Weeks in Naviras (21 page)

I only met Gavin for the first time after Morgan was elected, and on her first state visit to the UK three months after she took the White House. They stayed at Buckingham Palace, as convention dictated. James and I attended one of the banquets during their trip, and although he’d recently become Home Secretary we sat nowhere near Morgan and Gavin at dinner. They were on the top table with Oliver Drake, along with his wife Arbela. James and I were consigned to the other side of the gigantic U-shaped table, opposite a couple from Moscow. One of these claimed to be in ‘public affairs’, I took that to mean he was one of those continually threatening to turn off the gas pipeline. I’m sure the government secretly loathed having such people at a state banquet, but had no choice but to suck it up since it had no other short-term answer to the energy crisis.

I smiled quietly to myself when I took my first bite of the fish course and found it vastly inferior to anything ever cooked by Lottie.
My word, how they’ve overcooked it, darling
. Her voice had often been popping into my head since her death, providing a running commentary on things.
Far too salty and it’s looks like it’s been frozen. Who would have thought it, at Buckingham Palace of all places?

Morgan gave an impressive speech, fully aware the Israeli ambassador to the UK was present. Normally these set-pieces were fairly anodyne but Morgan used hers that night to spell out for the first time how a two-state solution with the Palestinians was an
out-dated pipedream. ‘The argument for there being one state, one shared set of overarching principles, is emerging as the only viable way forward for these two peoples.’ A murmur travelled up and down the long tables.

‘They will always be two peoples, each with their own identities and beliefs,’ Morgan went on. ‘But it’s my hope that in the next few years, both sides will come to see how they inhabit the same shared space and work together on that premise.’ It was only one of several foreign-policy observations in her speech, but it was dynamite and it dominated the next day’s headlines around the world. Everyone took it to mean a call for some kind of Greater Israel, which seemed preposterous. Presumably she had something more nuanced in mind but that’s less easy to turn into a headline.

It’d been three years since I’d last seen her in person and everything had changed for her, but still she remembered me when I was introduced to her after supper. ‘Eleanor, James, my erstwhile saviours. You know, I’ve never walked out without my adrenaline since that afternoon.’

As a way of palming us off she immediately introduced me to Gavin, handsome in his white tie but oddly insouciant about the whole occasion. ‘Hey, James, good to see you again, how long has it been?’

‘Too long, Gavin. How are you settling into Pennsylvania Avenue?’ Although he’d only met the First Gentleman a few times before the election, James conveyed a familiarity which I suspected to be only skin deep.

‘Well I’m hardly ever there, really,’ said Gavin. ‘I lived in planes and hotel rooms for a year before the election, I thought that would stop but it’s only gotten worse.’

Spotting someone across the room, James quickly excused himself, leaving Gavin and I facing each other, uncomfortably.

‘So what do you do, Mrs. Weeks? I can’t believe it’s taken so long for us to meet.’

‘Ellie, please. I don’t do much, apart from run James’s constituency office.’ I explained how I’d trained as a barrister but had found myself in a quite unexpected occupation, one without a clear job description.

He gave his small grin. ‘Happens to the best of us, unfortunately. I guess knowing James, he won’t be stopping at home secretary.’

‘Well, I don’t expect the prime minister to be going anywhere soon,’ I said, not reassured by my own words. ‘I’d be happy for James to stay in one job for more than a year or so. He’s making a habit of changing things all the time.’

‘Well yeah, quite an extraordinary career. He’s very highly rated in DC, that I know.’

‘He works hard,’ I said. ‘And his new job’s one of the toughest in Cabinet.’

‘Yeah you guys go through Home Secretaries like water,’ he grinned.

‘Prime Ministers don’t seem to be lasting much longer,’ I said. ‘I sometimes think it would be better if they were given more, I don’t know..’

‘More strikes before they were out?’

‘I suppose. It’s becoming a vicious circle, they worry their time’s going to be short so they rush things, which leads to more mistakes and fiascos. At least when you elect a president, they know they’ll normally get four years.’

I’d started paying a lot more attention to such things, was making little observations about the political machine and all its faults. By that point Bobby was nearly five and Sadie was two-and-a-half. She’d started finding ways of urging James to leave the house, during the brief periods he was around. She’d developed astonishingly fast, and kept telling him he should be doing something else. ‘You should go to the gym, Daddy,’ she’d say on Sunday mornings, if James wasn’t doing a round of TV interviews. I think he found it amusing and certainly wasn’t hurt by it. I’d asked him, the Sunday night before we were due to have a quick break in Naviras. He’d just laughed and said, ‘She’s at that age, she only wants her Mum.’

Oddly enough, our respective attitudes towards Naviras had changed in the preceding year. With Lottie gone and the guesthouse closed I had mixed emotions at going out there – pleased to see Luis, of course, but worried I’d accidentally give something away about my ownership of Casa Amanhã. I wanted to see the house, but was wary of arousing suspicion by taking too much interest in it. Yet for James the village had become more appealing, perhaps because it was out of the way and safe, more likely because there was no longer any excuse not to stay in the hotel.

We didn’t have the kind of motorcade we’d end up with once James was PM, but it still came with an outriding police bike, up ahead. James had recently started drinking high-energy fat-burning drinks, which were supposed to help him lose weight without making him feel tired. He was drinking five of them every day and they’d given him foul breath and uncontrollable, noxious wind. The back of the car stank. Bobby had just discovered the word ‘fart’ and was giggling. Sadie was holding her nose.

The first suggestion of problems came as we sat in the departure lounge. It was unpleasantly warm and people were complaining; staff at the gate told us the air conditioning wasn’t working properly. As we walked down the jetway to the plane James’s phone rang. It was Rav, by then a special adviser in the Home Office. As he listened James stopped walking abruptly, causing the people behind us to bump into him.

‘Problems with the power grid,’ was all he said to me as we sat down and buckled up, people still filing past us down the aisle to their seats. He’d thought about getting off the plane, had asked Rav to call Number 10 to see if they wanted him back at Westminster. But Rav called back to say Downing Street viewed it as an isolated incident, little more than a fluctuation in the supply. ‘Drake says it’s okay for us to go,’ said James. ‘He’d better be right, otherwise there might no getting back.’

Still he fiddled with his phone long after the doors had closed and the safety video was playing. The flight attendant frowned at James as she was pointing out the exits. ‘You should put that into flight mode,’ I said, as the plane turned onto the runway and the engines signalled their eagerness to rev up.

‘Don’t be silly, L, you can’t crash a plane with a phone.’ The flight attendant was still staring at James from the very front of the plane, perhaps she knew who he was and let it pass. By the time we landed in Lisbon it was clear things had taken a turn for the worse. First there’d been a blackout across much of northern England, it had lasted an hour but had been dismissed as a one-off. Then the whole country started to experience brownouts, inconvenient at first but increasing the pressure on Downing Street to account for them. The fluctuations played havoc with all sorts of things; computers were crashing, cars and phones failed to charge properly. Clocks told the wrong time, fridges and freezers either defrosted or iced up.

Privately James was informed that two separate things had occurred in tandem. An unusually long period of high pressure over Britain had caused the wind to drop, rendering the onshore windfarms useless. Meanwhile the Russians had diverted their gas exports to countries prepared to pay more than Britain. It had happened before but suddenly there wasn’t any slack left in the system to absorb the loss. Everyone in Whitehall knew; it wouldn’t be long before the media put two and two together.

By the time we got down to Naviras in a taxi, checked into the hotel room and unpacked our things an email came through from Rav, saying James was needed back in Britain for an emergency Cabinet meeting. ‘Oh, now they tell me,’ he said. I don’t know whether James was annoyed with Drake for not getting a grip sooner, or with himself for not getting off the plane in London when he’d had the chance.

‘I think we ought to stay here,’ I said to him. ‘Me and the kids, I mean.’

‘How come?’

‘Well if there’re problems with the power then we’re better off here until it’s all sorted, surely?’ The issue was confined to Britain; Portugal had plenty of electricity thanks to its ubiquitous wind farms and solar panels.

James went to the balcony of our hotel room with his back to me, staring out at the sea for a moment with his hands on his hips. ‘Okay,’ he said, turning around. ‘Yeah, it makes sense. No point you ruining your holiday over this. It’ll hopefully be resolved in a few days.’

Once again he was leaving me in Naviras to go back and do politics, only it no longer bothered me; I was pleased about it, glad to be in the village and away from what seemed to be the makings of a serious mess.

I didn’t care much for the hotel and tried as hard as I could not to make this obvious to the staff working there, none of whom were Portuguese. The rooms all had aircon, fruit platters waiting for us by the bed, there was even a phone in each of the bathrooms right next to the lavatory. Has anyone ever actually used one of those phones, I wondered? Can any conversation be so urgent that it has to be taken while relieving oneself? I began to see things like this, thanks to Bobby. ‘Mummy, can I phone Daddy from the toilet?’

‘Maybe later, darling.’ I couldn’t help using the word, even though invoking Lottie was always painful.

I doubted whether the hotel made any money. It was never full, nowhere near. I think I only saw three other families staying there during that trip. The staff seemed bored much of the time and tended to over-compensate. Sitting by the rooftop pool they’d constantly ask if we’d like drinks or food, seemingly disappointed by each refusal. I hated the pool, sheltered from the wind by high walls which made it impossible to enjoy what should’ve been a tremendous view. The whole roof terrace felt clinical and new, the young shrubs in the planters looked like they’d been potted the day before; unweathered and too perfectly positioned. After a few hours I decided to take Bobby and Sadie down to the beach instead.

In most ways Naviras was made for children, the only problem was Sadie’s habit of running off down the steep streets, and she hated being picked up or held back once she’d discovered the joys of walking. I couldn’t take my eyes off her as the three of us made our way down to the beach bar for some lunch. As we left the slipway I could see Luis sitting on the sundeck, smoking. I took the kids down to the beach, slathering them in suncream before laying out the towels and the toys, telling them not to go into the sea until I returned . They were happy making sandcastles by the towels. I walked up to the beach bar and across the terrace to Luis, who stood up. We kissed on each cheek before I sat down.

‘How’s scuba school, Luis?’

‘It’s going really well, I love it.’ He put the cigarette in the ashtray. ‘It’s been hard work setting up the business, but it’s actually starting to make money, believe it or not.’

‘I’m so pleased for you.’ It was good to see him with some direction to his life. I was just sorry about what taken him to spur into action. ‘Do you know what’s going on with Casa Amanhã?’

Luis went to light another cigarette just seconds after extinguishing his last. ‘Nothing. Some people came a few weeks ago, saying they wanted to value the place.’

I was shocked. ‘Where did they come from?’

Luis was undoing the top buttons of his shirt. ‘Carolina saw them at the gates to the house and rang me. When I arrived they said they were acting on behalf of the vendor, they said they wanted to go inside and take photos of the rooms, but I stopped them. They didn’t have a key,’ He produced a leather cord from inside his shirt, hanging around his neck. ‘Not this key.’ He smiled at me, picking up his cigarette again. ‘I told them to piss off, unless they had proof of ownership. Then they left, and they haven’t come back. I check the house every day, to see if anyone’s tried to get in.’

I was struggling to take it in. ‘Who were they?’

‘I haven’t seen them in the village before,’ he said. ‘A man and a woman, they seemed like a couple. Quite old, English, both of them. I asked them a few questions about the house but they didn’t seem to know enough about it, so I said they weren’t getting in.’

‘I didn’t know you had a key to the house.’

‘It was me who chained up the gates in the first place,’ he puffed. ‘Nobody else seemed to be doing anything about it. The whole thing’s strange, I mean somebody must know what’s going to happen to it, but not anyone in Naviras. Where’s Jamie?’