Fifty-First State Read online

  William’s eyes, large, soft and fringed with dark curly lashes, rested on the remaining couple seated by the window. His job was to know who belonged to which party, ministry or newspaper, although he himself had no interest in politics. From childhood on he had tuned them out, the way other people tune out football, high finance or health information. Of course, he knew that the pretty, dark-haired woman in the pale linen jacket was Mrs Julia Baskerville, Labour Member of Parliament for Whitechapel Road and Stepney Green, elected three years earlier by the poor London constituency. That was after her predecessor had blotted his copybook with his leadership and been deselected, to be seen no more. Before that she’d been – what? – a teacher, a lecturer or something. Julia’s good-looking companion, who reminded William vaguely of Lawrence of Arabia in the classic movie, was Joshua Crane, the Conservative Member for Frognal and South Hampstead. He’d been in the House for ten years. Julia and Joshua were partners on Westminster Unplugged, the weekly TV show about Parliament, chaired by the skinny and sardonic Hugh Patterson, previously editor of two national papers. Their sharp comments, and the way they flirted with each other and ragged the presenter like naughty schoolchildren was enjoyed by a small but devoted audience.

  William liked them. He also thought there was nothing more than friendship between them – something he was also paid to know. From what he knew Julia was married to a surgeon who worked in Houston, Texas. They were running a long-distance marriage. There was a little girl. Joshua Crane was also married. William had never seen his wife.

  William suppressed a yawn. Julia and Joshua’s companion at the table, Lord Gott, had disappeared hours earlier and he wished the couple had gone with him, instead of hanging on and on gossiping and laughing.

  ‘Should we do the National Government on the programme?’ Julia asked Joshua.

  ‘We featured it two months ago,’ Joshua pointed out.

  ‘Well – what about the prospect of another election?’

  ‘You’re getting tired. We did that then, too. Hugh Patterson wouldn’t let it happen.’

  ‘How can we stop talking about it? It’s the topic. There’s no choice now. We must have a National Government.’

  ‘You’re out of office. You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Joshua told Julia. They both knew that the only way forward was an all-party government, with Labour and Liberal Democrats in the Cabinet. But Joshua’s Party Leader, the Prime Minister, would never agree to it. The Liberal Democrats and Labour, being out of power, were in favour. Frederick Muldoon, though, was in power and not planning to surrender any of it.

  ‘Come on, Joshua. Everything’s been stalled for years. It’s like living in the Weimar Republic. A National Government’s the only way and you know it.’

  Joshua, who had to support his PM, whatever he thought privately, said nothing.

  Julia turned and caught William’s eye. ‘I’m sorry, William,’ she called over. ‘Give us the bill and we’ll go.’ She turned back to Joshua. ‘They’re saying the Queen’s in favour of it.’

  ‘Right,’ Joshua acknowledged without enthusiasm.

  The business of the bill worked out nicely. It was Julia’s turn to pay – William took a bit off the bill because he liked her. It was Joshua’s turn to tip, so he gave William nearly double what William might have expected. Everyone was happy. Outside the restaurant, as they waited for their taxis, Julia said, ‘That policeman rang me up again.’

  Joshua laughed. Julia’s suitor was a joke between them. A month earlier the spring tides had brought a foot of water into the House of Commons. The proposed billion-pound barrage in the Thames Estuary had never been built. So the water came up and Julia had fallen off a duckboard leading from the car park to the entrance, into the arms of a waiting policeman, who had twice rung her to ask her out for a drink.

  ‘Has the committee come up with an answer?’ said Joshua. Julia’s friend Alison was on the committee – known, of course, as the Canute Committee.

  ‘They’re talking of allowances for Commons’ staff for protective footwear,’ Julia told him.

  ‘Wellington boots?’ Joshua said.

  ‘That’s right.’ The first taxi – Julia’s – arrived. It was hydrogen powered. Julia insisted on using oil-less, in spite of the problems with reliability the taxi fleets sometimes had. In this eco-friendly vehicle Julia would return to her small terraced house in Whitechapel.

  Joshua, getting into his own petrol-fuelled cab, asked the driver to take him to an address in Battersea. But just after they had started up he leaned forward and requested the driver go to Chelsea.

  William locked the door, cleared the table at which Joshua and Julia had been sitting, put everything on a trolley, ran it through the swinging baize doors to the kitchen, then hurried upstairs past the private dining rooms on the first floor and up to the top of the house. There was a small room off the landing where hanging racks held the waiters’ and waitresses’ black suits and dresses. He whipped out of his suit and was just doing up his other trousers when his boss, the owner of Sugden’s, came out of his flat, pale as a vampire, in his usual purple smoking jacket. William had heard the sound of a television from behind Jack’s front door, but had quite hoped, at this hour, to avoid an encounter. He took his jacket from a hanger.

  ‘Everything all right, William?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Pretty good,’ William answered. ‘Twenty covers, not bad for a weekday, and table six had three bottles of Bollinger. One card was refused so the diner paid cash.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Edward Jeffreys,’ William told him.

  Jack nodded. ‘There’s a divorce pending. Pick up anything about an election?’

  William shook his head. Jack said, ‘Fine.’ It was not the fate of a great nation that concerned the restaurateur. It was that during the course of an election campaign, normally lasting something like six weeks, the restaurant would be largely empty. The clientele would be in their constituencies, campaigning, or burning the midnight oil to produce statistics or publicity. They would be studying graphs, poring over newspaper leaders, monitoring broadcasts, creating smears, awaiting the results of opinion polls, all involved in the short but tough episode that is a British election campaign.

  ‘Good,’ Jack said. ‘That’ll keep the private rooms full.’

  A group wanting to dine in private, to plan and conspire, would often take one of Sugden’s two upstairs private dining rooms. This was filling Jack Prentiss’s bank account. From time to time the cabal from one dining room would bump into members of the group they were conspiring against on the landing separating the two dining rooms. William had once asked Jack why secret meetings were so often held in this less-then-secret restaurant, a stone’s throw from Parliament and Whitehall. He said the conspirators could have kept their secrets more secret if they’d met in a Little Chef on the M1.

  Jack had told him, ‘You’ve got to remember that when Parliament’s in session politicians can’t breathe the air more than a mile from Westminster.’

  William started downstairs.

  ‘All-night bus?’ Jack called after him. William had the impression that Jack sometimes got lonely at night, with only his porcelain collection for company. Sometimes he tried to detain him in conversation, which William, after a long shift and yearning for home, didn’t always welcome.

  ‘How’s Lucy?’

  William looked up at Jack. ‘I’m not sure. She’s usually in bed when I get back and she’s often gone to work when I get up.’ He added, ‘I think it’s her in the bed – but it might be the woman next door, for all I know.’

  Jack laughed. William didn’t like it. As he left, relocking the door behind him, William reflected that shift work was hard on marriages. His boss’s life proved it. Two – or had there been three? – of Jack’s marriages had foundered. William had decided his would not. At the first sign of trouble he’d leave and look for another job.

  He set off through the darkness to his bus stop in
Whitehall. He had joined the governed, rather than the governors now: an old man carrying a black plastic bag wandering down to the river to find somewhere to sleep; a group of cleaners chatting in a foreign language on their way to the tube station. Two bemused teenagers wandered down the wide and empty Whitehall, dwarfed by the sombre height of the government buildings. There was little traffic other than the patrolling armoured police cars. The air was fresh, with a feel of spring about it.

  After eight hours in the enclosed atmosphere of Sugden’s William felt invigorated. He was content. Of course, he and Lucy didn’t have enough time together, with Lucy on shifts beginning at 6 a.m. It was hard to meet friends who worked more normal hours. But they managed, somehow, to make their days off coincide. The mortgage got paid and they were saving to get a bigger flat, with a second bedroom, and a garden. Then they would have a baby, they hoped.

  The bus eased round the corner from Parliament Square. William Frith, a happy man who had waited only five minutes for his bus on a spring night and was going home to a wife he loved, climbed on.

  Off the bus, heading home, William saw, under the street lights on the other side of Shepherd’s Bush Green, about 400 yards away, a group of Auxiliary Police, in their olive green uniforms. They were standing behind two young men who had their arms high up against the bonnet of an old car. The policemen were patting them down, not gently, for weapons. They were shouting, ‘Don’t move! Don’t speak! Bastards – stand still! Bastards!’ The voices of men who are aggressive – in charge – afraid. The contents of a gym bag were tipped out into the street. One of the young men, dark-skinned and terrified, turned his head towards the heap of clothing on the ground. One of the Auxiliaries handcuffed the second man. William walked by, on the other side, still hearing the shouts. Just after Christmas, on a Saturday, a suicide bomber had blown himself up in a north London synagogue. Six men had died and thirty others had been injured. Another bomb had been discovered in an underground train at New Maiden. It had failed to explode. Raids on houses, chiefly Muslim, had been stepped up. Stop and searches of men who looked Mediterranean or North African increased. The powers of the Auxiliary Police had been augmented. William had no quarrel with this. Obviously the two young men weren’t bombers but they might have been. Somebody had to check. He’d been stopped himself on the way home twice in a month, pushed back against a wall, sworn at, searched and let go without apology. Even so, the scene he had just witnessed made him feel uneasy, though he was not sure why. He was trying to recall some old film he must have seen on daytime TV as a boy – a dark street, old-fashioned cars pull up, uniformed men leap out – no, he’d forgotten what it was. He put it out of his mind and went home.

  The White House, Washington DC, USA. April 4th, 2015. 10 p.m. (GMT).

  Seated on two couches in the Oval Office, the President of the USA sipped mineral water while her Secretary of State, Ray Hollander, drank Scotch and water. Hollander’s tie was loosened and the top button of his shirt open. His cheeks and chin were darkening. Had there been any public meeting that evening he would have shaved for the third time that day. His President wore a pale-blue linen suit, a baby colour Hollander associated with his second wife, who had often worn it when about to deliver a sucker punch. The President’s hair and make-up were impeccable, as always, but a long day was ending and, like a flower in a vase, though unwilted, she gave the impression wilting was not far away.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Call the Chiefs of Staff, recheck the time of the meeting and then, just late enough to catch them and not so late they think we’re playing with them, get that Harvard professor into the meeting on Presidential say-so. I need the input.’

  ‘They’re not going to like it,’ Hollander said.

  ‘I don’t want them to like it. I want them to know I want the truth, not a twenty-page report saying ten different things. I want to know – can we handle Afghanistan and a reinvasion of Iraq, if we need to. And will they back me, really back me, if that is what we need to do?’

  ‘Madam President,’ Hollander said. The Army did not have enough men. Already the military was discussing the possibility of a draft, hoping Vietnam was enough of a memory now. Hollander knew the spectre of the draft was for ever rising before the President’s eyes. And no one thought she would introduce any form of compulsory recruitment in an election year.

  He said, ‘So it’s really going to be Sheikh Mohammed this time?’

  ‘That would seem to be Allah’s will.’

  Sheikh Mohammed Al Bactari was a senior Shia cleric, fiercely patriotic and ferociously anti-American.

  Hollander looked his President in the eye and said, ‘Muldoon.’

  She looked straight back and said, ‘Ray. Not again.’

  He had never understood her distaste for Britain and British politics. It could not have been historical. The President knew no history. If it had been personal he would have known about it. Maybe she disliked the style of the Brits, how they talked, walked and thought about things. He sympathized; he couldn’t take that traditional evasive cunning either. He said, ‘If these Iraq elections go bad on us and we have to reinvade, the Brits will have to go with us. The other big Europeans won’t. But a lot of the Brits were against the 2002 invasion. They couldn’t wait to get out. And Frederick Muldoon has no power in the House of Commons and won’t ask for the support of the country because he knows he won’t get it. But we have to have them, with China and India on the Security Council accusing us of trying for world domination. Then there are the Russians—’

  He read her mounting impatience. She interrupted, ‘You’ve told me the problem. Where’s the solution?’

  Hollander had no illusions about his President. She was tougher than he was, and more ruthless. If he was tungsten, she was kryptonite.

  ‘There’s only one. Muldoon goes and the new PM is one of ours and has a strong majority. He backs us militarily and gets rid of the nests of Islamic vipers in their major cities.’

  ‘Just tell me what we need to do,’ she said and stood up. He did the same.

  ‘Goodnight, Madam President,’ he said.

  ‘Goodnight, Ray, and thank you.’ After the President left the room two men came in, nodded and stood against the door, watching him. He nodded back and stood up. ‘Just leaving, guys,’ he said. But for a moment he paused, staring up at the portrait of a long-dead politician in knee breeches.

  ‘Subvert the government of Great Britain,’ he said to himself. ‘Yes, ma’am. OK, ma’am. Anything you say, ma’am.’

  12 Emscott Drive, Hamscott Common, Kent. April 5th, 2015. 2.30 a.m.

  Thirty-year-old Kim Durham woke up, sweating, with a start. She pulled herself up and lay back against the pillows. Oh, no, she thought to herself. No, not again. The dream was back, the one where Jonathan told her when he came in from work that the marriage was over, told her while she stood at the kitchen counter, cutting up peppers (’Only fresh, organic food eaten in our house,’ she had boasted then), told her there was someone else, someone he worked with, as she desperately tried to understand what he was saying, while another part of her mind equally desperately hoped that five-year-old Rory would stay where he was, watching TV in the sitting room – that dream was back. It had never gone away, really, but over eighteen months it had come back less and less often, filling her with despair, wrecking the night and the next day as well.

  But now it had returned. Night after night, there it was again. She knew why, of course. Because one day soon she would have to tell Rory, asleep with his plastic figure of Grimgraw, probably still muttering to him on the pillow beside him, that on the other side of the world he had a brother – half brother – his father’s new son. And until she did that, she’d have no peace. But for now, she could not decide when to do it, or how. She was a teacher. She’d seen often enough the effects of such news on a child. Seen it done badly, seen it done well – she ought to be able to manage this, but she couldn’t. You couldn’t imagine how it would tear you apart
twice – once on your own account, the second time when you looked into the eyes of a bewildered, betrayed child.

  There was the scream of a flight of fighter jets overhead, that noise those who had been born and bred at Hamscott Common knew well enough to sleep through. Kim knew she wouldn’t sleep tonight, or only for an hour or so, before her alarm went off. She lay down and closed her eyes, though.

  Resting’s as good as sleeping, she told herself. And, it’ll all look better in the morning.

  It did look better, a little better, as Kim and Rory drove down the country road to the school they both attended; he as a pupil, she as a teacher. It was a clear, sunny day. Big clouds were blown lazily across a blue sky. The hedgerows on either side were throwing out the first, pale budding leaves.

  Rory watched a field of leaping lambs, then looked keenly forward as the car rounded a bend. To one side of the now-unhedged road was a fringe of grass. Behind this an expanse of Hamscott Common, old woodland, gorse and unfurling ferns, spread as far as the skyline. On the other side of the road the Common stretched away, except for the area, a mile and a quarter square, which had been cleared and flattened over seventy years ago, at the beginning of the Second World War. Then it had been Hamscott Common airfield. The buildings, hastily erected, had housed the RAF squadrons fighting the Battle of Britain. From its short runways Spitfires and Wellington bombers had taken off to fight over the coast of England. A very old man who had been one of the pilots lived in the old folks’ home half a mile from the base.

  Since the war the airfield had expanded and been rebuilt. A short stretch of grass led to the perimeter fence, where two guards in US uniforms stood outside the high-wire gates. Seventy-five metres inside the outer fence lay a second one, also patrolled by armed soldiers. Behind a second fence was a parade ground and, to the rear of this, administration buildings. To the right was the vast expanse of runways, on which military planes stood, to the left, small homes for service personnel, all identical. Behind all this, against the backdrop of tall trees where Hamscott Common, outside the base, started again, were towers and low buildings, always patrolled. Here some thirty nuclear bombs were stored, readied for mounting on the new, heavy B63 bombers.