‘Yes, really,’ she said. ‘I am relieved to say that role is behind me – and I can assure you there is nothing less diplomatic than an ex-diplomat.’ Emily noticed TJ nodding fervently. ‘But surely,’ Nessa continued, ‘we should be allowing Emily a little more freedom than I had?’
‘Yes, sure … I mean, erm, no,’ said Gerald, confused. ‘That is, Emily is an asset,’ he beamed at her, ‘and we feel she has an important role to play in enhancing the appeal of the party to the electorate. She and Ralph are a package. That’s the point.’
‘So she can continue being her charming, supportive, delightful original self?’ pressed Nessa.
‘Oh yah, absolutely,’ said Gerald. But he didn’t mean it. Emily could tell, having been mugged by the central office mafiosi before, not least when they insisted that she turn down a parliamentary sketch column – the would-be pinnacle of her journalistic career – because of a “conflict of interest”. In other words, it “conflicted” with Ralph’s “interest” in becoming the youngest member of the Cabinet.
‘Anyway,’ said Nessa, tiring of her TJ baiting game, ‘I’m off.’
‘I’ll call you later,’ she whispered in Emily’s ear as she gave her a goodbye hug. ‘And I think you might be needing this,’ she added as she pressed something hard-edged and heavy into her hand.
Bringing it up to her face, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. There, in her hand, was the copy of How to Run the Perfect Household by Felicity Wainwright, 1950’s housewife extraordinaire.
Remember, your husband will be looking forward to returning home and off-loading the stress of his day. Even if your own day has been wearing, don’t make the mistake of burdening him with your problems. Instead, prepare to amuse him with an entertaining snippet or two.
FELICITY WAINWRIGHT, 1953
‘Tash has got nits again,’ she said to Ralph as he took off his coat.
‘Really? What glamour, what hedonism you enjoy when I’m away,’ he joked. ‘D’you think it’s the school? Maybe we should send her private …’
‘The village primary’s fine. She’d still get nits in a snob school.’
‘Ah, but posh nits though. A better class of nit, if you will …’ said Ralph, giving her a hug and a glancing kiss on the cheek. ‘Nothing for it though, the village primary it must be. Better for the image don’t you know?’
She did. ‘How was the surgery?’
‘God, what a ghastly crowd,’ he groaned. Fresh from the excitement in Westminster, the weekly constituency surgery had seemed even more parochial than usual. ‘Can you believe that horrific old crone from Maybury showed up again to rant about double-yellow lines with her photo album of badly parked cars? Do you know, she actually goes around with a measuring tape to get evidence? One can only hope she’ll get squashed by a lorry…’
‘Did we not get a reply from highways on it? You remember we decided to ask them to do a study on it to see if the parking restrictions should be extended to help the flow of traffic?’
‘Did we? To be honest I don’t have a clue any more,’ admitted Ralph, running his fingers through his hair, rubbing his scalp hard as if his head hurt which it probably did, to be fair.
‘Tea or wine,’ she offered.
‘I’m not sure either of them are going to do it, have we got any gin?’
‘Sorry. Gin, yes, but tonic, no. I forgot to put it on the list.’
‘I’ll have wine, as long as it’s not that filthy stuff we got in for the cheese and wine do last week,’ he conceded, but not before Emily had seen his irritated look at this failure in the domestic machinery which was, of course, her fault.
Emily rummaged for the corkscrew, eventually turning out the whole drawer onto the kitchen table, but then realised it was a screw top anyway as they almost always were nowadays, even the decent stuff which Ralph now insisted on. She recalled the days when any old plonk would do.
The day they met – her newspaper had sent her to do a profile on him as one of the chief architects of the new party – their business lunch had run into the evening and then through the night, with Ralph insisting on ordering another bottle of wine and then another before repairing to his Westminster flat where he talked her into bed. She had been ripe to be impressed by him. Flattened by the series of painful events that preceded her meeting with him, he was ten years older than her, successful, dynamic and in no way plagued by the self-doubt that crippled her.
Ralph, in turn, was totally bewitched. It was not just her petite frame, which belied her strength, or even the way her bright, brown eyes flashed with passion when she expressed her views on political issues. She was so genuinely earnest and charmingly unaware of her own physical attractions.
‘I love your naive idealism,’ he told her. ‘I have to assume it’s your youth.’
‘Yeah, probably,’ she had replied, unimpressed. ‘I suppose I’m bound to have turned into a dried up old cynic by the time I get to your age.’
Not used to taking any woman seriously, let alone a younger one, Ralph found her enchanting and vowed to have her. When she fell pregnant just weeks after they met, he received her nervous announcement with the same decisiveness that he applied to his professional decisions. They would get married, he said. It would all be fine. The timing was ideal as he had been advised to find a wife before standing for Parliament – no-one was so stuffy as to care if the bride was up the duff nowadays – and the wedding would give him an excuse to invite all the people he wanted to cosy up to.
It had worked. He was rewarded for his loyalty to the party with a safe seat, although she had been disappointed it was in Sussex where she had no friends or family nearby. He had been elected to parliament when Tash was just a new-born and Alfie not even thought of, but the move to the country and downgrading of career for Emily had meant that she, quite naturally, had taken an interest in Ralph’s constituency work. Initially, he had been driven by the desire to make things better for those whose votes he had relied on. Lately though, the glamour of Westminster and his rise within the party to shadow Home Secretary had replaced that passion with cynicism and a waning interest in local matters. Emily had tried to take over out of genuine concern for righting wrongs but found she was depressingly powerless to help.
‘So, how are the boys at central office reacting to the election announcement?’ she asked.
‘Excited. Feeling like the PM’s made a bit of an error calling it now, given that we’re riding so high in the opinion polls but who are we to complain?’
‘Who indeed?’ smiled Emily.
‘But then, what choice did he have? Looks like things aren’t going to go their way over the next ten months and then they’d be forced to call an election anyhow. They obviously thought waiting until the last minute would be even worse.’
‘Will we win then?’
‘There’s a good chance. As long as the key people can be persuaded to keep their noses clean over the next couple of months anyhow. It’s all going to be on personalities. You could barely get a fag paper between our policies and everyone else’s.’
Emily nodded. This had been her main angle when writing her political commentary even before Alfie was born and nothing much had changed since then.
‘Yeah,’ continued Ralph, ‘as we’ve been saying, it’s all on personalities now, so we just have to make sure we are offering what the voters want.’
‘Perfect, shiny, happy families then?’
‘Well, yes,’ he conceded, ‘that’s us. Then we’ve got the cool, cosmopolitan gay guys who are obviously Charles and Ivan, the steady older bloke with business experience, Alan – we need him to be the PM in waiting of course. In any other economic climate we’d be fielding a younger man as leader …’ he trailed off, rubbing his forehead with fatigue and thwarted ambition.
You would have been the ‘younger man’, thought Emily, who knew how painful it had been for Ralph when last year’s leadership battle had led to his narrow defeat, despite the party nearly sp
litting in half over the battle to decide between him and Alan. He had been persuaded behind closed doors to stand down and back Alan, reuniting the party by publicly and vociferously stating his satisfaction with the role of shadow Home Secretary.
The phone rang.
‘Ralph Pemilly,’ he answered rather too loudly. Emily smiled to herself. However shattered he was – and he frequently was – he always answered the phone as if he had just been interrupted doing something important and dynamic.
‘Yep,’ he said, ‘absolutely – no, you’re absolutely right Gerald,’ he was saying.
So it was pinstripe man, thought Emily. Judging by Ralph’s manner with him, Gerald was a major cog in the machine. She supposed she ought to have been more appreciative that he spent so much of his time and energy on her and TJ yesterday.
Now Ralph was smoothing back his hair, checking his reflection in the darkened kitchen window. They were not overlooked and Emily rarely lowered the blind. Funny, she thought, how people tended to groom themselves when they were on the telephone. Almost like videophones were an everyday reality. And thank goodness they are not, she thought, given the number of times she had answered the telephone to constituents naked. Well, she justified, they did seem to think it was fine to call whenever they had a mind to.
‘Okay, yeah, definitely,’ he was saying now. ‘Just tell him to contact the constituency office when he wants to come down.’
‘Everything okay?’ asked Emily when he put down the phone.
‘Great, actually,’ said Ralph, still arranging his hair. ‘That was Gerald saying he’s managed to get a Sunday Times magazine feature on me.’
‘Wow,’ said Emily.
‘Yeah, well, they wanted Alan,’ he admitted, ‘but he was tied into an exclusive deal with the Telegraph just before the election announcement, so no-one else is allowed to do anything on him ‘til it comes out. The Telegraph have landed on their feet of course, getting a print exclusive with the next PM.’
‘Their loss is your gain though,’ pointed out Emily.
‘Yeah, well, Gerald did a good job of getting them to go for me instead,’ he said with a humility Emily was sure he didn’t feel. ‘The leader of the party’s more of a coup, obviously. Actually, they’ve not just decided to write about me, they want the whole thing; you, the kids, the whole family man thing.’ He looked at Emily anxiously.
‘Sure,’ she reassured him. ‘That’s fine. It’s not like it’s a sleazy tabloid rag doing an exposé of your drug-taking, hard-drinking, and rent boy habit.’
‘Nor yours my sweet,’ he said, tapping her on the nose for her cheekiness. ‘He’ll probably be here on Monday to start getting a feel for everything at a constituency level. I said he should call TJ and go from there. I expect he’ll want to spend more of his time in Westminster all told. That’s where the action is really.
‘I think he’s probably quite good, this journalist,’ he continued. ‘Don’t know if you’ve come across him at all in your former life? Bloke called Matt Morley?’
Emily froze. After a moment, Ralph looked at her enquiringly, waving his hand in front of her face.
‘Earth to Emily! Have you heard of him?’
‘Certainly not,’ she snapped and then caught the puzzled look on his face. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘Heard of him? This Matt Morley bloke?’
‘Erm,’ Emily thought fast, ‘heard of him? Yes, sorry, I thought you said “had I had him” whereas you actually said “had I heard of him” …’ she trailed off, giggling nervously. ‘So yes, the name rings a bell. I think he’s reasonably good,’ she added, blushing because, in that minute, for the first time in their marriage, she had just told her husband a big fat lie.
Chapter Two
It is a huge mistake to let personal standards slip once you have that ring on your finger. Your husband will still expect his wife to be the neat and pretty woman he chose, so always make sure to leave time, after the housework, to change your apron for a clean frock, comb your hair and perhaps apply a little make-up before you expect him home.
FELICITY WAINWRIGHT, 1953.
The children soon cottoned on that their mother was not fully present that weekend. Instead, Emily drifted around in a daze, saying yes to all sorts of rarely permitted treats, even allowing Tash to bury the homework that needed doing deep in her schoolbag and take herself off on a sleepover with her best friend Rosie. Alfie settled for telly watching, even in the morning when it would normally be strictly forbidden. He was delighted to be watching Scooby Doo, having also managed to score a packet of cheesy biscuits. With both children happily engaged, and Ralph out playing golf with a local rich party supporter, Emily at last had the peace and privacy she had been craving since the bombshell the night before.
Matt Morley – the man whose brief but passionate acquaintance overshadowed her early twenties, and whose success she had watched with fascination and longing ever since. Not only had she adored him as a lover, she’d idolised him as a journalist, watching his stratospheric career trajectory as his stern professionalism and tenacity secured him more and more prestigious staff positions on the national newspapers. His high profile meant that Emily, who had dropped out of his sight when their affair had ended so catastrophically, had been able to watch him invisibly (she fondly imagined) from the sidelines over the ten years since her hasty marriage to Ralph. Each glimpse of his by-line caused a twist in her guts that she could not decide was pleasure or pain – or just straightforward lust. And now she would see him again. Even more disconcertingly, he would see her. Of course, with just a day or two until they met, there wasn’t much she could do about the sensible MP’s wife wardrobe, the extra twenty pounds she weighed or the pedestrian lifestyle that he would surely despise in comparison to his own life. At least she could do something about the superficial grooming.
When Ralph came home, Emily was lying on the bed stinking of fake tan and wrapped in a towel, her freshly painted toenails separated by tufts of cotton wool.
‘Can’t talk darling, my face will crack,’ she said without moving her lips as she got up and went over to the basin.
‘What is that stuff?’ said Ralph incredulously. ‘You look like a mummy.’
‘I am a mummy,’ she replied, as she splashed her face with warm water, the clay mask dissolving into sludge in the basin. ‘That’s the problem. Children have rather made me lower my standards, personal refurbishment-wise …’
‘But I like you a bit scruffy,’ protested Ralph.
‘Oi, watch it. I never said “scruffy”, I just feel I could gloss things up a bit. You know … be the trophy wife for you a bit more. Make blokes fancy me.’
‘Oh yeah?’ he teased. ‘Anyone in particular, because you do realise you’re not really TJ’s type, don’t you?’
‘Not anyone in particular,’ Emily replied, blushing and feeling her X-certificate thoughts were written all over her face. ‘No, actually,’ she continued, improvising wildly, ‘I was thinking about Gerald and, like he said, boosting your image, and – stuff.’ She smiled triumphantly. ‘I need to support you by making people lust after me. In a dignified, respectful way, obviously …’
‘Right. OK, well I have to say, I’m all for it,’ he agreed, nuzzling her newly de-masked neck.
She wriggled out of his way, feeling ashamed for doing it but she didn’t want to be touched. Not by Ralph anyway.
‘Sorry,’ she smiled at him. ‘I must go and get supper on.’
Matt, too, was preparing for meeting Emily again. Although it would never occur to him to review his grooming routines he’d had the office prepare a cuttings file so he could track media coverage of Ralph’s career and was working his way through it in date order. He tried to suppress his tendency to pay more attention to the stories where Emily was mentioned, and – better still – pictured. Not to say that he hadn’t seen most of it before. You couldn’t call it stalking, just a general ‘keeping an eye’…
Matt lingered o
ver a recent photo of Emily at her local village fete. Her face was a little rounder and her figure fuller than when Matt had known her. The sweet smile he recognised but there was something else – a complacent, implacable demeanour which was new. Despite himself he remembered returning to their little flat one night to discover her sobbing over a biography of poet Sylvia Plath.
‘Don’t you think committing suicide is a selfish thing to do?’ he had suggested. ‘It’s an act of violence against the people you leave behind, I’ve always thought.’
‘She didn’t do it to hurt people,’ Emily had insisted. ‘She killed herself because the love of her life fell in love with someone else,’ she said, waving her hand at the book in explanation. ‘Look, she says it here: “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever,” How could she live without her heart? Tell me you won’t ever do that to me.’
‘Your heart is safe with me,’ he had promised, smiling. Later, he stumbled on an early copy of Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection in a second hand book shop. It wasn’t a first edition but, because it was signed, it was still a big chunk out of his young reporter’s salary. He paid happily, added his own inscription and handed it to her when they were in bed one morning. He wondered if she still had it. Probably not.
He had loved her tendency to relate to other people on such a visceral level. It had made her a good journalist, he remembered, but vulnerable too. And then, just when he thought he knew her inside out, a rough patch in their relationship had turned rapidly and unexpectedly into a breakup. She announced she was pregnant just before he was due to travel to Kazakhstan. She asked him to cancel his trip, and – like an idiot – he went anyway, sure they would sort things out when he returned. Instead, Matt’s face hardened at the memory as he recalled her phoning to say she had got rid of their baby. He had been staggered and appalled. By the time he returned she had moved out of their flat and he had never seen her again. Where is the girl I loved? thought Matt, staring at the picture in the paper. She wasn’t that person now. Perhaps she never had been.
Never Marry a Politician Page 2