by Andrew Marr
The next time Mary, Callum and Fergus came down, Davie tried harder than ever to find enticing amusements and surprising places to eat. He hardly stopped talking – about London, about his job, about the exciting things that were going to happen to him. With every syllable, with every look, he was lying to all three of them. The boys said nothing, and behaved as if everything was normal. But Mary looked at him intently, and asked several times if everything was all right. She didn’t know a thing. She knew everything. He said nothing. His ‘nothing’ was everything. For the first time in his life, he had no words. Now strangers, they clutched each other in the darkness like a pair of drowning children.
Barker
Everybody has to come from somewhere. If you don’t come from somewhere, find somewhere.
Himself
Caroline’s shattering defeat of cocky, disagreeable David Petrie in the debate about Sharia law was, Angela told her, the first great victory of their new life in Barker. ‘If we stand together my love, who can resist us?’
The weeks after Angela’s decision to leave Pebbleton had been the most extraordinary blur. Angela, unbound, was like an Old Testament angel – tangled hair flying, colourful wings whirring, everywhere at once. Her new parish was just outside Caro’s constituency boundary, and it quickly became clear to Angela, after meeting the curate, the verger, and some of the pitifully sparse regular congregation, that this was a community in desperate need of leadership. This part of Barker was mainly composed of narrow, red-brick terraces built in the glory days when the town was world-famous for its shoemakers. Once, Barker’s annual fair had been a magnet for traders and performers from across the Midlands. Even between the wars, Barker had been a thriving centre of manufacturing – typewriters, vacuum cleaners and bicycles – which had lured Scots and Welsh workers. But, badly hit by the Luftwaffe in 1941, the town’s factories never fully recovered. The shoes were made more cheaply abroad, first in East Germany and Poland, and later in China. Typewriters gave way to personal computers; bicycles arrived by container from the Far East. Meanwhile, waves of immigration from Pakistan’s Swat Valley and Sylhet in Bangladesh, where foresight about global manufacturing developments was in short supply, had brought new communities to Barker. For obvious reasons, they rarely got on. By the twenty-first century Barker was as well known for its gangs as it had once been for its fairs. The chapels built by the Welsh, and the late-Victorian Anglican churches, had mostly been converted to housing or to mosques.
Angela had arrived early for her interview, and had chosen not to book into the only hotel in the area – her enquiries had revealed that it was run by one of the churchwardens – but found a bed and breakfast. She had walked the streets, noting how many families still gathered on the front steps of their terraced houses, and observing the graffiti and the abandoned toys, bikes and prams in the gardens. She had seen how the Bangladeshi women huddled close to the walls as they walked along, and shivered in the cold. Pebbleton it wasn’t. But there seemed to be more chip shops and fried-chicken outlets than curry houses.
As she walked, Angela felt a curious and intense physical sensation. A hot, prickling feeling began behind her knees and then ran up the backs of her legs, rushing up her torso and neck before crackling around her scalp. She gasped, and felt herself flooded by a feeling of delight and peace. ‘I am being called by the Lord,’ she said to herself. ‘This is how it feels.’
There was apparently a shortlist, though Angela never met any of the other candidates. The interview panel met her in the church hall. They were mostly women in their sixties or older, plus a couple of bulky men in suits, the verger, and a younger man who must have been the archdeacon. They seemed tough, weathered people, but friendly enough. After a short prayer imploring God to give them wisdom in their judgements, Angela was asked about her ambitions for Christianity in a town like Barker, and the differences she expected working here, as compared to a small rural living in Devon. She was warned that the ‘parsonage’ was in reality a two-bedroom brick house next to a general store. (This in itself had put off another of the candidates.) She was asked about her children, and whether they would go to the local school. Perhaps, she answered; she would have to see. As to the parsonage, the panel were aware that her partner was the Member of Parliament for Barker, and she expected that they would buy a house together, big enough to accommodate both her family and her work on pastoral matters. There was a ripple of approval in the room. She wasn’t asked about her sexuality, or her views on women bishops; she got the distinct impression that neither mattered here. These people wanted someone who could rally the fainthearted and spread the gospel in these forgotten streets.
She was chosen, as she knew she would be; as she felt she already had been. Three days later she had had an offer accepted for a four-bedroomed house recently built on land reclaimed from a railway marshalling yard. It had a neat garden, though the new lawn was suspiciously bumpy, and there were already cracks in some of the ceilings. Entirely happy, she called Lady Broderick, who turned out to know the archdeacon – and who had perhaps put in a word for her – and asked her to send the boys up by train. There was a grammar school in the next town, and Angela, still brimming with flaming certainty that the Lord was with her, knew they would be offered places there, and that they’d like it.
Caroline, when she arrived at the new house for the first time, found herself feeling selfishly jealous. Angela had already crammed the few bookshelves with her dusty Thackeray and Dickens paperbacks, and the broken-backed works of radical theology, feminism and Eurocommunism left over from her university days. She had put up a painting of Pebbleton she’d bought for a song at a charity auction; the furniture had been hurriedly purchased from an IKEA outside Milton Keynes, and was still mostly unassembled. Compared to Caro’s cosy flat in London, it seemed nothing to do with her life. But, seeing Angela’s radiant face, she pushed aside her misgivings and kissed her thanks.
In bed that night Angela lay on top of Caro, her nose burrowed into her sweet-smelling neck as they hugged tightly.
‘A new adventure.’
‘Together.’
‘Against the world.’
‘Us.’
Health and Efficiency
The good minister initiates; the bad minister reacts.
The Master
He had a scratch. It ran down the outer side of his right shin. His legs were pleasingly hairless, although freckled, and the red line of his scratching was obvious.
‘It’s not a scratch, it’s an itch,’ said his wife, who was reading her emails in bed.
‘Do you think I’ve got something? It’s sort of tingly.’
‘Yes, my love. You’ve got a messiah complex.’ Sadie glanced over at him. ‘But sadly, it isn’t fatal. Not for you, anyway.’
‘My love, you have woken in an acid condition … Hey, it’s all my fault. We don’t spend enough time together.’
Sadie rolled away from him, heaving the duvet over her, and groaned.
The Master climbed out of bed. He slept naked. ‘There’s nothing today that I can’t cancel. We could have a walk. We could have lunch together, just the two of us. Talk.’
‘You really are the most invincibly vain man I’ve ever met. Do you think I don’t have things to do? People to meet?’
The Master, feeling hurt but discovering no plausible retort, made his way to the bathroom. Sadie listened to the creak of the floorboards under him. ‘And don’t just stand in there admiring your bottom in the mirror. For a man of your age, it’s undignified. Even in private.’
It was true that the Master was well-toned. Well into his sixties, there was barely a finger of loose flesh on him; Sadie sometimes referred to him as Dorian Gray. The muscles on his arms, chest and legs were well-defined. He had escaped varicose veins, precancerous moles and cellulite. He particularly prided himself on his bottom, which he felt was still a work of art. But ‘work’ was right: he had worked hard for this body. After losing power, years of trav
elling had been made tolerable by frantic workouts in hotel gyms from Abu Dhabi to Singapore. When he wasn’t speaking, he was jogging. There was nothing he could do about his face, which was scored and tautened by decades of stress, public smiling and late-night reading. So far he hadn’t been tempted by Botox or a facelift; and anyway, if anything, he looked too young for his age. He quite fancied thicker eyebrows, he sometimes thought. But meanwhile his body, the feeling of it and the look of it, was a completely legitimate pleasure. Sadie was probably jealous; that, he thought, was probably why she was trying to get him to cut Petrie loose. Feminism was all very well in public, but …
After the Master had disappeared into the bathroom, Sadie flung the duvet away and hurriedly dressed herself in jogging pants, sports bra and a Juicy top. The bloody man wasn’t giving up on his nasty little Scottish boy. She was a heavy woman, but still young-looking. She lit a vanilla-scented candle and tucked herself on the floor for her customary twenty minutes of mindfulness – mindfulness, she said, was yoga without the moaning. But before she began, she reached for her phone and texted every one of her eight children. Voice recognition helped, but each of the eight messages was personal, appropriate and up to date. Only then did she switch off the phone and close her eyes.
The Master returned, clean and shaven, in a pressed blue shirt and smart grey trousers. He watched her for a moment, and coughed. A spasm of irritation passed across her face. He thought about it, then coughed again. This time her eyes opened and she turned around.
‘No, you are not ill. You’re pathetic. That’s not even a real cough. And so, no, it’s nothing serious.’
‘Sorry, darling, all I wanted to do was talk. Did you hear the debate last night? Caroline and Petrie?’
‘Of course I did. I stayed up and watched it on the parliamentary channel. She trounced him, didn’t she? I’m actually amazed that you can’t see that.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. But I’ve been thinking. Inadvertently, perhaps, didn’t we give her a lot more help than we gave Mr Petrie?’
‘True. But we had to. He went for her ferociously. That wretched newspaper article, and to use FGM against her – that was completely unacceptable. It was inappropriate.’
‘Sadie, you’re right. But, hey, that was our guys. Sometimes they get a bit Hunger Games. Don’t blame the runner. And he did make that excellent speech about Trident and Egypt. I was talking to Don in Washington’ – Don was their eldest son – ‘and he said it was noticed there. Caroline hasn’t done anything quite that bold so far. Sure, she’s lovely, but she lacks a bit of inner steel.’
Sadie, realising that mindfulness was off this morning’s agenda, unknotted herself. She had come to feel rather pro-prietorial about Caroline Phillips. ‘Caro’s more than tough enough, and she’s going to come right. We need to get her a government job. You need to call in some favours. In fact, if you’re not too distracted by any passing mirrors, you might get to work on it today. I’m going to see her myself later on.’
‘Really? Where are you off to?’
‘To help train my team. Somewhere White and Khan can’t overhear us.’
Cleanliness
Better out than in. Except for office, obviously.
The Master
There was a freshly painted cream door in the brick wall on a corner off Kensington Church Street. Above it was a metal sign that read ‘Vitality’ and ‘The In-Town Clinic’. Sadie, enwrapped in a thick quilted coat, pulled a bell shaped like an acorn, and was immediately let in.
Beyond a small urban garden, planted with azaleas and cacti, the clinic was housed in a ruthlessly modernised set of Victorian cottages. Much of the frontage had been ripped off and replaced by a long, curving wall of frosted green glass. Sadie buzzed and was let through. A spectacularly beautiful African girl in a white uniform looked up from behind her desk and smiled.
‘Ah, Mrs …’
‘Shhh,’ mouthed Sadie.
‘Your guest is here. Mrs Phillips is just undressing.’
Sadie went through to a large, warm room with low lighting. Banquettes covered in thick white towels lined the walls. On one of them, Caro was sitting in a light white dressing gown. She looked a little nervous, Sadie thought.
‘Nothing to worry about, darling. This is going to be our girls’ moment, pure pleasure; and you’ll feel like a million dollars afterwards.’
‘I hope so. It just seems a rather odd way of spending a Tuesday morning. I had to cancel a …’
‘Well, that’s part of the point. Everything can be cancelled. In your life you need to think more about stress and how to fight it. And after more than forty years married to a politician, I can tell you that this works.’
The In-Town Clinic had been founded in the 1980s by a friend of Sadie’s, Fara Clara Jenkinson, a socialite, Buddhist, professional anorexic and occasional companion of British princes. Underneath the froth, Fara Clara was as tough as a Levantine arms dealer. But despite her elevated social status, she had very little money. Then she noticed that, in California and certain spa resorts of Middle Europe, many stressed, wealthy women had discovered the therapeutic benefits of ‘high colonic irrigation’, or having warm water squirted up their bottoms. She borrowed some money, and began to show her entrepreneurial qualities. Although the treatment tended to make husbands and lovers snigger, Fara Clara’s discreet and expensive service began to make quite a lot of money. Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Tatler and The Lady all ran articles about her, in which the euphemisms bloomed like desert flowers; but frank, quiet word-of-mouth was her best advertisement.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century Fara Clara had refined and extended her services. A range of branded Fara Clara health drinks – nettle juice with beetroot, carrot and caramel frappé, cold olive tea – were followed by ‘home treatments’. Plastic buckets of mud, supposedly sourced from the Auvergne and Baden-Baden though in fact from Wolverhampton and Frinton, were mixed with gold leaf, dry rice and black pepper, to be smeared on exhausted faces and sagging bosoms in the privacy of bathrooms from Virginia Water to Chipping Norton. You could buy Fara Clara oils and Fara Clara candles and Fara Clara pampering kits. Their acrid fragrances were unusual and unmistakable.
But the bum-squirting business remained at the heart of the Fara Clara empire, and it was there that her instinct for innovation could be seen at its most ingenious. Relatively early on in the high colonic irrigation movement, the invigorating effect of introducing coffee into the enemas had been realised. Fara Clara took this one stage further. The In-Town Clinic offered organic Ethiopian coffee treatments, rainforest-friendly ones, coffees with cardamom, and coffees whose beans had been hand-picked on obscure mountain ranges. For special clients Fara Clara offered marijuana enemas, enemas incorporating fluoxetine or other antidepressants, and for the artistically inclined, jasmine tea.
It was rumoured that the wife of a Premier League footballer who found it hard to keep her food down had paid Fara Clara to feed her otherwise: entire meals were bought at the best London restaurants, liquidised, and inserted, half-litre by half-litre. It was only after a doctor, writing in the Times health pages, had pointed out that bypassing the stomach entirely rather undermined the point of ingesting food, and was in fact dangerous to the heart, that Fara Clara recoiled from this new business model – what she had wanted to call ‘fesstaurants’.
Sadie and Caro were ushered through to the treatment room, with low hospital beds and an entire wall of taps, temperature controls, hoses and nozzles – but there was Cherubini playing, and half a dozen cinnamon candles. A powerfully built Thai woman was waiting for them.
‘We have Java, Blue Mountain, organic Ethiopian and English Breakfast this morning. Any preferences, ladies?’
Sadie untagged her bathrobe and lay face-down on one of the beds. The Thai woman immediately covered her with an embroidered sheet.
‘Oh dear, are we out of the Fortnum & Mason Christmas Blend already? Well, I’ll have the Blue Mountain – I’m f
eeling strong today. And perhaps a teaspoon of the Prozac mix. No sugar, Dolly.’
Caroline felt most uneasy as she edged herself down onto the other bed. ‘What if someone comes in?’ she whispered to Sadie. ‘I mean, if the Daily Mail knew where I was right now …’
‘Don’t worry, nobody will come in. We have the place to ourselves. I booked it all. The Master was happy to pay.’
‘Oh. Well, what should I have?’
‘First time?’
‘First time.’
‘I’d try the Java. You’ll feel transformed.’
The Thai woman intervened: ‘It’s Fair Trade, modom.’
Caroline succumbed.
‘So, Sadie,’ she said as the Thai woman busied herself with preparing the infusions, ‘I take it we’re here for some ulterior reason. It felt more like a summons than an invitation.’
‘I’m sorry about that – my PA can sound a little brisk at times. But yes, since you mention it, I thought this would be a good place to talk. Why don’t you go first? Just roll over on your side. Try to relax.’
‘Knees to your chest, modom. I’m just going to massage your tummy.’
‘Ow. Oowww! So what did you want to talk about? Am I wrong in assuming you’re here with your husband’s blessing?’
‘We don’t really have that kind of marriage. If anything, it’s the other way round. But we do work together on the big things. And the most important thing I have to tell you today is that it’s time for you to join the government.’
‘Tuck up, tuck right up, modom. Just roll onto your back. Breathe out.’
‘Very kind. But that’s hardly in your gift, is it? And thanks to shooting my mouth off about the Barker Muslims … Ahh. Oww! That really hurts … I’m not exactly the most popular girl … Aaahhh … with the Grimaldi people. It’s too hot!’