Fifty-First State

by Hilary Bailey

  They had had this discussion many times. They were drifting away from the point and William sensed Lucy was making this happen.

  ‘Think how often we’ve stayed with them,’ Lucy appealed. William might have pointed out that this was not their decision. He could have added that as far as he was concerned each visit to the Sutcliffes had been a waste of free time which would have been more enjoyably spent elsewhere. But Lucy knew quite well what he thought.

  William told her this, adding, ‘I wouldn’t mind so much if I knew how long they were staying.’

  ‘Yes, you would,’ Lucy declared.

  ‘Not as much,’ said William, drinking. He knew that after one more glass of wine he would start a row. He didn’t care.

  ‘There it is!’ cried Lucy. The suicide bombing at Thwaite was old news now but on the TV there was a picture of a wide gate being rebuilt, armed guards and fluttering police tapes. A medalled RAF officer and a man in a suit stood in the wind, discussing the event. Worldwide terror, constant vigilance and full alert were mentioned. The terrorist, blown to fragments, had not been identified. The van had been stolen in Swansea.

  William said, ‘This business at Thwaite is just an isolated incident. Anyway, they live ten miles away. London’s one security alert after another. How’s your mother going to feel getting patted down going into the Tube? Oh, I forgot, she won’t be going into the Tube.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she’ll be going anywhere,’ Lucy admitted.

  ‘No – we’re just going to sit here waiting to die together.’

  ‘Mum’s just terribly afraid of being left alone, without Dad,’ Lucy said defensively. A thought struck her. ‘You won’t walk out on me, William, if they come?’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ he said. ‘If I walk out, it’ll be with you. Maybe we should go and stay at the B and B.’

  Lucy surprised him when she said, ‘I thought about that, but it’d put a dent in our savings.’

  ‘Let’s go out to the Venezia tonight to celebrate our last night of freedom.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you they were coming tomorrow,’ Lucy said.

  ‘You didn’t have to,’ William said. ‘I’m good for a week, Lucy. But after that we’ll have to think long and hard. And Charlie stays.’

  They went to the restaurant and tried not to talk too much about the imminent arrival of Lucy’s parents.

  Manderton, Oakdene Avenue, Bromley, Kent. August 25th, 2015. 3.30 p.m.

  Joshua Crane was only too pleased, on the afternoon of the day after his return from a month’s holiday with his family in Italy, to be rung up by Edward Gott and invited to a last-minute meeting over dinner at Sugden’s. Standing in the French windows of their long living room, he told his wife Beth, who was sitting by their pool maintaining her tan, ‘I’ll have to go to London. The election.’ In fact, he was keen to get to Chelsea to discover if his girlfriend was back. She’d told him she would be holidaying with friends, unspecified, in Goa while he was away giving his wife what he thought he owed her – a month in four-star hotels in Italy, with shopping trips to Rome and Milan thrown in. But knowing Saskia, she might just as easily have gone to Cape Cod, Saint Tropez or Thailand. She might have found a new boyfriend or even got married. He’d tried phoning her at midnight from the bottom of the garden the day before, but had only reached her answering machine.

  Beth Crane looked up from her magazine and said, ‘I can’t see why. Your seat’s safe. And I don’t suppose they’re going to ask you to stand for leader.’

  This squib, after a month of the same, made Joshua revise his plan to be detained in London overnight and turn it into being detained there for several days. When he was with Saskia he always claimed to be staying in Batter sea with his old friend, a fellow MP, Douglas Clare. Douglas, without approving, covered for him. Although Beth was, of course, right that the dinner with Gott could not concern any really important matter. The Party Chairman, Graham Barnsbury, who had been hastily appointed election co-ordinator, had already rung him in Italy and briefly checked he would be supporting Alan Petherbridge for leader.

  ‘Perhaps something’s come up,’ he muttered to Beth.

  She sat up and began to file her nails. ‘Try to get back as soon as you can. While the boys are still on holiday.’

  She wasn’t demonstrating any desire for his company as a husband. No surprise there, thought Joshua, piqued. He sometimes feared that his wife guessed something about the affair with Saskia. In morbid moments he wondered if she knew everything about it. He concealed his mobile phone bills, but she could have obtained copies – she might even have hired a detective.

  He had accepted that after twelve years of marriage, during which he and Beth were supposed to have drawn closer, they had only discovered more things about each other they did not like. Beth made no effort to bridge the gap (why should she, if she knew he’d been unfaithful to her since she’d been pregnant with Marcus, their first child?). She repelled Joshua’s few remorseful, bumbling efforts to improve matters. Joshua wondered if Beth was patterning her own marriage on her parents’, which was distant. Perhaps she just didn’t like him. Perhaps she knew or guessed about all his infidelities over the years and believed that if she weakened, and tried to trust – even love – him once more, she would suffer even more when he betrayed her again. But when he considered making a clean breast of it to his wife and offering to start again, his courage failed. He doubted if Beth would forgive; he doubted if he would remain faithful to her even if she did. The marriage had become a marriage of convenience, with Beth enjoying the good standard of living and kudos which went with being an MP’s wife and Joshua benefiting from the family he needed for his political career.

  His solution was to erect a mental wall between his marriage and the rest of his life. If the wall ever came down and he had to confront the situation directly the results, he guessed, would break his heart – separation, divorce, his wife would take his sons away. His sons, he would think – his sons – and then run and crouch behind the wall again.

  ‘I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone – I’ll ring, of course,’ he said.

  ‘Chambers’ party on Saturday,’ she reminded him.

  Barrington Chambers was Joshua’s local Party Chairman. A self-made man, he owned several men’s outfitters in Finchley and Frognal. Joshua thought privately that while you couldn’t really describe Barry Chambers’ political views as being to the right of Adolph Hitler’s, Barry and Hitler would certainly have found common ground if they’d ever got together for a chat about immigration, gypsies and gays. He would have disliked Barry more if Barry had not been inconsistent. When one of the asylum seekers, part of a band of builders run by a gang master, fell off Barry’s roof and broke a leg, Barry gave him a large sum of money in cash to tide him over until his leg mended. Beth said that if Barry had any real concern for the man, or others like him, he wouldn’t have employed a cheap firm that had no regard for the safety of its workers.

  ‘You’ll come?’ questioned Joshua. It was important not to seem to snub the Chambers.

  ‘Of course,’ Beth told him. ‘But I don’t know who’s more unbearable – Barry or his wife. He’s too loud and she never speaks – but when she does she’s got a voice that could cut metal.’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ Joshua said, and, packing a small bag, then drove to his girlfriend’s mews house in Chelsea. He rang the bell. There was no answer. The fuchsias in the baskets hanging on wrought iron hooks beside the front door had withered and died. The bay tree in its earthenware pot beside the door was browning. Joshua borrowed a hose from a man on the other side of the mews, who was washing his car, and gave the plants and the tree a good drenching. Doing this, he wetted his shoes and left, disconsolate. His next stop was Douglas Clare’s flat in Battersea, where he left his bag. Then he went back across the river to Sugden’s, where Edward Gott was waiting for him.

  He wondered what Gott wanted. Probably nothing – or just lunch – he thought. Parl
iamentary holidays are very long, giving rise to all kinds of behaviour – boredom is the least of an MP’s problems. And he knew Gott had many sons, six in all. Three were married, with children of their own, and all were expected by Lady Gott to spend part of their holidays at the family’s house in the Borders. Joshua had stayed at Brigstock once. It was a semi-fortified house in a charming wooded place by a loch and had been occupied by Lady Margot’s family since Culloden (Edward Gott had married above himself. He had brought the money, Lady Margot the status).

  Once seated, each man asked the other about holidays, both claimed to have enjoyed them and neither fully believed the other. Gott did mention that in spite of a converted barn and several cottages Brigstock, at mealtimes, seemed crowded, and that he had begun to understand the old tales and ballads where people eating dinner, often relatives, started quarrels and set on each other with swords. Joshua, in turn, mentioned that shopping in Rome’s fashion stores with two restless boys, aged nine and seven, made him feel like wielding a sword himself.

  Lord Gott asked the waiter about William, whom he’d not seen. ‘He’ll be in later,’ the waiter said. ‘What have we here?’ Gott said, studying the wine list critically. He ordered a bottle. Then they turned to the menu. Gott settled on veal and fried potatoes as he was, he said, on a diet at home. Joshua ordered trout. ‘So,’ Joshua said, when the orders had been taken, ‘what’s afoot, Edward?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ Gott confessed. ‘It’s still Alan Petherbridge, of course. That little turd Geoffrey Shawcross tried to try it on,’ Gott added. ‘He began to wonder if an open leadership campaign might not make the party look more democratic, wondered if him standing might help. But we got him behind the bike sheds and persuaded him he was wrong. “The election’s the thing – your seat’s safe, no trouble there?”’

  Joshua thought of the coming election and asked Gott, nervously, ‘What does it look like?’ His own seat ought to be safe enough, with a majority of 8,000, but elections bring out the high-wire artist in politicians – fear, excitement and dread of the unexpected mingle.

  ‘We’ll win, barring accidents. Carl Chatterton’s got all the appeal of a wet sock and we’ve shed Muldoon, who had all the appeal of the other half of the pair. We’ll have Petherbridge, a new face no one’s had time to get disillusioned about. He’s been an efficient and careful Home Secretary, due to good luck and good management he’s been able to open three new prisons during his period of office and there’s nothing the electorate likes better than seeing shiny, new slammers opening up. And he came well out of the Kim Durham affair. So we’ll win. But only a third of the public will vote because they’re fed up with elections. And politicians. And they’re guessing whoever wins won’t have a majority – again. Well, I don’t think you or I, privately, would dare disagree with them. The upshot will be that Liberals will hold the balance of power again, as usual. Then comes a National Government. Muldoon has made that inevitable.’ He added gloomily, ‘We can’t afford to fight, of course, but we’ve got to. So have the others and they’ve no money, either.’

  ‘Petherbridge won’t like a National Government.’

  ‘No PM fancies presiding over a Cabinet full of his opponents.’

  ‘What’s he like?’ asked Joshua, who knew that, as Party Treasurer, Gott must know more about the man than he did.

  ‘A cross between Cardinal Richelieu and Torquemada,’ Gott replied readily. ‘He’s very brainy, of course. Outwardly he’s a civilized man. But he’s got hidden depths, where monsters lurk.’

  ‘What monsters?’

  Gott evaded the question. ‘The highest office in the land,’ he said, ‘is like an extreme psychological test – like being in the condemned cell or suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, alone and afraid. The problem is that the man being tested, the PM, doesn’t realize this and no one around him will tell him. Our problem is that we don’t know what the incumbent’s weaknesses are until he’s tested, and by then it’s too late.’

  Joshua persisted. ‘But you say Petherbridge isn’t a stable man. What do you know?’

  ‘Not enough,’ said Gott shortly.

  ‘There’s a Mrs Petherbridge, isn’t there? But she’s never around. What’s the story there?’

  ‘Annabel Petherbridge is very frail, physically and mentally. As long as she stays where she is, on what I believe is a nice little farm in Gloucestershire, she’s all right. Too much exposure to the bright lights – or her husband – and she starts to get a little wobbly. She always turns out for the Party Conference and she’ll be there in a hat when Petherbridge kisses the Queen’s hand. Alan just has to use her sparingly, that’s all.’

  ‘What about other women?’ Joshua asked.

  ‘Joshua,’ Gott told him, ‘we’re not all like you.’

  Joshua looked at his plate, then raised his head. ‘You bastard,’ was all he found to say.

  Edward Gott raised his glass. ‘Well – to victory.’

  Joshua, numbly, echoed him.

  After lunch Gott had another meeting and Joshua went to a film. When he phoned Saskia again, there was still no reply. He then rang Julia Baskerville, suggesting that if she was free that evening they might sit down and make some plans for the new series of their TV show, Westminster Unplugged, which was due to start up again in October. By that time the Tories would have a new leader and they would be nearing the end of the election campaign. ‘If we don’t tell them what we want, the director and Patterson will make all the decisions,’ Joshua told Julia, who agreed and said that as she liked to spend as much time with her small daughter as she could, she hoped Joshua would come to her house for supper.

  Julia lived in a small terraced house in the East End. Her front door opening directly on to the pavement. When Joshua came in Julia’s daughter Millie was lying on the couch in her nightdress watching a video, while in the connecting kitchen, Julia was cooking. The rooms were not large but the room where Millie lay was redeemed by a small conservatory at the end. Open doors let in a small, evening breeze.

  Joshua greeted Millie, who acknowledged him without interest, and then joined Julia, who was at the stove, in a flowery shirt and shorts. ‘It’s boiling in here,’ she said to him. ‘Do you want to take a glass of wine out into the yard? There’s a little table out there.’

  ‘I’ll sweat it out in here with you,’ he said. ‘Can I have a glass of water? I had lunch, and wine, with Edward Gott earlier and then I went to a movie. Now I feel terrible. It must be old age.’

  Julia handed him a glass of water and he leaned against the wall, drinking it. ‘Good hols?’ he asked.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she told him. Julia had spent a month in Cape Cod with her husband and Millie. She was so plainly happy that Joshua found himself, in the hot little kitchen, envying her – or, as he took in the long, tanned legs and tendrils of hair falling over her face, perhaps her husband. He shook himself, mentally.

  ‘Yours?’ enquired Julia.

  ‘Italy,’ he responded briefly.

  ‘What did Gott want? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘The leadership – the election; underneath, it was probably Gott’s desire to get away from Lady Gott and his large family in Scotland.’

  ‘Any new candidates for the leadership?’ asked Julia.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Joshua said. ‘But no, actually.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Julia. ‘It would have made a programme.’ She whipped a pan of fish out from under the grill. ‘Just a couple of trout – potato salad, etc’

  ‘Great,’ said Joshua, who had eaten trout for lunch. She handed him a bowl and some plates. ‘Can you carry those into the garden?’ she asked. ‘It’ll be cooler out there and anyway, Millie’s going to fall asleep in a minute. I let her stay up, but she ought to be in bed, really. We’re going to stay with my aunt in Brighton tomorrow.’

  ‘Nice,’ he said, walking past the rapt Millie.

  Julia, carrying a tray behind him said, ‘Up to a point. My aunt doesn’t like
me, but she loves Millie. We can’t stay long. I’ve got to get back to see my Party Chairman, as soon as he gets back from Bangladesh.’ As Joshua put down the dishes she said, ‘You know, Alan Petherbridge has always scared me.’ She passed him and put down another dish and some knives and forks. ‘Damn – I forgot the wine.’

  ‘What do you mean, scared you?’ Joshua enquired.

  She said over her shoulder as she went back to the kitchen, ‘I don’t know why. I know what he is superficially …’ She ducked into the kitchen and returned with the bottle and glasses. ‘How he presents himself. There’s just something under the surface I always feel, with Petherbridge. I don’t know what makes him tick.’

  ‘It’s a clock in his tummy,’ murmured sleepy Millie.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ said Julia to Millie, and wrestled with the cork of the bottle until Joshua took it from her.

  He said, ‘Gott said something like that. All I see is that Petherbridge is cleverer than most and probably more ruthless. Pragmatic, but that’s safer than a man with his head stuffed with ideology.’

  ‘Pragmatic doesn’t mean anything. Well, I know you don’t like ideals,’ Julia said with a smile.

  ‘Your party, of course, being led by that great idealist, Carl Chatterton. Who has the job because your party’s more terrified of ideology than mine is.’

  ‘Not for long,’ Julia could not resist saying. Joshua opened his mouth to ask a question but she added quickly, ‘The National Government’s getting closer. We should concentrate on that. Anything else for the programme? I know Hugh wants us to flirt more but when the show starts up again we’ll be in the last weeks of an election. No time for fun and games.’

  ‘It’s been ninety years since the last National Government if you don’t count the Second World War. What say we get a researcher on it straight away?’

  Julia agreed. ‘At least we can be sure that with a National Government the US can’t drag us into a reinvasion of Iraq. No all-party Cabinet would let that happen.’