A Parliamentary Affair (18 page)

He hugged her silently. It was wiser to say nothing. Being in love with his job was taken for granted, by both himself and society generally – and certainly by his spouse. He could well fathom that for a woman it might be a lot trickier. If Elaine were to add to her obsession with politics a substantial affection for another man, her marriage might prove fragile indeed. He hoped firmly that that was not the case. An affair was one thing; a love match something else. One might withdraw easily if regretfully from a sophisticated casual encounter. Love, on the other hand, involved obligation. Both had enough obligations already to last a lifetime.

Dickson rolled over and turned on the bedside light. Regretfully he checked his watch then started to extricate himself from the tousled, inviting bed.

‘I said I was visiting a constituent with an emergency flooding problem,’ he explained gently. ‘I am expected back. Your own daughter may return at any time, or your absent husband’s plane may be cancelled. Much as I adore you and enjoy your inestimable company, getting caught
in flagrante delicto
is not part of the game plan – for you or for me.’

She watched him appraisingly as he dressed.

‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ she said quietly.

He sat on the bed with his back to her, pulling on socks and shoes, returning to normal. She could not see his face, flushed and working as he struggled to regain control. A soft, expectant silence filled the warm room. It was a long time before he spoke.

‘Don’t, Elaine. It isn’t wise. Now I really must go.’

He bent and kissed her on the mouth, resisting her entwining arms almost roughly. Soon he had left her. She heard him reverse his car into the path, grind his gears uncharacteristically and then roar away. She rolled over and contentedly buried her face in the pillow still warm from his head, a stray precious Dickson silver hair tickling her cheek. The bed smelled of him, of his soap, his sweat. She would have to change the sheets.

But not yet.

Diane Hardy looked up from her cluttered desk and spoke severely. ‘It would be
very
helpful if we could sort out your diary. You’ve got thirty-two unanswered invitations to speak next month. Even if you attempted one each day you’d have some left over. There’s a Chief Inspector Collis needs half an hour: I think he’s Special Branch. Probably routine – they talk to all the new MPs, The BBC wants you for
Any Questions
again; you were quite a hit last time and it looks as if you’re going to be a regular. Central TV are after you for
Celebrity Squares
. No? I warn you, they don’t give up easily. Or there’s
Central Weekend Live
this Friday night for your views on grunge fashion – and they’d like you to model some.’

Elaine was staring out of the window. Her tiny office, perched high in Commons Court building, gave out on to a grimy inner courtyard of the Palace of Westminster. Opposite on three floors were similar offices into some of which she could see clearly. A number were far more of a mess than her own, with piles of yellowing papers all over desks, floor and chairs. At least in hers movement was possible, if difficult. Diane was ruthless in filing the minimum and throwing out everything else.

She motioned her secretary to come and look. Down a floor and to the left Freddie Ferriman’s office was visible. He was sitting talking to a pretty, long-legged girl with a notebook on her lap who might have been a researcher. Unaware that he was being observed he was sliding his hand up her skirt.

‘Dirty old bastard,’ grunted Diane. ‘It’s only ten o’clock in the morning.’

Elaine was unsure how to react. Perhaps the girl was a willing partner, had sought a job at the Commons hoping to land herself a glamorous MP as a lover or potential husband. In that case she was barking up the wrong tree with Freddie, who was not known for commitment to any woman other than the unsuspecting Mrs Ferriman. It was, however, depressing to be obliged to be pleasant to men who saw women purely as sex objects: worse, it was demoralising. A more introspective person than Elaine, who was inclined to scoff at other people’s fears, might have recognised that it was thoroughly intimidating.

Diane took a different view, fearing the pressure on young female staff whose continued employment might depend on their cooperation. It had been put that way to her – once. By comparison, working for Elaine Stalker was a treat. But if that kind of pressure were to be combined with a little charm, excitement and skill – and neither watcher doubted Freddie could manage all those when he was so minded – then the girl was in no position to argue. Only the very brave would scream blue murder. If she was an American, as many of the Commons researchers were, she might find herself on the next plane back to Houston in disgrace. Better to smile sweetly, run the tongue over the teeth in a frozen smile and hitch up the skirt.

Elaine and Diane argued amicably for several minutes over the scene. Despising such characters, calling them names and dismissing them, as Diane could readily do, was not enough for Elaine. There were too darned many like that. Individually such men were insignificant. Collectively there were enough to preserve the intensely masculine aura of the House of Commons. She felt a compulsion to try and change matters, somehow. The notion that women had specific roles in life and that serving men was the most important of these was so outdated. Millions of men no longer reacted that way. Yet in the overwhelmingly male Commons it was men like Ferriman whose style predominated, and who might be the last to disappear from the place, sometime in the next century – if ever.

Across the way Ferriman drew the curtains. The two women bent their heads and concentrated on the post. Among the letters were several from Northern Ireland, including a request from Unionist MP Sir James Kilfedder, an incorrigibly good-natured man who usually sat and voted
with the government, that she might like to meet his supporters on her next visit. A couple of days were duly set aside for a trip to Belfast.

‘Marcus Carey has been on again. He’s back in England next week and asks if he can take you for lunch. He wants your advice.’

Elaine pulled a face. ‘I don’t know why he keeps asking me. He has far more friends in high places than I have.’

‘I suspect you’re one of the few people who’s genuinely nice to him,’ Diane suggested quietly. ‘The rest ignore him, don’t return his calls or, worse, patronise him.’

‘Book a restaurant near my flat and tell him we’re going Dutch. OK?’

Peter Manley combed his blond hair nervously, tucked the
Evening Standard
under his arm, jumped down from the red 77 bus and stood gazing with open mouth at Big Ben. He had never been this close before. The place was so startling, so dramatic, so
big
. It looked just as it did on television, yet far more awesome.

Gerry Keown was on duty and watching him. Peter was confident he would pass muster in his grey suit and polished shoes. A haircut that morning irritated his neck and he ran a finger around his collar. He hoped to be taken for a City dealer, like those red-braced fanatics frantically making money and boasting about it on the telly, but with the self-deprecating manner which always worked so well. As a result he resembled the stylish, impecunious young men who work as political assistants for all parties, blandly handsome and falsely modest. The long queues waiting for Prime Minister’s Question Time had dispersed. Peter had deemed it prudent to come when the rush was over. Like shoplifting it was easier to escape attention at the end of the day.

A long way from Swindon. The memory made him wince. Still, it was in Swindon, in the Mayblossom home run by the local council, that Peter had first learned the importance of appearance. It was not their fault that he and his sister had been brought into care when their mother collapsed for the umpteenth time with serious psychotic illness. Dad – or the man who had most recently answered to ‘Dad’ – had long since disappeared. Mum would turn up on Wednesdays doped to the eyeballs and leaning heavily on the arms of sturdy psychiatric nurses who stood by watchfully. Later she came to Mayblossom by herself, a mass of shawls and boots and clanking jewellery, clutching bags of presents bought with money provided by the latest lover, and weep over her embarrassed children. Gradually, as her spells in hospital diminished, so did her visits, until one day Peter realised that she had not been for over a year and that it was getting difficult to remember her face. Aged twelve, he was growing from a pretty child to a delicately fine-looking boy. He knew because the warden Jack Hudd had told him so.

At first it was just a bit of touching, not unpleasant or frightening at all, in exchange for sweets or an illicit cigarette. He grew three inches that year and supposed that the attention might even be doing him good: it made a change from the usual casual neglect. When at last he was almost as tall as Jack Hudd, he tasted his first wine one Saturday night in Hudd’s room and liked the woozy happy feeling very much. Cautiously he responded to the man’s hesitant approaches. He slid his own hand in a caress over Jack Hudd’s bald head, and bent down and kissed him. Curious as to what Jack was up to, Peter stood passively as buttons were undone and his shirt was pulled slowly off, then the rest of his clothes, all folded in a neat pile, as if to compensate for the abnormality to come. The room was warm and he did not shiver. It hurt a bit, then, even though Jack apologised and cuddled him afterwards, but it was the first of many times.

Peter knew the other children mocked Hudd behind his back but responding to Jack’s need and making someone else happy did not seem to him so dreadful, and there was no duress. In the absence of any other love, why not? The girls around him were all dirty tarts with too much lipstick and cheap perfume, reminding him of his mother. Girls might tease him if he wasn’t very good at it.
Jack would never laugh at him, just talk dreamily while the boy half listened and fought off sleep. It wasn’t that he couldn’t imagine sex with girls: he could imagine it all right, having heard it all too often grinding away through his mother’s bedroom walls with drunken laughter and worse, bangings and shouts and screams, and black eyes and swollen faces in the morning. That was not, never would be, his way. That he was being corrupted and engaged in immoral or illegal activity did not cross his mind. A clear distinction between right and wrong had never been offered to Peter through either prescription or example. Like most of the nation, he reckoned, if he bothered to think about it, that if he enjoyed something and hurt no one it couldn’t be that bad. Not wicked, like killing was wicked. Not anti-social like thieving. It was enough that somebody treated him with gentleness.

All went well until he was fifteen, at which point Hudd was promoted to another home out of the area. The new warden was a cretin who accepted as gospel truth all the children’s lies about being allowed out at night. Before long Peter discovered that Jack Hudd was not the only man who found him attractive. Hudd had given him small sums of money – not enough to arouse notice or jealousy – without comment or explanation, until it seemed normal. Yet the first time a casual lover had stuffed a twenty-pound note in Peter’s pocket he had been confused and scared, not sure he dare try to cash it. Swindon led to Soho, and thence to Belgium and the Netherlands. The name ‘Manley’ wasn’t his own; but it had a fine ring to it. He’d seen it on a letter from the council once, and liked it.

Quickly Peter came to specialise in older men whose agonised fumblings betrayed a terrible guilt. Often they were married, or had been. Even with Holland’s liberal laws the stigma still existed. Lacking any sense of shame, Peter was able to help. While relieving their desperate need, he was gentle and reassuring. Several in Amsterdam had become regulars. He was quite proud of his ability to earn a good living providing a necessary service.

The visit to London was nothing out of the ordinary. As usual he touched base with his sister and dossed down in her cramped boxroom in Stoke Newington, his head jammed against unpacked suitcases and boxes. Since her second marriage and acquisition of teenage stepchildren, his presence, though welcome, was no longer particularly convenient. Either he would have to find somewhere more comfortable, preferably conducive to work, or by Friday he would be back on the plane to Amsterdam. That was why he had bought the newspaper’s first edition halfway through the morning. Finding little to tempt him among the short-term lets, he had flicked over the pages and come across a familiar face.

‘Stephen’, wasn’t it? He opened the newspaper and looked again. False names were nothing new in his game but he was reasonably sure that the florid features smiling back at him were the same. A quick check in the public library had revealed the man’s full name, title and constituency, Milton and Hambridge. The map at the back of the reference book showed it was not so far from where he grew up. There was no harm in trying.

A tall, black-haired policeman bent and listened to Peter’s request, then pointed him towards St Stephen’s Entrance. The boy chuckled as he heard the name: so that’s where ‘Stephen’ came from. Up three steps, he explained himself once again: ‘I’ve come to see my MP.’ Already he had picked up the jargon: ‘I’m going to put in a green card for him.’

A short flight of stone stairs led to the south end of Westminster Hall under an enormous stained-glass window. Sunlight filtered obliquely down, turning the dun-painted security hut gold and red and blue, improbable hues blending and shifting as clouds moved across the source of light.

Peter was carrying no baggage so his progress through the screening system was swift. Now he was in Central Lobby. The sheer scale of it took his breath away, as indeed it was designed to do. It was like a great cathedral, a place of worship of Victorian self-confidence, but far busier and noisier than any church. All around people were waiting, talking, voices echoing, or sitting on nearby green benches clutching bags and papers and petitions. A well-dressed group were filling in gallery passes. One tubby MP was expansively bidding farewell to a constituent – or was it a client? – shaking hands
effusively and propelling him towards the exit. Several women sporting large lapel badges for some minority cause were waiting disconsolately. Police guarded the entrance to the House of Lords to the right. To the left, surrounded by applicants, stood a wooden upright desk. Peter approached, took a deep breath and asked to see Sir Nigel Boswood MP.

A green card was handed to him to fill in. All that is required is the name of the MP summoned, the name and address of the summoner, a brief purpose for the visit and the time. No identities are checked, no references required. Parliament has repeatedly reaffirmed the ancient liberties of the people to badger their MPs any time the House is sitting. It was an easy matter for Peter to think up an address in Hambridge. He hesitated about the reason for the visit, then wrote ‘Personal – Amsterdam’ underneath.

The card was taken from him and shunted into the inner sanctum of Members’ Lobby a few yards away, to the noticeboard where phone messages were also received. It was from there a few moments later that Sir Nigel Boswood retrieved it himself, on his way to the tea room.

For a minute Nigel was nonplussed. The word ‘Amsterdam’ reminded him he had been meaning to book a flight for Bank Holiday weekend. His brain was reluctant to make the connection between the city and anybody he knew. Perhaps this constituent had business there and needed advice. There were a few minutes to spare. He hurried into Central Lobby, showed the summons and waited impatiently, tweaking his bow-tie as the police officer on duty called out the name. Peter rose from a side bench and moved smiling towards him, hand held out in greeting.

‘Hello, Sir Nigel! Do you remember me?’

Nigel felt the blood drain from his face.

It all came back in a great mixed-up unhappy rush. He grabbed the boy’s arm, gritting his teeth in a welcoming smile, and pulled him into the nearby corridor where narrow green benches line the walls. The two sat, knees nearly touching.