Fifty-First State (40 page)

Gott (as I suppose I will go on calling him in this narrative) had evaporated to the USA without even going back to Scotland to say hello to his parents. Elspeth knew there was something wrong, called him and badgered the truth out of him. She gave him hell, got on a train immediately, went to my parents and got my address from them without telling them what was going on.

She turned up at the flat without warning and told me, ‘It's late but not too late for an abortion. But if you want to have the child, we'll help. But you'd better find another course to follow. Edward can't help you financially and nor, alas, can we. So if you plan to rear a child alone, you'd
better get a degree in something that will help you earn a living.' Bang went the dream of digging the ruins of Babylon (not too much of them left now in everyday Baghdad, I suppose) but Elspeth somehow managed to give me back my cocky sense of being able to do anything I put my mind to. I got myself on to a law course. Elspeth and Jack Gott and my parents helped with my daughter, Chloe, and gradually, over time, Gott and I came together as friends – and parents of course. Gott paid what he could – very little as he established his career and then more as he was able to do so. But it was doughty Elspeth and her no-less doughty husband who played the biggest part in pulling us, Chloe and me, through.

Gott can be very stupid for such a clever man, but then, cleverness of that kind doesn't guarantee being sensible. So, of course, he never found the right time to tell his wife. His six sons and their four wives agreed to keep his secret and, miraculously, did so. But I'm not surprised he thinks Elspeth told his wife early on about me and Chloe. That would have been typical of Elspeth Gott. All his ‘secret' did was give Petherbridge leverage over him, with his threats to leak the story to the papers; it also marked the moment when Gott began to hate him.

So I, and Chloe of course, went to the party to celebrate his birthday. The restaurant was more than half full. I spotted a party of MPs and a famous society girl with an American general. There was a TV journalist in a corner with a soap star and at another table, four men I felt fairly sure were CIA and Secret Service. I knew enough by now to recognize them. At another table was a group of three men with the look of successful drug dealers. Drug dealers were thriving. Their livelihoods had always depended on smuggling. They knew the dodges and they knew the routes. I even had a client who had given up dealing in drugs and started bringing in petrol. He'd been caught coming up from the south coast in, believe it or not, a stolen petrol tanker. He was very indignant. His view was that he'd given up the drugs trade to deal in a legal commodity – and now, for the first time, he'd been arrested.

Everyone in the restaurant looked as if they were doing all right. I felt uneasy about sitting among these powerful, wealthy people. They weren't suffering; they were the kind who never will. But the rest of us were. My husband Sam and I were buying vitamin pills with our own money to hand out to his patients and their children. I learned there and then that however bad things are there are always smart, expensive restaurants and people with the money to enjoy them.

The restaurant's owner, Jack Prentiss, was in charge, working with the manager, the old man who must have been William Frith's predecessor, now called back into service. The Miss Bonners had gone, retired it was said, and in their place were some delightful, glossy-haired, straight-toothed young American women, generally believed to be spies. I had
spoken several times to Harry but I'd never actually met him. He was grey-faced and worn-looking. Running a restaurant in these hard times must have been no joke. Presumably this was another area where the drug-dealers – or former drug-dealers – came in. On the supply side.

Harry came over, wished Gott a happy birthday, and introductions were made. Hearing my name, he asked me if I'd had any news about William. I said that Lucy had sent me a postcard about a fortnight ago.

‘He's getting better,' I told Harry. ‘And thanks for what you did.'

‘Thanks for what
you
did,' he replied. But I was never sure what I'd done or not done in that awful affair. And I was still haunted by the fate of Jemal.

‘Tell William if he ever comes back he can have his job back.'

‘I don't think they'll ever come back,' I told Harry.

‘Never say never,' he said, and wishing Gott happy birthday again he went off.

‘You know William Frith?' said Thomas Wickham, the man sitting next to me. He looked a little surprised. I am a woman in my fifties and had been thickening round the waist until the food shortages kicked in; I wash my hair with whatever I can get – my hands are rough because the hot water is normally cold. I look tired. I don't look important. He was probably wondering why I was there at all. I knew, though, that Wickham was a high up at the Ministry of Fear, as we learnt to call the Home Office. A lot of people – and I'm one of them – wouldn't have invited him to any party, let alone their birthday party, but he and Gott had grown up together and perhaps that was the reason. I suppose, like many a functionary before him, he was a good husband and kind to his dog. He may even have been one of the good guys, working within the system to mitigate its horrors. But, alas, how quickly these days one of the good guys can become one of the bad guys. I couldn't help wondering what he'd been doing that afternoon – signing an extradition order, viewing video tapes made inside some unsuspecting person's house, assessing evidence obtained by torture or sending someone to appear before the three judges who preside over the more sensitive of our trials these days. And such judges. Well, I didn't know Wickham but I had to assume he and I were natural enemies. He either hadn't caught my name when we were introduced or hadn't made the connection when he heard it. I was burning with rage. I was remembering the skeletal William Frith, weeping outside Belmarsh, sitting mute on the verandah of his parents' house in Spain for three months.

OK, no doubt a few years ago Gott's old friend, Thomas Wickham, was going quietly about his business at the Home Office, trying to make ID cards work efficiently or writing a paper on the rehabilitation of offenders in prison. But now he was probably covering up torture in the same prisons and arming the Auxiliary Police. He had ended up as part
of the civil wing of an oppressive government and I had ended up fighting it. Yet if you'd asked either of us two years before whether that was what we wanted, we would both, I'm sure, have said no. That is what decisions by the powerful and unrestrained really mean – that ordinary people are swept away by the currents and end up where they don't want to be. But however easy it was to go along with orders from on high, and however hard it might have been to refuse, there was Amina Sharif, for example, who had given birth to a dead baby on the floor of a cell while in police custody after the whole family were scooped up in a police raid – and Nasruddin Faisal whose only crime appeared to be that he was a sixteen-year-old down by the canal on a bike at one thirty in the morning. But whatever he'd been doing there, no one knew where he was now, or if he was dead or alive.

John Stafford is still fighting for his soldiers who, along with Jemal and the other men captured after Hamscott Common, have disappeared into the American justice system without trace. Lawyers, friends and family are struggling to get them back, but the fight is hard and the outcome uncertain.

The man I was talking to, Thomas Wickham, was part of all that. Just another example of how life distorts under occupation.

So, ‘You know William Frith?' he asked.

I wasn't going to cause a problem at Gott's birthday party. ‘My father runs a small hotel in the small town where William Frith's parents live,' I said carefully. ‘William and his wife went over there when he was released from prison.' My father was still hoping William would go in with him and help him expand the hotel, but he told me he didn't think that would happen soon, if at all. Even now, William was fragile. I never found out exactly what they did to him in prison. Perhaps Lucy knew.

‘Father in Spain,' said Wickham alertly. ‘So I suppose you can get over there from time to time.'

Because of the shortage of diesel fuel, foreign travel was confined to business people and, on compassionate grounds, to those with relatives abroad. Medical certificates or letters from religious leaders were required for these trips – astonishing, my husband said, how many people he got in his surgery with urgent family reasons for visiting relatives in Australia, Grenada or Italy. Always somewhere warm, Sam said. Never have so many relatives abroad suffered so many serious illnesses and mental breakdowns.

I agreed with Wickham that my position was useful although actually I was luckier than that. If I wanted to go to Spain I wrote to the Home Office and said I had to see my client, William Frith; a fiction, really, for he no longer needed representation. They never dared refuse me.

Looking at the menu the waiter had handed me, I was excited. Soup
(unspecified) it said. Cod with herb sauce. Ragout of lamb. Sorbet. Four courses! And, triumphantly at the bottom – cake! The soup arrived and it was good. Chloe was giggling with one of Gott's sons. Julia and Joshua, though talking to others, Julia to Gott and Joshua to Macready, were holding hands under the table.

Wickham was looking at me steadily now and then said suddenly, ‘You were the lawyer responsible for William Frith's defence.' His tone was hard and I was frightened. As my defence of William went on, and the surveillance on me had increased, I had become more and more afraid of being killed by one of those cliché-figures, some ‘rogue element in the security services'. Or of ending up in a women's prison in Texas. The fear now returned, just because of sitting at a table with Wickham, hearing his voice, seeing the look in his eyes.

I nodded and agreed, ‘Yes, I was.' He dropped his eyes and said no more. The Frith case was a sore point, evidently, but I didn't know why. Didn't want to.

Macready stood up to propose a toast and we all cheered. Wickham and I didn't speak from then on. We ate our meal, and during it many people came up with congratulations. Gott was popular. And finally we cut the cake, had a glass of champagne each, and then most of us – the Wickhams, mercifully, left after the meal – went back to Gott's house. His chauffeur drove quietly through dark and silent streets. Because of the oil shortage Gott was doing pretty well out of his fuel cell car business. He'd put everything he had and some of Haver's money into a new plant and started a twenty-four-hour-a-day production line. That and his investment switches had bought him a very big house in Upper Berkeley Street, once the property of a big supermarket baron whose firm was on the brink of bankruptcy as a result of the food shortages caused by European sanctions. Gott's neighbours were, on one side, the Commission for European Security and Democracy, which was bankrolled from the US, and on the other a wealthy Syrian in exile who was believed to be the US nominee for Syrian President, when and if Syria fell under American control. Inside the ring of steel extending for half a mile around the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the neighbourhood where Gott lived was an American enclave. His neighbours can't have wanted him there but, as he said, they would be watching him anyway, so why not make it easier for them – though if he had a lawn someone would no doubt have burnt a fiery cross on it. Anyway, inside the cordon, Gott lived in (comparative) luxury.

We had to be admitted to the area by armed soldiers at the checkpoint in Park Lane. But even Gott could not override the electricity cuts – we settled in his drawing room, close to a bright fire. Two branched candelabra, perched at either end of a marble fireplace, provided light. We sat in peaceful silence while below, in the street,
there was little sound. A car passed. There was the sound of marching feet – patrolling soldiers. Then silence again until, from somewhere in the distance, a piano began to play – Bach, perhaps. But this far-off sound was drowned out by the noise of a surveillance helicopter overhead. A great shaft of light startled us when its beam came, full on, into the windows of the room, then moved on. With that reminder of who we were and where we were, we began to talk. Gott produced a bottle of Courvoisier and we congratulated him as if he'd scored a winning goal in the last minute of a World Cup match.

Chloe played the piano. That evening we had light, warmth and music and were happy. I didn't join in the conversation, just let the voices wash over me, listened to Chloe's music and thought long thoughts. Only two years earlier we had been able to wake up looking forward to more of the same – another hung Parliament, another bit of DIY on the bathroom, another trip to the supermarket, another commute to work – and now we were cold, hungry and poor, trapped in the confines of our small island, pitied by our neighbours and occupied by our ally, the one with whom we had that ‘special relationship'. Even the rich who had stayed were poor now. Of course, they could buy scarce commodities one way or the other and pay doctors to provide them with the documentation to take a holiday in France or Italy but this only alleviated a basic state of deprivation.

What was happening in people's minds I don't know. We can't judge the collective mind – there isn't one. What we can see is what is happening to people and, more particularly, the people we know – William, slowly recovering from harsh imprisonment; Chloe, bringing up her child in Brighton while his father is in jail. (Keith was a travel agent and when travel became out of the question he turned his experience and contacts to good use, got involved in smuggling and was caught.) People were certainly waiting for the next election, in three years' time, when they would get their chance to throw out Alan Petherbridge. No donations to the Conservative Party would save him this time. The Labour Party, with Mark Moreno as leader, would have one object, to get the Yanks out. They'd even promised a Constitution. Even the Queen was said to be in favour.