A Parliamentary Affair (56 page)

Her low voice set his nerves tingling. ‘Mine. And yours. We haven’t employed it properly together for a long time. Perhaps you’d better show me what you’ve been using it for.’

He moved backwards without protest, only needing her to make the move. So she made him make love to her: for the first time in their lives without affection or kissing on the mouth, but kissing and sucking and biting everywhere else, as animals might, crying and hurting, until she cried out with it: ‘Show me what you did to her! Show me! Show me!’

And he did, with fierce passion and force, expressing all the pent-up frustration, not merely the months of empty asexuality, not only the denial and exclusion from her life, but the slow ebb of sovereignty in his own home as his wife.

He had become seduced by life beyond it. And she, in an exact matching, knew precisely what hurt him as he pounded into her, and both struggled with it and grew wilder, needing the apalling reminder that she was a woman first, last and always, and that this was her wedded man whom she had betrayed, long before his betrayal.

On the bedclothes she could detect Barbara, and with a yell hurled the pillow over to the other side of the room, knocking over ornaments with a crash. Love, they call it.

This was not love, this furious coupling. His shame turned to anger and brutality, but it was she who forced him and he could not prevent her or stop himself, as if she were the stronger partner and he an errant wife for whom forced mutual congress was the punishment.

And then as he climaxed she hit him, hard across the face again and again, crashing her forearm into his mouth until he bled. He screamed out like a wounded beast and collapsed down on top of her, wiping his bloodied cheek on her breast, whimpering, as a terrified infant might nuzzle its mother. And he wept, as if his heart would break, as he never wept when their baby died; and he said terrible things about her absences, and her turning away, and her leaving a black hole in space without gravity or life forms, where once there had been love and sharing and hope and fulfilment.

He did not fight back. She swore at him, obscenities lining in her mouth like bile. She hit him again, kneeling over him as he raised his arms to protect himself, turning his wounded face away. She howled out all her own misery and agony, not knowing or caring, aware only that everything must unavoidably change. But that it should change in such a fashion was a terrifying blow. The world she took so much for granted had vanished, the moment Barbara’s white shoes had fallen to the hall floor.

Eventually her passion was spent. The two lay still, tumbled together but not touching. Now, having fought what had come between them, they might once more have come together; but it did not happen and the moment passed. She pulled the duvet around her and stumbled towards the door. She left her husband sobbing quietly on their bed, curled up like a child brutalised by a drunken parent.

She was a mess, besmirched with bloodstains, fouled with disgust and horror and sex. For the second time in less than a year her home had been invaded by invisible demons. What was happening to her? In a daze she showered, the green shower gel incongruous, stinging and crude. She searched dully in the airing cupboard and found and pulled on underwear, clean cotton trousers and a sweater. Absolutely drained of emotion she towelled her hair and tied it back. Habit, healing habit, was slowly returning. She put out fresh towels, even tapped on the bedroom door and spoke in a low voice: ‘Bathroom’s free.’

Devoid still of conscious sense she went downstairs and wandered around for a long time, touching everyday objects as if they were unreal. After a while she found herself in her study, where she first reached for the Glenfiddich, then decided against. Her daytime mind with its natural defences was slowly returning. There was no point in getting drunk; she would be tempted into a parallel confession, if only to make Mike feel better, and that would not do. Only one person in this house had any explaining to do and it wasn’t her.

In the kitchen she sat down at the table and tried to think. The loud ticking of the kitchen clock got on her nerves. Irritated at yet another intrusion she put the clock in a drawer, where it ticked softly on in protest. With a start she realised it was nearly seven. Suddenly she felt totally exhausted, put her head down on her arms on the kitchen table, and fell asleep.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Mike was dressed, smelling of soap and standing sheepishly at the door.

She nodded wordlessly. He busied himself in silence for a few moments, then put the mug in front of her, found her sweeteners and set them like a peace offering on the table. After a moment’s hesitation he sat down opposite her.

Married people do not sit opposite. You can tell them in restaurants, seated side by side, those who know each other very well, who no longer need to gaze into the loved one’s eyes; who have no compulsion to touch toes or legs under a table, or to feign lovemaking, for they have somewhere to go to make love, all night if they want. You can tell married people in a bar: they are the ones who do not chat animatedly to each other, who do not ask if the drink is OK, who are no longer endlessly solicitous of the other’s welfare. With married people a
modus vivendi
has long since been established, discarding the bits that don’t suit, like throwing away the peel of an orange or a banana or
not eating the marzipan off a cake. Married people do not sit opposite in their own kitchen to talk quietly to each other. This marriage had ended. Elaine felt real foreboding and fear.

Mike took a deep breath and started. The side of his face where she hit him was swollen red. Tomorrow his flesh would be dark and livid, a mark of Cain.

‘If it will help, Elaine, I’m sorry.’

She waited.

‘It’s not a longstanding … er … affair. I don’t expect you to believe that, but it’s true. Only for the last few weeks.’

He needed to explain, but part of the revenge was to deny him the chance. She waved him away.

‘I don’t want to know the sordid details, Mike. Just tell me what you want to do.’

He took a long swallow of his coffee and examined the remaining contents carefully, as if the answer lay at the bottom of the mug. His sigh of resigned despair touched her to the quick.

‘I don’t know; only that I don’t want to carry on as we have been doing. I love you very much – well, I did. You’ve not been around much for me to love since you got elected. Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud of you, and Karen is too. But you’re never here. And when you are you never have time for us, only for your bloody voters. They get the best of you – the only time we see you with your hair done and make-up is when you’re going out, never for me or Karen.’

‘But I have to get dressed up for my job!’ she protested. ‘The last thing I want when I have any time off is to wear a flipping suit! Have a heart – you take off your uniform the moment you get home.’ The gold-braided jacket was still on the back of the chair, mute testimony to the last moment when their marriage was still intact. She allowed resentment to well up. ‘Looks as if you take off everything else too.’

He swallowed hard. ‘We cannot carry on like this. We don’t have a marriage any more. We’d have had to talk about it sooner or later – had to make an appointment in our diaries to do so, probably.’

‘That’s as much your fault as mine,’ she flashed, but she was tiring of the argument. She knew what she ought to say was that she loved him too, liked being married to him, wanted him to stay, would make amends, spend more time at home. It would have been extremely difficult to extricate herself from her current obligations, perhaps even finish with Roger, but not impossible. Coolly, shocked, she realised that she did not want to. The last occasion when she had consulted her diary, apart from crossing off tonight’s meeting, had been when Roger had phoned her at the flat to ask her if she could keep Tuesday free. Her happy affirmative, in contrast with her profound reluctance now, told her all she needed to know. To keep Mike happy would require dramatic alterations in her life, options she was not willing to put on the table. Especially not giving up Roger. Of course there were sacrifices in having a secret affair like that, but in one sense each loss was a comparative gain. No public appearances with him meant no pretence, no obligations of any kind. No birthday cards, no cufflinks, no agonising over gifts at all – they were
verboten
. Yet the risks added spice and made each moment precious – exactly the opposite to taking it all for granted and becoming jaded as with Mike. Tonight’s extraordinary performance could not be repeated; it had been a dangerous row of monumental proportions which ripped apart her perception of sex with her husband. She and Mike would not have intercourse again.

He was right, it wasn’t much of a marriage.

‘I am not going to fight you,’ she whispered. ‘Do what you want.’

He looked at her as if to say more, then his mouth lightened and he shrugged just slightly. Instead he gathered up his papers and jacket and went out. She heard his car revving throatily as it scrunched away over the gravel.

Softly, imperceptibly, summer days turned cooler and shorter. Karen Stalker collected a clutch of respectable GCSEs with five A grades, which enabled her to move to a college of further education in the nearby town.

Out went the hated stained school uniform, striped tie and masculine blazer with its tattered inked-over badge, yet the sexy black fashions of a year earlier did not reappear, even though her figure would have suited them. Too many lessons had been learned to forget in a hurry.

Her own resilience surprised her, but then she was her mother’s daughter, tough and practical and not much given to introspection. Perhaps a blessed mechanism of self-protection was at work. As time went by the number of lights diminished when she lay awake grieving either for herself or for her parents. It helped not to hide matters away but to allow her thoughts to flow freely, to try rearranging them in a more orderly sequence, like cutting up meat into small chunks and chewing thoroughly before attempting to swallow. Gradually the pile of worries heaped on her plate seemed to come under control. It also helped to be working hard at her studies, keeping her sights firmly set on A levels and university in two years’ time.

At any rate she could ensure that her own life was not wrecked by all the strange goings-on at home. Those she loved seemed so preoccupied. Thus she learned by example how to be self-absorbed in a self-centred world, to become more self-sufficient and not to cry for help. Her mother noticed the change and approved. She put the girl’s disciplined calmness down to increasing maturity and the college atmosphere, and congratulated herself on successfully shielding the child from the most recent trouble.

For Karen knew nothing about the incident involving the white shoes. However furious and bereft her mother might be there was no point in dragging Karen in as well. The matter was entirely between two adults, or rather three. It had caused enough misery and was better kept contained. That also seemed to be Barbara’s attitude, for after a few days moping around her house weeping and hiding from Elaine she had packed her bags and disappeared. A ‘For Sale’ sign soon appeared in her driveway.

Elaine’s instinct dictated that it would not be right to turn Karen’s mind against her own father, who might have been foolish but in a bleakly endearing way had shown that he was only human. Indeed many of the events of that miserable afternoon reminded Elaine of what had drawn her most to her husband when he was younger: his sexiness, his willingness to take risks, his disregard of convention. In challenging him to lovemaking, she had queried whether he too remembered those early days; and he had.

Mike had left the house and not returned, staying the night in an airport hotel. His office let her know his whereabouts at his request from then on, precisely, impersonally. How ironic that she knew more about his movements now than before, when they had been ostensibly happily married. Elaine felt no urge to chase or plead with him. He was the one who had misbehaved and been caught; he the one who had left that night. It was for Mike to make the next move, as she continued living in the same house, paying the bills and acting as if nothing had happened. It was as if she were scarcely breathing, in the hope that nothing would change, that no awful decisions would be required from her. She reasoned that making any contact with him would have been unwise, would have raised the emotional temperature once again. If this marriage were to fall apart it would do so gently and without further recrimination. Old love and shared tenderness in the past meant not wanting to hurt or damage each other any more. So, for the time being, there would be no lawyers, no signed papers, no divorce. Perhaps if everything were handled with kid gloves now, some day the two could be friends again in a wary fashion; or at least not enemies.

It could not be kept a secret for ever. Eventually one quiet Friday afternoon on the way home from college, in answer to a simple question, Elaine told Karen that her father had left, that it was nothing to do with Roger, that the two had simply decided to live apart for a while, that it was not even formalised, they were not legally separated and as far as she was concerned did not want to be. The girl wept a little, but her mother seemed resigned rather than actively unhappy. Her father’s leaving was no surprise, given the decoupling which had been under way for some time, on which Karen herself had commented after his non-appearance at her hospital bedside. Elaine repeated without much conviction the formula that all marriages go through bad patches, as Karen remarked how common was this pattern among her friends. Making marriage work must be fiendishly difficult.

There were changes afoot elsewhere. Gerry Keown was promoted, after two and a half years in the job. Martin Chadwick arranged for his own rapid elevation out of Nigel’s glowering clutches and was put in charge of the forthcoming environment summit in London; Fiona Murray from Roger Dickson’s office, red-haired, sleek and self-controlled, took his place. The housing market was moving at last, though sluggishly. Finland and Austria completed their negotiations and prepared to join the European Community, with two more countries close behind. The British economy returned to modest growth after three years of decline, indeed had the highest growth rate in Europe, though since all the other countries were in. trouble that was nothing much to boast about. Over 200,000 UK companies had gone out of business in the longest recession since the 1930s. There were race riots in Potsdam and Leipzig against Turks and Romanians, in Marseilles against black migrants from the Maghreb, in Los Angeles by black Americans against Koreans. The north of Italy plotted secession from the rest, fed up with paying for corrupt national politicians and the Mafia. The Channel Tunnel project was put back another year. Latvia joined Lithuania in returning a new communist government, while the Russians became the world’s biggest suppliers of arms for hard currency. President Clinton cut the American defence budget by $76 billion and survived an assassination attempt by a disgruntled ex-soldier, while Jacques Delors prepared to rescue France. The dismal, debt-ridden nineties, breaker of promises, graveyard of hope and harbinger of despair, rolled on. Only the currency speculators were smiling.

By autumn, the political atmosphere in Britain had shifted, as if a vast iced-over lake was beginning to experience the first hints of a thaw. Under the feet came rumbling tremors as if great ice-floes were breaking off and starting imperceptibly to move. From this point the time to the next great contest was shorter than the distance from the last. In a parliament lasting a maximum of five years the halfway mark had been passed. All thoughts began to turn towards the next general election.

‘Roger! You there? Do you want your white tie as well as black?’

Caroline Dickson waited for an answer, her arms full of clean shirts and underwear. It was already, dark and the lights in the bedroom were switched on, reflecting off gold and green House of Commons cufflinks and the pearl buttons on his dress shirt. Packing for Party Conference was a tedious but essential chore yet never quite routine. The Dicksons had chosen to go the following day, Monday, ready for an early attendance on Tuesday morning, and to stay till Friday and the Prime Minister’s hopefully rousing closing speech to the party faithful. Caroline was proud that Roger was now a recognised figure, called on to speak at fringe meetings and to do the rounds of receptions and balls. There had been so much uncertainty about the summer reshuffle that the Department of the Environment should be taking a back seat, though a junior minister from the Lords would be addressing a question-and-answer sessions on the council tax, which came to much the same thing.

The conference location this year was Bournemouth. A great improvement over horrible old Blackpool, Caroline reflected, Blackpool with its ghastly boarding houses and miles of boring windy promenade going nowhere. Bournemouth, blameless Bournemouth, with its neat flowerbeds
studiously snobbish, had survived the recession reasonably well, though its genteel elderly grumbled over low interest rates all the way to the bank.

There was no answer from downstairs. Caroline the garments carefully in the suitcases and went to lean over the banister.

Roger was in the darkened hallway, phone pressed to his ear with one hand, banging the other fist hard in a gesture of impotent fury into the wainscoting. One look at his grim face made Caroline retreat quickly. She sat on the top step, head cocked.

‘They’ve done
what
? Oh, Christ… Yes, I see… Yes, of course, Chief. My God, we could have done without this.’ A pause, a nod. He reached for a pencil. ‘Where is he, may I ask? … Right. Is he OK? … No, I’m serious. He’ll be horribly upset.’

The call continued for a few minutes more, with the other voice agitated and rapid. Then Roger put the handset back on its cradle and stood, hands thrust in trouser pockets, head bowed.

‘Sounds like trouble.’ Caroline was matter-of-fact.

‘Too right. That was the Chief Whip. Remember the Parkinson business at the Party Conference in 1984? Dreadful for everyone concerned, except the press, who had a field day. Well, we’re about to have a rerun. With a modern twist.’

Caroline raised an eyebrow. Her husband looked worried, not amused or detached. That meant they would be close to the matter. She decided to tease a little, to try to lift that black mask.

‘Really? Roger, what have you been up to?’

He looked up quickly, then passed a hand over his brow as if trying to read a hidden message. Immediately Carol regretted her levity, and went downstairs to stand beside her husband. He turned to her and slipped an arm around her waist.

‘Not me, sweetheart. Not this time, anyway. It’s Nigel Boswood. It appears he’s been harbouring a prostitute in his London house who has been singing to the press. It’s all over the first editions.
The Globe
has some lurid photo, which clearly show poor Nigel compromised. Not pleasant, especially not for him.’

Caroline sensed that there was more to come and teased again, gently. ‘Nigel is a lovely person. Maybe being seen with an attractive woman might do his reputation sonic good.’

With a start Roger realised how little he talked to his wife about his job and the people with whom he shared every waking hour. Caroline was not the sort to indulge in political gossip. Her guileless remark revealed her ignorance of the long-standing rumours about his boss.

‘I know what you mean, Caroline, but this is different. For a start, the tart is one-third Nigel’s age, young enough to be not just a child but a grandchild. Secondly the photos are, I hear, absolutely diabolical, with Nigel dressed up as some wild-eyed Egyptian queen, which is almost appropriate – because thirdly it isn’t some busty madam, it’s a boy, and under age at that.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Caroline sat down again on the bottom step, her eyes wide with horror. ‘I never realised Nigel was…’ Her voice tailed off. ‘You know … like that. What has he been up to, Roger? What did the Chief say?’

Her husband gave a helpless shrug. ‘Not much more than I’ve told you. Apparently the press are besieging the hotel in Bournemouth, as you’d expect. Nigel went up there all innocent this afternoon. I’m asked to go and help all I can. The lawyers are on their way. We’ll have to decide tonight whether we can sue.’

‘How awful.’ Caroline began to think through the implications. Her husband was very close to Nigel Boswood and would want to be sympathetic and helpful. If Nigel were unable to do his work it would naturally fall on Roger’s shoulders. On the other hand, if there was nastiness it did not do to be too close to it. Dirt has a habit of being contagious.

Roger continued in a sombre tone, ‘They’ve tried for an injunction against the paper but got nowhere. We never got around to tightening the law on privacy; we argued about it, messed about but
never made any effective changes. Not that it would do any good, anyway. We never got round to fulfilling those election promises we made so blithely to homosexuals either, about changing the law. This little squirt who’s about to ruin Nigel’s life is held legally incapable of making up his own mind who he wants to sleep with. So the police and the vice squad are likely to be involved, gross indecency or something of that ilk.’

He paused for breath, his voice bitter. Caroline put out a hand to him, beseeching him not to take the pain into himself. It was nothing to do with him. Angrily Roger scowled at his wife. He wanted Elaine, quickly, suddenly. She would understand the appalling guilt and fury welling in his own breast. He had known about this for – what? – ages, since the boy had appeared draped provocatively on Nigel’s bed at Blackpool. A year ago. He could kick himself for having fastidiously said nothing whatever to Nigel, not asked any pointed questions, not faced the man with the danger and wholesale foolishness of his actions, as a former whip should. He should have discussed the matter in confidence with the Chief Whip, dreadfully disloyal as it would have seemed at the time. Then Nigel would have been released promptly as he had requested last summer, instead of trailing on. Dickson struck his forehead with the palm of his left hand in a gesture of despair, trying to get his own brain into gear. Worst of all, the party was responsible, for the reasons he had blurted out to his wife, and which he would elaborate for weeks to come to Elaine: because, in the confusion and muddle over the Exchange Rate Mechanism and Maastricht and the Euro-elections all the rows over the loss of sovereignty to Brussels, no one had thought to make good use of the meagre powers which still remained to the Westminster Parliament, to abolish outmoded laws affecting millions of ordinary people. All it would have taken was a bit of courage, a little finesse, a willingness to create a result instead of this pathetic waiting for events to overwhelm them.

Now one smart boy had pocketed a fat cheque and talked. Sold his photos for a mess of money, and sold Nigel down the river at the same time. Poor Nigel. Poor tragic bastard. The thought of his mentor galvanised Dickson into action.