by Andrew Marr
It was brutal. Even on this day of all days, it led the news.
The Master had had a superb new state-of-the-art running machine installed in the country house he’d bought north of London. It wasn’t Chequers, but it wasn’t too shabby. It had a tower, Victorian battlements and a tennis court. He had added a cinema, a heated indoor pool and cottages in the grounds for his grandchildren. There was no library; he wasn’t big on books. The gym was his special pride, gleaming with oiled and sparkling equipment. The running machine came not only with multiple speeds and elevations, and a screen showing ‘Great Runs of the World’ – through forests, along mountain tracks and down the miraculously emptied streets of famous cities – but it also had an ‘On-Board Coach’ whose disembodied voice crackled out of speakers. The Master was close to his record time for a 10-k, just leaving San Francisco under the Golden Gate Bridge, with sparkling turquoise water to one side of him and the shadows of redwoods to the other. He was gasping.
‘Way to go! Keep those thighs pumping!’ said Coach’s recorded voice.
The Master accelerated.
‘Yeah! Good job! Who’s the man?’ Coach wanted to know.
‘I’m the man,’ puffed the Master.
‘Damn right! Don’t quit on me now,’ said Coach.
‘Nnnnnn …’ said the Master.
‘Who’s the man?’
‘I’m the man.’
But then, without warning, half a kilometre before the finishing line – which featured a row of graphically enhanced women jumping up and down, whooping and calling his name – the Master found himself slowing down. The machine was rapidly decelerating.
Coach was furious. ‘Don’t quit on me now! Don’t you dare give up now! You a man or you a chicken?’
The Master was too exhausted to give a coherent reply, though he felt suitably rebuked. But it wasn’t his fault. His wife was standing behind him, having turned the machine off.
‘Sadie! I was about to beat my record. Didn’t you hear Coach?’ he panted.
‘You really are overdoing it. Those aren’t buttocks any more, they’re a pair of gooseberries. I’m here on more serious business, however. Have you seen the news? Have you heard what that ghastly Phillips woman has been saying about you?’
He hadn’t. As he vigorously rubbed himself down, Sadie filled him in, omitting no hurtful detail. He clicked onto News 24, and there it all was. The commentators had taken the new prime minister’s words as signalling that it was open season on him, and they were all piling in – all those half-forgotten scandals, all those decomposing disappointments, freshly stirred up. The pouchy faces of his disgruntled enemies were being interviewed again and again, in a never-ending purgatorial loop of denunciation. It was Dante. It was foul.
‘It’s foul,’ said Sadie.
The Master turned and looked her full in the face. ‘No it’s not. It’s hurtful, yes. She’s going to be a monster. But as soon as she threw her vicar to the wolves, I knew that one day she would deny me too. And in a way, it’s really rather wonderful.’
‘Wonderful?’ spat Sadie. ‘She’s a cold-hearted bitch. Caroline Phillips is a bad woman!’
‘Exactly. Bad people doing good things. She’s just what this country needs. Of all of them, you see, my dear, she was the only one who really listened.’
Postscript
Mary said it was the pressure: it was only after he’d finished the job that the physical effect of those years in Westminster came home to roost for David Petrie. At any rate, while he’d been mucking in on the foundations for the new house, he’d had a mild heart attack. The cottage hospital, small as it was, had saved his life. He’d taken things a bit easier since then. The firm could almost look after itself; the new Scottish government had accelerated house-building, and in Ayrshire, Petrie Homes had a better reputation than anyone. Using the new legislation he’d brought in himself, the company was also now expanding into the construction of beautiful, traditionally-designed public buildings. Bunty, who’d lost to Tony Moretti in the by-election (the PM had been furious), was working for Davie as general manager, and doing a fine job.
One November morning, with a bright blue sky and sharp, vivid, almost horizontal light producing incandescent colours on the larches he’d planted around the new house, Davie was outside, cutting back some rose bushes. He’d just waved goodbye to Callum – a big bugger these days, but a constant delight – when he noticed a small black figure coming towards him on the new road that wound up to the house. A woman, judging by the halo of dark, crinkly-looking hair, but a tall one. He’d never seen her before in his life.
Angela had served nine months in prison. She’d found she almost enjoyed it; she worked with the prison chaplain, of course, and discovered a real talent for teaching reading and writing to her fellow unfortunates. Now she was out, and sober, the Church of England had shown true forgiveness and understanding. The possibility of being the first ever female bishop in the West Country was dangling before her.
But Angela didn’t believe in loose ends. She’d tried very hard to understand Caroline, and she’d followed her closely, not with particularly hostile eyes, as she grappled with the almost impossible job of being prime minister. Lady Broderick had helped engineer her return to Pebbleton. The boys were both being ghastly, and were staying up at the big house, refusing to move to the vicarage. But the church was full, and the village, if anything, friendlier than it had been before.
‘I’m sorry to turn up unannounced, Mr Petrie,’ she announced. ‘I think you’re looking better than you used to on the telly, by the way.’
He straightened up, and stretched out a cautious hand.
‘We have a mutual friend. Or we used to. I’m Angela. I felt I had to come up here to talk to you. There’s so much I don’t understand.’
‘You won’t get much help from me, I’m afraid. I don’t understand it either.’
As he said this, David tried to imagine Caroline. He found he couldn’t picture her. There was a bright, glazed oval, a sense of warmth, excitement – but no features at all. What colour were her eyes? What was the real shape of her nose, her mouth? Davie concentrated. He could see the Prime Minister’s face clearly in a newspaper picture. But he couldn’t remember her as a person, at all. Was this the truth about political success? There was always a gap between the human being and the political mask – so much was obvious, so much was well known. But then, for a successful politician the face and the mask must fuse; the flesh must grow into the caricature, so the politician is never off-guard. Eventually, there is no space between the human being and the public figure; the takeover is complete. There can never be a lapse, or a flaw, or ‘the real story’. But what would you need to do to yourself to achieve that? How far would you have to go? And once you’d got there, what would you be capable of?
‘I’m sorry to say,’ he said, ‘I think your ex-girlfriend was always a bit of a psychopath.’
‘But I think you loved her. We have that in common, don’t we?’
‘I did. We do.’ Davie lowered his voice. Mary was inside, probably watching television. Probably. ‘But I always had this problem. If she’d stuck by you, if she’d been the person I hoped, I’d have wanted her – but then, of course I couldn’t have had her, by definition. But because she didn’t, and wasn’t that person, I found I didn’t want her after all … ken, being –’
‘A psychopath? I can’t disagree. Poor you. But so far she’s making rather a good fist of being prime minister, isn’t she?’
‘She is.’
‘And do you think you need to be a psychopath to be a successful politician?’
‘I think it helps.’
‘But you’re not a psychopath.’ Angela looked around her. ‘You seem to me to be a happy man, in a happy place.’
‘I’m not a psychopath – now. I was. But I got out in time. Others don’t.’
As they’d been talking, a small, slight, golden-headed girl, no more than eight or nine years old, h
ad appeared, and was standing beside Angela.
That was curious. Davie was sure she hadn’t been there before. He remembered church times. She was a wee angel. She reminded him, somehow, of Caroline. It was very odd.
He looked straight at the vicar. ‘I was going to try to persuade her to stick with you, you know. I think she truly loved you. I think you were the only person she’d ever felt anything for in her whole life. I’m truly sorry about what happened.’
Angela smiled. ‘Thank you. But I’ve got the boys back, and I’ll sort them out one day. And I haven’t really lost Caroline.’ She gestured at the angelic-looking little girl.
Davie leaned down and said quietly, ‘Hullo, little one. Where’ve you come from? And what’s your name?’
Angela answered for them both. ‘She won’t say anything. Not to you. She’s called Caroline, actually. She used to hang around the other one. Now she’s been deserted.’
The small girl smiled, and Davie felt himself blaze with an inexplicable sense of joy.
Many years later, on a cold, dry December morning, across a lake, beyond the willows and the gorse, in one of the wild grey ziggurats of the University of East Anglia, a seminar was held. The department of politics had invited her three bio-graphers, four professors of politics from other universities, and a dozen political writers from the major websites. The proceedings were being recorded, and published in real time on the UEA democracy site.
The smell of coffee and fresh baking wafting through the overly warm room made some of the students in the audience restless. But it was a lively morning. The final session attempted to answer directly the question: had Caroline Phillips been the most successful prime minister since the Second World War? All the wearily familiar cases were made for Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, and the Master. All had, in their way, found new solutions to old problems. It was the rangy Professor Emily Catherine from Cambridge who had summed up their conclusion: in returning the UK – still as one political entity, just about – to the reformed EU and a global leadership role, and providing ten years during which private companies took a much greater share of the burden of educating and supporting working people, Caroline Phillips had proved herself a modest modern Titan. By this stage, intrusive and irrelevant questions about her private life were barely discussed. She’d been much more important than that.
Afterwards, enjoying a perfectly adequate early lunch, the academics and journalists chewed over their discussions. The man from the Times-Mail site felt that they’d failed to confront the hardest question of all: had she been a good person doing bad things, or a bad person doing good things? The sages there agreed that there was no chance of answering such a question.
Also by Andrew Marr
FICTION
Head of State
NON-FICTION
The Battle for Scotland
The Day Britain Died
Ruling Britannia
My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism
A History of Modern Britain
The Making of Modern Britain
Diamond Queen
A History of the World
A Short Book About Drawing
We British: The Poetry of a People
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com