Heaven's Light (34 page)

‘You were very kind to me,’ she said. ‘I think I got off lightly.’

Hendricks chuckled. He’d already given her the telephone number of the
pied-à-terre
he used in Southampton during the week, making it plain that Pompey First’s onscreen prospects might benefit from a closer relationship. ‘You were terrific,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t done this before.’

‘I haven’t. I’d tell you if I had.’

‘Then you’re a natural. And the more you do, the better you’ll get.’ He bent to kiss her cheek as the Mercedes pulled up beside them. Then he reached for the rear door and opened it with a flourish. Barnaby was already out of the car, watching the pantomime. Hendricks caught his eye. ‘Pretend you’re the chauffeur,’ he said. ‘It’s the least you owe her.’

Barnaby and Kate exchanged glances, then Kate giggled and slipped into the back seat. She’d had barely anything to eat and a second glass of Sauvignon had gone to her head. Barnaby rounded the bonnet and shook Hendricks’s hand. ‘Thanks for everything. You’ve been an enormous help.’

Hendricks was still looking at Kate.

‘It’s a pleasure,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

Back on the motorway, returning to Portsmouth, Kate was still in the back seat. As he drove through the suburbs of Southampton, Barnaby had talked about her performance, and she’d responded to his compliments with a smile and a nod, saying little, refusing to play the excited
ingénue.
What mattered, she’d murmured, was the next appearance and the appearance after that. If Pompey First was to be more than a gleam in Charlie Epple’s eye, then they had to think long-term. This time round, they’d been lucky. Hendricks and the production team had made it easy. Perhaps Hendricks might come up with another invitation.

Barnaby eyed her in the rear-view mirror. ‘He wants to do a profile,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised he didn’t mention it.’

‘A what?’

‘A profile. That’s if we win, of course. He wants to shadow you with a crew. See how you cope with real power.’

‘He does?’

‘Yes.’

‘And would he be there? In person?’

‘I imagine so.’

Kate said nothing, gazing out of the window at the blur of warehouses on the outskirts of Fareham. The expression on her face, reflective, content, enigmatic, reminded Barnaby of Sunday mornings after they’d made love. There were parts of Kate it was impossible to touch, and he knew with absolute certainty that, no matter what he did, they’d always be beyond his reach. He could spend his whole life trying but he’d never truly know her. That, at least, was now clear.

Kate breathed on the window then drew a little cartoon face with her fingertip, its mouth bowed upwards in a grin.

‘You should have done that interview,’ she said. ‘You’re the one with the real brains.’

‘Nonsense. You were great.’

‘I’m serious. Why should I get all the fun? All the glory? It’s not your style, darling, all this back-seat stuff.’

Barnaby laughed. She was in the back seat. He was at the wheel.

‘That’s not what I meant.’ She wiped away the face. ‘You’ve spoken at meetings. I’ve heard you. You do it brilliantly. It’s what you’re best at. People believe you, they listen to you.’

She leaned forward, her arms folded over the back of the passenger seat. Barnaby could smell the wine on her breath as she bent towards him, dancing her fingertips along the line of his collar.

‘No?’

‘No what?’

‘Don’t you miss it? Resent it? Just a little bit? People like me hogging it all? Some of the other guys, too. When you’ve done all the work.’

Kate mentioned a handful of the other candidates, men and women who’d spent the last month or so devoting their spare time to bedding down the Pompey First campaign. Thanks to Harry Wilcox, the
Sentinel
had carried little stories on each, accompanied by the photos Charlie Epple had so carefully commissioned. The sight of their own faces in the local paper, alongside a column or two of helpful prose, had sent party morale through the roof. This was evidence that Pompey First was truly under way, proof that, individually, their touch on the wheel mattered.

‘You think I should have been a candidate?’

‘Definitely. And I still don’t understand why you’re not. You had the pick of the ward seats. You could practically guarantee a result.’

Barnaby accepted the point. Back in the spring, he’d toyed with the idea, but the harder he’d thought about the realities of the job the less keen he’d become. Being a local councillor meant grubbing around in people’s lives, sorting out their problems, mediating in their quarrels, defending them from the chaos that increasingly threatened to overwhelm
them. As a solicitor, he’d shouldered this kind of burden for years, applying Legal Aid to society’s walking wounded, and he knew exactly how frustrating and exhausting the burden could be. Far better, he’d decided, to remain behind the scenes, directing strategy, allocating resources, acting as a counterweight to Charlie’s wayward brilliance. This, he was certain, was where the real power lay. Not in the weekly trudge to draughty ward surgeries and endless committee rooms, but back at party headquarters, updating the political map, plotting the line of the next assault. He was a general, he’d decided, not one of the sharp-end troops. Though generals, too, might command a little of the limelight.

Kate was sitting back again, watching his eyes in the mirror. When the mobile rang, she reached between the front seats, lifting the handset. The message was brief. At the end of it she glanced at her watch. ‘Give us ten minutes,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you there.’

Charlie Epple was waiting on the main London road, deep in Portsmouth’s northern suburbs. Above his head, on a huge billboard, a man on a ladder was flattening the last wrinkles on the latest of Charlie’s posters. Since March, he’d been buying space on prime sites across the city, firing broadside after broadside in Pompey First’s assault on the local political establishment. This one, in its cheeky irreverence, was typical. Against the now-familiar sea-green background, in bold white lettering, it read
HONK TWICE FOR POMPEY FIRST
.

Barnaby touched the Mercedes’ horn as the car slid to a halt beside the kerb. Charlie bent to the window. The last week or so, he’d taken to wearing a Pompey football-club
tracksuit, complete with grass stains on both knees. He was a walking reminder, he said, that the big game was getting closer. Now he was indicating a group of men across the road. They were standing on the pavement outside an open door, staring at the poster.

‘Don’t you love it?’ he said. ‘Just look at them.’

Barnaby followed his pointing finger, recognizing the newly painted premises of the Labour Party headquarters. Few of Charlie’s ideas lacked impact but this one was less subtle than most. In the back of the car, Kate’s head was in her hands and she was sobbing with laughter. Another car swept past, hooting derisively.

‘They’ll have to move,’ Charlie said. ‘They’ll never put up with that.’

‘They can’t move. There’s only five days to go.’

‘Exactly.’ Charlie banged the car roof, then asked Kate about the TV recording.

‘She was brilliant,’ Barnaby said. ‘Absolutely brilliant. Wiped the floor with them.’

‘You did?’ Charlie reached into the car, cupped Kate’s face in his hands, kissed her on the lips and then changed the subject yet again.

There’d been another breakthrough on the media front. A leading Sunday tabloid had been on, looking for a new angle for the local elections. One of the city’s Tory MPs, Philip Biscoe, had lodged an official complaint about another of Charlie’s posters. This one had featured a photo of the House of Commons in full cry. Charlie’s graphics team had added balloons and silly hats to the bedlam in the Chamber and top and bottom Charlie had penned yet more copy that summed up the public’s contempt for mainstream politicians.
PARTY TIME,
the line had read,
DON’T THEY JUST LOVE IT
? Beneath the photo, in a smaller typeface, Charlie
had added the inevitable conclusion,
VOTE POMPEY FIRST. THE PARTY FOR GROWN-UPS.
And on a new line,
ACTION, NOT WORDS
.
Hard on the heels of similar digs, this poster had evidently stretched Tory patience to the limit and, rather later than Charlie had expected, the big guys had cracked.

‘So what’s Biscoe done?’

‘Gone to the ASA.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘Infringement of Commons copyright. He says it’s not our photo to deface.’

‘Is he right?’

‘Yeah.’ Charlie chortled. ‘Of course he’s right. But that’s not the point. The point is, he can’t take the pressure. The point is, we’ve dug a hole and he’s fallen bloody in. I talked to the
Sunday Mirror
this morning. They’re promising a centre spread. Biscoe’s gone barmy.’ He grinned. ‘Two million people read the
Mirror.
Are you telling me that’s bad news?’

Barnaby shook his head, trying to assess the damage. The Advertising Standards Authority seldom went further than a slap on the wrist but getting up Parliament’s nose was a different matter. In theory, they had the power to summon Charlie to answer before the House of Commons, an order that Barnaby knew Charlie would be only too happy to obey. Publicity, in his view, was the fuel that powered Pompey First. The more you put in the tank, the quicker you’d change the world.

Kate wanted to know more about the centre spread in the
Sunday Mirror.
Were they serious about a double page? Or was that more journalistic licence?

‘It’s kosher,’ Charlie said. ‘They’re trying to line up the heavy guys to have a pop at us.’

‘Heavy guys?’

‘London politicos. If they’ve got any sense, they won’t touch us with a barge pole but it’s a funny old time. The
Mirror
still goes to a lot of Labour families, and that size of readership might be hard to resist—’ He broke off to yell abuse at a passing motorist who’d neglected to sound his horn.

‘But if they
did
do a double spread?’ Kate insisted.

‘Yeah, it’d be brilliant, that kind of space …’ Charlie was back with Barnaby. ‘But we still haven’t quite got it, have we? We’re still not quite there. We need a headline, an issue, something really solid, something for the broadsheets. It’s out there somewhere. It has to be. But I’m buggered if I know where.’

Barnaby was checking his watch. When he looked up again, he was smiling. ‘I think I may have found it,’ he said, ‘I’ll phone you later.’

Barnaby dropped Kate outside her house. He didn’t tell her where he was going next and she didn’t ask, understanding that this was the real answer to the question she’d posed earlier about Barnaby’s political ambitions. There were some moves he preferred to make in private, without consultation or interference. When she’d tackled him before about this, demanding to be part of whatever it was he had in mind, he’d shaken his head and talked about the importance of taking risks and about not wanting to load the responsibility for failure onto others.

At the time she’d assumed this independence of his was strictly professional but since then she’d gathered that this was pretty much the way he led the rest of his life, playing the tables alone, piling the chips onto a particular colour or a lucky square, and hoping to God that the numbers
came up. Kate adored this addiction to chance, the preparedness to look disaster in the face. Indeed, it was one of the reasons she’d felt so attracted to Barnaby in the first place. But lately she’d spotted something else in his makeup: that playing the tables was one thing but winning was quite another. Given a lucky roll of the dice, Barnaby was incapable of dealing with what followed. It had been the same with his marriage, the same in their own relationship. Once the hunt was over and the quarry run to earth, the man became somehow caged, the prisoner of his own success.

Kate watched the Mercedes round the corner and disappear, wondering whether it was anything as simple as boredom. Success, after all, could be claustrophobic: lots of money, lots of security, the sudden prospect of a risk-free life. The latter was especially relevant just now. Kate was still no closer to knowing how Liz had found out about their renewed affair but by kicking her husband out she’d certainly changed everything. For three difficult weeks, Barnaby had camped in her house, sharing her bed, her bathroom and the intimate routines she called her day. If she’d believed a tenth of the promises he’d made, the letters he’d penned, the poems he’d Blu-tacked to the windscreen of her car, this sudden plunge into domesticity should have knotted them closer than ever.

Yet the reverse had happened. He’d become secretive, and slightly irritable. He’d talked incessantly about Jessie. And last weekend, when he’d finally decamped, having taken a six-month lease on a luxury seafront apartment, it had been with barely an hour’s notice. He had some things to work out, some issues to resolve in his head. It wasn’t anything to do with her. It was simply a period of introspection, of retrieving a little perspective, a little focus. Kate had
listened to it all, watching him ferrying his bags to the car and, to his visible relief, she’d expressed neither anger nor surprise. In truth, she’d felt both, though the house – and her own life – had been infinitely less oppressive since.

She felt in her bag for the front-door key, wondering where he was off to now. She admired the intelligence and sheer energy that he and Charlie Epple had brought to Pompey First. That kind of talent, in her experience, was rare in local politics. But local politics, with all its trivia, involved real consequences for real people, and she’d come to realize that the problem with the Hayden Barnabys of this world was their self-absorption. They were clever and hardworking and never ran out of zippy ideas but, in the end, she suspected, they didn’t really care at all. Not because they didn’t want to, but because they simply didn’t know how.

Harry Wilcox was sitting in the bar at the Imperial Hotel when Barnaby walked in. Wilcox nodded at one of the waitresses and the glass of Tiger beer was already on the table by the time Barnaby had peeled off his coat and sat down. Wilcox listened to his account of the afternoon at the TV studios, lifting his glass to Kate at the end. For public consumption, Wilcox was obliged to keep his personal political leanings a closely guarded secret but he’d never left Barnaby in any doubt that his heart was with Pompey First. It was, he’d confided from the outset, a defining idea. ‘And Zhu?’ he enquired. ‘Our Raymond?’