The Madness of July Page 11

The pavement was busy, and he felt the holiday spirit abroad in the crowd moving around him in the direction of Parliament Square. To the world beyond his own, politics was entering its summer hibernation. He stopped to talk to a backbencher with whom he was friendly, giving his visiting constituents their ministerial moment, then negotiated the traffic in the square to get back to base.

  As he did so, Lucy was ringing Francesca. ‘If Lawrence is on time, which I’m sure he is, Will is in the car and on his way. May we talk?’

  Francesca was cool. ‘We have to. What’s going on, Lucy?’

  ‘You mean, with Will?’

  ‘Of course. I just can’t get through to him,’ Francesca said. And without any further acknowledgement from either of them, the conversation took on a different tone. They were still feeling each other out, but understood that they were going to take the risk and trade information.

  ‘You know he’s been a bit distracted in the last week or two. I don’t know how much he’s told you,’ Francesca began. No response.

  ‘May I be frank?’ Francesca continued. ‘Will had a bad night last night after the opera. He was secretive, unhappy. And he asked me a strange question out of the blue when he was half asleep – about how I’d define madness. I don’t know whether he even realized he’d spoken. No context, just that. I didn’t know what to think. Has he said anything like that to you?’ Then she added, ‘Please.’

  Lucy didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, end of last week. Don’t know why. He passed it off with a laugh. I think he was surprised it had slipped out.’

  Francesca asked, ‘Did you have an answer for him?’

  ‘’Course not. Made a joke of it.’

  Francesca, not ready to resurrect her lunch invitation, said they both had to try in their different ways to help him through.

  ‘I’ll try as best I can, and it’ll be fine,’ Lucy said. ‘We’ve been here before.’ Francesca thanked her, and prepared for her day. Lucy straightened her papers and asked the rest of the office staff, bustling around, to leave her alone. She took an envelope from her locked cabinet, stood still for a moment, and placed it on Flemyng’s desk.

  *

  As she did so, the two other ministers from the opera party were across the street, together in a small conference room in number twelve Downing Street, where the chief whip had his headquarters, with a disagreeable problem on the table. Harry Sorley’s bill was caught in a parliamentary struggle that seemed to draw added heat from the rising temperature outside, and had the whole of Westminster complaining about long nights and the prospect of postponed holidays. The bill was being eviscerated and the entrails, as the chief put it, were beginning to stink.

  ‘Sorry to call you together at this God-awful hour,’ he said. ‘But we need to get this fixed, and quick.’

  Extricating themselves from Sorley’s muddle would be messy, but that was politics. The whips were ready. There would be a concession to the unhappy mob and the threat that if they didn’t buy it, maybe had the gall to ask for more, the House would stay sitting into the school holidays. Deal done, as the chief knew, but there would be pain. Jonathan Ruskin had fetched up, Sorley’s friend at court, to dispense wisdom and warmth.

  The chief whip was large and sometimes cheery, but kept his job because he had a relish for black politics, coloured with a scatological turn of phrase and a love of verbal violence. Sorley was dressed more smartly than usual, as if to make the point that he was going to keep his self-respect to the last. The chief whip sniffed his shaving balm when he entered, and blew his nose loudly. He noticed that Gwilym wasn’t smiling, which was unusual, and said to him, ‘You look terrible. You should piss off for a while. Let’s get on with it.’

  Sorley had put up a terrible performance at the party meeting on Tuesday, and there was a panicky interview in the Telegraph the following day, in which he had unwittingly revealed his fear, giving the scent of blood to a parliamentary pack on the prowl and stirring their ravenous urge. He’d be dead meat before the weekend was over. A firm hand was needed. As far as Ruskin was concerned, the detail of the bill was of no moment. ‘It’s piss and wind, I’m afraid,’ he’d told the chief whip the previous afternoon, though he’d flexed his muscles in arguing for it in cabinet a few months before, when the wind was coming from a different direction. An age ago.

  Gwilym pulled himself together to begin. ‘Harry, it’s obvious that this could drag on for a longish stretch, to no one’s benefit. Clause three, which I know is what you’re most concerned to save, isn’t going to make it through this side of the recess, I’m afraid.’ He paused to chew his pen. ‘Maybe not at all.’

  Sorley felt on his cheeks the first brush of the kiss of death. Gwilym said, ‘The boys won’t wear it – backbenchers are in a funny summer mood. Jumpy.’ His pen was passing to and fro above the offending paragraphs in his copy of the bill, circling for the kill.

  He lightened things, aware of the tension. ‘The party’s in a state. I think we should do something dramatic. Cut loose and get the advantage.’ With this, he threw a thin smile in Sorley’s direction.

  ‘Chief?’ In response, there was a sharp nod from his right.

  Sorley drooped miserably. It was Ruskin’s moment. He spoke softly. ‘Harry, drop clause three altogether. Out it goes. Get up there and make the concession. Be forthright – make a virtue of it. We don’t do it often enough. Just say – “I’ve changed my mind.” We can do an all-night sitting on Tuesday, get the whole damned thing through and sail off on holiday, with Sorley the hero who’s saved the day.’

  He lifted his arms from the table with a flourish. The chief whip grunted again. ‘Done,’ he said.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Sorley, ‘because it involves me getting up in the House, standing on my head and then sticking it up my arse.’

  Gwilym, now in the groove, was ready with a reassuring word. ‘Come on, Harry. There’s not a minister in any government you can remember who hasn’t had to do this. Forbes had the frigate procurement balls-up and put his hand up. Mr Humility. The papers were fawning at his feet, and he hasn’t been out of the news since. You can do it and prosper, you know.’

  ‘Damned right he did,’ said Sorley. ‘We both know he’s a complete shit, but you’re not allowed to say it. Out there, they think he’s fun. He screws up something, they say “Good Old Jay”; with me it’s “Sorley Sinks Again”.’ His listeners realized there was a real danger of tears.

  Gwilym ploughed on. ‘Jonathan’s right. We can make this work. The foreign debate on Tuesday we can ditch easily; it was always a filler in case we needed a slot in the last week. I’ll fix it with Will Flemyng. An evening on Iran he could do without anyway. It means we can have a last all-nighter before the summer – they all enjoy it at this time of year in the heat and the dark, as we know – and by the time we’re back in the autumn, your bill will be safe and ready for the statute book.’

  Being a broadly honest soul, he added, ‘Well, most of it.’

  ‘You’re right about our Will, anyway,’ Sorley said. ‘He’ll carry it off, Flemyng the Glamour Boy. Some of us don’t have the bloody ancestral estate. Only have one spare suit. He’ll always power on, when the rest of us fall away.’

  There was silence. The chief whip broke it, but offered Sorley nothing. ‘Stop it. Flemyng’s one of your friends. Don’t you forget it, or you’ll have none left. It happens damned quick, in my experience.’ Peering across the desk at Sorley, and refusing to offer him a hand, he repeated, ‘Damned quick.’

  With Sorley looking sick, and turning pale at the inevitability of it all, Ruskin rode to the rescue, which was his special skill in gloomier moments, dropping his voice even further to a consoling level. His perfect grooming, and his taste in shirts, made him the picture of confidence. He put a hand on Sorley’s and inclined his head to talk in confessional mode, keeping his voice steady. Ignoring Sorley’s outburst against Flemyng, he said, ‘Listen, friend’ – the formula perfect at that juncture – ‘you’re understandab
ly browned off by our folks over the road, and their silly games. Our own lads who make it difficult. We’ll get some of them, you can be sure of that. But there’s life for you beyond this bill. You’re in favour.’

  To be clear, he repeated it, ‘You’re in favour,’ making it sound like a priestly indulgence, offered without need of grubby payment. ‘Act big now and you’ll reap your reward. ‘He touched Sorley’s arm, feeling the thick black hair and nearly being jerked into what would have been an unhelpful recoil.

  ‘We’ll brief on your steadiness under fire.’

  Sorley’s head was down and his fingers were drumming on the table, making a quiet tumbril sound. He understood that whatever chutzpah he might manage to summon up for his speech on Tuesday, he had surrendered his dignity around this table. Everyone knew it. ‘Fine,’ he said, looking down at his hands. Then, realizing that he had to make a show of it, he added, ‘Let’s do it!’ and gave the table a feeble slap, which was more embarrassing than doing nothing, because it revealed that all conviction had left him.

  They turned quickly to their own affairs, with Ruskin leading Sorley from the room under the protection of an arm long enough to clutch the far shoulder as they walked. ‘It’s a rough old trade,’ he said as he saw him out into Downing Street. ‘We’ve always known it. We just have to rely on friends, and you have them in spades. Including Will – don’t forget it. Now we’ll all stick together. Nil desperandum,’ which Sorley found irritating but knew was kindly meant.

  ‘Thanks, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful, but there we are.’

  Gwilym went to his room to phone Flemyng’s office and tell Lucy to forget the Iran debate, tying up the job. The business of government went on.

  A normal, hot Friday.

  *

  Flemyng had arrived in his own office just before the chief’s meeting broke up and Sorley was led away. After settling at his desk, with his first coffee drained, he asked Lucy to come in and close the door. She was in one of her maroon shirts, which he’d told her he liked, and her long reddish hair was managed as well as ever, tumbling free across her shoulders. She was not in a mood for compliments, and Flemyng saw weariness in her pallor and downturned mouth.

  ‘OK?’ he said.

  Lucy had difficulties at home. Her teacher husband was not looking forward to the next foreign posting, due to come her way soon. She was turning thirty at the end of the year and wanted a move. There were no children yet, and Flemyng knew enough to be aware that they argued about whose career should prevail. It was unresolved. ‘I hope everything’s better back at base.’

  She ignored the overture and said sharply, ‘Why are you avoiding the point?’

  Flemyng’s eyebrows rose. He picked up the envelope on the desk in front of him. ‘This?’

  ‘I’ve read it,’ she said. ‘I assume that’s why you left the drawer open overnight. So that I would find it.’

  He smiled.

  ‘It was sneaky – I’m being blunt here – trying to make me feel bad, or putting one over on me in some way? Why not just show it to me? I can only think of one explanation.’

  ‘Come on then,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘That you wrote it yourself.’

  The cruelty, born of anger, was deliberate and Lucy saw him stricken with shock, eyes narrowing and creases appearing on his brow. The hollows in his cheeks seemed to deepen. But she said, ‘I think I deserve an answer, don’t you?’ without giving way.

  Flemyng got to his feet. ‘Of all the things you might have said, I didn’t expect that, I promise you. Surely you can’t believe it, if you’ve read that letter carefully?’

  ‘All I know,’ said Lucy, slapping the table with her hand, ‘is that you’ve been sunk in some kind of gloom for the last week. Everyone’s seen it. Then you put on a pantomime to lead me to discover this. If it’s a game, it’s a weird one. So you can see how I reached my conclusion.’

  Taking his time, he walked round his desk to the chair and sat down again. He took the single sheet of paper from the envelope, unfolded it and put it squarely in front of him, smoothing the folds. ‘Well, let’s read it again, together. And I’m very sorry, Lucy. You didn’t deserve this.’

  Then, with his gift for surprise, he leaned across the desk towards her and said without warning, ‘I’m scared. Can’t you see it?’

  She stared at him.

  He splayed his right fingers on the paper and turned it round in one movement, pushing it slightly towards her. It gave the letter an untouchable quality, as if it were liable to explode if interfered with. She placed both elbows on the desk, pulled her chair in, and looked down without setting her own hand on it. For a moment Flemyng imagined her sitting an exam paper, or having a first look at some teasing cipher that resisted explanation, and was excited by the intensity of her gaze. She settled gently to the task like an archivist in a quiet cloud of dust.

  He watched, knowing that she was clearing her mind and reading the letter as if for the first time.

  Before her lay a sheet of House of Commons notepaper without a member’s name printed across the top, only the portcullis crest and no other indication of its origin. It was a photocopy of a note, dated eight days ago with the month rendered in roman numerals, vii, typed like the rest of the letter. Her discipline and fingertip concentration allowed her to begin at the beginning and not to try to jump to the last line, although from her study of it the previous evening she could have recited some passages from memory.

  There was no salutation at the top and no signature at the bottom.

  Flemyng leaned back and watched her work her way through the letter, her only movement being a slight shifting of the elbows. She didn’t touch the paper, and her head stayed perfectly still. She didn’t look up as her eyes moved down the page. He heard her catch her breath a couple of times, very quietly, as if capturing some meaning that had previously escaped her. She read deliberately slowly, as if she was starting on a paper that was much longer than the thirty lines of this letter. Twice she stopped and went back to give a passage a second chance. On each occasion a twitch at the corners of her mouth suggested that she had confirmed an opinion, not changed it.

  Lucy could devour a complicated government paper and get to the point in a flash, but she was controlling herself here and forcing her eyes to take their time.

  Finally she read it aloud, and he leaned back to listen. He knew almost every sentence by heart.

  ‘I cannot express the pain your disdain caused me yesterday… why have you repaid me like this? You must know how deeply this hurts, after everything we’ve done. How are we going to continue?

  ‘I may be losing my mind.’

  Flemyng assumed that she shared the surge of embarrassment and guilt that he had felt on first reading these words, but that she was also engrossed in analyzing the personality laid bare on the page in front of her. There was now no outward sign of the stab of alarm he had felt when she accused him of having written it. He appeared content.

  Lucy decided, without any appeal to him, to continue to read aloud.

  ‘I have come to the conclusion that you are bent on a cruel destruction of our relationship. This can’t be happening by chance. I would beg you to stop, but it may be too late. Is this inevitable in our lives? Did you always know?’

  For the first time, she looked up, drew breath and turned back to the letter.

  ‘Where do we go from here? I’m desperate.’

  Lucy glanced over the page at him. ‘Desperate? The trouble is, I believe it.’

  ‘How can you pretend that this is not happening? For you it’s business as usual; but agony for me. When I need your help you’re not there. All the others are driving me insane. We need this game, both of us, but we have to play it together. The only way.’

  She had almost done. She saw that the last paragraph had words that were heavily underscored in ink, some of them several times, and that the typed text took on a rattled character, with wayward punctuation, as if it h
ad been composed in fits and starts. She read on, without losing her rhythm. One line near the end held her attention, so she repeated it. Flemyng watched her closely.

  ‘This could kill me, or both of us. Don’t you see that?’

  She lifted up the sheet of paper to try to catch the light better, and let her eyes examine it from an angle. ‘From the same typewriters as we use, so familiar.’

  She returned to reading aloud the last line. ‘We may not have long. Help me.’

  Sitting back, she looked across the desk at him. ‘Well?’ said Flemyng.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘I take it,’ he said, ‘that you now understand what I meant when I said I was scared.’

  Quietly, she said she did. Then, considering the seriousness with which Flemyng had approached the letter, his horror at the suggestion that he might have written it himself in a storm of despair, and his concentration on her reaction, she decided to take a chance and leap over the first fence. ‘I’m assuming that your interest in this means that it’s either addressed to a minister, or written by one, or a senior official using this notepaper. There’s nothing low-grade about this. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter. It’s from our level or above.’ She moved one hand back and forth, palm parallel to the desk. ‘Although I find that a difficult thought. Unbelievable, in fact.’

  ‘Yet you thought it could be written by me.’

  Lucy said she was paid to think the unthinkable, take nothing on trust. ‘I’m sorry if that hurts. But you always say you want honesty.’

  ‘It does sometimes hurt. Forget it.’ He turned away as he spoke. ‘I think you’re right that it was written by a minister. That’s my own conclusion.’

  She revealed that her first impression matched his. ‘Can you tell me where this came from? It’s odd as well as scary. At first you might think it was – well, about sex. Naturally.’ Lucy gave no sign of embarrassment. ‘But somehow, and I’m not sure why I say this, I don’t think it is.’ He put out his hand towards her, to show that he’d reached the same conclusion, with the same level of incomprehension.