One Day in May

by Catherine Alliott

  Letty had heard the car and come to open the door. She was wearing cropped jeans and an oversized man’s blue shirt and her feet were bare. Without the heels she’d worn at the graduation I realized she was tiny. Her long blonde hair was slightly tangled, and her huge, luminous grey eyes beautiful. I seemed to be catching my breath a lot today. She welcomed us warmly, ushering me in, kissing Dominic, who held her tight and kissed her hard on the lips, which surprised me.

  ‘We don’t usually snog when we see each other,’ she assured me, seeing my face, ‘but I’ve been down here all week.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  ‘Normally I come up to town, but I’ve been as sick as a dog. Thought I’d rather lie in a shady garden and puke than puke in London.’

  I was about to enquire, sympathize, when I realized her tummy was slightly swollen. I was too young to know what to say to pregnant women. Finally I managed, ‘Congratulations.’

  She grimaced. ‘Thanks. Come on, come through. Even I’m allowed one glass of wine. We’ll crack open a bottle.’

  We did; a very cold white one, which she grabbed from the fridge as she padded around the kitchen in bare feet, Dire Straits blaring, chatting away, hair swinging: an easy grace. And then out of the French doors we went to a terrace at the back, where a table sat under a wooden pergola dripping with ancient pink clematis. The sun was still low and unseasonably warm in the sky, and there was a view of the hills, sheep in the meadow, a brook at the bottom, the lot.

  ‘So you slipped through Katya’s radar? I can’t imagine how she let that happen; you’re far too pretty!’ she grinned at me, as Dominic brought out the glasses. ‘Crisps, darling?’ She glanced at him.

  ‘Have we got any?’

  ‘In the larder.’

  He turned back, and I thought, all week I’ve seen this godlike figure telling everyone else what to do, and now here he was, obediently trotting back to the larder.

  ‘In a bowl!’ Letty called after him, just as he reappeared with a huge packet. He stopped and went back to get one from under the island.

  ‘Hattie rather cunningly became indispensable,’ he explained as he rejoined us. ‘So Katya was effectively kiboshed. Didn’t have a leg to stand on.’

  ‘I think she’s happy enough now, though,’ I said loyally. Katya had actually been very kind to me.

  ‘I doubt it. But I should think she’s relieved you’re not Estelle Butcher!’ Letty giggled and sipped her wine. ‘Ooh, that’s good. First of the day.’

  ‘Estelle Butcher?’

  ‘Mike Katz’s private PA,’ she explained as Dominic rolled his eyes to heaven. ‘Big tits, short skirts, French too – hot. She’s deeply in love with Dom, pantingly so, and has been itching to join the department, which would have sent Katya reeling. The other day she asked if he played squash, and when he said no, she said, “Shame.” ’ Letty affected a husky French accent. ‘ “I want to do something sportif wiz you.” ’ She snorted. ‘Katya nearly had to be given brandy.’

  As she giggled into her wine, I regarded this merry, lively girl: clearly aware that half of Westminster fancied her husband, certainly aware that at least two women were in love with him, and not just the repressed Katya, but Estelle too, whose description I now recognized, and who was indeed one very saucy, clever babe. Yet there she was, laughing and confident, in the country all week, not batting an eyelid. And I could see why. Why would he want more? Why, when he came home to this beautiful creature who looked no older than me, but must have been a good eight years, who was having his baby, in this deeply settled domestic scene, in this perfect house, with its creepers round the door, basking in a secret fold of the Buckinghamshire hills? Why would she be even faintly worried?

  As the sun sank, rosy and glowing in the sky, settling almost in benediction on the pair of them, on their shiny blond heads, a deep sigh unfolded from the soles of my trainers. I tucked them under my chair, aware how vast they looked beside her tiny bare toes, and reached for the crisps. I’d been starving myself for three weeks, but it seemed to me it didn’t really matter how fat I got now.

  6

  The following day, as promised, Dominic took me to his surgery to get the bigger picture. It was located in the local market town, and the action took place in a back room of the town hall, which flanked the main, cobbled square. Cold, sparse and smelling of floor polish and dust, it was less than salubrious, with just a table and chair at the far end for him, and another at the door for his constituency secretary, Amanda. Amanda was a hefty woman in a navy-blue jersey two-piece, who puffed and blew like a small chugging engine as she moved, but who mostly sat squarely at her post like a sentry, muttering darkly about the nutters in the waiting room.

  ‘Nutters?’ I stuck my head round the door, expecting to see a room full of jabbering delinquents, like something out of Hogarth’s illustrations of Bedlam. Instead, several grey, quite ordinary-looking people gazed opaquely back. Amanda chugged back to her desk from shutting the front door.

  ‘Have you ever been to see your MP, Hattie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have your parents?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Brothers, sisters, friends?’

  ‘Er… no. Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘Precisely. I rest my case.’ She shuffled her papers, still blowing hard. ‘If you ask me, they’re all a bit peculiar.’

  Dominic frowned at her, but it wasn’t without a twinkle, and as the first one came in, I hurried to sit beside him to listen. Drains were the problem, apparently, which stank. No help from the council. Dominic said he’d see what he could do. Then a woman who’d tripped on a paving stone and wanted to sue the local authority. Dominic pointed her in the direction of Legal Aid. Next, a Sikh family with immigration problems: a father and daughter, the father fragile and bewildered, barely speaking English. Dominic was endlessly patient and kind. Then, just as I was wondering what on earth Amanda was talking about, a smartly dressed woman in a tweed suit burst in before Amanda, who’d got to her feet and bustled round her desk, could stop her.

  ‘There you are!’ the woman declared, hastening towards Dominic and me at the far end. The carpet slippers seemed at odds with the rest of her outfit.

  ‘Why didn’t you come home? I did liver, your favourite.’

  ‘Barking Brenda?’ I muttered.

  ‘No, Mad Martha. She thinks I’m her husband.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Martha gripped the table ‘Is this her?’ She glared at me.

  Crumbs. I pushed my chair back.

  ‘Little chit,’ she spat. ‘Little squinty-eyed whore.’ Her eyes blazed.’

  ‘Perfectly harmless,’ Dominic murmured in my ear as Amanda bustled up to strong-arm her out.

  ‘Come on, Martha,’ she soothed.

  Martha shook her off, eyes still sparking. ‘Not till I’ve had my statutory two minutes. I know my rights!’

  ‘Yes, quite right,’ agreed Dominic. ‘That’s fine, Amanda. Do sit down, Mrs Carter.’

  ‘Martha!’ But she sat.

  ‘Martha. Now, how can I help?’

  ‘You can start by fixing the handle in the downstairs loo and then you can see about that damp patch on the landing wall.’

  ‘Righto, I’d be absolutely delighted,’ Dominic said with exaggerated courtesy. He picked up his pen and scribbled away studiously. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, you can put your shirts in the bucket outside the back door to soak like I showed you so I don’t have to scrub the collars, and then set to in the garden. It’s getting ever so late for bedding plants.’ She seemed to have calmed down somewhat.

  ‘Of course. My pleasure.’ Dominic’s face was a picture of contrition as he wrote. Then he put his pen down with a flourish, stood up, and smiled broadly as he came around the desk. She got to her feet too.

  ‘And it’s the whist drive on Tuesday,’ I heard her mutter, less forcefully now, shoulders sagging.

  ‘So it is!’ said Dominic as he t
ook her arm and escorted her out. ‘What a treat. I shall look forward to it. Couldn’t be more thrilled. Goodbye, Martha!’

  He waved her off at the door, beaming excessively, then turned and came back, looking weary.

  ‘You go along with it?’ I gaped.

  ‘Only way forward. Contradict her and she gets punchy and we end up calling the police. Any more, Amanda?’

  ‘No, that’s it.’

  ‘Thank the Lord. Come on, let’s pack up and go home.’

  The rest of the weekend flew by in a relaxing, country house manner, the like of which I wasn’t accustomed to. It was punctuated by huge fry-ups, long walks, pub lunches, and culminated with a drinks party on Sunday evening hosted by the Forbeses.

  ‘A grisly little ritual we Tory wives are supposed to throw on a regular basis,’ Letty confided to me in the kitchen as we sliced lemons and cucumber. ‘I do about one a year. All the great and the good come. Most are over seventy, and even the men are lavender-tinted. You’ll love it,’ she promised with dark foreboding.

  ‘But who wants to turn out on a Sunday evening?’

  ‘Oh, never underestimate the snoop factor.’

  True enough, on the dot of six, the house filled up with what looked like a Saga holiday coach tour. Bright eyes darted around the sitting room like magpies, not missing a trick. Amongst the wrinklies, an old boyhood friend of Dominic’s called Hugh, whose parents lived in the big house on the hill, and who was down from London for the weekend with his wife, Carla, a sulky-looking beauty who folded up her long limbs on the sofa to chain-smoke, occasionally hissing in Italian at her little boy, a skinny, plain child with a withered arm, who slunk about miserably. Hugh was sweet, though, and funny. He pointed out all the local gentry to me, chatting genially as they came up to wring his hand enthusiastically. Then, as they tottered away, he’d mutter in my ear, ‘Chartered Accountant. Two months for white-collar fraud in an open prison in Hastings.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘See the wife? Dear old soul in beige? Shot her sister in the knee in ’67 to stop her running away with her lover, who turned into the accountant.’

  ‘What about the one with the eye patch?’

  ‘Disgraced standard bearer from the British Legion. Turns out he was never in the army at all, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the eye. They took away his flag last Remembrance Day. He didn’t give it up without a struggle, though. Nasty scene at the war memorial on the village green.’

  I giggled, and thus a merry evening was filled, fuelled by buckets of Pimm’s, as I listened to Hugh’s no doubt apocryphal, but colourful take on the community.

  ‘So you don’t see yourself coming back to live here then, amongst the good burghers of Thame? I mean, presumably the house will be yours one day.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ hissed Carla, who’d left her perch momentarily to join us. ‘If I had to leeve here, I’d slit my wrists. No, we leeve in London and Firenze, don’t we, Hughie?’

  ‘We do,’ admitted Hugh, sadly.

  ‘Come.’ Carla stubbed out her last cigarette in a pot plant. ‘Time to go. I can bear it no more. Poor, poor Letty.’ This to her hostess, in commiseration. ‘She will go to seed,’ she lowered her voice in an aside to me. ‘They all do, in this place. Her hair one day will be blue. You’ll see.’ She swept out.

  ‘Lovely to meet you,’ I told Hugh as I said goodbye. I meant it. He’d made me laugh.

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Back to London?’

  ‘Yes, back to London.’ And I thought he’d looked wistful.

  ‘Nice couple,’ I said diplomatically to Dominic and Letty later as we were collecting up glasses and ashtrays.

  ‘He is. She’s a cow,’ Letty informed me cheerfully as she drained her glass. Her voice was slightly slurred. ‘She got her claws into Hugh a few years ago, then suddenly she was pregnant, and that was it. Bye-bye, Hughie.’ She threw her hands up for emphasis.

  ‘Letty, should you be drinking?’ asked Dominic mildly, not quite out of my earshot as I went back for more glasses.

  She looked surprised. ‘I’m not drinking, darling. I’ve had two glasses, which my GP says is absolutely fine. Do lighten up.’

  On the way back to London in the convertible, bundled up beside him in a huge old overcoat he’d lent me, Dominic confided: ‘Letty finds all the constituency stuff a bit of a strain, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ I said staunchly. ‘It’s hardly her age group.’

  ‘No, true,’ he conceded. ‘In fact, there’s hardly any young blood in the party at all, apart from the Young Conservatives. But I always think that sounds so… well, preachy, doesn’t it?’

  ‘’Fraid so. Like a church youth club. Cravats and blazers.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He narrowed his eyes at the road. ‘The problem is, most young people aren’t actually that interested in politics unless there’s a whiff of the revolutionary about it. You’re quite unusual, in that respect, Hattie.’

  Me? I was startled. Oh… yes. Luckily it was dark.

  But as we rattled along the M40 I wondered if this was my moment to fess up. To admit to not being that drawn to the bump and grind of the legislative process in Westminster, but more to the buzz and glamour. On the other hand, the roar of the engine was awfully loud. Quite tricky to be heard.

  ‘D’you mind the roof down?’ he yelled above the wind. ‘I can stop and put it up?’

  ‘No, no,’ I snuggled down into the coat, which smelled of him. ‘I love it.’

  The weeks rolled by – months too – and Katya’s back didn’t improve. To her intense chagrin she found herself having to take more time off, and I, in turn, had to shoulder more of her workload. The pressure was on and I was literally learning on the job, but I’d studied at the feet of a master: I’d seen Katya deal with stroppy MPs or recalcitrant civil servants, who were the bane of Dominic’s life, on the one hand forever wanting lengthy meetings, which he considered a complete waste of time when so much could be achieved by email, and on the other, barring his way to the people who really mattered. My job was to ensure those he wanted to speak to could reach him, and those he didn’t couldn’t.

  ‘But I was told he’d be available for a meeting with the honourable member for Guildford at eleven o’clock?’

  ‘Ah, yes, but something came up. At the moment he’s with the party chairman discussing plans for the reshuffle.’

  He wasn’t. He was in his office writing a paper on the reintroduction of competitive sport in schools, a subject much closer to his heart, but it sounded scary and shut backbenchers up. I was learning to tell white lies, to box and cox as Katya and, to a greater extent, Dominic did. I was learning politics.

  And the reshuffle, coming as it did, hot on the heels of an unpopular budget, was on everyone’s mind.

  ‘Tony Palmer’s worried,’ Dominic confided to me in the Ebury Street wine bar, which we often repaired to for a quick drink after work. ‘The PM’s rattled by all these sleaze allegations. He’s threatening a comprehensive shake-up. And if Tony’s worried, I should be too. I may lose my job as whip.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course you won’t,’ I soothed, as I did regularly these days; sometimes over supper too.

  Well, it was lonely for him in that tiny flat in Westminster, and Letty wasn’t having a very straightforward pregnancy. Driving made her feel sick and she loathed the train: she hardly came up at all. They barely saw one another, a problem – amongst others – we touched on occasionally. Sometimes I cooked him supper in the flat I shared with Laura, a rather swanky Pimlico apartment courtesy of Laura’s modelling career. Dominic did a double take when he met Laura – everyone did, she was that gorgeous. Even nursing a broken heart as she was then, having just been dumped by a well-known brat-pack actor. She was bruised and tearful and didn’t want to go out, but craved company, so it suited us all. Particularly me. I was very scared of how I felt about Dominic, and knew it was important not to be alone with him. No more
Ebury Street drinks, no more suppers at Roussillon, I decided. Just here, at the flat, and only if Laura was around.

  More numbers were added to my safety one evening as Dominic brought along Hugh. Except it was a different Hugh from the jokey, light-hearted one I’d met in Buckinghamshire. Carla had left him and gone with Luca to live in Rome, for good.

  ‘She can’t bear England any more,’ he told us, white-faced, sipping a whisky. ‘Can’t bear me either, apparently.’

  We embarked on a fairly drink-fuelled supper until, at ten o’clock, Dominic’s phone went and he was called in to vote. I walked him down the three flights of stairs to the front door. As he turned to say goodbye, he regarded me a moment.

  ‘Walk with me,’ he said impulsively.

  I caught my breath. Back to the Commons, on a beautiful early summer’s evening.

  ‘I’ll only be ten minutes, then we can wander back here again.’

  By which time a velvet night would have descended, maybe with a scattering of stars.

  ‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘I’m tired. I think I’ll have one more drink then go to bed.’

  He nodded, but his eyes held mine for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. And then he turned and went.

  As I went slowly back upstairs, my heart was pounding against my ribs. Oh God, oh God. Not good. Not good at all. I made to go back into the kitchen to join Laura and Hugh, but from the hall, saw two heads bent low over the kitchen table, both unloading tales of recent heartbreaks. The bottle of wine was going down rapidly. They didn’t even notice me in the doorway. Instead I walked on down the corridor, and went to bed.

  7

  I’m not proud of this next bit, so I won’t be lingering. In fact you may even get edited highlights. The reshuffle was scheduled for two weeks hence, and in the days leading up to it the atmosphere in the Commons was electric. Insecurity about jobs was rampant, everyone was tense, and Dominic, as whip, was presumed to have the PM’s ear. As I swept down the corridors of Portcullis House beside him – Katya managing only three days a week now – arms full of papers, heels clicking in a spookily déjà vu way – dark-suited figures would emerge from the shadows: ‘Can I have a word, Dom?’