Fifty-First State (30 page)

‘Thanks, Jeremy,' Gott said.

‘Who's that on the steps?' Jeremy asked, peering.

‘It's a man I called in. I've had your flat swept. I hope you don't mind,' said Gott as he left the car. Jeremy, just starting up to find a parking space said, ‘Swept? For bugs?'

‘That's right. I think he found something. He's looking pleased with himself.'

‘Thanks, Mr Throckmorton,' said Edward Gott, in a discouraged tone.

‘Sorry, guv,' said Throckmorton. ‘You want my guess – it's British security.'

‘That'd be mine, too,' said Gott.

Inside the flat, the security man, a wizened figure with two missing front teeth, held out on his palm ten little red dots. ‘All over the place,' he reported. ‘All your phones, obviously, in the TV, under your bed, in the shower, even inside that nice piano. And something special for the computer. Want them?' he asked, with the air of a dentist offering a patient the teeth he has just extracted. ‘Keep them,' said Gott.

Jeremy appeared in the open doorway. ‘Find anything upstairs?' he asked keenly.

‘Even in your toilet,' said Throckmorton.

‘No!'

‘'Fraid so,' he said. ‘Do you want them?' and he again held out the red dots.

‘Do you know, I don't think I do,' Jeremy said.

Money changed hands.

‘Right-ho, guv,' said Throckmorton to Gott. ‘We'll be back tomorrow to put your infrared beams in. They won't do this again.'

‘The toilet, though,' said Jeremy, still shocked.

Gott said. ‘I'd pretty much expected it. Here am I, spearheading this attempt to overthrow the bill to sell the British airbases to the US military. There's Petherbridge, knowing that if the bill's defeated it will weaken him here, and his paymasters at the White House will lose faith in him. They won't forgive – they'll do all they can to get him out and get somebody more effective in. Small wonder Petherbridge got his security minions to bug my house. Well, tomorrow they'll put in infrared rays across doors and windows and various other tricky bits and pieces. We'll be able to plot the Queen's assassination in here after that, and no one will know.' He was staring unthinkingly at the small grand piano, on which a vase of roses stood. Only one person ever played it – the person he supposed he loved best of all, if you could weigh these things. It'll be fun, Jeremy,' he said. ‘The system will start screaming when a cat walks on a sill or a
pigeon lands. It'll scream when the cleaning lady comes in, probably when we do. Come back here with your girlfriend and before you've kissed, the cops will appear. It all adds to the gaiety. Doesn't bother me.'

He sat down on the piano stool and stared at the grim-faced portrait of his grandfather above the fireplace. ‘Petherbridge can sit in Downing Street watching me pee as much as he likes. You saw his stepfather – you went to his mistreated mother's grave. His wife's a nervous wreck. And he's a traitor. Do you know what my son Jamie's wife says – she's a child psychiatrist? “He picked sides and allied himself with the powerful man, his father, who was beating his mother, but he would have felt that as a betrayal, seen himself as the betrayer.” Not that you need qualifications to guess that.'

But whatever he said, Gott thought of his piano and his daughter who played it and knew he hated Petherbridge as much as he despised him.

Clough Whitney Credit and Commerce, Leadenhall Street, EC1. February 5th, 2016. 11.30 p.m.

Edward Gott took off his black jacket, loosened his black tie and undid the top button of his starched shirt. He got coffee from the kitchenette attached to his office and sat down at the computer. The day had been a long one. The previous one had been even longer.

That was when Gott had flown to his house in Scotland – which was actually his wife's house – landing in the early evening in foggy weather. Perhaps it was the landing that had caused Gott's queasiness. Or, perhaps, the slight nausea was caused by the fact that he had come to tell his wife something he ought to have told her before they married. Not such a bad story, compared with those that other husbands have had to confess to their wives. Many years before, he had fled to the USA leaving a pregnant girlfriend in Britain. His family had helped the young woman, a student, and her daughter, when she was born. At that time Gott had been a student himself – had not even met his wife. He knew this was a common enough tale. The worst part of it was that he had never told his wife, during thirty years of marriage, that he had another child. Or perhaps the worst part was that he was only doing so now because the Prime Minister had threatened to leak the tale to the press.

The couple had dined alone and, after his wife had left him at the table, Gott had had a couple of brandies to steel himself. When he joined her she was sitting at her small desk in the corner of the drawing room, writing a letter. At his request, she joined him at the fire. ‘I have something to tell you – something I should have told you long ago,' he began. She looked at him from the other side of the fireplace and said, ‘This sounds grave, Edward.' Her face had no expression, but he had not expected her to react otherwise – this was a woman who had borne six sons, at home in her own bed, and never uttered a cry. And so he said, ‘I'm afraid this may hurt you. Unfortunately I have made some enemies and they are trying to damage me. I didn't want you to read it in the papers.' And he had told her about his former girlfriend, a fellow student, his graceless disappearance and the birth of a daughter. ‘Margot,' he had said, ‘I am so sorry. I should have told you before we married. I was so afraid that I would lose you.' There were tears in his eyes when he finished speaking and Lady Margot's face had still not altered. After a silence she
said, ‘Yes, you should have told me, Edward. At some time during the years we've spent together.'

‘I was ashamed,' he told her.

‘So you should be.'

‘What do you
think?
' he exclaimed, meaning, of course, that he wanted to know what she felt.

But Lady Margot seldom spoke of her feelings and, when she did, usually in connection with her children. She said only that she very much wished he had seen fit to tell her of this earlier. She wondered that he had so little confidence in her. Gott knew his wife to be a resolute woman, a worthy descendant of Fergus the Redhanded and Donald Skullcracker and whatever other member of her bloodstained family it was who had lit a fire under a cauldron and boiled an enemy alive. Nevertheless, he found this aristocratic restraint unnerving. He heard himself say, ‘At least it's kept me straight over the years – knowing what I did, what I was capable of.'

He was immediately ashamed of this outburst. He did not actually see Lady Margot smile, but just had the impression she was, although her face had not moved. ‘That's a blessing,' she said, and stood up. ‘Well, Edward. You've given me a lot to think about. You'll be here for breakfast?'

And Gott said he would be, but thought it unlikely that this question meant that his wife would be ready for a discussion at breakfast the next day, or at any other time. He drank another brandy and went to bed, but not in the matrimonial bed.

And, as he had expected, Lady Margot did not refer to his revelation the previous evening. Instead, she referred to the kipper he was eating, the rebuilding of the north wall of the estate and a very nasty quarrel over a will in the family of one of their daughters-in-law.

It was only after taking off in the helicopter in even thicker fog—‘Clearer south of the Border' the pilot said – that, somewhere over Birmingham, it dawned on Lord Gott that his wife almost certainly knew the story of the woman and the child. He was not sure why he thought this. It might have been that, having been married to Lady Margot for thirty years, her reactions told him. She had not been deceitful enough to pretend to be shocked or surprised, or untruthful enough to say that she was. Equally, she had not let him off the hook by telling him she already knew about the woman and her child, because that would have made things easier for him, and she wanted to punish him as, he had to admit, he fully deserved.

Who had told her? One of his sons, who knew all about their half-sister and met her from time to time? On balance, he thought not. So who else would have told her? And suddenly he knew exactly who had
told Lady Margot about his illegitimate child. It had been his mother. Perhaps even his father? He discarded the thought – no, it would have been his mother. And that meant, since Gott's mother had been dead for twenty years, his wife had known his sordid little secret for at least twenty years, perhaps longer. She had known it while she was bearing and rearing at least some, perhaps all, of their sons. Gott was startled. He thought of himself as a clever and competent man but it seemed he had not known what was going on under his nose. His wife and his mother had deceived him. Of course, his mother had thought it right to let his wife know. Of course, Lady Margot had been too well-mannered to bring it up. That would have been against her code. But she would – who would not – have wanted him to tell her the truth. And he had not.

Gott was sobered. And he was not proud of the fact that he also felt relieved. At least, he thought, if his wife had known the story for so long, she was not going to divorce him now. Sadder, wiser and considerably less anxious, Gott landed in London and began to go about his other business.

He had received a surprise invitation from the French Embassy so he rang a senior official at the Foreign Office, to be offered, not just an informative chat but a meeting with a bright young man from the European department.

At lunchtime he arrived in a Whitehall pub to find Wilkes, a weary-looking man in his thirties, sitting in front of a pint and a sandwich he had barely touched.

‘Another?' Gott glanced at Wilkes' near-empty glass.

‘If only,' Wilkes said sadly. ‘I've got to keep a clear head. It'll be FO sandwiches and coffee into the small hours again, I imagine.' Gott barely knew Wilkes and saw in him that slightly camp Old Etonian manner, which, as a Scot and outside this exclusive club, he mistrusted.

‘I hear you've got a new daughter,' Gott said. ‘Congratulations.'

‘Not that I see much of her,' Wilkes said. ‘My wife could do with me at night, too.'

‘Get a nanny,' said Gott, unsympathetically.

‘We had one, but she's gone back to Croatia. Scared,' said Wilkes.

‘That makes you think,' Gott said. ‘Well, not to waste your time – I'd appreciate your advice. Four days ago – short notice, I thought – an invitation comes to me from the French Ambassador to a small, informal dinner at the Embassy. Not a big, public affair, you see, and I don't know anyone at the Embassy – or not on that basis.'

Wilkes nodded.

‘In short, I was surprised. I accepted on the principle that the secret of life is being there. Now I want to know why you think I might have been invited – is there anything I ought to know – is there anything I know that I shouldn't say?'

‘Are you sure there isn't anything involving the bank?'

‘I've tried to find that kind of connection. There isn't one,' said Gott. ‘Now I'm going to sit down at a dinner table with a lot of Frenchmen so sharp they'll cut themselves and I don't know the agenda. There must be one.'

‘They're pretty upset about this rapprochement with the US,' Wilkes said.

‘Rapprochement. We've been up their arses since 1945. But what's that got to do with the price of fish?' said Gott, who, confronted by someone like Wilkes, could not resist coarsening his tone.

Wilkes did not flinch. He said, reluctantly, ‘I don't suppose there's any harm in telling you. There's a lot of EU talk about imposing sanctions on Britain if we don't stop aiding and abetting the US. And they're particularly worried about a reinvasion of Iraq. The French are the chief instigators, because of their traditional feeling that they're entitled to mess about in Middle East politics but no one else is. Nevertheless, other countries are supportive. It would be hard to think of any who positively oppose the French stance.'

Gott had not expected this. ‘Sanctions? They'll never go through with it.'

Wilkes said, ‘Obviously, they've been worried for years about this closeness between Britain and the US. The proposed sale of the bases has exacerbated it. And their clever thinkers have been thinking ahead, imagining an ever-closer relationship with the US, economic as well as military. My guess is your invitation comes from the fact that you're about to begin an assault on the sale of the bases. If what I hear is true.'

He looked at Gott enquiringly. Gott didn't say anything.

‘Exactly how far are you going with this?' Wilkes enquired.

The Foreign Office was trying to work out whether he was a thorn in the flesh or a serious problem. The FO believed first and foremost in stability. Not change, not improvement, whatever that might be, just stability. Put the whole of the FO in hell and they'd start a dialogue with Satan, aimed at achieving greater stability in the Underworld. Which was probably why they didn't trust or respect the creators of instability – politicians—and let it show, in their Etonian way.

‘I'm planning to oppose the third reading and stop the sale of the bases,' Gott said, steadily. ‘I think you know that.'

‘Then the French and their allies in Europe will see you as an ally, of a sort. My enemy's enemies are my friends. I should watch your step. They may hope you'll win the vote and then go further, try to get Parliament to vote to take the bases back under British control. We're supposed to be contributing to the EU Defence Force.'

There was a silent question here but Gott did not take the bait. ‘What will they want?'

‘Information about your plans I should think. They won't press you. This will be to start a relationship with you which might prove helpful later. That's my guess. As I say, be careful.'