House of Cards (19 page)

He thrust her violently backwards, and she fell heavily into a table laden with glasses before sprawling back onto the sofa. The crash of glass onto the floor stopped all conversation in the room as everyone looked round. Three more buttons had gone, and her left breast stood exposed amidst the torn silk.

There was absolute silence as O'Neill stumbled towards the door, pushing still more people out of the way as he tumbled into the night. The young girl clutched at her tattered clothing and was fi
ghting back the tears of humili
ation as he disappeared. An elderly guest was helping her rearrange herself and shepherding her towards the bathroom and, as the bathroom door shut behind the two women, a ripple of speculation began which quickly grew into a broad sea of gossip, washing backwards and forwards over the gathering. It would go on all evening. - Penny Guy did not join in the gossip. A moment before she had been laughing merrily, thoroughly enjoying the engaging wit and Merseyside charm of Patrick Woolton. Urquhart had introduced them more than an hour earlier, and had ensured that the champagne flowed as easily as their conversation. But the magic had been smashed with the uproar. As Penny had taken in O'Neill's stumbling departure, the sobbing girl's dishevelled clothing and the ensuing speculation and chatter, her face had dissolved into a picture of misery. She fought a losing battle to control the tears which had welled up and spilled down her cheeks and, although Woolton provided a large handkerchief and considerable support, the pain in Penny's face was all too real.

H
e really is
kind.
Very considerate,' she explained. 'But sometimes it all seems to get too much for him and he goes a little crazy. It's so out of character.' She pleaded for him, and the tears flowed still faster.

'Penny. I'm so sorry, dear. Look, you need to get out of this party. My bungalow's next door. Let's go and dry you off there, OK?'

She nodded in gratitude, and the couple squeezed their way through the crowd. No one seemed to notice as they eased their way out of the room, except Urquhart. His cold blue eyes followed them through the door where Landless and O'Neill had gone before. This was certainly going to be a party to remember, he told himself.

THURSDAY 14
th
OCTOBER

‘
You're not going to make a bloody habit of getting me out of bed every morning, are you?' Even down the telephone line, Preston made it clear that this was an instruction, not a question.

Mattie felt even worse than she had the previous morning after several hours of alcoholic flagellation with Charles Collingridge who was clearly determined to prove his doctor hopelessly wrong. Now she was having great difficulty grasping what on earth was going on.

Hell, Grev. I go to bed thinking I want to kill you because you won't run the story, and I wake up this morning and find a bastardised version all over the front page with a by-line by someone called "Our Political Staff". Now I
know
I want to kill you, but first I want to find out why you are screwing around with my story. Why did you change your mind? Who's rewritten my story, and who the hell is "Our Political Staff" if it's not me?'

'Steady on, Mattie. Just take a breath and let me explain. If only you had been around when I tried to call you last night and not flashing your eyes at some eligible peer or whatever it is you were doing, then you would have known all about it before it happened.'

Mattie began vaguely to recall the events of last night through the haze, and her pause to persuade her memory to catch up with itself gave Preston time to continue. He began to search for his words carefully.

'As I think Krajewski may have told you, last night some of the editorial staff here didn't believe there was enough substantiation of your piece on the opinion polls for it to run today.'

He heard Mattie snort at the clumsy twisting of the tale, but knew he must press on or he would never get the chance to finish the justification.

'Frankly, I liked the piece and wanted to make it work, but I thought we needed more corroboration before we tore the country's Prime Minister apart on the day of an important by-election. A single anonymous piece of paper wasn't enough.'

'I didn't tear the Prime Minister apart, you did!' Mattie wanted to interject, but Preston rode through her objections.

'So I had a chat with some of my senior contacts in the Party, and late last night we got the corroboration we wanted just before our deadline. The copy needed to be adapted to take account of the new material and I tried to reach you but couldn't, so I rewrote it myself. I refused to let anyone else touch it, your material is too good. So "Our Political Staff" in this instance is me.'

'But that's not the story I sent in. I wrote a piece about a terrible opinion poll and t
he difficult days the Party was
facing. You've turned it into the outright crucifixion of Collingridge. These quotes from "leading party sources", these criticisms and condemnations. Who else do you have working in Bournemouth apart from me?'

'My sources are my own business,' snapped Preston.

'Bullshit, Grev. I'm supposed to be your political correspondent at this bloody conference, you can't keep me in the dark like this. The paper's done a complete somersault over my story and another complete somersault over Collingridge. A few weeks ago he was the saviour of the nation as far as you were concerned, now he's - what does it say? - "a catastrophe threatening to engulf the Government at any moment". I shall be about as popular as a witch's armpit around the conference hall this morning. You've got to tell me what's going on!'

Preston, his carefully prepared explanation already in tatters, retreated into aggression and pomposity.

'As editor I am not in the dubious position of having to justify myself to every cub reporter stuck out in the provinces. You do as you're told, I do as I'm told, and we both get on with the job. All right?'

Mattie was just about to ask him who the hell it was who could tell the editor what to do when she heard the line go dead. She shook her head in amazement and fury. She couldn't and wouldn't take much more of this. Far from having new doors open up to her, she was finding her fingers getting caught as her editor kept slamming the doors shut. And who else had he got ferreting away at the conference?

It was a good thirty minutes later as she was trying to clear her thoughts and calm her temper with yet another cup of coffee in the breakfast room when she saw the vast bulk of Benjamin Landless lumbering across to a Window table for a chat with Lord Peterson, the party treasurer. As the proprietor settled his girth into a completely inadequate chair, Mattie wrinkled her nose. She didn't care for what she smelt.

The Prime Minister's political secretary winced. For the third time the press secretary had thrust the morning newspaper across the table at him, for the third time he tried to thrust it away. He knew how St Peter must have felt.

'For God's sake, Grahame.' The press secretary was raising his voice now; the game of ping-pong with the newspaper was irritating him. 'We can't hide every damned copy of the
Telegraph
in Bournemouth. He's got to know, and you've got to show it to him. Now!'

'Why did it have to be today?' he groaned. 'A by-election just down the road, and we've been up all night finishing his speech for tomorrow. Now hell want to rewrite the whole thing and where are we going to find the time? He
’
ll blow a bloody gasket, and that won't help the by-election or the speech either.'

He slammed his briefcase shut in uncharacteristic frustration. 'All the pressure of the last few weeks, and now this. There just, doesn't seem to be any break, does there?'

His companion chose not to answer, preferring to study the view out of the hotel window across the bay. It was raining again.

The political secretary picked up the newspaper, rolled it up tight, and threw it across the room. It landed with a crash in the waste bin, overturning it and strewing the contents across the carpet. The discarded pages of speech draft mixed with cigarette ash and several empty cans of beer and tomato juice.

I’ll
tell him after breakfast.'

It was not to be his best decision.

Henry Collingridge was in a good mood and enjoying his eggs. He had finished his conference speech in the early hours of the morning, and had left his staff to tidy it up and have it typed while he went to bed. He had slept soundly if briefly for the first time during conference week.

The end-of-conference speech always hung over his head like a dark cloud. He disliked conferences and the small talk, the week away from home, the over-indulgence around the dinner tables - and the speech. Most of all the speech. Long hours of anguished discussion in a smoke-filled hotel room, breaking off just when progress seemed in sight in order to attend some ball-breaking function or reception, resuming a considerable time later and trying to pick up where they had left off, only more tired and less inspired. If the speech was good, it was only what they expected and required. If it was poor, they still applauded but said the strain of office was beginning to show. Sod's Law.

But it was now almost over, bar the delivery. The Prime Minister was enjoying breakfast with his wife, watched carefully from surrounding tables by his personal Special

Branch detectives. He was discussing the merits of a winter holiday in Antigua or Sri Lanka.

‘I
would recommend Sri Lanka this year
’
he said.
‘
You can stay on the beach if you want, Sarah, but I would rather like to take a couple of trips into the mountains. They have some ancient Buddhist monasteries and some nearby wildlife reserves which are supposed to be quite spectacular. The Sri Lankan President was describing them to me last year, and they sounded really
...
Darling, you're not listening!'

'Sorry, Henry. I was
...
just looking at that gentleman's newspaper.'

'More interesting than me, is it? What's it got to say, then?'

He began to feel ill at ease, remembering that no one had yet given him his daily press cuttings. Someone would surely have told him had there been anything that important.

Come to think of it, he had never felt comfortable since his staff had persuaded him that he didn't need to spend his time reading the daily newspapers, that an edited summary of press clippings prepared by them would be more efficient. But were they? Civil servants had their own narrow views on what was important for a Prime Minister's day, and he found increasingly that their briefing on party political matters was scant. Particularly when there was bad news, the controversy and the in-fighting, he often had to find out from others, sometimes days or weeks after the event. He began to wonder if eventually he would never find out at all, and some great political crisis would burst upon the Party about which he was kept blissfully unaware. They were trying to protect him, of course, but the cocoon they spun around him would, he feared, eventually stifle him.

He remembered the first time he had stepped inside 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. He had left the crowds and the television crews outside and, as the great black door closed behind him, he had discovered an extraordinary sight.

On one side of the great hallway leading away from the door had gathered some 200 civil servants,
his
civil servants now, who were applauding him loudly - just as they had done Thatcher, Callaghan, Wilson and Heath, and just as they would his successor. On the other side of the hallway facing the host of civil servants stood his political staff, the team of loyal supporters he had hurriedly assembled around him as his campaign to succeed Margaret Thatcher had begun to take off, and whom he had invited to Downing Street to enjoy this historic moment. There were just seven of them, four assistants and three secretaries, dwarfed in their new surroundings.

He told his wife afterwards that it was rather like the Eton Wall Game, with two hugely unequal sides lined up to do battle, with no clear rules and with him cast as both the ball and the prize. He had felt almost relieved when three senior civil servants called an end to the proceedings by physically surrounding him and guiding him off to the Cabinet Room for his first Prime Ministerial briefing. One of the party officials present had described it more as an Assumption, with the Prime Minister disappearing into a different world surrounded by a band of guardian angels -Civil Service, Grade
1
,
Prime Ministers, for the Protection and Guidance Thereof: Exclusive. His party officials had scarcely seen him for the next six months as they were effectively squeezed out by the official machine, and none of the original band was still left.

Collingridge's attention returned to the newspaper being read at the far-off breakfast table. At such a distance he had great difficulty in bringing it fully into focus, and he fumbled for his glasses, perching them on the end of his nose and trying not to stare too hard. He found his air of studied indifference difficult to maintain as the large headline print came into focus.

‘P
oll crisis
hits Government', it screamed. P
M's future in doubt as personal slump hits party'. 'By-election disaster feared'. And this in what was supposed to be the most loyal of newspapers.