Children of the Master

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Children of the Master Page 4

by Andrew Marr


  So Petrie sat out the fag end of the Blair and Brown years, making money and growing thicker, and growing the company too. He married up, an Edinburgh graduate who had been to a posh school in St Andrews and whose father farmed a big estate. He built his own house, using stone from a new quarry north of Glasgow, and built a new bungalow for his mother next door to it. He fathered two children, and was a notably gentle and loving father to them. His PA noted that for the first time he was leaving work before 9 p.m., and told the office, ‘It’ll be the making of him.’

  These were the years of the Scottish National Party’s triumphant hegemony. Labour folk in Scotland sucked sour plums, kept themselves to themselves. Petrie didn’t waver in his allegiance, but he made sure to get on well with his local MSP, and even to oil up to the housing minister in Edinburgh. He was old enough – just about – by now to play both sides.

  From the outside, there was no doubt: Davie Petrie had survived, and more. Inside, it wasn’t so easy. He struggled with his wife; he was slow to express affection. He hated being touched. At times, triggered by the most meaningless, trivial things – one of his sons laughing on the telephone, losing some paperwork – he would be overwhelmed by a black rage that had him shaking, his fists balling, his teeth clenched. This scared him, and he learned to deal with it, turning his back and walking away, using breathing exercises he’d been taught at a gym class. He kept himself fit. He liked to walk up the braes behind the village, where there was a little birch wood and a burn running down. He’d squat down and stare at the magic of the colourless water running over green stones, and rub his fingers on the moss and smell the wild garlic. He loved the view that spread out in the distance – wobbly blue lines of Ayrshire hills, with Glaikit and the colliery hidden in the foreground. Good times.

  Well, mostly. Even then, some days, there was a blankness from the moment he awoke, a wall of white vapour, a background drone. He felt almost outside himself. Some other dim creature, it seemed, a badly-put-together, ungainly homunculus, was acting the part of David Petrie. Away from Glaikit, they might have called it depression. There were occasions, in the pub or at Tesco’s, when he bumped into loutish young men he’d known as boys at school. In their presence, he felt himself shrinking: the wounds weren’t yet quite healed.

  By the time David Cameron and his snooty coalition were in office, David Petrie was being asked to speak to Labour conferences on behalf of ‘small business’. Not that small, by now. He had money in his pocket. He had become a past master at the art of influence-peddling: money flowed out of Petrie Associates into the pockets of Labour councillors and council officials; more money flowed out of the council coffers into Petrie building projects. He had a Mastermind brain, right enough: special subject? Aye – planning permission.

  Davie chose to distribute a little of his wealth to his party during the Miliband years. Largely because of a long-standing feud with the local Scottish National Party, he helped fund the ‘Better Together’ campaign against independence in 2014. Close call, but. His Nationalist minister friend from Edinburgh rang him at home and warned him that he was making a big mistake: a new Scottish state would be looking at major house-building projects, and would remember its friends. David told him where to go – ‘Aye, right, and awa’ to Kelty with you, Minister.’ (They used to say, and not so long ago, that when the devil had finished building Hell, he used the rubble for Kelty, in Fife.)

  For Davie and his kind, the referendum marked a complete change. It started with comments in the pub about the Labour Party being shoulder to shoulder with the Tories. Then there was some nasty business. A woman put up a ‘No’ poster in her window, and her neighbour, whom she’d known since they were girls, came round chapping at the door.

  ‘Planning on staying long, Elsie?’

  ‘Whit d’ye mean, Sally Catherine? All my life.’

  ‘Aye, but your kind willnae be welcome round here after the eighteenth. Just a gentle word.’

  Or so the story went. Davie never met ‘Elsie’, and no one could say exactly where she lived.

  More worrying were the ‘question time’ sessions in the school, heaving with yes supporters, and the spread of ‘Scotland, Be Brave’ posters in shop windows, a daft, sexy girl in a kilt, wi’ red hair; and a general feeling in the coffee shops and pubs of the town that it was nobler to be Yes than No. Was he still even on the right side? Once upon a time, no Catholic would have dreamed of going anywhere near the damned Nationalists, but that sleekit Alex Salmond seemed to have won the archbishop round somehow. These days, if you boasted a season ticket at Celtic Park, you were almost certainly a ‘Yes’ man. So Davie’s moral and political planet began to crumble at its little green edges.

  There was even talk that the SNP would take the constituency from Labour for the first time ever. They were certainly digging in up north in Glasgow, though hereabouts there was a strong local party, still with the old inherited NUM discipline. Lanky Boswell, Davie’s second cousin, who’d gone on to uni in Dundee, and come back as a primary teacher and raving Nat, would seek him out some nights in the pub after work and give him gyp.

  ‘See here Petrie, you’re a good guy. You just haven’t been paying notice, and you find yourself on the wrong side. Folk around here don’t like you playing footsie with the Tories. They just want – no bedroom tax, keep the health service going, dinnae grind the faces of the folk on welfare – all the things you want too, I know, Davie. Whit’s the problem?

  ‘The London Labour Party’s corrupt, just pale-blue Tories. It’s not too late to come over. We’re a broad church and we’re friendly folk; you ken most of us already.’

  Davie would respond with his old lecture on the ‘Tartan Tories’ and the importance of solidarity, and of building social democracy right across the United Kingdom; but he found himself almost wearying of his own arguments. The truth was, the ‘Yes’ folk had made some bloody good points. Quite a few local party members had defected. Inside, Petrie was still angry and bored, but when it came to politics, it was all too obvious that time was short. If he was a Labour man, it was time either to do the necessary or to get off the pot.

  A Perfect Girl

  I don’t know what charisma is. Nobody does. But it comes from God, and it makes power tolerable.

  The Master

  Caroline Elizabeth Phillips’s seemingly effortless success in life had been based on two things. The most important was her irresistible likeability. Whenever she walked into a room, whether it be the lounge bar of a pub or, later on, a dreary, low-ceilinged political meeting room, the temperature rose. People who had been down in the dumps found themselves smiling; misery-gutses discovered they just wanted to be liked. This, apparently, was charisma. She’d had it since she was a toddler. She was the kind of small child whose hair every adult wanted to ruffle. She smiled, they smiled back. Easy. Sometimes she almost glowed. Yet her father, Thomas Phillips, was a dourly forgettable man of business. People struggled to remember his name even if they were closely related to him. Her mother, Simone, was sharp-tongued and energetic, but, like her husband, essentially bland – bland with lemon sauce. Between them they had produced a source of light. It was as surprising as if two affable Burgundian peasants had given birth to a saint, complete with spangled wings, or as if a pair of Brummie shopkeepers had spawned a multi-coloured dragon. Of course you’d have to know the family to understand just how extraordinary it was. In photographs, Caro looked pretty enough, but not remarkable. In the flesh, her oat-coloured radiance entranced everyone lucky enough to come across her.

  Caro disapproved of the word ‘lesbian’. ‘For one thing, it denotes an islander, it’s inappropriately geographical … And beyond that, people make assumptions,’ she had told her mother (who certainly did). ‘They think they know what music I like, my political opinions, how I decorate my house. They think lesbians are driven by sex, and have “pashes”. Lesbians wear lesbian clothes, and eat lesbian food, and watch gloomy Nordic lesbian films about gloomy
Nordic lesbians. Well, if even part of that’s true, then I’m not a lesbian. I’m an old-fashioned, friendly, meat-eating, Christian woman who happens to love other women. Not even that. An other woman.’

  That other woman, Angela, had been known as ‘Pep’ when Caro first met her – tall, dark, and only just a teenager. Pep stood for pepperoni, which stood for pizza, which stood for pizza-face. Angela had suffered from relatively mild acne. That was the kind of humour their school specialised in.

  To a visitor, this school looked warm, even cosy. Based around a 1930s country house in Sussex, originally constructed for a shipbuilding tycoon, it had many acres of games pitches, and modern outbuildings. Queen Eleanor’s prepared the daughters of wealthy commuters for Russell Group universities. From the outside, it might have been a spa resort or an affluent golf club. The main building had a pleasantly arts-and-crafts feel to it; with its long, sloped roofs, high chimneys and cream pebbledash, it spoke of a conservative-minded, late-in-the-day architectural admirer of Ruskin and Morris. ‘Pleasant’ was a word that was often used of it. Just like Sussex itself, Queen Eleanor’s was … pleasant.

  But behind the fresh cream paint and the well-kept hedges, the school was not what it appeared. Its pupils were mostly sturdy, normal, healthy-looking girls with their hair in clasps, their gleaming metal orthodontics and their knees the colour of turnips. But there is nothing on this small green planet as dangerous and terrifying as English schoolgirls in packs. On the surface, serge and cheesecloth. Below it, claws and fangs, the splash of blood and the muffled squeal. Girls left this lovely school prepared to throw themselves into abusive relationships or starve themselves to death, or if they’d done pretty well, settled for decades of dogged, surreptitious alcoholism. A girl might come to Queen Eleanor’s with a straight back and a clear eye; she would be lucky to leave without slouching – hating herself, curled up, sarcastic. Emotional survival in this pleasant – so, so pleasant – place, with its choir which did Purcell, and its glossy, neatly-lettered rolls of honour, was harder than in the drab council estates of Ayrshire.

  What about the families? Powerful men who knew about the world – barristers, accountants, company directors – sent their daughters there. In due course, later on, they would idly wonder why little Sarah, Penelope or Tessa had become so sullen, so thin and so uncommunicative on the family’s annual skiing holiday to Val-d’Isère. What had happened to the once-easy conversations around the breakfast table? Once in a while, a particularly bold father might clear his throat and ask Julietta or Tamara whether she was happy. In response he’d be confronted by a face as white as a sealed envelope, or a shrug of skeletal shoulders. He would rarely press the point: Queen Eleanor’s sent its platoons of damaged young women to Oxford, Cambridge and the cream of foreign universities. It attracted the offspring of television celebrities, and it was the most successful sporting girls’ school in the Home Counties: its hockey team thrashed the London day schools, and it had one of the best girls’ football teams in England. It was a school parents boasted of; but to thrive there, you needed not only to be pretty, but to have a poisonous tongue and a hide like an armoured personnel carrier. Suicide attempts were not unknown, though none had recently been successful when Caroline Phillips, long-limbed and handsome, glowing with self-confidence, had been dropped off by her nervous parents and left with two large suitcases to unpack.

  She, and they, had expected a dormitory, but by that time the girls got their own bedrooms, although bathrooms were shared. Trying to forget the empty feeling in her tummy as the family Audi turned and headed back down the school driveway, Caro had just begun laying out the lilac-striped shirts, the blue skirts and endless pairs of white socks when suddenly her door was shoved open by a pack of hunting girls, smelling of tobacco and peppermint. She was shoved down onto the bed, her cases upended on the floor, and she was subjected to an hour of relentless questioning – boys; fit brothers; bleeding yet? Did she do herself? Ciggies; pills; any spare cash?

  Humiliated but dry-eyed, she survived. Before they’d left she had handed over the £60 her father had said should last her the whole term, and a small box containing a pair of earrings, just given to her by her mother as a starting-school present.

  ‘We are the bitches, we are the witches. Make us rich and never snitch, or we’ll cut your throat, no hitches,’ Farola Ponsonby and Africa Crewe chanted as they left her.

  Caro wondered whether her looks and her ability on the hockey pitch might not, after all, be enough to protect her. She carefully refolded her clothes and put them away. She pulled out the framed photographs of her parents and her brother. And she put them away too.

  It was several days later, while playing table tennis, that Caro first noticed Pep. Pep was very tall, very thin, freckled, with intense dark eyes and cascades of black hair. And yes, there was some acne. The thinness was not unusual at Queen Eleanor’s – even the teachers joked that each year was divided into A and B streams, anorexia or bulimia. But the intensity of Pep’s stare was extraordinary. The moment their eyes met, Pep looked away again, but Caro felt an instant, completely unfamiliar shudder.

  The two girls soon struck up a friendship based on reading, cheerfully incompetent hockey and music. They hung around together. In year four, Caroline put an arm around Pep’s bony back. In year five, Pep returned her kiss; her mouth smelled of peppermint, and their tongues touched. By then they were leaders in the school Christian Union, and were an admired, deferred-to couple. At Queen Eleanor’s this was hardly exceptional. The school had a long-established Sapphic reputation, and at a time in British history when lesbianism was going mainstream, this caused barely a ripple among the parents. To have a gay daughter was, for a dull executive on the London commute, chic.

  As for the staff, they had plenty of other things to worry about. Caroline and Pep were among the girls who had developed to a fine art the communal destruction of teachers. One of them might begin to hum, in a high tone, in the middle of a lesson. Another would pick up the hum, and it would spread around the class. As soon as the teacher pounced in one direction, the noise billowed up from another. Group punishments had no effect. There is nothing half as frightening and destructive as a group of middle-class English girls intent on mischief, and Queen Eleanor’s was not alone in being unable to cope.

  The high mistress, the chief uncoper, was a large-bosomed, horse-faced woman whose greatest talent was her inability to see what was going on in front of her nose. Everything about the school was marvellous. Her girls were marvellous. She was lucky in her marvellous staff. She had surrendered long ago. She walked the corridors with a glassy, painted grin, in a bubble of invincible optimism. It so chanced that idiot opti-mism, an inability to see looming disaster on every side, was a considerable skill in the Britain of her time. She could have run anything – a lousy, malodorous hospital; a violent, drug-infested prison; a tax-squandering, inept government department. In each case her smile would have been as bright, her self-confidence as intact, and her calmness hugely reassuring to all who worked for her. Everything would have been splendid.

  So there was, as far as the high mistress was concerned, no ‘mucking around’ at Queen Eleanor’s. Once, and once only, she had been persuaded by a newspaper article of the need to give the girls a lecture. But all her glossy circumlocutions had made this entirely pointless: the younger girls had no idea what she meant by ‘skulking in dark corners’, and the older ones had simply tittered. Anyway, the teaching staff were almost unanimous that the alternative – insanitary, dangerous and occasionally life-wrecking ‘messing about’ with boys – was worse. As the deputy head once remarked, ‘I’m so old I can remember when the girls who kneeled were the pious ones.’

  By the time they were in the upper sixth, of course, Caro and Pep had fallen out, and were barely speaking. Caroline’s charisma meant that she was constantly surrounded by admirers – sporty girls, musical girls, oddball girls. Pep, meanwhile, embracing her frizzy, black-eyed eccentricity,
had plunged into darker places, cutting and ‘restricting’ and reading far too deeply.

  The day came when Caroline’s parents were called in for the ‘What next?’ conversation with the headmistress.

  ‘Caroline is exceptionally talented. She will do exceedingly well. She has done marvellously here and we have done marvellously with her. But we cannot quite decide, just at this moment, at what, exactly, dear Caroline will excel.’

  Her mother asked what sort of careers Queen Eleanor’s girls tended to pursue.

  ‘In the old days, it was all public service – the Foreign Office, the army, and so on. But …’ Her voice faded away. This was a hard one. In the Queen Eleanor’s Chronicle she had become a past headmistress of the art of euphemism. Patti Vidal, undoubtedly the stupidest girl the school had ever known, had become a glamour model, largely famous for her hindquarters. Few of Patti’s films could be referred to by name, never mind seen, by decent people. ‘Actress’, the headmistress had written firmly. ‘Royal Shakespeare Company, etc.’ Amy Brewer and Madelyn Strindberg, from the following year, were currently serving time in a Singaporean prison after a few exciting months as drugs mules. ‘Working in international pharmaceuticals’ appeared against their names. Lorraine Gatto, who had been a senior prefect, had apparently now opened a dungeon off Sloane Square, complete with whipping bench, nipple clamps, a suspendable cage and other useful gadgets. The headmistress had thought long and hard about Lorraine – such an obliging girl – before writing the single word ‘Rehabilitation’.

  But, faced with these transparently pleasant and intelligent parents, she hesitated. ‘Many of our girls these days go into entertainment – film, television, music, that kind of thing – and others do charity work. But Caroline is especially gifted. Everybody wants to be her friend, you see. She sings like a bullfrog and dances like a cow, but she lights up a room.’

 

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