Serious Sweet (8 page)

My customers like to yell beside their barrows, squeal in their prams.

Still, it always felt like coming home, this walk to his department. And this had made a kind of sense when he'd been weathering the marital home, avoiding its issues. But with his Chiswick existence now fairly far behind him, he was still overfond of his desk, cherished his mouse pad with its picture of Beauly – a view from Phoineas Hill over Strathglass, to be more accurate. It was a present from Rebecca. With green hills kept too far from him, he could feel most relaxed when he was strolling through the suitable bustle of his professional precincts, or seated and thinking, devoted to his calling, inside a place where he might strive to do good.

He could have that aim.

Becky's wrong – the office doesn't eat me. It has eaten me. I was swallowed up long ago.

But that wasn't so bad, not really, and he was coping with and moderating the challenges of his day. The taxi from Chiswick, defeated by traffic, had dropped him at the far side of Parliament Square and he'd been only negligibly late.

He'd walked the small homecoming distance to his department, thankful that he had an overcoat to wear and hide his shame.

Now my coat is hiding corduroy, brushed cotton and my heart.

A man's got to have a coat.

Anorak or parka with a business suit – it was a rotten combination, made you look like an estate agent or a copper, and yet one saw it all the time. A declaration of defeat.

And over there on the opposite pavement: grey overcoat with a flash black velvet collar, something approaching a blue suit beneath and caramel-coloured shoes, for God's sake. Inexcusable. Pacing about and speaking intently into his phone as if the world depends upon him when it doesn't. I know him. And it does not. He whispers in ears. Thinks he's an intimidating figure, and that he is large in the world, but that isn't so. He'll drop through the fabric of how things truly are and the world will heal over him like water and not a sign will show he ever was.

For some reason the street had looked a bit off, a bit unkiltered to Jon as he'd first rounded its corner – it had seemed weird. It still did. There was something too bright about it, or else too
grey – it had badly adjusted colours … badly adjusted something.

God. I'm in a strange mood – joy with phases of fury. I'm going feral in my dotage. It's the kind of thing one might anticipate if I'd been sent out on secondment to the UN. That place breaks you. It's not old enough, not enough layers and labyrinths and customs to keep you locked away from rogue motivations, to temper your impulses and moral imperatives. But here – here one can be expected to render acceptable counsel, be open to the necessary pressures, lie down beneath them and have faith that all is well.

Parliament has a long-established mind designed to supersede your own. Its brain has grown into suitably baroque coils and undulations, redundant organs and strange structures of unclear purpose. It dominates – like the will of a grand old beast, like a God set apart from God.

When I'd get a new team member, I used to tell them the story of the Eastern monastery where a cat was always tied up outside the hall while the monks meditated. Whenever a cat died, they'd find a replacement and tie it up. Across centuries. One novice asked why. He was told the community once owned a playful cat which had troubled the monks as they tried to worship peacefully and perfect themselves. So the animal was tied up when they needed calm. And what was once practical and necessary had become a habit and then a tradition and then a sacred necessity. Now no one would think of meditating in the absence of a tethered cat. At the end of the story I used to say, ‘Beyond the obvious implications – try not to be the cat. Don't let them tie you.' I haven't bothered for a while.

No one would ever send me to the UN … Why would they? Why would I think of that? Off the leash in New York and looking for blues connections – being ashamed of myself in the corner of no-longer-smoke-filled clubs … Ridiculous.

He was almost at the office now and could picture the wide and automatically opening doors – two sets, like an airlock. And they'd installed these little gates in the foyer that snapped away and back when you tapped in your key – like gaining access to a provincial railway station.

The decor inside was more reassuring – not luxurious, but of definite quality and in the neutral tones currently preferred by
homebuyers and classy landlords. If you paid attention to the standard of your surroundings, you could be reassured that what went on here was of value. Why else have such charming natural wood features and detailing?

Like Portcullis House – never mind the misguided artworks and the flyspecked conference-room ceilings, just look at the wonderful doors. Solid. Generous. Borderline baronial in a modern way. Five hinges apiece, they'd withstand a siege.

His own department looked pretty – it wasn't all bumpy layers of nicotined gloss white, dangerous gas fires and khaki linoleum. There was no sense of continuity with the nobility of the war effort and a nation in its prime, because you no longer continued to drink rusty civil-service tea from the war effort's teal-coloured cups.

Or that could be one theory.

One can hardly complain that one is comfortably appointed.

It had to be admitted that Jon was virtually ambling by this point, his thought dragging him back and tangling around his ankles – his thoughts, or his morning's efforts. As he approached his office, the tribes of the political quarter were out on display. The middle-ranking dads: inelegant, fading, ends of their jacket sleeves compressed by the cheap elastic of their unwise cagoules. They smelt of Badedas and escalating fear. There were only a couple just now, but they'd be out en masse later, collecting the lunches they'd bring back to eat at their desks – a heartening change from the canteen, a breath of air, enough exercise to remind them they don't get enough exercise.

I shouldn't be out of breath, shouldn't be weary. I try my best – a sort of improvised training programme in the flat: weights that I bought online and a mat for what would be termed floor work, I think. Last week Carter told me he was buying a scooter – we're about the same vintage. Our age-related panic emerging in different ways. He will zip around on his scooter, fantasising – one shouldn't say, but even so – about milk bars and seaside violence, or angora sweaters tight over Wonderbras, and cappuccinos in glass cups.

Which is completely unfair – and making sexual assumptions.

He most assuredly just thinks that a scooter would be easier to park and soon he won't have to ferry paperwork about and will be released into the world. More time for the garden, the grandchildren – the bloody scooter.

I am a greater absurdity. I try to bulk up muscle mass to alleviate the worst of the … slackening, wrinkles, crêping at joints and when I bend … how unappetising I am to myself when naked. How appalling for anyone else to have to see and see and see.

And no mantel full of grandchild photographs – we had Rebecca late and lonely and after what we've taught her about marriage one can't really expect …

Becca, please don't have a baby. Not yet. Not with him.

Do have a baby. Children are wonderful. They are beyond description. But not with him.

None of my business and the more I fixate upon them, the more likely my fears all become. This is axiomatic. As I no longer feel it's my professional duty to point out.

A woman passed him, talking quietly as she wandered. She was one of Westminster's distressed, all of whom were impressively, theatrically Other: dirty white hair and long fingernails, coats fastened above further coats, multiple grubby bags in hands and either aimless or passionately darting.

I have a theory that they offer a physical demonstration of each regime's health. At some subconscious level they respond to and act out our ambient political tensions. Visible anxiety in the street people seems to coincide with Budget announcements and emergency debates, votes of confidence. Recess leaves them tranquil, while a major tussle with the Lords provokes twitches and random laughter, an increase in the number of bags and other carried belongings.

That's only anecdotal – someone should prepare a thorough study, it might be worthwhile.

There were tradesmen nipping fags outside the café: work trousers, company logos, ignoble and yet indispensable skills on hand. And here were the tourists, stunned with jet lag and epidemic unfamiliarity, hesitant gaggles of them.

The tour buses park in our street. The drivers rest up here, having released their interested parties to snap photos of Big Ben's mildly leaning tower, or to queue for access to Westminster Abbey – pay your entrance fee to pray in a place of worship which could lend sophistication to your pleas. No guarantees, but who can say? Or I suppose that I don't mean the abbey lends sophistication – it now sells it. The abbey is customer-facing. Healing services available. No cats.

The grasping, the failed, the crazed, the obviously stupid, the sweat-soiled and annoyingly necessary – they were what Westminster saw of the world, of the other ranks bumbling and labouring and muttering through.

‘… Immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses …' That was it. Stephen Crane. I used to read him a lot. ‘… who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet …' That's what Parliament sees in the average voter. And it sours us. How could it not? These visible voters' failures make Westminster fail them, make Whitehall fail them. We are their fault.

And no children here, nothing beyond adult description, adult use … This is no place for youth unless it's suited up and toured about in little parties of prematurely middle-aged chaps: being shown the world they can walk into once they've got their degrees in Presumption, Prevarication and Economics.

Here is democracy, children – in its palace, in its unnatural acts.
And he looked at the better-informed faces passing with that Westminster Expression, the Estate Expression: a certain gravitas, a pinch of visible intelligence, alert attention and – above all – irritation. Westminster found all that was not Westminster – and much that was – deeply irritating.

Here it is.

But here I am, also.

The first set of doors opened to gather him inside and away from the street.

Home.

And then the next.

Even more home.

He nodded to Albert on Reception:
nice man, has a daughter going up to St Edmund Hall, of all the colleges to choose.
Her future had both delighted and terrified poor Albert.
He comes all the way from the Ivory Coast to Tooting and now she'll end up at Teddy Hall – which is much further.

He's right to be scared – he will lose her. She will come back to visit and still be far away.

Like me.

When I arrived off the train from university, I shook my father's hand. I kissed my mother as if I were meeting her for the first time at a party – acting the prematurely middle-aged chap.

In Mother's case that was perhaps not altogether a bad thing. I might well have seen it as a repayment for past favours. Dad didn't deserve what he got, though.

But being in your teens is about being savage and too savage to notice it. If you're lucky.

Or was that whole hand-shaking incident earlier? After I'd gone away to school?

Jon slipped through the snap of the gates.

Probably it was both and on any number of other occasions I'd much rather forget. They wanted me to be successful, Mum and Dad, and success was a country they'd never been to and wouldn't visit. Society Street was a neighbourhood unlikely to harbour it.

At least the whole nonsense didn't put them into debt. I was a scholarship boy, me, and then I could round off my future with a grant. Every Good Boy Deserves Funding. The fenny winds and greens of Cambridge, so much softer and bicycle-paced than the Other Place. And enjoying the Wren chapel – lovely plasterwork – that chapel replacing an earlier model, repurposed as a library – from one sacred pursuit to another – knowledge to knowledge, that making sense, that making of sense …

And one tried to fit in.

One acted, along with all of the others attempting to be successfully socially mobile. The least bad of the alternatives.

Behind a book, on paper – then I was at home.

I was most at home.

The words, the knowing – they could hold me and let me walk all the way from Old Court to New Court and be safe. And Lord, the relief in the God-awful squalor of seventies' student fashion – the concomitant lack of expense.

It was going away to school that did the damage. Years of keeping my secrets from the others, the ones who belonged – not mentioning family holidays taken at Blackpool, Uncle Angus who bred turkeys in his yard and sold dead cars, nothing about my address, my house, the provenance of my Sunday suit, the provenance of my tottering accent, the quiet strain in every possession – and the lying and lying and lying about my life and heart and soul.

Good practice.

Not that I wasn't seen through and found out.

Not that I wasn't in danger of being adopted as a pet, an inverse asset. Particularly at college.

Good practice, all the same …

I can't complain.

It would be ungrateful.

As Jon had made it to the lift, Findlater joined him –
Oh, really … Is that absolutely necessary? Why Findlater now?
Any lift containing Findlater felt overfilled. Although he was not a substantial man in any sense.