The Closed Circle (7 page)

Paul looked across at his brother. It was hard to tell whether he was grateful for Benjamin's concern, or annoyed that his own unease should prove so visible.

“It's just that I was cornered by a journalist in the members' lobby this afternoon. He asked me a question about Railtrack and . . . well, I didn't think hard enough before answering. I think I may have put my foot in it.”

That afternoon, it had been announced to the press that responsibility for safety on the railways was going to be handed over to Railtrack—a privately run company—rather than to an independent and publicly accountable body as many critics had been demanding. Paul basically approved of this idea (all of his political instincts inclined him towards the private sector) and had been happy to say so on the record, believing that this would make him popular with the party leadership. However, it appeared that he may have overstepped the mark.

“It turns out,” he said, “that the people who are really up in arms are the ones who lost relatives in the Paddington rail crash. They say it's not good enough.”

“As you'd expect.”

“Well, of course they're
grieving.
That's entirely understandable. But that still doesn't make it helpful to blame every little thing that goes wrong on the government. We're starting to live in a culture of blame, don't you think? It's like the very worst side of America.”

“What did you actually say?” Benjamin asked.

“It was a guy from the
Mirror,
” Paul explained. “He said to me, ‘What would you say to the families who were bereaved in the Paddington rail crash, who are describing this decision as an insult to their loved ones?' So first of all I said that I respected their feelings, and so on, but of course that's just the kind of thing he'll cut out. I know exactly what he's going to quote. It was the thing I said last of all. ‘Those who seek to make capital out of human lives should look to their consciences.'”

“Meaning the relatives?”

“No, not at all. Meaning the people who are going to hijack the relatives' emotions and use them to score political points.
That's
what I meant.”

Benjamin tutted. “Too subtle. People are just going to think you're a heartless, uncaring bastard.”

“I know. Fuck it,” said Paul, to himself, looking out of the window at what used to be the ABC cinema on the Bristol Road, but had now for many years been a large drive-thru McDonald's. “Tell me about this woman we're meeting, anyway. Is she going to cheer me up?”

“Her name's Malvina. She's very bright. Divides her time between here and London, from what I can make out. Just wants to talk to you about your relationship with journalists, I think. A bit of background to help with her dissertation.”

“Well,” said Paul, grimly. “She could hardly have chosen a better day.”

Looking back on that evening, some time later, Benjamin realized that it had been foolish of him not to have anticipated the change he saw in Malvina. He was so familiar—so wearily familiar—with his younger brother that he could never quite get used to the idea that nowadays Paul was a star, to most people, and meeting him was an event: something you dressed up for. When they arrived at Le Petit Blanc, and found Malvina already waiting for them at their window table for three, Benjamin lost his breath for a moment, startled by her loveliness into awestruck silence. He had seen her wearing make-up before, of course, but never quite so lavishly or artfully applied; never with her hair teased into quite such calculated disarray; and never, unless he was much mistaken, wearing a skirt
quite
as short, quite as indecent as this one. Benjamin kissed her on the perfumed cheek—how intently he anticipated that moment, and how quickly it was gone—then turned to make the introduction to his brother and saw that Paul had already taken her hand so reverently, so tenderly, that Benjamin thought at first he was going to kiss it rather than shake it.

He watched the way their eyes met, and how abruptly they both looked away. He watched the way that Paul straightened his tie, and Malvina smoothed down her skirt as she sat down. His heart sank. He immediately found himself wondering whether he had just made one of the worst mistakes of his life.

While Benjamin toyed with his first course—Thai chicken salad with green papaya and rocket—Paul began telling Malvina, in a likeable, self-deprecating way, about the foolish remark he had made to a journalist that afternoon; and soon he was talking more generally about the uncomfortable co-dependence, as he saw it, between the government and the print and broadcast media. Benjamin had heard much of this before, but was struck, tonight, by how knowledgeable Paul sounded, how authoritative. There was also, he realized, a
glamour
that attached to his brother these days: a glamour that derived from power—even the limited power that he was able to wield in his current position. Malvina listened, and nodded, and sometimes wrote things down in her notebook. She said very little herself, at first, and seemed rather humbled by the thought that Paul was taking time out to explain these matters to her. By the time of his second course—panfried seabass fillet with courgettes, fennel and sauce verge—Benjamin could see that the balance had started to shift slightly. Malvina had become more talkative, and Paul was no longer just imparting information: he had begun to ask questions, soliciting her opinions, and it was clear that she was both surprised and flattered. Benjamin himself had lapsed into a morose silence, which persisted into dessert. Picking unenthusiastically at his passion fruit brulée, he watched as they polished off a single dish between them: chocolate mi-cuit, smothered in warm crème anglaise, which they shared with one long-handled spoon. By now he knew, with a lumpy certainty in the pit of his stomach, something that would have seemed inconceivable a couple of hours ago: he had already lost Malvina. Lost her! In what sense had he ever possessed her? In the sense, he supposed, that while those ambiguous weekly meetings had continued, he had at least been able to sustain a fantasy about her, a fantasy that this friendship might, through some miracle (Benjamin was a firm believer in miracles) mutate into something else, something explosive. He had not bothered himself, so far, with the details; had not got as far as contemplating the pain he might cause to Emily—and himself—by proceeding further down this treacherous path. It had begun as a fantasy, and would probably have stayed that way: but Benjamin lived for his fantasies—had done all his life: they were as solid to him as the contours of his working day or his weekend trip to the supermarket; and it seemed cruel, bitterly cruel, to have even these pale imaginings snatched away from him. He felt coils of despair beginning to wrap themselves around him, and at the same time a familiar hatred for his brother crept into his bones.

“So what you're trying to argue, as I understand it,” Paul was saying, “is that political discourse has become a kind of battleground, in which the meaning of words is disputed and fought over, every day, by politicians on the one hand and journalists on the other.”

“Yes—because politicians have become so careful about what they say, and political utterances have become so bland, that journalists now have the task of
creating
meaning out of the words that they're given. It's not what you guys
say
that matters any more, it's how it's
interpreted.
”

Paul frowned, and licked the last traces of liquid chocolate off the back of their spoon. “I think you're being too cynical,” he said. “Words have meanings—fixed meanings—and you can't change them. Sometimes I wish you could. I mean, look at what I said to the
Mirror
guy this afternoon: ‘Those who seek to make capital out of human lives should look to their consciences.' There's no getting out of that, is there? It's going to sound nasty, however it's presented.”

“OK,” said Malvina, “but supposing you claimed that you'd been quoted out of context?”

“How could I do that?”

“By saying that you weren't talking about the victims' families at all. What you were doing—as someone who supports railway privatization, by and large—was firing a warning shot at the new railway companies, telling them not to make ‘capital' out of human lives by putting profit above safety. So that
they're
the ones who should be looking to their consciences.” She smiled at him: a quizzical, challenging smile. “There—how does that sound?”

Paul looked at her in astonishment. He didn't quite understand what she was saying, but somehow she had already made him feel better about this afternoon's gaffe, and he could feel a huge burden of anxiety starting to slip from his shoulders.

“That's what's so clever about the word you used,” Malvina continued. “ ‘Capital.' Because that's the danger, isn't it? That people start to see everything in terms of money. It was such a smart use of language. So ironic.” That smile again. “You
were
being ironic, weren't you?”

Paul nodded, slowly, his eyes never leaving hers.

“Irony is very modern,” she assured him. “Very
now.
You see—you don't have to make it clear exactly what you mean any more. In fact, you don't even have to mean what you say, really. That's the beauty of it.”

Paul remained silent and immobile for a few moments, mesmerized by her words, her certainty, her stillness. By her youth. Then he said: “Malvina, will you come and work for me?”

She laughed incredulously. “Work for you? How can I? I'm just a student.”

“It would only be for one day a week. A couple of days, at the most. You could be my . . .” (he searched his mind for a suitable phrase) “. . . media adviser.”

“Oh, Paul, don't be silly,” she said, looking away, and blushing. “I've got no experience.”

“I don't need someone with experience. I need someone with a fresh pair of eyes.”

“Why do you need a media adviser?”

“Because I can't do without the media but I don't understand them. And you do. You could really help me. You could act as a sort of—buffer, a conduit, between . . .”

He tailed off, and Benjamin muttered: “They mean the opposite of each other.”

Paul and Malvina both looked at him—it was the first time he had spoken in about twenty minutes—and he explained: “Buffer and conduit. They mean opposite things. You can't be a buffer
and
a conduit.”

“Didn't you hear?” Paul said. “Words can mean what we want them to mean. In the age of irony.”

Paul offered to drive Malvina to New Street Station, in time for the last train to London. He picked up the bill for dinner himself, and paid it discreetly and quickly while Malvina went to the toilet.

“What exactly are you playing at, Paul?” Benjamin hissed, as they waited for her outside the restaurant. “You can't
employ
her.”

“Why not? I get an allowance for that sort of thing.”

“Do you know how old she is?”

“What's that got to do with anything? Do you?”

Benjamin had to admit that he didn't: it was one of the many things he didn't know about her. In any case it occurred to him, as he watched Malvina climb into the front passenger seat of Paul's car, that the age difference between them didn't seem so great after all. Paul looked a good deal younger than his thirty-five years, and Malvina looked . . . well, ageless, tonight. They made a handsome couple, he conceded, through gritted teeth.

The passenger window of Paul's shimmering black BMW glided noiselessly open, and Malvina looked up at him.

“See you soon,” she said, fondly: but they had not kissed, this time.

“Keep your pecker up, Marcel,” said Paul, who for some years had delighted in annoying his brother by introducing him to people as “Rubery's answer to Proust.”

Benjamin glared at him and said balefully, “I will.” His parting shot— the best he could manage—was: “Remember me to your wife and daughter, won't you?”

Paul nodded—inscrutable, as always—and then the car was gone, with a squeal of rubber against tarmac, and Malvina with it.

Rain started to fall as Benjamin set off on his slow walk to the Navigation Street bus stops.

26

Half way across Lambeth Bridge, Paul braked to a halt, steadied himself with one foot on the kerb, and rested a while to recover his breath. His thigh muscles pulsed with dull pain from the unaccustomed effort of his one-and-a-half mile ride. After a few seconds, he swung the bicycle through ninety degrees and pedalled over to the eastern side of the bridge. Just as he was dismounting, the driver of a huge bottle-green people-carrier, a vehicle more suited to transporting essential food parcels along the treacherous supply roads between Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul than taking—as seemed to be the case this evening—a rather comfortably-off family of three down to the local Tesco and back, honked her horn angrily as she swerved wildly to one side, mobile phone in hand, and avoided killing Paul by about three inches. He took no notice, having quickly come to realize that such near-death experiences were a daily occurrence in central London, where car drivers and cyclists lived in a permanent state of undeclared war. And besides, it would make a good episode for his new column, “Confessions of a Cycling MP,” which Malvina was planning to pitch next week to the editor of one of the free magazines that got distributed on the underground every morning. She was taking her new appointment seriously, and this was just one of a string of ideas she had presented to him a couple of days ago. Another was that he should make an appearance on a high-profile satirical television quiz show: she knew one of the producers, apparently, and was planning to broach the subject with him as soon as possible. Already she was proving far more efficient, and far more useful, than he would have believed possible.

He lifted his bike on to the pavement and leaned it against the railings of the bridge. Elbows on the parapet, chin cupped in his hands, he gazed for a while at the view that never failed to entrance him: to his left, the Palace of Westminster, floodlit and buttery, its shimmering reflection throwing a golden light on to the black metal surface of the sleeping Thames; and to his right, the new upstart, the London Eye, bolder, sleeker, bigger than any of the buildings around it, patterning the river with pools of neon blue, transforming the whole cityscape with casual impudence. One of them represented tradition and continuity—the things Paul was most suspicious of. The other represented—what? It was sublimely purposeless. It was a machine, a flawless machine for making money and for showing people new vistas of something that they already knew to be there. The Wheel and the Palace squared up to each other, co-existing for now, sharing their ascendancy over this part of London in a surreal, uneasy, beautiful truce. And Paul stood on the bridge between them, feeling a shivery exhilaration, an overwhelming sense of the rightness of a life that had led him, finally, to this place, and this time. It was where he belonged.

Doug Anderton was waiting for him at a corner table of a Westminster restaurant specializing in Anglo-Indian cuisine. The restaurant building had until recently housed a lending library, and the walls of the galleried mezzanine area were still lined with books, so that the diners, already cushioned by the air of exclusivity generated by the extravagant prices, could experience an extra illicit
frisson
at the thought that they were eating in a space which had once opened its doors to the general public, in accordance with a now comically outdated democratic ideal. Doug was studying the op-ed pages of one of his broadsheet competitors, with a frown either of concentration or rivalrous contempt—it was hard to tell which—while sipping on a pineapple Bellini. His studiedly proletarian uniform of denim jacket, T-shirt and jeans did not detract at all from the impression that he looked very much at ease in these surroundings.

“Doug,” said Paul, holding out his hand and smiling warmly.

Doug folded up his newspaper and gave him a curt handshake. “Hello, Trotter,” he answered.

“Trotter?” said Paul, sitting down opposite him. He seemed determined to keep things good-humoured. “That's not very friendly, is it, after twenty-one years?”

“You're ten minutes late,” Doug pointed out. “Did you have trouble parking?”

“I cycled,” said Paul, helping himself to a large glass of still water, from a bottle for which they would later be charged more than the hourly minimum wage recently introduced by New Labour. “I cycle everywhere these days. Malvina thought it would be good for me.”

Doug laughed. “Got you on a health kick already, has she? I thought your wife was called Susan, though.”

“She is. It's got nothing to do with health. Malvina's my media adviser. You spoke to her on the telephone.”

“Ah, yes. Of course. How could I forget. Your . . .
media adviser.
” He stretched the words out as thinly as he could. “Well, look, shall we order something, and get the preliminaries over as quickly as we can—what have you been doing for the last twenty years, all that sort of bollocks. Then we can at least get some food down our necks.”

“Not much need to catch up, is there?” said Paul, picking up a menu. “I've followed your career with close attention. And vice versa, I'm sure.”

“Well, I did refer to you, obliquely, in a little talk I gave on the South Bank a couple of months ago,” said Doug. “But I'd hardly say that you've been uppermost in my mind over the last few years. In fact I don't think I'd given you a moment's thought till you popped up on election night, 1997, knocking a very distinguished Conservative minister into political oblivion and looking like you'd just had the shock of your life.”

“You don't still believe that hoary old crap, do you, about me not expecting to get elected? I know you wrote it at the time, but . . . come on. Give me a little bit more credit than that.”

“How's your brother?” Doug asked, by way of reply.

“Oh, Benjamin's fine.” (It was hard to tell whether Paul really believed this, or he was just trying to convince himself of it.) “You know—his real trouble is that he's perfectly happy, but he won't allow himself to admit it. Being unpublished suits him. Being unperformed suits him, too. He actually loves being an accountant. Nothing could please him more than being able to think of himself as the Emile Zola of the double-entry system. The fact that the rest of the world refuses to recognize him just adds to the piquancy.”

“Hmm . . .” Doug didn't seem very persuaded by any of this. “Well, I don't know him as well as you do, of course: but I would have said he was unhappily married, hated being childless, and was completely unfulfilled in his professional and creative life. What about Lois?”

Paul reeled off some details quickly—that Lois was still living in York, still a university librarian, still married to Christopher—making it more and more clear as he did so that his brother's and sister's lives bored him almost to the point of disgust. When he noticed that Doug himself was doing his best to suppress a yawn, he said: “I know. They haven't exactly set the world alight, have they, my siblings? Sends you to sleep just thinking about them.”

“It's not that,” said Doug, rubbing his eyes. “We've got a new son. Ranulph. Five months old. I was up half the night with him.”

“Congratulations,” said Paul, dutifully.

“Well, you know, Frankie wanted another. That's my—”

“Your wife. I know. The Honourable Francesca Gifford. Daughter of Lord and Lady Gifford of Shoscombe. Cheltenham and Brasenose College, Oxford. I looked her up in Debrett's this afternoon.” He glanced at Doug, with an indefinable slyness in his eyes. “Married before, wasn't she?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Amicable break-up?”

“What is this, an interview?” Doug had been pretending to study the wine list. Now he laid it down, seeming to conclude that if he had landed himself with the task of spending two or three hours in Paul's company, he might as well make a go of it. “Basically, she only left
him
because he didn't want any more kids. He'd had enough of the whole child-rearing thing: whereas she loves it, for some unknown reason. Loves the whole business. Loves being pregnant. Doesn't even seem to mind the labour too much. Loves everything that comes afterwards. The visits from the midwife. The bathing, the nappy changing. All the paraphernalia—the slings, the pushchairs, the cots, the Moses baskets, the bottles, the sterilizers. She
loves
all that. Spends half her waking hours expressing, these days—hooked up to this milking machine that makes her look like a prize Jersey.” He blinked, apparently having some difficulty getting the image out of his head. “Gives me a completely different attitude to her breasts, I must say.”

“How many does she have now, then?”

“Just the two—same as everybody else.”

“Children, I mean.”

“Oh. Four, altogether. Two boys, two girls. All living at our place. Plus the nanny, of course.” Reflecting upon his current
ménage
like this never failed to depress Doug, or at least to make him feel obscurely guilty. Perhaps it was the thought of his mother, now widowed and still living alone in Rednal, and how small and lost she appeared whenever he managed to persuade Francesca to allow her to stay with them for a few days. He shook the thought away impatiently. “And Antonia must be—what? She must be three by now.”

“Yes, absolutely. What a retentive memory you have.”

“Hard to forget a baby who was named after the party leader, and managed to play such a big role in an election campaign when she was only a few months old. She must have visited more doorsteps than the postman that month.”

Paul sighed tiredly. “She was
not
named after Tony. That's another stupid myth you journalists have dreamed up.” He added: “Listen, Douglas, if you're just going to be cynical and hostile to me all evening, I don't know that there's much point in continuing with this.”

“I'm not entirely sure that I could see the point in the first place,” said Doug. “Why
did
you invite me here, exactly?”

And so Paul attempted to explain. Malvina had made him realize, he said, that in order to raise his media profile, he would have to start cultivating friendships with well-disposed journalists. What could be more natural, then, than a desire to renew his acquaintance with someone who had made a name for himself as one of the most highly regarded political commentators in the country, and who had been such an important figure to him throughout their schooldays together, back in the far-off, touchingly innocent days of the late 1970s?

“But we hated each other at school,” said Doug, smartly putting his finger on the only flaw in the proposal.

“I don't think so,” said Paul, frowning and looking shocked. “Did we?”

“Of course we did. Well, for a start, everybody hated you—you must remember that.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because we all thought you were a creepy little right-wing shit.”

“OK, then—but it was nothing
personal.
So that means we can still be friends, doesn't it, twenty years on?”

Doug scratched his head, genuinely baffled by the direction the conversation was taking. “Paul, the years haven't made you any less weird, you know. What do you mean, ‘friends'? How could we ever be friends? What would this friendship consist of?”

“Well . . .” Paul had already worked out the answer to this. “Malvina thought, for instance, that since you and I had children of about the same age, we could maybe introduce them and see if they wanted to play together.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Doug: “your
media adviser
is suggesting that your children and my children should play together? I've never heard anything so ridiculous.”

“It's not ridiculous at all,” Paul insisted. “You and I have far more in common than we used to.”

“Such as?”

“Well, politically, for instance. We're both on the same side now, aren't we? We both agree, by and large, that the best hope for the prosperity of Britain and its people lies with the Labour party.”

“What on earth makes you think I believe that? Don't you even read my stuff in the paper?”

“Oh, I know you have a few criticisms to make, here and there—”

“A few—?” Doug sputtered, brokenly, scattering the remnants of a pickle-laden poppadom over the tablecloth.

“—but on the whole it's true, isn't it? You subscribe, as I do, to the core beliefs and ideals of the New Labour revolution. Don't you?”

“Well, I suppose I might,” said Doug, “if I could work out what the fuck they were.”

“Now you're just being silly,” Paul muttered, sulkily.

“No I'm not.” Warming to his theme, Doug dismissed the waiter who was hovering at their table and continued: “What
are
your ‘core beliefs,' Paul? Tell me. I'm curious. Genuinely.”

“Do you mean mine, personally? Or the party's?”

“Either. Anyway, I'm assuming they're the same.”

“Well . . .” For the first time that evening, Paul seemed to be lost for words. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “What did you send that guy away for? I was just ready to order.”

“Don't change the subject.”

Paul wriggled in his seat. “Well, look here, Doug, you're asking me to reduce a very broad, very complex set of beliefs to some easy formula, and it just can't—”

“The ‘third way,' for instance,” Doug prompted.

“What?”

“The ‘third way.' You're always banging on about it. What is it?”

“What is it?”

“Yes.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, ‘What is it?' It's a simple enough question.”

“Really, Douglas,” said Paul, dabbing at his lips with a napkin, even though he hadn't eaten anything yet, “I can't help thinking you're being very naive about this.”

“
What is it?
That's all I want to know.”