The House

by Tom Watson

  Now he has to tell him. He can’t say ‘yes’, and tell Owen afterwards. He puts down the tongs. ‘Look, Owen. I resigned from the institute yesterday. I was going to tell you this morning, but your news sort of trumped mine.’

  Owen shrugs and lifts his beer to him. ‘You were wasted there. Sounds like great news. Are you going to run? I mean, I can get you on the inside track on a couple of seats in Essex. Local boy made good … ’

  Phil shakes his head. ‘I resigned because I’ve got a new job. Policy unit.’

  Owen looks baffled, but still pleased. ‘Will you be based out of Charlotte Street? That would make this campaign a lot easier to take.’

  Owen’s hair is damp with the rain, his shirt clinging to his arms in places and he looks so excited for him. Just say it.

  ‘Owen, no. I’m leaving Labour. I’ve had an offer from George Osborne’s people. I’ll be working for, campaigning for … the Conservative Party.’

  The punch comes out of nowhere, or it seems to. Phil sees Owen’s face turn to thunder and then he sees stars, an explosion of pain, and he staggers backwards and falls over the edge of the umbrella stand. More pain in his back and his hand stings.

  ‘Owen!’ Georgina is standing by the door with Kieron beside her. He looks bemused. Phil holds up the hand that doesn’t hurt.

  ‘I’m OK, I’m OK.’

  Owen shoulders past Georgina in the doorway. They hear Christine call his name and the slam of the front door. Phil clambers awkwardly to his feet. He can feel blood running from his nose and his right palm is scraped and stinging.

  ‘You told him, then?’ Georgina says and Kieron laughs. Phil pushes past them both. ‘Cook your own fucking sausages, Georgie,’ he says. Then he goes upstairs to pack.

  He can hear the sounds of the party breaking up downstairs while he fills a bag with clothes and orders a cab. The rest he can come back for later. Fuck, Owen, fuck the party. They had left him, not the other way around. Cameron was the future, not Gordon with his betrayal of the project and the past decade of government weighing him down.

  His nose isn’t broken, at least he doesn’t think it is, but it hurts like hell and his hand stings every time he touches anything. He rams his laptop into the case and swears at the twisting power cable. Owen still has his copy of The Big Sort. He’s had it for weeks. Phil crosses the corridor and pushes open the door to Owen’s room. It is expensive, that book, and Owen will probably throw it on the barbecue now rather than return it.

  The book is on top of the bed with Owen’s papers and laptop. Phil grabs it, victorious. Then he sees it. Just lying on the bed and covered in Owen’s neat blocky handwriting. The list of defensive marginals.

  Outside through the shiver and hum of the traffic passing on the wet street he hears his taxi blowing its horn.

  Chapter 27

  Friday 11 March 2022

  Owen distracts himself on the train back to the constituency with Pam’s briefing notes, though his blood is still fizzing and thumping from the fight with Philip. He forces himself to concentrate.

  He has a surgery on Saturday afternoon, then on Sunday he’ll be on this listening session with local businesses. The list is all small businesses, entrepreneurs – the people who are actually going to pull the world out of recession. Not like insurance companies and big data specialists and lobbyists who are making fortunes picking over the bones then hiding their profits where the tax man can’t get them.

  Like Victor Collins and his start-up? If it was a bad idea, why did they buy the company? Christine’s question itches at the back of his mind. They only paid three quarters of a million, though. That must be chickenfeed to them. Perhaps it was done with a shrug, and a ‘Maybe it’ll inspire our tech lads.’ Then Collins – disturbed, over-worked, borderline psychotic Collins – his hopes dashed, cooked up this conspiracy theory.

  Jay’s medical records … if they were a result of one of Maundrill Consulting’s clients roaming around the NHS data vault, then Victor’s claim his own records were being used against him gains a lot of credence. But Maundrill Consulting could have just as easily bribed a receptionist, a doctor. Tabloid hacks used to do it all the time.

  Was Victor’s idea any good? Owen has no way of knowing. He knows some things: the files Elsie made and Christine dumped on his neighbour included Victor’s mobile phone bills. He did get a lot of calls from government numbers for a while, four or five times a day, and then they stopped cold. No gradual tapering off as the department lost hope or interest. A sudden screeching halt. Enough. He has made his choice, he withdrew the question and the story will disappear. Lefiami’s investigation will conclude that what happened to Jay was tragic, and make a few recommendations on dealing with the mental health of young staffers and then Owen can get back to politics. Of course we’ll fucking win. And he’s going to be there when they do.

  The train starts to slow and he gathers his bags and papers. The brakes hiss and eventually the door release button flashes. He pushes it with a knuckle and it sighs open.

  The platform is quiet. Most people travelling back from London got home an hour or two ago. The gates at the side of the station building are open and the only movement is the orange on black signs, writing and rewriting themselves with promises of the next train and the current social distancing advice.

  ‘Here!’

  Owen turns towards the voice and sees Liam Holdsworth leaning up against his dark red Vauxhall Astra. The last man in England to buy British. British-ish. Last time Owen was in the underground parliament car park, he saw Georgina climbing into a BMW. Even he has ended up with a Volvo.

  Liam’s in his pub gear. Chinos and a polo shirt which shows off the thickly braided muscles of his arms. Shaved head. Tattoos down both biceps. Owen has no idea how he manages to keep in shape with two kids and a full-time job in an office full of women who adore him and like to show their love through baking. He’s worked at Citizens Advice for five years now. He is Owen’s eyes and ears in the constituency, among his voters, and his friend.

  He pops open the boot and takes Owen’s bag from him.

  ‘Nice week at the office, dear?’

  ‘Lovely. What’s for dinner?’

  Liam presses the boot shut and Owen gets into the passenger seat.

  ‘Beer, of course. The Cock and Magpie?’

  Real Ale. Tables out front on the tow path. Quiet.

  ‘Yeah, perfect. So what do I need to know?’

  Liam chats to him about the local news as they go up the Coventry Road and round the back of the hospital. Owen automatically checks the verges, hedgerows, roadworks. OK. The council seem to be keeping on top of things, just.

  ‘New campaign on the local Facebook groups about extending the car-free area, and some fuss about drugs in Priory Park. You’ll hear about that tomorrow at the surgery, I guess.’

  Liam comes to the surgery sessions at the weekend, walking the people who come to see Owen through benefit forms and advising them on how to fight evictions, deal with debt. Owen’s constituency agent calls him her extra set of hands.

  The headlights catch a FOR SALE sign outside one of the industrial units. It’s been there a month now. Not good. ‘Sensible taxation for the nation. More money needed for the police, more money for social services,’ he says automatically.

  ‘Some bloody jobs would be a nice step forward too,’ Liam grunts as he winds past the modern blocks of flats and older single-family houses and turns into the pub car park. He pulls in behind a wall of beer barrels, turns off the engine. ‘Anything you can do about that?’

  Owen gets out of the car. Slowly. Watches as Liam gets out and shuts his door. ‘Do you blame us?’

  ‘What?’ Liam says, hitting the button on the key fob. The car park smells of cooking fat, sour beer and behind it the vague green weed tang of the river.

  ‘Us. Politicians, I mean. For the lack of jobs.’

  He shoves his keys in his pockets. ‘Me personally? I don’t know, mate. Sometimes.
Not much you could do about the pandemic, but the rest of it? I like you. You’ve done OK by me, but even when I put a cross against your name, it’s because I think your lot aren’t as bad as the Tories, not because of any shiny future I see coming over the horizon.’

  ‘Hence Brexit.’

  ‘Hence Brexit.’ They walk round the canal side. ‘Why are you asking?’

  Owen feels embarrassed. ‘I’ve got some stuff going on.’

  ‘OK. I’ll get the first round in. You stare at the ducks for a bit.’

  Owen does as he’s told and takes a seat so he can lean up against the wall of the pub and look at the water, lit in yellow patches by the lights of the pub. A painted canal boat with a family on board chugs past. The little girl sitting at the back waves shyly at him and he waves back.

  Liam returns from the bar, shouting something over his shoulder back inside. Owen hears distant laughter.

  ‘Have you heard about the investigation into Jay Dewan?’ Owen asks as Liam sits down.

  Liam takes a long pull at his pint. ‘No.’

  Owen lifts his own pint. ‘Now I’m dwelling on my past mistakes.’

  ‘Sounds like a laugh.’

  You blame yourself. Get the messaging right. Mistakes were made.

  Owen feels a twitch of irritation. ‘If politicians, if people, can’t own up to the things they’ve done wrong in the past, why should you trust them to try and do the right thing in the future?’

  Liam looks sceptical. ‘You’re off your game, fella. I mean, twenty years in and all of a sudden you’ve discovered you’re a politician?’

  Owen is looking at Liam’s arm. The tattoos mostly cover the scarring, but it’s still there if you look for it. Shrapnel from an IED in Helmand Province 2008. Liam sees him looking and shifts sideways. Shoos his eyes off with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Sorry. Doesn’t make a soldier feel any better, saying, “Sorry we sent you to war, turns out it was a shit idea.” I was out there for the bloke next to me. Not for Tony Blair. So if that’s what you’re thinking about, don’t.’ He drinks. ‘And all this apologising gets my goat. Why go over it? Let it lie. Never seen this shit do any good for anyone.’

  Owen might have said the same thing a week ago when he first heard about the investigation. ‘It’s not about making people feel better. It’s about rebuilding trust.’ Exaggerated eye-roll across the table. ‘Fuck’s sake, Liam. I mean it. And I’m not just talking about the party. If it doesn’t start with individual politicians, people like me, then what’s the point? I don’t want my whole career to be an exercise in arse-covering.’

  Liam snorts into his pint. An alarmed duck leaps back into the water at the sound and Liam laughs at it.

  ‘Did you see that! I gave the poor bloody thing a heart attack.’ He glances sideways at Owen, grows serious again. ‘Mate, I can’t think of a job that isn’t an exercise in arse-covering. Mind you, that makes it refreshing when somebody stands up, I’ll give you that.’ He goes quiet and waits until Owen is looking at him again. ‘I know what happened that night. You know, I know. That’s fine. You showed up and helped. That kept my family together. You didn’t have to and that means something. Never felt the need to chat about it. I like my privacy.’

  ‘Shall I get the next one in?’

  ‘Yeah, and stop looking at me like you want to kiss me. It’s freaking me out.’ Owen stands up. ‘Tell you what does matter, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being heard. We’ve worked hard on that list for you on Sunday. Promise me you’ll listen to them, not just stare over their heads and wait for a chance to trot out one of your talking points.’

  ‘Do I do that?’

  ‘It has been known, Owen.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Liam folds his arms and leans back in his chair. ‘Excellent. You may now buy me more beer.’

  Chapter 28

  Phil finds himself picking over the fight with Owen in the Chapter House as he nods and bows his way around the drinks reception. It’s a ‘health care around the world’ conference closing party. The room is huge for the numbers, the windows flung open and piles of face masks and hand sanitiser scattered among the table decorations where you used to get bowls of nuts.

  One delegate after another tries to whisper in his ear and he palms them off with vague promises of future meetings, working groups. Greg Griffen, an accomplished heckler when he was in the House, gets a nod and a photograph and makes vague congratulatory statements about Phil’s great work then disappears back into the crowd. His card says he’s working for Maundrill Consulting. Suddenly, Phil can’t get out of there fast enough.

  He’s starts rerunning the fight with Owen on the way home, working through his papers on the back seat while his driver listens to Classic FM, and kicking himself for the chances he had to cut Owen down to size. By the time his driver drops him in front of his house in Marlow, he’s fuming again.

  Sara, Phil’s wife, calls a hello from the kitchen and an offer of gin. His house. Her house. He couldn’t afford to live like this on an MP’s salary, even with the ministerial bump. He met Sara when he was working in the City after the 2010 election, getting some ‘real world’ experience Tory HQ had called it, and she had stayed there miraculously accruing wealth even as the rest of the country turned to ashes around them.

  ‘Honey! Welcome home!’ The kitchen floor is scattered with Lego. The twins have been on an orgy of construction and destruction. Sara has a gin and tonic on the go already.

  ‘I’ve ordered Thai. Hope you don’t mind. Not feeling very wifey tonight.’

  He kisses her, grateful for the smell of her face lotion, the familiar reassurance of her hand on his waist.

  She makes him the drink while he goes upstairs to change out of his suit and kiss his two children. They are splayed out on their beds in their shared room, sheets twisted around their legs. Alex is curled up, hands under his cheek and his curly hair falling across his cheeks. He looks like a model for a Victorian postcard. James is lying on his back, arms and legs akimbo. Behold, the man.

  He arranges the sheets over them. Kisses their foreheads and goes back downstairs unsure how he got so lucky, the anger with Owen beginning to leak out of his blood but leaving him tired and unsettled.

  ‘What’s up?’ Sara says as she hands him his gin.

  He tells her. Sara has never met Owen, seen him across a crowded room or on TV from time to time, but never met him. He is a figure in their marriage nevertheless, a ghost in the back rooms of their relationship, their understanding of each other, just as her dead father is. A formative influence, absent and unchallengeable, but still invisibly buffeting your partner’s actions and reactions as they move through life.

  ‘Not the conversation you’ve been hoping to have with him,’ she says when he is done.

  ‘No. I don’t know what I was expecting. Why I was expecting anything else. When I told him I was joining the Conservatives, I knew he’d be raging at first but I thought we’d be able to talk about it eventually.’ He stares at the ice settling in his glass. ‘All these years later he’s still going for my throat.’ He drinks, feels the kick of the alcohol and his own disappointment. ‘Everything is so tribal with him. I don’t understand why he doesn’t get it’s that sort of thinking which has brought the world to its knees.’

  ‘That and a global pandemic, my love,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Sara,’ he snaps. She holds up her hands, eyebrows raised. ‘Sorry, sorry. I blame Owen. The man drives me mad.’

  ‘Did you do it?’ She asks the question very carefully, quietly. ‘Did you give the list of defensive marginals to Conservative Party HQ?’

  He could give a non-answer. He could bluster. But he loves his wife.

  ‘Yes.’

  She gasps, a tiny intake of breath. ‘And I thought we got this seat because of my charm and all our hard work.’

  They had worked hard. The local party weren’t wild about the idea of a
n ex-left winger from the other side of London and the wrong side of the tracks being parachuted into the constituency. Sara had thrown herself into the work while pregnant with the twins and supporting him financially. She’d bought this house between coffee mornings and school fetes and posed for photographs, hanging on his arm, even while the morning sickness was at its worst.

  ‘You made all the difference.’ He means it and he thinks, hopes, that she believes him. ‘It was never an explicit quid pro quo, you know. And I was trying to convince myself they wanted me in parliament for myself, not as a result of my past … ’ he can’t find the right word, ‘endeavours.’

  She swallows, still absorbing the change in perspective. Folding the new information into their story. ‘Why did Owen never confront you about it before?’

  Phil is raw. ‘It would have taken him a while to work it out, and we never spoke again after his and Christine’s engagement party.’

  ‘When he punched you.’

  ‘When he punched me. He might have started wondering when he saw how well focused our spending was. Me being selected for this seat probably felt like a confirmation.’

  She swills the last of the ice water in her glass. ‘Why didn’t he tell anyone else?’

  ‘Because it would have made him culpable too. He shouldn’t have left the list unattended in the house, even in our house.’

  ‘Poor Owen.’

  His anger flares again. ‘He would have done exactly the same thing if he’d had the chance! He’d have leaped on something like that and spent years crowing about it, no matter who he screwed over to do it. He’s never done anything that wasn’t about the party and what he thought was best for it. Sod the greater good. The guy is the ultimate machine.’

  ‘Apart from meeting you today,’ she says gently. ‘Whatever that was about, it wasn’t about what is good for the Labour Party.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was, and I just missed it.’

  The doorbell chimes softly and she goes to fetch the food while he lays out the plates and cutlery. They set out the cardboard boxes, licking the drips off their fingers. She hasn’t put any music on, and Phil unfolds slowly into the peace of it. The garden is dark. A curious fox blinks at them from the patch of light spilling onto the grass from the floor-to-ceiling glass doors, then disappears.