by David Belbin
‘Like Jasper used me?’ Sarah asked.
‘I’m sure you’ll find a way to use him back.’ Gill gave her a wink which was almost dirty before gliding out of the room, followed at a discreet distance by a tall young man with a mop of blonde hair.
‘Didn’t know you two were friendly,’ Steve said when they’d gone.
‘That’s the first time we’ve spoken.’
‘A Compassionate Conservative. I thought they were a media myth.’
Sarah tried to work out how to phrase a delicate question. Steve was better at collecting gossip than she was. Pushing fifty, Gill was attractive, but not overwhelmingly so. In Parliament, as Sarah had found, a reasonable figure and a pretty face made any woman into an object of lust. Men had to have someone to fantasize about during long debates. She lowered her voice.
‘Do you think the dirt on her is true?’
Gill was reputed to have an open marriage. Her husband was a Euro MP who spent weekdays in Brussels. Gill certainly had a different, always handsome, male ‘researcher’ every year, but that proved little.
‘Oh yes.’
‘But the papers leave her alone.’
‘Tories are better at managing these things than we are. Gill’s discreet. Both her and her hubby are friendly with the papers’ owners. And they’re rich enough to sue. A paper that wanted to get her would need its story spot on, fully backed up.’
‘Whereas I can’t afford to sue anyone,’ Sarah pointed out.
‘There was nothing in any of the papers for you to sue over. Litigation only benefits lawyers. Anyway, I’m telling you, babe, if the punters think you’re fucking a handsome bastard it isn’t going to hurt you one little bit.’
4
Sarah’s fortnightly surgeries rotated around every ward in the constituency. The second surgery of the second month was in Stoneywood Library. Most of the cases she took on could be handled by a Citizens’ Advice Bureau but an MP carried more weight with the agencies concerned, usually branches of the Home Office or Social Security. This Saturday, her last visitor was a member of the Shanks family, the dead police officer’s younger sister, Polly Bolton. The poor cow had adopted the murdered couple’s children.
Sarah had seen to it that Polly was the last appointment. They could go on as long as necessary. However, she was already running half an hour late.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she told Polly. ‘But I can stay as long as it takes.’
‘I can’t.’ Sarah’s age, with hard, grey eyes, Polly looked nearer forty. For all that, her platinum blonde hair was professionally done and her steely, over made-up face formed a striking carapace, beneath which beauty might lurk. ‘I go on shift in half an hour,’ she continued. ‘I’ve a taxi coming in ten minutes.’
‘I do apologize.’
‘Doesn’t matter. What I have to say won’t take long. That Ed Clark was all over the paper yesterday, going on about justice and the compensation he has coming. What I want to know is, where’s justice for my brother, rotting in his grave? Where’s justice for our Liv?’
‘I share your concern,’ Sarah said, wishing she could explain how true this was. She talked about police systems, about due legal process. Polly interrupted.
‘Police talk to me. Terry was one of theirs. They say they’ll reopen the case but there’s no point, because they know who did it: Ed Clark. They say if Ed Clark puts a single foot wrong, they’ll have him back inside, but they have to be careful or it’ll look like victimization. Far as I can see, you and his lawyers are the only people who think Ed Clark’s innocent. So tell me, who do you think did it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sarah said. ‘Whatever officers who aren’t connected to the case are telling you, the investigation is ongoing. Believe me, nobody will rest until they find out who killed your brother and sister-in-law. We all want to see that monster brought to justice.’
Polly stood abruptly and went to the library window.
‘My taxi’s here.’
‘Let me walk you out.’
‘If you have to.’
Sarah tried to make conversation as they walked, asking about the Shanks children, but the sister wasn’t having it.
‘That slimy Tory MP,’ she said, apropos of nothing. ‘How could you?’
Sarah gave the answer she’d given a hundred times in the last three weeks. ‘It was a dinner about work. The paper made up the rest.’
‘Pull the other one. What kind of woman are you, standing up for murderers and adulterers?’
Sarah didn’t reply, transfixed by the sight of the guy getting out of Polly’s taxi. It couldn’t be who she thought it was.
Polly, not expecting a reply from Sarah, left the building, went straight up to the driver. The cabby stubbed out the cigarette he’d just lit. From this distance, the taxi driver was a dead ringer for Sarah’s first love, Nick Cane, aged by the twelve years since she’d seen him last.
When Sarah got in from the surgery, she tried to restore her spirits with a long bath. She opened the half bottle of champagne she kept on standby in the fridge. But drink didn’t help. When she wasn’t on a guilt trip about what Ed Clark might do now that he was out, she was thinking about the man driving the taxi.
She’d got off with Nick after a Labour Club meeting during their second year at uni. He was the best-looking bloke she’d ever been out with. The smartest, too. That evening, he’d actually come to resign from the party. Which dispute was it that alienated him? She didn’t recall. He hadn’t wanted to let his membership lapse. He’d wanted to tear up his card at a meeting. But when he’d got there, Sarah was the only other person who’d turned up. So they talked.
She’d seen him around before. He had a strong chin with a small dimple in the centre, warm eyes and dark, thick hair. Nick wasn’t what she thought of as her type – she’d been drawn to more earnest men until she discovered how quickly they bored her. Nick liked a drink and a smoke, but he had a serious side and was more pragmatic than her. That first night they talked about Sarah running for the union presidency. The time might be right for a real socialist, Nick reckoned. Last year, the election had been won by a joke candidate who, when he became president, turned into a bureaucrat.
Nick helped Sarah to write her manifesto, advised her to grow her hair before having any photos taken. ‘Blokes will vote for a woman they fancy. And they fancy women with long hair more than women with short hair. Proven fact.’ She was twenty years old and it was her first election. He introduced her to dope, which she’d been sniffy about. The ‘comrades’ saw it as a decadent bourgeois habit. It relaxed her.
The union presidency was her first election victory. By then, she was living in a shared house with Nick. She won by a ten per cent margin over the Anarchist candidate. That summer, she and Nick hitched around Europe together. They visited her father, who was living in Spain. She took him to meet her paternal grandfather, Sir Hugh. Well into his seventies, he had retired from Parliament, but was still on top form. He entertained them with stories of suppressed scandals from the Wilson years, when he had been a cabinet minister. Grandad also had scathing anecdotes about the turncoats who had recently defected from Labour to form the Social Democrats. The SDP went on to split the anti-Tory vote, letting the bastards back in by a landslide at the next general election, in 1983.
By then, Sarah was in her final year, after the interruption of a year spent as Union President. Nick was doing teacher training. She knocked herself out to get a first, while Nick found his course much more demanding than his degree had been. Nevertheless, the two of them made time to work for Labour in the general election. They were in love with the struggle against Thatcher, as well as each other.
That year, they considered getting married, but decided against. Marriage was a ‘bourgeois institution’. Nick was less convinced of this argument than her.
‘We might change our mind when we want kids,’ he said. Sarah thought it best not to mention that she had no intention of ever having children.
/>
But she couldn’t hide her decision to join the police. They talked it over endlessly. Not rows, as such. Nick knew where she was coming from, understood that she wanted to make a difference, but he thought she was making a big mistake. Turned out he was right, but it had taken Sarah three years to work it out. You didn’t join the police because you were interested in justice. That was why you went into politics. You joined the police because you were interested in keeping order. Back then, she thought Nick was being naïve, that he was prejudiced against the police because of his fondness for soft drugs. But she thought that they were solid.
Nick started his first teaching job and she left for police training in Henley. He rented a flat and she visited most weekends. At first, Nick was overwhelmed by his job. He liked to get smashed out of his face on Friday and Saturday nights to make up for the fifteen-hour days he worked the rest of the week. Sarah had little patience for this behaviour. Nick showed little interest in her new career.
They had niggling arguments rather than big rows. For instance, he never came to her police accommodation. Then he did, once. That awful weekend, when they were both drunk on bad wine, she tried to get a rise out of him by saying she was tempted to see someone else. He replied that he was, too. Unlike her, he seemed to have someone particular in mind
‘Maybe you should go for it,’ he said.
‘You’d like us to have an open relationship, would you?’ she asked. Open marriages were still fashionable at the time. Lefties who wanted to screw around came up with ideological reasons to do so. There was a terrible meanness in the air: another facet of Thatcherism.
‘I don’t know what I’d like us to have,’ he mumbled.
‘Me neither.’
‘Why don’t we see how it goes?’
‘Okay, I guess.’
And that was it. They fucked up a great thing by casually giving each other permission to screw around. Sarah shagged a sergeant on her training course. Nick had a brief affair with Sarah’s best friend in Nottingham, Louise. This came out in a phone conversation, the memory of which Sarah had since done her best to suppress. As soon as they told each other, each knew that it was over, but they never formally split up. They just stopped calling. Louise stopped calling too, so Sarah no longer had any reason to visit Nottingham.
He did write to her, later that year, when Grandad died. It was a warm letter, but with no news, no suggestion of a meeting, no return address. He’d probably have written when her father died too, but that didn’t get into the papers. Anyway, he’d used Mum’s address, and she’d moved by then. He wouldn’t know where to find her.
The last time she saw Nick was the following year, the summer of 1985, when she was a fast track probationer. Sarah was on duty at a march in support of the miners’ strike. It was in Leicester. Nick was there, with the Nottingham contingent, a pretty Asian girl by his side. Sarah saw him, but prayed he hadn’t seen her.
When Sarah was putting herself forward for selection, she was asked about her view of the strike. She’d been out of the force for years, doing different short term contract jobs, mostly in London, looking for a seat to stand in. Having been the president of the local university student union didn’t hinder her, but her university dates didn’t overlap the strike. Nobody at the selection conference brought up the police connection and neither did Sarah. She used phrases like ‘tactically outmanoeuvred’ and ‘the fatal failure to hold a democratic ballot’ and got by.
The strike was less popular in Nottingham than elsewhere (most of the scab miners were from nearby pits) and, anyway, this was meant to be a safe Tory seat. But Sarah had been on the wrong side of a picket line, and knew what it felt like to be a class enemy. Nick’s father was a miner, long dead of emphysema. If Nick had seen her that day, he would never have forgiven her.
She later learnt that Nick was working as an English teacher at an inner city secondary school. Louise, when they reconnected, a couple of years later, told her that she and Nick had only seen each other for a few weeks. She’d apologised for messing up their friendship but she’d always had a thing for Nick and had to take her chance. Sarah understood that the prospect of a lasting romance always overrode friendship. But she was sorry she’d given Louise the opportunity. Last Louise heard, Nick was living with the Asian girl Sarah had seen at the march. They got a lot of hassle. The girl’s brothers had twice beaten Nick up. That wouldn’t put him off. Nick always liked a challenge. And he was smart, at least as smart as she was. Sarah wouldn’t be surprised if he was a deputy head by now, with an Asian wife, lots of kids. Nick had no strong ties to Nottingham she knew of, not unless you counted the footballer brother he had never got on with. So he could be anywhere.
We all make mistakes when we’re young. You have one great, fulfilling relationship and, if that runs into trouble, naturally you assume that another, even better one is waiting round the corner. Staying with Nick was the great what if of Sarah’s life. Her longest relationship since then had been with Dan. They’d enjoyed plenty of good moments, but the whole was a pale facsimile of what she’d had with Nick.
Louise moved to the US in 1988. She invited Sarah to her wedding, but Sarah couldn’t go and they’d since lost touch. Sarah had never been very good with female friendships. Most of her friends were in the party. Nick would have stopped that happening, if she’d stayed with him. On nights when she got drunk alone, played old records, became a bit teary, Sarah was still convinced that Nick was the love of her life. He’d left a hole that she filled with work, work, work.
If by some chance the driver she’d just seen was Nick, what was he doing driving a taxi? Sarah got out of the bath and checked the phone book. No Nick Cane. There was a Joseph Cane, who had two numbers, one of which was for Cane Cars. She remembered Nick’s younger brother and used to keep an eye on his football career, though she had left the city by the time he came here to play for Notts County.
People’s lives fell apart. An MP who did casework was more aware of that than most. Sarah was tempted to ring Joe’s number, ask to be put in touch with Nick. But if Nick had been in Nottingham all this time, he must know she was a local MP. He could have contacted her at any point during the last two years. Which meant he didn’t want to.
On Thursday, Brian Hicks from the Evening Post showed up in Sarah’s first-class carriage from St Pancras. He sat down next to her, stale aftershave mingling with the sweat and booze odours of an afternoon spent picking up gossip in Annie’s Bar. This was the one House of Commons watering hole where journalists and MPs were able to meet on equal terms. Brian spent a lot of time there. It was too blokey for Sarah.
Tired, she forced a smile. ‘Good to see you, Brian.’
‘Ed’s back from holiday. Fancy doing that joint interview with him?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘It’s old news now.’
‘Human interest stories don’t date. And you pulled out of the one we had scheduled last month. You owe me this.’
Sarah kept her tight, professional face on. Brian would know that there was something she wasn’t telling him. ‘I owe you one, Brian, but it’s not going to be this one. An election’s about to be called.’
‘At which you’ll lose your seat. Any publicity will help.’
‘Anything short of an unprecedented landslide won’t help. Leave it, will you?’
A steward came down the carriage with coffee. Time to change topic. Sarah considered asking Brian whether he knew anything about Cane Cars. But Brian was a gossip by trade and she didn’t want to alert him to her sudden interest in an old university boyfriend.
‘Got any plans for what you’ll do after the election?’ Brian asked.
‘I expect I’ll take a holiday,’ Sarah said.
‘Your Dan can get the time off?’
‘He’s not my Dan any more,’ Sarah said.
‘Sorry to hear that,’ Brian said, and the look he gave her was sincere. ‘That wasn’t connected to the Jasper March incident, I hope.’
; ‘No, we split before that. He moved out ten days ago. You know how it is, relationship not going anywhere.’
‘I’ve had a marriage like that for twenty years. Never thought of moving out though.’
Sarah gave him a weak smile. She had never met Brian’s wife, who spent most of her time in their Derbyshire ‘weekend’ cottage, but suspected that the marriage was a good one. They had no kids, so why would they stay together otherwise? Sarah had an unfashionably idealistic notion of marriage. Some people stuck together out of fear of being alone, but she would never settle for less than love, for less than she’d once had with Nick.
5
MARCH 1997
In prison you spend all your time waiting for the future to begin. Leaving prison wasn’t like when I fall in love or when I have kids or after Labour wins the next election. This future was going to happen. On a set day, you would be released. Until then, you could legitimately put your life on hold.
Nick had done four years, seven months and eighteen days of an eight year stretch. Five years ago, he’d been pasty-faced and flabby, a packet-a-day smoker, with several joints on top of that. Now he was well built, down to ten slender rollies a day and hadn’t touched draw since a random drugs test cost him three months’ remission.
His brother was waiting for him at the gates in a yellow taxi with Cane Cars on the side. Nick got into the passenger seat.
‘You look well fit, my friend.’
Nick smiled sheepishly and reached out his arm. The brothers were six years apart, far enough for the two of them not to have been close growing up, near enough for the gap not to matter now. When he went inside, Nick thought he had many friendships far stronger than that with his younger brother. But Joe was the one who kept visiting, who offered him a place to stay on the out. Most of his friends had slipped out of touch by the second year.
The two men hugged awkwardly over the handbrake.
‘Caroline’s cooking something special for you,’ Joe said, enthusiastically. Joe’s wife wouldn’t want him in the house, Nick knew, and who could blame her? But it was only for a few weeks, until he got a place of his own, one his probation officer would have to approve.
