Ducros: It’s nothing, right? Currently many of those individuals have doctorates. It’s just a minimum standard.
Journalist 1: All the twenty-seven present heads of national governments meet this requirement?
Ducros: They exceed it in all cases.
Journalist 1: So why bother?
Ducros: We have no crystal ball, heh? Who knows who might apply to join in the future, or seek to head up a government?
Journalist 2: I get it. Bob Grant doesn’t pass the test.
Ducros: Please, be serious. The UK is not even a member. Though certainly, if it wished to rejoin, it would have to find a prime minister with at least three years’ post-18 education. But frankly, some things are too unlikely to talk about. Mr Grant getting five more years’ education, I mean to say.
35
London Friday 19 June 2020
Defence secrets were circles within circles. ACERBIC was one of the smallest and Patrick was its custodian. He initiated newcomers into ACERBIC’s mysteries. For Kathy that meant two or three times a year finding an hour for Patrick to descend into the Main Building’s bowels. Jennifer, the new Chief of the Defence Staff, or CDS, would be ‘done’ at three o’clock that afternoon. Bob’s indoctrination had been postponed three times but should take place finally on Monday.
As to what ACERBIC’s secret was, Kathy had no clue. Could she have pierced the veil? For example, could she have noticed how inactive ACERBIC was? There was no ‘traffic’ – no digitally sealed ‘eyes only’ ACERBIC messages for her boss. She was sure that the Prime Minister and the CDS wouldn’t be communicating with Patrick on some gadget in a sock drawer. She knew secret gadgets froze, needed re-booting and disappeared up their own backsides at least as often as their everyday cousins. In real life James Bond would need not just Q but R, S and T (repairs, support and technical assistance); in Patrick’s case she’d be the one phoning for help.
Besides, secret circles were forming and disbanding all the time. The most recent was WHITE GHOST: the destruction of any embarrassing monitoring which the intelligence agencies had done on BG before the election. After 7 May a blizzard of secret messages had flown back and forth for five days. (Patrick had commented that the only embarrassment which the agencies needed to cover up was how little they had done on the Vigilance.) But in all Kathy’s time as Patrick’s right hand, ACERBIC appeared to be a silent community: they had nothing to say to each other. She assumed the whole thing belonged to the tangled knot of Government War Book procedures invoked in the run-up to Armageddon.
‘At ease,’ said Jennifer, standing Kathy down from her salute. The new CDS had cheeks like scones smeared with cream and jam, and a grin like someone who had scoffed a plate of them. Nicknamed ‘Jennifer’ during officer training at Sandhurst, the full name of Patrick’s military twin was Hugo Eccles Montcalm Tremayne. Sadly for the CDS, even his startling promotion last week from two-star general to four hadn’t caused the nickname to fall off. ‘Patrick about? I thought we might mosey on down together.’
‘He’ll be right along, sir. I’m sure he will enjoy that.’
‘Excellent. I can’t wait to find out what all this ACERBIC stuff is about.’ Jennifer parked both his behind and his peaked cap with red band and gold braid on Patrick’s desk, and helped himself to a Daily Telegraph.
Contemplating the man in front of her, Kathy reckoned it would not take long for the paunch to grow from two stars to four as well. Mind you, the days of having to go to the right school (Patrick’s) to reach the top of the Army had long gone: Jennifer had attended Sherborne.
Jennifer and Patrick were like the Archbishops of Canterbury and York: separate and equal, but not quite equal. For most purposes, Jennifer had the edge. For one thing his was the second finger on the nuclear trigger, alongside the Prime Minister’s. If the country was going to hell in a handcart, Jennifer was in the firing line – literally. Patrick wasn’t. On the other hand, Patrick had the brains and the spider’s web of contacts into Number Ten and other ministries.
Patrick swept round the corner. ‘You’re a lucky man, Jennifer – double promotion, lunch at the Palace and the front page of the Telegraph all in a fortnight. Mind it doesn’t all go to your head.’
‘Patrick!’ the CDS exclaimed. Two weeks before he would have said ‘Smath’. ‘You’re a good man. I thought we’d go down together. The new leadership team – being visible – working together. You know how people talk in this building.’
‘What an instinct for leadership you have, Jennifer. How envious I am.’ Patrick elicited the desired puffing up of the scone-like cheeks. Then the two men were gone, although one had forgotten his hat.
Kathy never forgot Jennifer’s re-appearance forty minutes later, when both of them had surfaced from the building’s blast-protected womb with doors of eighteen-inch steel. The cream and the jam had been wiped off the scones with wire wool. It was as if the Archbishop of Canterbury had reached that position and only just been told about the crucifixion. The Archbishop of York, on the other hand, remained totally inscrutable – except for the fraction of a moment in which Patrick looked across to his private secretary and self-satisfaction danced a conga across his lips.
When Kathy and Patrick were alone she said, ‘I’m going to the safe house at the weekend.’
‘I know. Zack’s really looking forward to it. His coach says he’s doing very well.’
‘You’d tell me that even if it wasn’t true.’
‘Mmm, but it also happens to be true. Ideally she’d like another two weeks, which I said looked possible. However we’ll get scarcely any warning when the right moment comes. She’s incredibly thorough. They’ve devoured footage of Bob greeting visitors in his office, or arriving at the beginning of Cabinet. Fortunately Bob hasn’t the faintest idea that we’ve got cameras rolling on him most hours of the day.’
‘CDS looked shocked when he came back from the ACERBIC briefing.’
The secretive mandarin ignored her reference. ‘I did my best to look shocked when the Deputy Prime Minister confirmed he was the choice. The man’s a fool. That’s why they picked him, of course.’
Patrick paused to look Kathy in the eye. ‘Kathy, please understand it’s my job to give this one last try. Everything I’ve seen tells me your future here is incredibly bright. Let Zack go to Canada on his own and you’ll be out there on your new posting within six weeks. We’ll even switch the posting from Washington to Ottawa.’
A surge of emotion, pride as well as patriotism, caught Kathy by surprise. ‘It’s taken a while for the penny to drop, but here I am, at last thinking that I might be as good as you’ve always said. But if that’s right, then I’ll be able to make things work out in Canada, and not just in the Navy. Besides, it’s getting fucking scary round here, don’t you think? Maybe you’re so used to politicians that you don’t notice it as much, but I can’t get over Alan. Things could go really pear-shaped. For the first time today I thought: don’t be an idiot, Canada’s the place to be.’
The aluminium in Patrick’s eyes softened. ‘I had to try but I’m not surprised. Go for it, girl. Be proud: you’ve already devised our best chance to save our country. Zack and I just need to walk on stage and say the right lines.’
36
Brixham, Friday 19 June 2020
It’s the end of week three. Mary Lee Gannon deploys the church hall keys with practised ease. Archie darts in through the door of the eighteenth-century church hall to curl up in a corner with some sun.
The wooden hall floor showed its age until it was covered in the chaotic psychedelic marks of a dozen coloured chalks. Obviously at various points during rehearsals I have thrown several plates of pasta, a cheese board, some large trays, a tureen of soup and a wedding cake onto the splintering boards, and Mary has chalked the spill of each in a different colour.
The second week was painful, occasionally hilarious. I kept tri
pping up over Bob’s way of saying ‘the Vigilance’, so one morning we stood with clipboards and a miniature recorder at the seafront, beside the replica Golden Hind and at Paignton Railway Station – anywhere with tourists from different places – getting them to say ‘the Vigilance’ as many times as we could. ‘Excuse me, ma’am, doing a quick survey for the Department for Employment. What do you think about the new things the government is doing to get young people to volunteer and learn new skills?’
‘Ooh yes, the Vigilance, I think it’s ever such a good idea. Walking about we feel safer, don’t we, Harry? Yes, both of us do.’
Since then we’ve been doing what we’re doing now, watching video of Bob interacting with people. A long list of people, from Cabinet colleagues and Shima Patterson to the four ‘Bills’, to this lady, a black woman, a doorkeeper at No 10. I’m memorising and practising what he does with each.
The first few times we watch without sound. Bob comes down the stairs at No 10 followed by one of the Bills, the young sexy one (Francine Ellis – I know their names even if my brother doesn’t. She does Pilates and as an actor I approve). We spent an hour watching six minutes of Bob and Francine last week. Now we’re watching him look up, grin and embrace Aude.
‘He’s started winking at her with his left eye, just as he reaches the bottom step,’ I say. ‘Not a deliberate wink, something brief, probably subconscious. Two weeks ago he wasn’t doing that, or the embracing.’
Mary has been making her own notes. ‘Yes. It’s so slight that overly copying it would be over the top. Just file it away and trust your own subconscious.’
Then we listen with sound, repeating from the beginning another five or maybe ten times until Mary says, ‘OK, we’re ready,’ and I come down the steps at No 10. The white chalk marks are the steps, Mary is Aude standing by the door or polishing brass. Then we do bite-sized improvisation: Aude and Bob discussing the football, or me taking her into my office because she’s had bad news at hospital. Each time three or four minutes’ worth, hellos, goodbyes, distance, body language.
I’ve thrown into Brixham harbour the idea that I know anything about the person I’m studying. Forty-one years of brother-to-brother emotions, made worse by Bob becoming a figure in the media whom I loathed more and more, did indeed turn out to be a block.
‘You’re really getting it now,’ Mary said at the start of this week. ‘Imagine you had to impersonate President Trump, and the sight and sound of him made you ill – how big a block would that be? What you’re doing is harder – you’ve got forty-one years of knowledge to get over as well.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ I pointed out. ‘We were only on speaking terms for twenty-eight.’
Today I walk down the steps at No 10 (the white chalk marks) and at the bottom announce, ‘BG is committed to landing a white horse on the moon. Britain’s Great! End of.’ The point which she made on the breakwater we are now grinding out in practice: I won’t be trying to pass myself off as Bob for weeks without anyone noticing. It will be short and sharp: in less than an hour to say or do something left field – like promise to land a white horse on the moon – and have those around me say, ‘What the fuck, Bob?’ and not, ‘Who are you?’ The real white horse on the moon will be handed to me by Patrick and his script writers.
Finally, there’s the homework that’s more like getting ready to be a spy than preening to go on stage. Now most evenings I spend a couple of hours with Howard, on top of my sessions with Tad the digital ghoster or Gary the personal trainer. Howard is my height and probably my age but thinning on top, with chemistry-teacher glasses and an Adam’s apple which bounces around like he’s trying to semaphore. He wears shirts so frayed I worry they’ll come apart during our sessions. I guess he’s the closest I’ll ever knowingly come to some kind of spy.
Each evening he opens up his briefcase and takes out his tablet to spread his wares; like a travelling salesman, he puts the new stuff out first. Typically we spend half an hour studying photos or clips with audio of new individuals I need to recognise. Then he syncs these to my tablet and we spend the next forty-five minutes in quiz mode. Which of the Bills has just had a baby? Who are Annabel Wale’s junior ministers? Whose picture is this? What’s their job? What do I call them? When did they join BG? When Angela Deil calls, how do I answer the phone? Do I flirt, and if so how much?
It was the evening we spent time on Nassia Sotiris which really churned me up inside. The last image of her, in the entrance hall at Number Ten, was date-stamped 202006171810Z – 7.10pm in summer time on Wednesday. I can’t help being surprised, even jealous, at how long she and Bob have stayed connected. Yes, I’m trying to throw my old knowledge of Bob away, but surely he’s not clever enough – not classy enough – for her? The way she pressed her business card into my hand I can feel as if it was yesterday.
Whatever Mary says, parts of this do feel like stepping into my brother’s skin. Two nights ago I dreamt that Howard would show up with my picture – Zack in his scruffy clothes and curls – together with what Bob thinks of me. When I get the heebie-jeebies like this, I think about Alan and what all this is for. Sometimes I say to Alan, ‘Take a look at me now. Even you can’t call what I’m doing ordinary.’ Of course, Howard never produces my picture. Someone I’m not going to meet at curtain up is myself.
***
Mary knows Kathy’s coming down and I have the weekend off, so she suggests we finish early with a couple of pints. Now we’re getting on and I jump at the company.
We enter the Maritime Inn under the watch of a naval officer from Nelson’s time who peers at the harbour through a telescope. Mary returns from the bar with two amber pints of Topsail. I gawp at a ceiling entirely covered in mugs hanging from hooks as well as suspended beer glasses, chamber pots, bedpans, ceramics and metalware. The Maritime Inn also boasts a parrot, perched on a Turner prize rendition of the modern skyscraper: a heavily pecked trainer, three-quarters of a plastic ball and a dishevelled oven glove hang from different levels of a vertical frame. Like a recluse in his penthouse, the parrot is silent but occasionally comes down to inspect the lower orders.
Mary hangs her gilet on the back of a chair. Somehow one knows that the experiences which line her face are real achievements. ‘You’ve cracked it,’ she says, downing half of her bitter in a few gulps. At this rate Archie must be the designated driver. ‘And I’m glad about that,’ Mary continues, ‘because BG scare the shit out of me.’
I say it feels like she has re-wired my acting brain – my whole brain, in fact.
Mary shrugs her shoulders. ‘Re-wiring, re-plumbing, you do what you’re qualified to do. ‘The mystery is what they’re going to ask you to do. However much I prod, all they will commit to is that you’ll be on stage for less than an hour.’
‘The profiles that have been coming through in the last few days? They’ve started to include some foreign prime ministers and presidents – France, Germany, that sort of thing. No sign of Trump as yet. Do you think I’m going to be signing a treaty? It seems the obvious thing I could do in less than an hour to change the course of the country. But there’s nothing about any treaties in the media – we’re not on speaking terms with that many countries at the moment.’
‘There’s no signing involved. Probably the second thing I asked them, where’s the handwriting expert? You’d need to practise Bob’s signature. But nothing doing on that front. So I’m as adrift as you.’
‘Sack Annabel Wale? Close Shock News? Actually, that would probably need a signature.’
‘Either would be a start. Fancy another?’
‘My round,’ I insist, though I’m only half-way through my first. I collect two more pints. Compared to London, the price is absurdly low. ‘The other side of this, Mary, is I hope still to be an actor, doing normal stuff – plays and films. I’ve read up on your work and you know me really well. I’d really appreciate any tips.’
M
ary guffaws. ‘What, apart from don’t go into the theatre?’
‘Me specifically, or the world?’
‘The world, Zack, not you. You can earn a living in drama. You made the best you could of an overly academic drama education. Guess what so many of us had? The same. One day each of us finds our way out of the pit. By chance you dug your way out of the pit by the seaside.’
‘So, advice?’
Archie looks up. Mary’s head hangs loose on the far side, her eyes closed. ‘All right. Too many actors try to beat the audience over the head into believing that the play is the real world. That’s violent and unnecessary. The audience know their own real world – the one in which hubby’s having an affair, Johnny’s fever’s back again and the washing machine has broken down. All the histrionics in the world aren’t going to wipe those things away. How scary would it be if they could?’
I agree.
‘Don’t act to create the real world, act to create a real world. Act for the people in the audience who have paid to come and live in a real world for an hour and a half, or two. Open the door. Make it believable. But let them walk through themselves. It’s a poor man who only lives in one world.
‘When it comes down to it, it will be the same with your show. Whatever door you walk through at curtain up, no-one will be expecting a brother they’ve never heard of. Open the door. Make it believable. But let them walk through themselves.’
37
London, Saturday 20 June 2020
Intranet post by Médecins sans Frontières:
Eight volunteer doctors wanted for 36-hour mission with refugees. Valid UK passport and strict confidentiality essential.
38
Totnes, Saturday 20 June 2020
Zack chose Totnes for the two of them for the weekend, about half an hour by minicab from Brixham. The minicab dropped him at the railway station. The bed in Brixham was too small (‘back to our student days’), Zack didn’t fancy the two of them becoming the manager’s Monday hot video pick and Totnes had fast trains from London. The station was packed with midsummer holiday-makers spilling over into the car park. Kathy had to rise slightly on her toes to kiss Zack, who wore his Bob shoes all the time. He had also added some muscle.
Time of Lies Page 18