The Image in the Water (7 page)

Roger's decision to contest the leadership lay on the borderline of their two lives. They had discussed it, but briefly, there being no disagreement. She wanted him to advance himself and would be willing as wife of the Prime Minister to undertake more public work alongside him than came her way as wife to the Home Secretary. He had no idea whatever how she would react to
Thunder.

‘He does not look very intelligent,' she said, sipping tea.

‘It amounted to nothing. No more than you see. An afternoon long ago, an hour or so on the beach. Even that makes it sound more than it was.'

She looked at him. ‘I understand that. Even if it were more, to me it would be nothing. It is long ago, and anyway,' she shrugged, ‘Roger Courtauld and grand passion do not go well together. Mrs Courtauld knows this and does not criticise. But politically for you, I wonder …'

She was about to cross their unseen frontier into the heart of his concerns.

‘You wonder …?'

But she retreated. ‘It is not something for me, Roger. You have good friends who know about these things. You must ask them. I will support you whatever you do.'

He considered pressing her, but the sense of frontier was too well established between them. He shuddered to think of those colleagues whose pillow-talk was politics. Better to have, like himself, a quick kiss, silence, sleep, and in the morning some necessary discussion of the diary or the children.

He moved to the window and opened it. The rough noise of a street market filled the room, but there could be no street market in South Eaton Place. One of the crowd of journalists outside the house looked up and spotted him. ‘Are you pulling out, Home Secretary?'

The questions shot in through the window.

‘Are you suing?'

‘Have you talked to your wife?'

‘Have you talked to Fritz?'

He shut the window. For him the immediate escape would be quite easy. In ten minutes his driver would arrive and park
immediately outside the front door. The two protection officers would see him through the jostling press, microphones and cameras into the car and away within a few seconds. For Hélène it would be much more difficult.

‘You are going out this morning?'

‘Of course. I have to chair the parents' meeting at the Lyceé. But do not worry. I must smile when I am photographed, keep moving, and say nothing. I learned this long ago. My smile must be my message, whatever you decide. They will not expect more from me.'

At the same time a similar, though smaller, crowd of journalists was gathered outside Joan Freetown's house off Brook Green. David Alcester, her campaign chief of staff, watched them with satisfaction. ‘Brewing nicely,' he said half aloud.

‘Come here, David.' Joan Freetown looked up from the sheet of paper on her desk. She preferred to communicate with her friends through David, whom she liked because he was articulate, loyal and good-looking. But she knew there was truth in Guy's description of him as a young man too obviously on the make. She felt uneasy when her husband and her chief of staff were in the room together, and relieved when, as today, Guy was out of London.

‘This is not logical, David. You say I have no comment to make, then I make one.' She tapped a silver pencil on the desk. David Alcester sighed inwardly. A fair lock fell across his forehead as he bent over her. He read aloud the text she was studying, knowing that his voice itself could lend arguments to his suggestion: ‘“Joan Freetown has no comment to make on the main story in
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today. She herself has answered fully all questions put to her by
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about the past,
recognising the public interest in such openness. She hopes that Roger Courtauld will find a satisfactory way of clearing up the questions in doubt.” It reads well, Joan.'

But she remained unhappy. ‘Sit down, David.' This was an old device of hers but he had no option. He sat down, she stood up and began to walk about. ‘David, you had no hand in gathering this material for Seebright?'

He wondered whether to simulate anger, but decided it would not work. ‘None at all, Joan. I told you yesterday. The first photograph came to them direct from an old man in Devon. The rest they dug out for themselves in Germany.'

‘You knew about it? You urged them on?'

‘They told me what they planned. I neither discouraged nor encouraged. They are professionals.' He changed tune. This was going too far. ‘Look, Joan, what is this all about? This story will swing things your way when they were looking bleak. You just have to sit back, smile, poke the story a bit, keep it alive. That's all I'm suggesting.'

‘I don't like it, David. I just don't like it. It could work either way. I don't want to be involved.'

Inwardly David Alcester seethed. God, she was a difficult woman to work for. His answer to her first question had been truthful, his second false. Of course he had encouraged Seebright. ‘Joan will be delighted.' He had gone as far as that in one conversation. Not for publication, of course, but Seebright would expect a reward – and deserved it.

Joan Freetown returned to the desk, took her silver pencil and crossed out the last sentence of the draft comment. She reread the rest, and crossed out the second, looked at it again. ‘I'm sorry, David, we must simply say, “No comment, no comment, no comment.”'

‘Sorry,' he said to Seebright later, ‘she won't play. No comment. I couldn't move her.'

‘Damn.' Seebright paused. ‘Is that a matter of principle or her judgement of tactics?'

‘You never can tell with her.' And in that reply David Alcester was entirely accurate.

‘We must hunt down the second photograph. That's our unanimous conclusion.' They had appointed John Parrott to speak for them. Because Roger was half an hour late they had had time to review the situation after the thunderbolt. Parrott had spoken rather formally: it was an important moment.

‘The reasoning?' Roger kept his voice flat.

‘There was someone else in that picture. The German is communicating with someone we can't see. We know it's not you. If we can find who it is, we can destroy Seebright's story, and show him up as a lying trickster.'

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘You will have to give us the German's name and the address to which you sent that Christmas card. Then we can find him and get his help.'

Once again Roger felt that deep reluctance to dig up the past, even though it was innocent. ‘He will have moved. Anyway, the missing character in the second photograph may be a young man.'

There was a pause.

‘You think your German may have been gay?'

‘I have no reason at all to believe that.' Another pause. Roger decided to put them to the real test. ‘Look. I have to decide whether to continue or quit. The price for continuing
may be too high. You accept that nothing wrong happened at Mothecombe. I'm grateful for that. But if I continue it will be on the understanding that we do not touch the
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story. We say nothing whatever. We let it live or die according to its own strength or weakness. I want to know two things. On that basis would you continue to help me? On that basis do you think I could win?'

Going round the table they all said yes to both questions. But Roger saw that they were not real questions for this particular group. By calculation or by loyalty they were too far in with him to pull back. The most calculating of them, the one he least trusted, made the only interesting remark. ‘Virginia Saltoun rang me this morning,' said Clive Wilson. ‘She's been on my doubtful list for a fortnight. She said the one thing the Tory Party should not accept was a leader imposed by
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So she's jumped. She hates what you stand for, but she'll vote for you. There may be others.'

Later events showed that this might have been a turning point for Roger. Political life is full of anecdotes, thousands a day. Most of them are sterile, disconnected from each other, insignificant. Part of the necessary equipment for successful politicians or political journalists is the power to distinguish between anecdotes. They need to shrug off and forget most of them, while remaining alert to spot the acorn that shoots up to become an oak. This part of Roger's political apparatus was not switched on when Clive Wilson spoke. Even if it had been, the outcome might not have been great, for the telephone rang, and his world changed again. The others could make little of his side of the conversation.

‘… I see … I see … Absolutely no trace … You were right to ring, I'm grateful … I think I'd better come right away, do
you agree? … I'll be with you in an hour, perhaps an hour and a half.'

He thought for ten seconds after replacing the receiver. There was strain in his voice when he spoke. ‘Something personal has come up. Nothing to do with politics. I'll have to leave London for a few hours. It means cancelling today's engagements.'

His colleagues took this bad news on the chin. Roger was not a man to invent little excuses for decisions which inconvenienced others.

‘What about the dinner tonight at the Carlton?' Sarah Tunstall was particularly keen on this. She had booked a private room at the club and invited two of his allies and five influential floating voters from the right wing.

Roger paused. ‘I'll be back for that, Sarah.' He stood and made for the door. Then the ice broke. He paused again in the doorway. ‘You've become my friends,' he said awkwardly. ‘You're backing me with all you've got. You're entitled to know my past, my present. But this is something I have to handle before I can talk. Can you all come to the Carlton at seven before the dinner? There'll be no secrets then.' From others it would have sounded artificial. They took it from him, but he went out feeling that there might be a strain even on their loyalty.

His driver had waited in the Home Office courtyard, accustomed in these days to sudden changes of plan.

‘We've got to get down to Hillcrest. As quickly as we can make it.'

‘Right, sir.'

Mark the driver and Sam the protection officer knew the
road to Hillcrest well. It was the preparatory school in Berkshire attended by the Home Secretary's two sons, young Roger and his brother Tom.

There was little point in hugging his privacy too tightly to himself. Mark and Sam would soon learn the story once they reached the school. Indeed, it might fall before long within Sam's responsibility as a police officer, though strictly speaking his job was to protect the Home Secretary, not the Home Secretary's family.

‘Young Roger has disappeared. Not been seen since breakfast. Missed his first class. Probably some simple explanation.'

‘Quite so, sir.' But if the Home Secretary really thought that, they would not now be moving fast down the Cromwell Road.

‘Excuse my asking, sir, have the school authorities notified the local police?'

‘Not yet, Sam. They're hoping the lad will turn up. He's only been missing four hours.'

‘Quite so, sir.'

A pause. The traffic thickened through Hammersmith.

‘Excuse me again, sir. Would you like us to use the siren?'

Protection officers loved the siren because of the speed and the audible authority it conferred. Drivers liked it because it showed their skill and appeared to raise them above the law. Roger hated it. They slowed down behind a long truck loaded with bright new cars. He was tempted. The siren would cut the journey by fifteen minutes, perhaps thirty. Waiting for bad news could be worse than the bad news itself. But he resisted. At moments of crisis it was better to stick to one's standards in small things. He tried to put himself into young Roger's mind. But soon he was looking into his own mind
instead. He cursed the selfishness that he and Hélène had shown a few hours back over the morning tea. They had worried about each other's feelings and forgotten about the children. At the Lyceé Felicity would be all right: she had her mother's tough, rather narrow French realism. Their second son Tom was tough, too, a small English schoolboy devoted to Arsenal. But Roger … A politician had no right to have young children.

Rain glistened on the rhododendron leaves as they sped up the school drive. There were tears, too, on the cheeks of the headmaster's wife, who stood to greet them at the top of the steps. Roger's heart stopped as he saw that the woman, virtually a stranger to him, was upset. He could hardly bear to shake hands. He felt a final irrational burst of anger. What right had this pale, scraggy person to shed tears for young Roger? It was the school's job to keep him safe, not to weep over him.

But, thank God, he had misread the signs. Her tears meant nothing mournful. In the Gothic entrance hall, dimly lit by tiny squares of pink and green stained glass, she explained that her husband was teaching the third year, as if that was important. As for young Roger …

‘He's just come back,' she said. ‘That awful newspaper … I haven't even had time to clean him up.'

Then Roger was alone with his son. Young Roger was exhausted beyond the point of tears. His bare legs were splashed with mud, where he must have run and fallen. Blood from a small cut was oozing through the dirt on one knee. He ran to his father then, after a brief embrace, turned away.

‘Sit down, Roger.'

They were alone together in a bleak sitting room with
chairs back against each wall as if prepared for a seminar. Reproductions of Constable and Turner combined as decoration with photographs of rugby and cricket teams. They conveyed no cheer.

‘What's it about, then? You tried to run away?'

Young Roger nodded. ‘But it was too far,' he said. And then, worst of all, ‘And, anyway, I didn't really want to go home.'

Home, home. The bleak over-protected government home in South Eaton Place was no home for a child. Mothecombe, of course, that was a real home in the holidays, but Devon was unimaginably far for a ten-year-old.