And the Land Lay Still (84 page)

The Dundas Research Institute was housed in a nondescript basement flat in a crescent in the West End. The entrance was gloomy, but at the far end of a long corridor was a surprisingly bright and spacious room looking out on to a garden. Twenty or thirty people, some of them known to him, were standing around in conversation when he arrived. From time to time trays of sandwiches and fresh bottles of wine were brought in from another room. Displayed on a table were copies of an austere-looking pamphlet, the reason for the event.
What’s Left for the Right?
it asked in sky-blue letters on a cloud-grey background.

After a few minutes a man chinked a glass with a knife, welcomed everybody in a soft American accent to the Dundas Research Institute, of which he was a director, and craved their attention while he said a few words about the contents of the newly published pamphlet. It took David a minute to recognise the speaker as the same Mormon-resembling economist he’d heard all those years ago in Brighton. He had a stoop and was silvery now, but was no less passionate. So much had been achieved, he said. Here in the United Kingdom and throughout the West, the insidious creep of socialism had been stopped in its tracks and rolled back. Further afield, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Iron Curtain raised. Gone were the regimes that had imprisoned their peoples behind it. A revolution had taken place but, unlike most left-wing revolutions, it had been almost entirely bloodless. People, given the freedom to choose, had chosen to be consumers not recipients, owners not slaves. He quoted Sir William Harcourt, a Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1890s, who had introduced death duties and excused himself by saying, ‘We are all socialists now.’ No longer, the economist declared. ‘We are all customers now. Lenin predicted that in a truly communist society the state would wither away. How wrong he was! Only in a truly capitalist society can the state wither away. And so we are at the start of a new era: unlimited freedom, unrestricted movement of capital and labour. But nothing is guaranteed. What can we do, as pragmatists who believe in the essentially liberating power of the market, to ensure that there is no return to the dead hand of statism, to ensure that the dependency culture is banished for ever?’

The silvery Mormon outlined a few proposals for doing this.
They were, he said, gone into in more detail in the pamphlet. David lost interest, or track. Maybe it was all too familiar. Maybe he’d knocked back too many glasses of wine. Maybe the burden of ministerial responsibility, though it wasn’t actually on his shoulders yet and perhaps never would be, was weighing too heavily. Or maybe he was thinking that, like the collapsed regimes of Eastern Europe, the order of which he was a part would not last, would be undermined by events and the shifting tolerances of the people. And maybe that was what the economist was saying too: we won’t be around for ever, so we’d better make sure we build in some security for when we’re gone.

The speech ended and there was applause, followed by a rush to refill glasses. David exchanged a few words with another backbencher who had turned up but who, if he too had been to see the Secretary of State, was saying nothing about it. (Probably the man for the job, then, David decided.) There were a couple of Edinburgh councillors present too, and a woman from the party office round the corner. He had a few words with each of them in turn, or was it they who had a few words with him? He was never quite sure, on these occasions, who was patronising whom.

Then he should have been on his way, but he lingered. He should have been catching a train at Haymarket, phoning Melissa to ask her to pick him up. It would just be the two of them at the weekend. Jessica was seventeen and at the same boarding school Lucy had attended – though Jessica, an academic achiever and rather brilliant pianist, was making a much better fist of it than her aunt ever had. Daniel was fourteen and in his second year at Kilsmeddum Castle. He wasn’t as clever as his sister but he’d survive. Possibly he’d flourish. As David had survived, and possibly flourished. Melissa, though herself a product of and believer in private education, had refused to send either of the children away before their teens, and was doubtful of Kilsmeddum, but David had overruled her. ‘It didn’t do me any harm,’ he said, consciously echoing his father’s opinion and almost believing it. Tradition trumps reform. It was one reason why he liked Westminster so much, and opposed devolution.

So he lingered. Why did he linger? Was it because he couldn’t face the thought of forty-eight hours alone with Melissa? No, because they wouldn’t be alone all that time, there was a surgery in
the morning and a dinner party on Saturday night and no doubt some other function he’d forgotten about which he or they would have to attend. Anyway, he was fond of Melissa. He loved her. It wasn’t her fault. Then what was it?

Whatever he was lacking it wasn’t to be found at home. He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to be out, unrecognised, without responsibility. He wanted to be anonymous.

Other people were leaving. Soon there was just a handful of them left. He had another glass of wine. The economist, whose name he kept forgetting, who earlier had been so eloquent and looked so competent, just as he had in Brighton, now looked as misplaced as David felt. It was as if, now that his pamphlet of ideas was launched, he had no reason to be there.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming along tonight.’ He appeared not to have a clue who David was, for which David was grateful.

‘Not at all. Fascinating stuff,’ he lied.

‘Thanks. Be sure to take a copy with you. Take half a dozen if you know anyone who might be interested.’

‘I must pay you for them. After all, we’re all customers now.’

The economist laughed. ‘We printed seven hundred. We can spare a few. We’re not expecting it to make us rich. That’s not what this is about.’

‘I remember hearing you speak many years ago,’ David said. ‘Conservative Party conference in Brighton. You were talking along the same lines even then.’

‘Was I?’

‘Yes. I remember being impressed by your arguments.’

‘Impressed? What about inspired?’

‘I suppose I must have been. Otherwise I wouldn’t be an MP now, would I?’

‘I guess not.’ The economist didn’t seem to care that he was an MP.

‘It must be gratifying,’ David said, ‘to see how far we’ve come since then.’

‘It is. But you know what’s more gratifying? The fact that we’re getting our message across to the other side. Not directly. You won’t catch Neil Kinnock or John Smith darkening our door. They wouldn’t want to be seen hobnobbing with the likes of us, oh no. But the younger ones in Labour, they’re different. They may not pick up a
pamphlet called
What’s Left for the Right?
but they’re thinking the same thoughts.’

‘They are?’

‘You bet they are. If we published this with a different cover – and maybe we should, let’s call it
What’s Right for the Left?
– they’d sign up for just about everything that’s in it. They can see the old politics are all washed up. This isn’t just about cutting themselves off from Arthur Scargill or rooting out the Militant Tendency – everybody with a brain knows they’ve had to do those things. But the younger ones, they want to go further. They don’t
want
to go back to old-fashioned Labour values, they want to tear that all up and embrace the market. Yes, they do. The Conservative Party has done all the dirty work, but Labour want to be there to reap the benefits. And sooner or later they will. Sooner or later Labour will be back in government. But it won’t really be Labour any more. So whatever happens at the next election, or the one after that, doesn’t really matter, not at a fundamental level.’ He paused. ‘That’s not to say it won’t matter to you, at a personal level. You might be a casualty, being subject to the whims of the electorate, but in a war there are always casualties.’

‘Yes, there are,’ David said, and the economist smiled sadly at him, shook his hand and moved on. David was thinking of the fighting in the Gulf, where Saddam Hussein’s forces had just been ejected from Kuwait. There had been relatively few casualties on the Coalition side. It couldn’t hurt any less, he thought, if your son or your husband was one of the dead, to know that he was one of only a few. Maybe it hurt more. There had been several incidents of ‘friendly fire’ too. That, he thought, must make your loss intolerable.

He collected a single pamphlet from the table and left. There was a train in five minutes and another in an hour. He called Melissa from a phone box and told her he’d be on the second one. Then he went for a walk.

He knew, though not precisely, where he was going. This was his purpose, to reconnoitre. It was a dark, damp night, and, although it was Friday, as soon as he’d put two streets between Haymarket and himself he was alone. He strolled through the sedate crescents and terraces, unremarked. If he did enter the government, or if he lost
his seat at the next election, either way he was likely to be spending more time in Scotland, in Edinburgh. He needed to check an address, its discreetness, even though he’d already been reassured about this in a preliminary discussion on the phone. He’d called from London, dialling a number in a contact magazine dealing in specialities. The woman had been very understanding. She catered for a variety of tastes and she could accommodate his. No names, no pack drill, of course. (She hadn’t put it quite like that.) His only concern was the location. But already, as he entered the crescent, with its black railings, its heavy, evergreen foliage, its stony gravity and its firmly shut front doors, he knew it was going to be all right. He had a sudden flashback to that time in the undergrowth with the photographer’s son. That had been somewhere around this area. He’d got away with that and he’d get away with this. Sure he would.

The address was a basement flat, like the Dundas Research Institute’s only with no brass plate on the iron gate at the top of the stone steps. There was a number on the door, an illuminated electric doorbell, and that was all. While you waited for the door to open you would be almost completely out of sight from the pavement. A passer-by could easily think that nothing went on behind that door at all.

Satisfied, for now anyway, he walked to the end of the crescent, found an even subtler route back to the main streets, then headed for the station.

§

It happened again, at the usual ungodly hour somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday morning. He woke to the sound of the rumble and he groaned because he was so tired yet knew he couldn’t lie there, he’d have to get up, have to go downstairs, make himself tea, the prelude to relief. Melissa stirred. ‘What?’ ‘It’s all right, darling, go back to sleep.’ And she did. And he slipped away.

In the study, in the secrecy of that hour, he conjured up images of what would happen in the basement flat in Edinburgh. It would be the same as what happened in London, the same but different. This was good. There was comfort in habit, there was excitement in change. He didn’t keep porn or anything else in the house in Glenallan. He might be mad – unhinged? – enough to visit prostitutes (not
that he, or they, liked to use that word) but he wasn’t a complete idiot. So here he had to depend on memory and imagination, sex in the head, as he lay back and thought of her, whoever she was, and her feet, her shoes, her heels, her shoes, and his hand was on his prick and here it comes here it comes here it comes and … aaaahhhh!

‘David?’

Jesus! He jerked forward, still spouting semen into the clump of tissue. His eyes couldn’t focus, he was still coming for God’s sake, and she was there, she was bloody well there, silhouetted in the glow of the passage light she’d put on, in her angelic white nightgown, the mother of his children, looking wide-eyed and horrified as she said again, ‘David? What on earth is going on?’ And the rumble was suddenly a roar, like a jumbo jet taking off, or like the sound Jericho might have made when its walls came tumbling down.

§

It became a tradition in the 1980s to gather at Jean’s place on General Election night. Jean frequently and loudly expressed her loathing of television, but she was a hypocrite, for she had a set in her bedroom and on election nights would trundle it down to the front room and plug it into an aerial socket beside one of the windows, and after the polls closed the others would arrive – the left-leaning nationalists, the nationalist-inclined socialists – to watch the results. They came, usually, more in fear than in hope. Mike doesn’t recall it happening in 1979, but maybe that was because in 1979 everybody knew what was coming: the blessed Margaret, quoting Saint Francis. But he remembers the communal despair in 1983, when she wiped the floor with the opposition; likewise the briefly raised expectations of 1987, the so-called ‘Doomsday Scenario’ election, which was supposed to demonstrate that the Tories had no mandate to govern in Scotland – and it did, and they carried on regardless. There was 1992, when the gathering really believed the long, dark winter was about to end, and it didn’t; and 1997, when finally it was over, and things, for a moment, could only get better. Off on, off on, like a light, like a relationship. Like the relationship he had with Adam.

Over the years, Mike took a special but silent interest in the fate of one particular MP, David Eddelstane. He’d never said anything to Adam about their brief liaison. It was too embarrassing, politically
and personally, and so long ago. Adam knew that Eddelstane had been at the same school as Mike, albeit some years earlier, but that was all he knew. At each election Mike would wait for the Glenallan and West Mills result, expecting David to be ousted, and each time he would survive on a diminished majority. The others in the room would shout or groan with disappointment, not because of any personal animosity towards Eddelstane but because he was a Scottish Tory MP who supported every government policy that they objected to, and this was reason enough to wish him to lose. And Mike would shout or groan with them, and it wasn’t personal for him either. And yet, though he could not say so in such company, of course it was.