And then who could it be but his sister? She was striding toward him between the various huddles, poised as ever, if dressed down today – jeans and penny loafers, a white shirt, a loose linen jacket. She looked younger, friendlier. He kissed her cheek.
‘No cameras today, Jonno?’
‘I’ve maybe had my fifteen minutes.’
‘Don’t say that. We’ll get you back in the limelight. So have you got time for me today, stranger?’
‘What have you got in mind?’
‘Oh, just a little chat would be useful.’
‘We could go for a stroll?’
‘I’m in the car.’
‘I’d prefer a stroll.’
‘Okay. Be like that then …’
Gore glanced over at Stevie and Lindy, still engaged in seemingly polite intercourse. ‘Shall we?’ he said, and hustled his sister toward the exit. No call or quick tread came after him.
*
They trudged through Hoxheath Park, sticking to the path, nothing much to look at in the grey autumn, though they looked about regardless. She took his arm. ‘Is it all going as you want it then?’
‘More or less. I suppose phase one’s been accomplished.’
‘Well, I must say, I’m impressed you’ve even got it off the ground.’
‘I didn’t do it alone. I’ve had some great help off people. People who’ve really gone out of their way for me.’
‘That’s people for you,’ she shrugged. ‘They like doing good turns. Makes ’em feel better about themselves.’
Oh God, thought Gore, not again. The Concise Susannah, her patented philosophy of the human heart as a customised engine for private consumption, fuelled by driving self-interest alone. There was no arguing with her. He was about his work now, she about hers, and he didn’t intend to resume the hard lashing of a dead horse.
She broke the silence. ‘Have you talked to Dad?’
‘I saw him. He seemed alright. Offered to give us a hand.’
‘Don’t let him climb any ladders. Seriously.’
‘And how’s it with you? Your business?’
‘Busy. It’s a lot different now. Funny for me, after all the lobbying I did. Working with Marty so much, I do find I’m on the receiving end.’
‘“Marty”?’
‘That’s his name. Don’t sneer, kidder. No, it’s got more interesting the more he’s got on. Changing of the guard, see. I get calls off people who wouldn’t give us the time of day before. Not when I started on my own. Old clients from Hook Millard, wanting to make a case. To who they think’ll be the next lot in charge.’
‘Because of Blair?’
‘Aye. People are shy of saying so, which is weird. But, yeah, of course it’s cos of Blair.’
‘So what do you tell them?’
‘To change their thinking. At least watch their language. I mean, see if I were repping Vickers Armstrong now? I’d be telling them to say they’re into making kinder, gentler sorts of tanks.’
Gore scoffed, as he assumed by her smirk that she wished him to. They walked on.
‘He’s been asking after you, actually. Marty? Persistently, I have to say.’
‘Asking what about me?’
‘Well, he’s heard about you now, obviously. Seen your stuff in the papers and that. Not on my account. But he’s very curious.’
‘And what have you told him?’
‘That you’re red-hot Labour. Hammer and sickle all through your spine. You are, still, aren’t you?’
‘I think I still pay my Party subs. Direct debit.’ Gore picked up a gnarled stick, threw it aimlessly. ‘I don’t go to meetings. Haven’t for an age.’
‘Well, anyhow. The thing with Martin is, he wondered if the two of you couldn’t maybe meet up sometime? Put your heads together?’
‘About what?’
‘I think he’s after a bit fresh thinking on sort of grass-roots work? In the community. The whole “social exclusion” thing.’
‘What on earth’s that?’
‘What you’re doing. How to do good work with little groups of people, stuff that’s new, different, forward-thinking. Getting people together for a good cause.’
‘Suze, that’s what we do in churches. We’ve done it for centuries. There’s nothing new about it. It’s nothing to do with politics either.’
Susannah shot him a scowl. ‘Don’t act the clart, John, I know you better. This is serious. I mean, are you not interested? Just a lunch maybe?’
‘Suze, I know how you’re all into this whole Labour thing of yours now, but I’m just not sure I’ve the time for it.’
‘Make the time, John. You know you can.’
‘Well, yes, but, it’s not just that. I think you know, in fact, that I don’t much care for your friend.’
‘Oh, well, that’s just odd. Far as I can see, you’ve a lot in common, you’s two. If you asked Marty to say what his politics were now, he’d say he was Christian Socialist.’
‘Oh, get away, Sue. He was a Trot.’
‘That was years ago, man. He goes to church now. A lot of them do these days, you might be surprised. People change.’
‘Well, that would be some manoeuvre. He must have smelt it on the wind.’
‘That’s his job. Having antennae. You don’t get going in politics without a good set. Otherwise you’d never have a clue what people want from you.’
‘You can always just do what you think’s right …’
‘Christ but you annoy me, John. Look, it’s not like you’ll be injected with a poison if you shake his bliddy hand. Don’t be so snide all your life. Are you interested in politics or not?’
‘I’m not – snide. I just don’t see the point of him and me talking.’
‘Well, that’s you all over, John. To be frank. I mean, you act like you’re above it. All the rest of us minions. Judging us.’
‘I don’t. I do not judge people. Not out of hand.’
‘You judge Martin and you never met the bugger. Not in twenty year, any road.’
This, Gore conceded, was a half-decent debating point.
‘Eh? I mean, where’s the harm? What’s one hour out of your weekend? It’s just possible, John, just possible that you might learn something.’
In his heart Gore already knew he would relent. The proposition was far too interesting. No pastoral chore on his dance-card could compare. Above all, though, he had never before seen his sister express such a need of him, and he would happily see more of it.
Chapter VIII
THE TRIBUNE
Sunday, 27 October 1996
As the afternoon’s amblers passed him by, Gore stood perplexed on a corner of Railway Street, peering up and down, checking again the address scribbled on the edge of his Sunday Sun. It was a corner office building below the Westmorland Road and Marlborough Crescent, newly refaced and whitewashed, six storeys of smoked windows and bolted glass-and-steel balconies. By the door a shiny plaque proclaimed ST JAMES’S BUSINESS CENTRE. Such was the address of Pallister’s constituency HQ – on the very cusp of the constituency, Gore duly noted, for this one could only call the border between the stricken west of town and the prospering centre. He buzzed the fifth floor, and gave the big stiff glass door a shove. On a low armchair in the foyer sat Susannah, restored to a dark blue suit in the two hours since they spoke. She rose to greet him and they entered a mirrored elevator.
‘Sorry, but can I ask who pays for this?’
‘You do, pet. The tax-payer. Don’t worry, we get a knock-down deal on the rent. He earns it, but. Who else works their Sunday lunchtime?’
‘You do, pet.’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve just got a bit paperwork. Might as well do it here. This way I get his little researcher to fetch us wor coffee.’
Gore waved his newspaper. ‘You saw your boy made page three?’
Gore had been amused to read of Pallister’s reprimand by the Speaker of the Commons for failing to correctly register a recent trip to Germany,
his hotel bill and sundry other costs having been met by a leading local manufacturer of motor exhaust systems. Susannah waved a hand.
‘Oh, usual bloody pompous procedure. He just forgot. Wouldn’t you?’
They had reached the fifth floor, and Susannah offered him a face so earnest he thought it comical. ‘Now you will listen, won’t you? You won’t just sit there and – I don’t know – throw the Bible at him?’
‘As if I wrote it?’
‘Exactly.’
She steered him through a fire door into a big pleasing open-plan room, new jute carpet and creamy walls, long windows giving vantage over the old Forth Yard toward the Tyne. At one desk a young man with a drooping fringe was bent over an open page and barely acknowledged them. Susannah led her brother round the books to the corner office, its outward-facing windows masked by strip blinds, its door ajar. Within, framed before a French window, in shirt sleeves and tie loose-knotted, Martin Pallister stood upright behind his desk in the act of taking a call. But he grinned and motioned for Gore to take the comfortable chair. Instead Gore stood a while, then sauntered to the office shelves.
‘No, look, I’ve not got a comment on it right this moment. If it’s true then it’s not good, obviously, but that’s for then …’
Hobsbawm’s histories, various bound Hansards, Deutscher’s Trotsky, Peter Drucker’s Management, one or two Viz annuals. Among wall-mounted photos Gore saw Pallister drinking a yard of ale with some rowdy Teutonics, and a shot of the Newcastle football manager, Keegan, cheerfully alongside Tony Blair, Pallister lurking at his elbow.
‘No, I’ll give you something before then. Yeah, I’ve someone here …’
At the edge of the MP’s desk, between the PC monitor and piles of foolscap folders, was planted a figurine in heavy cast metal. Gore lifted and hefted it – a paperweight of sorts, in the shape of a pitman lugging a coal-truck.
Pallister hung up the receiver and stretched his arms over his head. Still a sportsman’s build, his shirt a little damp. Still a cocksureness in his gaze, humour lurking at the corners of his mouth. Still annoyingly handsome, too, though up close he looked a little punchier than his photos, a slight boozer’s ruddiness round the nose and eyes – possibly historic. But those eyes were still bright, hair still lustrous, if speckled with salt like his own, and now piled high in a style that put Gore suddenly and joltingly in mind of Pallister’s dad, One-Armed Joe.
He pointed at the figure in Gore’s hand. ‘Like that, do you? I got given it off the fella who makes them, out of scrap. Used to be down the pit himself. Enterprising. You found us okay, then?’
‘Yeah. You’re just about inside your constituency, aren’t you?’
Pallister smiled. ‘Well, I tell you, I understand now why Voltaire made his home on the Franco-Swiss border. You never know when you might need a sharp exit. Any road, pleased to meet you, John, thanks for coming in.’
They shook hands across the desk and took their seats.
‘We did meet before,’ Gore ventured. ‘Once, a good few years back.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘Suze was there too, has she never mentioned? It was one of the big CND rallies in London.’
‘She might have mentioned … I don’t recall. God, when would that have been then? Eighty-four? Eighty-three? I would’ve still been lecturing.’ He whistled through his teeth. ‘Interesting times, as the Chinese say. You weren’t a vicar back then, but?’
‘I was still at school.’
‘Gotcha. Right sort of age to be on CND marches.’
‘It’s funny, but – I remember meeting you so well. Mainly because you were so down on Labour at the time.’
‘We’ve all been down on Labour one time or other, it’s a rite of passage. I was still a member then, but. Like I’ve always been. Like you, right?’
Gore nodded.
‘And now look at us, eh?’ Pallister smiled broadly.
‘I was interested, actually, in what I read in the papers about conference?’
‘Oh aye? It was different this year, right enough. Odd …’
‘Not like it used to be?’
‘Well, there’s that, but it was that rotten business in Dunblane really got to me. How do you legislate for that? Some shithouse loon walks into a school and starts strafing. I mean, I’ve got a young son myself, school age.’
Gore nodded, deferring to the sentiment, loath to be distracted. ‘Dreadful, yes. But what I read in the Guardian was you’re in favour of splitting from the unions. Is that right?’
‘Listen, if the Guardian attacks us then we’re doing something right. I mean – and we’re off the record now, yeah?’ Gore pulled a quizzical face. Pallister shrugged. ‘Well, you do media, don’t you? So, just between us? My view is once you commit to balloting members you’re on the way to cutting them ties. Now you’ll not hear me defaming the cause of organised labour. But – it’s been a marriage. Not always a happy one.’ Gore could sense Pallister warming to his topic. ‘In the past, you know, the unions have been a bit of an abusive husband. Coming back from the pub full of beer, wanting their tea and all else. I mean, you’ll have been to the same sorts of meetings as me, right? You always got a lot of macho crap off the brothers.’
Pallister leaned back in the chair, cupped his hands behind his head. Gore rather felt he was witnessing a rival show of testicular authority.
‘Now, if you’re talking Party coffers – well, the pocketbook is an issue in any marriage, right? The thing is, now, Tony’s got a real touch when it comes to getting new donors in. Why are you smiling?’
‘“Tony” …’
‘The maximum leader. Aye, I know. It’s not like we were at school together. But, that’s his name. Like I say – money’s always laid us low. We’re poor, as a party. So where do we find what we need? To put meat and muscle on the bones? Unions won’t do it. Local parties have nowt. If you’re not careful you spend half your life at whist drives. Bring-and-fucking-buy sales. ’Scuse my French, but you must find it similar with the church, right? What you’re doing?’
Nice try, thought Gore. ‘I do. At the same time, I find one has to be careful about the kind of help you accept. The kind of people. What they think they’re paying for.’
‘I hear you. How keep thyself pure, brother? Look, we’re not like them sleazy tossers in power. There’s some things aren’t for sale. But we have to raise a war-chest, we have to. Sure, there’s bread-and-butter overheads we should always meet worselves. But, I mean, look at this wanker …’
Pallister had rustled up a newspaper clipping from a desk drawer.
‘Here’s this Todd on his high horse, saying it’s an outrage that a supermarket’s sponsoring badges at conference. Talk about a matter of state, eh? Come on. Why stump up for forty thousand plastic badges when some fucking grocer wants to write you a cheque? Are they seriously calling that “bought influence”? Get away. Hardly cash-for-questions, is it?’
‘I noticed you made the paper yourself today.’
And for the first time Gore knew he had touched a wound. Pallister drew breath, made a bridge of his fingers on the desktop before him.
‘If I go abroad these days, trust me, it’s business. My business is Tyneside. That thing you’re on about? I was in Baden-Württemberg, in the Ruhr. I’m interested in regional power, it’s a bit of a hobby horse of mine. They’ve got it. Here, you know, it’s a mix, regions always clashing with the centre. So you get overlap, waste. Ah, anyhow.’ He chuckled. ‘What the sainted press don’t understand is I’m not in this for my own good. Okay, I’ve got a mortgage to pay, just like they do – you too, probably. Or the Church pays yours, right?’
‘They bought it for cash. Just a little ex-council place in Hoxheath.’
‘Blimey. Right, well, I suppose they can manage. But me, it’s not like I’m coining it. Otherwise I’d never have gone into politics, I’d have stayed where I was in business.’
‘What business were you in again?’
‘Well, it was the business of generating business. I worked for TREC, the development company? That was some good years. Taught me a lot, I can tell you. Look at this, I’ll show you what I’m talking about, come on …’
He beckoned Gore from his chair to join him at the French window, and they stepped out onto a metal balcony shielded by panels of frosted glass. Precipitously below them were the enclosed rubble mounds and brute foundations of Marlborough Crescent’s sprawling construction site. Ahead of them, the glinting roofs of the industrial sheds of the old Forth Yard. Further removed, Central Station, and a train from the south rolling home under afternoon sun. On the horizon, the Tyne Bridge, a tall crane placid behind it. Gore found the view wholly lovable, yet he was sharply aware – Pallister, too, surely knew? – how the frame round this picture sliced off the very much less scenic imagery marooned behind them to the west, the run-down ramshackle sprawl of Hoxheath.
But Pallister was grinning at Gore, his eyes highly lively. ‘Not bad, is it? Sometimes, but, you know what? I get the maddest urge just to jump off.’
‘I’m sure the angels would bear you upward,’ Gore murmured, deciding a split second later that he was pushing his luck.
But Pallister only laughed, one short sharp Ha! ‘Shame we can’t see the business park from here … but you’ve got the new science centre going up. Out of a bus station and some derelict land. That’s a fifty-million-pound project, right there. TREC, we put money into it.’
‘You and who else?’
‘Oh, the lottery.’
‘The weekly binge …’
‘It’s only a quid. I’ve made worse punts. And someone’s got to win, right? God, but.’ And he rattled at the balcony’s mercifully sound railing. ‘I get like a kid when I see a big site. I love demolition, me, I do. Cos it means construction. Construction means jobs, it means property. That means prosperity. It goes right through the economy, like lightning, it really does.’
‘What about your constituents? In France or Switzerland or whichever?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I just wonder. Fifty million. What if you drove west from here and threw that money in the air? Do you not think it’d trickle down a lot faster? To them that need it?’
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