The Final Cut fu-3

by Michael Dobbs

  'If only I'd met you while I was still Foreign Secretary this might have been so much easier,' he said wistfully. 'I could've unlocked some doors from the inside rather than having to kick them down from out in the street.'

  'But then you would be deceiving me officially instead of personally.'

  'What do you mean deceiving you personally?' He sounded affronted.

  'That cup of tea you offered me the first day we met and you invited me into your kitchen? I still haven't had it.' She leaned over and kissed him before rolling out of bed.

  'Now get up, Makepeace. There's work to be done.' Evanghelos Passolides sat alone in his darkened restaurant. The last diner had long gone and he'd made a perfunctory effort at cleaning up, but had been overcome with melancholy. He felt deserted by everything he loved. He hadn't seen Maria for days. And his own Government in Nicosia was about to give away a large chunk of his beloved homeland to the Turk. Was this what he had fought for, what George and Eurypides had died for? He sat amongst all the memorabilia, drunk, an empty bottle of Commanderia at his elbow. A glass was lying on its side, the table cloth stained red with droplets of what many years before might have been blood. He sobbed. In one hand he held a crumpled photograph of his brothers, two tousle-haired boys, smiling. In the other he held a much burnished Webley, the pistol which had been taken from the body of a British lieutenant and with which he had always promised to exact his revenge. Before he had become a cripple.

  Now it was all too late. He had failed in everything he had touched. Others were heroes while life had stripped him of honour and all self-respect. He sat alone, forgotten, an old man with tears coursing down his cheeks, remembering. Waving a pistol. And hating.

  FIVE

  A man's place in history is no more than that – one place, a single point in an infinite universe, a jewel which no matter how brightly it may be polished will eventually be lost amongst a treasury of riches. A grain of sand in the hour glass.

  For Urquhart, this was a hallowed scene: the shiny leather bench scuffed by the digging of anxious nails, the Dispatch Box of bronze and old buriri polished by the passing of a thousand damp palms, the embellished rafters and stanchions which, if one listened carefully and with a tuned ear, still echoed with the cries of great leaders as they were hacked and harried to eclipse. Every political career, it seemed, ended in failure; the verdict of this great Gothic court of judgment never varied. Guilty. Condemned. A place of exhortation, passing approbation and eventual execution. Only the names changed.

  In recent days, whenever he turned away from the lights, there were voices in the shadows which whispered it would one day be his turn to fall, a matter only of time. As he sat on the bench they were at it again, the whispers, growing assertive, impertinent, almost heckling him. And through them all he could hear the voice of Thomas Makepeace.

  'Is my Right Honourable Friend aware' – the constitutional fiction of friendship passed through Makepeace's lips like vinegar – 'that the Greek Cypriot community in this country is deeply concerned about the existence of graves which still remain hidden from the time of the war of liberation in the nineteen fifties…?'

  Old memories like embers began to revive, to flicker and burn until the crackle of flames all but obliterated the words with which Makepeace was demanding that the British Government lay open its files, reveal all unreported deaths and burial sites, '… so that the tragedies of many years ago can finally be laid to rest?'

  For a moment or two the House observed the unusual sight of the Prime Minister sitting stiffly in his seat, seeming unmoved and unmoving, lost in another world before cries of impatience caused him to stir. He rose stiffly to his feet, as though age had glued his joints.

  'I am not aware,' he began with an uncharacteristic lack of assertiveness, 'of there being any suggestion that graves were hidden by the British…'

  Makepeace was protesting, waving a sheet of paper, shouting that it had come from the Public Record Office.

  Other voices joined in. inside his head he heard contradiction and confusion, talk of graves, of secrets which would inevitably be disinterred with the bones, of things which must remain forever buried.

  Then a new voice, more familiar. 'Fight!' it commanded. 'Don't let them see you vulnerable. Lie, shout, wriggle, abuse, rabbit punch on the blind side, do anything – so long as you fight!' And pray, the voice might have added. Francis Urquhart didn't know how to pray, but like hell he knew how to fight.

  'I believe there are great dangers in opening too many old cupboards, sniffing air which has grown foul and unhealthy,' he began. 'Surely we should look to the future, with its high hopes, not dwell upon the distant past. Whatever happened during that ancient and tragic war, let it remain buried, and with it any evils which were done, perhaps on all sides. Leave us with the unsullied friendship which has been built since.'

  Makepeace was trying to regain his feet, protesting once more, the single sheet of paper in his hand. Urquhart silenced him with the most remorseless of smiles.

  'Of course, if the Right Honourable Gentleman has anything specific in mind rather than suggesting some stampede through old archives, I shall look into the matter for him. All he has to do is write with the details.'

  Makepeace subsided and with considerable gratitude Urquhart heard the Speaker call for the next business. His head rang with the chaos of voices, shouts, explosions, the ricochet of bullets; he could see nothing, blinded by the memory of the Mediterranean sun reflecting off ancient rock as his nostrils flared and filled with the sweet tang of burning flesh.

  Francis Urquhart felt suddenly very old. The hour glass of history had turned. 'Go for it, Franco,' the producer encouraged. He sat up in his chair and dunked his cigarette in the stale coffee. This could be fun.

  Behind a redundant church which had found a new lease of life as a carpet warehouse in a monotonous suburb of north London lies the headquarters of London Radio for Cyprus, 'the voice of Cypriots in the city,' as it liked to sign itself, ignoring the fact that the four miles separating it from the City of London stretched like desert before the oasis. Describing the basement of Number 18 Bush Way as a headquarters was scarcely more enlightening – LRC shared a peeling Edwardian terrace house with a legitimate travel agency and dubious accounting practice. It also shared initials with a company manufacturing condoms and an FM wavelength with a Rasta rock station that fractured ears and heads until well after midnight. Such are the circumstances of community radio, not usually the cradle for budding radio magnates and media inquisitors. LRC's producers and interviewers struggled hard to convey to their small but loyal audience an air of enthusiasm even while they did daily battle with second- and third-hand equipment, drank old coffee and tried hard to remember to turn on the answering machine when they left.

  Yet this item had legs. The girl was good, somewhere behind those lips and ivories was a brain, and the old man was a fragment of radiophonic magic, his voice ascending scales of emotion like an opera singer practising arias. Passion gave him an eloquence that more than made up for the thick accent; what was more, in its own way the story was an exclusive.

  'Remember, you're hearing this first on LRC. Proof that there are graves left over from the EOKA war which are buried deep within the bowels of British bureaucracy…'

  The producer winced. Franco was an arsehole from which a stream of incontinence poured forth every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, but he was cheap and his uncle, a wine importer, was one of the station's most substantial sponsors. 'So what do you want?' Franco asked the pair. 'We want as many people as possible to write in support of Thomas Makepeace and his campaign to have the full facts made public. We can prove the existence of two graves, those of my uncles. We want to know if there are any more.' 'And you, Mr Passolides?'

  There was a pause, not empty and mindless but a silence of grief, long enough to capture the hearts of listeners as they imagined an old man rendered speechless by great personal tragedy. Even Maria reached over to touch
his hand; he'd been behaving so oddly in recent days, morose, unshaven, digging away within himself, changes which were ever more apparent since she'd been spending more time away from him. When finally his voice emerged the words cracked like a hammer on ice. 'I want my brothers.'

  'Great, really great,' Franco responded, shuffling his papers in search of the next cue.

  'And I want something else. The bastardos who murdered them.' The voice was rising through all the octaves of emotion. 'This was not war but murder, of two innocent boys. Don't you see? That is why they had to burn my brothers' bodies. Why they could never admit it. And why this miserable British Government continues to cover it up. Wickedness! Which makes them as guilty as those men who pulled the trigger and poured the petrol.'

  'Yeah, sure,' Franco stumbled, scratching his stubble, unused to anything more heated than a weather report. 'So I suppose we'd all better write to our MPs and give Mr Makepeace a hand.'

  'And crucify the bastards like Francis Urquhart who are betraying our island, selling us out to those Turkish poustides…'

  The producer was second-generation, not familiar with all the colloquial Greek covering the various eccentricities of human anatomy, but the intonation was enough to cause him alarm, especially with licence renewal coming up. Uttering a prayer that no one from the Radio Authority was listening, he made a lunge for the fade control. And missed. The cup of stale coffee tipped everywhere, over notes, cigarettes, his new jeans. Havoc. Evanghelos Passolides, after an armistice of almost fifty years, was back at war. The French Ambassador had begun to feel a strong sense of kinship with General Custer. Since the elevation of Arthur Bollingbroke to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, business had degenerated into bloody war, waged by the Frenchman against insuperable odds and a foe who had dispensed with diplomatic trimming in favour of wholesale scalping. Monsieur Jean-Luc de Carmoy had no illusions about the fact that the Court of St James's had become distinctly hostile territory. The Ambassador preferred to pursue his campaign with strawberries and champagne rather than the.44 calibre Winchesters of the US cavalry but, like the blond American general, he had made the deeply personal decision that if he were going to die he would do so surrounded by friends. They milled about him as he stood directing manoeuvres from the lawn of his official residence overlooking Kensington Gardens. 'Enjoying the quiet life, Tom?'

  Makepeace cast his eyes at the garden crowded with guests. 'As much as you.'

  'Ah, but there are differences between our lives,' de Carmoy sighed, lifting his eyes in search of the sun which shone over his beloved Loire. 'I feel at times as though I have been sold into slavery, where every rebuke must be met with a smile and every insult with humility.' He paused as a butler with hands resembling black widow spiders supplied them with full glasses before taking Makepeace by the arm and leading him towards the seclusion of a nearby lime arbour. There were obviously things to discuss. 'I envy you, Tom.' 'The freedom of the wilderness. You envy that?' 'What would I not give at times to share with you the liberty to speak my mind.' 'About what in particular?' 'Your Mr Urquhart.' His face had the expression of a leaking milk carton. 'Scarcely my Mr Urquhart.' 'Then whose, pray?'

  Around them the branches of the pleached limes twisted and entangled like a conspiracy. They were both aware that the Ambassador had crossed beyond the frontiers of diplomatic etiquette but, caught in the crossfire between Bollingbroke and the Quai d'Orsay, de Carmoy was in no mood for standing still.

  'Tom, we've been friends for a long time now, ever since the day you summoned me to the Foreign Office to administer a formal mutilation' – the Frenchman brushed some invisible piece of lint from the sleeve of his jacket – 'after that confidential computer tape went missing from British Aerospace.' 'Along with two French exchange technicians.' 'Ah, you remember?'

  'How could I forget? My first week at the Foreign Office.' 'You were frightfully severe.' 'I still suspect the clandestine hand of some official French agency behind the whole thing, Jean-Luc'

  The shoulders of the Ambassador's well-cut suit heaved in a shrug of mock Gallic confusion. 'But when you'd finished you sat me down and plied me with drink. Sherry, you called it.'

  'Standard Foreign Office issue. For use only on open wounds and Africans.'

  'I think I tried to get Brussels to reclassify it as brush cleaner.'

  'Didn't stop you finishing the whole damned decanter.'

  'My friend, but I thought it was meant to be my punishment. I remember I was swaying like a wheatfield in an east wind by the time I returned home. My wife consoled me, thinking you'd been so offensive I'd had to get drunk.'

  Like old campaigners they smiled and raised glasses to toast past times and dig over old battlefields. The Frenchman took out a cigarette case packed with Gauloises on one side and something more anodyne on the other; with a quiet curse Makepeace took the Gauloise. He'd started smoking again, along with all the other changes in his personal habits. God, he'd left her only an hour ago and knew that in spite of the after-shave he still reeked of her. Pleasure and pain. So much was crowding in on him that at times he had trouble finding space to breathe. Slowly the trickle of humour drained from his eyes and died. 'How is Miquelon?' he asked. 'Blossoming. And yours?'

  'Teaching. In America.' He gave his own impression of the Gallic shrug, but without the enthusiasm to make it convincing. 'You sound troubled. Let me ask…' 'As Ambassador? Or as an old friend?'

  'About politics. I have no right to pry into personal matters.' In any event, the Ambassador didn't have to. At the merest mention of his wife, Makepeace's face had said it all. He'd never make a diplomat, no inscrutability, all passion and principle. 'I hear many expressions that the era of Francis Urquhart is drawing to its close, that it is only a matter of time. And much discussion of who, and how. Many people tell me it should be you.' 'Which people?'

  'Loyal Englishmen and women. Friends of yours. Many of the people here this afternoon.'

  Makepeace glanced around. Amongst the throng was a goodly smattering of political correspondents and editors, politicians and other opinion-formers, few of whom were renowned as Urquhart loyalists. From a distance and from behind a tall glass, Annita Burke was staring straight at them, not attempting to hide her interest.

  'You've been getting pressure,' de Carmoy stated, knowing it to be a fact.

  'Nudges aplenty. I suppose I'm meant to be flattered by so much attention. Now's the moment, they say, step forward. But to be honest, I don't know whether I'm standing on the brink of history or the edge of a bloody cliff.'

  'They are your friends, they respect you. Virtue may be a rare commodity in politics, it may speak quietly at times, but no less persuasively for that. It sets you apart from others.' 'Like Francis Urquhart.' 'As a diplomat I couldn't possibly comment.'

  Makepeace was in too serious a mood to catch the irony. 'I've thought about it, Jean-Luc. Thinking about it still, to be precise. But did any of these friends of mine suggest to you how their… ambitions for me might be achieved? Or are these no more than slurpings through mouthfuls of Moet?'

  'My assessment is that this is not idle talk. There's a desperate sense of longing for a change at the top. I've heard that not just within your party but from across the political spectrum.' 'And from Paris, too, no doubt.'

  'Touche. But you can't deny there's a great moral vacuum in British politics. You could fill it. Many people would follow.'

  Makepeace began running his index finger tentatively around the rim of his crystal glass as though he were tracing the cycles of life. 'For that I need a vehicle, a party. I might be able to grab at the wheel, force Urquhart off the road, but it would probably do so much damage that it'd take years to get it working again. The party's scarcely likely to offer the keys to the man who caused the accident.'

  'Then create your own vehicle. One that's faster and better built than Urquhart's.'

  'No, that's impossible,' Makepeace was responding, but they were interrupted by another guest, the Ministe
r for Health who was seeking to bid farewell to his host. Felicitations and formal thanks were exchanged before the Minister turned to Makepeace.

  'I've got only one thing to say to you, Tom.' He paused, weighing both his words and the company. 'For God's sake keep it up.' With that he was gone. 'You see, you have more friends than you realize,' the Ambassador encouraged. 'In his case not a friend, merely a rat hedging his bets.'

  'Perhaps. But they are edgy, waiting to jump. The rats, too, believe the ship is sinking.'

  Makepeace was back with the rim of his glass which was vibrating vigorously. 'So often we seem to go round in empty circles, Jean-Luc. What's necessary to make it more than noise, to get the whole universe to shatter?' 'Action.'

  The Ambassador reached for the finely cut crystal, taking it from his guest's hand and holding it aloft by the stem, turning it around until it had captured the rays of the afternoon sun and melted into a thousand pools of fire. Suddenly he appeared to fumble, his fingers parted and before Makepeace could shout or move to catch it the glass had tumbled to the lawn. It bounced gracefully and lay, undamaged, on the grass.

  Makepeace bent his knee to retrieve it, stretching gratefully. 'That's a stroke of…'