Fifty-First State (2 page)

Gott greeted his young, tall and thin private secretary-cum-assistant Jeremy Saunders at his waiting car and entered the opulent eight-seater, custom-made for him because he owned the company. Gott took the front passenger seat and Jeremy started up. It was only a second before suspicion flooded Gott's mind. He swung round to look beyond the partition to the larger part of the vehicle. The seats were all empty but lying silently on the floor was Jeremy's intelligent Border collie, Finn. Finn looked sideways at Gott and away again. Lord Gott did not like dogs in general and Finn in particular, perhaps because Finn was an individual with whom Gott had to share Jeremy.

Gott turned back. ‘Jeremy – how many times do I have to tell you I don't want that dog in the car?'

‘I had to take him to the vet.'

‘Nothing serious, I hope,' Gott said harshly, meaning the opposite.

‘I felt a lump in his tail. It turned out to be a piece of shot. Must have been there for ages. He must have been in the way of a gun.'

Gott had the grace not to say any more, although Jeremy knew what he was thinking. They were drumming along beside the brimming river,
the Houses of Parliament in sight. Jeremy reflected that Gott and Finn had more in common than Gott suspected. They were both intelligent, energetic, self-interested and quick but shallow thinkers – although, Jeremy thought, Finn was of course infinitely more loyal.

Fox Square, London, SW1. April 5th, 2015. 1.30 a.m.

In five hours it would be dawn. The pale sun of early spring would come up, striking the glass of the tall towers of the City of London from the East, gleaming on to the spires and domes of churches, glancing off the water of the River Thames, hitting the east side of the Mother of Parliaments, and filling the streets slowly with light.

Just off one of the streets close to Parliament, dark at this hour, lit only by the weak gleam of mock-Victorian street lights, lies a little square, Fox Square. At one end is the eighteenth-century church of St Botolph's. On the remaining three sides are three-storey Georgian houses. In the centre of the square is a small island, on which stands an equestrian statue of General Sir Galahad Montmorency Havelock, hero of two Afghan Wars. He is seated on a spirited horse, sword raised, rallying his men to the attack. Carved on the pedestal beneath his feet are his dates. Born in 1828, he died on the North West Frontier in 1879. By a coincidence, his great-great grandson had just been killed there, in the rubble of the Khyber Pass.

On the side of the square facing the church, and sideways on to Sir Galahad, in the middle of a row of ten houses, there is a famous restaurant, Sugden's. The surrounding houses are tenanted, as is shown on the gleaming brass plates outside, by firms of solicitors, charities or organizations connected directly or indirectly with the government of the country. The agents of the ducal landlord of the houses would never allow any but the most respectable of firms as tenants. It's unlikely that if Sugden's – a mere restaurant – applied for a lease now they would get it, but Sugden's is an institution. Sugden's has been in Fox Square since the days when it was a chop house catering for members of Queen Victoria's Parliaments and the scribblers who wrote about it.

The small windows on either side of the door are masked by lace curtains little different from those which had hung there in the days of Empire. On the six inches of lintel above the front door the name ‘Sugden's' is picked out in black on white. No larger sign could be allowed, nor could any changes be made to the front of the building, but this lack of advertising was not a disadvantage, perhaps the reverse.

Inside the front door is an oak counter, manned at that time by two elderly sisters, big Miss Bonner and small Miss Bonner. To the left, still,
is the restaurant, a large room, which was probably at one time the drawing room and dining room of the house. Most of the back wall is now a large window looking out on to a small walled patio, where at night soft lamps burn and, in summer, tables stand.

On this particular night, only two parties of diners remained. One was a group of six men, sitting at the back of the room. The man at the head of the table for six – two businesslike-looking Chinese men, a Frenchman and three Englishmen – called for his bill. William Frith, a tall, thin man in his early thirties came forward with the bill on a plate and handed it to the host, a former Cabinet Minister, who enquired jovially if anyone would like a last drink before they parted. All, to William Frith's relief, declined. ‘All right, then, gentlemen,' said their host. ‘But I shall be more insistent when we meet after the contracts are signed. I won't take no for an answer then.'

After he had dealt with the bill and seen the men off, relocking the front door after them, William returned to his post. Only two diners, a man and a woman sitting near the windows, were now left so William took the opportunity of sitting down. He wore a dinner jacket and a black tie, his pale brown hair was still sleek and tidy after a long evening but his long face was pale and there were smudges under his large, pleasant brown eyes. He had spent most of the day painting his bathroom, before going on duty at six.

William loved his job. All he wished now was that the couple by the window, lingering over Armagnacs and black coffee, would go, freeing him to go upstairs, get into his day clothes and take the bus back to his flat in Shepherd's Bush and his wife, Lucy. However, the restaurant owner, Jack Prentiss, had a firm policy that Sugden's clients should be allowed to stay almost as long as they liked. A lunch might stretch into dinner, a dinner into the early hours of the morning and still the staff would not cough, yawn, shuffle, look discontented or attack the guests by asking, too often, if they required anything else. Only at three would Jack, who lived upstairs and whose hours of sleep were tailored to the movements of his business, come downstairs and ask his guests to leave.

William's eyes, large, soft and fringed with dark curly lashes, rested on the remaining couple seated by the window. His job was to know who belonged to which party, ministry or newspaper, although he himself had no interest in politics. From childhood on he had tuned them out, the way other people tune out football, high finance or health information. Of course, he knew that the pretty, dark-haired woman in the pale linen jacket was Mrs Julia Baskerville, Labour Member of Parliament for Whitechapel Road and Stepney Green, elected three years earlier by the poor London constituency. That was after her predecessor had blotted his copybook with his leadership and been deselected, to be seen no
more. Before that she'd been – what? – a teacher, a lecturer or something. Julia's good-looking companion, who reminded William vaguely of Lawrence of Arabia in the classic movie, was Joshua Crane, the Conservative Member for Frognal and South Hampstead. He'd been in the House for ten years. Julia and Joshua were partners on
Westminster Unplugged,
the weekly TV show about Parliament, chaired by the skinny and sardonic Hugh Patterson, previously editor of two national papers. Their sharp comments, and the way they flirted with each other and ragged the presenter like naughty schoolchildren was enjoyed by a small but devoted audience.

William liked them. He also thought there was nothing more than friendship between them – something he was also paid to know. From what he knew Julia was married to a surgeon who worked in Houston, Texas. They were running a long-distance marriage. There was a little girl. Joshua Crane was also married. William had never seen his wife.

William suppressed a yawn. Julia and Joshua's companion at the table, Lord Gott, had disappeared hours earlier and he wished the couple had gone with him, instead of hanging on and on gossiping and laughing.

‘Should we do the National Government on the programme?' Julia asked Joshua.

‘We featured it two months ago,' Joshua pointed out.

‘Well – what about the prospect of another election?'

‘You're getting tired. We did that then, too. Hugh Patterson wouldn't let it happen.'

‘How can we stop talking about it? It's
the
topic. There's no choice now. We must have a National Government.'

‘You're out of office. You would say that, wouldn't you?' Joshua told Julia. They both knew that the only way forward was an all-party government, with Labour and Liberal Democrats in the Cabinet. But Joshua's Party Leader, the Prime Minister, would never agree to it. The Liberal Democrats and Labour, being out of power, were in favour. Frederick Muldoon, though, was in power and not planning to surrender any of it.

‘Come on, Joshua. Everything's been stalled for years. It's like living in the Weimar Republic. A National Government's the only way and you know it.'

Joshua, who had to support his PM, whatever he thought privately, said nothing.

Julia turned and caught William's eye. ‘I'm sorry, William,' she called over. ‘Give us the bill and we'll go.' She turned back to Joshua. ‘They're saying the Queen's in favour of it.'

‘Right,' Joshua acknowledged without enthusiasm.

The business of the bill worked out nicely. It was Julia's turn to pay – William took a bit off the bill because he liked her. It was Joshua's turn
to tip, so he gave William nearly double what William might have expected. Everyone was happy. Outside the restaurant, as they waited for their taxis, Julia said, ‘That policeman rang me up again.'

Joshua laughed. Julia's suitor was a joke between them. A month earlier the spring tides had brought a foot of water into the House of Commons. The proposed billion-pound barrage in the Thames Estuary had never been built. So the water came up and Julia had fallen off a duckboard leading from the car park to the entrance, into the arms of a waiting policeman, who had twice rung her to ask her out for a drink.

‘Has the committee come up with an answer?' said Joshua. Julia's friend Alison was on the committee – known, of course, as the Canute Committee.

‘They're talking of allowances for Commons' staff for protective footwear,' Julia told him.

‘Wellington boots?' Joshua said.

‘That's right.' The first taxi – Julia's – arrived. It was hydrogen powered. Julia insisted on using oil-less, in spite of the problems with reliability the taxi fleets sometimes had. In this eco-friendly vehicle Julia would return to her small terraced house in Whitechapel.

Joshua, getting into his own petrol-fuelled cab, asked the driver to take him to an address in Battersea. But just after they had started up he leaned forward and requested the driver go to Chelsea.

William locked the door, cleared the table at which Joshua and Julia had been sitting, put everything on a trolley, ran it through the swinging baize doors to the kitchen, then hurried upstairs past the private dining rooms on the first floor and up to the top of the house. There was a small room off the landing where hanging racks held the waiters' and waitresses' black suits and dresses. He whipped out of his suit and was just doing up his other trousers when his boss, the owner of Sugden's, came out of his flat, pale as a vampire, in his usual purple smoking jacket. William had heard the sound of a television from behind Jack's front door, but had quite hoped, at this hour, to avoid an encounter. He took his jacket from a hanger.

‘Everything all right, William?' asked Jack.

‘Pretty good,' William answered. ‘Twenty covers, not bad for a weekday, and table six had three bottles of Bollinger. One card was refused so the diner paid cash.'

‘Who was that?'

‘Edward Jeffreys,' William told him.

Jack nodded. ‘There's a divorce pending. Pick up anything about an election?'

William shook his head. Jack said, ‘Fine.' It was not the fate of a great nation that concerned the restaurateur. It was that during the course of
an election campaign, normally lasting something like six weeks, the restaurant would be largely empty. The clientele would be in their constituencies, campaigning, or burning the midnight oil to produce statistics or publicity. They would be studying graphs, poring over newspaper leaders, monitoring broadcasts, creating smears, awaiting the results of opinion polls, all involved in the short but tough episode that is a British election campaign.

‘Good,' Jack said. ‘That'll keep the private rooms full.'

A group wanting to dine in private, to plan and conspire, would often take one of Sugden's two upstairs private dining rooms. This was filling Jack Prentiss's bank account. From time to time the cabal from one dining room would bump into members of the group they were conspiring against on the landing separating the two dining rooms. William had once asked Jack why secret meetings were so often held in this less-then-secret restaurant, a stone's throw from Parliament and Whitehall. He said the conspirators could have kept their secrets more secret if they'd met in a Little Chef on the M1.

Jack had told him, ‘You've got to remember that when Parliament's in session politicians can't breathe the air more than a mile from Westminster.'

William started downstairs.

‘All-night bus?' Jack called after him. William had the impression that Jack sometimes got lonely at night, with only his porcelain collection for company. Sometimes he tried to detain him in conversation, which William, after a long shift and yearning for home, didn't always welcome.

‘How's Lucy?'

William looked up at Jack. ‘I'm not sure. She's usually in bed when I get back and she's often gone to work when I get up.' He added, ‘I think it's her in the bed – but it might be the woman next door, for all I know.'

Jack laughed. William didn't like it. As he left, relocking the door behind him, William reflected that shift work was hard on marriages. His boss's life proved it. Two – or had there been three? – of Jack's marriages had foundered. William had decided his would not. At the first sign of trouble he'd leave and look for another job.