What Will Survive (10 page)

Now the sixth-formers were openly laughing. Stephen's colleagues were momentarily shocked into silence; next to him, he could feel Val Greehalgh bristling with anger, the shoulder pads of her cerise jacket lifting towards her ears. Toby Ayling fiddled with the lapels of his smooth grey suit.

‘Angus? Valerie? Who'd like to answer that?'

Someone choked and tried to turn it into a cough. It was bad enough that Opposition MPs had been told to go out and get their message across to the next generation of voters, a project some of them had serious reservations about, but now they were having their wounds re-opened in public. Fortunately there was no one from the press in the room, apart from a bored hack from a freesheet in Val's constituency who was here to take a photograph which would appear in the next edition with an extended caption.

‘Stephen? Any thoughts you'd like to share with us?'

‘Me?' He looked at the kids in front of him, suddenly realising they were only a little older than his elder son. ‘I haven't — actually it's a perfecdy reasonable question.' He hesitated. ‘You're right, we're demoralised. And no, we don't know what to do about it. What we've been told—'

‘Stephen.'

‘Sorry, Toby, but these kids are bright and they haven't come all this way to hear a — a press release from Central Office.' He ignored the protest from Val on his left and continued, the words coming out before he'd had time to think about them. ‘What we've been doing this morning — what you've been doing because I have to admit my heart isn't really in it — it's not a pretty sight.' He looked directly at the teenagers, half of whom were alert
for the first time that morning. ‘When the voters reject you, you can't believe it's happened. I look at some of my friends...' He gave a grim laugh. ‘You know, if the Party went to a shrink, they'd diagnose what-do-you-call-it, post-traumatic stress disorder. A collective nervous breakdown.'

‘Now — now, wait a minute.'

‘Just who the hell d'you think you—'

‘Are you feeling all right, old chap?'

Stephen ignored the question from Angus McSorley, a medical doctor and the only one of his colleagues who seemed to have an inkling that he was doing more than speaking out of turn. Looking in the direction of the girl who had asked the original question, without quite engaging with her, he said, ‘I get up in the morning and ask myself, is it worth it? Why do we bother, any of us?' He sat back in his chair, his hands flat on the table. ‘Maybe it's time to give it all up, go off and — and write books or something.'

‘Books?' One of the boys, sitting among a little group who had not previously spoken, repeated the word incredulously. All morning, they had tended to defer to the girls, exchanging bored looks and occasionally passing notes to each other.

‘Someone should have opened a window,' Angus said loudly. ‘It's awfully warm in here.' He got up, gripped Stephen's shoulder as he passed and bent to speak quietly to Ayling. The two men could hardly be more different, and not just because of the disparity in age; Angus's jacket was as old-fashioned as his tie, a heather-mix tweed which Ayling eyed with distaste before nodding his head curtly and announcing a short break.

‘Why didn't you stop him?' Val hissed, glancing round the room and trying to assess the scale of the disaster. The teenagers were talking among themselves, clustered round the girl with the braids, as Ayling began to defend himself to his irate colleague. Stephen watched it all dreamily from his seat.

After a hurried consultation, which Stephen took no part in, Ayling cleared his throat. ‘As my colleagues — as my colleagues've indicated, what Stephen Massinger's just offered is an, ah, very personal opinion, not shared by... He may, on reflection, indeed I'm sure he will come to feel that such sentiments are best kept private. If they exist at all, which — which naturally I doubt.'

‘Hear, hear.' Val tugged at her jacket, giving the impression she would like to do the same to Stephen.

‘Meanwhile, I'd like to thank you all for coming to Westminster and giving us this opportunity to find out what the youth... what young people today are concerned about. You've given us a lot to think about and I imagine you've also heard some things that you, ah, might not have expected to hear.' He forced a smile, trying not to look down at his notes. ‘I'd also like to say you've been a credit to St Benedict's sixth-form college, which is only what I'd expect after its latest glowing report. And of course to Mary — to Marjorie Montague Girls' School, which Valerie tells me is the educational showpiece of her constituency. Now, I believe your tour of the Palace of Westminster kicks off shordy, so I'm going to hand you back to your excellent teachers.'

He finished to polite applause, leaned across to shake hands with the teachers, and the teenagers began filing out. When the door closed behind them, and the solitary reporter was safely out of earshot, he rounded on Stephen: ‘What the fuck was all that about? Are you out of your mind?'

Stephen barely acknowledged him. ‘It's all true,' he said. ‘We're in the wilderness. It's where we're going to be for the next decade unless a miracle happens.' He pushed his chair back. ‘Excuse me—'

‘You humiliated us. The whips'll have something to say about this.' Val swept up her papers and nodded curtly to Ayling. ‘I'm going after that reporter, I know him slightly, see if I can get us out of this mess.'

‘Stephen, this is not like you.' Angus turned to Ayling. ‘He had the PM on the back foot, did you hear? Pity you weren't there, Toby.'

Ayling snorted and muttered something about an urgent constituency meeting. He claimed to have handed over the everyday running of his PR company to his partner, the daughter of a former Home Secretary, but his absences from the Chamber were becoming a talking point.

Angus persisted: ‘Have a look at yesterday's
Telegraph.
It's the first nice thing anyone's said about us for an age.' He moved closer to Stephen and lowered his voice: ‘I should go and see your GP, Just to make sure nothing untoward is going on.'

‘As long as it's a head doctor.' Ayling snapped shut his briefcase. The door closed behind him, leaving the two men alone in the room.

‘Have you been having headaches, anything of that kind? Problems with sleeping?'

Stephen was fiddling with his phone. ‘Thanks, Angus, but you don't have to give me a professional opinion. If you'll excuse me, I've got a couple of urgent calls to make.'

Angus regarded him closely. Stephen's eyes were red-rimmed and his usually handsome face was pallid; even his hair — springy and dark, as Angus's had once been — was flattened in places, as though he'd slept on a plane. Stephen wasn't a heavy drinker, as far as Angus knew, and he wondered if the younger man could be suffering from clinical depression. ‘You're not looking yourself,' he said compassionately. ‘We're all feeling the strain, even if most of us don't want to admit it. Not in public, at any rate.'

Stephen's mobile rang and he started. ‘Yes, speaking.' Pause. ‘The euro? Yes, I am broadly in favour but—' He listened for a moment, then moved the phone away from his head while an expression of great weariness passed over his face: ‘I'm sorry, the line's breaking up. I can't hear you—' He pressed a button and ended the call, then looked at Angus as if he had no idea what they had been discussing.

‘That's the first sensible thing you've done all morning. Who was it?'

‘Hmm? Oh, someone from the
Mail.'

Angus shook his head and began collecting his things. Folding away a copy of
The Times, a
picture caught his eye and he gestured to Stephen. ‘You knew her, didn't you? That poor lass who died in Lebanon?'

Stephen stepped back, bumping into a chair.

‘A bad business, these landmines. I have a constituent, she married a Lebanese, met him when she was a nurse in one of the refugee camps — Sabra and Shatila, I think it was. Her husband's nephew, laddie of twelve or thirteen, had his legs blown off and she's trying to raise money for artificial limbs. Say what you like about Princess Diana, but she's on the right lines with this campaign of hers. Did you know her well?'

Stephen said blankly: ‘Princess Diana?'

‘No, Aisha Lincoln, isn't that her name?'

Stephen's eyelids fluttered. ‘Yes, I — I knew her.'

‘I remember seeing you with her in the dining room. A striking lady.' A look of enlightenment crossed his face and he added: ‘Ach, no wonder you're not feeling yourself this morning. Sudden death is always—'

Stephen's mobile rang again. He looked down, read the number on the phone's display and answered in a strained voice: ‘Carolina?'

Angus touched his arm, lightly this time. ‘Give her my regards.'

‘What?'

‘Your wife. Give her my regards.' He had met Carolina Massinger — the Honourable Carolina Massinger, not that she or Stephen made a fuss about it — and remembered her as a slightly washed-out blonde with a long face and an aristocratic accent. She had a sister, also with an unusual first name, who seemed rather more forceful — ran a charity for displaced agricultural workers, according to something Angus had read or heard recently. They were the daughters of a Party grandee, Lord Restorick, and Angus had the impression Stephen was not entirely comfortable with his father-in-law. Judging by Stephen's grim expression, he was not on the best of terms with his wife either and Angus remembered a rumour in the tea room that the Restorick family was furious, en masse, about Stephen's refusal of a job on the Opposition front bench. Though that was almost three months ago...

‘It's out of the question,' Angus heard Stephen exclaim, and he instinctively moved towards the door. Reaching for the handle, he could not help overhearing Stephen's side of the row: ‘I told you last night, Carolina, there's a three-line whip. There's nothing to discuss, I'm staying in town again and that's it. Well, perhaps in that case you shouldn't have married a politician. What about your father? Oh God, don't start—'

Angus had heard enough. He made a quiet exit, walking slowly down the corridor and thinking about his own wife, who had died a couple of years before from cancer. They had been perfectly content with each other, if not wildly passionate, but then Angus knew from many years of observing his colleagues where that sort of thing could lead. Perhaps it was something to do with not having children, so that Nora hadn't minded the demands of his job or having to travel down from the Scottish borders to see him during the week. They had — Angus still had — a little flat behind
Smith Square, from which they used to plan evenings at the opera while Nora cooked the simple meals Angus preferred to dinner at the House of Commons.

He descended a flight of stone steps, his hip giving him a bit of trouble, and he had almost reached the bottom when he remembered that there was no three-line whip that night. Frown lines creased his brow. Stephen was far from being the first MP to invent parliamentary business as a means of avoiding his wife, but Angus wondered if what he had just witnessed meant that another political marriage was on the rocks. A pity: he liked Stephen, who was not just out for himself like the management consultants in expensive suits who seemed to be taking over the Party in recent years.

Entering the Central Lobby, which was as familiar to him by now as the stone house just outside the constituency where he and Nora had lived for almost forty years, Angus wondered if he was getting too old for all this, especially as the Party was likely to be out of office for several years, as that pretty mixed-race girl had pointed out. His own majority had been cut, at the general election, to a figure that made it marginal for the first time in living memory, and his chairman had been pressing Angus to cut down on his part-time medical practice and show his face more often at local functions. Angus wasn't sure he could summon the energy or the enthusiasm to lay on more than his annual Burns night supper, which fewer and fewer people had attended in recent years. On the other hand — he sat down on a green leather bench and reached for
The Times
again — what else lay ahead for a widower of sixty-eight who had been in Parliament for more than three decades? Turning to the crossword, he settled down to wait for a parliamentary undersecretary at the Department of Health who had promised to brief him informally about the future of a crumbling hospital in his constituency.

‘Everyone here?' The editor surveyed the semi-circle of section heads and writers in front of his desk. His office, normally large and empty, was crammed with more than a dozen people and his PA had to negotiate her way through them as she appeared with coffee in a Styrofoam cup. He accepted it without acknowledgment, removed the lid and sipped as he waited for the journalists to settle. On his desk were copies of all that morning's newspapers, a flat plan of the next day's edition and a photograph of his children. Behind him, the arm of a crane moved past the window in a stately arc, its operator invisible six floors below.

Amanda, who had not been invited to morning conference before, wondered if he would say anything about her piece on Aisha Lincoln. She had looked at it again on her way to the office and thought of a couple of points she could have added if she had had more time. But it read all right — she moved her chair a fraction, unsure what to expect.

The editor pushed his coffee to one side and said, ‘Nice profile of the Foreign Secretary, Sabri, though it could have done with a bit more personal stuff.' He looked from face to face, making eye contact and speaking slowly to make his point. ‘More anecdotes, that's what this paper needs. Little personal touches, the readers want to be able to relate.' His gaze came to rest on the picture editor. ‘Pic could have been a bit more exciting.'