Fifty-First State

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘If I believed it, I’d buy candles, firewood and a bicycle,’ Gott told him. ‘I’m much obliged to you, Mr Lamb. Please ring me if there’s anything I can do for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Lord Gott.’

  ‘If I were you,’ Gott advised, ‘I would go upstairs and extract the dummy from your daughter’s mouth before your wife comes home.’

  Gott then rang a sleeping banker in Zurich and a wide-awake one at the Federal Reserve in Washington. From Zurich he heard that the Swiss banks were taking the threat of embargoes against Britain seriously. From Washington he heard another voice. Leo Radetsky said, ‘It won’t happen. Can you see the French wilfully stopping their farmers from exporting to Britain, or anywhere? They wouldn’t dare. What would Germany and France do to persuade their industrialists they had to take a cut? What about the newer Euro states? They’re bluffing, Edward.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gott.

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but your Prime Minister, Alan Petherbridge, says they’re bluffing.’

  ‘Does he?’ said Gott. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  With the screen of share prices still blinking in front of him, Gott thought. Hard-headed men in Europe knew about the bought election, connected it with the sale of the airbases and were drawing conclusions. They were now envisaging Britain as a vassal state of the US, Britain as the bridgehead for sales of US goods in Europe and, finally, the linkage of the dollar and sterling and the final battle, the mother of all currency wars, the battle between the combined forces of the dollar and the pound against the euro, with the yuan looking on and watching the struggle.

  There was the sound of a loud explosion, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, which made Gott, shaking his head, begin to make his moves. He knew it was a bomb, he’d heard them often enough before. He didn’t know what kind of a bomb it was, precisely where it had struck – in the financial areas close to the river, he thought – or who it might have killed. Nor did he particularly care. Except that if it was not a bombing by Jihad, or a similar group, it would be attributed to them. A politically motivated bombing in the City was always bad news for the nervy international markets. The explosion, coming at that moment, seemed like an omen of coming disaster. He turned to his computer screen.

  In his professional career, when uncertain, Gott, father of six, was inclined to ask himself a basic question – what would he do if the problem concerned his own money, not someone else’s? Asking the question and answering it, he sold all his currency holdings in sterling, the dollar and the euro. He bought Chinese yuan. He got out of oil, tourism and airlines. He got into insurance, mining, telecommunications, food and drink, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. He bought into land. He bought a failing British hotel chain. He bought into the British Investment Bank, so widely known for money-laundering that it was called, in the City, the Launderette.

  As Gott worked, he heard, through his thick windows, the sound of emergency vehicles speeding to where the bomb had gone off. Surveying his newly constructed portfolio, he felt satisfied that although the yield would be poorer, the investments were safer than they had been half an hour earlier. He then did almost exactly the same thing for his clients and drafted a memorandum to the bank, explaining what he’d done and why, and recommending the bank to consider, at speed, revising all its loans and investments in the light of his thinking.

  He suspected his fellow directors would not back his judgement, would probably say secretly that he’d gone mad. They might even form an alliance to eject him from the board. His clients might be furious and go elsewhere. If that was the case, thought Gott, so be it. He had formed a judgement and acted on it. This was the way he had always operated, usually successfully. Which was no guarantee that this time he was not making a grave, possibly a fatal, mistake.

  But Gott, when it came to the point, liked risk. He felt quite light-hearted as he finished his work. He reminded himself that he was putting everything on the line these days – his job, his political reputation and, had it not been for the early domestic conspiracy against him, he might have been risking his marriage also. The only sign of nerves he experienced was a raging thirst. He drank two more glasses of water and went downstairs.

  In the ornate lobby with its atrium of tropical trees, the night guard said to him, ‘Hear the bang, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gott, putting on his gloves. ‘Sounded like a bomb. Is that smoke I’m smelling?’ A reek was permeating the huge area of marble.

  ‘The explosion was at the Canfield Building down on Upper Thames Street. I suppose the wind’s blowing it this way.’

  ‘Any casualties?’

  ‘Not so far,’ the guard said. ‘Too soon to know, really.’

  ‘Are they saying who did it?’

  ‘An anarchist group says they did it. But their leader has denied it. You don’t know what to think.’

  ‘No,’ said Gott. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘The drivers can’t get out of the garage because of the police cordons down there,’ said the guard. ‘Shall I get you a taxi, sir?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Gott. ‘I’ll walk.’

  ‘Are you sure, sir? Another one could go off.’

  ‘Might just as easily get blown up in the taxi,’ said Gott. ‘It’s all a matter of luck.’

  He walked the three miles back to his flat, suspecting that after what he had done he would be too agitated to sleep. He was wrong. Almost as soon as his head touched the pillow, he fell asleep.

  Nine

  The House of Commons, London SW1. February 24th, 2016. 6 p.m.

  Joshua Crane stood alone on the terrace of the Houses of Commons. Even from where he stood, overlooking the Thames, the shouts of the huge crowd assembled in Parliament Square and all the way up Whitehall as far as Trafalgar Square could be heard. ‘Take back the bases!’ ‘Take back the bases!’The bridge beside Parliament was thick with marchers, holding banners reading, NO TO US IMPERIALISM, HANDS OFF BRITISH BASES, NO TO THE HANDOVER and REMEMBER KIM DURHAM. Many of the banners showed young Rory Durham at the soldier’s feet.

  On the other side of the Thames there were more people, people Joshua could scarcely see but whose voices travelled over the water. Over two million people – approximately one in every twenty British adults – had come to London to demonstrate. The police had powers to turn the demonstrators back from Parliament, but had told the Home Secretary that the numbers made this impossible without the Army. And so the marchers had come – and come and come.

  That morning’s papers had been an almost incomprehensible patchwork of agendas. PETHERBRIDGE STANDS FIRM, had declared the largest, right-wing broadsheet paper (owned by an Australian with US nationality). THE BASES ARE BRITISH was the entire front page of the largest right-wing tabloid (now owned in Hong Kong) and PETHERBRIDGE MUST GO, the largest left-wing tabloid had said (the owner Canadian). If the question of the bases had divided the press along unusual lines, the same was true of the country. Those opposed to the sale of the bases ranged from the reddest-faced Colonel Blimps in their manor houses, to the most wasted anarchists in their Hackney squats. Nevertheless, in spite of the Home Counties brushing shoulders with the inner city, Muslims with Quakers and the home-grown with young foreign demonstrators from Italy, Germany and France, the opinion polls said that the public were evenly divided. On the side of selling the bases to the US were those who had accepted the argument that this was the only way of separating Britain from US war aims, who saw the sale as acknowledging an accomplished fact or believed the sale was necessary to secure continuing protection by the world’s greatest military power. Others, including many in the House of Commons, were simply not prepared to challenge and perhaps overturn an elected government over anything but a matter of life and death. Not if the result were to be another election five months after the last.

  For the past three weeks, Joshua and the other dissident MPs had been campaigning up and down the country, making speeches in town halls and conference centres. He
had written letters late into the night. He had encouraged the waverers and heartened his supporters. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister had piled on the pressure until there were men who, seeing a Party Whip come into the tea room, would simply get up and leave.

  Joshua’s wife had rung from Yorkshire, offering to come with Joshua on the speaking dates and sit by him loyally on the platform. After the experience of the general election, and knowing that this time Beth dreaded and disapproved of what he was doing, Joshua had found it easy to refuse his wife’s offer. Nevertheless, Beth had wished him well, though she could not resist adding, ‘And I hope when this is over your good friend Lord Gott will have a job lined up for you.’ Joshua felt he could hardly blame her for the comment. His meetings were packed with supporters and his mailbag was 90 per cent in support of him, but the truth was that if the MoD Lands Sale Bill became law his career would probably end, together with the careers of his supporters. Their punishment at the Prime Minister’s hands would be swift and terrible. His fate was in the hands of the Labour MPs in the House.

  Carl Chatterton and his party had been sitting on the fence. The Labour Party had voted with the Government at the first two readings of the bill, though not without an internal revolt led by Mark Moreno, a charismatic left-winger, formerly a trades union leader, now the MP for Rudgwick in Cumbria and tipped to be the next Labour leader when the party’s impatience with Chatterton reached boiling point. Labour’s National Executive had declared in favour of Moreno. Chatterton’s pitiful agony was that of a man afraid of his own party. In the end he did what his closest colleagues guessed he would. He declared a free vote for his party, which meant that from now until the count no one knew what the outcome would be.

  Joshua had spoken well in a House so packed that members had to stand against the walls and in the entrances. He had been praised for his speech. He was, as he stood there on the terrace, the man of the moment. But, if his side lost the vote, in an hour’s time he would be finished – a loser, a man who had earned the implacable hatred of the Prime Minister, a man others of his party would hardly dare to be seen with. If they won, of course, it would be a different story. It was not impossible that at some point he would become Prime Minister.

  ‘There are your supporters,’ said Julia Baskerville, who had come up behind him. Joshua was feeling the power and weight of the crowd. Like any politician suddenly experiencing the rapid emotional highs and lows of triumph, and the possibility of great office, he began, almost, to fear it. There was the crowd, huddled in their coats and woolly hats, blocking the bridge and a mile of streets round Parliament – two million of them, shouting their support.

  ‘How much weight have you lost?’

  ‘About ten pounds,’ said Joshua, who had been forced to rush out that afternoon and buy a new suit, off the peg, so as not to make a major speech looking like a scarecrow. He said, ‘It must have been a relief to you when Chatterton gave the party a free vote.’ He thought Julia didn’t look very well herself. She, too, seemed to have lost weight and she was very pale. Perhaps she had a cold.

  ‘A relief for me – but not as big a relief as it was for you,’ she told him.

  ‘It keeps the excitement at full pitch.’ She worked very hard, Joshua thought. Her constituency made big demands. ‘You OK, Julia?’

  A hired steamer had been going up and down the river from Greenwich to Westminster, banners stretched along each side reading, VOTE NO TO AMERICAN BASES ON BRITISH SOIL. Now, a light mounted on the deck raked the side of the House of Commons, picked out the figures of Joshua and Julia and a voice boomed out, ‘Thanks, Joshua – No Yank bases on British soil.’ Joshua, caught in the light, was recognized by the crowds jammed on the bridge. As Julia stepped out of the light, people began to shout ‘Crane! Crane! Crane!’ Joshua, surprised, recovered himself, waved and smiled and then, miming a need to go elsewhere and do something else, grabbed Julia’s arm and retreated from the terrace. Julia smiled. ‘Not since the Nuremberg rallies,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t have to say that.’

  ‘I couldn’t resist it.’

  Then Joshua was claimed by a group of men who had been looking for him. ‘House is about to divide,’ one said urgently. They ran inside, to vote.

  7 Adam Street, Shepherd’s Bush, London W12. February 24th, 2016. 9 p.m.

  William, Lucy and Joe were sitting quietly in the sitting room while Marie lay on the pull-out bed, asleep, under heavy medication. Her husband slumped in an easy chair, looking ten years older than he had that morning.

  Somehow, at the time of the Hamscott Common invasion, they had managed to prevent Marie from leaving the hospital, but the problem had not gone away. It had become plain that Marie would never be able to return to the Sutcliffes’ house in Yorkshire. It would be sold and the Sutcliffes would move to London. William did not like this idea but consoled himself with the thought that his in-laws, who had no taste for the inner city, would end up living in a pleasant suburb at least ten miles away. At the moment it was not that prospect which troubled him. It was the immediate future.

  He was not prepared to spend months, or even weeks, living in the flat with his in-laws while they sold their house and found somewhere else to live. Before the Sutcliffes had got back from the hospital he and Lucy had had a row. When he said he was not prepared to have her parents in the flat while they house-hunted, Lucy suggested that they find another flat and live in it for the duration. William began to shout. He would not pay hundreds of pounds a week to rent a flat while a house Marie could tolerate was found. He’d had enough. He never wanted to see Lucy’s parents again. If they moved back into the flat, he ranted, he would seriously consider packing in his job and moving to Spain. Lucy knew he had a long-standing job offer from Felix Arnold, a friend of his parents, in Villalba.

  Lucy had stood, silent and appalled, staring at the shouting William. Then the doorbell had rung. The Sutcliffes were back. A grim silence had fallen between the couple.

  Lucy now looked at her father and said, ‘You’d better get to bed, Dad. William – do you want to come out for a walk with me?’

  In the street she said, ‘God, William. Do you mean it about Spain? You’d really leave me?’

  ‘Lucy,’ he said. ‘Lucy … You know I … Oh, fuck! I don’t know what I mean. Let’s go and get a drink.’

  They headed silently for the local pub on Shepherd’s Bush Green. William wondered whether he could really leave his wife and head for Spain. No, he couldn’t, he decided. He could not take up Felix Arnold’s offer to help him with the expansion of his hotel unless Lucy came, too. But, he thought, he could sure as hell pack in his job and go there until the Sutcliffes were out of the way. He was wondering how to put his decision to Lucy when, rounding a corner, they saw police vehicles and lights on the Green and police officers and Auxiliaries clustered on the pavement opposite. They stopped, ‘Not again,’ said William. ‘Looks like a quiet drink round here is out of the question. I can’t face the flat again.’

  They walked through quiet streets, though still hearing sirens and spotting police at intersections. ‘I didn’t mean what I said about clearing out for good,’ William told Lucy. ‘But I can’t hang about while your parents go through all the business of a sale and buying a new place. Can you imagine your mother while all that’s going on? I couldn’t take it. I’m serious, Lucy. I will go. But what I’ve been thinking is this – this place is shite. Look at what we’ve just seen – cops all over the place, bombs – maybe Mo had the right idea when he got out. Agreed, he and his family were under more pressure – but the pressure’s getting worse for all of us. What is this stuff about air force bases – fucked if I know? And all these rumours about the Prime Minister buying an election. And then there’s going to be another war in Iraq. What I’m saying is, maybe this business with your parents is a wake-up call. Look at our lives, working all hours to save for a small flat so we can have a baby and then keep on working all hours so we can bring him up – and
look what we’re having to live through just to get that – bombs and terrorism, the lot. At least we’ve got a choice. We could go to Spain together. It’s a plan, Lucy. Thousands are doing it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucy slowly. ‘We’ve got a choice.’

  William suddenly wanted it settled quickly. He told Lucy, ‘I don’t want to wait any longer. I don’t want a lot of discussion about what Joe and Marie are going to do. We’ve got to decide soon.’

  ‘Give me a day or two to think,’ she said.

  ‘OK. But don’t take any longer.’

  Lucy didn’t like this. ‘Don’t bully me,’ she said.

  They were walking up an avenue of houses. On the pavement outside one of them there were concrete crash barriers. A policeman was on duty in the porch.

  ‘Wonder who that is?’ said Lucy.

  ‘Whoever he is, he’s better defended than we are. Your parents are mad to move here – this place is a mess.’

  Their mood had changed since they left the house. ‘Let’s forget the pub,’ she said. ‘I’m on duty at seven.’

  * * *

  When they returned, Joe was chatting to a thin young man who was sitting on the couch. ‘You weren’t long,’ Joe said amiably. ‘In the meantime, your friend dropped in.’

  The young man looked up and said, ‘Hello, William.’

  At first, William didn’t recognize Jemal Al Fasi, Mo’s brother, although he did recognize the T-shirt and jeans Jemal was wearing. They were his own. Jemal’s hair was wet. He must have had a shower. Once he realized who Jemal was, and had got over the fact that Jemal was wearing his clothes, he was even more surprised, simply to find Jemal in his flat. He thought the whole family was in Morocco. He hardly knew Jemal. What was he doing here?

  He took in Jemal’s face, tired and keyed up, then looked down at the boy’s feet. He was wearing his own trainers, which were battered and smeared with mud that had not been properly washed off. There was a big tear on the side of one shoe. William suddenly felt worried.