“A new party,” she began once again. “A big media launch with some prominent names in support. Then more to follow over the weeks ahead. Several from within our own party. Perhaps one or two even from within the Government.”
“Madness!” Booza-Pitt snorted.
But Urquhart’s eyes had grown fixed, his frame stooped in concentration as he walked, studying the ground as though peering through a trap door into a personal hell. “He’d hope for a couple of by-elections where they’d buy anything new on the shelf. Bite after bite, taking mouthfuls out of my majority. Making it ever more difficult for me to govern.”
“One step building on the next.”
“He wants to bleed me. Death by a thousand cuts.”
“Could he do it? Could he really?” Booza-Pitt had at last caught the changing wind. “Sounds like a party no one but women’s magazines would take seriously.”
“Even women take time off from painting our nails to vote, Geoffrey. We’re not all hot flushes and flower arranging.”
A sense of urgency crept into the Prime Minister’s step; Booza-Pitt felt he was being left behind. “But where’d he get the money for it all?” he demanded breathlessly. For Geoffrey, the practicalities of life all came down to a question of money. He’d once found a shortcut on the school cross-country run and, much to his annoyance, had made the team. He’d found consolation by selling the shortcut to his friends.
“Money’s not his problem, it’s time,” Claire responded. “Time to build momentum. Time to build an organization before the next election and to establish that he’s more than merely a figment of the media’s fevered imagination. Time to encourage our sweaty band of galley slaves to jump ship.”
“It’d be no more than a dinner party at prayer,” Booza-Pitt all but spat in contempt. Then his expression altered as though refashioned with a mallet. “Good God. What does that mean for my Bill? I’d be giving him all the money.”
Urquhart came to a sudden halt under the limbs of a spreading cedar tree. “Not quite what I had in mind,” he conceded quietly.
“I’ve…I’ve got to withdraw it. Somehow.” Booza-Pitt’s voice trailed away, his mantle as defender of democracy in tatters even before it had been woven.
“There is another way,” Claire offered.
“One that would keep my reputation?”
“Keep the Government’s reputation, Geoffrey,” she corrected. “Your Bill will sponsor as many different groups as possible. Fine. We mustn’t give Tom a clear run.”
“Nibbled to death by a thousand minnows, that was always my thinking,” Geoffrey exclaimed, wondering whether the time had come to reclaim authorship of the plan.
“And meanwhile make damn sure our own supporters have got something to get their teeth into. Let’s fly the flag for them. Give them something that reminds them what we’re all about, and how much they’d lose if it all went wrong.”
“Like what?” Geoffrey pleaded.
“I thought you were the one with all the bright campaigning ideas.” It was Urquhart, his tone sharp, back among them. “Geoffrey, why don’t you go and have a wander through the Long Library before lunch? Fascinating collection of first editions—Sartre, Hemingway, Archer. Right up your street.”
“Maybe a little later, FU?” he suggested, determined not to be written out of the plot.
“Geoffrey. Be a good fellow and bugger off.”
“Yes, right—Long Library. See you at lunch then.”
She marveled at his resilience to insult. Even now, she suspected, he was working on how he would divulge to others the privilege of the PM’s personal invitation to inspect his rare editions.
“He’ll not love you for that,” she commented.
“Geoffrey is incapable of love for anyone except himself. His adoration of his own inadequacies is as total as it is astounding and leaves no room for anyone else. I suspect I shall survive, as will he.”
In the distance a lunch gong was being beaten and the squeals of children echoed with renewed impatience, but he ignored the summons, instead gripping her arm and leading her through French windows that brought them from the terrace into the house. They were in his study with the windows firmly closed behind them, shutting them off. Suddenly she felt claustrophobic, the rules had changed. This was no longer a summer stroll around the garden making sport with Booza-Pitt, but one-on-one, she and Urquhart, in an atmosphere of personal intensity she’d never felt with him before.
“I’m sorry, Francis. Did I offend you, talking about the possibility of defeat?”
“No. You managed to express, and most eloquently, something that”—he was going to say “voices inside my own head”—“my own thoughts have been telling me all too sharply.”
“So you think it could happen?”
“I’m not a fool. Of course it could happen. We’re no more than passengers on a tide; even as we are rushed along by it, only one small slip could sweep us under.”
“And if we were to slip and he were to win, just once, there would be no way back for us. Tom’s always been committed to proportional representation—he’d change the election law himself, skew it in favor of the small parties, the minnows.”
“Who would grow into great pikes and tear any Government apart. This country would be turned over to chaos. By legislative order of Booza-Pitt and Makepeace, destroyers of civilization. Hah!” To her alarm he sounded as if he found ironic pleasure in the prospect of the Apocalypse.
“You would be history,” she warned.
“And favored by it all the more!”
She realized why she had begun to feel so claustrophobic. She was standing beside not just a man, but a political Colossus whose deeds would be writ large. Yet she had known that from the very start; wasn’t that why she had agreed to join him, for her own selfish place in his shadow, the thrill and experience of standing beside a great chunk of that story? Up so close, so privately, it left her not a little in awe.
“There is one major gap in his armor,” Urquhart continued in a state of considerable animation, “his point of greatest vulnerability. He must keep his momentum going, appear irresistible before enough people will take their courage in their hands and march with him. But to raise an army he needs time. Time that is ours to give, or to deny. We must keep an eye on young Tom.”
“I already am,” she responded a little sheepishly. She’d intended to keep it secret, in case he disapproved, but the atmosphere of intimacy overcame her caution. “He has a new driver who is—how shall I put it?—extremely keen to share his experiences, especially when he picks up his weekly paycheck. From a very close friend of my husband.”
“Really? How splendid. I should have thought of that. I’m slipping.”
“Or perhaps I’m learning.”
He began to look at her quizzically, in a new light. “I do believe you are—turning out to be a truly remarkable find, Claire, if you’ll allow me to say so.” He had turned to her, taken her hands, his voice dropping to a softer register. He’d already invited her to share so much, yet there was a new and pressing intimacy in this moment. “One thing I have to ask. You’ve been pretty tough about Tom Makepeace. Politically, I mean. Yet from the way you understand him so well I get the impression—a sense, perhaps—that once you and he were…close. Personally.”
“Would it have mattered?”
“No. Not so long as I could be sure of your loyalty.”
Loyalty tied by bonds at least as secure as any she had shared with Makepeace.
“Francis, you can. Be sure of my loyalty.”
She felt herself being pulled by the enormous force of gravity that surrounded him. She panicked, realizing she was losing control, her lips reaching up toward him. Suddenly she was afraid, of both him and her own ambitions. She was falling, yet couldn’t find it within her to resist, even in the knowledge that coming so close to him was lik
ely to leave her burned up and scattered like cinders. As had happened to others. She was on fire.
Then there was ice. Urquhart drew back, allowed her hands to fall and deliberately broke the spell that tied her to him. Why, she would never know, and Urquhart would never admit, even to himself.
For how can a man admit to such things? The guilt he felt for others he had taken in such a way, used, discarded, left utterly destroyed. With the passage of time he felt himself being drawn toward the day of his own judgment and such things bore more heavily on his mind. Some might even mistake it for conscience. Or was it merely the knowledge that in the past such entanglements had caused nothing but grief and turmoil, confusion he could do without in a world that, thanks to Thomas Makepeace, had suddenly grown far more complicated?
Yet there was something else that turned his blood cold. The gnawing dread that Francis Urquhart the Politician had been constructed on the ruins of Francis Urquhart the Man. Incapable of children, denied immortality. A desert, a barrenness of body that had infected the soul and in turn had been inflicted upon Mortima, the only woman he had ever truly loved. The others had all been pretense, an attempt to prove his virility, but in the end a pointless exercise, a scream in a soundproof chamber.
And, as she stood before him, desirable and available, he was no longer sure he could even raise his voice. The end of Francis Urquhart the Man.
Francis Urquhart the aging Politician stepped back from temptation and torment.
“Best that we keep you as my good luck charm, eh?”
***
In the Cypriot capital the crowds streamed through the entrance gates for an evening with Alekos, a young singer of talent from the mainland who had built a remarkable following among Greeks of all ages. The young girls swayed to the rhythm of his hips, old women fell for the voice that dripped like honey on dulled ears, the men were won over by the manner in which he crafted the images and emotions of Hellenism into music of the Greek soul more powerful than a first half hat trick by Omonia. He had flown from Athens for a special concert in support of the Cyprus Defense Fund. Few of the several thousand enthusiasts at the open-air auditorium gave a thought to how a concert could raise money for the CDF when all the tickets had been given away, as had the large number of banners being waved above the heads of the emotion-gripped crowd. We Shall Not Forget, the refrain in memory of the victims of Turkish invasion, was thrust high alongside other soul slogans such as Let Us Bury Our Dead With Honor, British—Give Back Our Bases and, yes, even Equality With Orchids.
The Bishop was much in evidence, cloaked dark in the seat of honor and surrounded by a hardworking team of his theological students. Theophilos was well pleased. Even the occasional outbreaks of alcoholic excess brought on by the heat and the ready supply of beer he bore with paternal fortitude. For three hours Alekos and his supporting musicians stirred, scratched, tickled and whipped their passion; as the night grew deeper, he reached for the refrain of Digenes Akritas, a tale of heroic defiance against the foreign foe, of cherished memories from the mists of time and, above all, of victory. They sang and swayed with him, lit matches and candles, their faces illuminated by hope in the darkness as the tears flowed freely from men and women alike. Alekos had them in his palm.
“Have you forgotten?” he breathed into the microphone, his voice stretching out to touch every one of them.
“No,” they sobbed.
“Do you want to forget those who died?”
“No…”
“Who gave their lives for a free Cyprus? Some of whom lie buried in unknown graves?” His voice was firmer now, goading.
(Later when he heard the reports, Hugh Martin was to wince at how Alekos in one emotional sweep had entangled together the subject of British graves with the Turkish invasion.)
“No, no,” they replied, with equal firmness.
“Do you want your homeland given away for British military bases?”
He stirred the muddy waters of old hatreds like a shark’s tail. In the darkness they began to lose their individual identities and become as one. Greek. Full of resentment.
“Then will you give your homeland away to bastard Turks?”
“No! Never!”
“Do you want your sisters and daughters to be screwed by bastard Turks, like your mothers were when the bastards invaded our country?” His clenched fist beat the night air, his bitterness transmitting to others.
“NO.”
“Do you want your President to sign a treaty that says it’s all right? All forgotten? All over? That they can keep what they stole?”
“NO,” they began to shout. “NO. NO. NO.”
“So what do you want to say to the President?”
“N-O-O-O-O!” The cries lifted through the Nicosia night and spilled across the city.
“Then go and tell him!”
The doors were thrown open and thousands swarmed out of the auditorium to find buses lined up to take them the two kilometers to the Presidential Palace, whose guards they taunted, whose gates they rocked, and whose wrought iron fencing they festooned with their banners. By the light of a huge pink Nicosia moon, the largest demonstration in the city since the election came to pass, and twenty-three unwise arrests ensured that the stamping of angry feet would continue to grab headlines for days afterward.
Like every other detail of the concert, even the encore had gone according to plan.
Twenty-Four
The game of politics usually proceeds by a succession of afterthoughts.
“Gaiters and gongs again tonight.” Urquhart sighed. He had lost count of the number of times he’d climbed into formal attire on a summer’s evening in order to exchange inconsequential pleasantries with some Third World autocrat who, as the wine list rambled on, would brag about his multiple wives, multiple titles, and even multiple Swiss bank accounts. Urquhart told himself he would much rather be spending his time on something else, something more fulfilling. But what? With a sense of incipient alarm, he realized he didn’t know what. For him, there was nothing else.
“I see they’re pegging out the lawn for that wretched statue.” Mortima was gazing out of the bedroom window. “I thought you’d told Max Stanbrook to stop it.”
“He’s working on it.”
“It’s preposterous,” she continued. “In a little over a month you will have overtaken her record. It’s you who should be out there.”
“She wasn’t supposed to lose, either,” he reflected softly.
She turned, her face flecked with concern. “Is all this Makepeace nonsense getting you down, Francis?”
“A little, perhaps.”
“Not like you. To admit to vulnerability.”
“He’s forcing my hand, Mortima. If I give him time to organize, to grow, I give him time to succeed. Time is not on my side, not when you reach my age.” With a silent curse he tugged at his bow tie and began again the process of reknotting it. “Claire says I should find some way of calling his bluff. Fly the flag.”
“She’s turning out to be an interesting choice of playmate.”
He understood precisely what she was implying. “No, Mortima, no distractions. In the past they’ve caused us so much anguish. And there are voices everywhere telling me I shall need all my powers of concentration over the next few months.”
“People still regard you as a great leader, Francis.”
“And may yet live to regard me as a still greater villain.”
“What is eating at you?” she demanded with concern. “You’re not normally morbid.”
He stared at himself in the mirror. Time had taken its undeniable toll; the face was wrinkled and fallen, the hair thinned, the eyes grown dim and rimmed with fatigue. Urquhart the Man—the Young Man, at least—was but a memory. Yet some memories, he reflected, lived longer than others, refused to die. Particularly the memory of a day many years e
arlier when, in the name of duty and of his country, he had erred. As the evening sun glanced through the window and bathed the room in its rich ocher light, it all came back. His hands fell to his side, the tie unraveled again.
“When I was a young lieutenant in Cyprus”—the voice sounded dry, as though he’d started smoking again—“there was an incident. An unhappy collision of fates. A sacrifice, if you like, in the name of Her Majesty’s peace. Tom Makepeace today wrote to me, he knows of the incident but not my part in it. Yet if it were ever to be made public, my part in that affair, they would destroy me. Ignore everything I have achieved and strip me like wolves.”
He turned to face her. “If I give Makepeace any of what he wants, he will pursue the matter. If I don’t, he’ll pursue me. Either way, there is an excellent chance I shall be destroyed. And time is on his side.”
“Then fight him, Francis.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You’ve plenty of strings to your bow.”
He joined her by the window, took her hands, massaged her misgivings with his thumbs, gently kissed her forehead. “Strings to my bow. But I’m not sure I have the strength anymore to bend the bloody thing.” He laughed, a hollow sound she chose not to share. “We must have one more victory, one more successful election behind us. The Urquhart name, yours and mine, written into history. The longest-serving Prime Minister this century.”
“And the greatest.”
“I owe that to you even more than I owe it to myself. I must find some way of beating him, destroying him—any way! And quickly. Everything I have ever achieved depends on it.”
“And what then, Francis?”
“Then perhaps we can think about stepping back and I can become an intolerable old man in carping retirement, if that’s what you want.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No. But what else is there? Apart from this I have nothing. Which is why I’m going to fight Tom Makepeace. And all the others. So long as I breathe.”
For Mortima it sounded all too much like an epitaph; she held him close in a way they’d not embraced for a considerable time, nuzzling into loose flesh and afraid she was falling into the deep pit of his empty old age.
The House of Cards Complete Trilogy Page 80
