‘No it isn’t,’ said Miranda. ‘I’m turning into the sort of person who totally creeps me out. Did I tell you what I said to Will?’
Will, until recently, had been her boyfriend-since-college. They had made what Miranda had thought was a mutual decision to break up, move on, and stay friends. A few months of careful, content-free chats on the phone and then, out of nowhere, Will had had a real anger-management failure and snarled ‘Oh, get a life!’ at her. She had found herself saying, ‘I don’t have to – I have a lifestyle.’
‘I mean, how could I have said that? It’s just … creepy. I mean, isn’t it?’
Dido was raking though an old wash bag full of nail varnishes. ‘No it isn’t,’ she said in an absent tone. ‘He was just being nasty because he’d found out you were seeing somebody younger.’
‘It wasn’t serious,’ she protested.
‘None of them are serious, are they?’ said Dido. ‘But it’s none of Will’s business, is it?’
‘You’re sure it doesn’t say that I can’t be serious myself? If I’m hanging with some non-serious boyfriend?’ Boyfriend? Ouch. Miranda was beginning to find that word a bit juvenile.
‘Nah,’ Dido reassured her. ‘It just means that you’re not all banged-up in a Big Thing. You are free to accept a better offer. But not from Will. Nothing wrong with that.’
‘My mother,’ said Miranda, ‘doesn’t buy it. That’ll be why she wants lunch. The best thing about Will was she couldn’t be on my case about not having anyone. I bet that’s what this is about. She doesn’t buy non-serious.’
‘Your mother doesn’t buy anything. Except those pointy shoes, I suppose. I can’t believe she actually sends out a gofer for them. Just tell her you’ll get serious in your own good time.’ Dido began to paint her nails. Choosing one colour had been too much for her that evening. She was doing every finger in a different shade.
Miranda had a hideously familiar and usually absolutely accurate feeling that her mother was about to weigh in for another round of troubleshooting her life for her.
A little later, she and Dido found themselves in a reasonably sophisticated place in Soho, where Miranda waved to attract the attention of the Tequila Boy. He was olive-skinned and mean-looking, in a prettyish, Johnny-Depp’s-secret-lovechild kind of way, and he wore his shot glasses on bandoliers over his shoulders and the bottles attached to his belt, in the area where hips are found on meatier men.
‘Will you sort us out a couple of blacks?’ she said sweetly.
‘Two blacks for the ladies,’ said Tequila Boy, popping the glasses out of his harnessings with a flourish.
‘Where are you from?’ she asked.
‘How do you know I’m from somewhere?’ he countered, juggling the bottle out of its holster.
‘Just a wild guess.’
‘A wild guess, eh?’ He poured two shots, with a lot more style than precision.
‘I kind of like wild stuff.’ She mopped up a few drops of spillage with a fingertip, and licked it. ‘What time do you finish?’
‘Late.’
‘Too late?’ They exchanged a friendly quota of eye contact.
‘Maybe not too late. Some of us go over the road to …’ And he named the nearby club that went on all night.
‘I might see you there,’ Miranda said, thinking what-the-hell, the Urban Phoenix owed her a late night or ten.
‘You might see me there,’ Tequila Boy pouted, capping off the bottle.
‘OK,’ she sighed, ‘so tell me a time.’
Dido watched with wide eyes as her friend’s new date sauntered off to his next customer.
‘I bet he’s a great dancer,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you just did that again. That’s just … wicked.’
‘Wicked is good, I’m OK with wicked. It’s serious I don’t like.’ Miranda shrugged. Waiters, barmen, Tequila Boys – they made her feel like Samantha in Sex And the City – sexy, grown-up and … in control.
2. Beyond the Cocktail Apron
A couple of years after Oliver Hardcastle sold his view of the Thames and moved to Saxwold New Farm, Clare Marlow sat in a restaurant on the river’s south bank, conveniently close to Westminster, and waited for the arrival of the Adviser to the Special Adviser to the Prime Minister.
She had taken up ambition late in her life, in the same spirit that some women dedicate themselves to playing bridge, or gardening, or doomed and humiliating love affairs. Having been universally acclaimed as a nice woman, such a nice woman even, and having raised a lovely daughter in Miranda and a son who at least had the decency to leave home as soon as he could, she realised that it was time to move on.
At the first whiff of fortune, not to mention fame, Clare Marlow had given up her aspirations to be nice and became driven, obsessive and bored by the friends who tried to put her in touch with how she was changing.
After a few years, the friends had washed their hands. Her husband retreated to Cambridge and burrowed into his old college, where he could study trade in pre-Roman Britain in peace. Her son got religion and her daughter got a long-hours job. Clare never even noticed. She had become a hopeless power junkie. Nothing, but nothing, had ever given her such a buzz.
The sweetest part of it all was that she had never been meant to do anything, let alone anything important. Her whole life suddenly became a subversive statement. No woman of Clare’s vintage had been intended to be summoned to a power lunch with an Adviser to the Special Adviser to the Prime Minister. She twisted her glass of still mineral water against the light and waited for destiny to make its next offer. She could have waited for ever, so delicious was the defeat of the dreary blueprint that had originally been drawn up for her.
The Adviser felt a twinge of nerves as he approached the figure at the table. She was perfect. She had all the attributes of a great statesman: a face for television, a way of speaking in short sentences that were virtually meaning-free and the ability to remain a size twelve without the aid of cigarettes. She was not encumbered by any significant flaws, such as a conscience or a good memory for promises. She had a family, a husband and two children, the majority of whom were available for photographs, non-criminal and not noticeably insane.
She had had flaws, but he truly admired the way she had identified and remedied them as soon as it had become appropriate. Take the voice thing. Way back whenever, Clare Marlow’s mother and father had managed the Scotch Wool Shop in Neasden, the least wealthy part of the North London conurbation, a region whose dialect sounded like two steel cables scraping together in a howling wind. By listening to the radio, Clare had acquired a BBC accent by the time she had been summoned to Cambridge for her university interview. Just as efficiently, she had later ditched these rounded tones in favour of a South London whine.
At the same time, she had realised by instinct that her presentation was too competent, too elegant, too much like some Eighties superwoman, and she had seized the opportunity of hiring a holistic publicist with whom to go shopping and buy the kind of clothes that, in a visually aware world, would proclaim vulnerability, foolishness, maybe even spirituality, rather than her natural and frequently indulged love of Gucci.
By all the laws of nature, such as nature was understood in London at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it was inevitable that one day Clare Marlow would be lunched by an Adviser and invited to consider a public office. And (the Adviser straightened his tie with pride as he thought of this) the honour was his.
Clare never mentioned the fact, because she had learned that it was career suicide to suggest that there had ever been such a thing as the past, but a woman of her class and vintage was intended by her fellow men to be a homemaker. The destiny her own mother had pictured for her was of greeting her husband at the door every evening with soothing words, a pitcher of chilled martinis in her manicured hand and a frilly red, white and black cocktail apron tied with a pretty bow around her wasp waist.
Her own mother’s aspirations for her had also included a Go
blin Teasmade among the wedding presents and a home with a vinyl-tiled floor that Clare would be able to clean with a sponge mop and a product advertised on the television. Miracle detergents! Labour-saving devices! In addition, she had had visions of her daughter living in a half-timbered house with lawns front and back, instead of a terraced dwelling with a coal hole and a concrete yard. She had seen her daughter as a mother herself, enjoying the supreme happiness of having the leisure to walk to and from school twice a day with her fine, floppy-haired son and sweet, curly-haired daughter, all neat in their spotless ankle socks and snugly buttoned coats with velvet collars.
No one had ever planned for Clare Marlow to be the CEO of the vast insurance and finance group known as Mutual Probity, as well as a homemaker and a mother, but she had pulled off the hat trick. Her parents had pretty well died of anxiety as they watched her soar into a social stratosphere beyond their understanding, but she had never looked back to notice them.
At Cambridge, where her mother had dreaded that she would become a frump and a spinster, Clare had acquired a husband with the greatest of ease. Male students outnumbered female by nine to one the year she went up to one of the women’s colleges, equipped with an exhibition, a bicycle and a prescription for the Pill. Following marriage, the children had been no problem – not really, anyway. First the boy, then the girl. She dressed them both in miniature denim dungarees rather than velvet-collared coats, and this led her naturally to go into business with another mother, selling designer baby clothes by mail order. Once she was dealing with balance sheets, Clare began to feel the intoxication of power.
Her little business had been bought by a bigger business, and she had found herself a director. An even bigger business had bought that business, and she had become a managing director. Power became more than an optional perk, it was a personal obsession. The first half of her life suddenly seemed like a cosmic waste of her time. The years she’d frittered away trying to be a flower child or a foxy lady or a yummy mummy, when she could have been mastering the universe!
Power over what, or who, was irrelevant; any power would do. Halfway through her life, Clare Marlow had woken up from her nightmare of socially sanctioned pointlessness and looked around wildly for new worlds to conquer. Her strategy was simple. 1) money, 2) politics and 3) television. Why not? And here she was, making the transition from 1 to 2, and being lunched by the Adviser.
‘The thing is, Clare,’ the Adviser said, cutting to the chase as soon as they could dispense with the waiter, ‘we want to give you something big. Foreign, Home, that big. I mean, we’re not in the business of wasting anyone’s time, are we? We know that if you’re ready to move on from the commercial sector, the offer needs to be right.’
‘Of course.’ She preened, with reservations. So he wasn’t going to offer her Foreign or Home. Well, too much to hope for first off, perhaps. Her future was still unrolling exactly according to plan. Just a few weeks ago, at an industry dinner, the Prime Minister personally had sounded her out about going into politics. Perfect timing. As the CEO of Mutual Probity, now the country’s leading financial services provider, her present position was getting ever so slightly uncomfortable.
Shortly after she put her family photo on her desk at Mutual Probity, she discovered that she was sitting on a time bomb. The group had no more dirty linen in its accounting history than any other global enterprise, but that was to say that it had almost a million imaginary customers on its books and had mis-reported last year’s loss as a profit.
Her job, she had deduced, was not to act like a girl and make a fuss, but to act like a man and keep this quiet as long as possible. She’d done brilliantly to hold the lid on the mess for the past six years, but sometime something had to give. Come this April and the end of the financial year, things were going to get sticky. With Enron and Worldcom still sensitive memories, a failure of investor understanding on such matters was imminent. She had, in fact, been lumbered with the whole nightmare. More than anything in the world, Clare Marlow really hated to be embarrassed in public. She had been looking to make the move. Urgently.
The Adviser was in his early thirties. He certainly watched The West Wing. He probably owned the boxed set of DVDs. His shirt was crisp and his eyes as sharp as kebab skewers. His hair knew it was supposed to bounce with discipline, like Rob Lowe’s hair, even if his nose was twice as large and his complexion a distressing shade of greyish-beige, and pitted with old acne scars. There was a trace of Rob Lowe around the middle of his face, which was significantly blank. Botox? Cocaine? Social anxiety? All of the above? Did it really matter?
Clare saw that the Adviser had perfected the art of checking the restaurant doorway for the arrival of useful contacts while seemingly focusing only on her. It was the merest flicker, a lizard’s blink. If she hadn’t been so good at that manoeuvre herself, she’d never have noticed.
He had ordered boyishly, something to do with sausages; and he was eating it boyishly, which meant in large mouthfuls, hastily swallowed. Odd that such a high-flyer should never have learned that the more important you were, the less notice you should take of your food. Clare understood this instinctively. She herself had a small disc of fish, a farmed fish whose flabby flesh she did not exactly eat, but occasionally touched with her fork, as if she could have cared that it was leaking a mild solution of poisons and antibiotics on to the plate.
‘So, what have you in mind?’
‘We’ve been asking ourselves how we could make the best use of your skills. And what would be the best way of introducing you to the public at large. We did some work with focus groups which suggests that awareness among the general audience could maybe be a bit higher. Your profile in the business sector couldn’t be better, of course.’
‘Thank you.’ Profile! Awareness! He was talking her language. Still, she felt a zephyr of doubt. Flattering that they’d researched her image, but this approach was just too itsy to be the hors d’oeuvre to a plum job. It wasn’t the preamble to a poisoned chalice either, but they’d have been mad to try that. All the same, he was trying to soften her up for something.
‘And no presentation problems. That’s a nice bonus for me.’ The Adviser meant that he’d been going crazy with the Minister she was to replace. The Sun headlined him as The Incredible Pink-Faced Blob and he had a tragic tendency to look like an obese paedophile dressed by Oxfam. Clare Marlow was an elegant woman. Famously elegant, even. She had authoritative height, honest eyes, those small camera-friendly features, the right sort of blonde hair and a nice taste in snazzy little suits. She understood the iconography of the power necklace: metal, heavy, a classic unchanged since Boudicca was Queen of the Iceni. She was also given to discreetly erotic footwear: pointed, black, agonising, a style which had endured since Sacher-Masoch’s Venus was wrapped in her furs. An Adviser’s dream, really.
‘But we need to get you noticed,’ he went on.
‘What are you softening me up for?’ she asked him, with her useful, faux-decent smile which sent the meta-message that she knew the game and was not offended.
He paused. He swallowed. He made eye contact. He stopped himself taking a deep breath and made himself sound natural. ‘The PM wants to start you off at the Fieldcare Agency.’
She paused. She swallowed. She held the eye contact. Fieldcare? Fieldcare? She pasted on a look of grave concentration while groping for the translation. Nothing made you look more past it than not keeping up with new official bodies. No, wait, Fieldcare was a department – wasn’t it? Christ, it was Agriculture! All this bullshit, and all they were offering was Agriculture.
She frowned and stopped herself saying, ‘Agriculture? Forget it!’ Instead, she countered him swiftly, ‘What about Northern Ireland?’
Her lunch partner dived in with the hard sell. ‘The PM really wants you at the cutting edge, Clare. He’s thinking about a three-term career for you, minimum. We can’t risk losing you in Ireland, anything could happen there. We admit that the Fieldcare sector has
been underperforming but we’re confident that with the right person at the top …’
‘Underperforming? Why am I not surprised?’ Clare played for time while her mind struggled for data. She knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about agriculture except that no Minister of Agriculture had ever made it to Downing Street. You might as well get lost in Culture or Sport.
Agriculture. Farming. The country. No, the countryside. A jumble of images from TV commercials came into her mind, women with old-fashioned hair running in slow motion through golden wheatfields, men with smelly dogs trudging up hills for no viable purpose.
Next, she remembered a TV programme showing an angry crowd walking beside tractors. A demonstration! Yokels, for heaven’s sake, in those terrible tatty green anorak things. And toffs, God help them, in those mouldy tweed jackets that never fitted anywhere. She had needed to check the TV listings to make sure she wasn’t watching The Fast Show.
She found she had no data on what the issue under protest might have been, but a clear memory of a pink blob of a man being ineffectual on television. Hah! So there was at least some media potential in the job. 1) money, 2) politics, 3) television. Fieldcare could serve her purpose. Perhaps that was what the PM had sensed when they talked.
She remembered that April was imminent. This year, April was going to be the cruellest month. There was a real danger of a Bank of England investigation at Mutual Probity. Almost more worrying – she seemed to be the only one who could see the big black clouds piling up, ready for a massive blame-storm.
‘The Fieldcare Agency,’ she said again. ‘The name’s not good enough. It doesn’t say “Government”. No sense of national leadership. Sounds more like an NGO.’
A look of relief washed over the Adviser’s face. ‘If you wanted to go for a new corporate image …’
‘Essential,’ she told him. ‘We need to communicate our vision. Agriculture that’s competitive, safe, modern, for Christ’s sake. I’d want to reframe the whole sector, distance ourselves from yesterday’s headlines, transcend the historical issues of class conflict, tell people we’re about ethical production, managed to the highest standards, viable in the global marketplace.’
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