The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (16 page)

“You got up this early just to come and woo me, didn’t you?” she teased, pouting in her bed.

“Cover yourself up, you little tart. That’s not fair.
They’re
not fair!” he exclaimed, gesturing at her body.

Playfully, provocatively, she threw back the bedclothes. She was starkly, stunningly naked.

“Oh, Pen, my darling, I wish I had this moment captured forever, in oils and on my wall.”

“But not in your bed.”

“Pen, please! You know I’m not at my best this early in the morning.”

Reluctantly, she reached for her gown. “Yes, it is rather early for you, Rog. You haven’t been up all night, have you?”

“Well, there was this incredibly beautiful Brazilian gymnast who’s been teaching me a whole series of new exercises. We didn’t have any gymnastic rings, so we used the chandelier. OK?”

“Shut up, Rog,” she said firmly, her mood grown gray like the morning sky. “What’s going on?”

“So young and yet so cynical?”

“It’s never let me down.”

“Which? Youth or cynicism?

“Both. Particularly where you are concerned. So tell me the real reason you’re here.”

“OK, OK. I had to make a delivery. In the vicinity. So…I thought I’d come and say good morning.” It was almost the truth, as close as he got nowadays, but not all the truth. He didn’t mention that Mattie Storin had nearly caught him as he was putting the document among her newspapers and needed a place to lie for a while. Oh, he’d scuttled down that corridor as though he were sidestepping his way through the entire English defense toward the try line. What fun! So it would cause the Party Chairman trouble. Brilliant. The cantankerous old sod had been particularly short with him these last few weeks, as Urquhart had pointed out. The paranoia that possessed O’Neill’s mind completely failed to capture the fact that Williams had been short with almost everyone.

“Let’s just say I believe you,” Penny said. “But for pity’s sake, Rog, next time you come to say good morning, try knocking first. And make it after eight-thirty.”

“Don’t give me a hard time. You know I can’t live without you.”

“Enough passion, Rog. What do you want? You have to want something, don’t you, even if not my body?”

His eyes darted, like a guilty secret exposed. “Actually, I did come to ask you something. It’s a bit delicate really…” He gathered together his salesman’s charms and started upon the story that Urquhart had drummed into him the previous evening. “Pen, you remember Patrick Woolton, the Foreign Secretary. You typed a couple of his speeches during the election and he certainly remembers you. He, er, asked after you when I saw him last night. I think he’s rather smitten with you. Anyway, he wondered if you would be interested in dinner with him but he didn’t want to upset or offend you by asking direct, so I sort of offered, you know, to have a quiet word as it might be easier for you to say no to me rather than to him personally. You see that, don’t you, Pen?”

“Oh, Rog.” There were tears in her voice.

“What’s the matter, Pen?”

“Pimping for him.” Her tone was bitter, an accusation.

“No, no at all, Pen, it’s only dinner.”

“It’s never been just dinner. Ever since the age of fourteen it’s never been just dinner.” She was second-generation immigrant, had been brought up in a crowded tenement off Ladbroke Grove and knew all the compromises required of a young black girl in a white male world. That didn’t distress her unduly; it gave her opportunity, but she wouldn’t have her dignity stripped away, not like this.

“He’s the Foreign Secretary, Pen,” O’Neill protested.

“With a reputation as long as the Channel Tunnel.”

“But what have you got to lose?”

“My self-esteem.”

“Oh, come on, Pen. This is important. You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t.”

“What the hell do you think of me?”

“I think you are beautiful, truly I do. I see you every day and you’re the one thing that brings laughter into my life. But I’m desperate. Please, Pen, don’t ask but…you’ve got to help me on this. Just dinner, I swear.”

They were both in tears, and in love with each other. She knew it hurt him to ask this of her, that for some reason he found himself with no choice. And because she loved him, she didn’t want to know why.

“OK. Just dinner,” she whispered, lying to herself.

And he threw himself at her and kissed her with joy before he rushed out as breathlessly as he had barged in.

Five minutes later he was back in his own room and on the phone to Urquhart. “Delivery made and dinner fixed, Francis.”

“Splendid, Roger. You’ve been most helpful. I hope the Foreign Secretary will be grateful too.”

“But I still don’t see how you’re going to get him to invite Penny to dinner. What’s the point of all this?”

“The point, dear Roger, is that he won’t have to invite her to dinner at all. He is coming to my reception this evening. You will bring Penny, I shall introduce them over a glass of champagne or two, and see what develops. If I know Patrick Woolton—which as Chief Whip I do—it won’t take more than twenty minutes before he’s suggesting that he might help her improve her French etiquette.”

“But I still don’t see where that gets us.”

“Whatever happens, Roger, and that we must leave in the hands of two consenting adults, you and I will know about it.”

“I still don’t see what use that is,” O’Neill protested, still hoping the other man might change his mind.

“Trust me, Roger. You must trust me.”

“I do. I have to. I don’t really get much choice, do I?”

“That’s right, Roger. Now you are beginning to see. Knowledge is power.”

The phone went dead. O’Neill thought he understood but still wasn’t absolutely sure. He was still struggling to figure out whether he was Urquhart’s partner or prisoner. Unable to decide, he rummaged in his bedside cabinet and took out a small carton. He swallowed a couple of sleeping pills and collapsed fully clothed on the bed.

Seventeen

Political office is like life. Your attitude toward it is usually determined by whether you are arriving or departing.

“Patrick. Thanks for the time,” Urquhart greeted as the Foreign Secretary opened the door.

“You sounded serious on the phone. When the Chief Whip says he want an urgent private word with you, it usually means he’s got the photographs under lock and key but unfortunately the
News
of
the
World
has got the negatives!”

Urquhart smiled and slipped through the open door into Woolton’s suite. It was late afternoon, the gale had stopped blowing but the umbrella standing in a puddle in Woolton’s hallway spoke of a tormenting day. Urquhart hadn’t come far, indeed only a few yards from his own suite in a series of luxury bungalows that stood in the hotel grounds. They had been set aside for Cabinet ministers, all of whom had a twenty-four-hour rotation of police guards running up huge bills. The local constabulary had christened it “Overtime Alley.”

“Drink?” the genial Lancastrian offered.

“Thanks, Patrick. Scotch.”

The Right Honorable Patrick Woolton, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and one of Merseyside’s many successful emigrés, busied himself at a small drinks cabinet that bore the signs of already having been put to use that afternoon, while Urquhart placed the ministerial red box he was carrying beside the four belonging to his overworked host, close to the edge of the puddle of rainwater. These brightly colored leather-clad boxes were the mark of any minister, their almost constant companions that guarded the official papers, speeches, and other confidential items. A Foreign Secretary requires several red boxes; the Chief Whip, with no conference speech to make and no foreign crises to handle, had arrived in Bournemouth with his box filled with three bottles of twelve-year-old malt whiskey. Hotel drink prices are always staggering, he explained to his wife, even when you can find the brand you want.

Now he faced Woolton across a paper-strewn coffee table, and dispensed with the small talk. “Patrick, I need to get your opinion. In the strictest confidence. As far as I am concerned, this has to be one of those meetings which never took place.”

“Christ, you do have some bloody photographs!” exclaimed Woolton, now only half joking. His eye for attractive young women had led him down a few perilous paths. Ten years earlier when he was just starting his ministerial career, he had spent several painful hours answering questions from the Louisiana State Police about a weekend he’d just spent in a New Orleans motel with a young American girl who looked twenty, acted as if she were thirty and turned out to be just a few days over sixteen. The incident had been brushed over but Woolton had never forgotten the tiny difference between a glittering political future and a charge of statutory rape.

“Something which could be rather more serious,” Urquhart muttered. “I’ve been picking up some unhealthy vibrations in the last few weeks. About Henry. You’ve sensed the irritation with him around the Cabinet table, and the media seem to be falling out of love with him in a very big way.”

“Well, there was no reason to expect an extended honeymoon after the election, I suppose, but the storm clouds have been remarkably quick to gather.”

“Patrick, in confidence, I’ve been approached by two of the most influential grassroots party members. They say that feeling at local level is getting very bad. We lost two more important local council by-elections last week in what should have been very safe seats, and we’re going to lose quite a few more in the weeks ahead.”

“Bloody East Dorset by-election tomorrow. We’re going to get kicked in the crotch on that one, too, you mark my words. We’d have trouble winning a vote for local dogcatcher at the moment.”

“There is a view, Patrick,” Urquhart continued in a tone of considerable discomfort, “that Henry’s personal unpopularity is dragging the whole Party down.”

“It’s a view I share, frankly,” Woolton said, sipping his whiskey.

“The question is, how much time does he have to sort it out?”

“With a majority of only twenty-four, not much.” Woolton was cupping his hands around his glass for comfort. “A few lost by-elections and we’d be facing an early election.” He stared into the peaty liquid, then up at his colleague. “So what’s your view, Francis?”

“As Chief Whip I don’t have a view.”

“You always were a canny bugger, Francis.”

“But as Chief Whip I have been asked by one or two of our senior colleagues to take some gentle soundings about how deep the problem actually goes. In short, Patrick, and you will appreciate this isn’t easy…”

“You haven’t touched your bloody drink.”

“Give me one more moment. I’ve been asked to find out how much trouble colleagues think we are in. Cards on the table. Is Henry any longer the right leader for us?” He raised his glass, stared hard at Woolton, then took a deep draught before settling back in his chair.

The silence settled around the Foreign Secretary, impaling him on the point of the question. “Well, bugger me, it’s come to that already, has it?” A pipe appeared from his pocket, followed by a tobacco pouch and a box of matches. He made an elaborate ceremony of filling the bowl, tamping down the fresh tobacco with his thumb, before taking out a match. The striking of the match seemed very loud in the silence. Smoke began to rise from around Woolton as he drew on the pipe stem until the sweet smelling tobacco was well alight and his face was almost obscured from view by a clinging blue fog. He waved his hand to disperse it, coming out of hiding. “You’ll have to forgive me, Francis. Four years in the Foreign Office hasn’t prepared me particularly well for handling direct questions like that. Maybe I’m not used any more to people coming straight to the point. You’ve knocked me out of my stride.”

This was nonsense, of course. Woolton was renowned for his direct, often combative political style, which had found an uneasy home in the Foreign Office. He was simply playing for time while he collected his thoughts.

“Let’s try to put aside any subjective views”—he blew another enormous cloud of smoke to hide the patent insincerity of the remark—“and analyze the problem like a civil service position paper.”

Urquhart nodded, and smiled inwardly. He knew Woolton’s personal views, he already knew the conclusion their hypothetical civil servant was going to arrive at.

“First, have we got a problem? Yes, and it’s a serious one. My lads back in Lancashire are hopping mad. I think it’s right that you should be taking soundings. Second, is there a painless solution to the problem? Let’s not forget we did win the bloody election. But we didn’t win it like we should’ve. And that’s down to Henry. But”—he waved the stem of his pipe for emphasis—“if there was any move to replace him—which is essentially what we are discussing…”

Urquhart contrived to look pained at Woolton’s bluntness.

“It would raise hell inside the party and those bastards in the Opposition would have a field day. It could get very messy, Francis. There’s no guarantee Henry would go quietly. And it would look like an act of desperation. It would take a new leader at least a year to glue together the cracks. So we shouldn’t fool ourselves that getting rid of Henry represents an easy option. No, sir. But, third, when all is said and done, can Henry find the solution to the problem himself? Well, you know my views on that. I stood against him for the leadership when Margaret went, and I’ve not changed my mind that his selection was a mistake.”

Urquhart lowered his head, stony faced, as though in gratitude for the candor, but in celebration. He had read his man well.

Woolton was refilling their glasses while continuing his analysis. “Margaret managed an extraordinary balance of personal toughness and sense of direction. She was ruthless when she had to be and often when she
didn’t
have to be as well. She always seemed to be in such a bloody hurry to get where she was going that she had no time to take prisoners and didn’t mind trampling on a few friends, either. It didn’t matter so much because she led from in front. You’ve got to give that to the girl. But Henry doesn’t have a sense of direction, only a love of office. And, without that sense of direction, we’re lost. He tries to mimic Margaret but he hasn’t got the balls.” He banged a large glass down in front of his colleague. “So there we have it. If we try to get rid of him we’re in trouble. But if we keep him, we’re in shit.” He raised his glass. “Confusion to the enemy, Francis.” And he drank.