More Than Love Letters (22 page)

It was easy enough down in Hampshire to pretend nothing had happened, but it had to come to an end. I had school today and he had to go back and face the music at Westminster. And now . . . well, of course I need to stay out of his way. What he needs is to just let it die down, and if the press saw me anywhere near him it would kick everything off again. But it’s bloody difficult, knowing he’s down in London fighting for his job, with the vultures probably camping outside his flat, and me here unable to do anything to help. And you are right, I know, Becs – why would he want any more ‘help’ from me, anyway, when I’ve lost him his good name and quite possibly his career? But I’ve got far too much time to think. To think about the people who would print those poisonous slanders, with no regard for Richard’s feelings, still less for the truth. Apparently they did try to ring him for a comment before they went to press, but having only got his voicemail they decided in line with proud Docklands tradition to go ahead and print it regardless.

Tonight, just to complete my cheerful day, I went to visit Helen, who has finally caved in and gone into hospital full-time for a spell. She is in a ward with five other beds, and although it’s meant to be an acute ward, not the chronic long-stay patients, some of the others looked pretty far gone, to be honest. God, those places are depressing – I think being in psychiatric hospital might be my worst nightmare. Helen looked different, somehow, even after just these few days. More detached. Maybe in less actual mental pain, but still, more . . . hopeless, though I would have found that hard to believe possible. I suppose they have increased her levels of medication, though she didn’t seem to know exactly. The patients don’t have responsibility for their own medication, the staff just come round with it twice a day, and it’s little cups of liquid, not tablets. I suppose it’s so no one can secrete them away to avoid taking them, or else stockpile them with a view to sale, trade or overdose. They must have to tell people exactly what they are on, if they ask, but I expect not many of them do. Helen is in no state to care about it. I might ask for her, but I expect they would refuse to tell me anything, since I’m not next of kin.

I’m sorry about Gil/Bill/Will. ‘Threnodial dirges’ are worth a 6.5, but you could have had bonus points if you’d thrown in a coronach or a jeremiad. They would all suit my present mood perfectly.

Love,

Margaret xxx

 

 

Flat 6
14 Charterhouse Square
London EC1 9BL

28 June 2005

Dear Mum,

I have been picking up the phone and putting it down again all morning, wanting to call you, and in the end I have chickened out, and am writing this letter instead. I know we haven’t spoken in a while, but I needed you to know it isn’t true, what it said in the paper. I know it doesn’t look good, but she isn’t a prostitute, in fact she’s a primary school teacher, and her name is Margaret, and I haven’t even kissed her yet, and I don’t know if I ever will. But I do know that she would want me to tell you, so that you don’t go on believing the press stories.

I know it was hard for you after Dad died, but it was hard for me too, and if you could have talked to me, tried to explain why I had to go to Aunty Sylvia’s, I might have understood. I wasn’t a little kid any more, I was fourteen. It was never the same after that; I was never sure when I came back home if it really was home any more. And I do think that somehow we could have found a way to keep Napoleon. But I love you, Mum, even if I never say it.

Richard.

 

 

From:
Richard Slater [[email protected]]
Sent:
29/6/05 22:55
To:
Michael Carragan [[email protected]]

 

Hi Michael,

Sorry I haven’t been in touch sooner, but I’ve just been keeping my head down completely for a while. I’ve had my phone off the hook, and the tabloid militia have been encamped outside both the flat and the office. Every time I open my door it’s like that scene out of
Notting Hill
where Hugh Grant is in his boxers and gets blinded by all the flash bulbs. (Or was it the Welsh room-mate? And a towel? I forget.) I did escape briefly on Monday to go and be mauled by the Rottweiler. It wasn’t an experience I’d wish to repeat. You were quite right – where bad press is concerned he doesn’t distinguish much between the deserved and the undeserved. He made it quite plain that being caught in a clinch with a girl – any girl – in spike heels and feathers on a notorious pick-up strip is not behaviour conducive to winning favour and influence with him. But, against all the odds, he is letting me keep my job at CM&S – at least for the moment. My penance is an Our Father and three Hail Marys, to be offered up to my constituency chairman next week. Nothing to the press except that simple statement of denial that went out yesterday, which his office drafted for me, and then heads down and try to ride out the storm. No explanations, no details, and definitely no interviews – he was quite emphatic on that last point, clearly doesn’t trust me within half a bar’s length of a journalist. The dirt might stick to me for a while, but that is evidently of no great concern (I can always be quietly reshuffled back into the outer darkness at a convenient later date), and seemingly it’s better than the messier and more long-lived furore that would surround either my resignation or any attempt to tell the real story publicly. At least it means I don’t have to drag Margaret into it – she can be spared that. Characteristically, she of course wanted to take up pen and paper at once (this being her answer to everything) in order to clear my name in the eyes of the world in general, beginning with the ROTW and working methodically downwards. I managed to convince her that it would be a waste both of her time and (more important, in her view) of paper, since at No. 10 the appearance of sin in the national print media is viewed as no less reprehensible than the sin itself. It clearly sits most uneasily with Margaret’s scorching sense of justice, but in the end I persuaded her that the best thing is for us both to keep quiet and lie low for a while. Anyway, I’d love to take you up on that drink, Mike, but at the moment we’d be like goldfish in a bowl, and I’m not sure I want to be branded with dipsomania on top of my other vices.

When the article first came out, Margaret and I sought temporary asylum at her gran’s near Winchester, just until Sunday night. She’s sweet, the gran, but she doesn’t miss a trick. And the pair of them are great together. There’s a real warmth – I could have settled into it very comfortably, stayed all week and pretended everything was all right. Margaret had nothing to wear, so I lent her some jeans of mine and a belt. Why is it so unbearably sexy when a girl wears your clothes? Then on Sunday we dug out some old clothes of her gran’s, and she chose a 1960s summer dress, blue rosebuds on a creamy white background, and because she’s taller than her gran it showed a curved sweep of calf. It’s funny – when she had it on she suddenly struck me differently. Fresh and lovely and wholesome, like something from a more innocent age – Elizabeth Montgomery in ‘Bewitched’, or Jackie Kennedy in those home movies of her with the kids, before the assassination. And I thought how much Margaret is all of those things all of the time, actually. I told her the dress suited her, and then felt how inadequate that was to express what I really meant.

Then of course she had to go back to school on Monday. I know she’ll have had some explaining to do, though she laughs and plays it down – how can I have got her into this mess? And now of course I can’t see her, can’t go to Ipswich and meet her after school, and risk leading the wolf pack to her door. I’ve called her a few times, but I never know what to say. God, Mike, this is absolute torture!

Richard.

 

 

From:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent:
30/6/05 21:53
To:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]

I’ve been thinking about it, Margaret, and looking at the pictures again, and whichever way you look at it, it’s hard to avoid one conclusion. Men (and news editors in particular) are just plain peculiar.

Feathers, well OK, just maybe. But even at telephoto range, and reproduced in grainy newsprint, I can make out distinct traces of chicken wire and papier mâché.

Love and hugs,

Becs xx

 

 

From:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]
Sent:
30/6/05 22:19
To:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]

 

Dear Becs,

Sadly, I fear it may not be that implausible. Remember that girl at college, Nicole, the one doing the M.Sc. in sedimentology? She was once waiting for a taxi in the city centre after coming back late from doing fieldwork, measuring silt deposits over at the reservoir. Half of it was still adhering to her oilskins and waders, but some chancer pulled over and asked her if she was doing business. Clearly mistook her for a specialist of some sort. And it’s only a short step from rubber to bird-fancying, I’d say.

Love,

Margaret x

42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
Suffolk IP3 2DA

The Today Programme
BBC Radio 4
Television Centre
Wood Lane
London W12 7RJ

1 July 2005

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about the way in which tabloid news stories are occasionally taken up and discussed on the Today programme as if they were established fact.

Repeating unsubstantiated allegations which have been made in tabloid newspapers, under the guise of reporting upon the political fall-out from those stories, is poor journalism, and unworthy of a public service broadcaster with the (usually deserved) reputation of the BBC. You are only encouraging the printing of these scurrilous and ill-researched pieces, by giving the papers concerned extra publicity. These people do not care whose lives they ruin – and you are making yourselves complicit in the damage they cause.

Yours faithfully,

Margaret Hayton.

 

PS. I still think that John Humphrys does a marvellous job.

From:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent:
4/7/05 21:40
To:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]

 

Jeez, what a day, Margaret! In a misguided moment of cultural head-rush a couple of weeks ago, the head declared today to be Music Monday, and all the kids were invited to bring in musical instruments from home. Now, if this were Chorlton-cum-Hardy, we’d have had guitars, a smattering of assorted woodwind, and perhaps even an ABIE mum who’s a concert violinist showing up with a Stradivarius under her arm in lieu of egg-boxes. All very nice and civilised. But not so at Brunswick Road, oh no.

We did get a sitar and a pair of clay ghatams, and luckily I had laid in a more indigenously British supply of combs and greaseproof paper, and some rice and empty Pringles tubes for making impromptu shakers. But it appears that the main recourse for infant music-makers in the homes of Moss Side is a distinctive form of battery-operated plastic keyboard. Between them my class brought in nine of them. Approximately fifty centimetres in length, they are preprogrammed to play a medley of the first lines of various well-known nursery rhymes and cheesy pop classics, at a frequency precisely calculated to fry the cortex of the human brain, particularly when deployed in an enclosed space, such as a classroom. I suspect that the technology is directly descended from that used by the Kremlin to beam destructive rays at the US embassy in Moscow during the height of the Cold War. To say that I now have a headache is a bit like saying that Joan of Arc felt a mild burning sensation. It is a miracle that I am not yet bleeding from the eyes or ears.

Rather weak and sickly hugs,

Becs x

 

 

From:
Margaret Hayton
[[email protected]]
Sent:
4/7/05 22:06
To:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]

 

Dear Becs,

Poor you – and that on top of the rigours of your self-imposed abstinence. I must say, my lot’s music sessions are surprisingly melodious: I really have nothing to complain about. Except, oddly enough, Jack Caulfield. I mean, you somehow expect blind people’s other senses to be compensatingly finely tuned, don’t you? Like the way impeded sight seems to be
de rigueur
for piano tuners – it’s practically a requirement of the job, I’ve always thought. But in this case, nature has dealt Jack another set of sensorily challenged organs, in the shape of the most solid-rubber of unmusical ears. He’s tone deaf, and has the singing voice of a laryngitic herring gull.

Cora and Persephone are downstairs concocting something that would probably have helped with your head. Apparently Professor Sprout, their herbology teacher, has set them an assignment involving the blending of infusions with supposedly analgesic properties. (OK, so her name is actually Spreight, and anyway, the allusion is lost on Cora. I have yet to set her on to reading Harry Potter.)

Persephone turned up with some lemon verbena which her niece had brought over from Jamaica for her. The niece is nursing in a specialist neonatal unit in London, and Persephone is immensely proud of her, you can tell. She knows that Persephone is fond of Jamaican verbena tea, so she brought some back for her after a recent trip over there. Apparently she just waltzed straight through customs clutching this large polythene bag full of suspicious-looking dried leaves. Persephone says they are so busy treating as putative mass killers anyone with unbarbered facial hair and a Muslim name on their passport that they no longer give a second glance to a black kid with a bag of weed. She admits to quite missing the old familiar days of the tail end of the last century, when even institutional racism seemed to take a simpler and more innocent form!

Meanwhile, I am still keeping away from London and Richard. I stayed here at the weekend, did nothing more about looking for Nas, and nothing to support Richard through his press nightmare. He says they are still hassling him. He plays it down, of course, because he doesn’t want me to feel more guilty than I do already, but I can tell that he’s upset. And I so want to be there with him, even though I know it’s impossible, and would make everything ten times worse. It’s not the same at all to talk on the phone. I get tongue-tied and never seem able to say the things I want to. It’s really killing me!