Born Yesterday (16 page)

Her Granita experience had an unexpected postscript.

Nine years later, in 2003, when Blair had been prime minister for seven years (and was showing no sign of keeping his part of the bargain with Brown, if there was one), she was having lunch with her agent Anna Scher in a Turkish restaurant in Upper Street. The restaurant was immediately opposite the premises where Granita used to be, and pretty soon after sitting down she could see from
the blackout curtains, the lights and so on, that filming was in progress. Of course it was Stephen Frears filming
The Deal
, with Michael Sheen as Tony Blair and David Morrissey as Gordon Brown.

When they had finished eating, Anna, who has known Stephen forever, insisted on going over. ‘Daaaaaaahhhhling!’ It was one of those. But all the time he was embracing Anna, Tully could see that his eyes were locked on her.

In the finished film it is a glammed-up version of herself – ‘more like Martine McCutcheon’ – who sweeps into the restaurant where Cassius and Brutus are plotting. The script has TB turning to GB at that point: ‘Now that –
that’s
power. Twenty million viewers.’

That was one example of the coincidences, traceable through the novels of Dickens to Virginia Woolf to Anthony Powell, that can happen in a city as big as London, the sheer teeming variety of city life, Clarissa still perched on the kerb and Big Ben ringing the hour, the plangent interplay between isolation and connection. A certain excitement over the daily renewal of vital energies in a city like London.

And as they were sitting on the pavement chatting, the notebook where she had diagrammed Granita still open between them, they shared a further experience of city serendipity, of that kind of coincidence.

The
Today
programme presenter James Naughtie’s book had provided the basis for Frears’ film. It had also alerted him to the fact that Sue Tully from
EastEnders
had also been eating at Granita that night. And now, as they sat
there with their drinks, this same Naughtie, looking pushed, maybe late in getting home to the Ellie to whom his book is dedicated, with love, maybe just a case of meetings being backed up (or being in danger of missing his cue for a concert he was due to introduce live from the Albert Hall – he also did that on Radio 3), Jim Naughtie came dashing towards them and flagged down a taxi a matter of inches from where they were sitting. She was in his book. The book was in his bag, along with fresh pasta, parmesan and other provisions from Camisa whose smells for some time had been making him feel hungry.

The closest I ever came to Tony Blair was on a train travelling from Manchester to London on a Saturday morning in late January 1993. I can be sure of the date because the story I had been in Manchester covering ran in the
Observer
two weeks later.

Blair had just been given the Home Office job by John Smith. Labour were still in opposition, but he was on the way up. (‘Oh, yes, young Tony,
very, very
keen!’ Kinnock had once been heard to joke of the barrister who he had just made a junior minister.)

A few hours before running in to Blair on the train I had been in a crack-house in what the paper called the ‘ganglands’ of Moss Side. I had been with ‘Maz’ and ‘Rodney’ (their real identities had to be kept hidden) and a photographer with very good contacts in Manchester, called Ged.

A few days earlier, a fourteen-year-old, Benji Stanley,
had been gunned down at a takeaway counter in Moss Side.

Like many people, Rodney claimed to know who was responsible for the murder, but nobody was talking.

Rodney described himself as ‘a thief, a robber, a gangster’, and also ‘a tidier-upper’: ‘If a weapon’s used, I believe in cutting it up and destroying it. Any weapon. If you walk and weapons get let off, I’ll be there, making sure that all the magazines and bullets are picked up.’ They weren’t playing at this. These were scary characters. (Rodney would later be crippled for life in a bungled armed raid on a Securicor van picking up the takings from a supermarket.)

It had been a long night. At around 3 a.m. I had had to count £50 notes into the hands of a dealer of crack cocaine and then watch while Rodney and Maz got off their faces smoking it from a plastic Coke bottle ‘works’ while Ged got his pictures. Later they posed in the narrow-mesh masks and balaclavas and combat gear of ‘field intelligence majors’, toting Uzis and pump-action shotguns.

I was in need of a shower and was tired. I had met a writer from another paper on the train and we were talking when Blair got on. He was seen off by a group of what were probably Party workers which included a group of women who he mwah-mwhaed on both cheeks before the doors closed.

The train had barely had time to pull out of Piccadilly station before he had his head buried in a book. It was a big fat volume and he had obviously been dying to get
back to it. He was about halfway through. Stockport. Crewe. Warrington Bank Quay. No other passengers came into the carriage. There was only the three of us. He never looked up.

Of course we were keen to know what he found so compelling. And, after about an hour, when he got up to go to the toilet, I took my chance.

Braced against any sudden lurches of the train, I slalomed down the aisle and grabbed a look at the cover:
Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American
Politician
, by Roger Morris. I felt the ridges of the presidential seal of office punched onto the cover before I read the words. I noted the number of the page. It was a number I carried for many years in my head until it became confused with many other numbers of PINs and passwords and the various keys for living a normal online life; just some data scooped up and washed away on the information tide.

Late in the summer, as a sign that he was history, a local ‘heritage’ plaque went up on the wall outside the Dun Cow: ‘The Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Anthony Lynton Blair while touring his constituency welcomed the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, Friday 21st November, 2003 to dine in the restaurant during a visit to the United Kingdom’.

Around the same time a much larger sign like a big bib went up across the front of Minsters which aroused a great deal of local resentment. In large letters it announced that
Minsters, so long the mirror Sedgefield used to look at itself, was now under new management. It would be reopening soon as an Indian restaurant, function room available, parties welcome.

‘Is that the one with the pigeons in it?’

An Australian family had got on just before the bus left St Andrew’s bus station in Edinburgh: mother, father, two boys, all open-faced, strapping, excited to be in Europe (although it would become clear, as the bus dawdled its way to the Firth of Forth and the road bridge across to where the PM’s constituency home is at North Queensferry, that the mother was originally from Scotland).

The parents sat in the seat behind him, the boys, who were probably aged about nine and eleven, together in a seat across the aisle from them. Occasionally a tube of sweets would make its way, hand to hand along the row, from one side of the bus to the other. They seemed to have an easy, uncomplicated relationship. (‘Ah, careful now, better sit back down, little buddy,’ the father would say whenever the younger boy stood up to get a better view of something out of the window. A schoolyard full of children – boys as well as girls – wearing kilts was one thing that propelled him to his feet. And then when the rust-red
spans of the railway bridge suddenly sprang up and started running parallel to the bridge they were all on across the Firth – or was it the Forth? It was a question the boy asked. None of them knew the answer.)

The wife was softly spoken; she knew how easy it was to listen in to other people’s conversations on these buses. But her husband was unabashed. They had been talking about the days they had just had in London, and Piccadilly Circus, and that was when he had asked the question about the pigeons: ‘Is that the one with the pigeons in it?’

It was easy to scoff, of course. And that’s what he had done a few days earlier when, bizarrely, he had overheard the same conversation while sitting on the top deck of a number 22 bus travelling along Shaftesbury Avenue.

A London girl was rather dutifully pointing out things of interest to her Canadian (possibly American, but almost certainly Canadian) cousin. They were heading in the direction of Piccadilly Circus, and she mentioned this. And that is when the cousin had said (as the Australian on the bus to North Queensferry would a few days later): ‘Is that the one with the pigeons?’

Tiger Tiger, the site of the so recently attempted bomb atrocity, going by on the left, went unmentioned.

But, back on the main route, the London girl pointed out Fortnum & Mason in the near-distance. ‘Oh, okay,’ the Canadian said, in her bored, sing-song way. ‘We have one of them. It’s a kind of franchise, right?’

He had felt irritated that day. Irrationally angry. It was
the kind of conversation worth carrying an iPod for, just to shut it out.

But four days later, hearing the same snippet of conversation repeated between Australians travelling through the suburbs of Edinburgh, he didn’t feel angry at all. He thought it was funny. Because in the meantime he had found himself all at sea in a major city, not knowing his Princes Street from his Royal mile, his Old Town from his New Town.

Only the night before, trying to find his way from his hen-coop of a room that he had booked a the last minute on the internet, to Waverley Station (a distance of less than a mile, roughly the distance from the eastern end of Shaftesbury Avenue to Fortnum’s) he had twice had to stop pedestrians and ask them to show him where he was on the map.

‘This part of it – the waiting and watching, looking for “something to happen”, like staring at the empty page, waiting for “inspiration”, some characters, a story – is part of the project.’ He had written this in his notebook over dinner – a dreary dinner in a terrible pizza place. But it wasn’t. It was just being adrift in a strange place without having any real idea of what it was you were doing there. He didn’t even know at that point that there was a railway station at North Queensferry – that there was a quick mainline connection from Edinburgh and that it was a well-used commuter stop: Gordon Brown’s stop for many years – and so had ended up taking the bus.

Madeleine’s face was up on the TV monitors in the bus station. Her father was Scottish. Her auntie Phil and her uncle John, her father’s sister and brother, both familiar now in the media for their part in the campaign to find Madeleine, Philomena in particular for the warm rapport she was supposed to have established with the prime minister, a Fife man, were Scottish. The website was being run from a tiny town up on the east coast by one of auntie Phil’s former pupils. Gerry had been over the week before to appear at the Edinburgh Television Festival, interviewed by Kirsty Wark.

But the housewives and little old ladies who might once have gathered in small groups and speculated on the fate of ‘the poor wee mite’ now hardly looked up, or if they did seemed impatient for the picture of Madeleine to flip over and for the more vital information about departure times and boarding bays to come back up.

They were witness to the more general shift from initial shock and intensity of feeling, to an alienated separatedness that was becoming apparent, a distancing.

Heading along Princes Street, the bus passed the National Galleries of Scotland whose venerable, mossy columns had been clad in once garish, now weather-beaten Campbell’s soup cans about two metres tall. The effect was slightly ludicrous, like one of Muriel Spark’s Kelvinside ladies arriving for tea at the tea-rooms wearing Spandex trousers and pop-sox.

The soup cans were there to advertise a travelling Andy Warhol retrospective, which he had been to see the day
before. He had been powerfully reminded by the images in the ‘Death and Disaster’ series, and by the famous repeated images of Jacqueline Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor and the many melancholic, corrupted Marilyns, of Kate McCann, snapped over and over in the flat bright light of Praia da Luz. Two big themes, in many ways the themes that have defined the world since ‘Camelot’ and Kennedy and that Warhol was smart enough to cotton on to before anybody: Glamour and Death.

‘The death series I did was divided into two parts,’ Warhol once said, ‘the first one famous deaths and the second one people nobody ever heard of, and I thought that people should think about them sometimes. It’s not that I feel sorry for them, it’s just that people go by and it doesn’t really matter to them that someone unknown was killed. I still care about people but it would be so much easier not to care. It’s too hard to care. I want to care but it’s so hard.’

The brutal fact of violent death. Kate McCann’s slim, blonde, disciplined Jackie-O standard of beauty; her dawn runs on the beach; her friendliness to the camera. The levelling sameness with which real, not symbolic, death erupts into daily life.

Faced with these paintings – car crashes, suicides, state execution, death-stalked celebrity – one might take seriously, if only for a moment, Warhol’s dictum that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, wrote Thomas Crow, but conclude that in his eyes it was likely to be under fairly horrifying circumstances.

The curiously intimate knowledge the world garners about an unknown figure.

MM. Madeleine McCann. Marilyn Monroe.

Everything I know about a woman who is dead and whom I didn’t know.

‘How are you feeling? Excited?’ the Australian in the seat behind asked his wife.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Strange.’

‘I’m feeling excited,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘About seeing Dunfermline. About seeing that part of your past. Putting in another little part of the puzzle about you.’

The rust-red Forth railway bridge, triple-dinosaur construction, like three dinosaurs with necks and tails entwined, rose up on the right. They all – husband and wife, both sons – had digital cameras, and they took pictures of the bridge, and then pictures of each other taking pictures of the bridge spanning the water which they were just then suspended over themselves.

‘Are you going to look up your dad?’ he said when it had all settled down.

‘No,’ she said. There was a silence. ‘No.’

Once on the other side of the water from Edinburgh, the sign saying ‘North Queensferry’ pointed left, but the bus
turned right and pulled in after about a mile at Inverkeithing services. There was no scheduled stop at North Queensferry, it seemed, for this particular bus, but he was told by a friendly man in the ticket office that it was easily walkable from there, and so he set off.

It was a warm day, and it was a steep hill that, at this Inverkeithing end of things, was unexpectedly rough-and-ready, with a bathroom-fittings cash-and-carry and an oily-rag garage with loud music thudding out of it. Further on, perspiring now, the sun directly overhead, he passed an abandoned quarry.

It was only near the brow of the hill, where the view opened out across the water back towards Edinburgh and east towards the small humped islands of Bass Rock and Berwick Law, that the houses started to look like they belonged to ‘the very best’ part of North Queensferry, which he had read was what this was.

Going up the hill, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was encroaching. Not on Gordon Brown, the prime minister, because this was a public road, and he had every right to be on it (although he would discover very quickly that the local police, still jittery under the burden of their newly imposed responsibility and having to get used to special fire-arms officers brought in from other constabularies, would aggressively dispute this).

He also knew that Brown was not at home. This was a Thursday. The previous day the prime minister had taken his place in Parliament Square for the unveiling of a statue to Nelson Mandela. On Friday he would be in the Guards
Chapel in central London for the service to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. He was then going to join the Queen and her family for the weekend at Balmoral.

No, the encroachment he felt, padding up Ferryhill Road, was on another writer – somebody he knew; a writer who in the past he had a sometimes shaky relationship with, and who, in a long autobiographical essay and numerous pieces of journalism, had described his home village into existence, meat pie by meat pie, whin bush by whin bush, rivet by rivet. Approaching it, he felt as any writer might feel trespassing the boundary into Roth’s Newark, New Jersey, say, or Naipaul’s Trinidad or the tiny piece of Wiltshire near Stonehenge that Naipaul evokes with such clarity and directness in
The Enigma of
Arrival
.

His first engagement with the police came when he was sizing up a large house behind a high stone wall and just deciding that the basket-ball hoop with backboard in the drive ruled it out as anywhere Brown might live. The two officers were young and wearing protection vests with automatic rifles slung across them. They asked if they could help and he said, yes, they could point him in the direction of the prime minister’s house. They asked for ID and he told them he didn’t have any (which, other than credit cards, he didn’t). Asked to explain the purpose of his visit, he told them that this was proving to be a summer of disappearances, absences, some voluntary, others not; that he was interested in the idea of absence, of erasure and
self-erasure. He said he found it more interesting to look at the prime minister’s house without him in it, in a way, than if he was actually there. Erasure, like rubbing out? But instead of looking alarmed, they looked sceptical at this, and allowed him to continue on his way.

Dramcarling, the house that Gordon Brown bought in North Queensferry in 1990, is one of a string of Victorian villas near the station which had been built speculatively in an attempt to woo commuters across the new bridge from Edinburgh. Unusually for a villa built in late Victorian Scotland, as this other writer who grew up in North Queensferry has of course already pointed out (he used to deliver papers to the Brown house as a boy), the walls are unrendered red brick and the roof flat. ‘You might even say it was a cautious kind of house.’

Dramcarling, in the event, identified itself. To the right, as he looked at it, were the first signs of the police beginning to dig in – some wire-mesh screens, some temporary, lightweight crowd-control barriers – like a junior, starter version of the bomb-detection portals and robotic inspection systems, the defensive architecture then in the process of being stripped away from the Blairs’ place in Sedgefield.

The significant difference was that Myrobella is situated in a copse, in a natural valley, folded away.

Dramcarling is raised aloft. Brown had bought it for the view it gives across the Firth of Forth towards Arthur’s Seat and the castle. But now he was finding more and more that
he
was the view. It wasn’t a glimpse of the bridges mirrored in the water the folks in the idling cars
were wanting to catch, but one of the PM in an intimate, unguarded moment, maybe hoofing a ball about with John and Fraser. Many people now will turn their backs on the view to gaze instead at the double-fronted villa in its enviable position on the crest of the hill and remember that Brown’s wedding to Sarah Macaulay, kept secret from everybody until the last minute, performed by the Church of Scotland minister from the local kirk in Inverkeithing, took place in the living room in front of a very few close friends and family, the bride elegantly attired in an ivory two-piece silk suit, the bridegroom in his usual rumpled suit with regulation red tie, the scrambled photo-call in the back garden that included an exchanged kiss between Mr and Mrs Brown ‘of some awkwardness’, leaving for his American honeymoon in his brother’s car.

There are few more authentic pictures of the real Brown than those from his wedding, wrote Naughtie, portraits of a man uncomfortable at the mingling of the public and private, ill at ease with the expected opening-up of a life for public observation and comment.

And now, all around Dramcarling, the barriers were really going up. Brown was being further closed off.

It was as if the high-visibility representatives of his heightened security were policing the perimeter of the prime minister’s psyche rather than merely the boundary of the ‘dream home’ with the dream view – his old books from his student days still lined up on the living-room mantelpiece as if he was still in a student let; the armchairs
comfortably shabby – to which he still retreats at every possible opportunity.