Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  ‘OK. Guilty as charged. But when did it become un-American to understand old Europe?’

  ‘When they gave up on the rest of the world, I guess. We’re here to cut some quiet deals. I get it. And if the president wants us to do that, I guess he’s got his reasons, and I’m fine with that. But Europe generally? It’s just thousands of miles of New York, so far as I’m concerned. A whole continent of New York. And the people? Soft, pacifist, work-shy, left-wing atheists who are scared of the future. It’s a continent of perverts. My wife originally came from over here, and she knows. They don’t make anything, they haven’t got any convictions to have the courage of – and they wouldn’t, even if they did have. Give me the Russians, the Chinese, even the Indians, any day. This place was the future once. But it isn’t any more. I say let’s get the job done and get home as fast as we can.’

  Sy Cantor yawned. Perhaps the head of homeland security was going to be amusing after all. At least he’d have a good store of anecdotes for when he got back to DC.

  ‘Very eloquent, Buzz. I don’t entirely disagree, but let’s remember why we’re here. Europe is frankly rancid with terrorists – the French jihadis who went to Syria, the Egyptian plotters in Rome, the Pakistani deobandis in Britain. But they’ve still got intelligence services over here, and we need everything they’ve got to give us a fighting chance of defending ourselves. Who knows what the Brits will do next – out of the EU, nearly lost Scotland – but their next leader, apparently, will be one of the delegates they’ve sent to this conference. So, in words a Wyoming boy like you will understand, let’s squeeze their balls.’

  ‘Well, I never thought I’d hear some sound common sense from a Jewboy New York lawyer. We live and learn. But set my mind at rest on one subject, Sy – I can call you Sy’ – it was not a question. ‘What are you doing here? Me, I understand. I’m the security guy, along with the CIA. But I don’t understand why the president went to all the trouble of sending you over here to size up a couple of possible future leaders of a third-rate power?’

  ‘“Sy” is fine. And that’s a fair point. My answer? He didn’t put it this way exactly, but the president foresees a much closer relationship with the Brits in the years ahead. Now they’re out of the EU, they’ve got no one to turn to but us. Corporate America is still going through a rough patch. We could do with the City of London humming “Yankee Doodle” a little more enthusiastically. They need to open up their socialised, out-of-date health service to US companies. Plus, Fox, Google and Netflix are just a few of our companies who would love to see the BBC broken up. And there’s a lot more after that. Local government contracts, infrastructure work, offshore drilling …

  ‘There’s not much left of the British, Buzz. This is our moment. It’ll be good for them, too – give them a place in the world, and some investment that isn’t Chinese or those bastard Qataris. They just have to be led gently by the hand. As you know, we’ve been working with that primping show-pony, their so-called Master, for years. Security’s the least of it; I think the president wants to see whether our British friends have really delivered the country itself. Think of this, Buzz, as final payback for the White House in 1814.’

  Buzz was impressed – if Sy was a Europe-lover, well then, America was in good hands – but still managed to look mildly contemptuous. It was, as he had said, a talent. ‘See you at dinner. They’ll be there?’

  ‘They’d better be.’

  The Happy Accident

  The good politician wastes nothing, including misfortune.

  The Master

  The rain arrived in pencil-sized arrows of water, and within seconds the streets of Barker were half an inch deep. Orange-coloured brick buildings turned purple-brown. Night was falling, and a rumble of thunder echoed through the town. A tall, black-haired woman, water pouring down her back, was running from a supermarket entrance across the car park. She was screaming imprecations; the only thing that jarred about the scene was that she was wearing a clerical dog collar. She stopped. She began to hop on one leg.

  Angela had had a squealing, honking, out-of-control, pig of a day. Sanity required that she thought about one thing at a time. But for eight hours, struggling through admin jobs, balancing books and placating parishioners, she had had Caroline on her mind. There was a bad taste in her mouth about the best thing that had ever happened to her. Something was wrong with Caro. She didn’t really want her in Downing Street. That much had been clear before Rome. The more she thought about it, the more she realised that something had always been wrong. Caro was a blue-eyed angel with a golden gaze – but angels weren’t fully human. Caro had distanced herself from Angela in recent months, and whenever Angela tried to confront her, an infuriatingly bland, self-possessed smile came onto her face. It was as if she was withdrawing into a cloud, a nimbus of her own charisma.

  Angela could, most of the time, cope with that. But Caroline seemed finally to have lost touch with their family life together. She didn’t do any of the shopping, or pay any of the bills, or more important, ask any normal questions about normal things. An orphan herself, Angela firmly believed that family was made, forged by willpower and love. It was not something you were simply handed. So she had made time to go with Caroline to see her parents, the dull and frosty Phillipses, in their overheated, chilly home, even though Caro never seemed to want to go. And by sheer dint of talking and pressing, she’d made Caro take an interest in the boys’ homework, and even got her to recognise their friends. Family had to be worked at, strenuously. In recent weeks she’d come to fear that Caro simply didn’t regard it as worth the effort. And if that was true, then surely they’d run out of road.

  With these loud thoughts buzzing around her head, Angela had found the small connections that had held this day together beginning to come apart. To start with, her slightly battered, flaking debit card had been refused at the supermarket during the weekly shop. She made the necessary call; but of course she had forgotten her online password: nearly £2,000, for which she’d worked jolly hard, was apparently beyond her reach. Struggling at the checkout to find the notebook in which the password might have been written (but was not), she had dropped her phone. It promptly shattered. The checkout girl looked down and shook her head. She didn’t seem upset. The screen was crystalline-mazed. The bloody thing was useless. Then the phone had rung nevertheless. Still shaking with frustration and being stared at by the rest of the supermarket queue, holding the crumbling glass tile to her ear, Angela heard the school secretary say that Nick, her older boy, was being kept behind for bullying and ‘vandalism’ – whatever that meant.

  Leaving her shopping still piled on the belt – a man three back at the queue had shouted ‘Shame on you!’ – Angela had sprinted across the car park. She was drenched. The heel of one shoe snapped off. Kicking away the other, she had driven home in soaking stockinged feet. At least she would be there when Ben arrived from school. Then she’d go back for Nick. On the way home, she had stopped at the phone company’s High Street store, hobbling wet and shoeless in from the pavement. A very calm Sikh man had pointed out that everything was her fault – that most of their customers either bought rubber cases for their phones or simply didn’t drop them. Anyway, it would take weeks to replace. It had her contacts list, her diary for the weeks ahead, and a fat stash of photos. Had she backed everything up? Well, they could do that, at least. They’d need the password, of course. Not the online password, the other one. But because the screen was broken, she couldn’t get into her phone to get at it.

  The man smiled pityingly at her. There was no solution for that. With a sinking heart, Angela left the phone with him anyway. By the time she had driven home she was shaking, probably with stress as well as cold. She splashed her way up to the front door. No lights on. She was desperate for a pee, and could murder a drink. She stabbed the lock with her key. It broke. The man across the road had a spare. The tarmac had torn her tights to pieces. Little pieces of wet, oily grit stuck to the soles of her fe
et. The man across the road was out. She really needed to pee. Angela shouldered her way past a laburnum bush, heavy with water, to the back garden, where she found – thank you, Lord – that she’d forgotten to lock the kitchen door. She dried her feet. She had her pee. She found Caroline’s slippers. There were two bottles of Chablis in the fridge, screw tops. She unscrewed one. As she poured her second glass, she vaguely wondered what she had forgotten about. The house phone rang. It was Nick. He never normally sounded distressed, but he was plainly in tears. ‘Please, Mum, come as soon as you can.’

  Just at that moment, Ben had come barging through the front door. He galumphed towards the stairs – his feet were currently too big for the rest of him to properly control – heading for the Xbox. Angela intercepted him, and kissed him hard on the sweaty crown of his head. There was no more pleasurable scent in the world than Ben’s hair. Then she explained that she was off to get Nick, and headed back to the car. She clambered unsteadily in, and turned the key.

  During the next few minutes Angela thought in a hard and concentrated way about what might have gone wrong with Nick. He’d had to cope with so much – his parents’ divorce, a busy professional mother, several changes of address, the whole coming-out thing. Caroline gave him hugs and kisses, in a perfunctory way, but never her whole attention. In turn, Nick gave little away. Ever since he’d been a toddler his calm, expressionless face had been that of an old man who had seen much of the world, and been impressed by very little of it. His estranged father had called him ‘Old Nick’. Angela had come to rely on his impassivity; sometimes it seemed to her as though he were the adult and she the striving, attention-seeking child. She remembered his now-famous fifth birthday party as she turned the car sharp left towards the school driveway.

  Nicky had … Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud banging sound. She saw a blur in the rain, and something thumped across the windscreen before falling towards the kerb. Jamming on the brakes and turning the engine off, Angela got out of the car. She realised that she was still wearing Caroline’s slippers. Something blue and silver was lying in front of her. The bicycle looked as if it had been subjected to major surgery. Its frame was badly bent, one wheel was crooked, and the other was missing altogether. There was a shatter of something silver on the road. It reminded Angela of her phone. The cyclist, on the other hand, seemed fine. She was lying in a comfortable-looking position on the pavement, legs and arms stretched out like a child making sand angels at the beach. She was an elfin girl with closed eyes and red hair.

  Angela knew at once that she was dead. A passer-by, no one she recognised from the church, took her by the arm. A few minutes later the police car arrived. By now there was a small crowd. People were gasping and wailing. ‘She stinks of drink,’ somebody said.

  The policewoman was one of Angela’s parishioners. She spoke kindly. ‘I’m so sorry, vicar, but I’m going to have to ask you to stand to one side and blow into this.’ Then she arrested Angela, not quite as kindly.

  Twenty minutes later Angela was sitting in a police cell. She’d been told she should call her lawyer. The dead girl hadn’t been wearing a helmet, but she’d had lights and a reflective belt. One of the witnesses, who’d been driving behind Angela, had said that she hadn’t indicated. To her shock, she found that she didn’t dare call Caroline. Had things become that bad between them? Instead, she called Nick. But she found she didn’t know what to say to him, so she just told him to go home and look after Ben.

  Once upon a time a small suburban police station on the outskirts of Barker, washed by the dark and the rain, would have been a million miles away from the centres of power; but that time had long passed. Just half an hour after Angela had been admitted, the newsdesk of the Daily Mirror received a quiet phone call from Peter Quint, and tweeted the story. Among those to whose attention it was brought was the Master in faraway Rome, who was halfway through a workout in the opulent, over-decorated gymnasium of the Hotel Excelsior Splendide. He leaned forward and slowed the treadmill down. Then, still on it, he did a little jig of pleasure.

  A Frank Talk

  The top politician who doesn’t intend to be prime minister isn’t a top politician.

  The Master (while still young)

  David Petrie had not particularly wanted to travel with Caroline Phillips, but now he was pleased that he had. The first-class cabin of the Airbus was virtually empty, and the minute he had put aside his paperwork with a theatrical groan, so had she. How could he exorcise the memory of that earlier, ill-starred flight to Italy with Ella? He turned to Caro with a broken smile, at his most gallant.

  ‘Well, my fair enemy – can I tempt you to a glass of champagne and a little light conversation?’

  ‘Thanks for the fair. And yes, you can. And if we can’t talk across an empty first-class seat, where can we talk? So, my turn first. You’ve been against me from our first hours in Parliament. Why was that?’

  ‘Because I’m in this game to get to the top, to play it as well as I can. And everyone told me that of all my colleagues, you were the one who was better than me – the one who could stop me. Come on, Home Secretary, you may be a very nice woman, but you’re a politician, and you know how it is.’

  Petrie, who had rejected champagne in favour of a brandy and soda, drained his glass and fell silent. He twisted in his seat so he was looking directly at Caroline. Most people who did this close-up flinched; not from her beauty, but from her questioning candour – those clear blue eyes, those acrobatic eyebrows. But Davie just stared back at her, intent, comfortable.

  ‘But you know what, Mistress Phillips? You can have it. You can have the whole damned lot. OK, so I’m here for the same reason you’re here. The Master wants us here, aye? He wants us to meet the vice president. So what do we deduce from that, Home Secretary? I tell you what – we deduce that this is big potatoes. Top tomatoes. It means the president himself’s involved. He knows our names. He’s interested in whatever challenge, whatever deal, awaits us over there. How did that happen? Do you know? I don’t. My guess is, three reasons – the Master, the Master, the Master. Many questions, only one answer. But for me, at any rate, I’ve just realised, it’s all becoming a joke. For me, it’s too late.’

  Caroline replied, ‘I wonder, Mr P, if perhaps you’re just a little bit drunk. You seem unusually … passionate. Not like you. I imagine we’ve been sent for some kind of test – some test of loyalty or of ruthlessness – and I assume that, as so often before, we’re meant to compete with one another. But you understand all of that, Mr Petrie. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have said that I can “have it”. That’s very kind of you, but I’m not sure I want “it” either. I’m here because I’m interested. I just want to know what happens next.’

  Petrie smiled again. He leaned forward and touched Caro on the arm. He’d never been less drunk in his life. ‘I want to know what happens next, too. Perhaps we can work together after all.’

  ‘The Master wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Interesting thought, though.’ And she turned back to the thick file of human incompetence and misery she’d been given to deal with.

  As the plane banked into its final descent to Leonardo da Vinci airport, Caro twisted towards Davie and asked him, ‘What do you mean when you say it’s too late for you? You’re as ruthless a politician as I’ve ever known. You don’t just shrug and give up.’

  ‘I’m surrendering. My hands are up – look. The thing is, Caroline, I’m guilty of a failure of love.’

  Of all the answers she had expected, this was one that hadn’t passed through her mind at all. She didn’t even know what it meant. Instead she asked: ‘David Petrie, what’s your Achilles heel? What’s your fatal flaw?’ She leaned forward. ‘We all have one. Everybody in politics has one thing, hidden inside them, which one day will bring them down. What’s yours?’

  ‘The game – I don’t love the game enough. I don’t love it beyond everything else.’

>   ‘That I’ve seen before. Alan Johnson. Alistair Darling. Personally, Petrie, I think you’re being too kind to yourself. I think your flaw is a lot more common than that.’

  He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I think your flaw is that you’re led by your cock. You’re a pretty man, but you’re a simple one, too.’

  Davie was annoyed. ‘I’d say that’s a simplistic woman’s explanation. I might even use the lesbian word. But since we’re talking frankly, what about you? What’s your secret weakness?’

  ‘My charisma. My charm. Everybody – well, almost everybody – falls for me. It’s all they see. But what they don’t see is that I don’t care.’

  ‘Care for what? The game?’

  ‘Oh no, the game is interesting. It keeps us going. No, I mean I don’t care about anybody else, not really. I can fake it so bloody easily, but I find almost everybody intolerably boring.’

  Davie nodded. The plane trip had been well worth it. ‘I think what you mean, Caroline Phillips, is that you are a psychopath. Just what we need in a prime minister.’

  The black-suited man waiting for them in the arrivals hall held a placard reading ‘HM government ministers’. Two carabinieri motorcyclists were revving their engines just in front of their limousine. Once they were settled inside, the driver handed Davie an envelope. ‘Open please, it is for both of you.’

  Inside it was a brief, handwritten note from the Master himself. It instructed them, after they’d checked in, to make their way to the Niccolò Machiavelli private dining room, where ‘some gentlemen will be waiting for you. Please be with us no later than 8.30 p.m.’

  ‘Mysterious,’ said Caro.

  ‘Peremptory,’ said Davie.

  ‘Should we?’ said Caro.

  ‘We have to,’ said Davie.