Head of State, page 4
It was then that she was snapped up by Olivia Kite, who recognised her brilliance and made her the number-cruncher and analyst-in-chief for the increasingly powerful Eurosceptic group inside the parliamentary party. Slim, pale, and with her mother’s shining hair, Jennifer Lewis continued to be much admired – though mostly from a distance.
Sex and Marriage
Who could ever have predicted that cold, bright June Lewis and Lucien McBryde, the tousled, coke-snorting lobby hack who had once been thrown off the prime minister’s battle bus, having been caught in the toilet, red-eyed, with crusty nostrils, would experience such an instant and intense mutual attraction? He was dishevelled, she meticulously shevelled. He disreputable, she shinily reputable. He a dark and ragged squiggle of a man, she as beautifully balanced as a complex quadratic equation. That both of them felt the same inside, both having been ruined by a selfish and indifferent parent, was something few people could have guessed. To a friend, Jen had explained: ‘He was the last person on earth I was ever likely to fall for. That’s why it happened.’
The sex, when they eventually got round to it, was intense and revelatory. (The shift from the time when people ‘had’ each other to when they ‘did’ each other had been the subject of a conversation between Ken Cooper and Robson McBryde.) In bed Jen experienced the only area of his life in which Lucien was not selfish. Two bodies became one. Away from bed, their friends said admiringly and jealously, each became more engaging and lovable.
Perhaps the happiest day that either Jen or Lucien would know in their lives centred around a lunch in a chaotic and cheerful Italian restaurant by Victoria station. No wedding, but a wine-and-pasta-fuelled meeting of two writing tribes, it was hosted in their honour by Robson McBryde. Racy literature and fervid political journalism acknowledged each other, and made dignified bows. Jen’s mother performed many of her most successful anecdotes, and was grudgingly admired by the wary elderly journalist, while their two children, both secure and both feeling that they knew who they were at last, looked on.
‘Luce, let’s never ever have a wedding anniversary,’ Jen had said as they teetered back up the street towards their respective offices. ‘Let’s celebrate this date as our special day, and come back here for years and years.’
Lucien had said nothing in reply. For once, he couldn’t speak. He was still trying to come to terms with this strange new feeling – not drunkenness, not ‘a rush’, but something calmer and more delicately coloured: perhaps it was happiness.
But nothing happy ever lasts. Just two months after the pair of them had been bound together, unable to keep their hands off each other, driven to nuzzle in public places and to stifle their conversations with kisses, London began one of her amazing changes of costume. For a few weeks her temperature rose to that of Paris, and even Rome. Magnesium glares splashed across her glass towers. Down in her shaded alleys and half-lit canyons, her citizens shucked off their grey woollens and padded jackets. Torsos, suspiciously tanned or thickly hairy, were openly displayed. Unhappy cats found themselves sharing urban gardens with pot-planters and barbecue-lighters. Damp pavements, now dried, hosted families of chairs and little tables, and brightly-coloured young people sat outside pubs and restaurants. The smells of charcoaling meat and fragrant tobacco filled the air. Dogs gambolled deliriously in the public parks. Annually, the people of London became inmates released from prison into a brighter world of possibilities. And amid all this chirruping and fluttering, Lucien and Jennifer had a terrible, terminal row. Like most of the worst rows, it seemed to blow up out of nothing at all. Yet it ripped their oneness apart forever.
Lucien had casually mentioned that an ex-girlfriend had asked him to supper. For no particular reason, he had never told Jen about this girl before. Jen froze, then snapped at him. Lucien went cold, and sneered at her. In an instant Jen found herself looking at him differently. Who was he, this stranger? Her face zipped shut, her melting eyes turned to ice, and when Lucien finally brought himself to look at her properly after a long silence, he found he barely recognised her either.
In the bitter public argument that followed, both spat out plosives and fricatives like shrapnel. Each, suddenly feeling sick inside, had been in subconscious training for this combat of ugly words, this tournament of misery, for weeks. Never conversationalists, they now discovered in one another a genius for invective. After twenty minutes they were standing silent and stiff-legged, like mannequins, at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall, before turning and hobbling off in opposite directions. By the time evening fell Jennifer had taken her things out of Lucien’s Notting Hill basement flat, and gathered a group of sympathetic friends to empty wine bottles and shred his already tattered reputation. His addictive personality had been too much for Jen. It had been slowly pushing the walls of her ordered life apart. Now she tugged them firmly back together again.
Lucien had been damaged the more severely. In the days that followed he realised that the first person who had ever made him feel like a fully functioning adult human being had walked away. He tried to comfort himself with the memories of earlier lovers and the promise of new erotic freedom, but felt nothing stirring at all, except irrepressible self-disgust. He thought about throwing himself off Hammersmith Bridge. But he was not a jumper.
Perhaps the break-up was inevitable, was even for the best. Had Lucien and Jennifer stayed together and had children, they would have passed their self-destructive traits down to the next generation. The French say that the children of lovers are orphans.
A few days later, Lucien’s father was in his local when he noticed that he was pouring his pint of bitter directly down the trouser leg of the man sitting to his left.
‘Oof. Groourrgh,’ protested the man. ‘Hoi, hoi.’ Nor did he say this in a friendly way. Robson tried to right his glass, but there was no strength in his wrist, and the rest of the liquid gurgled onto the man’s crotch. He said ‘Hoi,’ again, sounding as though he meant it. Robson tried to explain and apologise, but no sound came from his mouth. Then he suddenly slid backwards off his bar stool, and landed face-up on the floor.
He was still feeling an overwhelming sense of irritation when the two ambulancemen arrived. One said to the other, ‘Shall we blue this one?’ The other replied, ‘God yes, we’d better blue him.’ Robson rather liked the sound of that – it made him feel important – but the stroke killed him even as the flashing and wailing ambulance pulled away from the pub.
The funeral had taken place at a crematorium in North London, attended by a ragged platoon of newspaper editors, including a stunned and bewildered-looking Ken Cooper, as well as famous foreign correspondents and columnists from the less popular papers. The rain cascaded down on the backs and hats of some two hundred people who could not be fitted into the chapel. Lucien was not there. He spent the day in his flat, emptying a bottle of his father’s favourite malt whisky, and sobbing.
He survived the weeks following his father’s death by drowning himself in the large, wet eyes of a series of sympathetic girls, and managed to keep working by snuffling fashionable stimulants. But his timekeeping, as Cooper noticed morosely, became ever more erratic.
Library Game
That Saturday, idly admiring the forthright, no-nonsense names of the old shopkeepers on the street – Lobb for boots, Lock for hats, winking, scarlet Berry Bros & Rudd for booze, Hockney for tobacco – Lucien McBryde turned right just before the Economist building, and wavered his way towards the north-west corner of St James’s Square, and a narrow building with tall windows that was the nearest thing he had to a spiritual home. This was the London Library, a private-subscription affair founded by whiskered and idealistic Victorians, lifelong membership of which had been a gift from his father during a brief phase when he’d showed some promise as a writer. Its collection was unsurpassed by that of any other private institution. Its dark reading room, smelling of old books and old men, was as calming a place as could be found in this square half-mile of clubland.
But that was not why Lucien McBryde used the building. Well-versed in the dangers of email, texting and mobile phones, he had made the library, in effect, his private communications hub. By this time on a Saturday it would normally have closed its doors. But tonight the annual party was in full swing, and McBryde lurched his way inside. For once he was not looking for another drink, free or otherwise. He was here, as usual, to send a message.
When pursuing a woman, or dealing with a particularly private source of information, McBryde avoided all the modern communications systems, which were vulnerable to being spied on by everyone from spotty youths in the pay of rival newspapers to, so the Guardian said, GCHQ, the Americans and probably the Chinese as well. He passed his most sensitive messages on by simply texting its recipient the title and author of a particular book, and leaving an old-fashioned handwritten note inside the London Library’s copy of it. All the girl, or civil servant, or junior minister, had to do then was to go to the narrow, metal-grilled stacks, pull out the book and retrieve the message. They would then repeat the process, texting him the location of his own ‘book-note’. So far, all parties had found this method entirely secure.
Others cottoned on, of course, and the waiting list for membership of the London Library had jumped remarkably. The venerable stacks began to reek of passion and secret liaisons. Many of those apparent bibliophiles fingering a history of the early French kings with an affectedly vague expression, or rubbing their palms along an anatomical sketchbook, were in reality trying to hunt down a passionate letter from a married man or woman, or a proposition for an indecent or politically sensitive rendezvous.
The crucial thing about the London Library postal service was that the messages had to be left in books which were in no danger of being taken out by the wrong person – some wandering visitor who was unaware of the system. They had to be secreted in books about thoroughly dull topics, books no one in their right mind would ever want to open. McBryde had experimented with obscure Swedish philologists, unknown Victorian novelists, and dense tomes of twentieth-century structural Marxism, but had finally settled on the works of the journalist and sometime historian Dominic Sandbrook. Sandbrook had been the unwitting Pandar for McBryde’s life-changing love affair; at last, flickers of energy had pulsed between his pages.
Tonight Lucien was on his way to deliver a message to Jennifer, but one that had little to do with romance, although just writing her name had given his heart a sickening lurch. He swiped his membership card and entered the library, then went upstairs to the History of England section, where he took down the latest of Sandbrook’s tomes, an eight-hundred-page history of Britain from 1982 to 1983. Into it, he slipped his note.
He felt clammy and weak as he made his way back out into St James’s Square, shouldering past the party guests – Sir Tom Stoppard was deep in conversation with Andrew Wilson. Once he was outside he checked his phone, which was full of increasingly terse messages from the office. He scrolled through them. Then deleted them. There was absolutely no point in being a reporter if you had to attend meetings or communicate with your bosses.
McBryde was planning a long – a very long – night. Even so, he remained just slightly more journalist than dipsomaniac. The tip he was passing on to Jennifer had come from Alois Haydn, the notorious Svengali of Number 10. Haydn knew everyone in London. He was London. His deepest secret was McBryde’s last romantic gift to Jen. Passing it on to her was a stroke of genius … Or so McBryde thought. But ever since their meeting a question had been nagging away at him. Why had that famously manipulative little man sought him out? He owed him no favours. Haydn?
A good journalist does not simply receive what is given; he always asks why he was given it. Loitering in a nearby pub over a whisky and soda, McBryde concentrated hard as he began to look his gift horse closely in the mouth. Alois Haydn only ever looked out for Alois Haydn. Everyone knew that. But the story he’d told him was one that put Haydn himself in a bad light – or would, one day. So if it wasn’t about power, what else could it be about? Was it money?
For all the wrong reasons – involving Soho clubs and drug dealers – Lucien had made some quite good connections in the murkier fringes of the City. He texted Charmian Locke, a school friend from many years ago who he had heard was currently working at one of the larger merchant banks, and arranged a clandestine meeting for the following evening. Both would probably be pretty pissed by then, Lucien thought, but he prided himself on being able to hold his drink. He would remember everything that was said.
3
Monday, 18 September
Referendum Day Minus Three
Who is Alois Haydn?
The cool of the Monday morning had lifted. A cloudless sky, and eye-scorching brightness, reflected from top-floor windows across the capital. A body had been deposited in the mortuary reserved for suspicious deaths. The pavement had already been cleaned, the police tape removed, and commuters were now passing heedlessly over the spot at which a young journalist had died. A mile or so to the west, almost equally invisible, a perfectly groomed little man was gliding purposefully along Piccadilly, his tiny feet barely touching the pavement.
It was once said of Josef Stalin, no less, that during his rise to power he was like a grey blur, always in the background, never quite in focus. Alois Haydn had the same talent. Somehow, one never looked at him closely. No matter how hard you tried, you could never remember his face, even after a difficult meeting. If he ever threw a shadow, it was a thin, vaporous one. This morning he was on his way to an important meeting with the executive members of a somewhat mysterious company, Professional Logistical Services, or ‘PLS’.
Alois Haydn’s name had been on the lists of the Most Influential Britons for more than a decade. All the political parties paid him court. His summer parties in Oxfordshire attracted ministers, celebrities and intellectuals alike. By the lake and in the marquee, prize-winning novelists and rising politicians mingled: the Lucasian professor could be found deep in conversation with the Eton-educated star of a hit American TV series; Prince Andrew and the crop-haired, boyish editor of the Guardian might be seen sitting at the same table. To receive one’s invitation, a month ahead of the event, had become part of Britain’s unofficial honours system, on a par with appearing on Desert Island Discs, being lampooned on the cover of Private Eye or speaking at Davos. Ordinary snappers clustered at the gate to capture the arrivals; a royal-connected fashion photographer took informal pictures inside the grounds.
Yet the host, Alois Haydn, was rarely photographed. Gatsby-like, he was little more than a linen suit glimpsed in the background shadows. And this year, to widespread disappointment, the party had been cancelled. Haydn had moved his home from the Cotswolds, rural heartland of the English establishment, to the Essex coast, on the edge of the island, where he was building a new house. The symbolism was much commented on.
Having bought Rocks Point, an elegant Victorian seaside mansion perched on a spit of sandy soil, Haydn had caused local uproar by demolishing the whole building, from its brick turrets and fancy battlements to its sprawling stables and wrought-iron greenhouses. In its place there had arisen a bleak outcrop of cubes, pyramids and mushrooms, as if a shoddily constructed alien spacecraft had crash landed on the site. Intriguingly, it was just a few miles from Olivia Kite’s Danskin House.
There was a lot of snooping. Mini-drones, tiny helicopters equipped with cameras and microphones, had just begun to be used by the mainstream media. Wildfowling in the marshes had long been a local tradition, so Haydn invited friends from London, county types and shadowy Eastern Europeans alike, for the shooting. Again and again they brought down the drones. Website owners were outraged. Lawyers rubbed their hands.
He could afford that: Haydn Communications had smashed through the old world of gentlemanly corporate public relations back in the 1980s, not long after Nigel Lawson had smashed up the cosy old world of the City: one of Alois’s big breaks had come from the privatisation of British Gas. His early years were lost in mystery, but he appeared to be a member of a famous family. His much older sister Camille Haydn had won the Turner Prize with her installation on the history of female sexuality, and his much younger brother Liddell Haydn was the eponymous creator of the successful TV production company. Haydn himself was of almost Middle Eastern appearance, and some said he had been plucked from a children’s home – there were no pictures of him from his early childhood. But he never spoke of such things, either to friends or in public.
Haydn’s bride, the daughter of the radical Tory peer and landowner Lord Mortlake, had brought him modest inherited wealth and an entrée to the highest levels of the Conservative Party. The wealth and the contacts lingered on after the dissolution of the marriage when Alois came out. He was now in a civil partnership with the Indian short-story writer Ajit Gupta. It was often stated by those who claimed to know that Haydn was ‘more New Labour than anything’, and he had certainly prospered under Tony Blair. He had given Tony, Cherie and the children the use of his holiday villa in Umbria, and had been pictured playing tennis with Tony at Chequers. Peter Mandelson was said to have him on speed dial.
Alois Haydn was, it seems, a hard man to pin down, and a hard man to describe. On this particular morning, walking past the Ritz in the late-summer sunlight, he was on his way to meet a roomful of people who prided themselves on being good observers – some of them professionally so. What might they have noted down?
They would have reported that Haydn was a man of something below middle height, and of average weight, and of middling years. His hair was hazel, and slightly curled. His face was olive-shaped and avocado-coloured, with dark, sunken eyes like two soft dates. He could almost have been Indian. His suit was Ozwald Boateng, and his shoes were Italian brogues. He wore a light-grey silk tie over a cream shirt, and his nails appeared to have been varnished. His views? Unfathomable. His educational background? Unknown. His psychological drive? Hush. He carried a small leather bag neatly in both hands, and he walked so lightly it was almost as if he were being blown gently along by the wind.
