He gathered that she moved regularly from one squalid accommodation to another, and that each change of address usually came with a change of boyfriend. From what she told him, every one of these seemed as arrogant, whining or deluded as she was. Sometimes all at once. He wanted to ask her why she fell with a kind of deliberate carelessness into one bad relationship after another, but didn’t for fear that she would ask what kind of relationships he had. He felt sorry for her but dared not show his sympathy. Like criticism, like comfort, it was something she couldn’t tolerate.
He would come away from their encounters feeling dirty and sad, and grateful that he was returning to the relative sanity of the world he inhabited. When he’d first arrived in London, he had felt himself on the edge of something different and hedonistic. It was almost – but not quite – infectious. You couldn’t ignore it – the girls in miniskirts with psychedelic carrier bags on their arms, the purple Mini Minors and pink VW Campers, the music of Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd pouring out of boutiques and first-floor windows. He’d let his hair grow over his collar, bought a pair of jeans for weekends and a loudish tie for work, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Sometimes he wished he were over thirty and one of the people he wasn’t supposed to trust. It will be over soon, he thought. Order will reassert itself.
In June 1970 the Conservatives, led by Edward Heath, won a General Election. Then, in the autumn of that year, the money happened. His maternal grandmother, who’d lived in Northumberland and whom he’d hardly known, died, leaving him £20,000 after death duties, a huge amount for a lesser Eddelstane. He would have to wait till he was twenty-one to access it, but that was only months away. A similar amount went into a trust fund for Freddy, not to be touched till he was twenty-one. A third of the legacy should have gone to Lucy but the old woman, egged on by Lady Patricia, had cut her from her will. David felt bad about this, and upped the fraternal donations for a few months; but he didn’t tell his sister what had happened. She didn’t even care that her grandmother was dead. Neither did he – he’d only met her half a dozen times – but that wasn’t the point. Was it? Applying Lucy’s own logic, he stopped feeling guilty. What would Q have said if he’d known about Lucy? ‘To hell with her,’ probably. Anyway, David assured himself, she’d only have rejected the money or sunk it in some new political idiocy. He could almost persuade himself he was keeping it in trust for her. If she ever came to her senses, he could help her out. Maybe.
When the cash was finally his he used some of it to buy a two-bedroom flat in Islington, and took Q’s advice regarding the rest. He spread the money around, into banks, insurance, pharmaceuticals, construction, oil, brewing. He shifted it regularly, kept it working, ahead of inflation and then a bit more. He went back to Q and said, ‘What was that you said once, about weapons?’ Q looked at him quizzically. ‘You told me people need weapons,’ he said, ‘like they need washing machines.’ ‘Well, they do,’ Q said. ‘Do you think war stopped in 1945? Do the sums. There’s been Korea, Malaya, Algeria, Aden. Now there’s Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique. I don’t even know where these fucking countries are but they’ve got a war or they’re about to have one. Use your loaf, invest in it.’ David must have gone a bit pale. Q saw it. ‘Look, it’s a hard world out there. Call it defence, if it makes you feel better. The Ministry of Defence used to be called the Ministry of War. If they can change the wallpaper so can you. People have to defend themselves and sometimes that means attacking the other bastard first. Either way they need weapons and there isn’t a country in the world, believe me, that won’t pay for weapons before it pays for anything else.’
David ditched his guilt again. Each time it was easier. He had a knack for backing good runners which his father entirely lacked. (What on earth could have induced the old fool to put money into Clydeside shipbuilding when it was obvious the glory days were over, and all that was left was crumbs for workers and management to bicker over?) He found that the investments he made in companies with defence interests did better than any of the others. Anyway, it wasn’t as if that was all they did. Ferranti, for example: they made power transformers, electricity meters, computers, semi-conductors (whatever they were), all kinds of components and instruments, only some of which were for military use. You couldn’t separate civil and military technology, that was the bottom line. Same knowledge, different applications. Q was right: the two went hand in hand and better by far that the advances were being made by British companies, or American ones, than by anybody else.
But as David’s confidence grew, so did his frustration. For one thing, he was still working for John Harris, buying and selling properties, and while Harris was now paying him a good salary and healthy bonuses David knew he could do better for himself by himself. For another, the more he learned about the market, the more he saw what was out there with the potential to give a good return, yet so much of it was badly managed, and government red tape choked the rest. Even worse, huge chunks of the economy were nationalised. Not just munitions – heat and light, water, telephones, communications, airports, railways. Even holidays – Thomas Cook was a nationalised company. How on earth had that happened? Q felt it too. ‘You’d think this was Russia,’ he said. ‘I know things are better than they were under Labour but I should be making ten times more than I am. In America I’d be loaded by now. It’s not a free market, it’s a constrained one, and that’s even before you hand over a great fucking wodge to the taxman. Something’s got to change, I’m telling you.’
In his own, less brash, way David was as good as Q at playing the game. Maybe better, because for all that he talked about being super-rich, Q never looked like he was going to strike off on his own. According to Q, John Harris always knew best. David didn’t think so. John Harris didn’t think far enough ahead. What was two, even three, years? It was nothing. If you had enough capital to keep on buying cheap, you should aim to hold on to properties for longer and longer periods. Ten, fifteen, twenty years. If you held your nerve, you’d trigger a huge payout eventually. You couldn’t help winning, the money would make more money. He thought about his father and how much he’d lost over the years. It was because he hadn’t kept his eye on the ball. David was extremely focused.
There was a sort of mini-boom going on, but it didn’t feel right. He diversified again, into bricks and mortar. He mortgaged the Islington flat (he’d bought it outright originally), and bought another, cheaper, and rented it out. Property prices were sluggish, but the buildings weren’t going anywhere and people, as Q had pointed out, would always need somewhere to live. No point in selling anyway, the tax would kill him. The income he got as a landlord easily covered the mortgage repayments. He looked around for more property, amazed at his own boldness and at what you could pick up for an absolute song. Thank you, Gran, whoever you were. He kept thinking of Edinburgh too, recalling the semi-derelict state of many of the buildings in the Old Town above ground-floor level, the shabby potential of certain streets on the fringes of the New Town. Edinburgh was a shadow of what it could be. His next moves were going to be up there.
How grateful he was not to have gone to work as an MP’s assistant! Through a combination of business dealings and family connections he’d been introduced to some high-rankers in the party anyway, and they gave him a lot more respect than they’d have given a penniless researcher. He let it be known that the idea of a political career interested him, and they let it be known that he interested them: he had the family history, which was good, but he was more biddable than Sir Malcolm had ever been, which was better. More modern too. He had the sort of image the party needed: longish but neat hair, good dress sense, clean, quiet – not braying and giving off that tweeds-and-heather smell his father had. David Eddelstane had prospects. Nobody knew what lay beneath the surface. He hardly knew himself. It was pretty much the only thing he still felt guilty about, but provided it stayed hidden, what was there to worry about?
§
It was only a year since the elec
tion but things were tough politically. Ted Heath was fighting an exhausting campaign with the unions over pay restraint, and there were rumblings in Tory circles about what to do when he lost. No doubt he was doing his best but his best wasn’t good enough. Northern Ireland was looking ever grimmer, prices and unemployment were on the rise, there were new strikes every other day and a lot of older industries were on their knees. Furthermore, a growing number in the party were dismayed by the country’s approaching membership of the European Common Market. Many on the right weren’t convinced of the vaunted economic benefits, but more profound was their fear that Heath was throwing away a thousand years of heritage, and selling the best bits of the Commonwealth, the white bits, down the river in order to gain entry to a club dominated by the French and the Germans. Something precious and irretrievable, they felt, would be lost when the day came. In the same way, even though it had been planned for years, the arrival in February of a new decimal currency, in place of lovable, weighty old pounds, shillings and pence, had been like a slap in the face of Britannia. Bit by bit the country people loved was being taken from them.
David had until then thought Heath an appropriate man to lead the modern Conservative Party, but increasingly at Tory gatherings he found himself in a minority. It was not in his nature to enjoy being in a minority. He shuffled rightwards until he felt more comfortable, nodding agreement with men and women twice his age who believed that Heath was not equipped to prevent a general slide towards chaos. A new direction was urgently required, within the party itself and beyond it. David picked up hints: phrases like ‘contingency plans’, ‘fallback positions’.
At the party conference at Brighton in October his attention was caught one evening by a poster that read IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM? – THIS WAY. He followed a series of signs that brought him to the back of a packed meeting just as the speakers were being introduced: a former SAS man and an American economist with the clean-cut look of a Mormon about him. It was familiar stuff – the creep of socialism, the suffocating hand of government, the erosion of choice – but there was an urgency, a seriousness about the way the men spoke that couldn’t be ignored. People listened intently, as if at last someone was telling them what they’d both longed and dreaded to hear. When the questions started it seemed as if half the audience was composed of men who’d once been in the army or police: the other half were angry businessmen who couldn’t move for red tape, some of their wives, a few MPs and councillors, and David. When somebody talked about setting up a ‘resistance network’ if the social and political order collapsed there was an eruption of applause. It was all, at first, as alien to him as the King’s Road on a Saturday afternoon. Then rapidly it became less so. These people spoke the same language as his parents, but they were harder, more clinical in their analysis, and they seemed to believe passionately in what they said they believed in.
Back in London he discovered that he too could create a grave, nodding, attentive silence among the very people he had formerly deferred to, by giving his own ‘first-hand’ account of the nation’s decline. He was indebted, for the details that gave his stories the feel of authenticity, to the SAS man, and to Lucy. A group called the Angry Brigade had been planting bombs in boutiques and car showrooms and at the homes of a couple of Cabinet ministers, causing damage and inconvenience but – so far – no deaths and no serious injuries. It was a campaign which Lucy not only approved of but about which she also seemed to have quite detailed knowledge. Omitting any mention of his sister, David gave a good impression of a sensible but streetwise young man who understood what was going on out there and wanted to do something to stop it. There didn’t seem to be any downside to developing this role – in fact it was enjoyable racking up the sense of impending doom – so long as he kept Lucy out of the picture. His biggest fear was that she might actually be involved with the Angry Brigade, and would be arrested and charged, tainting him by association. He was much relieved, therefore, when at the end of the year she converted to Trotskyism, attached herself to the International Marxist Group and headed for Glasgow to support the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in.
§
There was somebody from back when he was very small, some woman: not his mother, not the housekeeper, Mrs Thomson, not either of his grandmothers; a woman he found both attractive and frightening. A teacher maybe – there were a couple of female teachers at his prep school, but he could remember them and neither seemed to fit – so probably it was before school; someone associated with his parents. He thought she must have been tall, this woman, yes, that would have been best, but even if she hadn’t been he’d only have come up to her thighs. Her shoes, her stockinged legs, her knees, the hem of her skirt. The world from his height then – when he was what, three, four? – was a world of passing legs and feet, mostly women’s. He kind of resented the fact that women and men were so obviously different in what they wore when he was that age. Maybe that was the trigger. Resented it yet loved it. The silky feel of that woman’s leg, the shine of her black leather shoe, the secret, warm odour he could breathe in when she sat cross-legged and let the shoe hang from her toe, the high heel ticking back and forth beside his head. He sat next to her chair on the floor and didn’t say a word. His mother smiled a warning at him but she didn’t need to: there was something about the other woman that kept him quiet. Did she know?
Smell, touch, look, hear, taste. He kept thinking back, trying to pinpoint moments of change. For as long as he could recall, his senses had picked up on everything from the soft, rich, shiny deadness of pheasants hanging in the pantry to the way the pile of a hearthrug felt when you stroked it, this way, that way. Those senses had been teased by words in books, by the deep-rolling sensuousness of Lady Chatterley. Then, as he approached puberty, he began to focus on something more urgent, more desperate: that thing which was already in him but had not yet revealed itself. That sinking, sickly, giddy sensation began to acquire an explanation.
Childhood lobbed strange memories at him. What had been his favourite fairy tale? ‘Cinderella’. Not because of the rags-to-riches romance or the pumpkin carriage, not even because of the glass slipper itself, but because of what it meant. In his book there’d been an illustration of the prince trying to force the slipper on to the foot of one of the ugly sisters while the other looked on, towering meanly over him. The prince was bent low, hot with the effort, crouched in obeisance to the foot. It was just a picture in a children’s book, a cartoon almost, but it had stirred something at his quick, made him want to turn the page swiftly, but then – always – turn back again.
He remembered other times when he’d tottered around in his mother’s shoes, feet crammed down into the toes. She’d laughed at him or flung something at his head – another shoe, a hairbrush, anything to hand – as she sat at her dressing table getting ready for going out, or staying in, whichever it was. Once he’d taken the shoes off and sniffed one and made a phew noise and she’d laughed again and turned her back on him and as soon as she had he stuck his nose right in, God Almighty, he wanted to inhale the whole shoe. Yes, he’d do it when her back was turned or she wasn’t in the room at all but had swept out in a haze of perfume, shoes and clothes left lying around – the bedroom was always chaotic, his father would trip over the wreckage and stand at the head of the staircase and yell at her why the hell couldn’t she pick her bloody things off the bloody floor – and David would wait till they were both downstairs or out and then he’d go in, alone, so yes even then, even that early, he knew it was wrong, or a secret, something that could trip him up and get him into trouble but something that was his, his own, and even then, at three or four, he knew deep down that what he really desired was to suck in the smell and taste and texture of the other woman’s shoe. The woman who scared him, it was her shoe he wanted.
Shoes, legs, stockings, they were connected but then everything kind of stopped. On the surface he could communicate very well with people but he didn’t connect with them. Men or women, they were p
uzzles he had to deal with and he did that as well as he could, he put on a good show but what he needed was something else, the comfort and safety and danger of a strange woman’s shoes and nylon-clad legs. And that had been his childhood, and then just as he was becoming conscious, dimly aware of what it was he liked, what he wanted, the 1960s happened. Disaster. Women in trousers, women in shorts, girls in socks, or in miniskirts without nylons at all. Jesus. The years went by. Shoe shops: the intense leather-and-feet smell of them; some of the sales assistants gave him suspicious looks, as if they knew what was going on inside his eleven-, twelve-year-old head, even though he didn’t know himself. Then he was at Kilsmeddum. Everybody wanked, as if it were a compulsory extra, like country dancing or the Combined Cadet Force. Sometimes you wanked someone else and he wanked you, in the presence of others, and that was to prove you weren’t a poof, but mostly you wanked yourself, by yourself. You were supposed to think about doing sex but when David wanked or was wanked it was shoes and feet and legs he thought of, innocent advertisements he’d torn out of the Sunday colour supplements or memorised from his mother’s fashion magazines.
One holiday a strange item from a world that was not the Eddelstanes’ world found its way into Ochiltree House: a home-shopping catalogue. Mrs Thomson had brought it in. David had a vague notion that she wanted to show his mother something in it, ask her advice or opinion, and it sat in the kitchen for a week or so. Mrs Thomson called it a ‘club book’. Other boys from other backgrounds would have known exactly what to do with a club book. You’d take it to the toilet and salivate over the pages of models in bras and knickers, but he, as if pulled in by a magnet sucking at a lump of metal lodged deep in his belly, went to the pages of women’s shoes. He could hardly see for dizziness, nearly fell off the stool at the kitchen table. Erection on him like a cricket stump. It was a relief when Mrs Thomson took the catalogue away and he couldn’t look any more.
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