The Magnificent Mrs Mayhew

by Milly Johnson

  That disarmed her slightly, that he’d remembered.

  ‘Er, yeah, yeah that’s right. Last time you were here, you said that you’d do your best to stop it happening and as far as we know it’s still going ahead.’

  ‘I had a word with the council,’ replied John, tapping his finger which was his prompt for Sophie to come in.

  ‘You have a note in your diary, John, that there is a meeting next week in the Town Hall for residents to discuss their concerns.’

  ‘Yes, they changed it to an open and well-publicised forum. I made sure they did that,’ said John, taking the credit for the email that Sophie had written in his name.

  ‘It’ll do no good,’ said one of the women standing in a group behind Mrs Sillitoe. ‘They hear but they don’t listen.’

  Sophie scribbled on her pad, then pushed it into John’s eyeline.

  John, glancing over at her words, was mopping them all up and processing them at speed. ‘You need to go to the meet—’

  ‘But they don’t need that road widening,’ Mrs Sillitoe interrupted him. Cardinal sin, because that was John’s pet hate.

  ‘I’m afraid they say they do,’ he replied and Sophie noticed his change of tone: it was subtle, but she picked up his annoyance. ‘As it stands, children going to Cherlgrove primary school are not safe. The council have asked that people attend the meeting so this can be explained. They only want to take away a slice of the green, a small price to pay for children’s lives, wouldn’t you say? There is no other way it can be done. Trust me, Miss Sillitoe, I have done all my homework on this one.’

  He hadn’t at all. Sophie herself had done the legwork and it had been painful because the leader of Cherlgrove Council was a florid misogynist who was better suited to appearing in a seventies sexist sitcom than he was to objective analysis.

  The fire had left Mrs Sillitoe’s voice as she continued:

  ‘I heard that in time they were going to close down the whole park. Use some for the road and then build on the rest.’

  Sophie wrote: Old rumour. No go. Ground not fit for building.

  ‘That is a very old rumour with absolutely no foundation to it,’ said John. ‘None at all. For a start the land isn’t suitable for building houses on.’

  ‘The council do what they want when they want,’ said a woman popping out from behind Carol Sillitoe. ‘There’s no point going to one of their bloody meetings. They just feed you bullshit.’ A murmur of agreement and nods ensued.

  ‘I would not be doing my job if I did not encourage you to engage with the council at a public meeting when you have the chance. The more questions you ask, the more answers you will be given,’ said John. ‘Go, and then if you aren’t happy with what they tell you, email me immediately. I so want to be there at this meeting with you.’ He turned to Sophie. ‘Did you try and switch things around so I could attend?’

  ‘You have a meeting with the PM. It can’t be done.’

  ‘Oh damn,’ said John. ‘Sometimes in this job I really do wish I could be in two places at once.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll go to it then,’ said Carol Sillitoe.

  ‘Good. Thank you for coming and please . . . you know where I am if you need any further help. Phone, email, I’ll answer always,’ said John, standing, holding out his hand. He was a master of dismissal; politeness and piss off balanced perfectly at either end of the see-saw.

  ‘You are amazing,’ said John to Sophie after she had helped him appease more people complaining about the green, a burly man who wanted to hang a bus driver for not accepting his Scottish ten-pound note and three people complaining about the new housing estate. Last in the queue was a student asking permission to use John as a case study for his project as he had to write about an influential modern-day politician.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said John, throwing up his hands, genuinely proud, feeling the sun shine on his ego. ‘We might even be able to get you down to Westminster for a visit. Log your details with my parliamentary assistant Rebecca on this number,’ and he whipped a business card out of his pocket.

  That was the first time Sophie had heard the R word.

  She questioned him about it in the car, who Rebecca was.

  ‘I’ve mentioned her, haven’t I?’ said John, surprised she’d asked. ‘She started about . . . a month ago. Girl Friday position really, does filing and makes tea. So far so good.’

  No, he definitely hadn’t mentioned her.

  ‘Why do you need another assistant?’ asked Sophie. He had half the cast of Ben Hur working for him.

  ‘Because Rupert blows a fuse every time I want a drink and he thinks it’s beneath him to stick a kettle on. So a Girl Friday was needed, or a boy, but a girl simply happened to come along first. She’s a graduate who wants to absorb the essence of Whitehall for a few months and she makes a very good Americano and files efficiently. Is there a problem here?’ A brittle tone had crept into his voice and so she didn’t say that after the Crying-girl episode, he’d told her he would only employ male aides because then he wouldn’t leave himself open to that sort of situation again.

  ‘No.’ What else could she say?

  Chapter 4

  Seven days before Doorstepgate . . . continued

  En route to the golf course John dropped Sophie off at the Cherlgrove Manor Hotel where she was due to meet a friend for lunch, although ‘friend’ was pushing it really because she’d known Elise Penn-Davies for over two years and yet she didn’t really know her at all. Her friends now were the wives of John’s friends (who weren’t friends either but party members, clients, movers and shakers, bum-lickers). She craved a friend, someone to whom she could open up wholly. There was no one like that in her life at present, but there was Elise.

  Elise was fifteen years older than Sophie and married to the MP for Cherlgrove North, Gerald Penn-Davies; a seasoned, efficient politician made entirely of fat who bore more than a passing physical resemblance to Winston Churchill and encouraged the comparison. Elise, by her own admission, was not to be trusted. ‘Never tell any female in our circle anything in confidence’, she had warned Sophie at their very first meeting. ‘Knowledge is power and currency and any one of them would use words like knives if they had to. Don’t even trust me, I absolutely insist.’ She was a Jewish princess, full of quotes and mantras and expansive gestures and she made Sophie laugh without meaning to with her words of wisdom: A stranger is just an enemy you haven’t met yet. Which was true, in their world at least. This present Tory party was a nest of vipers, all residing amicably in a low-alert swirl but ready to bare fangs and bite jugulars in order to survive.

  Elise was already seated at the table, which was a first because she was always fashionably late, and there was a glass in front of her with a dribble of wine left in it. She looked pale and drawn, despite the attempt to disguise that with make-up. She’d lost weight since Sophie had seen her a month ago. Her skin was stretched more thinly over her cheekbones and the corners of her mouth were sunken as if pulled down by a weight of depression. She stood at the sight of Sophie and they air-kissed. Elise sported her usual fragrance, which was Gardenia and, on this occasion, a hint of bar-room floor. A waiter greased over and handed Sophie a menu, told her that the soup of the day was asparagus and that the fish of the day was turbot. Then he took their drinks order: a sparkling water for her and bottle of Pinot Noir for Elise. Sophie waved away the offer of a second glass. She sensed an undercurrent, a whirlpool of activity below Elise’s customary composure.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Sophie dared to ask.

  ‘Totally,’ smiled Elise. ‘I’m worn out today already and sick of the sight of bloody coffee after spending an excruciating morning with Dena Stockdale and her hangers-on. Feel your ears burning, did you?’

  So, they’d been bitching about her then.

  ‘Why, though?’ asked Sophie.

  Elise had laughed then. ‘Because Dena looks in the mirror and sees her and not you, darling.’

  The compliment
was lost on Sophie; she felt only a deep pang of disappointment, especially because she’d seen a potential friend in the milkmaid-plump Dena, wife of the Chief Whip, who was heiress to the Daisy Shoes fortune. At functions Dena always greeted her effusively and said that they must do lunch, though they’d never managed to fix a firm date. Sophie had decided that the next time they met, she would pin her down to a meet. Maybe not, then.

  Elise had no compunction about being brutally candid. Sophie was in no doubt, thanks to her revelations, how she was perceived by people in John’s circle. She says she wouldn’t have your figure if someone paid her, Elise had once told her about Cordelia Greaves, who was married to the leader of Cherlgrove Council. Apparently you’re too thin and pasty. The treasurer’s wife, Eileen Eveleigh: She said you looked very cold, very unapproachable, boring. Remember when she apologised for forgetting to invite you to the ladies’ lunch – she didn’t forget. Yet to her face, they were full of fawning pleasantries. So, for now, Elise was the only person she socialised with for any amount of time and out of all the women in their world, she felt as if Elise was the least likely to stick a knife in her back. She might not have trusted her as far as she could throw her, but Sophie liked her nonetheless.

  ‘So how was the surgery?’ asked Elise.

  ‘Busy,’ replied Sophie. ‘John was keen to get it over and done with as quickly as possible, as he had a date with eighteen holes.’

  ‘I don’t know how you put up with all those whingeing people, Sophie. I mean John has to listen to them all moaning on about roads and schools, but you don’t.’

  ‘I enjoy it.’

  ‘Do you? Or does it give you a purpose that you feel is lacking from your life? You can so easily become a shadow of your partner in this job,’ sniffed Elise. ‘Take Eileen Eveleigh. I’ve seen more personality in a dead moth. If she didn’t bitch, she’d have nothing to say.’

  True, thought Sophie, though she didn’t say that. Having a conversation with Eileen was excruciatingly hard work. ‘So, how are you?’

  ‘Builders have gone, extension is finished, thank God,’ said Elise with a weighty sigh of relief.

  ‘Oh, that’s good.’

  ‘Bought myself a grossly expensive sports car this week which I’ll pick up on Monday, and I do believe Gerald is having an affair.’

  She said it so matter of factly that Sophie didn’t absorb the enormity of her words at first, not until Elise picked up a roll of bread from the basket and ripped it roughly in two as if it represented something more flesh and blood and connected to her husband via his groin.

  ‘Are you . . . are you joking?’ It wasn’t delivered like a joke but the idea that Gerald would even dare to try and do the dirty on the formidable Elise was surely not to be taken seriously.

  A small, barely discernible shake of the head from Elise, as if dismissing her last words. The matter had opened and been closed down immediately.

  ‘Cherlgrove Ball tomorrow. Should be very good. I’m looking forward to it immensely.’

  ‘Yes, so am I,’ said Sophie, respecting Elise’s choice not to talk about Gerald’s alleged affair further.

  ‘I think I’ll have the lamb today. Then again, Welsh lamb. No, I don’t think I’ll bother. Let me reconsider that.’

  The airspace around them felt unpleasantly charged with whatever was going on inside Elise’s head.

  ‘I shall have the stroganoff,’ Sophie said eventually, her voice crashing into the silence between them as if it were a hammer on ice.

  ‘Good choice. Me too.’ Elise snapped the menu shut as the waiter arrived with the wine. He rotated the bottle, showing it off.

  ‘Just pour,’ she commanded. ‘I don’t need to test it.’

  When he had gone, Elise snatched up her glass immediately and drained half of it in one.

  ‘Ever felt another female straying onto your territory, Sophie?’ she said, dabbing at her mouth then with the stiff white napkin.

  A bubble of Crying-girl drifted across the front of her brain but Sophie ignored it. ‘No.’

  ‘Bloody annoying.’

  ‘You can talk to me in confidence, Elise,’ Sophie said gently.

  ‘I shall talk, don’t you worry. I’ll go mad if I don’t tell someone and I wasn’t going to spill to the fucking Witches of Eastwick this morning.’ Her face remained immobile, but then she’d just had a course of Botox that would have smoothed out a whole adult male African elephant. But she didn’t talk until she had drained her glass of the rest of the wine and poured herself another.

  ‘Do you know who she is?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘She’s Welsh,’ answered Elise, imbuing the word with all the worst qualities she could muster, ‘and is renting a house in his constituency. Quite attractive if you like that frumpy, face-scrubbed-with-a-Brillo-pad look. Twenty-five.’

  ‘Twenty-five?’ Sophie couldn’t help the exclamation which came out louder than she’d anticipated and she quickly tweaked the volume down for the third syllable. How the hell had the portly Gerald Penn-Davies managed to pull a twenty-five-year-old, even if she was desperate? If Gerald sat in the sun and burned, he’d turn into a pork scratching.

  ‘Yes, twenty-five. It’s obvious what you’re thinking, Sophie, but power is a sexual lure; haven’t you realised that by now? We have husbands who are riddled with it, soaked through with it. Of course they’re going to be prey for libidinous harlots. I’ve had to shoo off a couple in my time before they got too close to their goal. Yes, even fat fucker Gerald has his groupies. Power can turn a frog into Hugh Jackman.’

  Sophie stopped another interjection of disbelief escaping her, even if she did have difficulty believing that anyone could ever equate Gerald with Hugh Jackman. She was also astounded that, after everything Elise had told her about spilling secrets, she was opening up to her like this. By Elise’s own admission, secrets could be used to dismantle; disclosures were mallets and chisels. Gerald and John, for all their outward camaraderie and joint obligation of party loyalty, both had their eye on the leadership and might have to resort to gladiatorial measures if that particular throne became vacant.

  ‘A pretty face coupled with ambition has the power to divert men’s brains from their heads into their underpants, darling,’ said Elise. ‘Even the most holy of them are susceptible. I really thought Gerald might have learned his lesson.’

  ‘There have been more?’ Sophie almost squeaked.

  ‘Just one, and I’m sure of that. No one else knows. I extinguished her totally, it’s the only way. They have a tendency to get nasty, you see, attempt to haunt you seeking vengeance, drill into your brain like a bug that can’t be reached or excised. It’s no good wounding them, you have to slaughter them where they stand.’

  ‘We are talking figuratively here aren’t we?’ Sophie thought it best to check.

  ‘Of course. But it probably would have been kinder if I had murdered her. I was rather brutal. But once she was gone, we could get on with our lives again.’

  ‘What about the trust, Elise?’

  Elise smiled. The long stretch of her mouth had little humour to it though.

  ‘Personally, I’ve never really put trust on a pedestal to be worshipped. Not fidelity within marriage sort of trust anyway. I trust Gerald to be loyal to the party, I trust him to keep within confines that allow him to progress in his career and keep us in the style to which I and our sons have become accustomed, but I do not trust him to remain impervious to womanly wiles. If, however, the woman to whom those wiles are attached poses a danger to his career or my comfort, then I will see her off without a moment’s consideration. And did. And will again, though it really is a bore and a drain on my energy having to deal with an infatuated silly cow who actually believes he would leave me for her.’ She blew out her cheeks. ‘Was it Abraham Lincoln who said that if you wanted to test a man’s character, give him power?’

  *

  Sheila Crabtree was Gerald’s long-term secretary. She was drab and dumpy and had b
een in love with him for years, Elise disclosed. Her internal organs must have exploded with joy when one night, after four fingers of malt whisky downed whilst he was writing a speech, Gerald’s hand extended towards her substantial bottom and slowly caressed it. Five minutes later he’d had his wicked way with her on the ingrained leather top of his oak partners’ desk. He didn’t realise it would result in releasing her inner bunny boiler.

  ‘She had her hair permed, face waxed, dropped thirty pounds, walked into work wearing lurid eyeshadow and glossy lipsticks,’ Elise told an enthralled Sophie. ‘Gerald’s “top-ups” to Sheila’s wage resulted in a complete personality change. She started behaving like his wife in the office, guarding him like a German Shepherd with a pig’s ear. It was when she would not allow me to speak to my own husband that I was moved to act. For all Gerald’s public reputation as a hardliner, he was terrified to confront Sheila, so I did it for him. She was a very stupid woman to underestimate a Jewish mother.’

  ‘What happened?’ If this had been the theatre, Sophie would have been on the edge of her seat. This was unashamedly more exciting than a James Herbert novel.

  ‘Always do your homework, Sophie. Come to the table armed with information and as many hidden knives as you can secrete about yourself – figuratively speaking again, of course. Sheila Crabtree had a history of fixations, stalking, I discovered. I told her to be a good girl, grow back her moustache and I’d find her another position within Whitehall, or she’d never work again. Conveniently she had a sick mother in a nursing home owned by a business associate of my brother. The mother was very happy there and a move could have been catastrophic for her.’

  Sophie gulped, in much the same way as she imagined Sheila Crabtree gulped.

  ‘I also had some very unflattering photographs of her sprawled on my husband’s desk, thanks to an excellent private detective I employed. Sheila really wouldn’t have wanted the people at her local church to see them. She went away without a whisper.’ Elise paused for more wine. ‘For some reason no one expects the wife to be so full of guile. The public see us standing behind our husbands and think we are vacuous and flimsy. More so if you are beautiful. I was modelling for Vogue when I met Gerald, therefore I was automatically stupid.’ She smiled softly. ‘My dear Sophie the Trophy, be Marilyn Monroe on the surface and Sherlock Holmes underneath it. The element of surprise can be your best friend.’ Then she sighed and said quietly, ‘Oh what a bloody week. Awful, absolutely awful,’ the words riding on her breath. Sophie saw a single tear slip down Elise’s face and realised just how seriously she was affected. Elise had said before that ‘tears were only for the weak and manipulative’ and ‘tears were a waste of vital fluid’, maxims that could have come straight from the ideology of St Bathsheba’s. Elise Penn-Davies did not do tears. Sophie’s hand moved across the table, closed over Elise’s, gave it a gentle squeeze.