This Honourable House (21 page)

Hazel resumed her seat. The egg-laden spoon was lifted again. ‘She says she’s still in love with you. That you’ve been led up the garden path, or words to that effect. That she’d be glad if our marriage foundered; she won’t be happy till you’ve seen the error of your ways.’

‘I bet she didn’t say that,’ Frank interspersed. At Hazel’s raised eyebrows, he continued, ‘Not the sort of phrases she’d use. I bet it was words put into her mouth by that journalist. They’ll say, “Would you agree that the marriage will founder?” And she’d have said no, or yes, or maybe, it wouldn’t have mattered. That sort of thing,’ he finished lamely.

Hazel glared, but for the sake of harmony, Frank guessed, left unsaid her usual riposte that his first wife was capable of anything. In another minute, however, she was spluttering once more and the egg-spoon had fallen into her tea. ‘They call you a philanderer. You! And say you’ll never change. And that I should watch you like a hawk.’

Frank grunted. His beautiful wife’s face was so contorted with fury, her lips drawn back, eyes blazing, fingers claw-like on the newsprint, that a raptor was exactly what she resembled.

‘And that they feel sorry for me! Me, Hazel Bridges! Wife of the Secretary of State!’

‘Now that, I agree, is outrageous,’ Frank murmured. He brightened. ‘But have you noticed that they don’t mention any of her accusations against me: all that palaver about hate mail and trashing her car? They’ve left it out.’

‘They don’t believe her,’ Hazel muttered. ‘Pity they didn’t take the same attitude to everything else she says about you. And about me. Oh, this is ridiculous. You should sue. Take them to court. You could win thousands, like Diane Clark.’

‘I doubt it.’ Frank began to explain the hazards of court action, then noticed that his wife was not listening. Her expression had become dreamier, which probably meant she had begun to spend the
money. On the television screen he could glimpse film of a gleeful Diane outside the High Court with yesterday’s edition of the
Globe
. ‘Don’t get your hopes up. If they haven’t mentioned Gail’s insistence that I’m a common criminal it’s because the lawyers won’t let them. That really
is
libellous. So it means the rest probably isn’t. Or not to such an extent that we can make a case.’

‘What about the Press Complaints Commission?’

‘Now you
must
be joking,’ said her husband scornfully. ‘A body designed to keep the privacy laws at bay? Toothless, slow, useless. The members
are
the press, editors, mostly, smarmy buggers laughing behind their hands. No, that’s not the way to deal with that article. Best to forget it.’

‘I can’t forget this,’ Hazel announced loftily. ‘I’m humiliated and hurt. If you can’t muzzle the media, Frank, you absolutely must do something about her. We can’t go on being the butt of her allegations and nastiness.’

‘She’s not a nasty woman,’ her husband protested. ‘It’ll die down. They’ll pursue somebody else in time, some other poor prat caught with his pants down. Someone who’s flavour of the month today, who’ll be mincemeat next week. Could be Diane, could be the Boss, could be the new baby. Tomorrow morning it’ll be the Home Secretary and his miscreant son. They don’t care.’

‘Well, I care,’ said Hazel grimly. She stood up and drew herself to her full height. ‘And there are moments, Frank Bridges, when I wonder whether you care as much for me as you should. You’re not half as upset on my behalf as you should be. I’m your wife, not her. And your cruelty is making me very unhappy!’

Her voice had risen to a squeak. Frank covered his eyes with one hand. Hazel stepped away from the table and immediately put her slippered foot into the marmalade. When she slithered and almost fell, Frank had to move his hand over his mouth to avoid laughing. It felt as if she had received her comeuppance.

He gave in. ‘Okay, but I don’t know what else I can do. Please, Hazel, understand. Go and get dressed and mind the glass. Do you still want me to clear up?’

Diane was humming ‘Simply The Best’ as she drove up the motorway. A busy day, she had said to Edward; it would have been terrific to have had him by her side, lover and staffer and helpmeet. Had it been merely a visit to the constituency, a standard Friday afternoon, with the prospect of drinks at the working-men’s club and a turn calling the bingo numbers at the community centre, or even a
fundraising
dinner in a local hotel with the mayor in his gold chain, she would have suggested it to him and tried to persuade him to come.

She wondered what he would think about her home in the patch, a modest bungalow set away from the road with a pretty if limited garden full of laurel and roses tended by a devoted pensioner. She had bought it cheaply during the housing recession some years before, furnished it simply, ensured it was warm in winter. It gave privacy to a surprising extent, though with one significant hazard. At the instigation of Special Branch the alarm system was connected to the local police headquarters: if set off by mistake it produced car-loads of unwanted police officers. All visitors had to be warned, especially anyone who, impatient of waiting for her arrival, might be tempted to climb in through a window. Once four student staffers had spent the train journey from London holed up in the bar; then, having found the correct address, had decided to force the back door. She had had to rush to the police station where she found them crestfallen and somewhat the worse for wear; the humourless sergeant, who had eventually released them into her custody, held her responsible for the incident since she was their boss and had made it clear he would not be voting for her next time.

It could be infuriatingly hard, Diane reflected as she hummed, to live a normal easy-going life while being famous. The more Bohemian one’s tastes, the harder it got. Especially when the profession was politics. For a start, much of the nation, the other side, was automatically against her. They would try to make matters tough. That bloody sergeant had probably never voted for her party in
his life. It wouldn’t have hurt had he said so, politely if formally. He might have had the grace not to mention politics at all. But no, they had to rub it in whenever there was trouble, even over something minor like her shambolic friends.

She slowed down. For anyone else a speeding ticket was a nuisance. For her, it was a hostile headline. An argument with a neighbour about an uncut hedge or rubbish bags left out untidily gave her a sleepless night; the tabloids would seize it greedily. None of the deference shown to politicians in other countries came into play. The press were foul. Diane had no illusions: the headlines she had gloated over that morning in the office could be overturned in a trice. In the
Globe
the target had already moved on. Poor Frank Bridges or, rather, poor Hazel: though Diane did not have much sympathy for a woman she regarded as a gold-digger, or at least someone not sincerely motivated by the party’s cause, she recognised that the wife would be more immediately wounded by the comments than the hard-bitten husband. Diane, Frank and their colleagues had had to become inured to it. If they couldn’t stand it, they got out. Their families suffered more, and without defence.

She would have to warn Edward. Dalliance with Diane Clark, if he wished to continue, meant he must put himself on guard. He was wise beyond his years, which had attracted her to him, but she felt a twinge of guilt. Common sense dictated that she should not have seduced him, or invited him in, or tried to make him coffee, which had still been in the pot, cold, when they left. She should not have offered him a lift after the party: that had been risky – many witnesses had seen them get into the back of the official car together, both rather drunk, and noted with glee that they had clutched each other with every sign of affection.

A promise had been broken. The Prime Minister would get to hear of it, no doubt, and would not be impressed. He would be irritated not merely that she had taken a new lover, but that she had agreed not to and proved unable to keep her word. But in certain aspects, the Prime Minister was wrong: his elevated position did not give him the right to dictate to independent souls like herself. Nor was her behaviour quite as reprehensible as he implied. She resented his assertion that her friendships had an element of exploitation about them, that her employees and volunteers were not free to choose to resist her. That was offensive nonsense. All those she came close to were perfectly capable of standing up to her, otherwise they were not the sort she would want to employ. Sycophants had nothing going for them.

In any case, none of this had come from the Prime Minister’s own mouth. The request, or command, that she desist and let Mark go his own way and, by implication, not replace him had been conveyed by Alistair McDonald, not by the Boss himself in direct conversation. Alistair, an employee, a minion, had never stood for election, had no idea of the hard slog to get to high office, and how grimly one would hang on to it. He had been a journalist prior to his appointment, one of the lowest of the low, a smirk permanently on his face. Now he imagined himself vital to the welfare of the country simply because he was the Prime Minister’s official spokesman. But that was supposed to be for dealings with the media, not for intimate conversations with close colleagues. She resented that. If the PM had wanted her to promise, he should have asked her face to face. He didn’t. He hadn’t. He should have.

Diane switched on the radio for the news, but was obscurely disappointed that her name was not mentioned. Yesterday’s story was no longer headlines. She would be featured for sure that evening on
Have I Got News For You
, or the radio
News Quiz
, and perhaps her snappier remarks might surface in Quote Unquote or some other upmarket quiz show. So would the antics of the Home Secretary’s son, who would never live down his public collapse: fifty years from now in his obituary in
The Times
, or its future equivalent, the inglorious incident would surface. It made her glad she didn’t have children. It was enough of a struggle to keep herself in order, let alone be responsible for a brood of recalcitrant infants.

If she had had children, would they have been chips off the old block? Would they have been
feisty, energetic, sexual creatures as she was? Passionate about politics, or about something else as fascinating and thankless? She hoped they would not have been simply interested in money. A son of hers making fistfuls in the City, a derivatives dealer, a capitalist with no consideration for his fellow human beings: such progeny she could disown, with few regrets.

What proportion of a person’s personality was due to genes? Probably more than the educationalists liked to admit. For them nature took second place to nurture. Instinctively, however, Diane believed that people followed their parents in tastes, proclivities, attitudes; though she tried her damnedest not to be like her own mother, she shared her stubbornness and self-centredness. Unlike her mother, though, Diane had striven to put these qualities to use in the service of others. If a child of hers had adored the world of politics and seen it as an opportunity to serve, their meeting of minds would have been complete.

Mother. Drat Mother. Diane pressed buttons to flip to a CD and went on singing along to Tina Turner. The miles disappeared beneath the old Volkswagen’s tyres. It was a long journey up to Tyneside to see her mother, whom she did not love, had never liked much, and visited only out of a nagging conscience. If the older woman had become curmudgeonly with the years, that could be put down to frustration, a lack of any satisfying occupation, or to a limited education that had left her bereft of enjoyable escape through books. For her mother was often ill, and dismal with it, which hardly made her the most pleasurable companion.

Diane had loved her father and missed his impulsive kindness. It was, of course, unlikely that a child would have all the characteristics of one parent and none of the other. If one was kind, the other selfish, what would be the outcome for the offspring? A mixture, maybe, a conflict, an erratic person. Much like herself. If one was cheery and the other prone to depression, what then? Diane shivered a little, remembering Edward’s remarks. His reflections troubled her. Mental illness carried such a fiendish, destructive stigma. People from every level of society pretended it wasn’t happening, or claimed that an episode had been caused solely by external events. A psychiatrist on TV had said that it was not necessary for a chronic depressive to suffer pain in order to feel pain. The mechanism for suffering was already in his mind.

If Edward had children would they be prone to depression? Did it suggest he had inherited it from one or other of his unknown parents? Might it be in his interest to find out?

What strange reflections, Diane chided herself. Her conscience seemed to be in a turbulent state, perhaps because of the new relationship, perhaps because she would soon be seeing her mother. Edward was splendid and would, with sensitive handling, make a fine long-term lover. His ardour last night, his puzzlement in the dawn light, his fear about his position and willingness to accept her assurances, most of all the quality of his intellect and his commitment to the job intrigued her. She would take more care than usual with his feelings. Their affair was to be a source of delight and joy for them both, not anxiety. She would take a maternal interest in him, look after him to the best of her ability.

The slip-road to her mother’s village was signposted. With a sigh Diane switched off the music and coasted to the roundabout. She hoped that her mother would be happy for once about the reporting of her daughter’s activities.

Frank was more than a little startled by the phone-call – at home, too, which was unusual since his number was ex-directory, and when Hazel was out. It was as if the caller had been aware of this, for his opening words were, ‘You alone, Frank?’

The accent gave it away. One of the Admiral Benbow gang. Sounded like Vic the Villain. He appeared to be speaking from a call-box: every few moments his voice was drowned by a big vehicle, a lorry or bus, driving alongside.