The House of Cards Complete Trilogy

by Michael Dobbs

  The terrace of the Palace of Westminster fronts the northern bank of the great river where once had strolled Henry VIII, through the blossom trees and hedging of what at that time had been his palace garden. It was always a problem site, being immediately adjacent to the medieval City of London with its teeming humanity and overflowing chamber pots. Perhaps it was on some fetid summer’s day while walking through the overpowering air that the King grew envious of the sweet-scented palace that stood further upstream at Hampton Court, where his Lord Chancellor lived, Cardinal Wolsey, a man whose fortunes and grasp on his home were to decline as the tidal flow of the Thames washed its noisome waters beyond, and then back again, past the King’s door. In any event, the spot never achieved great popularity until those mightiest of urban redevelopers, the Victorians, built both sewers and solid embankment and thereby transformed its attractions. By the side of the river the architects Barry and Pugin erected a great orange-gold palace for Parliament in the manner of a sand castle by the beach, complete with flags and turrets. On its fringe they formed a terrace where on warm summer days members of either House of Parliament might sit and sup, the lapping waters easing the passage of time and legislation instead of launching, as in days of old, an assault on their senses.

  Major the Lord “Bungy” Colquhoun traveled to London infrequently, but when he did he found the House of Lords a most convenient club. He had therefore been amenable to his cousin’s prompting that he should hold a small drinks party on the terrace and invite a few carefully selected guests. He did not know his near-neighbor and soon-to-be-noble brother from Cold Kirby, but was happy to meet him. As was Mortima.

  Watling was an affable man, courteous but cautious, feeling his way on uncertain soil. He was not a man to rush. For a while on the terrace he stood quietly, staring across the silt-brown river to where an army of worker ants were transforming what had been St. Thomas’s Hospital into what was to become an office and shopping complex with multiscreen cinema.

  “Progress?” she inquired, standing at his elbow.

  “You mean the fact that if my heart were to stop right now they’d take an additional fifteen minutes to get me to treatment?” He shook his head. “Since you ask, probably not.”

  “But it wouldn’t, you know, not in the House of Lords. Every Gothic nook and cranny in the place seems to be stuffed with all sorts of special revival equipment. Every closet a cardiac unit. You’re not allowed to die, you know. Not in a royal palace. It’s against the rules.”

  He chuckled. “That’s reassuring, Mrs. Urquhart. I suppose as a judge I’d better stick to the rules.”

  “I don’t profess to understand the legal system…”

  “You’re not supposed to. Otherwise what’d be the point of all us lawyers beavering away at the taxpayers’ vast expense?”

  He was shy, mellowing a little; it was her turn to laugh. “And are you taking the King’s shilling at the moment?”

  “The Cyprus shilling, to be precise.”

  “Oh, that one’s yours?” She allowed the breeze to ruffle through her hair, anxious not to appear—well, anxious. “Is the case a difficult one?”

  “Not unduly. The areas of difference are clear and not especially large; it’s a finely balanced matter. So the panel sits in judgment for about twelve hours a week, the rest of the time we go off and…compose our thoughts.” He raised his glass of champagne in self-mockery.

  “So there’s a panel? For some reason I had the idea it was an entirely British affair.”

  “And it would have been all the better for it. Sometimes I find the Entente Cordiale neither an entente nor particularly cordiale.” The previous day Rodin, the Frenchman, had been at his most persistently illogical and truculent. But then he usually was.

  “So the French are involved, too?”

  “And a Malaysian, an Egyptian, and a Serb. In theory the heat we generate is supposed to reforge swords for the service of a better world, although in practice the plowshares often have edges like razors.”

  “I suspect you’re secretly very proud of what you do. But—forgive my ignorance—doesn’t having such a mixture of nationalities, and particularly the French, in this case make your task a little…awkward?”

  “In every case,” he agreed with vehemence. “But why especially in this?”

  “I mean, with the oil…”

  “Oil? What oil?”

  “Don’t you know? Surely you must. They will have told you.”

  “Told me what? The seismic showed no oil.”

  “But apparently there’s another report, very commercially confidential, or so I’ve heard—perhaps I shouldn’t have?—which says the place is floating on a vast reservoir of oil. And if it goes to the Greek side, the French have been promised the exploitation rights.” She looked puzzled. “Doesn’t that make it difficult for a French judge?”

  So that’s what the bastard Breton’s been up to. Watling’s face clouded with concern, while the great River Thames, and Mortima beside it, rushed on.

  “Forgive me. Forget everything I’ve said. It was probably something I overheard and shouldn’t have—you know, I never really take much notice of these things, whether I should know or shouldn’t know.” She sounded flustered. “I’m a silly woman stumbling into areas I don’t understand. I should stick to dusting and Woman’s Hour.”

  “It is probably something we shouldn’t be talking about,” he conceded, his face soured as though his drink had been spiked. “I have to deal with the facts that are presented to me. Impartially. Cut myself off completely from extraneous material and—forgive me—gossip.”

  “I hope I haven’t embarrassed you. Please say you’ll forgive me.”

  “Of course. You weren’t to know.” He spoke softly but had become studiously formal, the judge once more, gazing again across the river, at nothing. Working it out.

  Mortima held silence for a moment as she fought to recompose herself, twirling the long stem of her glass nervously. It was time to occupy new territory, any new territory, so long as it wasn’t sitting on oil. She offered her best matronly smile. “I’m so glad you could bring your mother; I understand Bungy gave you both tea.”

  He nodded gently. “My mother particularly enjoyed the toasted tea cakes. Couldn’t stand the Earl Gray, though. Said she was going to bring her own tea bags with her next time.” Watling experienced a sudden twinge of anxiety—“next time.” Had the baron-to-be let slip a confidence by appearing to assume too much? Would the Prime Minister’s wife know about New Year? But surely the invitation to tea and the terrace was simply a means of easing him into The System?

  “And your father?”

  “No longer with us, I’m afraid. Indeed, to my enduring regret I never knew him, nor he me.”

  “How very sad.” Once more she was ill at ease, flushed, seeming incapable of finding the right topic, distressed by her clumsiness. She took a deep breath. “Look, all my nonsense about oil, please don’t think I was implying that it might affect the opinion of the French judge. I respect the French; they’re a nation of brave and independent spirits. Don’t you agree?”

  Watling all but choked on his champagne. She took his arm, fussing with concern. His eyes bulged red, his complexion bucolic. She began to wonder about the revival equipment.

  “My apologies,” he coughed, “but I’m afraid I don’t entirely share your opinion about the French. A little personal prejudice.”

  “So, you’re a Yorkshire-pudding-and-don’t-spare-the-cabbage man, are you?”

  “Not quite, Mrs. Urquhart. You see, my father died in France. In 1943.”

  “During the war…?” Her face had become a picture of wretchedness but this was not a subject from which, once engaged, he was to be easily diverted.

  “Yes. He was an SOE agent, parachuted behind the lines. Betrayed to the Gestapo by the local French mayor who was a quiet c
ollaborator. Most of them were, you know. Until D-Day. The French got back their country, and in return my mother got a small pension. Not much on which to bring up four children in an isolated Yorkshire village. So you will understand and forgive, I hope, my little personal prejudice.” There was no mistaking the restrained hint.

  But there was more. The oil. The French. The Breton bastard. Now Watling knew why Rodin was being so stubborn. Suddenly it was all a mess. How could he impugn the integrity of a fellow judge? He had no proof, nothing but suspicions, which some would call prejudice. In any event, the smallest reference to oil would throw the proceedings into chaos. No, he would have to resign, wash his hands of it, his own judgment undermined by gossip and private doubt. But that would also cause chaos. Inordinate delay. Endanger the peace, perhaps. And he could kiss the barony of Cold Kirby-by-the-edge-of-the-Moors good-bye.

  “But I know your reputation for impartiality, Professor Watling,” he heard the silly woman protesting. “I feel certain none of this will affect your views…”

  There was one other way. He could stay quiet. Pretend he hadn’t heard. Get the job done, as everyone was begging him to do. Dispense justice, in spite of the French.

  “And your father—I’m so sorry,” she continued. “I had absolutely no idea.”

  At least, no more idea than had been supplied by Who’s Who and a few minutes spent perusing Watling’s press cuttings.

  ***

  He crossed himself in the laborious manner of the Orthodox and knelt in the new-cropped grass beside his wife’s grave, positioning his bones like a man older than his years. “Eonia mnimi—may her memory live forever,” he muttered, running his hand along the lines in the marble, ignoring the complaints of his splayed leg. At his elbow, Maria replaced the fading flowers with fresh, and together they reached back with silent thoughts and memories.

  “This is important,” he said, “to do honor to the dead.”

  Greek legend is built around the Underworld, and for a man such as Passolides who knew he must himself soon face the journey across, the dignities and salutations of death were matters of the highest significance. Throughout the history of the Hellenes, life has been so freely cast aside and the dark ferryman of the Styx so frequently paid that elaborate rituals of passage have been required in order to reflect a measure of civilization in a world that was all too often uncivilized and barbaric. Yet for George and Eurypides there had been no ritual, no honor, no dignity.

  Since their metaphorical stumble across the brothers’ graves an appetite for his own life seemed to have been conjured within Passolides. He had gained a new fixity of purpose, and if for Maria it seemed at times to be excessively fixed, at least it was a purpose, a mission, a renewed meaning, which had produced within him a degree of animation she had not witnessed since the happier times before her mother had passed away. Even his leg seemed to have improved. During the day he had begun to leave the shadows of his shrine, taking frequent walks on a limp leg through Regent’s Park, often muttering to himself, relishing the open green spaces once again, the arguments of sparrows along the hawthorn paths, the rattle of limes beside the lake. It was as close as he could get in the center of London to the memories of a mountainside.

  As Maria polished the cool marble headstone she examined her father carefully, sensing how much he had changed. His small round face was like a fruit taken too long from the tree, wizened, leathered by age and ancestry, his hair sapped steel white, cheeks hollowed by the pain of his clumsy and uncomfortable body. Yet the eyes glowed once more with a renewal of purpose, like an old lion woken from sleep, hungry.

  “What was the point, Baba? What were the British hiding?”

  “Guilt.”

  He knew his subject well. Guilt had filled his own life to exclusion, the feeling that somehow he had failed them all, comrades and kin. He had failed as the eldest son to protect his younger brothers, failed again as a cripple to pick up the banner of resistance dropped by them. He would never admit it to anyone and only rarely to himself, but secretly he resented his martyr brothers, even as he loved them, for George and Eurypides were the honored dead while Evanghelos was inadequate and miserably alive. He struggled in their shadow, unable to live up to his brothers’ memory, uncertain whether he could have found the same courage as they had, and deprived of any chance to try. He would never be a hero. He’d spent a lifetime trying to prove to the world that his dedication was the equal of his brothers’, even while in his cups blaming them. He blamed them and in turn blamed himself for the worm of envy and unreason that turned inside him. Yet now, it seemed, and at last, there was hope of relief, somebody else to blame.

  “Guilt,” he repeated, rubbing his leg to help the blood circulate. “What else does a soldier hide? Not death, that’s his business. Only guilt has to be buried away. Burned.”

  She plucked a few stray strands of grass from around the grave as she listened. He thought she knew nothing of his hidden shame but she had lived with it all her life and understood, even though she could do nothing about it. “Go on, Baba.”

  “They had a right to kill my brothers, under the British law. George and Eurypides had guns, bombs; who but a few toothless Greeks would have complained? The British once hanged an eighteen-year-old boy, Pallikarides, because he was found carrying a gun. It was their law. Mandatory.” He had trouble with the word, but not its meaning. “No, it was not their death they tried to hide. It must have been the manner of their dying.”

  “So that’s why they burned the bodies, because of what they had done to them. Torture?”

  “It happened.” He stopped, his eyes focused on a land and a point in time far away. “Maybe they weren’t bodies when they burned them. Maybe they were still alive. That happened too.” On both sides, although he didn’t care to remember and it was something else he would never admit to his daughter. But even after all these years it had proved impossible to wipe his memory of the figures soaked in gas and vengeance. “Prodótes!” Traitors, Greek convicted of informing on Greek, stumbling down the village street, still screaming their innocence through charred lips, eyes no longer sighted, burned out, their bodies turned to bonfires that branded a terrible message of loyalty into all who saw. But George and Eurypides had betrayed no one, weren’t prodótes, hadn’t deserved to die like that.

  “You know what this means, Baba? There may be more hidden graves.”

  For the Greeks of Cyprus, on long winter’s nights when the womenfolk stoked the fires of remembrance and told stories of the life of old, no memory cut so deep as that of “the missing ones.” In 1974 Greek extremists in Athens, frustrated at the lack of progress toward Enosis, union between island and mainland, had conspired to overthrow the Nicosia Government of Archbishop Makarios. It was a fit of madness from which Cyprus would never recover. Five days later the Turks had retaliated and invaded the island, dividing it and breaking up the ethnic jigsaw in a manner that ensured it could never be remade. During that time a thousand and more Greek Cypriot men had disappeared, swept up by the advancing Turkish Army and swept off the face of the known world. Their suspected fate had always been a source of unfeigned outrage to the Greeks and embarrassment to the Turks—such things happened in war, misfortunes, examples of isolated barbarity, even wholesale mistakes, but who the hell liked to admit it afterward? Yet in the quest for peace the Turks had admitted, surrendered all they knew about “the missing ones,” which after nearly a quarter century was painfully little—a few scattered graves, old bones, fragmentary records, faded memories—but even a small light shining upon the island’s darkest hour brought understanding and helped ease the suffering, had allowed families to mourn and do honor to the dead. Myrologhia. Yet now it seemed there were more graves. Dug even earlier, by the British.

  For Maria, who had never known her uncles and could therefore not share fully in their loss, the issue was a matter of politics and of principle. Yet for her fath
er it was so much more. A matter of honor and of retribution. Cypriot honor. Vangelis retribution.

  “We must find out what we can about these hidden graves, Baba.”

  “And about the crimes they tried to bury in them.” He heaved his bent body up straight, like a soldier on parade. “And which bastard did the burying.”

  Thirteen

  Trial by ordeal is a system of feudal torture that has been done away with everywhere, except in Westminster.

  At the south-facing entrance to the Chamber of the House of Commons stands an ornate and seemingly aged archway, the Churchill Arch. Its antiquity is exaggerated, the smoky pallor having been produced not by the passage of time but by its presence so close to one of Reichsmarshall Göring’s bombs, which razed the Chamber to the ground on 10 May 1941. On either side of the archway stand bronze statues of the two great war leaders of modern times, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Lloyd George’s pose is eloquent, Churchill’s more aggressive, as though the old warrior were hurrying to deliver a booted blow to the backside of the enemy. A little further along is a plinth bearing no statue, perhaps left as an act of encouragement to all those who pass and who hope, by dint of endeavor and great achievement, to join the rank of revered statesmen.

  Roger Garlick would not, in any passage of lifetimes, number among them. Of course, he had a high opinion of himself that fit his role as a Junior Whip, one of those whose task it was to round up Government MPs and herd them through the voting lobbies. Garlick was a man of considerable girth but limited oratorical ability; he recognized that his chances of achieving high public acclaim were thereby limited and relished the opportunity to exercise his influence more privately, through the dark arts of whipping. He feasted on abuse, his favorite diet being new members and any woman.

  “Roger!” The cry of recognition came from Booza-Pitt, making his way through the Members’ Lobby where MPs gather to collect messages and exchange gossip and other materials necessary to their work. Booza-Pitt reached out and squeezed the Whip’s arm in greeting but didn’t stop. Garlick was a useful contact, a man who was willing in private and under pressure from a second bottle of claret to share many of the personal secrets he had unearthed about his colleagues, but the middle of the Members’ Lobby was not the place. The Transport Secretary made off in search of other indiscretions.