Fifty-First State (39 page)

That summer, Gott was very depressed. He'd been outmanoeuvred by Petherbridge. The land for military camps had been secretly bought, there was a huge US military presence in the country, and the bases he'd risked so much to keep out of US hands were now, effectively, American fortresses. He abandoned altogether any effort to put together an alliance to get the matter of continued US control of the airbases discussed in Parliament. It was too late, he said; it was a
fait accompli
; possession was nine tenths of the law; he had lost; Petherbridge and Washington had won. He took it all as a personal failure, assuming too much blame for not preventing moves which had been well planned by many powerful men and women. When Julia Baskerville tried to tell him this, he said, ‘If I go back to all that, then I, or Joshua Crane, or somebody else is going to have a nasty accident.'

He said, ‘The Emperor Diocletian abdicated and went back to where he had been born, a slave, to farm. Several years later his co-Emperor asked him to return and resume power. He'd retired to the country and he replied, “If you could see my cabbages, you would not ask me that.” I'm with Diocletian.'

In actual fact, Gott grew no cabbages. He was just depressed. Although he'd never been a drinker, he drank more, worked less and often spent all day at his flat in pyjamas. After some months of this, Jeremy was worried enough to ring Lady Margot, who produced a sensible doctor and all Gott's sons. Whether it was the doctor or the concerted attack on him by his children, Gott had to yield and, sulking, get back to work. We thought the constant visits from his son Robin's wife and her children, who had never been checked or reproved in any way, had done the trick. The message was, pull yourself together or Celia, with little Harry and Martha, will come round every week and tear the flat to pieces.

By September Gott was more or less back on his feet again. In fact, he had no financial reasons for gloom. His nightmare was becoming real but he had taken precautions months earlier to protect himself. However, being right is no pleasure when what you're right about is something so terribly wrong.

With work on the new Thames Estuary barrage only just begun, the Thames flooded in September, putting 250 metres of central London beside it under water. Sewers broke, power lines became useless. The City of London was plunged into darkness for three days and the Stock
Exchange had to close. The flooding of the fifty square miles was a disaster.

Parliament itself was under a metre of water on the ground floor. Sewage pipes had burst, the floor of the House was full of stinking water in which unmentionable things floated. Nicely symbolic, said Joshua Crane, who had been nominated by Petherbridge to be part of the inspection team, though you didn't appreciate the symbolism when you were standing in your Wellingtons in cold, dirty water in which turds and used condoms floated – and saw, over by the Speaker's Chair, the swirl of water which had to be the wake of a swimming rat.

The Houses of Commons and Lords had to meet somewhere else. There was no chance the great and good would go north, to York, for example. They relocated to the New Crystal Palace in South London. Each morning, a convoy of private cars, official vehicles, police vehicles and outriders swept through the drab streets of South London and up to the new Xanadu at Crystal Palace, watched apathetically by people on the pavements.

It was outside Lambeth Public Library that, Joshua Crane said, he saw the start of the Point and Laugh Campaign. He saw, he claims, a small child in his mother's arms, watching the convoy. The child pointed and laughed at the spectacle. The mother, mimicking the child, pointed and laughed as well. Beside her, a man copied her and the child, though perhaps less innocently. And soon a crowd of about twenty citizens, all standing watching their legislators sweeping through their streets, began pointing and laughing. Joshua was in a car with his friend Douglas Clare, a man from the Ministry of Education due to appear at a Select Committee and Tobias Kerr, right hand man to one of Alan Petherbridge's right hand men. The need to get to Crystal Palace sometimes made for strange travelling companions. He said Kerr was disconcerted by the pointing and laughing. So were many others in the convoy, which probably explains why pointing and laughing caught on – pointing and laughing at US patrols, pointing and laughing at the Mayor and at the man coming down the street to bang on doors and check the IDs of the people in each house. The public was ground down, civil liberties a joke, but you can't arrest someone for pointing and laughing. Petherbridge put together a secret committee of lawyers to see if legislation could be introduced to do exactly that, but word got out that he was trying to make laws to stop people from pointing and laughing – so people laughed their unamused laughs even more.

At this stage Petherbridge was probably hated more by his own party than by the Opposition, the other parties in the House or the country at large. The Conservatives knew he had bought their own successful election. Gott was still refusing to provide the damning evidence but, as the
facts mounted up – B53s flying missions at random over cities, troops in the streets, the ever-present American at House committee meetings, the Watchers in the public gallery of the House of Commons – Gott's testimony was hardly necessary. The party was ashamed. Naturally, it had its pro-Americans, too. There are always those who make a profit in hard times. There are always those who will support the strongest side of the argument because they are afraid to do otherwise.

If conditions were hard, the system was awash with money for those who knew how to grab it. ‘Bribes have been taken and jobs handed out,' said Gott to Joshua. He mentioned many names – this MP on the board of an oil company, that MP sucking up contracts in the Lebanon, a third who had just been offered a lucrative directorship of an American-owned company. ‘A lot of noses in the trough,' he said. ‘Then there are the threats – exposure of that schoolboy affair with another boy, now a High Court judge; old Wigston is effectively a bigamist, after a ceremony on a beach in Thailand; Hamish Smith is on the verge of bankruptcy. And Franks can't protest because the US base in his constituency is the only source of jobs and businesses there. Even the MPs who aren't on the take and can't be threatened are doubtful – they've looked into the future and believe it's American, whether they like it or not. They have to ask themselves whether maybe America is the bulwark against chaos and terrorism.

‘So,' said Gott, ‘Petherbridge is the
capo de capi
of the Tory Party now. Sinister. It's only a matter of time before the mysterious deaths begin. Don't look so sceptical, Joshua. Wait and see. Of course, the party won't be supine for ever. There'll be a leadership contest soon.'

In November a leadership campaign was mounted. Joshua Crane was urged to stand, and agreed to do so although Lord Gott advised him against it. He added up the numbers for Joshua, who refused to be persuaded.

In the end the respected Edmund Thorsen, who had lost the leadership campaign to Frederick Muldoon in 2012, decided to stand. It was obvious that he was the stronger candidate and that Joshua's candidacy would only split the anti-Petherbridge vote. Joshua, disappointed, withdrew. ‘Best day's work you ever did,' Gott told him unsympathetically. ‘And in any case, what do you think Petherbridge would make of your present domestic arrangements? He'd crucify you before the vote.' Joshua believed no one knew – how could they? He blustered. Gott cut him down. ‘We're all under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Our phones are tapped and our mail is read. Don't be stupid, Joshua.'

‘You may be prepared to sit down under this!' Joshua had exclaimed. ‘I'm not.' Thorsen was defeated by a narrow margin. The hardship went on.

Joshua had a secret. His secret was Julia – Julia's secret was Joshua.
Agreed, party barriers matter less in these times – the occupation has set the agenda, making alliances between former enemies, enemies of former friends. Nevertheless, there are still protocols; you may vote with MPs from other parties but it's doubtful if it's all right to sleep with them.

The semi-detached marriage between Julia and her surgeon husband in Houston had collapsed, just as Mr Zulfeikar Zulani, butcher of East London, had predicted to his own wife at home. Julia's sister and her husband had taken their children away for a holiday in Florida in the New Year of 2016. They decided to change their flight to look in on Julia's husband, Nathaniel, on their way home. They all had a pleasant dinner together, parted and all would have been well if the Desmond family's flight had not been delayed. Or if they had stayed overnight at the hotel provided, instead of electing to spend the night at Nat's so that the children could see a little more of their uncle. Once there, signs of a hasty, not-quite-efficient-enough clear-up manifested themselves. In the middle of the night Julia's sister awoke, nudged her husband awake and asked, ‘Do you think Nat's having an affair?' Her husband said, ‘Yes. Go back to sleep.' Julia's sister had found a tube of make-up at the back of a bathroom cupboard. Her husband had looked into the eyes of a man with something to hide. Both concluded that Julia's husband had another woman.

They jointly agreed not to tell Julia. In February, shortly before the vote on the Ministry of Defence's Lands Sale Bill, Julia's sister broke the pact and told her. At first, Julia angrily derided any suggestion that her husband was unfaithful to her. Then, over successive nights, she pieced together the evidence collected over what had seemed to her to have been a very happy Christmas – the hang-ups on the phone, the lost scrunchy in a corner explained as belonging to the short-haired cleaning woman, the occasional faraway look in Nat's eyes. And then events took place as they so often do. Many sleepless night later, she asked her husband over the phone if he was seeing another woman. He said he was not. In June, he rang and asked for a divorce.

This was on the same day that the EU had announced its early sanctions, also the day
Westminster Unplugged
was due to go out live on air. Because of the political crisis, the producer of the show had called an emergency meeting with the director, the presenter and the popular political duo, Joshua and Julia, at his house in Notting Hill. Julia arrived in dark glasses, which she did not take off during the meeting. She did her best to contribute, but everybody there could see something was wrong. Afterwards, Joshua grabbed her and made her come round the corner with him to a pub. No stranger to messy affairs of the heart and being in agreement with Zulfeikar Zulani, though he didn't know it, about the
prospects of the survival of a marriage between a young and good-looking doctor and a young and good-looking MP, over five thousand miles apart, he spared her by simply pushing a brandy into her hand and telling her what the problem was. ‘He's leaving you,' he stated. And Julia nodded.

It's only fair to say that at this point Joshua was not on the make. He was disinterestedly fond of Julia. He gallantly hauled Julia through the evening's show. Viewer complaints came in later, protesting about how he'd hogged the time and the camera. However, as time went on, Joshua being Joshua, things changed. He began to woo Julia, who rejected him at first, but then Christmas approached, with its silent shout about love, friendship and family. Julia was facing the holiday in the middle of a divorce, with a bewildered child and no husband. Joshua was looking at the ordeal of ten days in Yorkshire with a wife who didn't like him, and showed no sign of returning to live with him in the near future. He would be with children he seldom saw and who were gradually becoming strangers to him. There was every chance that on his arrival he would be faced with the retired, widowed lecturer who had been courting his wife, who might by now have caught her and who would doubtless be in for mulled wine and mince pies on Christmas Eve wearing his old-friend-of-the-family face.

That evening at Julia's house, Joshua had heard Millie on the stairs going up to bed, ask her mother, ‘Will we ever see Daddy again?' Having put her daughter to bed, which took a long time, Julia came red-eyed down the stairs and offered Joshua a meal of rice and mushrooms, which was all there was. Then Julia and Joshua had looked at each other and fallen into each other's empty arms.

At least they're happy, and these days it's wise to take happiness where you find it. There's not so much of it about, after all, and the worry that if it's here now, it may be gone tomorrow.

Only last week I went to a dinner party – at Sugden's, of course. It was Edward Gott's 56th birthday, and where else would he celebrate? Joshua and Julia were guests and the ever-present Jeremy and old friends of Gott's, Joe Macready and Thomas Wickham and his wife, Annette. Then there were four of Gott's sons and two of their wives – and me, of course, and my daughter, Chloe. Fifteen of us in all, a vast number of guests in such times – a banquet. Lady Gott was not present but was busy organizing a party for Gott in Scotland. Of course, if Lady Gott had been present I would not have been, and nor would my daughter. It will be plain by now that Chloe is my daughter and Edward Gott's. It's hardly a secret since Petherbridge leaked the story to his favourite tabloid over a year ago.

It's not an unusual story. Almost thirty years ago I was a student at Oxford reading archaeology, when I met Edward Gott. We fell in love, I conceived and Gott – who was graduating just as I found out I was pregnant – ran away. He actually put his pen down in the examination hall having finished his last exam paper and disappeared without a word to the USA, where he had a postgraduate course at Yale lined up.

I'd had irregular periods before exams, which was why I had not realized sooner that I was pregnant – but there was still just time for an abortion. Having a baby at the start of your second year at university is not to be recommended. I didn't go home at the start of the summer vacation but hid in London with a friend, working as a waitress and trying to decide what to do. After several late-night discussions I'd finally made an appointment at a clinic to discuss a late termination and it was the following morning that Edward's mother, Elspeth Gott, tracked me down in the scruffy London flat I was sharing.