be a better place and her efforts to look after her husband and child as they should be looked after. ‘The world is so lovely,' she had said. ‘The world is like heaven. And my Joe and my Lucy are like angels.' The doctor was trying to get a history of Marie's mental illness from Joe when Lucy came in, still in uniform, with a bloodstain down the front of her apron. To William this indicated that Lucy meant business. Ordinarily she would rather have appeared naked than shown her mother a patient's blood on her clothes.

She took the doctor into the bedroom for a conversation. When they came out the doctor spoke to Marie, now hunched on the sofa like a punished child, ‘Mrs Sutcliffe. I think it would help you to enter a hospital for assessment, and a little rest. Your daughter agrees.' And to William's astonishment Marie said meekly, ‘If you and Lucy think it's best, doctor.'

Lucy went back to her own hospital, while William and Joe took the docile Marie to St Mary's with her bag.

The internal phone rang again at the reception desk and small Miss Bonner told the weary William, ‘Coffee, a bottle of gin, and tonic water for the Green Room.'

There were nine people squashed in the Green Room, some sitting round a table in the middle, others in easy chairs. Tired lace curtains hung at the window and, beside them but not drawn, tired green and red brocade curtains. There were lamps with cream parchment shades burning in corners of the room. A dim light filtered in from Fox Square. Joshua, leaning on the table, was reminded of having to help his mother clear out her Uncle Charlie's house in the faded West End mews house he had lived in. Not for the first time he pondered about how comfortable the powerful of Britain appeared to be in surroundings redolent of
the past – old houses, old colleges like those at Oxford and Cambridge, shabby old furniture, anything somehow linking them with the past. Beside him sat his friend, Douglas Clare, and beside Douglas at the table were two other dissident Conservative MPs, members of the awkward squad, the Usual Suspects – old Jacob Whittington and the younger, fatter Emma Pym who had the air, as someone had said, of a magistrate about to order you to be transported for twenty years to Van Diemen's land. The other leaders of Gott's cadre of dissidents, Jenny Appleby and Victor Treadwell, were away holding meetings. Lord Gott, Graham Barnsbury and Lady Jenner were also there. The seven politicians were, effectively, the hosts.

The guests, and the reason for the meeting, were Rod Field, editor of the country's most-read broadsheet, and Amelia Strange, Head of BBC news. Gott, after his dark night of the soul on the road back from Berkshire, had decided not just to rally his troops at Sugden's, but to go public. It was a risky strategy. Amelia Strange was coldly brainy and Rod Field was, it was generally held, a nasty wicked man, exceeded only in nasty wickedness by his employer, the owner of the paper, Helmut Niemeyer. But, as Gott had said, with the Prime Minister under pressure from Washington to join in the invasion of Iraq, and the British public against it, now was the time to press home the opposition to the Ministry of Defence Lands Sale Bill, which would hand the airbases over to the US government.

Gott and Barnsbury sat at the head of the table. Lady Jenner and Amelia Strange were in easy chairs, facing the table. Gott stood up, banged a fork on his glass, and, when he had silence, immediately sat down again. ‘I've no need to introduce most of you to Joshua Crane, a young – youngish—MP, a promising man with a big public profile and a reputation for honesty and straight speaking. Nor do I need to say very much about Jacob Whittington and Emma Pym, nor about Jenny Appleby and Victor Treadwell, who unfortunately can't be here tonight. They're MPs, they're honest, they're attractive, they have high public profiles and they're spearheading the opposition to the third reading of the Ministry of Defence Lands Sale Bill, scheduled, I've just heard, for February the eleventh. Unseemly haste – are we surprised? I can tell you we have promises of seventy votes in opposition and I think there may be more from those who don't want to declare themselves but will in the end vote against, or at least abstain. There will be a public debate at Westminster Hall a week hence in the name of the coalition against the bill. We have, of course, the support of the Liberal Democrats. I, the distinguished Lady Jenner, the effective Graham Barnsbury and everyone else here, will answer any questions you have to put.'

‘Edward,' said Amelia Strange, leaning forward in her chair, ‘are you sure the third reading has been scheduled?'

‘Quite sure,' said Gott.

Rod Field, who was sitting on a hard chair beside the window, looking as if he was going to get up and go away at any moment, said, ‘The important question is what Carl Chatterton's going to do. You have the Lib Dems, you have your well-organized dissidents, Lord Gott, but unless the Labour Party votes with you, and there's no sign they will, all you might have done is stir up a revolt in your own party. Chaos for nothing. So what will Labour do?'

‘I don't know any more than you do – or Carl Chatterton does,' Gott told him staunchly. ‘I believe the pressure from the Labour voters in the country will make Chatterton oppose the bill.' Field raised his pointed eyebrows. ‘Yes?' he said.

‘The latest MORI poll says that seventy-five per cent of Labour supporters are against the sell-off,' Joshua said. ‘It'll be published the day after tomorrow.'

‘You don't need to tell me,' said Field.

‘Then you'll see Chatterton has every reason to vote against the bill.'

‘At worst he'll allow a free vote,' Amelia Strange said confidently. ‘Actually, Edward, I wondered if, as the party treasurer, you have any comment to make about the increasingly loud rumours about the party funding for the last election.'

‘I'll be making a statement about that closer to the time,' Gott said.

‘What do you mean?' Field asked.

‘What I say – I'll make a statement within weeks.'

‘Come on,' demanded Field.

Amelia Strange's phone rang. She would not have been interrupted except in an emergency. Everyone in the room listened. ‘My God,' she said. Then Field's phone rang, and Douglas Clare's. And then Gott's.

They all had the same news. A gang of unidentified, armed men had taken over the base at Hamscott Common. A US serviceman had been killed and another injured. The base was in darkness.

Amelia Strange and Rod Field left immediately. The caucus remained.

Gott broke the silence. ‘Well – that's our story on radio and in the press fucked.'

He was only saying what everyone else in the room was thinking.

19 Claremont Road, Whitechapel, London E1. January 25th, 2016. 8 p.m.

Julia accepted another cup of tea from Mrs Suleima Zulani, who then retreated to the kitchen, where she was sitting with her sister. Julia and her local Party Chairman sat in easy chairs, part of a comfortable suite, in the Zulanis' immaculate living room. At the back of the room, visible to Julia from her chair, young Aziz sat at the table, looking at a page of the textbook in front of him, and following the conversation while pretending not to. Intermittently he shot an unfriendly glance at Julia. Opposite him at the table his sister, a science student, was working at her books.

Six men and a woman, all Muslims, had been taken during the massive sweep following the TV Centre bombing. And Julia had only discovered the whereabouts of one of the three young detainees arrested at Christmas. Nine of her constituents were missing and she, their elected representative, could not find them. The police, under the new provisions of the Civil Contingency Act, had no obligation to give her or their families any information. She had a civil rights lawyer involved, and a second lawyer who specialized in European law. But all civil liberties organizations were working at full stretch now and lawyers for the disappeared were being blocked, obviously as a result of orders from high up in the chain of command.

‘I and several others have asked for a personal meeting with the Home Secretary. He'll see us on the first of February,' she reported. ‘A lot of questions have been put down—'

Zulfeikar's face told her that he had little hope of a good outcome from the meeting, or the Parliamentary questions. ‘These actions are legal,' he told her. ‘The only questions will be about whether the powers are being used rightly. And while that goes on these men will be in custody, with the US authorities using pressure to get them extradited to the US. It is the law that is wrong. The law of the land. The law I have obeyed all my life. There is not even any evidence that this bombing was carried out by Muslims. Those who did it have not been found. What can we do, Mrs Baskerville? These young men who see their friends and their brothers pulled off the street in police round-ups will not stay quiet for ever.'

‘I understand, Mr Zulani. You know I do. I will keep on working. And I hope we can overturn this bill about selling the bases to the Americans.
That would send a signal to everybody that we aren't passive about US policy.'

‘I agree,' said Zulfeikar, ‘but what are we going to do about what's happening on our streets?'

‘Keep on trying,' Julia said. It was all she could say but in her heart she knew both she and Zulfeikar Zulani were likely to be turned out by a local party unable to bear the slow, shaky and often ineffective operation of the system any longer. The appeals not heard, the peaceful demonstrations ignored, the admonishments from Europe overlooked and mocked.

‘One law is bigger than ours now,' said Mr Zulani. ‘American law. That is what we all must obey.'

‘What are people thinking?'

‘Some of us want to go home. Some are going. Some want separate communities – schools, hospital, everything.'

‘Ghettoes,' Julia said.

‘A name means nothing.'

‘And illegal action?' she prompted.

‘Of course,' said Zulfeikar. Then his phone rang. His son answered it. There was a long conversation to which Zulfeikar listened. His wife opened the kitchen door and she and her sister came into the room and stood in the doorway, the beginnings of alarm on their faces. Aziz was talking in a torrent, Zulfeikar himself had risen and was putting out his hand for the phone, which his son would not relinquish.

Finally he shouted something angry and at that point the young man slammed the phone back in its cradle, stood up and began to talk aggressively at his father. His aunt let out a soft cry, his mother put her hand to her mouth. Zulfeikar's daughter remained perfectly still, watching. Julia, believing there might be some serious family issue involved, stood up to leave. Zulfeikar did not try to prevent her.

He said coldly, ‘You should know. A group of men has invaded the Hamscott Common base. They have taken the soldiers at the base prisoner.'

‘Who are they? Do they want something – what is it?' she asked.

‘That is not clear,' said Zulfeikar. Julia thought, judging by young Aziz's reaction, more was clear than her Party Chairman was ready to tell her.