The Madness of July (13 page)

He felt her arms go around him again before he could reply, and she wouldn’t wait for him. ‘Listen.’ She spoke more softly than at any time that evening. ‘I saw Joe through all his troubles. I knew what he’d fallen into, how he got out and slipped back, time and again. But he had a fear that never left him. And it tells us everything.’

Her grip on Abel was still tight, and he fancied he felt the beat of her heart.

‘Joe was scared of needles. He never used a syringe in his life.’

Friday

8

‘When are you going to tell me what you’re keeping from me?’

Francesca’s question came after a weary night. Flemyng had pleaded fatigue when they went to bed after the opera and spoken of complications that needed the clear light of day to explain. Each woke once or twice in the dark, said nothing. And when the morning sun was brightening their bedroom, nothing much had changed.

‘I don’t even understand the family stuff you’ve been talking about, because you won’t let me in,’ she said. ‘You mentioned Mungo in your sleep. I heard his name. I care about him, but you won’t talk. And what’s been going on in the office? I’ve never known you so dark.’

He asked for time. ‘I’m going to sit outside for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘Please.’

Francesca sat up abruptly. ‘Is there someone else? I deserve to know.’

He was stricken, and with Francesca beginning to weep, found it impossible to give her an answer. Instead, he said, ‘I love you. Never forget that.’ And closed the door.

He stepped softly downstairs, stopping twice to calm himself. He opened the door from the kitchen and went outside, disturbing a squirrel and some blackbirds breakfasting on the lawn. There was a swinging chair under a canopy of white climbing roses near the chestnut tree that marked the far limit of their garden and he sat down, the swing squeaking softly with his weight. He realized his cheeks were damp with tears.

But deliberately he turned his mind away from home, and concentrated. Methodically, placing each conversation and each event in sequence, recalling words and gestures from Paul and Lucy and Gwilym, he built up a picture of the previous day, piece by piece. To make sense of it, he then turned back to Wednesday, the night before his long walk to meet Sam and then Paul’s bolt from the blue, the arrival of Sassi and the opera night. There had been a strange encounter in the dark.

He’d not expected to see Paul late on a Wednesday, because the cabinet secretary had seldom any need to cross the road for a long parliamentary sitting. But he was around, and they’d fallen into conversation on the terrace alongside the river, surrounded by members enjoying a late night (Sorley’s bloody bill, again) because they could escape between votes for blissful drinking and banter in the dark, a balmy orgy of politics at the end of the day. Flemyng had responded to the unexpected quality of the encounter and now, sitting in his garden at dawn, could remember how their conversation had developed and, as he recalled, got out of hand.

At first, a routine canter round the course. The temper of government, how summer crises were ephemeral storms, strikes and inflation and the Europeans, and Paul’s vague concern about the Americans, which had intrigued Flemyng. They’d leaned on the stone balustrade with their drinks and watched the river, letting themselves relax, and Flemyng had spoken of the forest fires of politics, the flames that sprang from nowhere and left the landscape bare. ‘I can feel the heat,’ he’d said. Paul was listening, refusing to interrupt.

Like a penitent getting close to the point with a confessor but stopping short, Flemyng had edged on to risky territory with thoughts about the nature of friendship in politics and his own troubles.

‘You think comradeship is the greatest gift in this game, and for a while it is.’ But the higher you got, the more certain it was that the closest friendships would break, and probably break you in turn.

Paul had asked how he could enjoy his world.

‘The intensity,’ said Flemyng. Then, as if that wasn’t enough to be truthful, added, ‘And the danger.’

Before they had parted, Paul had said enough to encourage him to go a little further, turn over a few more cards. So Flemyng had added: ‘The more you concentrate on behaving sensibly in politics – rationally – doing the right thing, moving up, the more the rules of the game are bound to make you behave irrationally. It’s so obvious. I’m the one they say has all the advantages – the silver spoon, the confidence. If they only knew.’

Paul had said nothing, letting him continue. Two party boats passed them on the river, weaving away towards the south bank, their music carried off into the night. The cover of darkness had encouraged Flemyng to continue.

A point was reached where you invited destruction, he’d said, as if it were inevitable. ‘Maybe madness isn’t an aberration, but the natural end to our game.’ Everyone aspired to it in politics, even if they didn’t recognize it for what it was.

Before they parted, half an hour later, he had been drawn into a conversation that courted yet more danger. ‘I’ve found out something that troubles me, Paul. I don’t want to say more now. I’ll choose the right time. But I’ve seen the fragility underneath. I’ve always known it was there, and I suppose that’s my trouble. I want it all. Need the promise, enjoy the fear.’

Paul hadn’t pressed him. ‘Tell me when you feel it’s right, or necessary.’ That was all.

Now, in his garden at the start of the day, he recalled how he had been disturbed enough by his own frankness to tell Lawrence to take the car away, and had walked home along the river in the warm and soft darkness. Near Chelsea Bridge, on a whim, he had taken the slimy stone steps down to the water’s edge for no purpose but solitude, with the tide rising and streaks of light from the street lamps breaking on the water. He spent a few minutes in isolation there, standing on the lowest step, hidden from any passer-by at the railing above, one hand touching the damp weeds clinging to the stone embankment wall. The world retreated, granting privacy. Above him, the traffic was thinning out. One o’clock struck. Then he heard the faint swish of an oar on water and saw out of the blackness a single rower, sliding rapidly westwards and almost noiselessly along the surface, alone on the waterway in the dark. His blades left silver traces picked out in the patches of light, but soon he was gone. His wake disappeared, and the river looked as if nothing had broken its surface. A city of the unexpected, always. When Flemyng climbed up the steps to the street and began to walk again, it was at a faster pace.

Half an hour later he had reached home. Francesca was already asleep.

On the inside doormat lay the message with its handwritten summons from Sam, using an old workname. He noted the time of delivery on the postcard inside the envelope on which Sam had written ‘Will’. It had been dropped off only a few minutes earlier. Flemyng had read it twice, then torn it into four pieces which he’d pushed to the bottom of the kitchen bin. He’d immediately planned his route for the next day.

He could still remember every step of the walk on Thursday morning, Sam’s alarm, and the atmosphere in Mansfield Mews where the government car had been parked outside number six. The movement at the window. Paul’s revelation of the American’s death had come only an hour later and now, in the stillness of the morning, Flemyng began to think through their next meeting, four hours away.

Francesca’s arrival in the garden with coffee jerked him back to the present and the misery that he’d felt when she began questioning him. She interrupted his apology with her own. ‘I don’t mean to be hard on you. But can’t you see, I’m worried sick?’ They hugged, swinging back and forth on the seat. ‘Can you reassure me?’

He squeezed her to him. ‘Of course I can. Of course. How could you think anything else?’

‘What am I supposed to think?’

‘I can’t tell you much,’ he said. ‘You know how it is. But I’ve learned something about what’s going on around me – hidden deep down and dangerous, I think. Forget policy, all that. This is about people, and what it’s like when they break.’

He asked her, as he had asked Paul, to give him time. Holding her hand, he turned to his plans for the weekend. ‘I’m still planning to go north tonight... I’ll fill you in properly on the family thing when I’ve talked to Mungo. That’s his territory, not mine. I owe it to him to wait.’

He got up and walked across the lawn, turning back to her after a few moments. ‘As for the office, I’ve been thinking about something you’ve often said to me.’

‘Which is?’

‘That I enjoy the thick of it, the camaraderie. Thrive on the fun. But that’s not the whole story, nor even the true one.’

For the first time that morning, Francesca smiled. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll always be the cat who walks alone.’

Then they heard the doorbell. Lawrence was waiting with the car to take Will to the office.

He picked up his red box, and the morning folder was waiting for him on the back seat of the car. He checked the diary, revealing a lightish Friday, although there were ominous signs in Lucy’s typed note of a queue of visitors forming in the building, all wanting decisions before the office powered down for the summer. And, Flemyng knew, so that they could wipe clean their consciences before they cleared their own desks. An ambassador from the Gulf was in town and had been promised lunch – that could go – and there were awkward phone calls to make to disgruntled backbenchers. His constituency chairman still wanted him, and Gwilym had to have a word about parliamentary business next week. Two big red boxes were threatened for the weekend in Scotland, fishing or no fishing. About the events that were consuming his thoughts, there was only one simple line: ‘Paul, 10 a.m.’

He flicked over the newspaper front pages as they drove alongside the river. Serene. He’d clear the afternoon.

He leaned forward. ‘Lawrence, could you drop the box at the office? It’s a fine day. I’ll walk the last lap. Work off last night’s indulgence.’ He got out of the car a hundred yards before Lambeth Bridge, and crossed the river. As he turned towards Whitehall, he rehearsed what he was going to say to Lucy, on the assumption that she had done what he had planned.

The pavement was busy, and he felt the holiday spirit abroad in the crowd moving around him in the direction of Parliament Square. To the world beyond his own, politics was entering its summer hibernation. He stopped to talk to a backbencher with whom he was friendly, giving his visiting constituents their ministerial moment, then negotiated the traffic in the square to get back to base.

As he did so, Lucy was ringing Francesca. ‘If Lawrence is on time, which I’m sure he is, Will is in the car and on his way. May we talk?’

Francesca was cool. ‘We have to. What’s going on, Lucy?’

‘You mean, with Will?’

‘Of course. I just can’t get through to him,’ Francesca said. And without any further acknowledgement from either of them, the conversation took on a different tone. They were still feeling each other out, but understood that they were going to take the risk and trade information.

‘You know he’s been a bit distracted in the last week or two. I don’t know how much he’s told you,’ Francesca began. No response.

‘May I be frank?’ Francesca continued. ‘Will had a bad night last night after the opera. He was secretive, unhappy. And he asked me a strange question out of the blue when he was half asleep – about how I’d define madness. I don’t know whether he even realized he’d spoken. No context, just that. I didn’t know what to think. Has he said anything like that to you?’ Then she added, ‘Please.’

Lucy didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, end of last week. Don’t know why. He passed it off with a laugh. I think he was surprised it had slipped out.’

Francesca asked, ‘Did you have an answer for him?’

‘’Course not. Made a joke of it.’

Francesca, not ready to resurrect her lunch invitation, said they both had to try in their different ways to help him through.

‘I’ll try as best I can, and it’ll be fine,’ Lucy said. ‘We’ve been here before.’ Francesca thanked her, and prepared for her day. Lucy straightened her papers and asked the rest of the office staff, bustling around, to leave her alone. She took an envelope from her locked cabinet, stood still for a moment, and placed it on Flemyng’s desk.

*

As she did so, the two other ministers from the opera party were across the street, together in a small conference room in number twelve Downing Street, where the chief whip had his headquarters, with a disagreeable problem on the table. Harry Sorley’s bill was caught in a parliamentary struggle that seemed to draw added heat from the rising temperature outside, and had the whole of Westminster complaining about long nights and the prospect of postponed holidays. The bill was being eviscerated and the entrails, as the chief put it, were beginning to stink.

‘Sorry to call you together at this God-awful hour,’ he said. ‘But we need to get this fixed, and quick.’

Extricating themselves from Sorley’s muddle would be messy, but that was politics. The whips were ready. There would be a concession to the unhappy mob and the threat that if they didn’t buy it, maybe had the gall to ask for more, the House would stay sitting into the school holidays. Deal done, as the chief knew, but there would be pain. Jonathan Ruskin had fetched up, Sorley’s friend at court, to dispense wisdom and warmth.

The chief whip was large and sometimes cheery, but kept his job because he had a relish for black politics, coloured with a scatological turn of phrase and a love of verbal violence. Sorley was dressed more smartly than usual, as if to make the point that he was going to keep his self-respect to the last. The chief whip sniffed his shaving balm when he entered, and blew his nose loudly. He noticed that Gwilym wasn’t smiling, which was unusual, and said to him, ‘You look terrible. You should piss off for a while. Let’s get on with it.’

Sorley had put up a terrible performance at the party meeting on Tuesday, and there was a panicky interview in the
Telegraph
the following day, in which he had unwittingly revealed his fear, giving the scent of blood to a parliamentary pack on the prowl and stirring their ravenous urge. He’d be dead meat before the weekend was over. A firm hand was needed. As far as Ruskin was concerned, the detail of the bill was of no moment. ‘It’s piss and wind, I’m afraid,’ he’d told the chief whip the previous afternoon, though he’d flexed his muscles in arguing for it in cabinet a few months before, when the wind was coming from a different direction. An age ago.