The Madness of July (8 page)

Lucy
–
let’s make that lunch next week. Wednesday? It’s a day when the diary says Will should be out of town. I was
so
touched by our conversation, and there’s much more to say. Let me know. I hope the office is not
too
wild.

Warmly,

F

She considered what she had written, re-read it and placed the card in an envelope which she addressed to the office, confident that it wouldn’t reach her husband’s desk by accident. Everything passed Lucy first, and Francesca could be sure that it would stay with her. She took the back staircase and walked to the post box in Bow Street to catch the first afternoon collection. But she slowed down as she went, disturbed by a thought that swept over her without warning. She stopped, and after a few moments tore up the envelope and dropped the pieces in a litter bin on the corner. It took about ten minutes in the sun for her feelings to settle, then she went back to prepare alone for the evening, first to the private dining room behind the royal box near the stage.

With a seating plan before her, she wrote names on place cards for supper in a free-flowing hand. Three to each side of the oval table and one at each end. She looked round the small, high room, saw the flowers in place beside the ormolu clock and the drinks tray ready on the table. From the opening that led from the dining room to the royal box, muffled by a curtain drawn across the door, came the sound of a single horn. A player had slipped into the pit for some private practice, the gleam of his instrument just visible in the gloom under the overhang. Above him a crew was banging around on the stage, making the last checks on a revolving set that would turn for the first time in public that night. Their voices were louder than usual, and reflected the excitement that had crept through the building. A new production, an atmospheric Thursday, and Francesca shared the shiver of tension that everyone around her craved. ‘Penny Jenner,’ she wrote. Then one for Paul.

The American party had almost arranged itself, doors flying open. She knew that the visitors – one from the embassy in Grosvenor Square and the other from Washington – were aware that their host would be Paul Jenner, the mandarin of mandarins, and she’d learned from his office that they were turning up the heat with two cabinet ministers. Yet it would be a chance for Flemyng to relax, free for a while from the family troubles that were disturbing Francesca because he had told her nothing of their origin. She saw brother Mungo as one of her charges, needing a woman’s helping hand without asking for it. He had said how well she understood him and his gratitude touched her, but she knew he would never call for help. That was beyond Mungo, who with every year that passed settled more firmly into the solitary routine at Altnabuie. She made a mental note to ring him, and turned back to her plans.

The guests would use the private staircase that ran up from the quiet side entrance in Floral Street and led straight to the dining room, from where they could enter the box in the auditorium after the lights went down, to take their places in the shadows, only noticed by those in the audience who were watching for them. They could slip in and out without fuss. She checked the cards, wrote ‘Mr Wherry’ and ‘Mr Sassi’ for the Americans, listened to the horn player doing his runs for a few moments and then walked round the horseshoe of the grand tier to start the obstacle race through the warren of corridors behind to her office high above the stage, looking out to the old market square.

She played with the seating plan in her mind. It should be easy, although there were only two women in the eight, and she turned over the permutations as she approached her tiny office, stopping to make way for a high trolley hung with wigs that creaked past her as it wobbled towards the chorus room.

The two ministers who were coming, neither bringing his wife, would add colour. She liked Jonathan Ruskin, known for being the tallest man in the cabinet, which was a useful identifier and had served him well, who was gently spoken and always an engaging companion. She enjoyed his bookish side, and he’d spent long evenings on their sofa in Putney chewing the fat of politics. She and Flemyng enjoyed his sense of adventure in all things – his account of a walk along the Rhine had been their holiday reading the year before, and he’d almost won a literary prize for it. Because he had to bend his elongated frame most of the time to avoid aloofness, he appeared in company to be a natural listener, always leaning towards the person who was speaking. He had no choice, but it made him seem willing. His eyes were as blue as gas jets. Francesca knew him rather better than Harry Sorley, his ministerial partner for the night, although there were tales of hidden depths.

Physically, Sorley had none of Ruskin’s style, being porky. There was a reputation for womanizing and sexual adventure. Dark where Ruskin was fair, he exuded a mid-forties vanity, his curls well-tended and not to Francesca’s taste, because they oozed with a seducer’s oil. She knew, however, that the effect on some others was different. And he was sometimes fun, if you didn’t mind the eyes, which reminded her of Malcolm McDowell in
A Clockwork Orange.
Not enticing. But the friends who clustered round her husband made a happy gang, and she enjoyed their naked relish for the game. She was a natural collector of the tales they told but protected her own sense of propriety with the promise that she would never keep a diary.

The favourite stories clinging to friends and rivals were shadows that never lifted. ‘Everybody has a past and we all know it,’ Flemyng had told her on one of their first weekends together. But she enjoyed them, stags of a common age including Ruskin and Sorley, who’d both slipped ahead of him by virtue of having started earlier, and the likes of Forbes and McIvor who were at his level, waiting for the next jump to a cabinet seat, and looking for a helping hand from anywhere. Sparger too, although he had once propositioned her when drunk, whispering all the while that music made him cry. But Francesca knew that one day their band of brothers would break up and there would be pain. Their life of rivalry made that a certainty, the fervour of the moment coming from the knowledge that it would pass.

Because she loved the risks of the stage, the life of politics worked on Francesca. Flemyng’s friends confided in her in ways that she found surprising, leaving their own wives in ignorance, and within months of Flemyng falling for her she’d been adopted by the gang. Forbes had shared the story of his failed marriage; Ruskin his desire for children and his wife’s distance from politics. She kept their secrets.

With her husband she’d developed the honesty that he needed. Her love for him, which had grown, obliged her to be tough. He wanted nothing less, and she could often see in his eyes, behind the dancing smile, an appeal for an openness between them that might one day be uncomfortable. He’d told her that without it he feared that he would drift, and maybe fall.

There would be politics around the table later. Francesca opened her window in search of some air, checked her clothes, and responding to the chatter from the cobbled street below, set off in search of strong tea to ready herself.

*

Back in his office, Flemyng dived into a red box of paperwork and sat alone. He was told that Lucy would be delayed so he took relief in his work. He spoke to the Beirut embassy, composed a message for Damascus about his September visit, and re-read a hostile Treasury paper on the cost of embassy entertaining in North Africa. The note on tactics from the official representing him at the following day’s budget wrangle seemed to do the job, so he scribbled a quick note of thanks and support, read the daily batch of embassy telegrams, which took an hour, and put away the last of his papers. Lucy hadn’t returned. He asked her assistant to let Ruskin’s office know they could talk the next morning, and made sure that the message would be passed on immediately. A letter of thanks to his party chairman in the constituency, and he was done. There was time for a quick shave and shower, in the poky bathroom he shared with the minister next down the pecking order, and he thought he had won himself some thinking time.

Instead he was summoned to a meeting, for the second time that afternoon. ‘Thomas Brieve rang,’ Lucy’s assistant announced through the doorway. Because she was junior, she used his full name.

Brieve. Prime ministerial foreign affairs adviser and, in Flemyng’s mind, the most obnoxious of the new breed. Fixers appearing in ministerial offices, confidants hired to do their masters’ business round the clock, and known for their lapdog loyalty. Brieve was their model – a Cerberus at the gate who sent unwanted ministers on their way, the boy scout who followed the paper trail wherever it went, the man who never missed a meeting. His memos, Ruskin would say, were like toxic lava from a volcano: get in its way and you’d be swallowed up. Tom Brieve, although his skinny, angular frame was physically unsettling and he had a boyish manner that multiplied the effect, had power. Gatekeeper and enforcer, he had secrets stuffed in his pockets. But Francesca was always surprised by Flemyng’s reaction to him, and puzzled. Brieve hardly seemed like Rasputin, she had said after first meeting him. Nor even Machiavelli. Flemyng said that she would be wise not to bet on it.

She remembered, however, how he had spoken of his own awkwardness and confessed that he felt it lifting in her presence. He understood the effect of his manner on his colleagues, he said, and Francesca remembered his relief when he realized that she found nothing embarrassing in his decision to speak to her intimately.

Flemyng made his call, and Brieve answered the phone himself in Downing Street. ‘I’d like to see you if I can, Will. Away from the office, now. Do you have a few minutes?’

Briskly, Flemyng agreed without asking why he was making such an unusual request, and suggested that they went to a subterranean bar near Charing Cross, a dingy, dusty place where they both knew it was easy to hide. There were corners where the shadows were deep. Half-burned candles, almost always unlit, stuck out of green bottles on each table, and the air reeked of the sherry dispensed from four great barrels lying end-on behind the bar, their bulging wooden ribs shining as if they sweated alcohol. Flemyng knew of a few affairs that had started in these premises, and some that had ended there. It wasn’t natural Brieve territory; so much the better. They’d meet in fifteen minutes.

Before leaving, he made one careful rearrangement in his office. Making sure that the door was closed, he took a plain envelope from his briefcase. It had no name on the outside and the flap was open. He checked the sheet of paper inside, read the words again, and placed it in the drawer of his desk, putting the key back in his pocket after he had unlocked it. He pushed the drawer carefully so that it was nearly closed, but not quite.

He walked across Whitehall, stopping to buy late-afternoon editions of the
Standard
and
Evening News
from the wooden shack at the Ministry of Defence corner – the water workers’ strike was still hogging the front pages – and was soon on the precipitous stairway to the cellar bar. Brieve was already established in one of the brick alcoves, seated at a rickety wooden table with two schooners of pale sherry in front of him. Flemyng shook hands and sat down. ‘Tom.’

Brieve was carrot-haired, freckled and pale. He was taller and thinner than Flemyng as well as a year or two younger, but the gawky façade was misleading. When he opened his mouth Brieve was smooth as silk, speaking in mellifluous tones. From the Foreign Office fast stream, he’d swum off to life at Harvard when he was barely out of his twenties, returning in triumph to the diplomatic whirl. With a speed that his contemporaries thought indecent as well as infuriating, he abandoned the department that once commanded all his loyalty in favour of his new ante-chamber adjacent to the seat of power. In Whitehall, his tracks were visible everywhere.

‘Will, I wanted to pick your brains.’ Flemyng drank some sherry and thanked him.

His curiosity rose as Brieve began a ramble that seemed to have no destination, without any of the discipline that was his hallmark. Flemyng had never heard him speak so aimlessly. ‘I wonder what you think,’ he said more than once in the course of his Middle East tour, but never paused to allow a reply. The coming Paris conference was thrown in, although it had little connection with Flemyng’s territory, and he told a long anecdote which he described as the only funny thing to come out of the latest session of disarmament talks in Vienna, which had stalled again. This was the excuse for some further musing about the Russians, and the scelerotic Kremlin succession that must surely come. Finally Flemyng interrupted him.

‘Tom, what’s this all about?’

Brieve flinched. ‘Why d’you ask?’

‘Because you’re all over the place, and that’s not like you. What’s up? You can tell me.’

Brieve’s natural pallor was touched by a flush of pink at Flemyng’s interruption. ‘The first time I met Francesca, I realized she was somebody that I could talk to more frankly than is often the case with me – this job, and so forth. I’ve often hoped that the same might be true of you, although we tend not to speak to each other in that way, or often enough.’ For the first time in Flemyng’s experience, Brieve showed symptoms of rising embarrassment.

‘Be my guest.’

Flemyng was sitting back in a wooden captain’s chair, and could feel its struts on his back. Brieve was hunched forward over the table in an attitude of supplication, and he spoke hesitantly. ‘This isn’t about a crisis, it’s more nebulous than that. An atmosphere…’ His head was still down, but his eyes had come up to observe Flemyng’s reaction. ‘Do you know what I’m referring to?’

Flemyng’s expression didn’t change and he made no effort to ease Brieve’s discomfort. ‘Out with it, Tom. Who?’

The answer surprised him. ‘It’s not a question of who, more a nervousness, a fear really, and I can’t work it out. I’ve got masses of stuff to put together before the Paris conference – the communiqué’s only halfway there, and there are all-nighters to come – but that’s manageable. Drafting’s my business, and we’ll fix it. That’s not my worry. I wanted to ask you if you’d had the same feeling lately – that things are unravelling. People keeping secrets, working against each other, that kind of thing.’