Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  As Murdoch White had predicted, Petrie’s praise finally sank Connelly. Any candidate who could afford to be so confident and large-spirited clearly had no fear of the former front-runner.

  In fact, Petrie nearly overdid it. He needed Connelly to come first in the opening round of voting, preferably ahead of the guy from the leader’s office. But after Davie had spoken, the London blow-in spent the next ten minutes saying that while Pat Connelly might be a good bus driver and a decent councillor in a quiet week, he didn’t have the oomph necessary to make his mark at Westminster. Then an increasingly upset Connelly savaged the London man back – a jumped-up metropolitan hack from Chelsea or somewhere, where a two-bed flat cost more than the entire housing stock of Glaikit, while Petrie stood at the back of the room handing out mugs of instant coffee and waiting.

  Still, as planned he came third in the first ballot; and as White had predicted, those who just found Connelly a bit depressing, and those who couldn’t stick the idea of a toff parachuted in from London, switched, and on the second ballot Davie came through triumphantly. He had abused nobody, except in jest. He had committed himself to very little. He had held out the hand of friendship to a man he’d thown. Poor Pat Connelly didn’t know what had hit him; he seemed dazed, and about half the size he’d been at the beginning of the meeting. ‘Welcome to politics,’ said Murdoch White.

  ‘Local Boy Chosen’, crowed the Glaikit Post. At the sub-sequent election, Davie’s campaign literature would show the Petrie family standing together with the slogan ‘He’s built half of Glaikit. Now let him build a better Britain.’

  Funny Farm

  The good politician understands that there are no chance meetings, only unexpected chances.

  The Master

  The collection of brick buildings didn’t make immediate sense. They were too scattered for a farm, too well-maintained for cheap housing, and not substantial enough for a hotel. A riding club, perhaps? And in the late-afternoon sunshine there were indeed a couple of young women on ponies crossing the lawn that backed onto a minor road.

  In their path stood a middle-aged man who appeared to have a swarm of insects inside his clothes. He scratched feverishly at his armpits and midriff. He windmilled his arms and stamped his feet in a dance of exasperation. He clawed at his longish hair and shouted, then threw himself onto his knees and rubbed his face in the dampness of the grass.

  ‘Poor Stephen,’ said one of the young women.

  ‘Yah. Poor Stephen. Stephen’s fine. He’ll be fine tomorrow,’ the other replied. Both girls were expensively well spoken and gaunt.

  Watching all of this from the window of her minicab was Angela. She leaned over, paid the driver for the ride from the station and opened the door, lugging a small suitcase.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be fine from here on.’

  At St Peter’s Asset Management, Caroline Phillips had been immensely popular. She couldn’t help it. Everybody loved this frantically hard-working and ambitious student of currency swaps; at the heart of the City, the steel and limestone palazzo of Damazer House almost overflowed with laughter as Caro and her new friends bought, sold, crunched the numbers and sold again. All through that first year, from April until early October, the sun seemed to splash through the windows and paddle gold fingers through the hair of the chosen. Caro’s mere presence had lightened St Peter’s, and her manager recommended her for promotion a mere eight months after she joined.

  She should have been very happy, and mostly she was. Young Caro had all the joys and sweetmeats that London life could bring in the twenty-first century. She had admiration, a challenging and interesting job which hadn’t even existed a few decades earlier, a colourful collection of international friends, enough money, and a status unthinkable for earlier generations of young, non-royal women. She had, in short, everything … except purpose. For even then, Caroline was too clever, and perhaps too moral, to believe that making money was a purpose.

  So when, at a C of E seminar for City employees, held at a Blitz-battered and restored Wren church, she bumped into Angela, her first emotion was jealousy. Caroline had been drifting – working hard as she drifted, admirably, lucratively, pleasantly. Angela, however, had a vocation. Just as when they’d first met at school, Angela had an intensity, a sense of urgency that beautiful Caroline lacked. Caroline’s world was full of promise, stretching out in the sunshine. But Angela’s world was more interesting; it had shadows and meaning, and it wouldn’t go on forever.

  Angela suited the priesthood. Caroline wore black suits by Dolce & Gabbana. Angela wore black suits by Wippell’s of Exeter; and she wore them better. With the bare minimum of make-up, and in a well-tailored jacket, she had become very striking – almost beautiful. She still burned with moral force. Addressing the seminar on the subject of how little it would take for everyone there to make a difference to the lives of bright teenage girls in Ghana, she used her hands like magic wands, and spoke with the self-confidence of a poet, a born preacher.

  Afterwards, when Caro went up to her, feeling oddly nervous, Angela was surrounded by a trio of admiring executives from Goldman Sachs. She seemed barely to remember Caro from their school days at all. She merely shook her by the hand and gave her a bland smile. Caroline left the room feeling wretched.

  She had just picked up a copy of the Evening Standard, and was about to plunge into the tube at Bank station when she was almost knocked off her feet. Two firm hands grabbed her head and covered her eyes. She gasped and spun around, thrusting off her attacker; and there was Angela, shaking with laughter.

  ‘Got you! You should have seen your face!’ Then Angela put both her arms around her waist, pulled her towards her and kissed her very firmly and insistently on the mouth.

  ‘You can’t do that, Pep,’ Caro spluttered. ‘People will see. This is where I work …’

  ‘I can do anything I like,’ Angela replied, licking her lips. ‘I am an ordained minister, with the great good luck to be living in twenty-first-century Britain. You haven’t come out? Not my fault, sugar.’

  ‘Well, I’m not really … You see, it’s complicated … That is …’

  ‘I know, hon. You’re not actually a lesbian, blah, blah, blah. But you can’t deny that you liked that kiss. You were squirming like a fish.’

  ‘I know. Yes, I did.’ And then Caroline said something impulsive, although she was naturally cautious about these things. She turned her back on the man dishing out free copies of the Guardian and said, firmly and clearly, ‘Whatever I am – and I don’t know – what I do know is that I’m in love with you. I always have been.’

  Over the next few years, life changed very fast for both of them. Caroline discovered that behind Angela’s self-confident exterior and success as a priest, her life had been the reverse of simple. Back at school Caro had known, of course, that Angela had been adopted, didn’t know her birth mother and had an awkward relationship with the admirable but strait-laced couple who had adopted her. Perhaps it was the urge to create a family she could rely on that had led her into a very early and ill-advised marriage which ended after eighteen months, its residue being at least a dozen epic rows, one mortgage and two young boys.

  These she had brought up with the help of her adoptive mother, who had dropped everything to come and live with her in her vicarage in Devon, but who could not stand Caroline’s arrival on the scene, and left shortly after it. For a while, at least, Caroline’s large City salary, with a cheering annual bonus, allowed the two women to buy in enough help for both of their careers to continue. Angela preached, visited, and quietly skedaddled east to London most Wednesdays. Caro skedaddled west each weekend. At times they seemed to be living on the A303. There are worse fates. They got through a lot of Bach. In London, they had parties. They had a civil partnership party, crammed with Caro’s friends from the bank – everyone came – and later on they had a wedding, not in a church but with lots of vicars and laughter. Caro, despite her principles, toasted David Cameron.


  But it didn’t take Caroline long to realise that in the years before their unexpected reunion, Angela had developed a new and dangerous, if extremely common, vice. She was drinking well over a litre of white wine a day. Well-made golden joy juice was freely available everywhere; in ever larger glasses it took the edge off a scratchy day, erased disappointment, uncorked conversation. The two of them would share a decent Chardonnay or Pinot, curled up on the sofa, and drank with friends all across London. There was something inside Caroline, some biochemical brake disc, which meant that she never went beyond half a bottle. Angela lacked this. One bottle, then two a day; the 6 p.m. freshener became the lunchtime tonic. Caroline raised the subject with her from time to time, but it never seemed worth a full-on argument; and as Angela pointed out, she had to cope with two demanding and puppyish boys as well as her work. She needed some help. Apart from Caro, nobody ever noticed. Angela began to fall asleep earlier each evening. Just occasionally, she embarrassed them at a dinner party. Just occasionally, she threw up into her handbag in the taxi taking them home. Caro remonstrated. Angela swiped back. The joy juice wasn’t making them happier any more. Finally, after several years, it had led them to Melody Farm, an expensive but reputedly effective rehab clinic – that scatter of red-brick buildings which wasn’t quite a hotel.

  Angela had discarded her clerical collar and the dark suit she usually wore. In jeans and a zip-up top she looked fit and vigorous; but her eyes were red, and her face was sallow and puffy. Walking with self-conscious care, she made towards the main building, passing a small white-painted sign which read simply ‘Melody, Ltd’. She ignored the man on the lawn, who had now stood up and was thrusting his arms in her direction, calling out, ‘Oh – OH – ooohhh.’ She also ignored the two riders; and they her. After checking in, she was shown to her expensively booked quarters in the former stables, which had a luxurious, high, old-fashioned bed, and a kitchenette with kettle and toaster. She unpacked, flung an Andrew O’Hagan and the selected poems of George Herbert onto the bed, then made her way to the communal area, which was housed in another brick building. Purple sofas were arranged in a giant U-shape; sprawling on them were a couple of well-dressed Arabs, a suspicious-looking woman in an expensive jacket who Angela thought looked somehow familiar, and a grizzled old man with heavily tattooed arms. His head was shaven, and there were more tattoos crawling up his neck.

  Angela introduced herself. Only the woman in the jacket replied, with a single word: ‘Sadie.’ The rest stared off into the middle distance. Behind Angela, the two riders entered the room. Away from their horses, they were tiny.

  Angela had been in places like this before, and made a quick assessment. She guessed that she was halfway down the pecking order. The Arabs would be there for drug addiction, probably cocaine and pills, possibly smack. They, and the poor soul doing cold turkey out on the lawn, were by common consent at the top of the pile. Then came the alcoholics. That was Sadie and her, and there were surely others around too. The eating disorders, who included the two riders, came last. Alpha, beta, gamma. In theory this was a democracy of the damaged, in which everybody helped everybody else out – made sure they kept hydrated, helped them up when they fell over, shared stories to bolster their straining willpower. In practice, the druggies were too self-absorbed most of the time to pay attention to anyone else. And when they were coming off, by God they swanked about it. The alcoholics, on the other hand – her team – were the biggest liars. Angela had called in at the M&S by the railway station and bought herself a bottle of white wine and a carton of apple juice. She’d poured the juice down a drain and filled the carton with wine. At this moment it was sitting innocently in her kitchenette. She thought she’d invite Sadie over for a quick one. She looked like fun.

  Sadie made meaningful eye contact. She understood the casual invitation to ‘have a look at the stables’. Probably she had her own stash hidden somewhere as well.

  As they idled across the lawn back to Angela’s room, Sadie said, ‘I can tell you think you recognise me. Let’s not have one of those tedious conversations where you ask whether I was at school with you, or if I’m on telly. I’m the prime minister’s wife – I mean the former prime minister’s wife, of course. And before you start, I’m nothing like the woman you’ve read about in the newspapers. Nothing.’

  ‘Is that a good thing? I don’t read the papers very much.’

  ‘Good and bad. They have me down as a greedy, conniving bitch. Well, I dispute the conniving part. They think I’m amoral, with no sense of humour. In fact I’m a practising Christian, and I’ve got the biggest fund of dirty jokes in central London. They think I’m addicted to money and handbags. I’m not; as you’ve probably worked out already, I’m addicted to nothing worse than wine. And I love my husband very much. He knows I’m here; he’s a bold man, and he may even come and visit. Now, you?’

  ‘Oh well, nothing very much to say. I’m an alcoholic lesbian vicar, and my congregation think I’m on pilgrimage in Jerusalem.’

  A burly man in a white T-shirt, with a close-cropped beard, came around the corner towards them as they arrived at the stable block. He was carrying something in his right hand. ‘But I don’t, dear. I know you’re here. And I know why, too.’ He waved a now empty apple-juice carton at her. ‘Naughty girl.’

  ‘Oh, fuck. And fuck you, too. Don’t be so bloody patronising. I’m sorry, Sadie, it seems the cavalry have headed us off at the pass.’

  ‘Never mind. Better for both of us, probably. But what’s with the language? Are you really a vicar?’

  ‘Ah well, the good old Church of England. There’s the mark of a cross in the sunburn between my boobs. Shall we try the hot tub before the light goes?’

  And so it was that Caroline Elizabeth Phillips, loyally visiting her girlfriend in her weeks of need, first came to meet the Master. Saturday was visiting day. Caro arrived by Saab. The Master arrived in a helicopter. By then his wife and Angela were firm friends. They shared a sense of humour, which had kept them going through some tough days – no sneaking off to the local pub, so far – and an embattled belief in the relevance of the Gospel. Angela didn’t care much for politics, but she talked a lot about Caro, who had at last decided to ‘do something’ and join the Labour Party. Sadie saw in Angela a tough, troubled woman who seemed to her the nearest thing she would find there to a reliable confidante, who wouldn’t go running off to the press. Angela, who immediately after their first encounter had avidly Googled her new friend, found a much-misunderstood and underestimated woman, with a fund of wonderful stories and a sincere devotion to the supposedly troubled former prime minister.

  It was no surprise, then, that over a picnic provided by the rehabilitation centre, the Master and Caro found it easy and entertaining to talk.

  Later, calling Sadie from a hotel room in Boston, the Master said, ‘Your boozy new friend, the Sapphic lady who wants to be an MP – she’s quite something, isn’t she? She’s got the magic dust.’

  ‘It’s her partner you mean; she’s the one who caught your eye. The boozer is the vicar. But the girlfriend has something, I agree. You might look out for her.’

  And later still, when Angela was back at Pebbleton, dashing out the parish newsletter and answering her sons’ homework questions, she paused to say to Caro: ‘He’s quite something, isn’t he? The Master. I could tell he really liked you. Not like that.’

  ‘Yes, I think he did,’ Caro replied. ‘Not like that, but yes.’

  Over the next few months, the two couples came to know one another better. Sadie greatly admired Angela, who was now moving in the Christian–business circles which occasionally hosted the Master. He and Caro exchanged emails. At a Christian socialist conference he had agreed to address, he gently corrected her misapprehensions about the current Labour Party leadership, and from time to time he suggested phrases that might help her as she gingerly embarked on her first public appearances as a would-be politician. She in turn rallied him with encouraging jokes when
he felt particularly beleaguered by a hostile and unforgiving media. The more he saw of her, the more the Master found common cause. Caro was passionate about educational opportunity, about getting people back to work, and about the environment. She was Europhile, but also an admirer of Washington – she followed American politics, and baseball, as a hobby. She never mocked the Master for his religious seriousness. So when, one day, he suggested that it was time for him to do something concrete to help her to put it all into practice, to get into the House of Commons and become a proper politician, it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

  Caro Gets Selected

  Any fool can get elected, and most of them do; but it takes real ruthlessness to get selected in the first place.

  Yes, him again

  Angela was unimpressed by the news. ‘But you’re not tough enough, darling. You’re not manipulative. And the Labour Party hardly exists down here in Pebbleton. You’re going to have to move. You’re going to have to move out. Just when we’re so happy. Politics – it’s a horrible world – look in the newspapers. They’ll have you for breakfast.’ She was doing the washing up, and scrubbed the plates as if they were guilty. Then she came over and kissed Caroline lightly. ‘I just don’t want you to get hurt.’

  ‘You mean you don’t want me to bugger off up to London when I’m so useful down here, looking after the boys.’ Caroline was cleaning the table, but was so distracted that she was simply sweeping crumbs onto the floor.

  ‘You’ve only just given up that ridiculous City job of yours. You’re beginning to enjoy life a bit. Why make yourself miserable?’ Angela was gripping her wine glass so hard that it broke. She checked her hand for blood, then threw the glass away, saying nothing.

  Caroline certainly looked miserable. But she straightened up and forced a smile. ‘Because we’re all put on this planet to do something. You’ve always said it. I’ve always known it. And I think this is what I can do.’