find it impossible to reach the depths required.
He was standing in his dress shirt, bow tie cast aside, staring out through the shard-proof curtains of the bedroom window across St James’s Park, when she came in. The room was in darkness, his face cast like a wax mask in the reflection from the lighting beneath the trees in the park. Francis Urquhart, shoulders down, hands thrust deep into his dress trouser pockets, looked miserable.
‘They turned old Freddie off,’ he whispered.
‘Darling?’
‘Old Freddie Warburton. The car crash? On life-support? They decided there was no point, Mortima. So they turned him off.’
‘But I thought you said he was useless.’
Urquhart spun round to face his wife. ‘Of course he was useless. Utterly and comprehensively useless. I’m surprised they could even tell when his brain had stopped functioning. But that’s not the point, is it?’
‘Then what is the point, Francis?’
‘The point, Mortima, is that he was the only surviving member of my original Cabinet from all those years ago. They’ll say it’s the end of an era. My era. Don’t you see?’
Mortima had begun taking off her jewellery, methodically preparing herself for bed in the semilight while she considered her husband’s fragile mood. ‘Don’t you think you’re over-reacting a little?’ she ventured.
‘Of course I am,’ he replied. ‘But they’ll over react, too, the wretched media always do. You know how the poison has begun to drip. Should’ve retired on his tenth anniversary. An ageing administration in need of new ideas and new blood. An age which is passing. Now with bloody Freddie away they’ll say it’s passed. Gone.’ He sat down on the edge of his bed. ‘It makes me feel so…alone, somehow. Except for you.’
She knelt on his bed and began to work away at the tension in his shoulders. ‘Francis, you are the most successful Prime Minister this country has ever had. You’ve won as many elections as anyone, in three months’ time you will have passed Margaret Thatcher’s record of time in office. Your place in the history books is assured.’
He turned. She could see the jaw muscles working away, making his temples throb.
‘That’s it, Mortima. I feel as if I’m already history. All yesterday, no longer today. No tomorrow.’
It was back, his black mood, when he raged at the pointlessness of his life and the ingratitude and incompetence of the world around him. The moods never lasted long, but undeniably they were lasting longer. The challenge had lost its freshness, he needed dragons to slay but instead they seemed to have crawled away and hidden between the subclauses of interminable policy documents and Euro-regulations. The cloak of office hung heavily on his shoulders, ceremonial robes where once there had been armour. He had towered like a giant above the parliamentary scene, quite beyond the reach of his foes, but something had changed, perhaps in him and certainly in others. They speculated openly about how long he would last before he stepped down, about who would be the most likely successor. His reputation for slicing through the legs of young pretenders was formidable, but now they seemed to have formed a circle around his campfire, skulking in the shadows, staying just beyond his reach, finding safety in growing numbers while they waited for their moment to step into the light. A few weeks ago he had appeared in the Chamber at Question Time, ready as always to defend himself against their arrows, carrying with pride the shield that bore the dents and scars of so many successful parliamentary battles. Then a young Opposition backbencher whom Urquhart scarcely recognized had risen to his feet.
‘Does the Prime Minister know the latest unemployment figure for this country?’
And sat down.
Impudence! Not ‘Will he comment on…?’ or ‘How can he excuse…?’, but ‘Does he know…?’ Of course Urquhart knew, two million or other, but he realized he needed not an approximation but the precise figure and had searched in his briefing notes. He shouldn’t have needed to search; he should have known. But the damned figure changed every month! And as he had searched, his glasses slipped, and the Opposition benches had erupted as he scrabbled. ‘He doesn’t know, doesn’t care!’ they shouted. He had found the answer but by then it was too late.
A direct hit.
It was unlike Francis Urquhart. He had bled, shown he was mortal. And the black moods had increased.
‘I sometimes wonder what it’s all been for, Mortima. What you and I have to look forward to. One day we’ll walk out through that door for the last time and…then what? Horlicks and bloody Bognor?’ He shivered as her fingers reached the knot at the back of his neck.
‘You’re being silly,’ she scolded. ‘That’s a long way off and, anyway, we’ve discussed it many times before. There’s the Urquhart Library to establish. And the Urquhart Chair of International Studies at Oxford. There’s so much we will still have to do. And I met a publisher at the reception this evening. He was enthusing about your memoirs. Said the Thatcher books went for something like three million pounds and yours will be worth far more. Not a bad way to start raising the endowment money we need for the Library.’
His chin had fallen onto his chest once more. She realized the talk of memoirs had been misjudged.
‘I’m not sure. Not memoirs, I don’t think I can, Mortima.’
‘We shall need the money, Francis. As much as we shall need each other.’
He turned sharply to look at her, staring intensely. In the dark she couldn’t detect whether the cast in his eye betrayed mirth or yet deeper melancholy.
‘No memoirs,’ he repeated. ‘Setting down the old falsehoods and inventing new ones. I couldn’t write about my colleagues in that way, speaking such ill of the departed. God knows, I uttered lies enough to bury them, I couldn’t pursue them beyond the grave. Not at all. Not for a King’s ransom.’ He paused. ‘Could I, Mortima?’
Hakim was angry. His coffee was cold, his moustache growing white, his talents under-appreciated, his bank unsympathetic, and everyone knew him simply as Hakim. Not Air Hakim, not Yaman Hakim, not Old Friend and Colleague Hakim. There was a small sign on his office door to that effect, they would carve it on his coffin: HAKIM THE FORGOTTEN. Then they would forget him, the wife, the kids, the bosses, his bank manager. All of them. Especially his bank manager. He sipped the lukewarm mud in his coffee cup and pursed his lips in disgust. A lifetime’s conscientious work and yet all he would have to take with him when the time came to go were his unfulfilled dreams.
He paused to consider. What would he most like to take with him into the afterlife? Young girls? Gold? An air-conditioned Mercedes? The vineyard he had always coveted? Probably young girls, he decided. No, on second thoughts he would take his bank manager. Then they could both burn.
He smiled to himself, then coughed painfully. The damned pollution was getting to his chest again. It was one of the many problems of building a capital city in the armpit of Anatolia where they burnt filthy brown coal and choked the streets with petrol fumes. And they were slowly, remorselessly congesting his lungs. A lifetime’s service in order that he could choke to death. And be forgotten.
If he just locked the door from the inside and rotted, would anybody notice? His was a miserable office, even by the unexceptional standards of TNOC, the Turkish National Oil Corporation – shelves crammed with old manuals and reports,
