What Will Survive

by Joan Smith

  ‘Your phone’s been engaged, sir, but it is normal procedure to visit next of kin in person.’

  Tim put his head in his hands.

  The woman said, ‘Can I get you something to drink, Mr Lincoln? A cup of tea?’

  He lifted his head and stared at her. Was she the one he’d spoken to earlier? He wasn’t sure. ‘Tea?’ he repeated. He thought he might be going to cry, but the inspector was speaking again.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s going to be on the news. Your sons—’

  ‘It’s on his, Ricky, switched off. His mobile.’ Tim stopped, unable to get his words in the right order.

  ‘Sir.’ The woman got the inspector’s attention. ‘Shall I?’ She nodded towards the door.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Brandy, if you can find some.’

  Thinking back, Tim wondered if he had been slightly drunk for the rest of the previous day. He had been drinking the generous measure poured by the policewoman when Iris arrived, walked through the open front door and found them in the sitting room. She took in the situation in an instant and blurted out, ‘Oh no. You’ve come to—’ She was very pale and swayed on her feet.

  The inspector got up to help her. ‘I’m very sorry, ma’am. You’d better sit down. Put your head between your knees, that’s it.’ A moment later, he said gently: ‘I’m Inspector Thomas and this is WPC Flint. You are?’

  ‘Iris — Iris Benjamin. I live — Aisha’s friend.’

  The inspector glanced at his watch. ‘I was just explaining to Mr Lincoln — it’s going to be on the news, his late wife being such a well-known lady. He needs to contact his sons.’

  Iris blinked a couple of times. ‘Of course. Max is in Chile with my daughter...’ She glanced at Tim, who had not said a word since she arrived; he was staring into the empty brandy glass, his features inert. ‘I came over so Mr Lincoln — I thought someone should be here when he told him, Max I mean. They’ll have to come back, I’ve got a couple of flights on hold.’

  The inspector looked relieved and addressed most of his remaining remarks to Iris, asking about Ricky’s whereabouts and making sure that both boys would be told as quickly as possible. He left a few minutes later, Tim reviving enough to refuse his offer to leave WPC Flint behind. To his surprise, Iris volunteered to go with the two police officers and talk to the reporters, explaining that the family wished to grieve in private and would not be speaking to the press. On her return, she sat quietly near him while he broke the news to Max. After a long call to Clara, for which she took her mobile into the small back garden, Iris called the airline again and confirmed two seats on the nine p.m. flight she’d provisionally booked before leaving home. Around seven, Tim found her slumped in a chair in the living room, a hand over her eyes.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Mmm? I was almost asleep,’ she said. ‘I talked to Becky, and then I must have dozed off — how bizarre.’ Aisha’s assistant had reacted to the news by bursting into noisy tears, which had exhausted what little energy Iris had left.

  ‘She’s not coming over?’

  Iris frowned. ‘No, though she’ll have to at some time. She’s very fond of Aisha, you know.’ Tim said nothing. ‘We need to eat,’ Iris said shortly, pulling herself upright.

  Tim grimaced.

  ‘I do, even if you don’t,’ she said, and used her mobile to dial the number of the local Chinese takeaway. A moped arrived shortly afterwards with a very basic meal and when Iris had finished eating — Tim did little more than push rice around his plate — she went home to sleep.

  She had appeared again first thing, on her way to Heathrow to collect Max and Clara from their overnight flight, wearing a straight brown skirt, a white T-shirt and brown sling backs. Her dark hair was loose, not tucked behind her ears as it had been the day before, and there were coral studs in her ears. She was wearing sunglasses and Tim thought, with an irrational spurt of anger, that she looked as if she was setting off on holiday.

  ‘In case I have to deal with officials,’ Iris said abruptly, reading his mind. She removed the sunglasses, revealing red-rimmed eyes. ‘The airline said they’d arrange it so they don’t have to queue for bags and stuff. Have you heard from Ricky this morning? What time’s his train?’

  ‘Gets in at one something. I told him to get a taxi and I’ll pay when it gets here.’

  Iris’s eyes widened but she didn’t comment. ‘Have you warned him about that lot?’ She gestured with her head towards the road where the reporters waited.

  ‘Yeah, he knows,’ Tim said grimly. ‘What I don’t understand—’

  ‘Did you have breakfast?’

  ‘Not hungry.’

  Iris shook her head and said, ‘Well, I’m going to make some coffee.’

  Tim followed her from the hall into the kitchen. ‘What the hell was she doing, driving round some place full of landmines? The Foreign Office tells you nothing, it’s all “I’m afraid I don’t have that information in front of me, sir”, but she wasn’t supposed to be in a fucking war zone. This guy Terzano — he’s supposed to be a war photographer, he knows — knew Lebanon like the back of his hand, so she said.’ He paused. ‘I should never have let her go.’

  Iris was filling the kettle. ‘You couldn’t have stopped her.’ She switched it on and her tone softened. ‘Look, Aisha got on and off planes like other people get on buses. It’s not as though she was going to the West Bank, for God’s sake. I can’t remember, do you take milk in your coffee?’ Tim grunted assent. ‘It was important to her, you know it was. She wanted to discover her roots.’

  Tim pulled a face behind Iris’s back. He watched her open the bread bin, irritated by the ease with which she moved around the kitchen.

  ‘Want some toast?’

  He shook his head. Iris turned to stare at him.

  ‘No — no thanks.’

  ‘Suit yourself. You don’t mind if I do? I’m out of everything, I was going to go to Waitrose yesterday before this — this happened.’

  She dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, took milk and butter from the fridge and made two cups of coffee. She ate the toast quickly, leaning back against the Aga, and then put her plate and mug into the dishwasher. ‘I’d better get going. You know what the M5’s like at this time of year.’

  Tim stood up too quickly and black dots swam in front of his eyes, blurring his vision. Iris stepped towards him.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes, no. I will be in a minute.’

  ‘Maybe you should speak to your GP.’

  He made a non-committal sound.

  ‘Well, we can think about all that when the boys are back. You’ll be OK while I’m gone?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Tim felt guilty, leaving the task of collecting Max and Clara to her, but he wasn’t sure he could drive any distance without endangering himself and others. ‘I’ve got things to do — formalities, you know.’ He turned and went into the hall, leaving Iris to follow.

  The morning’s post was lying on the floor by the front door, ignored by Tim. Iris scooped up half a dozen envelopes, guessing that the letters and cards of condolence had already begun to arrive. On top was a flyer for an Indian restaurant and a postcard. ‘What’s this? Isn’t that Aisha’s—’

  ‘What?’

  She lifted her head. ‘Tim.’

  He waited, not getting it. Eventually, in a strained voice, she said, ‘It’s a postcard to Max.’

  ‘To Max?’

  ‘It’s from Aisha.’

  ‘Aisha’s dead.’

  ‘She must have — I can’t read the postmark.’

  Iris passed it over, not saying any more. Tim stared uncomprehendingly at the image, a black-and-white photograph of a garden and a building with a sign in Arabic and English: ‘Putting on Special Clothes Room’.

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a horrible coincidence, that’s all. She couldn’t have — Tim. Tim? We should be back by half seven but I’ll call if t
here are any hold-ups.’

  When he didn’t reply, Iris exhaled noisily and left him in the hall. Tim closed the front door, holding the postcard between his index finger and his thumb, and climbed the stairs to his study. As if performing a ritual, he cleared a space on his desk and placed the rectangle of card next to the phone, face up so he didn’t have to look at Aisha’s handwriting. It had been sitting there ever since and Tim could not avoid seeing it when, after a longish period of silence, the phone rang.

  ‘Tim,’ he began, his voice coming out as a croak. He cleared his throat and said more firmly: ‘Tim Lincoln.’

  He listened for a moment, his eyes widening. ‘No, she’s not,’ he said, wondering if the call was some kind of sick joke, and cut the connection. Was there really anyone who didn’t know by now that Aisha was dead? He felt in his pocket for a crumpled piece of paper, took it out and dialled one of two numbers scribbled on it.

  ‘Can I speak to Amanda Harrison?’ he asked brusquely.

  ‘Sorry, she’s in a meeting. You can try her mobile—’

  ‘I already have.’ He put the phone down.

  He seized the postcard, turned it over and forced himself to read the printed legend: ‘Entrance to Umayyad Mosque, Damascus old city’. Below was the message Aisha had written for Max, which he read several times, trying to find a hidden meaning. But there was nothing, just the affectionate expressions anyone would expect from a mother to a son. Tim choked and threw it down, unable to look any longer at the words Aisha had unknowingly chosen for her last message.

  ‘Girl at the back. Yes, with the, um, hair.’

  It was in shoulder-length braids, with coloured beads that rattled as she moved her head. She lifted her chin and stared at Toby Ayling, the backbench MP who was chairing the meeting at Westminster with sixth-formers, then asked her question.

  ‘You keep saying how much you care about your con — constituents and how it’s so great to be in Opposition?’ She was nervous, but she clearly had something more challenging on her mind than the questions about mad cow disease and fox-hunting which the four MPs had been fielding for the last hour. One boy had enlivened the proceedings by asking whether the Party’s new young leader was prepared to legalise acid raves, and on any other day Stephen would have had to hide his amusement from his colleagues.

  Now, though, he was unable to concentrate on anything or anybody but Aisha — had been feeling dazed, in fact, ever since he happened to glance at a discarded copy of the Evening Standard in the lobby of 1 Parliament Street a couple of days earlier. He had hurried to his office where he read the story several times in a state of stunned disbelief, until a knock at the door roused him and he had a surreal conversation — he could barely remember a word of it — with a neighbouring MP. Then he remembered he was supposed to be meeting Carolina for dinner with her brother and sister-in-law, an ordeal he endured in a state of dull resignation before insisting that he would have to return to London and stay at their pied-à-terre in Charles Street. Carolina had reluctantly dropped him at the nearest station, looking wounded, but at least Stephen hadn’t had to go through the additional agony of thinking up an explanation as he tossed and turned all night. Early the next morning — was it only yesterday? — he’d turned on the news and heard that Aisha was dead.

  ‘...can you actually do?’ the sixth-former was saying, the rising note of defiance in her voice penetrating even Stephen’s clouded consciousness. ‘When the Government’s got such a big majority, I mean. Who cares what you actually think about anything?’

  ‘Rowena,’ one of the three teachers in the room said warningly but a ripple of nervous laughter was already spreading among the teenagers.

  ‘We’ve been told to be polite, yeah?’ the girl added, glancing at the teacher. ‘But it’s the only reason we’re here — you wanna be seen talking to yoof.

  A girl in the next row, who was wearing glasses with large frames and a dark blue headscarf, joined in. ‘You never asked us before,’ she said, speaking directly to Ayling. ‘My Dad says you’ve been our MP forever but we only ever see you in the paper.’

  Now the sixth-formers were openly laughing. Stephen’s colleagues were momentarily shocked into silence; next to him, he could feel Val Greehalgh bristling with anger, the shoulder pads of her cerise jacket lifting towards her ears. Toby Ayling fiddled with the lapels of his smooth grey suit.

  ‘Angus? Valerie? Who’d like to answer that?’

  Someone choked and tried to turn it into a cough. It was bad enough that Opposition MPs had been told to go out and get their message across to the next generation of voters, a project some of them had serious reservations about, but now they were having their wounds re-opened in public. Fortunately there was no one from the press in the room, apart from a bored hack from a freesheet in Val’s constituency who was here to take a photograph which would appear in the next edition with an extended caption.

  ‘Stephen? Any thoughts you’d like to share with us?’

  ‘Me?’ He looked at the kids in front of him, suddenly realising they were only a little older than his elder son. ‘I haven’t — actually it’s a perfecdy reasonable question.’ He hesitated. ‘You’re right, we’re demoralised. And no, we don’t know what to do about it. What we’ve been told—’

  ‘Stephen.’

  ‘Sorry, Toby, but these kids are bright and they haven’t come all this way to hear a — a press release from Central Office.’ He ignored the protest from Val on his left and continued, the words coming out before he’d had time to think about them. ‘What we’ve been doing this morning — what you’ve been doing because I have to admit my heart isn’t really in it — it’s not a pretty sight.’ He looked directly at the teenagers, half of whom were alert for the first time that morning. ‘When the voters reject you, you can’t believe it’s happened. I look at some of my friends...’ He gave a grim laugh. ‘You know, if the Party went to a shrink, they’d diagnose what-do-you-call-it, post-traumatic stress disorder. A collective nervous breakdown.’

  ‘Now — now, wait a minute.’

  ‘Just who the hell d’you think you—’

  ‘Are you feeling all right, old chap?’

  Stephen ignored the question from Angus McSorley, a medical doctor and the only one of his colleagues who seemed to have an inkling that he was doing more than speaking out of turn. Looking in the direction of the girl who had asked the original question, without quite engaging with her, he said, ‘I get up in the morning and ask myself, is it worth it? Why do we bother, any of us?’ He sat back in his chair, his hands flat on the table. ‘Maybe it’s time to give it all up, go off and — and write books or something.’

  ‘Books?’ One of the boys, sitting among a little group who had not previously spoken, repeated the word incredulously. All morning, they had tended to defer to the girls, exchanging bored looks and occasionally passing notes to each other.

  ‘Someone should have opened a window,’ Angus said loudly. ‘It’s awfully warm in here.’ He got up, gripped Stephen’s shoulder as he passed and bent to speak quietly to Ayling. The two men could hardly be more different, and not just because of the disparity in age; Angus’s jacket was as old-fashioned as his tie, a heather-mix tweed which Ayling eyed with distaste before nodding his head curtly and announcing a short break.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ Val hissed, glancing round the room and trying to assess the scale of the disaster. The teenagers were talking among themselves, clustered round the girl with the braids, as Ayling began to defend himself to his irate colleague. Stephen watched it all dreamily from his seat.

  After a hurried consultation, which Stephen took no part in, Ayling cleared his throat. ‘As my colleagues — as my colleagues’ve indicated, what Stephen Massinger’s just offered is an, ah, very personal opinion, not shared by... He may, on reflection, indeed I’m sure he will come to feel that such sentiments are best kept private. If they exist at all, which — which naturally I doubt.’

 
‘Hear, hear.’ Val tugged at her jacket, giving the impression she would like to do the same to Stephen.

  ‘Meanwhile, I’d like to thank you all for coming to Westminster and giving us this opportunity to find out what the youth... what young people today are concerned about. You’ve given us a lot to think about and I imagine you’ve also heard some things that you, ah, might not have expected to hear.’ He forced a smile, trying not to look down at his notes. ‘I’d also like to say you’ve been a credit to St Benedict’s sixth-form college, which is only what I’d expect after its latest glowing report. And of course to Mary — to Marjorie Montague Girls’ School, which Valerie tells me is the educational showpiece of her constituency. Now, I believe your tour of the Palace of Westminster kicks off shordy, so I’m going to hand you back to your excellent teachers.’

  He finished to polite applause, leaned across to shake hands with the teachers, and the teenagers began filing out. When the door closed behind them, and the solitary reporter was safely out of earshot, he rounded on Stephen: ‘What the fuck was all that about? Are you out of your mind?’

  Stephen barely acknowledged him. ‘It’s all true,’ he said. ‘We’re in the wilderness. It’s where we’re going to be for the next decade unless a miracle happens.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Excuse me—’

  ‘You humiliated us. The whips’ll have something to say about this.’ Val swept up her papers and nodded curtly to Ayling. ‘I’m going after that reporter, I know him slightly, see if I can get us out of this mess.’

  ‘Stephen, this is not like you.’ Angus turned to Ayling. ‘He had the PM on the back foot, did you hear? Pity you weren’t there, Toby.’

  Ayling snorted and muttered something about an urgent constituency meeting. He claimed to have handed over the everyday running of his PR company to his partner, the daughter of a former Home Secretary, but his absences from the Chamber were becoming a talking point.

  Angus persisted: ‘Have a look at yesterday’s Telegraph. It’s the first nice thing anyone’s said about us for an age.’ He moved closer to Stephen and lowered his voice: ‘I should go and see your GP, Just to make sure nothing untoward is going on.’