A Sentimental Traitor

by Dobbs, Michael

  As the ballot papers were counted and confirmed, they were wrapped in bundles of a hundred and stacked in lines on one table. As the minutes passed the lines for each candidate grew, but at different paces, like trenches stretching across a battlefield. In previous elections they’d scarcely needed to do more than weigh Harry’s vote, the count itself little more than a legal formality, but elections aren’t decided on tradition. Bagshot had already stretched into a lead.

  ‘Don’t worry, Harry,’ Oscar’s wife whispered, ‘these are her wards. Ours are coming in now.’ But the fire she had shown on the steps had dwindled.

  The size of the Bagshot lead waxed and waned, but never completely disappeared. The final boxes from the five most distant polling stations arrived. This was when they would know. ‘Our boys and girls,’ Oscar’s wife whispered in encouragement from behind Harry’s shoulder as the lids were hauled off and a tsunami of paper flooded across the tables.

  He turned, wanting distraction, saw Oscar, was about to ask how the results were going elsewhere, but Oscar had switched off his screen. The hall was filling with the rustle of barely restrained excitement as activists from all parties crowded around the last counting tables. The atmosphere was growing heated, uncomfortably sticky, when Harry realized he hadn’t thought of a thing to say. Whatever the result there would be a need for words, yet at this moment his mind was an empty canvas, devoid of colour. He retreated from the hall, found the washroom, splashed water over his face, trying to revive his brain, staring into the mirror, and it seemed like a stranger who was staring back at him. Perhaps it was the crappy lighting, but the face seemed a thousand years old, full of creases and shadows.

  When he returned to the hall he saw Zafira Bagshot almost lost in the middle of a huddle of her supporters, their heads down, conferring. Suddenly she was jumping up and down for joy.

  Oscar rushed to his side. ‘I think it’s over,’ he said ambiguously. ‘The Returning Officer wants you.’ And, as one, the television lights on the balcony kicked into life. Bagshot’s supporters broke into song. ‘Another One Bites the Dust!’ they chanted. In a corner, Oscar’s wife was weeping.

  One of the most searing memories of Harry’s political life had come as a kid, in 1979, too young to know much about anything, but he remembered a face from election night – that of Jeremy Thorpe, who had been leader of the Liberal Party. He was a huge figure of his day, and after a previous election he had been offered the post of Home Secretary, yet five years later, caught up in lurid allegations of an attempt to murder his homosexual lover, he had been driven to the brink. He stood there on election day, and the voters pushed him off.

  Harry had been watching television with his mother that night when Thorpe appeared from his count. Except it wasn’t Thorpe. The face was a mask, the eyes were dead, the lips barely able to part, the voice a monotone of fear. As near a ghost as Harry had seen. The youthful Harry had understood very little about politics and nothing at all about buggery, but even at that age he had known there was a better way to die. There had to be.

  The Returning Officer was beckoning. Harry found a smile, pinned it on and strode forward.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sleep was impossible. Too many thoughts, too much hurt. Harry rose from his bed long before the sun and began writing letters of thanks. It was like the times he had been required to write to the wives and parents of men in his command who hadn’t made it back. Then telephone calls, with plenty of incoming. He avoided those from the media, had said all he was going to say the previous night, after the count, when for a little while he had been besieged. But it had quickly passed. Yesterday’s news.

  He didn’t turn on the radio or television. Usher had lost, the government had fallen, Harry’s wasn’t the only seat lost that night. He didn’t have the heart to count casualties.

  There would be compensation, of sorts. A pension, around £25,000 a year for his length of service. He wondered whether he would see any of it, or whether it would all go to his creditors. One of his supporters was a local estate agent. He picked up the phone.

  ‘Kishor? Harry. No easy way to deal with this except to say thank you. You and Ruth have been brilliant. I couldn’t have asked for more, but there is one more favour, if you would. Will you sell the cottage for me, discreetly, not too much of a fuss? Any reasonable offer. Furniture, too, if they want. Just send on my personal stuff. No, I won’t be standing again. I’m not coming back . . .’

  He had nearly completed his list, the names ticked off, when the phone rang. A blocked number. He thought it might be media and almost put it through to his voicemail, but answered it anyway. ‘Yes?’

  A female voice. ‘I have Mr Usher for you.’ Not the Prime Minister any longer, just plain old Ben Usher.

  ‘Hello, Harry.’

  ‘You sound like I feel.’

  ‘I’m just waiting to go to the Palace,’ Usher said. ‘Twiddling my thumbs. Got a flat full of removal men upstairs and a room full of secretaries downstairs in tears. Never did know how to handle tearful women, particularly by the dozen. It’s simply . . .’ A deep sigh of exhaustion rattled through his ribs. ‘I wanted to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s nothing you could have done to save me, Ben.’

  ‘No, perhaps not. But I could have taken your call. I feel wretched about that, a little cowardly, to be frank. I believe in you, Harry, you tell me you’re innocent and I’m one hundred per cent behind you.’

  ‘A very long way behind me, it seemed.’

  ‘Yeah. You know what elections are like, people telling me I mustn’t get dragged into your difficulties. I don’t feel proud of that. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me. I’m trying to make amends. I’d be happy to appear as a character witness.’

  ‘A character witness?’

  ‘You know, in court.’ Bugger, he hadn’t expressed that very elegantly, but the night after rarely shows itself to be a time for subtlety. ‘Sorry, Harry, I’ll have to dash. My tumbrel awaits.’

  Harry knew a news helicopter would already be hovering, waiting to accompany Usher on the short drive from Downing Street to the Palace for his final conversation with the Queen. It would still be there an hour later when Dave Murray did the journey in the other direction. The battle was over, the hour had come for the dead to be removed from the field. Except Harry would be a long time dying. With a charge of sexual assault hanging over him, the media would take it in turns to come down from the hills to bayonet him on a regular basis, and there would be plenty who would help to give the blade a twist. Politics. Taken from the Greek. ‘Poly’, meaning many. ‘Ticks’ denoting tiny blood-sucking insects . . .

  Then it hit him, so hard that he gasped in pain. He had lost everything. He had lost. Everything. And so quickly that he still had no firm grasp on what had happened. He was physically exhausted, financially ruined, publicly humiliated, emotionally disembowelled. He had been hurled into a pit of despair and there was still no sign of him hitting the bottom. He was falling, tumbling, utterly helpless.

  The screen on his phone came to life once more. A message. From Jemma. ‘So very sorry. J.’ He erased it.

  He stood up from his chair, straightened. Do this like a man. He took one last look around, like a refugee, leaving everything behind. Then he walked out of the door. He didn’t look back.

  It took him two hours to reach London. He drove in silence, no radio, his phone switched off. He found a parking meter in Berkeley Square, dumped the car, didn’t pay the fee, what was the point? They’d stick him with an eighty-pound ticket which would grow with every passing deadline, but by the time they sent heavies knocking on his door it would be too late, he’d be a bankrupt. Probably wouldn’t even be his door any longer. So to hell with them. Every single one of them.

  The old man with the kindly, downcast eyes who ran the gallery further along his street waved as Harry walked past. Harry ignored him. He stood on his doorstep, produced his keys, registering only vaguely that he hadn’t
double-locked the Chubb, slammed the door shut, dropped his bag, ignored the messages, stood in the middle of his sitting room, too drained and numb to register what was around him. When at last he saw, he stared, and the room stared back, insistent. The final insult. He had been burgled. He stepped back in pain, and disgust, hit a wall, slumped to the floor, and there he remained for many hours.

  It was dark by the time Harry stirred once more. He now knew what he wanted to do, to walk away, close the door, as he had already done that morning, leave no trail. And he knew he could do it. What was there to hang around for any longer? He felt sick, angry, ashamed, humiliated. He had faced many enemies, but never one as virulent as this. Everything that had happened to him these past months – Emily, the money, even the assault on Jemma – had cut away at his sense of self-worth. Now he’d been turned away by those who were supposed to know him best, his constituents. Harry Jones, unfit for duty. That had never happened before, he didn’t know how to deal with it. Silly, he knew, but he felt grubby and dishonoured. So move on, Jones, find some other life, another place. But before he left he resolved that he was going to get blindingly, chokingly drunk, so comprehensively obliterated that he hoped it wouldn’t hurt any more.

  It took him three days to finish off all the booze in the house. By the time the last empty bottle had toppled onto the floor, he was in desperate need of fresh air and a change of company, so he staggered out in search of reinforcements. His recollections of the next few days were so obscure and filled with fog he half expected Sherlock Holmes to come sauntering out of it, and he had no memory whatsoever of staggering back to his front door and being intercepted. The next moment of cognition was when he woke an untold number of hours later, on his bed, naked, with his face being swabbed by a cold flannel. As his eyes regained focus, he saw someone staring down at him.

  ‘Have I died?’ he murmured. Then he stared. It was Jemma. Her face was drenched in fury. ‘And if I died, did I go up or down?’ He laughed feebly at his own joke before finding that even that paltry effort made him feel profoundly sick. He staggered into the bathroom and vomited. Afterwards, as he washed his face, he stared into the mirror. A total stranger stared back. It had worked. He was no longer Harry Jones. His new life had started.

  ‘You total bloody fool!’ Jemma snapped as he found his way back into the bedroom.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he snarled.

  ‘Apart from letting you in your own front door which you were too pissed to open yourself, you mean?’ She threw a bathrobe at him. ‘A friend of mine told me he’d bumped into you. Quite literally. You were flat out on the grass near the Serpentine. Makes me wonder why you didn’t get yourself arrested. Again.’

  ‘Cuts.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cuts. Never enough policemen around when you need them.’ With a savage tug of anger Harry tightened the belt of his robe; it made him want to throw up once more. ‘So what are you doing here, Jem? Come to gloat?’

  She was about to retaliate with her own bucket of abuse when she bit her tongue. It would serve no purpose. She lowered her voice, and with it her temper. ‘I came, Harry, because people were telling me they’d stumbled over my boyfriend in the park. Does wonders for a girl’s reputation.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘Ex.’

  ‘But the stench still lingers.’

  ‘Dammit, Harry!’ And suddenly she was fighting back tears. ‘Let’s get some food into you.’ She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

  When she reappeared a little later with a tray of coffee and toast, she found him sitting in the living room, staring at the chaos. Chairs pulled over, shelves pulled down, books scattered, cushions thrown, pictures smashed, and everything covered in a million pieces of paper.

  ‘I was going to clean up,’ she whispered, ‘but I felt it would be intruding.’

  ‘Some bastard’s already done that,’ he muttered, no longer wanting to fight. He gazed around him, and the mists of despair closed in once again, allowing no escape. His house had been violated. But it wasn’t simply his, this was Julia’s house, too. They’d chosen it together, decorated much of it themselves, often late into the night, sleeping in their paint-spattered T-shirts, even though they’d been able to afford a dozen decorators, and Julia’s presence here had survived everything that the years had thrown at him since then, even Mel. There had always been a part of this place that was Julia. Her father’s brass shell casing in the hallway for umbrellas, his own ridiculous cooking apron that she’d found at some hunting store in the Adirondacks, the pair of hideous, funky champagne glasses that made him cringe and always made her laugh. And her desk. He bought it for her, that last Christmas, before they’d gone off skiing. Now it was lying on its side, where they’d left it, the drawers spilled out, its contents scattered. He pulled it upright, replaced the drawers, knelt down, sorting through the mess. He found her passport. The date said it had expired, it didn’t seem that way to him.

  ‘Julia’s?’ Jemma asked. They’d got far enough in their relationship for her to know.

  He nodded.

  Well, no point in a jealous twitch, it didn’t matter any more to her, did it? ‘I’ll help you clear up – if you want?’

  He nodded again.

  Jemma began scouting round the room. ‘What did the police say?’

  He seemed startled. ‘Police? Never called them. Too many police around this place recently. Too late now, anyway.’

  ‘Looks like they got in through the back window,’ she said, pointing. ‘You must have left it open.’

  ‘Better see what’s missing.’

  Slowly, methodically, they began sorting through the mess, Jemma righting the displaced furniture, making orderly piles of the displaced books, cleaning up the broken picture glass, while in the manner of a robot Harry gathered all the pages of paper that had been strewn about and dumped them on the dining table. And as they began to re-impose a sense of order, it became clear to him that little physical damage had been done. She was fixing the shade back onto a side lamp when she noticed he had sunk to the floor once more.

  ‘Harry, you OK?’

  ‘I didn’t leave the bloody window open.’

  ‘You might have done—’

  ‘No, Jem,’ he insisted. ‘And the front door wasn’t properly locked, not the way I always do it.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Buggered if I know for sure. That . . . maybe . . .’ He shook his head trying to clear the swarm of fireflies that had found their way inside. ‘They came in the front door, left the window open as a distraction.’

  ‘Who has keys?’

  ‘No one. Not since you.’

  ‘So how does a burglar get through a locked front door?’

  ‘I don’t think it was a burglar,’ he insisted impatiently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s nothing missing. Nothing I can find, at least.’

  ‘They got disturbed.’

  ‘No, I don’t think they came here to run off with the candlesticks. This was about something else.’ Like the thugs who had broken into her place, he thought, but he didn’t say so, there was no point in making her go through that again. Now someone was trying to get at him, too, and he didn’t very much care any more about who or why.

  He felt like a wounded animal that wanted nothing more than to crawl back into his cave and shut the rest of the world out. Yet he couldn’t. Over the next few days there were too many things dragging him back out into the open. The need to clear out his office, say goodbye to his secretary, accept the commiserations of colleagues before they hurried on their way, leaving him staring at their backs. Because a man in public life is raised higher, so his ultimate fall is deeper and more difficult to control. Harry knew politicians who had suffered nervous breakdowns, seen their marriages collapse, become ill. One close friend had committed suicide. Being a Member of Parliament wasn’t merely a job, it was a passion for a certain way of l
ife, and once that life support system had been switched off, things had a habit of breaking apart into razor-sharp shards, reminders of things that once were, and every attempt to pick them up only made you bleed all the more. The hundreds of letters Harry received and tried to read did nothing to help, only ground in the sense of failure still further.

  He wanted to lean on Jemma, and more, but she made it clear that her help was available only on the basis of friendship.

  ‘Don’t you believe me when I tell you I didn’t assault that bloody woman?’ Harry asked, petulant, a little aggressive.

  ‘Yes, but . . . Harry, she was with you late at night, you were drinking. Kissing.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘Nor mine, either. Anyway, I’m seeing someone else.’

  ‘Seeing?’ He made the word sound as if it was an activity that ought to end in a charge at the European Court of Human Rights.

  ‘Not serious, not the love of my life, Harry, but . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But grow up about it.’

  He was hurt, didn’t want to play the man. So Harry spent his evenings alone, climbing the walls of his home – a home that his accountant told him he was in all probability going to lose. He was there one evening when his phone rang. It was the steward who ran the bar at the Special Forces Club. ‘Mr Jones, you asked me to let you know if . . .’

  He never got to finish the sentence. Harry was already running. It was little more than a mile. Harry flew, blind to the traffic or the shouts of startled pedestrians, his heart pounding, lungs screaming, and he made it in less than ten minutes. He was still running when he hit the stairs and raised eyebrows when he burst into the bar. The man was still there, sitting at the bar, back to the door, but his figure was unmistakable.

  ‘Hello, Sloppy,’ Harry declared, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘I think you owe me a drink.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN