In The Presence Of The Enemy (73 page)

The Prime Minister had given his from-the-steps-of-Number-Ten acceptance of her resignation shortly after noon, looking solemn and mouthing all the appropriate sentiments of a man obliged to toe-dance between the opprobrium expected from one who had hung his hat on the peg of A Recommitment to Basic British Values and the acknowledgement required from a fellow Tory to an esteemed Junior Minister who had served him tirelessly and with distinction. The PM managed to strike the right note of regret while simultaneously distancing himself from her. He had, after all, fairly decent speech writers. Four hours later, Colonel Woodward had spoken from the front door of the Constituency Association office. His words had been terse but eminently suitable for the nightly news sound bite: “We elected her; we’re keeping her. For now.” And ever since those two oracles had decreed her fate, the reporters had been hungry to record her reaction, in words or in pictures. Either would do.

She didn’t ask the constable at the wheel of the Golf if the reporters knew that Dennis Luxford had been inside Scotland Yard to meet with her. At this point it didn’t make much difference. Her connection to Luxford had become old news the moment Luxford’s tabloid had printed it for public consumption. The only matter that now counted with the reporters was the acquisition of a fresh angle on her story. Luxford had scooped every paper in London, and there wasn’t an editor from Kensington to the Isle of Dogs who wasn’t sledgehammering his staff into remembering that fact. So from this moment until the next news sensation seized the public’s fancy, reporters would hound her for some new twist they could use to sell their papers. She could try to outwit them, but she couldn’t hope that they would show her any mercy.

They had plenty for tomorrow, courtesy of both the Prime Minister and her Constituency Association Chairman. They had enough to make their current pursuit of her very nearly superf luous. But there was always the chance of something more delectable falling their way. And by God they weren’t going to miss an opportunity to shovel another mound of dirt onto her grave.

The constable continued his attempts to elude pursuit. His mastery of the streets of Westminster was so absolute that Eve wondered if he’d done previous duty as a London cabbie. But he was still no match for the fourth estate. When it became apparent that, however circuitously, he was heading for Marylebone, the newshounds merely phoned their colleagues who’d been loitering round Devonshire Place Mews. When Eve and the Golf finally made the right turn off Marylebone High Street, they were awaited by a phalanx of camera-toting, notebook-wielding, and otherwise shouting individuals.

Eve had always given the appropriate amount of lip-service to the Royal Family. She was a Tory, so it was expected of her. But despite her inner and unspoken certainty that they were nothing more than a brainless drain on the economy, she found herself wishing that one of them—any of them, it didn’t even matter who—had done something this day to merit the rabid attention of the press. Anything to get them off her own back.

The mews was still blocked off, manned by a constable who was ensuring that her home was still off limits. Despite her resignation and no matter what came of that resignation in the next few days, the mews would stay blocked off until the furor died down. She had Sir Richard Hepton’s promise of that much. “I don’t throw my own to the wolves,” he’d said.

No. He just threw them in the general vicinity of the wolves, Eve concluded. But that was politics.

Her driver asked if she wanted him to come inside the house with her.
To secure the premises
was the expression he used. She told him such security wasn’t required. Her husband was waiting for her. No doubt he’d already heard the worst. She wanted only privacy.

She heard the cameras shooting off their rapid-fi re pictures as she ducked from the car to her doorway. The reporters were shouting from behind the barrier, but their questions were yammered against a backdrop of traffi c from the high street and the noise from the outdoor boozers swilling their beers at the Devonshire Arms. She ignored it all. And once she closed the front door behind her, she couldn’t really hear it either.

She shot the bolts home. She called out,

“Alex?” and went to the kitchen. Her watch gave the time as 5:28, post-tea, pre-dinner.

But there was no sign of either meal having been consumed or prepared. It didn’t matter terribly much to her. She wasn’t hungry.

She climbed the stairs to the fi rst fl oor. By her count, she’d been wearing the same clothes for eighteen hours now, since leaving the house the previous night for her barren attempt to fend off disaster. She could feel the clammy touch of her dress cradling her armpits, and her underpants clung damply to her crotch like an inebriate’s palm. She wanted a bath, a long, hot soak in a tub with scented oil and a beauty mask to scrape the fi lth from her skin. After that she wanted a glass of wine.

She wanted it white and chilled with a musky aftertaste that would remind her of bread-and-cheese picnics in France.

Perhaps that’s where they’d go, until things died down and she was no longer the Fleet Street scandalmongers’ fl avour-of-the-month.

They would fly to Paris and hire a car. She would lean back in her seat and close her eyes and let Alex drive her wherever he wished. It would be good to get away.

In their bedroom, she stepped out of her shoes. She called, “Alex?” again, but only silence answered. Beginning to unbutton her dress, she went back to the corridor and called his name again. Then she remembered the time and realised he’d be at one of his restaurants, where he usually was in the afternoon.

She herself was never home at this hour.

Doubtless the house, which seemed so preter-naturally quiet, was really quite in order. Still, the air seemed hushed, the rooms seemed so breathlessly waiting for her to discover…what?

she wondered. And why did she feel such a certainty that something was wrong?

It was nerves, she thought. She’d been through hell. She needed that bath. She needed that drink.

She stepped out of her dress, left it in a lump on the floor, and went to the cupboard for her dressing gown. She pulled open the doors.

And there it was. She saw what the silence had been trying to tell her.

His clothes were gone: every shirt, every suit, every pair of trousers and shoes. They were so thoroughly gone that not a single wisp of slut’s wool had been left behind to give evidence that someone had once used this length of now-empty rod, this line of shelves, and this wooden tree to store garments and shoes.

The chest of drawers was the same. As were the bedside table and, in the bathroom, the vanity and the medicine cabinet. She couldn’t imagine how long it had taken him to remove every vestige of himself from the house. But that’s exactly what her husband had done.

She made certain of this by checking the study, the sitting room, and the kitchen. But everything that had marked his presence in the house—as well as in her life—was gone.

She thought, Bastard,
bastard
. He’d chosen his moment so well. What better means of driving the sword through her flesh than to wait until he could make her public humilia-tion complete. There was no doubt that those carrion eaters waiting on Marylebone High Street had seen him leaving, Volvo packed to the bursting point. And now they were waiting to record her reaction to this fi nal moment of her life’s obliteration.

Bastard, she thought again. The fi lthy bastard. He’d taken the easy course, slinking out of here like a puling adolescent when she wasn’t around to ask any questions or demand replies. It had been simple for him: Just pack up, go, and leave her to face the chorus of questions. She could hear them now: Is this a formal separation? Is your husband’s leaving related in any way to this morning’s revelations by Dennis Luxford? Was he aware of your affair with Mr. Luxford prior to the story in today’s
Source?
Has your stand on the sanctity of marriage altered in the past twelve hours? Is divorce in the offing? Have you any statement at all that you’d like to make in regards to—

Oh yes, Eve thought. She had plenty of statements. She just wouldn’t be making them to the press.

She went back to the bedroom and hurriedly dressed. She applied fresh lipstick. She combed her hair and smoothed her fingers over her eyebrows. She went to the kitchen where the calendar hung. She read the word
Sceptre
on Wednesday’s square in Alex’s neat hand. How propitious, she thought. The restaurant was in Mayfair, less than ten minutes by car.

She saw the reporters snap to attention behind the police barrier when she pulled her car out of the garage. There was a general scramble among them as those with vehicles in the vicinity made a race for them to follow her. At the barrier, the constable leaned into her car and said, “Not a good plan to set out alone, Ms. Bowen. I can have someone here in—”

“Move the sawhorse,” she told him.

“This lot’s going to be on your tail like mad hornets.”

“Move the sawhorse,” she repeated. “Move it now.”

His look said
bloody stupid bitch
, but his mouth said, “Right.” And he swung aside the wooden barrier to give her access to Marylebone High Street. She gunned her car through a fast left turn and sped in the direction of Berkeley Square. Sceptre was tucked away at the corner of a cobblestone mews just southwest of the square. It was a handsome building of brick and vines with a profusion of lush tropical plants in the entry.

Eve arrived well in advance of the reporters, who’d had the disadvantage of consuming time in scuttling for their cars and adhering to the rules of the road, which she herself had ignored. The restaurant wasn’t open for business yet, but she knew that the kitchen staff had probably been there since two and before.

Alex would be among them. She went to the side door and rapped on it sharply with her brass key ring. She was inside the dry storage room, face-to-face with the pastry chef, before the trailing reporters were even out of their vehicles.

“Where is he?” she asked.

The pastry chef said, “Working on a new aioli. We’ve a swordfish special tonight, and he—”

“Spare me the details,” Eve said. She brushed past him and went to the kitchen, past the enormous refrigerators and the open-fronted cabinets where the pots and pans shimmered in the bright overhead lights.

Alex and his head chef were at a work top, conversing over a mound of minced garlic, a bottle of olive oil, a heap of chopped olives, a bouquet of cilantro, and a currently untouched collection of tomatoes, onions, and red chilis.

Round them, the preparations for the evening’s dinner were in full swing as assistants made soup, prepared the night’s starters, and washed everything from arugula to radicchio.

The mixture of scents would have been intoxicating had she been hungry. But food was the last thing on her mind.

She said, “Alex.”

He looked up.

She said, “I want a word.” She was aware of an instant’s hush after she spoke, but it was followed by the kitchen noise rising again with pot-banging determination. She waited for him to play the puling adolescent a second time in twenty-four hours: “Can’t you see I’m busy? This will have to wait.” But he didn’t do that. He merely said to his chef, “We need to get our hands on some nopalitos before tomorrow,” and then to Eve, “The offi ce.”

A bookkeeper was seated in the offi ce’s only chair. At a desk she was dealing with a mound of bills. She appeared to be in the midst of arranging them into some sort of order, and she looked up when Alex opened the door.

She said, “I swear we’ve been overcharged again from that stall in Smithfield, Alex. We need to change suppliers or do something to—” She suddenly seemed to register the fact that Eve was standing behind her husband.

She lowered the account she’d been referring to and looked round the room as if seeking a place to which she could retreat.

Alex said, “Five minutes, Jill. If you wouldn’t mind.”

She said, “I’ve been longing for a cup of tea.” She got to her feet and hurried past them.

Eve noted that the other woman didn’t look her in the eye.

Alex shut the door. Eve had expected him to appear mortifi ed, embarrassed, regretful, or even belligerent. She didn’t expect to fi nd on his face a bleak desolation that lined it deeply.

She said, “Explain yourself.”

“What would you like me to say?”

“I wouldn’t
like
you to say anything in particular. I want to know what’s going on. I want to know why. I think you owe me that much.”

“You’ve been home, then.”

“Of course I’ve been home. What did you think? Or did you expect the reporters to be the ones to inform me my husband has left me? I take it you managed the move right in their view?”

“I did most last night. The rest this morning. The reporters weren’t there yet.”

“Where are you staying?”

“That isn’t important.”

“Isn’t it? Why?” She looked towards the door. She recalled the expression that had crossed the bookkeeper’s face when she’d seen her standing behind Alex in the corridor.

What had it been? Alarm? Dismay? Cat with the canary? What? She said, “Who is she?”

Wearily, Alex closed his eyes. It seemed a struggle for him to open them again. “That’s what you think this is all about? Another woman?”

“I’m here to understand what this is about.”

“I can see that. But I don’t know if I can explain it to you. No, that’s not true. I can explain. I can explain and explain right into tomorrow, if that’s what you want me to do.”

“It’s a start.”

“But the end of my explaining will be the beginning of it. You won’t understand. So it’s better for both of us to walk away from each other, to cut our losses and spare each other the worst.”

“You want a divorce. That’s it, isn’t it? No.

Wait. Don’t answer yet. I want to make certain I understand.” She walked to the desk, placed her bag upon it, and turned to face him. He stayed where he was by the door.

“I’ve just passed through the worst week of my life, with more to come. I’ve been asked to stand down from the Government. I’ve been told to vacate my parliamentary seat at the next election. My personal history is in the process of being smeared all over the national tabloids. And you want a divorce.”