The Closed Circle (15 page)

“It's all a joke,” said Malvina. (Though not a very funny one, judging from her tone of voice.) “It's all a terrible mistake. What's that song? ‘This Wasn't Supposed to Happen.' Who was that, Björk? That's what it's like, anyway. None of this was supposed to happen. And I'm not his ‘media adviser.' He shouldn't be paying me a penny. I got him on to one quiz show, because I happened to know some sleazebag producer. The rest has just been common sense.”

“Well, that's a pretty precious commodity, as far as Paul's concerned. He certainly hasn't got any of his own. How did it start, though? How did you meet him?”

“Through Benjamin.” She took a drag on the cigarette, rubbed one tired eye with her thumb. “I was staying . . . I was going up to Birmingham . . . pretty regularly . . . staying with friends. I started going to the café in Waterstone's and I kept seeing him there and in the end . . . we just got talking. We started talking about books, and then he told me about this thing he's writing, and I told him about the stuff I write, and . . . He just mentioned one day who his brother was, and . . . I'd seen Paul's picture in the paper, or something . . . seen him on the TV, and . . . I suppose I fancied him a bit even then, already . . . And Benjamin . . . Benjamin kept trying to do things for me . . .
keeps
trying, actually . . . He thinks that if he helps me, he'll . . . Well, I don't know what he thinks. Benjamin seems to be going through a little . . . crisis . . . all of his own.”

“Benjamin's in love with another woman. Has been, sadly, all his married life. Someone he knew at school.”

Malvina's eyes came into focus and she looked directly at Doug, as if this was the first truly interesting thing he'd said all night. “He told you that? He told me that as well.”

“Well, it's no secret, unfortunately. Benjamin was on the rebound when he married Emily. In fact he's still on the rebound. He'll be on the rebound when he's seventy, the poor bastard. If he ever gets that far without topping himself.” He smiled, mirthlessly, knowing at once that he shouldn't have said this. “Go on.”

“So, he offers to introduce me to his brother . . . as some kind of favour. I don't think I even asked him to do that for me. Though I liked the idea, as soon as I heard it. It was to help with my dissertation . . . which I'm still trying to write. Didn't help at all, as it happened. It's held me up, if anything . . . Anyway, so then Paul and I meet, and . . .
bingo
. . .”

She smiled a loopy, embarrassed, what-can-you-do sort of smile. Doug couldn't quite return it.

“I suppose,” said Malvina, working herself up to a seismic declaration, “I suppose I'm in love with him.”

“Shit.”

“Shit. Again. That's turning out to be a pretty useful word tonight, isn't it?” She appeared to have shocked Doug into temporary silence. “I don't suppose you think much of my taste.”

“Hey,” he said. “Everybody's got to love somebody. The heart has its reasons, et cetera, et cetera. And I suppose he's not bad looking.”

“Yeah, but . . . none of you like him, really. Admit it.”

“I don't like his politics, that's all. And I think he's allowed himself to become dishonest, because of this . . . weird situation we've got ourselves into in this country at the moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if the public ever got to hear what he really thinks—well, they'd realize. Because most of them still believe that they've voted in a left-wing party. Whereas really they've just voted for another five years of Thatcherism. Ten years. Fifteen, even.” He laughed quietly at the irony of it, which seemed to pass Malvina by. “Anyway, that's why he never knows what to say when someone puts a microphone in front of his nose. And that's why he needs you. He does. You've transformed him. Turned him around.”

“Oh, he
needs
me all right. He needs my . . .
services.
And he's desperate to sleep with me, into the bargain. But that's not what I want.”

“You want a hell of a lot, actually, don't you?”

Malvina tried to drink from her glass, not noticing that it was empty. “That woman's not good for him. Not right for him. Don't you agree?”

They looked at each other for a few silent seconds.

“I don't have an opinion about that,” said Doug. “And I don't think you should, either.”

He tried to read the expression in her eyes, which seemed blank. Her eyelids were drooping. Then, all at once, he saw tears welling up, and Malvina was quivering with sobs.

“I'm so fucked,” she kept repeating. “I'm so fucked.”

“Malvina . . .”

“You're right. I shouldn't have shown you that story. It was a stupid thing to do.”

“Never mind about the story. The story's . . .”

“Get me another drink.”

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

“One more. Please. Then I'll go home.”

He sighed, and said, against his better judgment: “One more. A single.”

“Thank you. I'm going to pull myself together now.” She took a Kleenex from her handbag, and started dabbing at her eyes and the running mascara.

Doug returned with two more drinks.

“Where are your parents?” he asked.

“My parents? What have they got to do with anything?”

“Maybe you should go home for a bit. Have a break from Paul. Do a bit of thinking.”

“I am having a break from him. We've hardly seen each other in the last couple of weeks.”

“Still. You could probably do with some home comforts.”

Briskly, Malvina said: “One: where my parents live—or rather, where my mother lives, with her fifth or sixth or ninety-seventh or whatever the fuck it is partner—is not my home. Two: there's nothing comfortable about it.”

“Where are they?”

“Sardinia. He runs a hotel there. Five stars—the kind of place movie stars stay. We were staying there ourselves, in fact. That's where she met him.”

“Can't you afford the air fare to get out there?”

“Oh, I dare say he'd pay for that, if necessary. It's his flat—
one
of his flats, I should say—that I'm living in these days, after all. But I'm not going. No fucking way.”

“What about your dad—your real dad?”

Malvina shook her head. “Never met him. All I know about him is what my mother told me. He worked in the theatre: he was a set designer. Complete genius, according to her. They split up even before I was born and then she heard he died of AIDS, some time in the eighties.” Already she had finished the latest whisky. She gave the empty glass a puzzled sort of look, as if she couldn't remember drinking it. “Why am I getting through this stuff so much quicker than you? Are you one of those men who pretends to be drinking but really he's just waiting for the woman to get pissed so he can take advantage of her?”

“I'm not the one who's taking advantage of you.”

She looked at him sharply and he thought, at first, that she was going to start crying again. Instead she slumped across the table and rested her head on his shoulder. He had no idea whether she was being flirtatious or was simply exhausted.

“Malvina . . .” he said. “What do you think you're doing?”

“That,” she murmured, forming each word with a drunkard's care, “is the fifty—million—dollar—question.”

“OK. I'm going to take you home now.”

“Good. You're a gentleman. There are very few of them left.”

He stood up with some difficulty while Malvina continued to lean heavily against him. He grabbed both their coats and then, with his arm around her narrow, almost skeletal shoulders, he did his best to propel her up the stairs. She stumbled at the top and fell flat on her face. Doug picked her up and dusted her down, muttering apologies to the other drinkers and diners and praying that none of his wife's friends were there that night.

Outside, mercifully, he was able to find a taxi within seconds.

“Pimlico,” he told the driver, and once they were sitting inside he managed to prompt Malvina into whispering the full address in his ear.

It was only a five-minute journey. As they climbed out of the taxi Doug looked around to see if the place was being staked out by any journalists: but no, they didn't seem to have reached that stage yet. He paid the driver and gave him an outrageous tip, then draped the now semi-conscious Malvina in her coat and fumbled through the pockets for her keys.

She lived, as he had expected, in a portered and well-heeled mansion block. Doug did his best to avoid the porter's curious eye as he guided her past the desk and towards the stairs. The porter called, “Goodnight, miss!” as they started climbing the first flight, but Malvina didn't answer.

The flat's main room was decorated neutrally, expensively, with only a few of her own books, and some teetering piles of newspapers and magazines, to indicate that they were anywhere other than some bland intercontinental hotel. Malvina was saying nothing by now so Doug had to guess for himself where the bedroom was. It was much smaller, more homely and chaotic. A desk in the corner was submerged beneath papers, floppy disks and a laptop which was still switched on: multicolored cartoon fish were criss-crossing the screen in random formations, with bubbly sound effects.

“You should drink some water,” Doug told her, but in an unannounced and surprisingly violent movement Malvina withdrew her arms from around his neck and threw herself on to the bed. Her eyes were firmly shut and she closed herself into a foetal ball and that was that. She was out for the night.

18

For the next few days, Doug and Frankie had guests at their house.

Malvina phoned him the next morning, to apologize for her behaviour and to thank him for looking after her so kindly. He repeated his suggestion that she should go and stay with someone for a while: what about her friends in Birmingham, for instance? She told him that they didn't live there any more: they had left the country. There was no one, really no one, she felt she could impose upon. So Doug invited her to stay with them. She arrived with a small holdall and stayed for two nights, spending most of the time in the kitchen sipping hot coffee, and watching Ranulph and Coriander wreak their infant havoc. She talked a lot to Irina and the other, more transient members of the Gifford-Anderton staff; less to Doug and Frankie themselves. On the afternoon of Thursday, April 27th, learning that Doug's mother Irene was coming down for the weekend and would ideally like to sleep in her bedroom, she thanked them fulsomely, presented them with a beribboned cellophane package containing twelve absurdly expensive cardamom-scented chocolates from a local shop, and left. She seemed in good spirits. She had not mentioned Paul throughout the whole of her stay.

Doug met his mother at Euston station on the Friday afternoon. It was four weeks since her hip operation and she was determined to show that she could be mobile again. Normally they would have taken the tube back to Chelsea but this time Doug insisted on getting a taxi and she kept a shocked eye on the meter, wincing with alarm every time another pound was clocked up.

“Seventeen pounds!” she repeated, over and over, as Doug carried her case up the garden path. “I used to get a week's family meals out of that when you were at school!”

The preposterous expense of living in this part of London remained, as always, a recurring theme of the weekend. All of the pubs where the elderly locals used to go and drink in familiar surroundings had been tarted up over the last few years, dividing walls smashed down and their interiors turned into vast open-plan spaces where young stockbrokers and estate agents could drink imported Dutch and Belgian beers at four pounds a pint. It was no use taking her to one of those. There remained a handful of unpretentious cafés scattered around the area, serving fry-ups and mugs of instant coffee; but Irene could still surprise him, sometimes, with a sprightly appetite for new experiences, and when she saw that a branch of Starbucks had recently opened on the King's Road, she asked if they could give it a try.

It was Saturday afternoon, one day after a strange and unexpected development in the Longbridge saga: the day before, flying in the face of all predictions (including James Tayler's) Alchemy Partners, without any forewarning or explanation, had pulled out of its negotiations to buy the troubled Rover group from BMW. Workers and campaigners, who had opposed the Alchemy bid from the start, had been jubilant when the news broke: there had been riotous celebrations outside Longbridge's Q gate on the Friday afternoon. Already, however, a new mood of uncertainty had settled in; it was by no means clear that the rival proposals from Phoenix were being taken seriously; and that was now the only other bid on the table. The alternative was simple, and terrifying: outright closure.

There were free copies of some of the day's newspapers scattered around the café, and while Doug queued at the counter, his mother picked up
The Sun
and scowled over its business pages.

“Disgusting rag,” she said, tossing it over to her son as he handed her a mug that was almost too big for her to hold. She gazed at the drink in stupefaction. “What's this?”

“It's a tall latte,” Doug explained.

“Didn't they have any coffee?”

He smiled and started reading the
Sun
's article.

Fifty thousand jobs were doomed last night as all hope of rescuing car firm Rover vanished.
In a day of industrial disaster for Britain, the Alchemy group
SCRAPPED
its deal to take over the company from BMW.

Workers
CHEERED
as the news broke—because they believed the rival Phoenix bid for the firm would resurface, saving more jobs than the Alchemy plan.
But last night the cheers had turned
to tears as the bleak reality sank in at thousands of Midlands homes—
there will be
NO
Rover rescue and many families are set to face life on the
dole.

“What right,” Irene was saying, indignantly, “what right have they got to publish something like that? Nobody knows what's going to happen. What are people's families going to feel when they read that this morning? They have
no right
to say it.” She took the paper back from him and flicked through its front pages, tutting over everything, especially the Page Three girl. “This used to be a socialist paper,” she said. “Until Murdoch got his hands on it. Look at it. It's a disgrace. Soft pornography and . . . tittle-tattle.”

“Spirit of the times, Mum. Spirit of the times.”

“Yes, but you don't write stuff like that, do you? Nobody
has
to write it.”

Doug thought for a moment, then drew closer to her and said: “Can I ask you something, Mum?”

“Of course you can.”

“The thing is—well, I've found something out. Something about a Member of Parliament.”

“Yes?”

“It's to do with his marriage, and sex, and . . . you know, the usual sort of stuff.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I'm not sure if it's big enough to finish off his career—maybe it isn't— but it would certainly do a lot of damage. What do you think I should do?”

Irene said, without hesitation: “Politicians should be judged on their politics. Anything else is just gossip and nonsense.” She pointed at the newspaper lying on the table between them. “You don't want to end up like them, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Anyway. People can be weak, in their personal lives. Especially men. It makes no difference.” Matter-of-factly, she added: “Your father was no saint.”

Doug was amazed. He had never heard her say anything like this before. “What do you mean?”

Irene weighed her words carefully, her fragile hands cradling the enormous coffee mug. “I had a lot to forgive him for. But he was a good man. He had strong principles, and he stuck to most of them. Nobody sticks to them all.” She looked around her and said, brightly: “After all, as socialists, we shouldn't really be drinking in a place like this, should we? Isn't globalization meant to be the new enemy?”

“Apparently,” said Doug. “It's May Day on Monday. There are going to be demonstrations all over London. They'll probably be targeting this place.”

“There you are, you see: the people are on the move again. It was bound to happen, sooner or later. Will you be joining in?”

“Maybe.” He smiled and leaned across to her, squeezing her hand. It lightened his heart to see her looking so well. “How's your coffee, anyway?”

“Delicious. How much did it cost?” And when Doug told her, she said: “I hope they put a big brick through the window.”

In the event, it was not Starbucks that came under attack from the protesters on Monday, but McDonald's: a small branch in Whitehall (a branch that was closed for the day) next to a
bureau de change
which was also smashed up and looted. Until then, the demonstration had been relatively peaceful: although the sight that greeted Doug when he jumped off the bus near Parliament Square was certainly bizarre.

It was not long after midday, and the Square had been taken over by about one thousand protesters. Drums were pounding, people were sitting up trees, and a statue of Winston Churchill had now been augmented by an upturned policeman's hat with a geranium planted in it. As for the Square itself, people had started digging it up, tossing the turf on to the road and embarking upon an impromptu gardening session which involved planting everything from lemon balm and rosemary to sunflower and rhubarb. Doug stood and watched for a while, thinking back to the rally for Longbridge just over a month ago and reflecting that what was happening here was very different in spirit. He moved on when he saw that a maypole was being raised into position and dancing had begun.

He had arranged to meet Paul in the members' lobby at 12:30, but in fact he didn't have to walk that far. He caught sight of him standing on the Green—the ritual gathering-point for representatives of the media who wanted to waylay any passing MPs and solicit their views—sounding off about the May Day protests to a couple of cameramen from Sky News and BBC News 24. Doug hovered in the background until the interview was over (it only took a couple of minutes) and then attracted Paul's attention with a wave.

“Been giving them the benefit of your wisdom, have you?” he asked, as they struck off on foot in the direction of Downing Street, dodging the swelling groups of anarchists, environmentalists and riot police gearing themselves up for a skirmish. “Come on, then: what was your line this time?”

“I told them that these people weren't to be taken seriously. If they want to contribute to the political process, then they have to renounce violence and they have to work within the existing structures.”

“Brilliant, as always,” said Doug, “except for the tiny fact that
you're
the people who've shut them out of the existing structures in the first place.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean that the entire system nowadays is only geared to accommodating a tiny minority of political opinion. The left's moved way over to the right, the right's moved a tiny bit to the left, the circle's been closed and everyone else can go fuck themselves.”

“Just from your vocabulary, Douglas, I can tell that you're mired in the past,” said Paul, as they cut down Horseguards Avenue, and into Whitehall Place. “That's your basic problem—mired in the past. As I seem to remember telling you more than twenty years ago, one bonfire night if I'm not mistaken. Where are we going, anyway?”

Doug took him to a vaulted, subterranean wine bar called Gordon's on Villiers Street. It was a narrow, tunnel-like space where neither of them could stand up straight as they made their way to a table: Doug explained that this was once a riverfront warehouse, and they were sitting in one of the vaults where the Thames barges would have come in.

“Very intimate, anyway,” said Paul, approvingly. He had not known about this place before, and had already got it marked down as somewhere he could safely bring Malvina.

“Well, I didn't want us to be overheard,” said Doug. “I wanted to talk to you about something private. Some
one,
I should say.”

Paul looked at him evenly. “Go on.”

“I think you probably know who I mean.”

“Probably,” said Paul. “What about her?”

“Well . . .” Doug swilled his orange juice around in his glass. He had decided to stay completely sober for the purposes of this conversation. “I think you should . . . consider . . . very carefully . . . where you're going on this one, in terms of both your . . . working and personal relationship.”

“OK.” Paul mulled these words over, and confessed: “I don't understand that. What exactly are you trying to say?”

Doug didn't know exactly what he was trying to say, in all honesty. Having considered, carefully and at some length, what he was hoping to achieve by meeting Paul this afternoon, he had come to only one conclusion: for both Malvina's and Susan's sake, he wanted to provoke Paul into taking some action, initiating some change. And the only way he could get him to do that, as far as he could see, was by scaring him.

“Paul,” he said. “I've got good news, and bad news. I went out with Malvina last week and after she'd had a few drinks she started talking to me about her feelings for you and she said . . . Well, she told me that she loved you.”

“Fuck.” Paul gulped down half the contents of his wine glass. “OK. Fine.” He had gone pale. “That's bad—I mean, that is
seriously
bad—but thank you for telling me. I'm . . . very grateful.”

“As it happens,” said Doug, “that's the good news.”

Paul's eyes began to flicker with anger and panic. “Are you taking the piss? How can that be the good news?”

“She's a very attractive woman. Beautiful, you might even say. Very intelligent. Nice disposition, from what I've seen. Any man would be proud to have a woman like that fall in love with him.”

“But I'm
married,
for Christ's sake. I've got a daughter.”

“Arguably, Paul, you should have thought about that before you started doing things like inviting her to spend the night at your family home.”

Even though Doug was speaking quietly, almost in a whisper, Paul instinctively looked around to check that no one could have heard.

“How the fuck do you know about that?”

“That,” said Doug, “brings me on to the bad news. I was at an editorial meeting last week and your name came up and it looks as though there are people on the paper—probably other papers as well—who've started to get interested in you and Malvina.”

“Shit,” said Paul, paling still further. “Shit shit
shit.
How much do they know?”

Doug changed the subject abruptly. “How's your relationship with Tony, these days? Close? Polite but cordial? Indifferent?”

“Just come out with it, Anderton. Just tell me what you're driving at.”

“I was only thinking that political parties, and prime ministers, react to these kinds of situations quite differently. Some people are considered indispensable, for instance, and even when they've disgraced themselves, party leaders will stand by them through thick and thin. Others are—well, more dispensable, to put it bluntly. I was just trying to work out which category you fit into.”