The Image in the Water (25 page)

‘Have a glass of wine. Alsace. Plastic, I'm afraid, but it's still cold,' offered Roger.

‘No, I must go back to the box. I just wanted to say—'

‘There's nothing new about this. Alcester has been banging away against the Scots for many months now.'

‘I know. Look.' Martin jabbed at the turf with his stick. ‘Up to a point I'm with him. It's wrong that the Scots should
march all over us. I'm English to the bone. But he's stirring things too far. The pot's beginning to boil. Too much noise, no respect for the law. Pulling down that plaque in Smithfield for example, the one to Whatsisname, Wallace – torn off the hospital wall by a mob. It's not a proper way of doing things. Not in this country, anyway. It's different abroad.'

Wearily Roger Courtauld turned his full mind back to politics. ‘I agree, the young man goes too far. Always has, always will. But he's got a case. Years ago, when William Hague ran the Party, he had a sound plan for making sure that English MPs could not be overruled on English matters. I looked it up the other day. If only that had been carried through. Hague proposed …'

But Roger had made the mistake of supposing that laymen who protested about politics were interested in policies. Martin Venables cut in. ‘I don't know about the details. Several of us talked over dinner last night. At the Lord Lieutenant's actually, though of course he's non-political and he kept quiet. We all thought that as our MP you ought to put a stop to the Tory Party running amok like this. Many of us have voted Conservative all our lives. We've put up with a lot of nonsense from the leaders we voted for. But there's a limit and Alcester has passed it.'

This, from Venables, was quite tough talk.

‘You forget that I'm way back on the backbenches. No one's going to take any interest in my meanderings.'

‘I beg to differ. That's not so. Everyone knows you, respects you. You've been quiet for a year or two. All the more reason why people should listen if you found your voice.' Venables paused, then ended abruptly. ‘Sorry to break into your afternoon. Wouldn't have done it if we hadn't
thought it important. Think about it, will you?' Another pause. ‘You owe it to us.'

That was nonsense, of course. He had worked hard, deserved a rest, owed none of them anything. Roger settled back into his chair, and tried to drive politics back into its cage. But after a minute he delved into the blue canvas bag for the
Telegraph.
David Alcester appeared in colour on the front page, his fair hair somewhat dishevelled. He was behind a cannon, a heap of cannon balls beside him. His youthful face shone with excitement as he shouted against the Scots. He was not in Carlisle, Venables had got that wrong, but Alnwick in Northumberland, the ancient castle of the Percys, often through the years besieged by successful Scots. Having served as prison house and execution place for unsuccessful Scots, it was civilised into Victorian Gothic, and yesterday had been the scene of a huge Conservative rally.

‘We have been patient, we English. I should say too patient. We accepted a Scots Parliament. We accepted Scots equality. We cannot accept Scots superiority. Five million cannot rule over forty-six million. We suggested a fair solution at Westminster; that was rejected. Then we suggested an English Parliament; that was refused. We have waited – and watched our money and our power over ourselves, our life blood flow north to Scotland, east to Brussels. But, my friends, enough is enough. We have lost enough blood. On these historic English battlements …'

And so on. The beer had flowed as copiously as the eloquence, the police had tried to prevent the burning of St Andrew's cross, there had been scuffles, a dozen arrests, a leg broken in a fall. It could all be looked at as a lighthearted frolic. No need to take it as seriously as Martin Venables had done.

Anyway, it was not as if he, Roger Courtauld, could do much about it. True, in Northamptonshire they nodded at him in the street, asked him to plant trees and lay foundation stones. Walking down village streets at the last election he had begun to feel like a moving monument rather than an active politician. People had been glad to see him in their neighbourhood. Children had run giggling out of doors to touch his sleeve, their parents had talked to him briefly about their lives, the local golf tournament, about the weather, about everything, indeed, except politics. But no one recognised him nowadays in the streets of London or in other places where it mattered. People stared for a few seconds, then questioned one another as to whether sometime somewhere they might have seen him on television. There was no fuel to launch him as saviour of the nation or the Party. To suppose otherwise would be a futile pretence. Nor would he wish it otherwise. At sixty-seven he might live for another fifteen or twenty years. He knew how he wanted to handle these years, through the gradual and contented narrowing of horizons. If Hélène and he had remained together, this narrowing would have been more difficult since she had enjoyed Covent Garden, Ascot, political dinner parties, and even (though she pretended not) the Party Conference each October. He had been deeply sad when she left him. But the sadness was now lifting, and he was skilled in matching his energy each day to the small items of contentment which it might bring.

Young Roger's polo, for example. His team was now in the field, wearing the claret and blue of their pony club. Young Roger, large with a pink outdoor face, looked better on a pony than on two legs. At sixteen he possessed independent limbs rather than a single co-ordinated body. He showed no outward
affection or gratitude to his father, but took the latter's kindness calmly for granted. Perhaps that was a genuine proof of intimacy.

Roger had taken the boy to
Antony and Cleopatra
at Stratford-on-Avon a week ago, just twenty minutes drive from Manston. Young Roger had been won over by the first half of the play, but his father had forgotten how long it took Antony and then Cleopatra to die. The unmatchable lines and half-lines floated over young Roger's head as he dozed; that afternoon's polo practice had been particularly strenuous.

Young Roger's team, the Pytchley, were now pressing hard. Just before lunch they had drawn one goal each against the Cottesmore; the deadlock now had to be broken. Anxious to make quick progress Venables, despite some mutterings from traditional colleagues, had decreed an Argentine run-down, a device that did not appear in the rules of the game. The first team to score a goal would win the match and, for this occasion only, the whole of each backline constituted the goal mouth. Both teams half disappeared down the slope at the far edge of the field. Young Roger reappeared in control of the ball, raising dust as he galloped. He wheeled to face the enemy's back line, hesitated, missed the ball.

Roger, though ignorant of the finer points of the game, enjoyed its sudden reversals of fortune, quicker even than politics. Long moments of static turning and thrusting in a confused mêlée without pattern or advantage to either side would suddenly resolve into a breakthrough. This match ended in smiles for the right side. The umpire gave a penalty against the Cottesmore, which young Roger took, and scored.
The hunting horn sounded the end of the chukka. Young Roger disengaged and rode up to his father.

‘Well done, boy. That was dramatic.'

‘Not too bad, I suppose. She's still pulling to the right.'

Their conversation rarely went deeper than this. Young Roger disappeared to unsaddle and sluice down his pony. Next year, no doubt, when he was heavier, he would need a second mount. Roger hired a groom to advise, to supervise the tack and drive the trailer, but insisted that young Roger do the main work of preparing and cleaning up after each mount. Roger did not wait for this, but drove his own Rover out towards the exit gate. The first heavy raindrops flopped against the windscreen, mixing with the dust of two weeks to create a few seconds of blurred vision. As the wipers washed the glass clear Roger saw Martin Venables wave him down. He had no wish to renew their discussion, but he could hardly ignore the outstretched hand. He braked, lowered the side window, took the initiative. ‘Well done. A good day.'

‘Thanks. That lad of yours is riding well. But did you get your letter?'

‘Letter?'

‘It was something urgent from Manston. Your gardener brought it up on his motorbike, looking for you. He saw young Roger first, gave it to him. I suppose the idle young sod forgot.'

Roger turned and found his son who, with a muttered apology, produced the envelope from the back pocket of his breeches. It was bent now and heavily smudged with sweat but the words ‘Urgent' on the front and the red government crest on the back stood out. Inside was a regular Government Hospitality card.

The Prime Minister
requests the pleasure of the company
of

The Rt Hon. Sir Roger Courtauld, MP
at dinner
in honour of
His Excellency Mr Adi Husseni
Prime Minister of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
at Chequers
on Thursday, 31st July

7.30 for 8 pm
Black Tie

Rather odd. True, Roger had once been involved with Jordan, in the days before he became Home Secretary when he was casting around as a backbencher for subjects of interest. He had visited the country twice and joined the Anglo-Jordanian Friendship Society. But that had been a long time ago. There was no reason why old Turnbull should ask him to Chequers to meet the visiting Prime Minister of Jordan, and certainly no reason why he should go to a dull official occasion in the middle of the polo season.

The stiff card did not slide easily back into its envelope. It had come up against a half sheet of notepaper. Roger recognised the Prime Minister's own hand: ‘Please come if you can. It would be good to have a talk. Politics are in a dangerous state. I may need your help. I would count it as a favour if you would stay the night.'

Cryptic, but enough to draw Roger back into the world he thought he had left for good.

*

The Prime Minister of Jordan was an ideal guest for this occasion. Having passed out from Sandhurst thirty years earlier he knew the rudiments of an English official dinner. Under King Hussein, his grandfather had moved up the social scale from the merchant to the military, tendering stalwart service to the King when he led a battalion against Arafat's guerrillas up and down the hills of Amman in the autumn of 1970. Both his father and his uncle had served the Hashemites briefly as Prime Minister, a role into which he himself had slipped gracefully when the call came.

For an hour before dinner he had sat with his British counterpart John Turnbull in the study at Chequers, each of them with a private secretary scribbling at his elbow. The agenda was not exciting. The Jordanians were in the market for tanks again, but the credit being offered by the British export authorities struck them as mean. Without entering into detail (it was, after all, two generations since his family had bargained in public) the Prime Minister wished to make clear that they hoped for better. He needed EU support in a long-running argument with Israel over the costs of replenishing the Dead Sea, now so diminished and over-salted that the tourists were staying away. But none of these were testing matters. If the Jordanian really wanted to ask about the disturbed state of Britain, the flag-waving riots in the streets, the extraordinary virulence of the Conservative Opposition, he was far too polite to do so.

After the business talks, the two men joined the guests for dinner. The commandant of Sandhurst of course, a distinguished lady novelist, a bank chairman, a trade-union leader, a couple of Labour backbenchers, all in black tie – in this as in other matters John Turnbull followed traditional ways, the
Labour version, but without any hint of the raffish media-driven innovations of the Blair era. A large photograph of Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister Turnbull most admired, stood on the grand piano of the Great Hall, to which they adjourned for coffee. The Jordanian was not surprised to find two Conservative grandees at the table, Roger Courtauld and Peter Makewell, though he would have been more interested to meet David Alcester, whose name was in every headline. The Leader of the Opposition had refused his request for a meeting on the grounds of pressing work elsewhere. The Jordanian took a malt whisky with his coffee, more as a cultural statement than because he wanted to linger. By eleven o'clock he and the other guests had departed, except for Makewell and Courtauld. With a word of appreciation to Mrs Turnbull, they and the Prime Minister adjourned to the study and sat easily in the big armchairs before the log fire. For all three this was politics as they liked it. The Prime Minister lit a pipe. He believed in silence as a political tactic, but this evening he had to lead off.

‘Thanks for staying,' he said. After a pause, ‘Your party's leading us a fearful dance.' Another pause. He fished a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. ‘These will be tomorrow's headlines. A riot in York. Forty arrested. Scottish bus hijacked in the middle of Newcastle. SLA march through Perth; police use tear gas. The official Edinburgh Festival cancelled. The fringe festival may descend into anarchy, say organisers. Alcester at Nottingham calls for Parliament to sit into August to pass Tory Independence Bill. A load of nonsense, of course. All of it.' He puffed. ‘But it's getting out of hand.'

‘I don't think either of us has any control over Alcester,' said Roger.

‘Nor influence,' added Peter Makewell.

‘He's your son-in-law.' The pipe stem pointed at Peter.

‘That makes it more difficult.'

‘I see.' Pause. ‘It's late. I won't beat about the bush. I have a plan, not put to Cabinet, just here in my head. I'll share it with you two if you answer one question correctly. A reasonable question. If either of you answers no, then we'll to bed.'

Roger Courtauld savoured the malt whisky. Some of the best moments in politics came in dialogue across the party boundary.

‘What's the question?'