Sheer Abandon (51 page)

Clio arrived in the early evening, when the pavements outside the cafés and bars of Clapham and Battersea were filling up with pretty, noisy young people; within ten minutes she felt at home. The house was so pretty, every room dizzily crammed with books and pictures and ephemera of every type; Jocasta collected a range of things, advertising memorabilia, silk shawls which were strewn as throws across every imaginable surface, and 1930s books of school stories by people like Angela Brazil. There were also several collages, made up with snapshots from Jocasta’s childhood, mostly pictures of her and Josh with their mother, a rather severe-looking woman—and only one with their father, taken at what was presumably Jocasta’s eighteenth. That was Jocasta of the year they had met, skinny, very brown, in a strapless black dress with her hair up. Ronald Forbes was what people described as a fine-looking man, tall and blond, very like Jocasta—or Josh—wearing a dinner jacket, standing close to Jocasta, but not touching her and not smiling, either. It was not in a collage, that picture, but mounted in a silver frame. Whatever she said, he clearly mattered to her—very much. Partly the basis for her relationship with Gideon, Clio thought: she had a father complex.

There were other collages, of her schooldays and her travels and even, rather touchingly, of her life with Nick: a dizzy display, taken in bars and restaurants, at parties and out with friends. Poor Nick. Clio, who had liked what little she had seen of him, felt very sad for him. She felt increasingly doubtful about Jocasta’s new relationship.

She had brought a few things for her supper with her and had just uncorked a bottle of wine when the phone rang.

“Is that Jocasta?”

“No, it’s not, I’m afraid. Who’s calling?”

“Is that Clio? What a wonderful surprise to hear your voice.” It was Fergus Trehearn.

“Yes. I mean, is it?” God, she must sound ridiculous. “Jocasta lent me her house for a day or so. I’ve got to be in London and—”

“This is Fergus Trehearn.”

“I know. I mean, I recognised your voice.”

“Well, it’s very nice that it made such an impression on you. My voice, that is. Now it’s ridiculous to be calling her there, I know, but she told me she pops in from time to time and I can’t raise her anywhere else. Her mobile is switched off. How are you, Clio?”

“Very well, thank you. Fergus, if you want Jocasta, she’s in New York. With Gideon. They’re staying at the Carlyle.”

“Ah, yes. It’s one of Gideon’s favourites. I’ll call her there. It’s not urgent, just something about Kate.”

“Fine. I hope you get hold of her.”

“I will. And I hope your business goes well. Some terribly high-powered medical conference, I expect?”

“No, not exactly,” said Clio. “I’m…visiting a hospital. I’m applying for a job at my old hospital and this place I’m going to is affiliated to it.”

“Applying for a job? As a hospital doctor?”

“Well, yes. A consultant. A consultant geriatrician. Which is what I was before.” Why was she telling him all this?

“Geriatrics—that’s the care of the elderly, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed.”

“What a wonderful job, what marvellous work to be doing. It breaks my heart to think of old people being neglected, uncared for. When they’ve done so much for us. And I wouldn’t mind betting they’re a little more courteous than your younger patients might be.”

“That’s exactly right,” said Clio, smiling, surprised at his insight. “Anyway, I’m sorry, I’m keeping you—”

“Not at all. I would love to continue the conversation. But, yes, I should call Jocasta. More’s the pity. Goodbye, Clio, it’s been extremely nice talking to you.”

She wished she could dislike him, because she so totally disapproved of what he did. But she couldn’t. He had the same effect on her, she reflected, putting the phone down, as drinking a glass of good red wine. Soothed. Pleased. The opposite of irritable.

On an impulse, and prompted by a picture on the wall of the three of them at Heathrow in a backpacking collage, she decided to try and raise Martha Hartley. It was only half past six, and since she had said in her interviews that she frequently worked till midnight, she might just catch her. She called Sayers Wesley and was put through to a girl with a coolly clipped accent, who told her that Miss Hartley was away, but that she would pass on the message.

“But I should warn you, she will be extremely busy for a few days at least. I can’t promise anything.”

Clio put the phone down feeling ruffled. Snooty bitch. She probably only passed on the messages she thought sufficiently important. For some reason she thought of Martha, all those years ago, talking about her very different life then as a vicar’s daughter, the conditions of what she described as “unbelievable respectability,” in which she had grown up “in a spotlight of sorts. The whole parish watching.”

Well, the parish would be watching her now; it was also her constituency. Binsmow in Suffolk. Now there was a way of tracking her down. She said in the article she went there every weekend, on constituency business. And her parents were bound to be nice people.

Clio suddenly felt rather excited. She would call them, see if they knew when Martha would be back. They would definitely pass the message on. She was intrigued now by Martha, the totally changed Martha. She had become a challenge. She dialled directory enquiries. “Binsmow, Suffolk,” she said. “The name is Hartley. It’s a vicarage.”

Nick was walking over Westminster Bridge next morning when his phone went; it was Theodore Buchanan.

“Hello, young Nicholas. Nice piece yesterday. Well done.”

He had run an item about rural unemployment, quoting several MPs on the devastating effect a hunting ban would have on employment in the area. It was a neat payment for Buchanan’s story about Chad Lawrence.

“I just thought you’d like to know,” Buchanan was saying, “I’m going to raise the other matter as a point of order this evening. I’ve given advance warning to the Speaker’s Office. It’ll be pretty late, probably about nine, because there’s a lot of stuff about the Lords Reform. Now, this is what I’m going to say…”

Later that day, Nick wrote his story and filed it—after rechecking with Buchanan that he was indeed making his point of order. He had run so many of these exclusive stories and they never failed to worry as well as excite him. The great fear being that with the story set and ready to run, something would prevent that statement (with its consequent parliamentary privilege) from being made.

“So that the newspaper isn’t actually reporting what an MP has said at all, but making an actionable statement of its own,” he had explained once to Jocasta, “and therefore laying itself open to the laws of libel.”

Buchanan reassured him once again that there was absolutely no question but that the point of order would be made, “In roughly two hours from now, I’d say.”

Chapter 28

         Sometimes they made her feel terribly hunted, her e-mails; they pursued her wherever she went. This morning she was checking them from her suite at the Observatory. Quite a long list, as usual. Mostly administrative matters: could she attend this meeting, agree to that memo, was she available for a session with Paul Quenell the following Wednesday. And there was a list of people who had called. She skimmed through them: mostly from outside the firm concerning committees and charitable boards she had agree to sit on, functions she was invited to attend. Then a name that made her heart lurch: Clio Scott. Would Martha call her about a meeting, as soon as she could?

Martha sat staring at the screen, feeling her mind fracture: Mackenzie, Paul Quenell, Sayers Wesley, Jack Kirkland, Centre Forward were in one part of it, a smoothly controlled, well-conducted place; and Clio was in quite another. What did she want? Why had she suddenly called? What could she possibly want with her, what might she know, what could she do?

Stop it, Martha, stop it; you’re panicking. It’s panic that’s dangerous. The only thing that’s dangerous. Calm is everything, calm and control: that’s what keeps you safe. Everything was perfectly all right. Maybe Clio wanted to arrange a reunion for the three of them. Jocasta had mentioned something of the sort. Yes, that was actually quite likely. Quite likely.

A sliver of cool was parting the hot panic, sending it away. There was no need to see Clio, talk to her even. She could simply tell her PA to say that she was too busy and she’d call her when her diary was a little less full. That was what she always said to unwelcome invitations and it always worked. Then she never called them, and usually they never called her back. Clio could be banished again, there was no need to admit her any further into her life.

And now she would go to the gym for half an hour before she had to set out for Wesley’s offices and another tedious but infinitely controllable meeting with Donald Mackenzie.

At one point she had been afraid she would have to stay on, but they seemed to be nearly there now; and she would fly back on Friday night, and be in London for the one really important event in her political diary, a meeting on Sunday with Janet Frean along with several other party members to discuss a standing committee Janet had been invited to serve on, in connection with benefit fraud. Martha was really excited at the prospect, at politics coming properly alive.

She was amazed how much better she felt out here. The trip to Avalon had, against all odds, done her good. She had looked at the other Martha and wondered at what she had survived and how well, had left her there, sitting on the beach, dressed in tattered Bermuda shorts and baggy T-shirt, staring panicked out to sea, and taken her successful, accomplished self back to Sydney Harbour. Avalon had changed along with her, she thought, had become chic and successful, full of smart pavement cafés, and expensive boutiques. She had even found the time to sit at one of the tables and have a skinny latte and watch the world going by, a world of chic young people and perfectly dressed young families. Only the surfers had not changed: they wandered along on bare feet, carrying their boards, sun-bleached and deep-down brown, and talking, talking endlessly, on their way to ride the waves. Such a lovely lifestyle it had been. Such a lovely lifestyle it clearly still was.

CLEAN SHEET PARTY AND THE CHINESE LAUNDRY

Chad Lawrence, the charismatic MP whose blond good looks and public-school charm made him a favourite with the old Tory Party, has behaved with uncharacteristic carelessness over the funding of his new party’s think tank. So claimed Theodore Buchanan, in a point of order in the House this evening.

He asked the House if it was in order “for the Centre Forward Party to be receiving funds from a source within the People’s Republic of China? Is it not the case that British political parties—in this House—are forbidden from receiving finance from foreign interests? Mr. Speaker, should not the Committee of Standards and Privileges investigate this disgrace as a matter of urgency?”

At which point Mr. Buchanan sat down amidst a great deal of booing and cheering.

When an old school (Eton, where else?) chum, Jonathan Farquarson, offered the new party a million pounds for party funding last autumn, Lawrence (Ullswater North) failed to check that Mr. Farquarson’s engineering company, Farjon, was entirely U.K. based; after a bankruptcy two years ago, it was acquired by a Chinese company operating from the north of Hong Kong. Not only is it against the law for a British political party to receive finance from foreign interests, it is quite possible that Mr. Lawrence could find himself under pressure to secure favourable import tariffs for the company. Once tipped as a future Tory prime minister, he was one of the founding members of the Centre Forward Party, the left-of-centre breakaway group from the Tories.

The party pledged to be squeaky clean, devoid of sleaze and cronyism; unfortunately for Mr. Lawrence, he has found himself in the middle of a row involving both.

Jack Kirkland, sitting with Chad Lawrence on the opposition benches, rose to say that the matter was receiving his full attention and meanwhile he would continue to have every confidence in his Honourable Friend, the member for Ullswater North.

Nobody was remotely deceived.

“What I want to know,” said Jack Kirkland, passing a glass of wine to Janet Frean, who had offered him her company that evening, “is who on earth can have tipped Buchanan off. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer—someone must have helped him. God, what a mess. In just six weeks. Fallen from our shiny pedestal, right down into the murky squalor, along with the rest of them. I suppose it was naïve of me to think our little band was unique. Above this sort of thing.”

“Not really. I thought so, too. It’s very sad.”

“Not sad, Janet,
bloody
stupid. Feckless.” He sighed. “I honestly think we may not recover from this, you know.”

“Oh don’t be ridiculous, Jack,” she said, her strong-jawed, rather handsome face full of sympathy. “Of course we can. Tomorrow it’ll be someone else, something quite different. How about a new Mandelson scandal? I’d put quite a lot of money on that.”

He managed a smile. “You could be right. Well, thank God for you. You’re not going to do anything dreadful to me, are you, Janet? You’re not going to be found snogging in the press gallery with someone or handing out houses for votes?”

She laughed. “Bob wouldn’t like the former too much and I don’t have the means for the latter. Sometimes I think I should have stuck to my original profession, the law, and made some money. But no, don’t worry, Jack, I won’t let you down. Promise.”

He looked at her very seriously. “I know you won’t. I trust you totally. I’ve always thought women were a far better bet for politics. Less power-crazed, more genuinely idealistic. I’d forgotten you were a lawyer. Like the blessed Margaret. And young Martha, of course.”

“Indeed.” There was an edge to her voice that he didn’t notice.

“Now there’s a clever girl. I think she’s absolutely splendid.”

“I agree. Although she seriously lacks experience.”

“She’ll gain it fast. Involve her as much as you can, Janet. I really think it could be worth it. I see her as our future. In an odd way.”

“Very odd,” said Janet, and this time he did notice her tone, “considering she’s had about two months’ experience.”

“Janet, Janet,” he said, patting her hand, “you’re not feeling jealous, are you? She may be the future but you’re our present. Incidentally, I heard a rumour that Iain Duncan Smith is going to make Theresa May chairman of the Tory Party.”

“What? I don’t believe it!”

“Oh, I think it’s very possibly true. One of his cleverer moves, I’d say. Putting a woman into that job. Just think, Janet, it might have been you.”

“Indeed,” said Janet briefly.

He stared at her. “You wouldn’t have wanted that, surely? With that lot?”

“Of course not,” she said.

Shortly after that, she made her excuses and left; when she reached home she poured herself a very large whiskey and went up to her study. Bob found her pacing up and down the room, fists clenched, raging silently; rather wearily, he asked her what the matter was.

“Just go back to bed and leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want to discuss it.”

He reflected that very few people would have recognised the calm, brilliant superwoman in that near-frenzied creature.

He was never quite sure how much he disliked her. Or even if he disliked her at all anymore, simply felt nothing for her. He had fallen in love with her at university, a brilliant girl, not beautiful but very attractive, reading law, had been flattered by her interest in him and even more so by her desire first to move in with him and then to marry him. It took a time for him to realise this had been largely inspired by his money—he was the beneficiary of a large trust fund—but by then it was much too late. He suited her beautifully, both financially and practically, as support for her ambition to become the second woman prime minister: he paid the bills—including those for her political expenses—babysat endlessly, oversaw the children’s upbringing, smiled by her side at functions and interviews.

But as she rose in the political firmament, she became increasingly dismissive of him, ignoring him whenever possible, eating alone, saying she had papers to read, work to do, walking away from him when he tried to talk to her. That was when he began to dislike her.

The only place she appeared to welcome him was in the bedroom—she was sexually voracious, too voracious, indeed, for him. It took a while for him to realise that his role there was as much for the begetting of their children as for satisfying her physically. It suited her career; her large family was a most useful tool in her self-publicity, a kind of shorthand for her image—Janet Frean the mother of five, Janet Frean the superwoman, Janet Frean who showed women they could indeed have it all.

Her career was of prime importance to her, and everything was sacrificed on its altar; primarily Bob, of course, but her children, her friends, her health, her own sanity, it seemed. He had become aware early in their relationship of the fanatical side of her nature, her ruthless destruction of anything in her path, her capacity to drive herself beyond exhaustion.

At first he admired it, then became wary of it, and finally anxious about it, recognising it as something almost manic, a psychological flaw. He looked at her sometimes, white and exhausted after late-night sessions at the House, saw her drained face, her taut neck muscles, her white knuckles as she chatted easily on the phone to constituents, to party workers. Her control was awesome. He often wondered when she would crack; it was only a matter of time. But he knew there was nothing he or anyone could do about it, and she should go to hell in her own way.