very high priority We can do some lobbying, of course, and
I can try and set up a meeting between you and the
appropriate minister, but that won’t be easy either. I agree
with you, these regulations are a nightmare. And the
trouble is, being British, we will play by the rules. Places like Italy and Spain, they ignore half of them. Much more
sensible.’
The personal conversation, which had been much longer
and more difficult, concerned Bob Macintosh’s marital
difficulties, and his reluctance to go along with the spin
doctors within the new, rollercoasting Labour Party and be
photographed playing happy families with his adulterous
wife.
‘I just don’t see why I should, Tom,’ he said, draining his
claret glass, nodding gratefully as Tom refilled it. ‘I’m
prepared to take Maureen back because I love her and I
know she’s sorry—’ ‘Tom doubted this very much, but
didn’t say so - ‘but I don’t give a monkey’s about the
wonderful new government being tainted with sleaze, as
that little shit who called me put it. Why should I? As far as
I’m concerned, the bloody minister can drown in his own
excrement. It’s so undignified, and hard on the kids.
They’re not daft, they know why the press suddenly want
to photograph us. The lad doesn’t know what’s been going
on, too young, but the girls have a pretty shrewd idea, and I
don’t like the signals we’ll be sending them.’
‘Like what?’ said Tom.
‘Well, like, it’s all right if you don’t get caught, and then
it’s still all right as long as you keep on lying.’
‘Presumably the other chap’s got to put on the same
performance?’
‘Oh, yes, and he’s more than willing. There he is, only
about a month into his grand new job. His wife’s agreeable
too; she’s enjoying her new life as well. And their kids are
younger.’
‘I’m amazed they want you to do it,’ said Tom. ‘I’d have
thought they’d be into a new form of damage limitation by
now. Everyone knew that picture did Mellor more harm
than good. No, of course you shouldn’t do it if you don’t
want to.’
‘I bloody don’t,’ said Macintosh. His jaw set in a way that
Tom recognised, and had come to dread himself.
‘The only thing I would say is that there might be
something you could get out of it.’
‘Oh, yeah? What? I’ve got Maureen back, that’s all I care
about. On my terms too, this time, no more of that lingerie
party nonsense.’
‘But is that really all you care about?’ said Tom.
‘Well, yes. That and the kids. I mean, what did you have
in mind, Tom?’
‘I’m not quite sure. It was something Octavia said,
she—’
And then he remembered Felix and the missed phone
call and its inevitable consequences - thinly veiled implications
that he hadn’t wanted to call at all, truculent
questioning as to whether he could cope with the project
anyway if he was so busy, Octavia’s resentment at his
negligence, when she heard about it from her father — none
of these things was helping his concentration. He’d have to
ring Felix straight away.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look, Bob, can you excuse me a
minute? I have got an idea, but I’ve got to ring my
secretary. She was getting some information for me that I
need before I go on to the House.’
It always worked, that one; sounded as if he was going to
the House of Commons to speak on the floor, rather than
hang about in the committee corridor for an hour or so, or
in the main lobby, waiting for someone to arrive.
‘Sure. Can I order another coffee?’
‘Of course. Brandy?’
‘No, thank you. Got work to do this afternoon.’
Tom ran down the wide steps to the men’s cloakroom,
pulling out his mobile phone, and punched out Miller’s
private number.
Felix Miller’s secretary said she was sorry, but Mr Miller
had left the office for the day and couldn’t be contacted
until that night, when he would be in Edinburgh. Could
she ask Mr Miller to phone Mr Fleming from there? She
couldn’t give Mr Fleming the number as it was a private house, and she had specific instructions not to.
Tom said that would be very kind of her and would she
give Mr Miller his good wishes and tell him that he had
been unable to call any earlier, as he had been in back-to
back meetings since eight thirty that morning.
He went back to the table, sat down again, drained his
coffee cup.
Macintosh was leafing through some papers. ‘You’ll get
back to me then on this regulation business? Very soon.’
‘Yup. Early next week. I’ll have a chat with an old chum
of mine in Whitehall. Meanwhile, sit tight, don’t do
anything rash.’
‘You sure about that? I did meet someone at a dinner last
week, someone quite high up in the government, who said
any time I wanted help, I had only to lift the phone. We
could shortcut the whole—’
‘Bob, please don’t do that. Let me put it more strongly.
On no account do that. Half the time these guys you meet
at dinners don’t mean it, or don’t have the clout and then
you’ve ruffled feathers in Whitehall which in the long run
are more important. Okay?’
‘Yes, okay,’ said Macintosh. But he didn’t sound
convinced. ‘And you don’t think I should do this ruddy
photo shoot?’
‘No, I don’t. Not if you don’t want to. Unless—’ Tom
stopped. He felt rather cold suddenly, as he always did
when he had a brainwave. ‘Unless we did something really
very clever. Made everybody happy.’
‘Does that include me?’
‘Oh, it does, Bob. It most certainly does. Pass me the
water, would you, there’s a good chap. Now listen…’
‘Fleming!’ Melanie’s head appeared round Octavia’s door.
‘Look, if it wouldn’t be too much to ask, could you possibly
come into my office? We do have a meeting scheduled and
it’s already ten minutes late.’
‘Sorry. I was on a complicated call.’ Octavia was never sure if it was Melanie’s personality, or her own innate sense of hierarchy, bred from her rigid childhood and education,
that made her so constantly nervous of annoying her.
‘That’s okay. Now listen,’ she said, leading Octavia back
into her own office, pushing a large tortoiseshell comb into
her wild hair, ‘any progress on Cultivate yet, and a sponsor?
Margaret Piper’s written me a letter, saying she’s very
dissatisfied.’
‘Evil old bat,’ said Octavia. ‘She’s my client, what’s she
doing complaining to you? Honestly, she’s getting more of
my time proportionately than any of my other clients. I
watched her feeding her chins for over two hours, and she
didn’t even thank me.’
‘I think she sees me as headmistress here,’ said Melanie.
‘Now calm down, Octavia, I’m not blaming you, obviously,
and I know how hard it is to get sponsorship at the
moment, and specially for a charity like that one. But I
don’t want to lose her, and if we’re not careful, we will.
And if, as you say, Lloyds Bank aren’t going to come up
with the goods, then we do have a problem and maybe I
should throw some names into the ring.’
It was pride as much as anything else that made Octavia
say she had actually, she thought, now got a sponsor for
Cultivate. Foolish, dangerous pride, as she saw very clearly
afterwards …
Marianne Muirhead had had a very good day. She had won
her golf match, on a course she was particularly fond of, the
Royal Surrey in Richmond. It had been the first course
ever to be designed for women players, and was extremely
pretty, studded with trees and ornamental shrubs and set on
the edge of the Old Deer Park, in that lovely area between
the Thames and Kew Gardens.
She had then stopped off to shop in Sloane Street on her
way home and bought herself an extremely chic black crepe
trouser suit from Prada, some perilously high-heeled boots
to wear with it, and an exquisitely beaded evening bag in
Valentino, and had then reached home to find a spur-of
the moment dinner invitation with one of her more interesting women friends, a barrister, waiting for her on
the answering machine. She phoned to accept and to agree
on a restaurant — Mon Plaisir in Monmouth Street, ‘so
pretty and the best frites in London’ — and then went down
to greet Romilly, who was calling her from the hall, flushed
with excitement at being chosen to play a saxophone solo at
the concert her school was putting on at the end of term.
‘Very well done, darling! That is just so exciting. What
are you going to play?’
‘“Summertime.” From Porgy and Bess. It’s really really
hard but—’
‘But you’ll be wonderful. Darling, I’m really pleased for
you. And proud. We must make sure Daddy is here - let
me have the date straight away, so I can brief him.’ It was
one of Marianne’s strengths as a divorced parent that she did
not just pay lip service to involving her ex-husband in their
children’s lives — she worked extremely hard and successfully
at it.
‘Sure. Thanks.’
Romilly kissed her mother. She was very tall for her age,
as tall as her sister Zoe’, and still growing. She was very thin,
and she had braces on her teeth, but she was clearly going to
be lovely, with a sheet of fair hair falling down her back,
perfect clear skin, and her mother’s large green eyes and full
mouth. She was shy and rather serious, hard working and
dutiful.
Zoe, who was none of those things, found her sister’s
goodness trying and teased her constantly about it, not
always kindly, while using her remorselessly as slave, banker
— Romilly always had money in her account while Zoe’s
allowance was spent long before she got it — and source of
alibi. Nevertheless, Zoe adored her and was fiercely
protective of her, more so than Marianne, constantly
watchful for what she felt might be unsuitable friends and
influences, critical of any clothes that seemed to her
remotely sexy — ‘Mum, you can’t let her go out in that
dress! It’s disgusting, you can see her knickers’ — and volubly anxious at Romilly’s naivety and gullibility. ‘Honestly, Romilly, you’ll end up in a brothel one of these days.
If some old perv came up to you in the street and told you
he needed you to come home with him, and make him a
nice cup of tea, you’d believe him.’
It annoyed Romilly, this protectiveness, and amused
Marianne, who was inclined to be liberal and argued that
Zoe would never have submitted to such censure. Zoe,
however, responded with some truth that she had been
born streetwise and could see trouble before it actually hit
her in the face.
‘You’ve got to be more careful with her, Mum; she’s
okay translating Chaucer, but she’s a complete spastic when
it comes to real life.’
Marianne said humbly that she would try to be more
careful.
But it was Zoe who was occupying her attention that
day: she needed to talk to Alec about her. Zoe planned to
take a gap year when she left school and spend it working
with some youth volunteer scheme in Zimbabwe. It
sounded rather worrying to Marianne, and, she couldn’t
help feeling, owed less to Zoe’s highmindedness and social
conscience than to an attachment to a boy she had met and
fancied who was joining the scheme himself. Marianne
didn’t dislike the boyfriend, he was extremely nice and
considerably more highminded than Zoe, but she felt he
was better equipped to survive the rigours of the scheme
than her daughter, and that he might become disillusioned
with her and thus prove a disappointment over the time
they spent out there: with potentially disastrous results.
It was, of course, out of the question to suggest any of
this to Zoe; the only hope was to distract her with a more
attractive and suitable plan for her gap year. Alec had
suggested he spoke to his sister in Sydney who ran a fashion
PR business, to see if she could employ Zoe in some
capacity. Zoe had long wanted to go to Australia, and from
Sydney would be able to join the teenage travel trail round
the rest of the country; Marianne had heard no more from
Alec about it, though, and Zoe was pressing her to sign papers and make large deposits on the volunteer scheme.
Zoe was going to be late home that evening, so
Marianne went up to her room, picked up the phone next
to her rather beautiful French roll-top bed, and dialled her
ex-husband at his New York office.
Mr Muirhead was in a meeting, his secretary said, but she
would have him call. Less than half an hour later, Alec
Muirhead’s voice — drawly, gravelly, the voice that
Marianne had so foolishly fallen in love with — was on the
line.
‘Good morning, dear. How are you?’
‘I’m fine, Alec. It’s late afternoon here, of course, it’s a
perfect English summer day, and I’ve won a golf match.
And bought a very expensive outfit. What more could a
woman ask?’
‘Very little, I’m sure. And the girls?’
‘Fine. I’m ringing about—’