“Happy birthday, Francis.”
***
Booza-Pitt had no hesitation. In many matters he was a meticulous, indeed pedantic, planner, dividing colleagues and acquaintances into league tables of different rank that merited varying shades of treatment. The First Division consisted of those who had made it or who were clearly on the verge of making it to the very peaks of their professional or social mountains; every year they would receive a Christmas card, a token of some personal nature for wife or partner (strictly no gays), an invitation to at least one of his select social events and special attention of a sort that was logged in his personal secretary’s computer. The cream. For those in the Second Division who were still in the process of negotiating the slippery slopes there was neither token nor undue attention; the Third consisted of those young folk with prospects who were still practicing in the foothills and received only the encouragement of a card. The Fourth Division, which encompassed most of the world who had never made it into a gossip column and were content in life simply to sit back and admire the view, for Geoffrey did not exist.
Annita Burke was, of course, First Division but had encountered a rock slide that would probably dump her in the Fourth, yet until she hit the bottom of the ravine there was value to be had. She was standing to one side in the black-and-white-tiled entrance hall of Number Ten, smoothing away the fluster and composing herself for the attentions of the world outside, when Geoffrey grabbed her arm.
“That was terrible, Annita. You must be very angry.”
There were no words but her eyes spoke for her.
“You need cheering up. Dinner tonight?”
Her face lit at the unexpected support; she nodded.
“I’ll be in touch.” And with that he was gone. Somewhere intimate and gossipy, he thought—it would be worth a booth at Wiltons—where the flames of wounded feelings and recrimination might be fanned and in their white heat could be hammered out the little tools of political warfare, the broken confidences, private intelligences, and barbs that would strengthen him and weaken others. For those who were about to die generally preferred to take others with them.
Dinner and gossip, no more, even though she might prove to be vulnerable and amenable. It had been more than fifteen years since they’d spent a romping afternoon in a Felixstowe hotel instead of in the town hall attending the second day of the party’s youth conference debating famine in the Third World. They both remembered it very keenly, as did the startled chambermaid, but a memory it should remain. This was business.
Anyway, Geoffrey mused, necrophilia made for complicated headlines.
Nine
I will trust him when I hold his ashes in my hand.
It stood in a backstreet of Islington, on the point where inner city begins to give way to north London’s sprawling excess, just along from the railway arches that strained and grumbled as they bore the weight of crowded commuter trains at the start of their journey along the eastern seaboard. During the day the street bustled with traffic and the bickering and banter from the open-air market, but at night, with the poor street lighting and particularly when it was drizzling, the scene could have slipped from the pages of Dickens. The deep shadows and dark alleyways made people reluctant to pass this way, unless they had business. And in this street the business after dusk was most likely to be Evanghelos Passolides’s.
His tiny front room restaurant lay hidden behind thick, drawn curtains and a sign on the grimy window that in loud and uncharitable voice announced that the establishment was closed. There was no menu displayed, no welcoming light. It appeared as though nothing had been touched for months, apart from a well-scrubbed doorstep, but few who hurried by would have noticed. Vangelis, as it was known, was unobtrusive and largely unnoticed, which was the point. Only friends or those recommended by friends gained access, and certainly no one who in any life might have been an officer of the local authority or Customs & Excise. For such people Vangelis was permanently closed, as were his accounts. It made for an intimate and almost conspiratorial atmosphere around the five small tables covered in faded cloths and recycled candles, with holly-covered paper napkins left over from some Christmas past.
Maria Passolides, a primary school teacher, watched as her father, a Greek Cypriot in his midsixties, hobbled back into the tiny open-plan kitchen from where with gnarled fingers and liberal quantities of fresh lemon juice he turned the morning’s market produce into dishes of fresh crab, sugar lamb, suckling pig, artichoke hearts, and quails’ eggs. The tiny taverna was less of a business, more part hobby, part hideaway for Passolides, and Maria knew he was hiding more than ever. The small room was filled to chaos with the bric-a-brac of remembrance—a fishing net stretched across a wall and covered in signed photographs of Greek celebrities, most of whom were no longer celebrities or even breathing; along cluttered shelves, plates decorated with scenes of Trojan hunters fighting for control with plaster Aphrodites and a battalion of assorted glasses; on the back of the door, a battered British army helmet.
There was an abundance of military memorabilia—a field telephone, binoculars scraped almost bare to the metal, the tattered and much-faded azure blue cloth of the Greek flag. Even an Irish republican tricolor.
In pride of place on the main wall hung a crudely painted portrait of Winston Churchill, cigar jutting defiantly and fingers raised in a victory salute; beneath it on a piece of white card had been scrawled the words that in Greek hearts made him a poet the equal of Byron: I think it only natural that the Cypriot people, who are of Greek descent, should regard their incorporation with what may be called their Motherland as an ideal to be earnestly, devoutly, and feverishly cherished…
It was not the only portrait on the wall. Beside it stood the photograph of a young man with open collar, staring eyes, and down-turned mouth set against a rough plaster wall. There was no sign of identity, none needed for Michael Karaolis. A promising village boy educated at the English School. A youthful income tax clerk in the colonial administration, turned EOKA fighter. A final photograph taken in Nicosia Jail on the day before the British hanged him by his neck until he was dead.
“Vangelis.”
Since he had buried his wife a few years before, Evanghelos Passolides had been captured more than ever by the past. Sullen days were followed by long nights of rambling reminiscence around the candlelit tables with old comrades who knew and young men who might be willing to listen, though the numbers of both shrank with the passing months. He had become locked in time, bitter memories twisting both soul and body; he was stooped now, and the savagely broken leg that had caused him to limp throughout his adult life had grown noticeably more painful. He seemed to be withering even as Maria looked, the acid eating away inside.
The news that there was to be peace within his island only made matters worse. “Not my peace,” he muttered in his heavy accent. He had fought for union, Enosis, a joining of all Greeks with the Motherland—one tongue, one religion, one Government no matter how incompetent and corrupt, so long as it was our Government. He had put his life on the line for it until the day his fall down a mountain ravine with a thirty-pound mortar strapped across his back had left his leg bones protruding through his shin and his knee joint frozen shut forever. His name had been on the British wanted list so there was no chance of hospital treatment; he’d been lucky to keep his leg in any condition. The fall had also fractured the spirit, left a life drenched in regret, in self-reproach that he and his twisted leg had let his people down, that he hadn’t done enough. Now they were about to divide his beloved island forever, give half of it away to the Turk, and somehow it was all his fault.
She had to find a distraction from his remorse, some means of channeling the passion, or sit and watch her father slowly wither away to nothing.
“When are you going to get married?” he grumbled yet again, lurching past her in exaggerated sailor’s gait with a plate of marinated fish
. “Doesn’t family mean anything to you?”
Family, his constant refrain, a proud Cypriot father focused upon his only child. With her mother’s milk she had been fed the stories of the mountains and the village, of mystical origins and whispering forests, of passions and follies and brave forebears—little wonder that she had never found a man to compare. She had been born to a life illuminated with legend, and there were so few legends walking the streets of north London, even for a woman with her dark good looks.
Family. As she bit into a slice of cool raw turnip and savored its tang of sprinkled salt, an idea began to form. “Baba.” She reached out and grabbed his leathery hand. “Sit a minute. Talk with me.”
He grumbled, but wiped his hands on his apron and did as she asked.
“You know how much I love your stories about the old days, what it was like in the village, the tales your mother told around the winter fires when the snow was so thick and the well froze. Why don’t we write them down, your memories. About your family. For my family—whenever I have one.” She smiled.
“Me, write?” he grunted in disgust.
“No, talk. And remember. I’ll do the rest. Imagine what it would be like if you could read the story of Papou, your grandfather, even of his grandfather. The old way of life in the mountains is all but gone, perhaps my own children won’t be able to touch it—but I want them to be able to know it. How it was. For you.”
He scowled but raised no immediate objection.
“It would be fun, Baba. You and me. Over the summer when school is out. It would be an excuse for us to go visit once more. It’s been years—I wonder if the old barn your father built is still there at the back of the house, or the vines your mother planted. And whether they’ve ever fixed that window in the church you and your brothers broke.” She was laughing now, like they had before her mother died. A distant look had crept into his eyes, and within them she thought she saw a glint of embers reviving in the ashes.
“Visit the old family graves,” he whispered. “Make sure they’re still kept properly.”
And exorcize a few ghosts, she thought. By writing it all down, purging the guilt, letting in light and releasing all the demons that he harbored inside.
He sniffed, as though he could already smell the pine. “Couldn’t do any harm, I suppose.” It was the closest he had come in months to anything resembling enthusiasm.
Ten
I see no point in compromise. It’s rather like suggesting jumping as a cure for vertigo.
Mortima despaired of trying to check her face in the flicker of passing street lights as the car made its way up Birdcage Walk. “So what kind of woman is Claire Carlsen?” she asked, snapping away her compact.
“Different.” Urquhart paused to consider. “Whips don’t much care for her,” he concluded, as though he had no identifiable opinion of his own.
“A troublemaker?”
“No. I think it’s more that the old boys’ network has trouble in finding the right pigeonhole for a woman who is independent, drives a fifty-thousand-pound Mercedes sports car and won’t play by their rules. Has quite a tongue on her, too, so I’m told.”
“Not something of which you as a former Chief Whip would approve. So why are we going to dinner?”
“Because she’s persistent, her invitation seemed to keep creeping to the top of the list. Because she’s different.”
“Sounds as if you do approve, Francis,” she probed teasingly, her curiosity aroused.
“Perhaps I do. As Chief Whip I welcomed the dunderheads and do-nothings, but as Prime Minister you need a little more variety, a different perspective. Oh, and did I say she was under forty and extremely attractive?” He returned the tease.
“Thinking of giving her a job?”
“Don’t know. That’s why we’re going this evening, to find out a little more about her. I could do with some new members of the crew.”
“But to make room on the life raft you have to throw a few old hands overboard. Are there any volunteers?”
“I’d gladly lash that damned fool Drabble around the fleet. And Annita Burke was born to be fish bait.”
“I thought she was loyal.”
“So is our Labrador.”
“Go further, Francis. Much further. Bring it back.”
“What?”
“Fear. They’ve grown idle and fat these last months, your success has made things too easy for them. They’ve found time to dream of mutiny.” They were passing Buckingham Palace, the royal standard illuminated and fluttering proud. “Even a King cannot be safe on his throne.”
For a moment they lost themselves in reminiscence.
“Remind them of the taste of fear, the lash of discipline. Make them lie awake at nights dreaming of your desires, not theirs.” The compact was out again, they were nearing their destination. “We haven’t had a good keelhauling for months. You know how those tabloid sharks love it.”
“With you around, my love, life seems so full of pointed opportunity.”
She turned to face him in the half light. “I’ll not let you become like Margaret Thatcher, dragged under by your own crew. Francis, you are greater than that.”
“And they shall erect statues to my memory…”
She had turned back to her mirror. “So make a few examples, get some new crew on board. Or start taking hormone therapy like me.”
***
The door of the buttermilk stucco house set in the middle of Belgravia was opened through the combined effort of two brushed and scrubbed young girls, both wearing tightly wrapped dressing gowns.
“Good evening, Mrs. Urquhart, Mr. Urquhart,” said the elder, extending a hand. “I’m Abby and this is Diana.”
“I’m almost seven and Abby is nine,” Diana offered with a lisp where soon would be two new teeth. “And this is Tangle,” she announced, producing a fluffy and much-spotted toy dog from behind her back. “He’s very nearly three and absolutely…”
“That’s enough, girls.” Claire beamed proudly from behind. “You’ve said hello, now it’s good-bye. Up to bed.”
Stereophonic heckling arose on either side.
“Pronto. Or no Rice Pops for a week.”
Their protest crushed by parental intimidation, the girls, giggling mischievously, mounted the stairs.
“And I’ve put out fresh school clothes for the morning. Make sure you use them,” their mother called out to the retreating backs before returning to her guests. “Sorry, business before pleasure. Welcome, Francis. And you, Mrs. Urquhart.”
“Mortima.”
“Thank you. I feel embarrassed knowing your husband so much better than you.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not the jealous type. I have to share him with the rest of the world. It’s inevitable there should be a few attractive young women among them.”
“Why, thank you,” Claire murmured, acknowledging the compliment. In the light of the hallway’s chandelier she seemed to shimmer in a way that Mortima envied and which she had thought could only be found in combination with motherhood between the pages of Vogue. Was Claire also the type that had herself photographed naked and heavily pregnant, just to show the huddled, sweating masses with backache and Sainsbury’s bags just how it was done?
Claire introduced her husband, Johannis, who had been standing back a pace; this was his wife’s event and, anyway, he gave the impression of being a physically powerful man who was accustomed to taking a considered, unflustered view of life. He also had the years for it, being far nearer Urquhart’s age than his wife’s, and spoke with a distinctively slow though not unpleasant accent bearing the marks of his Scandinavian origin. Carlsen’s self-assured posture suggested a man who knew what he wanted and had got it, while she displayed the youthful vitality of a woman with ambitions still to be met. Contrasts. Yet it took only a few moments for Mortima to bec
ome aware that in spite of the superficial differences, somehow the Carlsens seemed to fit, have an understanding, be very much together. Perhaps she hadn’t married him simply for the money.
Claire led the way through to a reception room of high ceiling and pastel walls—ideal for the displayed works of contemporary European artists—in which the other eight guests had already assembled. Urquhart knew only one of them, but knew of them all; Claire had provided him with a short and slightly irreverent written bio of every diner, including Johannis. She’d made it all very easy, had chosen well. A bluff Lancashire industrialist who did extraordinary things with redundant textile mills that kept his wife in Florida for half the year and in racehorses for the rest. The editor of Newsnight and her husband, a wine importer who had provided the liquid side of the meal, which he spiced with spirited stories of a recent trip to vineyards in the mountains of Georgia where, for three nights, he had resided in a local jail on a charge of public drunkenness until he had agreed to take a consignment of wine from the police chief’s brother. The wine turned out to be excellent. There was also an uninhibited Irishman-and-American-mistress partnership who had invented the latest departure in what was called “legal logistics”—“profiling alternative litigation strategies,” he had explained; “Lawyers’ bullshit, it’s witness coaching and jury nobbling,” as she had offered.
And Nures. Urquhart had known he would be there, a relatively late addition to the guest list while on a private visit to London for dental treatment; his family’s fruit firm had used Carlsen freight facilities for more than a decade. The Foreign Office would normally have expressed qualms about his meeting the President of Turkish Cyprus in this manner, without officials present, but Nures was no longer an international pariah. Anyway, the Foreign Office couldn’t object because Urquhart hadn’t let them know; they would have felt obliged to parley with Nicosia, Ankara, Athens, Brussels, and half a dozen others in a process of endless consultation and compromise to ensure no one was offended. Left to the Foreign Office, they’d all starve.
The House of Cards Complete Trilogy Page 68
