This Was A Man (52 page)

Emma was delighted to see a few heads nodding. Giles’s speech had been well received, but it was her responsibility to explain the finer details of the proposed legislation. She took their
lordships through the substance of the bill clause by clause, but was unable to kindle the flame of passion that her brother had ignited so successfully.

As she turned another page, she became aware of what her grandfather, Lord Harvey, once described as losing the attention of the House, that moment when members become listless and begin
chattering among themselves. Far more damning even than jeering or cries of ‘Shame’.

She glanced up to see an elderly peer nodding off, and when, moments later, he began to snore, the members seated on either side of him made no attempt to wake him, as they were all too clearly
enjoying the minister’s discomfort. Emma realized the minutes were slipping away before the House would be asked to divide and the votes would be counted. She turned another page. ‘And
now I would like to acknowledge the backbone of the NHS, our magnificent nurses, who—’

Giles leapt to his feet to interrupt the minister, and in doing so strayed on to enemy territory. Emma immediately gave way, allowing her brother to command the despatch box.

‘I am grateful to the noble lady for giving way, but may I ask, if she considers nurses are doing such a magnificent job, why are they only receiving a three per cent pay rise?’
Convinced that Emma was now on the ropes, he sat down to loud cries of ‘Hear, hear!’

Emma resumed her place at the despatch box. ‘The noble lord, if I recall his words correctly, demanded a fourteen per cent pay rise for nurses.’ Giles nodded vigorously. ‘So I
am bound to ask him where he expects the government to find the extra money to pay for such an increase?’

Giles was quickly back on his feet, ready to deliver the knockout blow. ‘It could start by putting up taxes for the highest earners, who can well afford to pay a little more to assist
those less fortunate than themselves.’ He sat down to even louder cheers, while Emma waited patiently at the despatch box.

‘I’m glad the noble lord admitted that would be a start,’ she said, picking up a red file that a Treasury official had handed her that morning, ‘because a start is all it
would be. If he is asking this House to believe that the Labour Party could cover a fourteen per cent pay rise for nurses simply by raising taxes for those earning forty thousand pounds a year or
more, let me tell him this, he would require a tax hike to ninety-three per cent year on year. And I confess,’ she added, borrowing her brother’s brand of sarcasm, ‘I hadn’t
realized that a tax rate of ninety-three per cent was Labour Party policy, because I didn’t spot it in their manifesto, which I read word for word.’

Emma could hear the laughter coming from behind her, even if she couldn’t see her colleagues jabbing their fingers at her brother and repeating, ‘Ninety-three per cent, ninety-three
per cent.’

Like Giles, she waited for silence before adding, ‘Perhaps the noble lord would tell the House what other ideas he has for covering the extra cost?’

Giles remained seated.

‘Might I be allowed to suggest one or two ways of raising the necessary funds that would help him to reach his target of fourteen per cent?’

Emma had recaptured the attention of the House. She turned a page of the Treasury memo inside the red file. ‘For a start, I could cancel the three new hospitals planned for Strathclyde,
Newcastle and Coventry. That would solve the problem. Mind you, I’d need to close another three hospitals next year. But I am not willing to make that sacrifice, so perhaps I should look at
some other departments’ budgets and see what my colleagues have to offer.’

She turned another page.

‘We could cut back on our plans for new universities, or withdraw the three per cent increase in the old age pension. That would solve the problem. Or we could cut back on our armed forces
by mothballing the odd regiment. No, no, we couldn’t do that,’ she said scornfully, ‘not after the noble lord spoke so passionately against any cutbacks in the armed forces budget
only a month ago.’

Giles sank further into his seat.

‘And remembering the noble lord’s distinguished record in another place, as a Foreign Office minister, perhaps we could close half a dozen of our embassies. That should do the trick.
We could even leave him to decide which ones. Washington? Paris? Moscow perhaps? Beijing? Tokyo? I’m bound to ask, is this another Labour Party policy they forgot to mention in their
manifesto?’

Suddenly the government benches were alight with laughter and cheering.

‘No, my Lord Speaker,’ continued Emma once the house had fallen silent again, ‘the truth is, words are cheap, but action comes more expensive, and it’s the duty of a
responsible government to consider priorities and make sure it balances the books. That undertaking was in the Tory manifesto, and I make no apology for it.’

Emma was aware that she only had a couple of minutes left, and the cheering of her delighted colleagues was eating away at her time.

‘I must therefore tell the House that I consider education, pensions, defence and our role in world affairs every bit as important as my own department. But let me assure your lordships,
when it comes to my own department, I fought the Treasury tooth and nail to keep those three new hospitals in the budget.’ She paused, raised her voice and said, ‘This morning the
Chancellor of the Exchequer agreed that the nurses will be awarded a six per cent pay rise.’

The benches behind her erupted in prolonged cheers.

Emma abandoned the final pages of her script and, looking directly at her brother, said, ‘None of this, however, will be possible if you follow the noble lord into the Not Contents lobby
tonight and vote against this bill. If I am, as he suggests, an infidel storming the hallowed gates of the National Health Service, then I must tell him that I intend to open those gates to allow
all patients to enter. Yes, my lords, free at the point of use, to quote his hero Clement Attlee. And that is the reason, my lords, I do not hesitate to urge you to join me in the real world and
support this bill, so that when I return to my department tomorrow morning, I can set about making the necessary changes that will ensure the future of the National Health Service and not allow it
to languish in the past, along with my noble kinsman, Lord Barrington, who will presumably still be reminiscing fondly about the good old days. I, my lords, will be telling my grandchildren, and
also my great-granddaughter, about the good new days. But that will only be possible if you support this bill, and join me in the Contents lobby tonight. My lords, I beg to move the second
reading.’

Emma sat down to the loudest cheer of the night, while Giles sat slumped back, aware that he shouldn’t have raised his head above the parapet, but should simply have feigned boredom and
allowed Emma to dig her own grave. She glanced across the chamber at her brother, who raised a hand, touched his forehead and mouthed the word ‘Chapeau’. Praise indeed. But both of them
were well aware that the votes still had to be counted.

When the division bell rang, members began to make their way towards the corridors of their conviction. Emma entered the Contents lobby, where she spotted one or two fence-sitters and waverers
casting their vote. But would it be enough?

Once she had given her name to the teller seated at his high desk, ticking off each member, she returned to her seat on the front bench and joined in the inconsequential chatter that always
rises like hot air from both sides while members wait for the whips to return and deliver the verdict of the House.

A hush descended on the chamber when the four gentlemen ushers lined up and marched slowly towards the table at the centre of the chamber.

The chief whip held up a card and, once he’d double-checked the figures, declared, ‘Contents to the left, four hundred and twenty-two.’ Emma held her breath. ‘Not
Contents to the right, four hundred and eleven. The Contents have it. The Contents have it.’

Cheers erupted from the benches behind Emma. As she made her way out of the chamber, she found herself surrounded by supporters telling her they had never doubted she would win. She smiled and
thanked them.

She finally managed to break away and join Harry and the rest of the family in the peers’ guest room, where she was delighted to find Giles opening a bottle of champagne. He filled her
glass and raised his own.

‘To Emma,’ he said, ‘who not only won the argument but also the battle, as our mother predicted she would.’

Once the rest of the family had departed, Harry, Giles, Emma, Karin and Freddie – his first glass of champagne – walked slowly back to their home in Smith Square. Emma climbed into
bed exhausted, but an intoxicating mix of adrenaline and success made it impossible for her to sleep.

The following morning, Emma woke at six, her cruel body clock ignoring her desire to go on sleeping.

Once she had showered and dressed, she hurried downstairs, looking forward to reading the reports of the debate in the papers while enjoying a cup of tea, and perhaps even a second slice of
toast and marmalade. The papers were already laid out on the dining table. She read the headline in
The Times
and collapsed into the nearest chair, her head in her hands. That had never
been her intention.

Emma knew that ‘resigned’ was a parliamentary euphemism for sacked.

THE END

H
ARRY PUT DOWN
his pen, leapt in the air and shouted ‘Hallelujah!’, which was what he always did whenever he wrote those two words. He sat
back down, looked up at the ceiling, and said, ‘Thank you.’ Another ritual fulfilled.

In the morning, he would send copies of the script to three people, so they could read
Heads You Win
for the first time. Then he would suffer his annual neurosis, while he waited to
hear their opinions. But just like him, they all had their own routines.

The first, Aaron Guinzburg, his American publisher, would leave his office and go home the moment the manuscript landed on his desk, having given clear instructions that he was not to be
disturbed until he had turned the last page. He would then call Harry, sometimes forgetting what time it was in England. His view could often be discounted because he was always so
enthusiastic.

The second was Ian Chapman, his English publisher, who always waited until the weekend before he read the book, and would call Harry first thing on Monday morning to offer his opinion. As he was
a Scotsman who was unable to hide his true feelings, this only made Harry more apprehensive.

The third, and by far the most intuitive of his first readers, was his sister-in-law, Grace, who not only offered her disinterested opinion, but invariably accompanied it with a ten-page written
report, and occasionally, forgetting he was not one of her pupils, corrected his grammar.

Harry had never considered Grace to be an obvious William Warwick fan until in an unguarded moment she admitted to a penchant for racy novels. However, her idea of racy was Kingsley Amis, Graham
Greene (the ones he described as entertainments) and her favourite, Ian Fleming.

In return for her opinion, Harry would take Grace to lunch at the Garrick, before accompanying her to a matinee, preferably by her favourite racy playwright, Terence Rattigan.

Once the three manuscripts had been despatched by courier, the agonizing wait began. Harry’s three readers had all been warned that
Heads You Win
was a departure from his usual
fare, which only made him more anxious.

He had considered allowing Giles, who had a lot more time on his hands lately, and Sebastian, his most ardent fan, to also be among the first to read his latest manuscript, but decided not to
break with his usual routine. He would allow them to read the final draft over Christmas, after his line editor had suggested any changes.

Miss Eileen Warburton, a spinster of this parish, was a woman Harry suspected lived alone in a basement flat and, like Mole, didn’t emerge until spring. During those winter months, she
would spend her time toiling away on her authors’ hapless scripts, correcting their mistakes, some of which were so inconsequential no one else would ever have noticed them. While others,
howlers, as she liked to describe them, had they gone uncorrected, would have caused a thousand irate letters to end up on the author’s desk, pointing out his stupidity. Miss Warburton never
allowed Harry to forget that Geneva was not the capital of Switzerland, and that the
Titanic
had sunk on April 15th, not 14th.

In a moment of flippant bravado, Harry had once reminded her that in Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
, the heroine’s eyes changed from black to brown to blue and back to black again
in less than a hundred pages.

‘I never comment on books I haven’t edited,’ she said, without any suggestion of irony.