Anatomy of a Scandal

by Sarah Vaughan

  It had carried on, their fling, until three weeks ago. Intense, when there was the opportunity, but with physical breaks during the recess: a week in the South Hams near Sophie’s mother; a fortnight in Corsica, where he had taught the children to sail and made love to Sophie nightly; had seen his fling with Olivia as a madness; something he could and would finish as soon as parliament resumed.

  He had tried to distance himself once he got back; told her it was over after the party conference. He had called her into his office, hoping that, this way, she wouldn’t make a scene; that they could be businesslike. Professional. It had been fun while it lasted but they both knew it couldn’t go on.

  Her eyes had watered and her tone became clipped, a reaction he was familiar with and so was unperturbed by: the response of previous girlfriends; and, on the very rare occasions when he had disappointed her, of his mother, Tuppence.

  ‘So, we’re all fine then?’ he had made himself ask, only wanting to hear her say yes.

  ‘Yes, of course we are.’ She gave him a bright smile: chin up, her voice all perky and plucky, though she rather ruined it when it wobbled. ‘Of course we are.’

  And that should have been it. Perhaps would have been if he hadn’t been a fool. If he hadn’t succumbed just the one last time.

  He rolls towards Sophie, pulls her tight. He won’t dwell on what happened in the lift. Barely the most romantic setting but then there was little that was romantic about their relationship: he doesn’t need the Mail to remind him of that fact.

  It must have been that that tipped Olivia over the edge: or rather his reaction to her afterwards. A flash of arrogance, perhaps, yes. But he’d thought it was a one-off; that a bout of fast and furious sex didn’t mean, as she predictably thought it did, that they were getting back together.

  ‘Thanks for that. Just what I needed.’ Feeling light-headed, he was uncharacteristically crass. He could see that now.

  ‘Does that mean?’

  ‘What?’ The lift had reached their floor and, as the doors opened, he stepped out into the narrow corridor and opened the committee corridor door; his mind already on the day’s events; uninterested in what she had to say.

  Her eyes had swelled into pools of hurt but he couldn’t be doing with it. They were supposed to be giving evidence at a committee: were now running late. He just didn’t have the time.

  Perhaps if he’d offered her a kiss, smoothed her hair, let her down gently. Perhaps if he’d been a bit less brutal then she wouldn’t have gone to the papers.

  But he had just left her: her hair less sleek; her tights, he remembered this now, snagged where he had pulled at them; had left her just staring after him.

  Sophie stirs, and rolls towards him; rouses him from the discomfort of the memory. He holds his breath, wary of causing her to shift away, feeling the familiar warmth of her body lying against his chest. Gingerly, he puts a hand between her shoulder blades then moves it lower towards the small of her back and pulls her into him.

  She opens her eyes – a deep, startling blue – and for a moment seems surprised to be in such proximity. Little wonder: she has spent a week being as physically distant as possible.

  ‘Hello, my darling.’ He risks a gentle kiss on her forehead. She draws her face away, her brow furrowing in a crease between her eyes as if deciding whether to view this as an intrusion. He takes his hand away then places it behind her shoulder, lightly enclosing her within his arms.

  ‘OK?’ He leans forward; drops a kiss on her lips.

  ‘Don’t.’ She shrugs her shoulders, discontented, but doesn’t move away.

  ‘Soph – we can’t carry on like this.’

  ‘Can’t we?’ She looks up at him and he can see the hurt in her eyes and then something more promising: a mixture of defeat and hope that suggests she doesn’t want to continue in this state of chilly restraint.

  He removes his arm, releasing her from the circle of his clasp and shifts back to look at her properly. There is a foot between them and he reaches across it to stroke the soft down of her cheek. For a moment she hesitates and then she turns her lips towards it and, as if she cannot help but do so, as if it is a force of habit, lightly kisses the palm of his hand. Her lids close, as if she knows she is being weak to concede.

  He draws her back to him. Holds her close; trying to convey through the force of his hug how much she means to him. Her shoulders, tense for the past nine days, are tight but her breath comes out in a rush as if she is trying to relax, as if she wants that desperately.

  ‘There’s nothing in the papers today. It seems to be all over,’ he says, drawing back and kissing her on the top of her head.

  ‘Don’t say that. It’s tempting fate . . .’

  ‘Chris hasn’t heard a murmur all weekend. And there’s nothing today.’ He brushes over her superstition. ‘I really think we’re safe.’

  ‘We need to listen to Today.’ She rolls away from him as the clock radio switches on automatically for the six-thirty headlines: A predicted drop in interest rates; a British nurse with Ebola; another bomb in Syria.

  They listen in silence. ‘Nothing,’ he says.

  Her eyes well with tears: huge globes that topple. She swipes at her eyes and gives a surprisingly noisy sniff.

  ‘I’ve been so frightened.’

  ‘What about?’ He is bemused.

  ‘You know. In case the papers dig up any stuff about the Libertines.’

  ‘Pffsh. Not going to happen.’ He has boxed those days away; doesn’t let himself think about them; wishes she wouldn’t. ‘My conscience is clear about what happened then. You know that.’

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘Soph?’ He tips her chin; looks deep into her eyes; gives her his most persuasive, heartfelt smile. ‘Truly. It is.’

  For a while they just lie there: her in his arms; his chin on the top of her head.

  ‘You’ve been my rock, you know?’

  ‘What else could I be?’

  ‘No, really. You’ve been my everything. You’ve had every right to be angry but you and the kids have got me through this.’ He peppers her face with kisses: a light dusting just as she likes it. She remains unresponsive. ‘I owe you so much, Sophie.’

  She looks at him, then, and he can see a hint of the young woman he fell in love with beneath the layers of distrust that have built up over the past week.

  ‘If I’m going to carry on sticking by you – if we’re going to try and make us work – then I need to know that it’s completely over,’ she says.

  ‘We’ve been through this before,’ he sighs. ‘Christ, I’m hardly going to want to see the woman.’ He gives a bark of laughter. ‘Besides, our paths aren’t even going to meet. She’s on sick leave, and she’ll be moved to another office when she returns – if she returns. There’s no need for me to see her again.’

  ‘And I need to know that you won’t do this again . . . I can’t bear the humiliation.’ She gives a shudder and recoils from him, shifting up in bed and wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘I can’t be like my mother.’ She looks at him, accusatory. ‘We said we wouldn’t be like them – like my parents. When we married, you promised me.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He looks down, conscious of the need to still play the penitent. ‘I don’t know what to say to convince you. I’ve – we’ve – all paid for my behaviour. It’s not something I’m ever going to repeat.

  ‘You are my world,’ he adds, sitting up and putting his arm around her shoulders. She doesn’t move away from him; and so he slides the second, exploratory, around her waist.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says, resisting now and shifting to the edge of the bed. ‘I’ve got to get the children up.’

  ‘But you do believe me?’ He gives her the look. The one she would normally find irresistible: a wide-eyed glance injected with a streak of disbelief.

  ‘I do.’ She leans against him, briefly, and gives a small, sad smile that acknowledges her weakness. ‘Fool that I am, I do.’


  He kisses her, then: a proper kiss, mouth open with a hint of his tongue. A kiss that manages to be respectful while being far from chaste.

  ‘It’s over,’ he tells her, looking into her eyes and trying to convey a conviction he doesn’t feel entirely. ‘Everything is going to be OK.’

  KATE

  31 October 2016

  Five

  I lay my copy of The Times down on the clear surface of my galley kitchen and work through it methodically then do the same with the Sun, the Mirror and the Daily Mail.

  Plenty on the foiled Mile End terror plot, more too on the all-consuming story of the week: a Egyptian beachside bombing. But nothing on James Whitehouse, ‘the PM’s mate caught bonking’ as the Sun described him, last week; or ‘Liv’s lover in the lift’. I double-check the tabloids, pilfered from the clerks’ office. Not one single word.

  It’s bizarre how swiftly that story has sunk: buried by proper, earth-shattering news and yet its complete absence is unsettling. Something doesn’t smell right, as my mother would say. The prime minister has said that he stands by his colleague. That he has the utmost confidence in him; that this is a private matter, now resolved. But other junior ministers, caught having sex with a junior member of staff, would be hung out to dry. So what has inspired this loyalty?

  It bothers me, this old boys’ favouritism, but I don’t have time to obsess. Nine o’clock on a Monday night and, just like every other night, I have a wheelie-case of documents nudging, like a loyal dog, at my heels. I scan through the notes for Blackwell, tomorrow’s hearing, at Southwark Crown Court. I’m prosecuting a recidivist sex offender who, at 2 a.m. one morning in March, abducted an eleven-year-old. His defence? He was being kind-hearted and the boy – paralytic on the four cans of the cider with which he’d plied him – is ‘a lying shit’. Sounds absolutely charming.

  I work efficiently and, despite the grubbiness of the evidence, the unrelenting sadness for the child, begin to feel lighter: Graham Blackwell, a 25-stone 55-year-old, will not endear himself to the jury. Unless something goes terribly wrong, I’m unlikely not to win. And then I turn to Butler, a case of relationship rape that will prove more difficult to prove. The details swim up from the pages of notes and I realise that my eyes are blurring: fat tears that pool and swell, I can feel them teetering on my lower lashes. I swipe them with my knuckles. God, I must be exhausted. I glance at my watch. Ten-forty: relatively early for me.

  I stretch, trying to energise my weary body. But I know this is less the bone-aching tiredness that comes from traipsing around the south-eastern circuit or the intellectual weariness of teasing out each legal loophole and more an emotional exhaustion that blankets me like the velvet darkness of a starless night. Here, in my quiet, rather lonely flat, I am tired of man’s inhumanity to man. Or, rather, his inhumanity to women and children. I am tired of such casual sexual violence or, as Graham Blackwell might put it, the refusal to give a shit.

  Time to buck up. I can’t allow myself to wallow. It’s my job to catch out these bastards: to use my considerable powers of persuasion to do all I can to put them away. I pack up my files; slosh whisky into a tumbler; dig around in the freezer box for some fat ice cubes – I remember to make ice even though I forget to buy milk; and set my alarm for 5.30 a.m. The flat’s cold – the central heating’s on the blink and I haven’t had time to get it fixed – and I run a bath, hoping it will warm my bones and unknot my tense shoulders; will envelop me in its watery caress.

  The steam rises and I submerge my limbs. It almost scalds but the relief is immediate: no one has touched me since last month’s brief, unsatisfying evening with Richard, and I feel exposed and somehow vulnerable as I take in my nakedness and note quite how thin my thighs are these days. My hips protrude like tiny islands; my stomach is concave, my breasts tight. I am dropping a cup size each decade. My face might have improved – high cheekbones; arched brows; my once-hated nose no longer kinked but straight and petite; a thirtieth birthday present to myself; the most dramatic evidence of my reinvention and success – but my body is more scrawny than lean. A bubble of self-pity wells as I remember the younger Kate and envisage an older one: a grey-haired husk of a woman as brittle and shrivelled as the beech leaves I scrunch through on my walk from the tube to my mansion flat. Desiccated.

  Oh, for God’s sake. Think of something else. My mind Rolodexes through the news – Egypt; the cloying fog; the planned arrival of Syrian refugees before Christmas – then flits back to James Whitehouse and the intensity of his friendship with Tom Southern. They go back thirty years: plenty of time for secrets to be made, shared and kept. I wonder if the tabloid hacks are sniffing around for them again, truffling for a tale of class and corruption, determined to unearth some choice nuggets this time?

  There’s that infamous photograph that emerged just after the prime minister was first elected, in 2010, of them both at Oxford. They’re posing on the steps of the grandest college, dressed in the uniform of their elite dining club, the Libertines: midnight-blue tails, velvet burgundy waistcoats, cream silk cravats blooming like peonies against each blemish-free face. The photo was hastily suppressed – news organisations can’t use it now – but the image persists of those preening, entitled young men. I see their smooth, smiling faces now: the faces of men who will sail through life: Eton, Oxford, parliament, government.

  And then I think of the child in Blackwell, the case of tomorrow’s repeat sex offender – and how his life chances have differed; how his life has already been derailed. The paper dips in the water, and I let the soggy mass slip from my hand to the floor as I find myself ambushed by a wave of sorrow: an ache that engulfs me so entirely that I can either succumb – or suppress it. I sink deep into the bath, welcoming the oblivion of the hot, greying water as it closes over my face.

  JAMES

  1 November 2016

  Six

  James walks briskly through Portcullis House, across New Palace Yard and through Westminster Hall, taking care not to glance at the tourists, who are peering up at the vast, cavernous space above them, rising up to the fourteenth-century, hammer-beamed roof.

  His brogues click over the stone floor, carrying him away from the babble of accents – Czech, German, Spanish, Mandarin at a guess – and the careful over-enunciation of a young tour guide; a recent politics graduate, perhaps, who is delivering his spiel – the largest roof of its kind; the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster – as he shivers in his old fogeyish tweed jacket and tie.

  Westminster Hall – chill, austere, redolent with history – is the part of the Commons in which the gravitas of his job – MP for Thurlsdon, junior minister in the Home Office, a member of Her Majesty’s Government – always strikes James most clearly. The largest room in all of Westminster, it was saved at the expense of most of the rest of the buildings when fire raged through the Palace in October 1834. There is no pretence in Westminster Hall; none of the over-elaborate fleur-de-lys tiles or marble statues or garish murals. None of the colour – that distinctive poison green for the Commons; the vermilion red of the Lords – that illuminates the Palace, as if an interior decorator had been let loose with a 1940s colour chart while on acid. Westminster Hall – all severe grey stone and rich brown oak – is as ungarnished and sombre as Oliver Cromwell could ever have wished it to be.

  It is bitterly cold, though. The sort of cold that demands people wrap up in furs in keeping with the hall’s medieval heritage; an uncompromising cold that laughs in the face of modernity and reminds James – should he ever get above himself – of his current insignificance in the history of this place. He sweeps on past a couple of policemen warming themselves by a vertical heater in St Stephen’s Porch, and on through the warmer, more intimate St Stephen’s Hall with its glittering chandeliers, bright stained glass and murals; its imposing statues of great parliamentary orators, resplendent in spurs and cloaks with marble folds. He passes the spot where the only British prime minister ever to be assassinated was killed, the
n has to duck around a bucket. The whole place is falling down.

  No one spares him a glance here – and on he goes through Central Lobby, the heart of the Palace, bustling with tourists, where a Labour backbencher, chatting to a member of the public, gives him a knowing, unfriendly nod. He hangs a sharp left, past another couple of policemen at the entrance to the area where the general public are forbidden: the relatively narrow Commons corridor leading to the Members’ Lobby, and beyond that the Chamber itself.

  He feels safer here. There is no way a lobby journalist could collar him, now that the House is sitting, unless, glancing to the corridors leading up to the lobby where they are allowed to hover, he chooses to catch their eye. There is no need for him to venture here today: Home Office questions aren’t this week; there is no debate that requires a large front-bench presence; it isn’t PMQs. And yet he feels the need to brave the public spaces of the House: to visit the tea rooms, to lunch at Portcullis, to sit in the Chamber. To prove to himself – and his colleagues – that, as he told Sophie, it really is all over and done.

  Meeting Tom, for a secret gym session this morning, has convinced him that Olivia and the subsequent fallout is a closed chapter. Chris had been incandescent when he heard about it later, but he had snuck in and out of Downing Street by 6.15 a.m.

  After forty minutes of bonding over the rowing machine, he refrained from giving his oldest friend a hug.

  ‘Thanks for not hanging me out to dry,’ he said at the end of an ergo which stripped everything back to basics. Sweat glistened on his skin and he wiped his drenched forehead.

  Tom, thicker waisted since becoming PM, couldn’t speak at first, he was panting so heavily.