The Image in the Water

by Douglas Hurd

  THE IMAGE IN THE WATER

  Douglas Hurd

  To the Electors of West Oxfordshire

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  A Note on the Author

  He lay, like a fallen garden statue,

  Gaze fixed on his image in the water …

  ‘… I never saw beauty

  To compare with yours. Oh, why do you always

  Dodge away at the last moment

  And leave me with my eyes full of nothing

  But water and the memory of an image?’

  ‘Narcissus’ from Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes

  Chapter 1

  In paradisum deducant angeli

  Roger Courtauld, Home Secretary, shifted his buttocks on the hard seat of the stall Though the chief constables of police had failed to drink him under the table at last night’s dinner he was suffering from a mild hangover. Beside him his wife Hélène peered this way and that from beneath her dark blue hat, rather too large for her trim French figure. Roger guessed that she was calculating whether the Westminster Abbey officials had seated them in the correct order of protocol. Certainly Joan Freetown and her husband Guy were nearer the altar than the Courtaulds, but on the opposite side of the chancel. Was that higher or lower in order of precedence? Nearer to God, certainly, but further from the Prince of Wales. And in any case was the Chancellor of the Exchequer senior in the pecking order to the Home Secretary? For some these were deep waters. Roger neither knew nor cared – though he admitted to himself that he was lucky to have a wife who did both. This ensured, without any effort on his part, that his own carelessness was never flagrantly exploited.

  He tried to turn his mind to Simon Russell, the Prime Minister five weeks dead, whom they had come to remember. The poignant melody of the anthem was a greater help than the vague benevolence of the Archbishop in his address. Roger felt that if his mind, despite the hangover, did not seize and pin down Simon Russell, now at the moment of his memorial service, their friendship would dissolve for ever, unclassified and therefore unreal. Had Russell himself (the surname came naturally to the fore despite their twenty years of work together) believed that angels were at all likely to welcome a prime minister into paradise? Perhaps yes, in the same manner, enthusiastic yet decorous, as a Conservative audience welcomed their Prime Minister at the end of a harmonious Party Conference, rejoicing in the grace of a good speech and a ten-point lead in the polls. He supposed that Simon Russell would now be coping with the voice of God in the same patient but not obsequious way as he had always coped with the voice of the people.

  Roger shook himself, dissatisfied. That was not the right level of thought for this time and place. Simon Russell had been a conventional Anglican, for sure. Roger had once heard him read the Christmas gospel in the huge gaunt Victorian church at the heart of Russell’s North London constituency, St Barnabas, or was it St Matthew? But he was probably a real Christian as well, not exactly fervent but privately praying and communicating with God in a way Roger envied but found impossible.

  In any case Russell had been a good prime minister. Roger remembered a joint press conference they had held together at Central Office during the last election. A young and pretty girl at the back had asked the Prime Minister what he regarded as his major achievement in office. It was a hopeless question, clearly intended to be helpful (perhaps even planted by the Central Office staff) but in fact devilish. Russell had sucked his silver pencil as usual, then begun his answer with a dangerous phrase.

  ‘That’s not really the right question.’ He had sucked the pencil again. ‘You see, being prime minister is not a matter of climbing mountains and planting silly little flags marked Russell on the summit. It is more like navigating a river in a clumsy boat full of passengers, a winding river with sandbanks, white water, rocks, even cataracts at some points, and tidal towards the end. Your aim is to convey your passengers safely to their destination. They are eating, drinking, playing computer games, only occasionally sparing you a glance or a thought. They blame you for the weather as well as for the rubbery soufflé at lunch. Your only reward is the satisfaction of eventually steering their ship safely into harbour. Then you can apply to the company for another voyage, which is what we are doing in this general election.’

  The Guardian had reported that the Prime Minister dodged the question, but the evening television had taken that excerpt, and several people had commented favourably to Roger on the campaign trail next day.

  It had proved an effective low-key philosophy, but Roger had not made it his own. He needed something riskier and more energetic. He shifted again in the stall, knocking a hymn book off the shallow ledge in front of him, earning a glance of reproach from Hélène.

  Right, he had done his stint in remembering Simon Russell. Now he had to concentrate on the big personal decision he faced. To stand or not to stand for the leadership. His mind rehearsed familiar arguments for and against, but in his heart he now knew the answer.

  In tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres

  Something about martyrs, Julia supposed. Her parents had decided that she should take Latin as a GCSE subject at the age of fourteen. She had outwitted them by simply not turning up at the lessons, and threatening to telephone the Mirror if they tried to coerce her. Julia had learned a lot from the speed with which both parents and school had yielded. Her father’s position as prime minister, which she hated, could be turned to good effect.

  Anyway, her father was not a martyr, or anything like – neither had he or his relationship with her anything to do with this preposterous great church. The Abbey seemed empty of him but filled with irrelevant history and an army of well-dressed hypocrites. She would remember her father her own way. Not the corpse in the coffin which they had shoved miserably through the curtain in the crematorium a month ago. Not even the serene face last seen on the pillow in Joan Freetown’s spare room, with the evening sparrows wittering in the yew tree outside the window. Her parents had been staying the weekend with the Chancellor of the Exchequer when Simon Russell had his second and fatal heart-attack. Engaged to join them for Sunday supper, she arrived to find her mother staring into the drawing-room fire while Joan Freetown busied herself with a thousand well-ordered telephone calls about death. Upstairs a red box full of unfinished work sat as a last congenial companion beside her dead father in his bed. Nor would Julia try to find some distant childhood memory, for he had not been prime minister then and being prime minister seemed an inseparable part of him. Julia fixed her mind on a walk with him under the beeches at Chequers, just before tea, the rain coming down hard, the two protection officers muttering ten yards behind and Simon trying to find the right words to re-engage with his daughter after a family row. She had loved him then, tired but turning back to her away from the incomprehensible political commotions that absorbed nine-tenths of his life.

  So she did not need to think about him in Westminster Abbey, and could look at the faces around her. Roger Courtauld immediately on her right, the flesh crowding in now on genial eyes and mouth. He had always kept a kind word for her, though she had never known how to receive it. Across the aisle was Peter Makewell, Foreign Secretary and acting Prime Minister, his face old and taut, skin stretched over a cage of bones. Joan Freetown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, elegant as ever in black, harsh hair with a white streak carrying backwards the exceptional pallor of her temples. On the rare occasions when Julia went to a reception at 10 Downing Street or Chequers, Joan Freetown had always given her a glassy smile of recogni
tion, but found no words. Not many words either when she had found Julia weeping in the unlocked bathroom ten yards from her father’s body. But the cold water, the towel, the ten-second hug had been kind as well as efficient. Today they were back to the glassy smiles. On the right, the Prince of Wales, himself rather than the usual representative. On the left, the Archbishop and other resplendent clergy – but who was the young man who had caught her eye and lifted his hand in a half-wave? Longish buttery hair, dark suit but an unsuitable bright blue tie, slightly rounded shoulders, even at that range an aggressive expression.

  Her mother, too, had seen the gesture, and leaned forward protectively. ‘David Alcester,’ Louise said, before being asked. ‘Best avoided.’

  Julia remembered. A year ago this young MP had managed somehow to get himself invited to a reception at No. 10 in honour of adult education. Julia had been cajoled into attending with the promise of a new red dress. David Alcester had backed her against a pillar and told her at length the story of his life. She remembered brown eyes under the blond forelock and a deep political voice. There had been nothing sexual in his advance. His only pleasure, it seemed, was in the rise and fall of his own voice.

  For once Julia agreed with her mother. Best avoided.

  Had that half-wave to Julia Russell been a mistake? The seats in the south transept were packed close. Though David Alcester was not tall, his knees were jammed against the chair in front. He had met Julia only once, though she had certainly been interested that evening at No. 10 in what he had told her about politics and his career. He sometimes wished that he might look at girls the way most of his friends did, or at least pretended to. But he saw little chance of being swept off his feet by love, or even lust. His fever lay elsewhere. One day soon he would need to think about marriage, or at least a partnership, some good-looking girl who would go down well in his Newbury constituency and help his career forward. There could be no possible harm in acknowledging Julia, who had been a prime minister’s daughter until a few weeks back, and would go on appearing in magazines for years to come. Had there been a glimmer from her in response?

  David had applied for a ticket in the Abbey on the general principle that he should be seen at gatherings of the great and good. He had hardly known Simon Russell or particularly approved of his quiet style of politics. David was not stupid and had recognised that from some source he could not analyse his former leader had drawn great strength.. But he preferred his politics clear and rough. The sight of Joan Freetown in her stall resolved him to write to her at once, offering his services in her leadership campaign.

  Meanwhile, there were two other matters to be decided. David believed in using every minute of his waking life to the full, and there was nothing to detain his mind in the anthem, the Abbey or any memories of Simon Russell. Begin with his appearance, always important. This was the first time he had worn this new suit. It had been bought off the peg, and was uncomfortably tight under the right armpit. Should he take it back to Austin Reed? Would he have to pay for an alteration? Or would it adapt itself once he had worn it once or twice? He decided to postpone the decision for exactly a fortnight, no more.

  Next, he had a question down in the Commons to the Minister for Transport for answer that afternoon about the need for new trees to be planted at the side of the Newbury bypass. In his supplementary question after the minister had answered should he refer to this memorial service and to the late Prime Minister’s well-known love of trees? He had read somewhere about Simon Russell’s plantings at Chequers and had worked out a phrase. Or would that be in poor taste? David did not trust himself yet as an arbiter of taste. He looked again along the line of distinguished faces in the stalls Yes, this time, certainly there had been a response as he caught Julia’s eye. To his earlier half-wave she now returned a half-nod. That was the sign he needed. He would certainly use that supplementary question. There were no votes in taste. ‘Would the minister accept that many of us who gathered in the Abbey this morning out of respect for the late Prime Minister remembered in particular his love of our countryside and …’

  Et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem

  Peter Makewell liked the lilt of the anthem. He knew nothing of music, but this was a pleasant goodbye tune of which Simon Russell would have approved. Indeed, had probably selected, for Simon had been meticulous, leaving nothing to chance – except, of course, the timing of his death, something outwith the control of even the most painstaking policy unit. Peter Makewell felt that mixture of satisfaction and sadness with which men in their seventies react to the death of younger friends. To this was added a small element of resentment. Simon Russell had failed to spot a gap in the constitutional arrangements of Britain, as a result of which Peter Makewell was for the moment not only Foreign Secretary but acting Prime Minister, a position he had not sought and actively disliked.

  The rules of the Conservative Party, endorsed in 1997 under William Hague, provided that an election for the leadership should be triggered either by the resignation of the party leader or as a result of a vote of no confidence by Conservative Members of Parliament. Strangely, indeed arrogantly, there was no mention in the rules of one rather frequent trigger of vacancy, to wit death. It took time to organise a party election, but the country could not wait to have a prime minister. So the ancient wheels of the constitution, which all the experts had banished to the backroom, were produced. The magic circle had operated. The grandees had been consulted on behalf of the monarch. They had worked with traditional speed and secrecy. The Queen had invited Makewell to form a government, it being understood that he would stand down as soon as a new leader was elected under the Hague rules. The grandees had rightly assumed that Makewell would not want to stand in that contest. He therefore found himself temporary Prime Minister because everyone knew that in the long term it was a job he did not want.

  Nor was this affectation. Simon Russell, whom he had much respected, had once passed on to him what he had described as the most closely guarded secret of the premiership, that it was not really hard work. The Prime Minister did not face each day the compulsory grind of departmental business. The fixed duties of the office by no means filled the week. Except at times of national crisis there were many hours for the Prime Minister to dispose of as he or she wished. Of course, prime ministers themselves always disputed this. They were likely to be persons of great energy. Not since Baldwin resigned in 1937 had Britain had a really lazy prime minister, though Callaghan had tried. The other had filled the time by constant and often unnecessary intervention in the affairs of departments, then complained of overwork. Prime-ministerial time, Russell had argued, should be better employed in leisurely strategic thought, touring the country to gain firsthand impressions, and consulting wise opinion from outside politics. Makewell had listened, but taken small notice, not least because Russell, during his four years at No. 10, had shown no sign of acting on his own prescription.

  Now Makewell was enduring his own experience. An avalanche of information daily overwhelmed him. He knew in theory that he had been lucky, in that the one crisis Russell had left behind, the Russian civil war, had been quickly settled by negotiation. The British peacekeeping troops would be coming home from St Petersburg next month. But even without a crisis Britain seemed impossibly hard to govern. The Scottish Nationalists, feeling robust on a diet of bad history and a high oil price, were pressing again for a referendum on independence. His own party was indignant against the Scots, and also now against the European Central Bank, which had just raised interest rates for the second month running. But he seemed to have no time for these problems of political management. Makewell had never served as a minister in either the Treasury or the Home Office. Now these two great departments, both prolific in problems, daily dumped their mysteries on his desk. Neither of the two responsible ministers, Roger Courtauld and Joan Freetown, nor indeed his own staff at No. 10, seemed to realise how ignorant he was, and it was now too late either to confess or to learn
. The details of stop-and-search legislation or the modalities of the withholding tax would always lie beyond his grasp. Once upstairs in his study, soon after his arrival, he had ventured to interrupt a long presentation on a forthcoming Bill: ‘Surely these are matters of detail which could be settled elsewhere.’

  ‘As you wish, Prime Minister,’ the senior Treasury official had replied, and continued his presentation as if nothing had been said.

  Makewell, knowing that, though intellectually limited, he was neither lazy nor stupid, supposed that there must be a way through this thicket. He must abandon dignity and ask for help, either from his main private secretary, Patrick Vaughan, or from his press secretary Artemis Palmer, both inherited from Russell. Could it really be true that Simon Russell had slept with Artemis? Russell’s wife Louise seemed to Peter Makewell exactly what a prime minister’s wife should be, beautiful, loyal, unpolitical. He could not imagine what spasm of desire or despair might have driven Simon to desert her for the skimpy embraces of his press secretary. But he acknowledged that he himself, long a faithful husband now a sober widower, found it hard to judge stories about the sex life of others. His happiest hours now were snatched at his old desk in the Foreign Office, surrounded by the much loved green and gold wallpaper, coping with the relative simplicities of the Cyprus question or the admission of Balkan states to the European Union.

  But he was misusing time. The anthem was moving towards its climax. This was an opportunity to ask advice, not from God, who for Peter Makewell was real enough but dwelt in the Perthshire hills and on Sunday in the Episcopalian Church at Blairgowrie, no, from Simon Russell, who was clearly present with them in Westminster Abbey and able to read minds even more skilfully now than during his life. As so often before Makewell put the problem as clearly as he could to his former leader.