The Buddha of Brewer Street (4 page)

Would he be missed? Goodfellowe wondered. The Prime Minister had suggested as much when he had handed in his resignation two days before, and indeed had spent a few minutes trying to argue him out of it. But he’d soon given up. Goodfellowe was adamant, his family truly needed more of his time. Anyway, perhaps Goodfellowe’s talents were just a little too apparent for his leader’s comfort; they all but demanded his inclusion in the Cabinet at the next reshuffle. Prime Ministers like to feel they have a measure of choice in the disposition of favours, which is why they are constantly in search of abilities less evident than their own.

‘You’ll be back,’ the Prime Minister had said, not meaning it.

‘Sure,’ Goodfellowe had replied, not believing it.

But at the Prime Minister’s request Goodfellowe had agreed to stay on until the weekend to allow a decision on his replacement to be taken with deliberation, so for now Goodfellowe was going through the motions. A diplomatic game of charades. One word. Nonentity. And after the news had leaked the whole world knew it. What was still more relevant at this moment, Madame Lin knew it, too.

She refused to make herself comfortable on the sofa, insisting on perching on its edge as though ready to walk out at a moment’s notice. He sat in the easy chair beside her.

‘I have been instructed by the Government of the People’s Republic of China to protest in the strongest possible terms,’ she intoned, reading from a formal statement. The voice was husky from tobacco.

Tonelessly the interpreter translated while Goodfellowe’s private secretary scribbled hurried notes. So what else was new? Complaints from Beijing nowadays fell like apples in autumn and were normally left to rot on the ground. Particularly after Hong Kong. In Goodfellowe’s view, handing over the colony had been a great mistake, but for the Chinese it had proved to be a time of great deception, the euphoria soon draining away into what Goodfellowe described as China’s ‘duckpond of despairs’. The great tiger economy had developed ingrowing toenails. Corruption. Food riots. Then had come the failure of the absurd military adventure to retake a small outlying island off Taiwan. As the world had watched through CNN, America had coughed and the Chinese had caught a very public cold. It was all unravelling in Beijing. So they complained, endlessly and usually without merit.

‘The Dalai Lama is a splittist and a renegade and a tool of imperialism,’ Madame Lin continued, her brow furrowed. Frowning didn’t suit her, thought Goodfellowe; she had remarkably smooth skin for her age, and in her earlier years must have been something of a beauty. Is that how she had prospered? It was an ungallant thought, but Maoism was a peculiarly ungallant creed.

‘The People’s Republic of China has objected most strenuously to his presence in this country,’ she continued, ‘but we were assured that this was an informal visit, with no political overtones. Yet Ministers of the British Government have already met with the Dalai Lama and tonight he is to be a guest at the Foreign Secretary’s official residence in Carlton Gardens.’

A rather frumpy residence, in Goodfellowe’s view, but with some fine Ming blue-and-white expropriated by British troops for safekeeping while they and the French were ransacking the Summer Palace. Not the British Empire’s most laudable episode, just another in a long line of imperial punishments handed out during the last century, which was perhaps why no one had ever bothered to tell the Chinese of the porcelain’s ancestry. Although inevitably, in this brave new and abominably correct world, suggestions had been floated that the porcelain might be handed back, as a gesture of goodwill, an opportunity to creep a little closer to a market of more than a billion wallets. Goodfellowe had dug in his heels so deep he thought there was a chance he might emerge in the Yellow River. He was fed up with apologizing for the past, and with giving things back. So long as he had any say in the matter, they weren’t getting the bloody vases. As he had scrawled on the relevant memo,
‘No. They’ll just have to make do with Hong Kong.’

On the sofa, Madame Lin took a deep breath, trying to draw up her diminutive figure to its full height. The clichés of diplomatic protest were laid before him. ‘Gross interference in China’s internal affairs … my Government’s serious concerns … Britain has turned a deaf ear … Dalai’s lies and slanders … in complete disregard of the major progress on human rights made in Tibet.’

One day, just one day, Goodfellowe promised himself, he’d get to ask a Chinese why, since they claimed to have delivered Tibet from serfdom, so many of these newly liberated serfs still risked their lives trying to escape from this Maoist paradise. They walked for weeks through the Himalayas, across the highest mountains in the world, equipped with nothing more than hope and prayer. Some made it, some didn’t. Many froze. Others starved. Vulture pickings. But still they came, thousands every year. Fleeing from paradise. Yes, one day he’d ask why. But not today.

He raised his eyes. The bookcase behind Madame Lin was laden with the doodles of diplomacy – the boxes of inscribed mementoes, the paperweights and pen sets and other assorted knick-knacks that Foreign Ministers seemed compelled to exchange with each other. Most of it was engraved, over-embellished, and crap. Before every meeting one of his private secretaries would scour the room, ensuring that the gift from the visitor’s country was on prominent display. Rather like pulling the photograph of mother-in-law out of the drawer. In their own turn the Chinese were rather more subtle. Visitors to Beijing were invited to the Pearl Room where a table would be laden with strings of raw pearls, all carefully sized. They were for purchase, but at very generous prices. Yet inevitably in the diplomatic marketplace there was a careful order of things. Goodfellowe had been shown which sizes of pearl had been selected by his French counterpart, and then he had been shown those chosen by his Whitehall superior, and with great Oriental deftness had been encouraged to go a little bit better than the first while not daring to go as far as the second.

Characteristically, Goodfellowe had screwed up the system and bought nothing. Couldn’t afford it, not at any price, not nowadays. Anyway, Elinor no longer had an appreciation of such things. Of anything, come to that, in those weeks when she climbed into her pit of depression and pulled the roof in on herself. It affected Goodfellowe, too. Despair would snap at his heels like a Black Dog, determined to pursue him. He called them Black Dog days – Churchill’s expression, and so apt; the initial effect was like hearing a dog growl, from very close behind on a stormy night. And recently there had been more of them. That’s why he’d had to get out. Before he was pulled down in the same way as Elinor.

He dragged his attention back into the room. Madame Lin was nearing the end of her homily. Something about her Government’s desire to ensure that the contents of this protest be communicated directly to the highest levels of the British Government. A matter of the most considerable significance. Her sadness that the Secretary of State himself was abroad, unavailable. The strong implication that she was deeply dissatisfied at being able to see only Goodfellowe. A mere Minister. Here today, a has-been tomorrow. She didn’t use those words, but the sense hung heavily in her tone.

That hurt. Of course the snub of offering up only him to hear the complaint was deliberate, the British Government getting its retaliation in first, but it served to emphasize that already he was a man of overwhelming unimportance. Thomas Goodfellowe. A sensation when at the Home Office. The rising star of the FCO. A man who with fortune might eventually have gone all the way. But not any more. Politicians never came back. There were too many colleagues to trample on the fallen. It was over. He was nothing. She knew it and was making it part of her official complaint. And he had to sit there and take it.

Then it was over and he was handed a formal copy of the complaint, like an irresponsible driver receiving a speeding ticket. A pity, he thought. She was new in her post and, on the couple of occasions they had met, Goodfellowe had warmed to Madame Lin. Sad to end on such a sour note.

He didn’t waste much time with his official response; they both knew the script by heart; indeed the details had been discussed beforehand by their underlings and advisers. The Dalai Lama was visiting Britain privately, not in any official capacity. Any contact he had with Ministers was in his role as a religious leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, not as a political figure. And platitudes about there being no intention of Her Majesty’s Government to interfere in China’s internal affairs. After all, thought Goodfellowe, they were making enough of a mess of it on their own; they scarcely needed Britain’s help to add to the chaos.

And then it was over. Madame Lin rose, bowed and made for the door. His last formal visitor as Minister of State was leaving. He thought the occasion should have been marked in some way. A little ceremony, a short speech, a small dedication, even a bottle or two. But already his private office was preparing for a new master. The contents of his red boxes for the last two days had dwindled to nothing but personal matters, letters from colleagues, an invoice from the office for expenses that couldn’t be claimed. He’d get that drink eventually, but on his own. He was drinking too much on his own.

It was as Goodfellowe’s private secretary was showing out the visitors that she turned. Both the private secretary and the interpreter hesitated, wanting to stay, but Madame Lin ushered them onward. The private secretary stood his ground, reluctant to leave his Minister alone with the diplomat, fearful of the damage that might result from an unguided discussion. Yet Goodfellowe didn’t care for his private secretary, Maurice, nor the bureaucratic games he played. Like handing him speaking notes so late that Goodfellowe had no chance of considering them, let alone altering them. Or hiding all the important papers that Maurice didn’t want the Minister to study too carefully in the middle of the pile. And stuffing Goodfellowe’s diary so full he didn’t even have time to break wind. Should have got rid of this wretched man months ago. Now was his very last chance.

‘Don’t you have some papers to shuffle? Or spies to catch, Maurice?’

Maurice smiled, lips parting like the drawer of a well-oiled filing cabinet. ‘Did all that last week, Minister.’

‘Do it again, will you? Can’t be too careful. Not about paper.’

Maurice hesitated. ‘Yes. I’m sure we have a few last items of yours to clear, Minister. Wouldn’t want to miss any.’

The door was closed as though on a lepers’ ward. They were alone.

‘Thank you, Mr Goodfellowe.’ Madame Lin was smiling, the dark eyes open and amused. ‘Now the formalities are over, I wondered: the opportunity for a private word, perhaps?’

‘So long as you have finished chastising me.’

‘It was never my intention to be unkind to you. Nor about you. I wanted to make that clear. I am deeply saddened by your loss of office; it was not my wish to refer to it in the official remarks. But my masters in Beijing insisted.’

‘As we thought they would.’

‘Which, of course, is why you did it.’ She laughed, a throaty, surprisingly masculine sound.

‘It’s kind of you to wish me well,’ he responded, trying to divert the conversation. She was unusually direct for a diplomat, astonishingly so for a Chinese.

‘I have enjoyed our meetings, no matter how brief. We could have done business together. Perhaps we shall in the future.’

‘A pleasant thought. But, as we both know, not very realistic.’

She crossed slowly to the old globe that stood in the corner of his office, by the window that overlooked the great Horse Guards Parade. The globe was an artefact of considerable value, if not of the greatest age. 1910. And about forty grand at auction. Her finger tracked slowly through the continents of Europe and Asia.

‘Life often comes full circle, Mr Goodfellowe. It changes. Then it changes again. Look at this globe. No Soviet Union, just a collection of nation states. As it was then, and as it is once more. Don’t give up hope. Life is a turning wheel.’

‘Funny. The Tibetans agree with you about that. The Wheel of Life turns. Uplifting. Turns again. Crushing. Your point of view depends on whether you are pushing the wheel or strapped beneath it, I suppose.’

‘I did not stay to continue the argument about Tibet.’ The eyes clouded in warning, then relaxed. ‘Merely to express my sincere condolences. To sacrifice office for your family is an act of honour. And of courage.’

‘You are very kind.’

‘I know the power of family, Mr Goodfellowe. I have but one daughter, no sons. Rather like you. And of all the many hopes I have for myself, my greatest ambition is to be a grandmother. I would like many grandchildren.’

Strange, Goodfellowe thought. The Chinese pursued the most ruthless birth-control policies of any power on earth. Compulsory abortions. Enforced sterilization. Infants, particularly daughters, left to die. Literally discarded, thrown away. In China, population control was nothing more than a crude numbers game. Yet undoubtedly she meant what she said.

‘Ah, I read your brow. You are wondering how I as a representative of the Beijing Government can favour large families?’

Extraordinary, thought Goodfellowe. Diplomat. Grandmother. And psychic. ‘May I speak personally?’

She nodded.

‘They’re barbaric, your Government’s policies on birth control. I understand the practice is often to inject the unborn foetus directly in the head to induce a miscarriage. Nothing short of barbaric. If I may speak personally.’

He had expected an animated response, but she remained collected. ‘I do not have to agree with all the acrobatics of my Government’s policies. Not here in my heart. Any more than you do, Mr Goodfellowe. But I hold my office with pride, and office brings with it responsibilities. But also certain … what is the word? Privileges. If one of those privileges is the opportunity to ensure I can have many grandchildren, don’t expect me to apologize or feel shame. Above all, my family comes first. Which is why I understand the sacrifice you have made.’ She turned the globe slowly. ‘I think we are much alike.’