The Closed Circle (10 page)

“So where is Paul?”

“Oh,
he
hasn't come along. He's gone straight off to Kennington to have a post-mortem about that stupid programme he was on. With his
media adviser,
if you please. Did you see it on Friday?”

“I did.”

“What a prat. He never said anything funny from start to finish. Well, how could he, he had his sense of humor surgically removed at birth. No, he just abandoned me on Chelsea Bridge, jumped out of the car, gave me their phone number and left me to get on with it. So I phoned up the house and got some dippy girl who hardly spoke a word of English—”

“That would be Irina. She's from Timisoara.”

“—and she told me that everyone would probably be here. So here I am. And here they are.”

She looked over at the two children, who were still sitting in the same positions on the unmoving see-saw, staring at each other with horrified antipathy. Benjamin wandered over to say, “Come on, you two, what's the problem here?,” and pushed the see-saw up and down a few times, after which they carried on by themselves, albeit rather half-heartedly. Susan got up to join them, and pinned a rogue strand of Antonia's hair back with a butterfly hairclip.

“Are we going to see Daddy again soon?” the little girl asked.

“That,” said Susan, “is anybody's guess. He's supposed to be joining us for lunch, but I wouldn't like to bet on it. Not when there's a choice between us and his media adviser.”

The words were spoken brightly; but Benjamin knew—from the way she then took his arm and squeezed it—that the brightness was forced. He tried to think of something consoling to say, but couldn't.

23

When they arrived at Pizza Express on the King's Road, they found that Emily, along with Frankie and Doug, their three other children, Ranulph, Siena and Hugo, plus Irina, the Romanian nanny, were all waiting for them at one of the large, round, marble-topped tables. The children, under the guise of doing some drawing, writing and coloring, were in fact poking each other in the eyes, ears and various other body parts with a selection of crayons and pencils, while the grown-ups were smiling the tight, eyes-on-the-horizon smiles of people who really wished for nothing more dearly than to be transported away from this place and back to a time before they had children. The noise level was deafening, and indeed you could have been forgiven for thinking, at first, that you had wandered not into a restaurant but a terminally short-staffed crêche for under-disciplined and over-privileged children. Everywhere you looked, blond-haired boys and girls with names like Jasper, Orlando and Arabella were wreaking havoc, hurling fragments of half-chewed pizza and dough balls at each other's French and Italian designer outfits, fighting for possession of their state-of-the-art Game Boys and shrilling across the room in perfect BBC English: beginning even now to master the braying accents of the ruling class with which, in twenty years' time, they would no doubt be filling the pubs of Fulham and Chelsea. A lone childless couple sat together at one small table in the corner, occasionally ducking to avoid the flying foodstuffs, sometimes looking up and glancing around in wordless horror, clearly desperate to leave and bolting their pizzas down as if aiming for a world record.

Susan and Benjamin made sure that the two new friends were placed side-by-side (for Antonia and Coriander, against all the odds, had already become inseparable, little more than an hour after meeting each other), then squeezed in and picked up their menus. Benjamin leapt up almost immediately, with a mingled cry of revulsion and pain, having sat on a half-chewed piece of bruschetta which was mysteriously impaled on the detached arm of a Barbie doll. Irina took it off him and spirited it away, defusing the crisis with the silent, inscrutable efficiency that appeared to be her hallmark.

Doug was in an expansive mood. He had spent all morning reading the Sunday papers and was apparently satisfied that this week he had beaten off the competition, as far as his rival commentators were concerned. He had written an impassioned polemic about the threatened closure of the Leyland plant, drawing heavily on memories of his late father's days as a shop steward there. Nothing else he had read that morning had been written with such feeling, or imbued with such a strong sense of personal experience. Now he felt ready to relax, and play the role of charismatic father-figure to this chaotic, extended family.

Fully within the earshot of his children, and mischievously conscious that he was being transgressive, he began to tell Benjamin the full story of Frankie's recent refusal to have sex with him.

“She's told you about this system she devised, has she? One day without sex for an ordinary swear word. Two days for F and three days for C?”

“Ingenious,” Benjamin conceded, glancing across at Frankie and noticing that she was listening to every word of the conversation, grinning broadly, clearly doting on her husband and enjoying the power she had over him.

“Well,” said Doug, turning in her direction, “do you realize that I haven't sworn for more than a week? And do you know what it means?”

“What does it mean?” she asked. (And there was, to Benjamin's ears at least, a kind of flirtatious tenderness to her voice even in apparently bland phrasings like this.)

“It means that tonight's the night,” said Doug, triumphantly. “I've paid off my debt to society. Balance repaid, account closed. And I fully intend—” he took a meaningful sip of his Pinot Grigio “—to claim my reward.”

“Duggie!” she reprimanded. “Do you have to share the details of our sex life with everyone at the table?” But she didn't really seem to mind. Benjamin and Emily were the ones who shifted in their seats and looked uncomfortable and avoided each other's eyes.

A few minutes later, Paul arrived.

“Bloody hell,” he said, kissing Susan functionally on the top of the head, “it's like the third circle of hell in here.” He ruffled Antonia's hair and she looked up—briefly—from her drawing, dimly registering the fact that her father had appeared. He ignored Benjamin altogether and merely said: “Hello, Douglas—are you going to introduce me to your beautiful wife?”

As Paul drew up a seat next to Frankie and embarked upon what he fondly believed to be the process of charming her, Doug stared across the table at him darkly. “I hate being seen out in public with that twat,” he whispered to Benjamin, sawing into his Four Seasons pizza. “Let's get out of here as soon as we can.”

And indeed, the parliamentary private secretary and his would-be ally in the quality press said almost nothing to each other over lunch, except for one moment when Doug made a point of catching Paul's attention, and raised the subject of his television appearance.

“Can I just ask you, by the way—if you can prise yourself away from my wife for a second, that is—what happened to you on television the other night? I mean, were you under written instructions from Millbank not to say anything? Because I don't think I've ever seen a guest on that programme who remained completely silent before.”

A look of fleetingly murderous anger passed across Paul's face; but he quickly composed himself and said (following the line he had agreed with Malvina a few hours earlier), “Do you know what? They cut my contributions out. Every single one—I don't know why. I said some terribly funny things, as well. There was this brilliant line about chocolate . . .” He tailed off, and shook his head regretfully. “Ah well—what's the use? I'll know next time. They just edit these things to make themselves look good, don't they?”

Doug pondered this explanation for a moment, before snorting in thinly veiled disbelief and getting to his feet.

“Anyway,” he announced, “Ben and I haven't had much of a chance to catch up so far, so we're just going to take a walk. See you all back at the house.”

They cut through the back streets until they had reached Chelsea Embankment, where an unbroken stream of cars and trucks roared back and forth, and the clouds of carbon dioxide hung heavy over the little village of millionnaires' houseboats moored in a crook of the river Thames, and the postmodern grandiosity of the Montevetro building gleamed back at them from the other side of the river and shimmered in the pale March sunlight. Benjamin thought of home: not the city centre, where he worked every day—and where buildings not unlike this one were beginning to spring up, as well, on a smaller scale—but the house he shared with Emily, off King's Heath high street, the little world they had built for themselves there, extending to not much more than a few shops, and a couple of pubs, an occasional foray into Cannon Hill Park . . . The difference seemed immense, suddenly. He couldn't get his head around it.

“Do you like it here?” he asked. “I mean, do you feel . . . comfortable?”

“Sure,” said Doug. “What's not to like?” Anticipating his friend's answer, he added: “If you're comfortable with yourself—inside your head— then you can feel at home anywhere. That's what I reckon, anyway. Stay true to yourself.”

“Yes, you've done that,” said Benjamin, pursing his lips doubtfully, “I suppose.”

“Just because I've married into a posh family,” (Doug's voice was rising in exasperation), “doesn't mean I've forgotten where I came from. Where my loyalties lie. I haven't given up on the class war, you know. I'm behind enemy lines, that's all.”

“I know,” said Benjamin. “I wasn't implying anything. Anyone can tell that about you—you only have to see what you write for the paper. It must be great,” he went on, more quietly (envy creeping into his reflections again), “having that kind of platform. You must feel . . . you must feel you're doing exactly what you want to do.”

“Maybe.” They had been leaning against the low wall close to Battersea Bridge, looking out across the water. Now Doug straightened up and began to walk downriver, breathing deeply on the noxious fumes pumped out by the ceaseless traffic. “I've reached a bit of a ceiling there, I think. I've been writing those pieces for about eight years now. A few months ago I started telling people I was feeling ready for a change. You know, putting the word around the office. Well, now they've sat up and taken notice, apparently. They're planning a big reshuffle. Been planning it for weeks, in fact.”

“Sounds good,” said Benjamin. “What do you think's going to happen?”

“Well, I know the editor's PA a little bit—Janet, her name is. Nice girl: she's only been there since just before Christmas. We kind of hit it off, and now she's always feeding me bits of gossip. And she heard—well, she
over
heard him talking on the telephone, and it seems my name came up, in connection with a job.”

Benjamin waited. Then had to ask: “Yes? Which was?”

“She wasn't sure,” Doug admitted. “She couldn't hear properly. But she said it sounded definite; and this was just a couple of days ago. And she was sure—well, ninety per cent sure, anyway—that he either said it was political editor—which would be brilliant—or deputy editor. Which would just be . . . fantastic.”

“Deputy editor?” Benjamin repeated, obviously impressed. “Wow. Do you really think that's what it's going to be?”

“I'm trying not to think about it,” said Doug. “Political editor would be great. That would be just fine. I'd settle for that.”

“Would it mean more money?”

“They both would. Lots more money, potentially. Which is going to make Frankie happy, for a start. Someone's probably going to phone me up today to let me know which one it is.”

“Today? On a Sunday?”

“Yep.” Doug started rubbing his hands together at the thought. “Today's the day, Benjamin. Maybe we can have a bit of champagne before you drive off this evening. Followed, in my case—after a whole week's abstention from oaths, profanity and all manner of filthy language—by what I can only imagine is going to be an
epic
shag. The mother of all shags.”

They crossed the road effortfully, threading their way through the four lines of traffic, heading back towards the picture book enclave where the Gifford-Anderton residence lay hidden.

“I thought you weren't in sympathy with the other people on the paper,” said Benjamin. “Politically, I mean.”

“Ah, but that's my trump card,” Doug pointed out. “It's true, they're all fucking Blairite idiots. But the bottom line is, they have to cater for the readers: and most of the readers are still Old Labour. So they need to have someone like me on board, even though they don't like it. I give those people a voice. The kind of people who think we should make some sort of an effort to keep Longbridge open even if it isn't making any money. The kind of people who are actually in their forties and fifties and sixties and have been reading the paper for years and don't give a fuck about what kind of eyeliner Kylie Minogue uses, which is the kind of story our esteemed editor seems obsessed with . . .”

“Do you not get on with him too well?” Benjamin asked.

“We get on fine,” said Doug, “but he's a man of no scruples. Completely opportunistic. A few months ago, for instance, they shot some particularly under-nourished looking model for a fashion piece in the magazine, but she looked so ill and scrawny that they couldn't use the pictures. Then last week he dug them out and put them in the main paper after all—to illustrate a story about anorexia nervosa. Didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with it.”

He chuckled sourly as they reached the garden gate and squeaked it open. Doug had forgotten his house-keys, so he pressed the entryphone button and they waited for a while, admiring the trails of ivy around the door lintel and the mullioned windows. Frankie was always too busy to do any gardening, Doug explained, so they had a man come and do it for them, three mornings a week.

Soon the front door was opened by a breathless Irina.

“Ah—Doug—come in, quickly. Someone phoned for you.”

“Who is it?” he said eagerly, following her inside.

“There—in there.”

She gestured towards the downstairs sitting room, which ran the length of the house and ended in a conservatory twice the size of Benjamin's back garden. Doug and Benjamin hurried in and found that everyone was there: Paul, Susan, Emily, Frankie, all of the children. They stared at Doug excitedly, smiling with anticipation, while Frankie spoke to someone on a cordless phone.

“Yes—he's here. He's just literally come through the front door. I'll hand you over. Here you are.”

Doug grabbed the phone off her and retreated to a corner of the room.

“Is it about his job?” Benjamin whispered, and Frankie nodded.

At first it was hard for the others to tell what was happening, just listening to one side of the conversation. Doug said very little, apart from occasional grunts of assent. Everyone started to notice, however, that these changed in tone as the exchange went on. Doug's silences became longer and longer: the voice at the other end of the line seemed to be building up to some sort of revelation. And when it finally came, Doug went deathly quiet. So did the rest of the room.

It felt as though whole minutes had ticked by before Doug said, “What?,” very quietly; and immediately afterwards shouted “
WHAT?,
” again, only this time at the very top of his voice, in a bellow of thunderous fury that had the children glancing at each other in frightened apprehension.

Now the voice at the end of the line was raised too, and could be heard saying, “Doug—please think about it. Don't ring off. Whatever you do—”