wickedly, pulling her back towards him. ‘Because they precisely match my own.’
‘You selfish bastard, Goodfellowe,’ she cried, picking up his newspaper and beginning to hit him around the head.
‘Don’t do that! I want to keep Amadeus’s letter. Invite him for a drink, perhaps. When you’ve put your clothes on.’
She began to laugh, like wind chimes disturbed by a summer’s breeze. She was remarkably unselfconscious about her naked body, and with good reason. Even in her thirty-somethings it was still finely crafted with, as Goodfellowe had once put it, ‘excellent long-term potential’. She had thought it a clumsy phrase, while he thought it summed her up exactly. So they fought a lot, misunderstood each other, had to compromise. But, as they fought, he learnt, about himself, and about that other half of humanity they called Woman. He liked learning as he neared his fiftieth, almost as much as he’d done in the fourth form. As for compromise, he found it easy when he was in her bed. Elizabeth de Vries. Excellent long-term potential. A body. Brains. A superb Russian restaurant thrown in, too. What more could a man want?
Except for an uncreased copy of the Telegraph. He grabbed it back.
‘Anyway, what does he say in his letter, your friend Amadeus?’ Elizabeth asked, conceding.
‘That the Government is crap. He’s probably right.’
‘But it’s your Government, poppet.’
She sounded the words slowly, with a smile of saccharine, as though she were lecturing a small child, but he wasn’t in the mood. Nowadays he was rarely in the mood. He had developed a fundamental humour loss when it came to this Government. His Government. A Government that was deep into its menopause and now so bereft of ideas that it had all but run out of things to leak.
‘That’s naïve,’ he responded, he hoped softly enough to smother the sounds of his own imploding frustration.
‘You vote for it every day of the week.’
‘Like all women, you don’t understand …’
‘What’s the matter, Goodfellowe, the only place you discover your balls is in bed?’ She laughed, claiming victory.
‘Ridiculous female logic.’
‘Typical male inadequacy might be closer to the mark.’
‘Elizabeth, you’re being emotional,’ he protested, knowing already that his banners were in tatters and the field was hers.
‘I know I’m nothing more than a weak and wanton woman, but you aren’t. So why don’t you do something about it?’
The coup de grâce. A single blow. Delivered with unerring accuracy.
‘Do something? Do something?’ he repeated, as though the question was struggling to penetrate the wits of a drowning man. ‘I can’t! I wish I could but I can’t. I’m a miserable backbencher with no power and a bike that’s going rusty while these bloody Ministers …’ He clenched the rescued newspaper in his fist as he spoke, unaware that he was crumpling it beyond redemption.
‘Most of them are cock-ups scuttling around Whitehall in search of an occasion,’ he continued. ‘They sweep past in their Ministerial limousines, their spin doctors strewing rose petals and whisky in their way, while we are expected to stand idly by in the pouring rain and wave them onward. And, to hell with it, look what you’ve done to my newspaper!’ he howled in the manner of some Dickensian villain.
‘No, Goodfellowe, you did it. And it’s my newspaper. My toast.’ She picked up the tray. ‘And my bed. Time to get out of it. The second shift arrives in half an hour.’
He looked at the disappearing tray with a sharp edge of hunger. Damn the diet. The toast didn’t look that bleak after all. ‘You know what I really want, Elizabeth?’ he called after her, his imagination full of the sight and succulence of a full English from the Connaught.
She turned at the door. ‘I know exactly what you want, poppet,’ she said with a certainty that for a moment completely overwhelmed him. ‘You want to be a Minister once again.’
For a moment he was stunned. Was it so bloody obvious?
‘It would cause problems for me, of course,’ she continued, her lips puckering. ‘The Minister’s mistress. I’d become a cliché.’
‘Would that be a very great problem?’
She stared at him directly, glints of orange fire in the marmalade. ‘I’d manage. If that’s what you wanted. In fact, old darling, I think I’d manage rather well.’
The words hung between them, persisting. It was the first time they had admitted to each other, perhaps even to themselves, that they saw their futures together, as a team. This was not easy for either of them to admit. There was something often a little theatrical about Elizabeth, like Vivien Leigh, all extravagance and dramatic passion as though she had stepped out of ‘Gone With The Wind’ with high cheekbones and expressive lips that could squeeze submission from almost any man. But if so much of her life was an act, it was only because, in those secret places inside, she had spent much of her life feeling inadequate. She had first learnt the mechanics of satisfying a boy at the age of fourteen. She had also learnt of the potential consequences when, once satisfied, he had simply walked away. Abandoned her to the sniggers of his friends. Made her feel like a slut. She had decided there and then that if anyone was going to do the walking away after that, it would be her. She had been walking away ever since, from her ill-prepared university exams, from her ill-starred marriage, from any sort of personal commitment she felt she could not control – until Goodfellowe had come along on his bloody bike. He was different, confusing, didn’t run by the normal rules. He was both infuriating and fun. So maybe it would be different this time. Maybe.
Goodfellowe understood some of this, although he had never been allowed to penetrate behind all the layers of tinsel. It meant that his love for her could never be a comfortable matter but, hell, he’d had years of respectable marriage, done the comfort thing and collected the T-shirts, all of which were starched and ironed and filled the locked matrimonial closet. He needed something different, not order and contentment but a challenge that would strip away the restraints and leave the T-shirts crumpled and torn, something that would allow the man beneath to show through.
As he listened to her words about Ministerial office and advancement, an uneasy sensation scoured his stomach. At first he hoped it might be nothing more than the echo of an unfinished breakfast, but quickly it overwhelmed him. A sensation he hadn’t felt in so very long.
Excitement.
Twisting inside him once more.
He had Elizabeth. And now, with her encouragement, once again he had that other inspiration missing from his life.
He had ambition.
The hour is late, well beyond evening. A solitary shaft of light cuts across the prep school lawn. The turf is immaculate, which is much more than can be said for Boris, the caretaker’s cat, a ginger-walnut tom with missing ear and the look of battles past, many of which he appears to have lost. He pauses, cautious, sniffing the air in suspicion before padding across the river of light.
The old clock above the quad takes its time about striking ten, disturbing the screech owl that had found a perch
