Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  Now she was standing on the stairs, looking down into the playroom, where the Master was sprawled on a low leather sofa, wearing only jogging pants, staring at the whiteboard.

  ‘He’s a bit of a cow’s arse,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t bear him. I don’t want him anywhere near me. Promise me that,’ he said, and groaned.

  ‘He has issues. He has … physical problems. Be a little charitable. You don’t have to speak to him.’

  ‘They’re all cows’ arses. Michael, Clive, Paul – the lot of them. Why do we need Peter Quint?’

  ‘Because people listen to him. Don’t ask me why. He flips and flops all over the place, but he’s sly, and he knows the smell of a news story. When you told him to get behind David Petrie, he wrote a couple of brilliant pieces. He even went up to Scotland for the background. Petrie would never have had the pick-up he’s been given by the Tory press and the broadcasters if it hadn’t been for our Mr Quint. If you’re going to pick a cow’s arse, at least pick the one the rest of the herd sniff.’

  The Master tugged absent-mindedly at his belly hair, then swivelled in the sofa and looked hard at his wife.

  ‘You really think we should do this? After all this time, you think we should switch horses?’

  ‘Well, darling, we started off with quite a sizeable herd of them, didn’t we? And now we’re riding just two. If we make the right choice, we’ll have the party under the thumb of somebody who understands how the world works again, who’s prepared to take unpopular decisions … But I needn’t tell you all that – it’s your speech.’

  She walked down the stairs and across the room to one of the Master’s desks, from which she picked up a carefully folded piece of chamois leather. ‘Petrie is, I’m told, a man for the ladies. He’s got some good ideas, but he’s volatile, flamboyant. I think he’s brittle. Caroline Phillips, on the other hand, has the perfect back story for here and now. A gay woman with a stable partnership and a strong religious background. She’s going to be our Margaret Thatcher, depend on it. So it’s time to simplify the story.’ And she walked up to the whiteboard and, before the Master could stop her, swiped out a square metre of squiggles which had prominently included the letters ‘DP’.

  The Master, however, was Master of his own whiteboard, if not his house. He unfolded himself with the athleticism of the Pilates addict, and reinserted Petrie’s name in red ink, albeit with a question mark after it.

  ‘I like him,’ he said to himself. ‘He’s got an inner anger. He’s not quite predictable. Anyway, where’s the fun in a one-horse race?’

  Then he changed colour, to blues and greens, and began to draw arrows and squiggles, and to add further words. They included ‘Grand Project!?’, ‘Rome!’ and ‘Ella-Leverage?!’. Like all bad writers, the Master suffered from a lifelong addiction to exclamation marks.

  Family Life

  Sex? Well, that’s a problem. Always has been.

  The Master

  Up in Glaikit, Mary, Callum and Fergus had quickly become used to David’s absence. If he’d thought a little more deeply, he might have been worried about that, but in truth he was mainly relieved. He phoned every day, sometimes twice; but as the boys’ worlds changed and evolved without him, the conversations grew briefer and less satisfying to both him and them. They acquired friends he’d never met. He lost track of where their schoolwork had got to. Mary was drily helpful for a while, but after a few months she was warning him, ‘I’m no’ letting you off the hook, Davie Petrie MP. They don’t talk about you any more over supper. They’re changing every day. If you want to stay their real father, their proper father, you’re going to have to find a way of coming back more often.’ From time to time she mentioned Davie’s cousin Angus, who had taken to coming around, doing small jobs about the house, keeping Mary company. The boys liked him a lot.

  Davie tried. Murdoch White had told him that the first necessity for a successful political career was a strong family background. ‘You need to be rooted. You need a place where you’re your real self. Kids cut you down to size. And they remind you of how quickly the world is changing. They’re not a distraction, not in this mad world; don’t let them go.’ So when he could dodge around the votes and the endless meetings, Davie schlepped across town for the sleeper train north. Sometimes he jumped into the car and drove without a break for more than four hundred miles, just to spend a night in his own bed with Mary. It was exhausting, and it affected his performance in the House. He talked to colleagues about moving the family south, but they all advised him against it. The cost of a house in London was prohibitive. He’d be taking the boys out of one education system and throwing them into a different one where they might not thrive. Sure, his family would be only a few miles away, but the late-night voting and the evening meals in the Members’ dining room wouldn’t go away. What they didn’t say, but often thought, was that the strange and lonely life of an MP required a bit of something extra, some night-time solace; and the less spouses knew about what went on in London, the better.

  Still, Davie wasn’t tempted. Or rather, he was tempted, but he coped. Mary was bonnie, and sensible, and better educated than he was; from a distance, he thought that without her, he’d never have climbed so far. She’d kept her looks. She’d fattened up a little, but in a way he liked. Above all, she’d kept her sense of humour. She could make him laugh like nobody else could, and she could take a rise out of him. She made him like himself better. Why would he go running after some skinny bint from London?

  At half-term, and for parts of the school holidays, Mary and the boys would come down to London, where they could just about all squeeze into his Dolphin Square flat. It was a kind of camping. They sat in the television room, the boys on the carpet, to eat breakfast. The boys slept in his study, one on the sofa and one on a futon. During the day, if he could get away, Davie took them on adventures around London. They went to the zoo, which Callum and Fergus thought less impressive than Edinburgh’s. They went up the Shard, and around Westminster Abbey, where Davie showed the boys the great black tombs of all those old English kings who had gone north to slaughter the Scots – it was a strange thing, but living in London, after years of fighting the Nats at home, had brought out a belligerent Scottish patriotism that Davie hadn’t realised he had. So he pointed out where the Stone of Destiny had once stood, and told them the story of that; and he took them to London Bridge, where all the Jacobite gentlemen’s heads had stood on pikes like rotten fruit; but he wasn’t sure if it was actually that bridge, or another one; and when he took them to the Tower of London, he reminded them that the Honours of Scotland were in Edinburgh Castle.

  But mostly it wasn’t history lessons, it was just a family holiday. They wandered through the fancy, expensive shopping streets, with fancy grocers and fancy paintings on sale, and fancy watches that cost more than a car, and fancy cars that cost more than most men would earn in ten years. And they’d find a pizza place, or a McDonald’s, and maybe see a film. Later, although it was a small flat, Davie and Mary would make love like in the old days, because it felt exotic and a bit of an adventure being in such a narrow, unfamiliar bed; and those little London holidays were some of the happiest times the family ever had.

  On later visits, Davie took them to the villages of London – to Hampstead and Highgate, Dulwich and Greenwich – and told them that London wasn’t really just one place, it was a whole lot of places stuck together. And they learned to eat Chinese dumplings off trolleys in Soho, and spicy meat in Brazilian cafés; to eat curried food with their fingers in the East End, and cold cherry soup and duck like the Hungarians. He told them that London wasn’t an English place really, not in the way that Glasgow, and even Edinburgh in a way, were Scottish places. London belonged to all the world. Hundreds of different languages were spoken there. So being in London was like going on holiday all around the world. Callum was more grown-up now, but Fergus said London smelled of poo; and Mary said that yes, it did, but you didn’t say poo, you sai
d drains. And that night Fergus said he needed to go drains, and they all laughed. But by then, when they went to bed Mary and Davie would lie beside each other all stiff and formal, like those early English kings and queens in Westminster Abbey; for something had happened, but they were both too scared to talk about it.

  The something that had happened was the obvious thing, the thing that always happened when a man and his wife were apart for so long. Davie wasn’t tempted by the skinny girl who worked for the Master. She was nothing on his Mary. But then, he wasn’t quite not tempted, either.

  Ella James, who Davie had originally thought worked for some TV station or other, was actually what the Master called ‘my eyes and ears’, or sometimes ‘my girl Friday’. As the months went by, Davie found himself getting ever more help and hints from Murdoch White, Leslie Khan and Alex Brodie. They would summon him to one of their houses, or sometimes for a meal in a discreet restaurant south of the river. They picked him up when he was down – most notably after that terrible trouncing in the House by Caroline Phillips – and taught him which journalists to cultivate, how to spread gossip without being fingered, even how to dress. Davie had always fancied himself as quite dapper, but Leslie Khan, with his neatly trimmed beard and handmade shoes, told him he looked like an IFA, an independent financial adviser, which was apparently a bad thing. He sent him to a tailor in Savile Row, who measured his shoulders and arms, his chest and inner leg; and cut out big pieces of brown paper and pinned them together; and later on fitted him with a suit covered with little chalk marks for small alterations; and charged him nearly £5,000. But after this, Davie felt different. He just looked more self-confident. Whether it was really the suit, or just the morale-boosting effect of spending so much money, it did make a difference.

  Khan in particular was full of small, obscure rules. Don’t wear brown shoes within two miles of Westminster between Monday morning and Friday lunchtime. Never eat while walking out of doors – you might be photographed, and you’ll look like a lout. Never wear plum-coloured corduroy trousers – infallible sign of a rascal. Never use Velcro, for any purpose whatever. Never be seen in public reading the Sun, the Mirror or Private Eye. Don’t read Prospect, the TLS or the New York Review of Books, but do buy them, and be seen carrying them. The occasional Virginia cigarette if you must; Turkish are for poseurs, cigars are for Tories and Russians only. Don’t say too much, particularly in political arguments. To wait silently, and then speak briskly and clearly at the end, is always more effective than simply piling in. And much more besides.

  Neither Leslie Khan nor Alex Brodie, who tended to advise Davie about public speaking, ever mentioned sex at all. Perhaps they took it for granted that he and Mary were safe. Perhaps the subject embarrassed them. Perhaps there was some other reason. At any rate, neither of them tried to warn him off Ella as she became more and more part of his life.

  That was easy enough, because Ella served as the Master’s representative on earth. The Master himself was very rarely available. His current life frequently took him around the world, to China mainly, and South America. His charitable foundation had offices in Portland Square, and if he ever appeared anywhere, it was there, without fanfare or prior warning. The offices were like those of a hedge fund or a private bank, smelling of fresh white paint and cut flowers. Smartly dressed men and women, quiet, polite and with transatlantic accidents, held murmured meetings and passed around files of creamy, expensive paper to be signed or initialled. Telephones gently coughed – never rang, never trilled. The carpets were blonde and several inches deep. So were the blondes. Every so often Ella would ring Davie and ask him to come in to the office. Each time, she half-hinted that the Master wanted to talk to him in person. Davie felt his heart racing as he approached the square, but the Master was never there. Instead Ella, with her interesting, mobile face and thin-lipped mouth, would talk him through something that was about to happen in the House. She would explain that the whips were going to call on him for a rather dirty late-night operation to talk out a popular but expensive backbench Bill. She would tell him that the junior defence minister was about to offer him a post as his parliamentary private secretary, or ‘bag carrier’; that this was an unimportant and unpaid job, and the minister in question was bleakly incompetent, but that he should accept the offer with grace and gratitude. He would make some American friends, who would turn out to be useful. It was even Ella who told him about his first promotion to real government office.

  By then they had been secret lovers for months. Ella had made her proposition sound more like a sensible career decision than adultery. ‘You will have an affair sooner or later. It’s not your fault. It’s certainly not Mary’s fault. But in this city, in this trade, every man – and most women too – needs an outlet. Politics is a passionate business. You’re a very handsome man, even if, unfortunately, you seem to know it. I’m not completely hideous, I hope. So take your time, and think this through. Sex in Westminster is a very dangerous thing. Literally no one is safe. Try to make a pass at someone, and you’ll find the story’s sold to the papers. Kiss a girl in a pub, and you’ll be photographed. Like everybody else, Mr David Petrie, you have normal animal passions. But if you act on them, you’ll be completely sunk. Or you would be sunk, if you didn’t have me.’

  This conversation was taking place in the highly public surroundings of the Pugin Room. Ella had a deep, slightly raw voice, and she was speaking just too quietly to be overheard by the MPs all around them. She leaned forward and drew her forefinger down Davie’s thigh before cupping his crotch. ‘Everyone knows who I work for. Everyone knows that he admires you, and that you and I are working together. Half of London thinks I’m having an affair with the Master; the other half “knows for a fact” that I am. So you see, I’m pretty safe. But here’s the most important thing. It’s something the Master himself told me long ago: “If you’re in public life and you’re going to have an affair, make sure it’s with someone who has more to lose than you do.” And although I’m unelected, I’m probably the most powerful woman in the Labour Party. So I’ve got plenty to lose.’ Then she stood up, looked around the room and said loudly, ‘We should go.’

  They took a black cab from the Members’ Entrance to Ella’s flat, and there, on an antique French bed, under the glassy gaze of a photograph of the Master, who didn’t seem interested, Davie committed adultery for the first time in his life.

  Ella was indeed pretty, in a forgettable way – lean, an unnatural blonde, with long legs, strong fingers, and her tight face. She was abandoned and shameless, certainly compared to the girls Davie had known in his youth back in Scotland. But there wasn’t much to say. Nothing about the encounter was surprising. It went on for quite a while, they came together, and Davie felt a hot flush of remorse afterwards, which he did not share or discuss with her. Both of them knew it would happen again – and again.

  From the first, however, Davie always wanted more. Not more sex – more intimacy. What was truly disconcerting about Ella was her ability to separate what they did together in private from the rest of their lives. About one thing, she was proved right: there was never the faintest suspicion or fragment of gossip. But this came at a price. Her businesslike attitude to Davie in public, whether in the Master’s offices or during their meetings at the Commons, stung him. One moment she had her face buried in the hairs of his chest and her arms around him; the next time she saw him she would be instructing him to do this or that political odd job as if he were an anonymous and junior functionary.

  There was no true closeness, no sharing of confessions, fantasies or private jokes. He told her about his mother and the village. He told her, late one night, about what his father had done to him, and the hot but hollow feeling inside it had left him with. She tugged his hair, or brushed her fingers against his cheek, or opened another bottle of wine, but said only ‘Poor dear.’ When he asked her about her past he got only shrugs or fragments – school here, interest in a pony there, ‘nice’ parents,
all related in a cool, neutral tone. It was as if she were describing someone else, whom she didn’t know particularly well and wasn’t hugely interested in. Whenever he asked her about the Master, a door slammed shut in his face. One day she told him, ‘You’ll see him soon enough, if you’re good enough. The world is too bloody full of bloody fools gossiping about him. Let’s not make ourselves yet another pair of them.’

  Petrie came to think that for Ella, the sex was no more than business. In bed, there were endearments, nuzzlings. But the light of day was always cold – swift exits, the radio turned up, toneless farewells. He found it was possible to be sexually fulfilled and very lonely at the same time. Later, when they had moved on to the more intimate stage of having arguments, she defended herself: if Davie was looking to give his life some meaning, it had to be through ambition and achievement. If he was lonely, so much the better; he would work harder. He was married, and he wanted to stay married, didn’t he? (He supposed he did.) Did he have any idea how hard it was for her to keep the necessary distance?