The Final Cut

by Michael Dobbs

  The Environment Secretary became aware that the two Ministers seated on either side, though still in the same claret leather seats, had yet managed to distance themselves physically from her, as though fearful of getting caught by a ricochet.

  'And you'd close them down. Wipe the entire town off the map. My God, not even Goring was able to do that.'

  'This is a European proposal which we are obliged to . . .'

  'And how many towns will those ill-begotten French close down? In August the whole of Paris reeks when the water level drops. Small wonder they all flee to the seaside and abandon the city to the tourists.'

  'This is a collective decision arrived at after careful study in Brussels. Our future lies in Europe and

  its . . .'

  There she was, driving up her one-way street again, in the wrong direction. 'Bugger Brussels.' He could no longer contain his contempt but he did not raise his voice, he must not seem to lose control. 'It's become nothing more than a bureaucratic brothel where the entire continent of Europe meets to screw each other for as much money as possible.'

  Bollingbroke was rapping his knuckles on the table in approval, tapping out his fealty. The curry shop could stay.

  'If you had spent as much time there as I have, Prime Minister, you would realize how . . .' - she reached for a word, considered, weighed the consequences and compromised - 'exaggerated that description is.' One day, one day soon, she promised herself, she would no longer hold back the strength of her views. She wouldn't let herself be emasculated like most of the men around the table. She was the only woman, he daren't fire her. Dare he? 'This directive is about chemical plants and refineries and .. .'

  'And fish markets and florists' shops! Environment Secretary, let me be clear. I am not going to have such Euro-nonsense pushed through behind my back.'

  'Prime Minister, all the details were in a lengthy position paper I put to you two weeks before the Council of Ministers in Brussels approved the measure. I'm not sure what more I needed.'

  'Instinct. Political instinct,' Urquhart responded, but it was time to back off, move on. 'I can't be expected to take note of every tiny detail buried in a policy document,' he parried, but the effect was ruined as he fumbled for his reading glasses in order to locate the next item on the agenda.

  What motivated Makepeace to join the fray even he had trouble in identifying. He was by nature an intervener. A friend of Annita and strong supporter of Europe, he didn't care for Urquhart's arguments or attitude. Perhaps he felt that since he occupied one of the four great offices of state he was in a strong position to conciliate, lighten the atmosphere, pour oil on troubled waters.

  'Don't worry, Prime Minister,' he offered light-heartedly as Urquhart adjusted his spectacles, 'from now on we'll have all Cabinet documents typed in double space.'

  The oil exploded. It was as if he had offered an accusation that Urquhart was - what? Too old? Too enfeebled for the job? Fading? To Urquhart, deep into humour failure, it sounded too much an echo of the demands for change. He rose with such sudden venom that his chair slid back on the carpet.

  'Don't deceive yourself that one opinion poll gives you special privileges.'

  The air had chilled, grown exceptionally rarefied, thinned by rebuke. Makepeace was having difficulty breathing. A tableau of deep resentment had been drawn in the room, growing in definition for what seemed several political lifetimes. Slowly Makepeace also stood.

  'Prime Minister, believe me I had no intention . ..'

  Others grasped the opportunity. Two Cabinet Ministers on their feet must indicate an end to the meeting, a chance to bring to a close such extraordinary embarrassment. There was a general rustling of papers and as rapidly as seemed elegant they departed without any further exchange of words.

  Urquhart was angry. With life, with Drabble, Burke and Makepeace, with them all, but mostly with himself. There were rules between 'the Colleagues', even those whose ambition perched on their shoulders like storm-starved goshawks.

  'Thou shalt honour thy colleagues, within earshot.'

  'Thou shalt not be caught bearing false witness.' 'Thou shalt not covet thy colleague's secretary or job (his wife, in some cases, is fair game).'

  'Thou shalt in all public circumstances wish thy colleagues long life.'

  Urquhart had broken the rules. He'd lost his temper and, with it, control of the situation. He had gone much further than he'd intended, displayed insufferable arrogance, seeming to wound for the sake of it rather than to a purpose. In damaging others, he had also damaged himself. There was repair work to be done.

  But first he needed a leak.

  It was as he was hurrying to the washroom outside the Cabinet Room that, near the Henry Moore sculpture so admired by Elizabeth, he saw a grim-faced Makepeace being consoled by a colleague. His quarry had not fled, and here was an opportunity to bind wounds and redress grievances in private.

  'Tom!' he summoned, waving to the other who, with evident reluctance, left the company of his colleague and walked doggedly back towards the Cabinet Room. 'A word, please, Tom,' Urquhart requested, offering the smallest token of a smile. 'But first, a call of nature.'

  Urquhart was in considerable discomfort, all the tension and tea of the morning having caught up with him. He disappeared into the washroom, but Makepeace didn't follow, instead loitering outside the door. Urquhart had rather hoped he would come in; there can be no formality or demarcation of authority in front of a urinal, an ideal location for conversations on a basis of equality, man to man. But Makepeace had never been truly a member of the club, always aloof, holding himself apart. As now, skulking around outside like a schoolboy waiting to be summoned to the headmaster's study, damn him.

  And damn this. Urquhart's bladder was bursting, but the harder he tried the more stubborn his system seemed to grow. Instead of responding to the urgency of the situation it seemed to constrict, confining itself to a parsimonious dribble. Did all men of his age suffer such belittlement, he wondered? This was silly - hurry, for pity's sake! - but it would not be hurried. Urquhart examined the porcelain, then the ceiling, concentrated, swore, made a mental note to consult his doctor, but nothing seemed to induce his system to haste. He was glad now that Makepeace hadn't joined him to witness this humiliation.

  Prostate. The old man's ailment. Bodily mechanics that seemed to have lost contact with the will.

  'Tom, I'll catch you later,' he cried through the door, knowing that later would be too late. There was a scuffling of feet outside and Makepeace withdrew without a word, taking his resentment with him. A moment lost, an opportunity slipped. A colleague turned perhaps to opponent, possibly to mortal enemy.

  'Damn you, come on!' he cursed, but in vain.

  And when at last he had finished, and removed cuff links and raised sleeves in order to wash his hands, he had studied himself carefully in the mirror. The sense inside was still that of a man in his thirties, but the face had changed, sagged, grown blemished, wasted of colour like a winter sky just as the sun slips away. The eyes were now more bruised than blue, the bones of the skull seemed in places to be forcing their way through the thinning flesh. They were the features of his father. The battle he could never win.

  'Happy birthday, Francis.'

  Booza-Pitt had no hesitation. In many matters he was a meticulous, indeed pedantic, planner, dividing colleagues and acquaintances into league tables of different rank which merited varying shades of treatment. The First Division consisted of those who had made it or who were clearly on the verge of making it to the very peaks of their professional or social mountains; every year they would receive a Christmas card, a token of some personal nature for wife or partner (strictly no gays), an invitation to at least one of his select social events and special attention of a sort that was logged in his personal secretary's computer. The cream. For those in the Second Division who were still in the process of negotiating the slippery slopes there was neither token nor undue attention; the Third consisted of those
young folk with prospects who were still practising in the foothills and received only the encouragement of a card. The Fourth Division, which encompassed most of the world who had never made it into a gossip column and were content in life simply to sit back and admire the view, for Geoffrey did not exist.

  Annita Burke was, of course, First Division but had encountered a rock slide that would probably dump her in the Fourth, yet until she hit the bottom of the ravine there was value to be had. She was standing to one side in the black-and-white-tiled entrance hall of Number Ten, smoothing away the fluster and composing herself for the attentions of the world outside, when Geoffrey grabbed her arm.

  'That was terrible, Annita. You must be very angry.'

  There were no words but her eyes spoke for her.

  'You need cheering up. Dinner tonight?'

  Her face lit at the unexpected support; she nodded.

  'I'll be in touch.' And with that he was gone. Somewhere intimate and gossipy, he thought - it would be worth a booth at Wiltons - where the flames of wounded feelings and recrimination might be fanned and in their white heat could be hammered out the little tools of political warfare, the broken confidences, private intelligences and barbs which would strengthen him and weaken others. For those who were about to die generally preferred to take others with them.

  Dinner and gossip, no more, even though she might prove to be vulnerable and amenable. It had been more than fifteen years since they'd spent a romping afternoon in a Felixstowe hotel instead of in the town hall attending the second day of the party's youth conference debating famine in the Third World. They both remembered it very keenly, as did the startled chambermaid, but a memory it should remain. This was business.

  Anyway, Geoffrey mused, necrophilia made for complicated headlines.

  It stood in a back street of Islington, on the point where inner city begins to give way to north London's sprawling excess, just along from the railway arches which strained and grumbled as they bore the weight of crowded commuter trains at the start of their journey along the eastern seaboard. During the day the street bustled with traffic and the bickering and banter from the open-air market, but at night, with the poor street lighting and particularly when it was drizzling, the scene could have slipped from the pages of Dickens. The deep shadows and dark alleyways made people reluctant to pass this way, unless they had business. And in this street the business after dusk was most likely to be Evanghelos Passolides'. His tiny front-room restaurant lay hidden behind thick drawn curtains and a sign on the grimy window which in loud and uncharitable voice announced that the establishment was closed. There was no menu displayed, no welcoming light. It appeared as though nothing had been touched for months, apart from a well-scrubbed doorstep, but few who hurried by would have noticed. 'Vangelis'', as it was known, was unobtrusive and largely unnoticed, which was the point. Only friends or those recommended by friends gained access, and certainly no one who in any life might have been an officer of the local authority or Customs & Excise. For such people 'Vangelis'' was permanently closed, as were his accounts. It made for an intimate and almost conspiratorial atmosphere around the five small tables covered in faded cloths and recycled candles, with holly-covered paper napkins left over from some Christmas past.

  Maria Passolides, a primary school teacher, watched as her father, a Greek Cypriot in his mid-sixties, hobbled back into the tiny open-plan kitchen from where with gnarled fingers and liberal quantities of fresh lemon juice he turned the morning's market produce into dishes of fresh crab, sugar lamb, suckling pig, artichoke hearts and quails' eggs. The tiny taverna was less of a business, more part-hobby, part-hideaway for Passolides, and Maria knew he was hiding more than ever. The small room was filled to chaos with the bric-a-brac of remembrance - a fishing net stretched across a wall and covered in signed photographs of Greek celebrities, most of whom were no longer celebrities or even breathing; along cluttered shelves, plates decorated with scenes of Trojan hunters fighting for control with plaster Aphrodites and a battalion of assorted glasses; on the back of the door, a battered British army helmet.

  There was an abundance of military memorabilia -a field telephone, binoculars scraped almost bare to the metal, the tattered and much-faded azure blue cloth of the Greek flag. Even an Irish republican tricolour.

  In pride of place on the main wall hung a crudely painted portrait of Winston Churchill, cigar jutting defiantly and fingers raised in a victory salute; beneath it on a piece of white card had been scrawled the words which in Greek hearts made him a poet the equal of Byron: 'I think it only natural that the Cypriot people, who are of Greek descent, should regard their incorporation with what may be called their Motherland as an ideal to be earnestly, devoutly and feverishly cherished . ..'

  It was not the only portrait on the wall. Beside it stood the photograph of a young man with open collar, staring eyes and down-turned mouth set against a rough plaster wall. There was no sign of identity, none needed for Michael Karaolis. A promising village boy educated at the English School. A youthful income tax clerk in the colonial administration, turned EOKA fighter. A final photograph taken in Nicosia Gaol on the day before the British hanged him by his neck until he was dead.

  'Vangelis".

  Since he had buried his wife a few years before, Evanghelos Passolides had been captured more than ever by the past. Sullen days were followed by long nights of rambling reminiscence around the candlelit tables with old comrades who knew and young men who might be willing to listen, though the numbers of both shrank with the passing months. He had become locked in time, bitter memories twisting both soul and body; he was stooped now, and the savagely broken leg that had caused him to limp throughout his adult life had grown noticeably more painful. He seemed to be withering even as Maria looked, the acid eating away inside.

  The news that there was to be peace within his island only made matters worse. 'Not my peace,' he muttered in his heavy accent. He had fought for union, Enosis, a joining of all Greeks with the Motherland - one tongue, one religion, one Government no matter how incompetent and corrupt, so long as it was our Government. He had put his life on the line for it until the day his fall down a mountain ravine with a thirty-pound mortar strapped across his back had left his leg bones protruding through his shin and his knee joint frozen shut forever. His name had been on the British wanted list so there was no chance of hospital treatment; he'd been lucky to keep his leg in any condition. The fall had also fractured the spirit, left a life drenched in regret, in self-reproach that he and his twisted leg had let his people down, that he hadn't done enough. Now they were about to divide his beloved island forever, give half of it away to the Turk, and somehow it was all his fault.

  She had to find a distraction from his remorse, some means of channelling the passion, or sit and watch her father slowly wither away to nothing.

  'When are you going to get married?' he grumbled yet again, lurching past her in exaggerated sailor's gait with a plate of marinated fish. 'Doesn't family mean anything to you?'

  Family, his constant refrain, a proud Cypriot father focused upon his only child. With her mother's milk she had been fed the stories of the mountains and the village, of mystical origins and whispering forests, of passions and follies and brave forebears - little wonder that she had never found a man to compare. She had been born to a life illuminated with legend, and there were so few legends walking the streets of north London, even for a woman with her dark good looks.

  Family. As she bit into a slice of cool raw turnip and savoured its tang of sprinkled salt, an idea began to form. 'Baba,' she reached out and grabbed his leathery hand, 'sit a minute. Talk with me.'

  He grumbled, but wiped his hands on his apron and did as she asked.

  'You know how much I love your stories about the old days, what it was like in the village, the tales your mother told around the winter fires when the snow was so thick and the well froze. Why don't we write them down, your memories. About your family. For my fam
ily — whenever I have one,' she smiled.

  'Me, write?' he grunted in disgust.

  'No, talk. And remember. I'll do the rest. Imagine what it would be like if you could read the story of Papou, your grandfather, even of his grandfather. The old way of life in the mountains is all but gone, perhaps my own children won't be able to touch it - but I want them to be able to know it. How it was. For you.'

  He scowled but raised no immediate objection.

  'It would be fun, Baba. You and me. Over the summer when school is out. It would be an excuse for us to go visit once more. It's been years - I wonder if the old barn your father built is still there at the back of the house, or the vines your mother planted. And whether they've ever fixed that window in the church you and your brothers broke.' She was laughing now, like they had before her mother died. A distant look had crept into his eyes, and within them she thought she saw a glint of embers reviving in the ashes.

  'Visit the old family graves,' he whispered. 'Make sure they're still kept properly.'

  And exorcize a few ghosts, she thought. By writing it all down, purging the guilt, letting in light and releasing all the demons that he harboured inside.