Weeks in Naviras (24 page)

‘The war office,’ Rosie smiled. ‘We’re calling up backbenchers, gauging support for a leadership challenge.’

‘Oh my God,’ I said, and went upstairs to lie on the bed in the spare room.

Eventually Rav came upstairs and called me from the landing.

‘In here,’ I said.

He wanted to see if I was okay, perplexed at how I’d stormed out of the dining room. ‘You must’ve known this day would come, sooner or later,’ he said, sitting down on the bed next to me.

‘I think I’m having a migraine,’ I lied. ‘And yes, I’d always wondered, but not like this, Rav. Not so soon, I thought Drake would just lose the election, or maybe resign. Then James can make his move.’

‘If he doesn’t do it now, someone else will,’ Rav put his hand on my leg.

‘And what happens to you, I suppose you’d become chief of staff?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t speak for James, obviously.’

‘No, that’s Rosie’s forte, isn’t it?’

‘Why do you dislike her so much, Ellie?’ He spoke quietly. ‘She’s just doing her job.’

I spluttered. ‘Of course she is. But what’s my job, exactly, Rav? Every time I get used to things being a certain way, they change. It’s frustrating.’

‘You’ll be able to make it whatever you want it to be,’ he gave me one of his reassuring grins. ‘Within reason, of course.’

More people came to the house that afternoon, a few of James’ young parliamentary and constituency staff. A grid was drawn up of those MPs likely to support James and those who were in the camps of potential rivals. I came downstairs as they were putting the finishing touches to it. ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’ said Rav.

‘What’s James doing?’

‘He’s at the Home Office, trying to act as normal as possible.’

I went into the living room and turned the TV on to find the Chancellor had resigned. Putting his family first, apparently, no word on who’d replace him. Drake was said to be mulling over his options. James’s mother brought the kids home, I saw them pull up in the driveway and went outside to greet
them. ‘There’s a lot of cars here,’ she said. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘A few staffers are here, having a meeting,’ I said. ‘So I’ll see you on Thursday?’ I didn’t want her adding to the overcrowded house.

As I went inside Sadie produced a picture she’d painted of me. ‘Mummy, why is Rosie here?’ She said it mercifully quietly.

‘They’re helping out Daddy with something important,’ I would have said more, but then the news flashed on the TV. Enough Tory MPs had publicly expressed lack of confidence in Drake, triggering a leadership contest. Minutes later Ralph Sinclair threw his hat in the ring. The noise in the dining room grew louder, a short time later the news confirmed that James would also join the contest.

The preceding few months had often felt like watching a car crash in slow motion, but then at the moment of impact everything went into double speed. It seemed grossly unfair to me that Ollie Drake would cop it, he’d been trying to galvanise energy production, fast-tracking nuclear power stations and even taking on core supporters by insisting on more wind farms. Every government before Drake’s had been calcified, some blamed coalition partners, others the vested interests. Build a power station here and hope the greens won’t go mad, extract some shale gas, but only where backbenchers who couldn’t cause trouble lived. There was no strategy to it, no long-term thinking.

James was cheerful when he came home that night, coldly practical about things. ‘Get it done at the end of August, unite behind the new leader at conference. For the best, don’t you think?’

I was quite surprised when Drake was eliminated in the first round of voting. He’d remain PM while his successor was determined, it was James and Ralph Sinclair in the final round. I immediately assumed, privately, that James would win, the party had never really liked his rival. It was partly the name, some people should just change theirs if they want to be prime minister. Ralph insisted his name be pronounced without the L, which annoyed the working class members, but the aristocratic side disparagingly called him Ralph, not
Rayfe
, since they considered him bourgeois. It was difficult for him to tap into any obvious constituency of the party. In the absence of anything better most voted for James. Not a ringing endorsement, more of a shrug. All the oh-so-clever commentators saw it as obvious after the event.

He assumed power on a cloudy morning in the first week of September. It’d rained a lot overnight, looked like it wanted to rain some more. ‘Hope it holds off long enough for the speech,’ James said, facing the mirror but looking behind himself to the shower clouds out the window. ‘I’ll look daft with someone holding a brolly behind me.’

He’d slept ridiculously well under the circumstances. I’d been lying awake, worried about the photo call in Downing Street we’d face later that day. There was a lot riding on it for James, obviously; how to sound, what tone to convey, but for me it felt more difficult because I had to just stand there, a few feet to his left and about a foot behind. It seemed impossible for me to work out how I should stand. Obviously I should be looking at him at all times, that bit I’d worked out for myself. But what about my legs? Feet touching or slightly apart? I didn’t want to seem like a harridan. What should I do with my hands? Unfortunately we’d all agreed Sadie and Bobby wouldn’t be part of the tableau. They would’ve given me something to focus on.

I decided I’d need a fairly large purse to occupy my hands. That was out of character, I found them old-fashioned and cumbersome and could never hold everything I needed. But at least that way, I thought, I could clasp the purse to my midriff then just keep the other hand to my side. Earlier in front of the full-length mirror, wearing a Highland green pencil dress and an understated, unadorned clutch in my hands, I practiced standing. On the TV in the reflection behind me I could see the old PM’s car meandering from Downing Street to the palace. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Perhaps Oliver Drake had told the driver to take their time, savouring the final minutes of his premiership, clinging on for dear life.

From the helicopter shot I watched him and his wife get out of the saloon and enter the palace as I put my makeup on. The car disappeared and was replaced by an anonymous navy blue one. About ten minutes later they emerged through the same door and got in, and that was them; off into relative anonymity and - I’m sure he felt - oblivion. He might’ve gone on to be one of the better PMs of this century, had events not conspired against him.

Unfortunately he’d gone slightly mad towards the end, having quickly discounted the notion that someone else might do the job someday. He didn’t have a preferred successor because he didn’t think there’d ever need to be one. Drake won his election when he was forty-two. That had made him the youngest PM for centuries. Then of course James trounced that by getting in at forty-one.

I pushed the chair from underneath me and finalised my appearance. In some ways I felt similar to how I’d felt on my wedding day, standing in my bedroom in silence as an envelope of noise floated up from the hallway downstairs. Making sure every tress of hair was correct, all creases smoothed out, every dark circle painted over. To impress whom? News editors, also chasing a younger audience of course.

‘Let’s go, L,’ James called from the landing.

On the way downstairs I kissed Bobby and Sadie on their heads. They were sitting at the top of the staircase, where they were being kept under virtual arrest by Paula. ‘Next time I see you two, we’ll be living in Number Ten Downing Street,’ I told them. Bobby was old enough to know what that meant, but didn’t seem at all excited.

There was a coterie of noisy advisers in the hallway; it was hard to tell the Tories and the civil servants apart, all of them talking to either each other or into some device. At the bottom of the stairs I went to the dresser to pick up the housekeys, opened my purse to drop them in, before Rosie walked over. ‘You won’t be needing those, Ellie.’ She’d enjoyed correcting me, perhaps it still seemed to her that we were fighting over something. ‘We’ll lock up the house when the press have moved on. I can look after them if you’d like?’

‘No, it’s fine thanks,’ I didn’t snap. ‘I’ll leave them here on the dresser. You’ll let them know where to pick them up?’ I walked past Rosie and joined James at the front door. Rav was there to open it, so we could step out into the street to the unctuous crowd of reporters waiting for us outside.

That was the first time I’d ever come close to losing my temper with Rosie. It was bad enough Rosie was taking the kids to Downing Street, but I was damned if I was going to give her the keys to my house. What Rosie didn’t know, what nobody knew, was what one of those keys could open. It had been on my key-ring since the night Luis walked out of Casa Amanhã. When I saw Rosie was distracted I picked up the keys and stuffed them into my purse, before walking to the front door where James and Rav were waiting.

James grabbed hold of my hand, his palms damp. ‘Ready for this?’ he asked me, pointlessly, as Rav was opening the door and I was starting to smile.

The smile of a politician’s wife is pretty easy to master after just a few months in the game. You don’t ever show too many teeth and you squint your eyes, ever so slightly. Your eyebrows go up, again only a small amount. A cross between pleasantly surprised and wanting to help out, that’s the look you’re aiming for. Luckily I could do this without corrugating my forehead too much, so no lines. I’d never faced a press scrum so large. It’s the foreign press that makes the difference, they double the number of flashes.

‘How does it feel to be the First Lady of England, Ellie?’ This in a laconic drawl from an American reporter woman I’d not seen before. No sign of Liz Brickman outside our house, though. She would be waiting in Downing Street, probably doing a running commentary on the images being captured by the helicopter hovering above us.

We walked down the two steps from the door slowly, down the little pathway in the front garden and stood there for what felt like a minute for the photographers and cameras. Then, after James had inwardly decided they’d had enough, we got into the car for the hour-long drive to the palace.

Briefly the country was in total interregnum. The King had been out of sight for more than a year; shut away from the world in grief, the official line. Rumours abound of course, but very few people knew how ill he really was; the country seemed uninterested at his apparent deletion from public life, seeing as though his son had more than made up for his absence. But convention dictated, and there were still some things that could only be done by the King, including the formal ceremony for new prime ministers.

‘Maybe you really should kiss his hand just to see how he reacts,’ I said, trying to introduce some levity as we arrived in central London. We’d both been silent almost all the way from Eppingham.

‘Do you think he’d like that?’ James turned in from the window, smiling but not for me. ‘I’d rather not kiss that withered old claw, thanks all the same.’

‘Maybe it’d be nice to start up some old traditions again,’ I said, wondering if the flashes from the cameras at the roadside were capturing anything meaningful. I kept the smile up, just in case.

A few people had turned out to watch the car as it drove slowly down the Mall toward the palace. James had been worried someone would throw an egg at the car. Even from inside we could hear the helicopter following us. Through the gates of Buckingham Palace we drove, under the stone archway at the front of the building and into the courtyard. As we walked through the fusty, portrait-lined corridors on the way to meet the King, I wondered how Drake had felt three years ago, when he’d been making the same journey. He must have known he was walking into the most god-awful mess. Why had he wanted it? For the same reasons James wanted it, of course.

Rav outlined the procedure, James would go in first, do his not-kissing of hands, then I’d come in for a brief chat. When the King’s private secretary opened the doors to the study he calmly intoned, ‘Mr. Weeks, His Majesty is ready for you, now,’

I tried to think of something witty or comforting to say to James. Good luck, break a leg, didn’t seem appropriate, so I ended up just saying, ‘See you in a bit, then.’ I thought I’d only be sitting outside for a few minutes but as the ornate mantelpiece clock ticked by, ten, then fifteen, then twenty minutes, I started to wonder if something was wrong. Had the King demanded a general election, in a moment of either delusion or clarity?

Finally the doors swung open and the private secretary was there again, neutrally declaring that the King had requested my presence. I followed him into the large study, where the curtains were all drawn, just a shaft of light running down the plush carpet, making it possible to see the King sitting in his wheelchair, staring not at James standing beside him, but into space.

His hair had almost all fallen out since I’d last seen him; a few scraggly wisps still clung to his scalp, which was the colour of an egg that hadn’t been poached for quite long enough. Only the eyes were the same, though they seemed cloudy and troubled. He was hooked up to a machine which was pumping a clear liquid through translucent tubes, snaking through his pyjama-shirt to his abdomen and trailing up around his neck and into his nostrils.

I bowed my head slightly to the King, whom I initially suspected had no idea what was going on. But his eyes focused on me has I drew near. ‘Mrs Weeks,’ he croaked. ‘I Hope you find your time in Downing Street productive, it seems to me the role of the prime minister’s wife is one,’ He paused, licked his lips. ‘Is one of great opportunity, one where one writes one’s own job description, perhaps?’ His breathing was shallow. Speaking to me was clearly a monumental effort.