He was in shock. A gun had been fired in his home. Elizabeth would be back soon. He had to calm down before she arrived so that he could talk to her about it properly. It would not help if they were both hysterical. He had to control himself.
Frank Armstrong, a man of thick eyebrows and a professionally cheery smile, a man of burliness, accustomed to command, came to the house with Rab and Dick Stark.
He was worried about something. Mr. Anton’s friend Ronnie Harwood was an old pal of the home secretary, Michael Howard, and had asked for a meeting to talk about the Rushdie protection. “What’s it about?” Frank Armstrong wanted to know. “I would suppose it’s about allowing me to live with some dignity,” he replied. “And to say, we must have a strategy for what happens if this house becomes known. That has to be a political decision as well as an operational one. I need everyone to focus on this subject and think it through. That’s what I’ve been saying to the Labour leadership, and that’s what Ronnie’s going to tell Michael Howard.”
Everything was political. Now that Armstrong saw that he had some political “muscle” he became cooperative, even deferential. The Branch was sympathetic to his request for armed personnel to be withdrawn from the property, he said. He had a proposal to make. If you were prepared to hire a retiring Branch officer or driver to work with you, maybe even one of the officers you have come to know, we might perhaps withdraw from the house and allow that person to be in charge of all your private movements, and offer you protection only when you move into public spaces.
Yes! He thought at once. Yes, please. “All right,” Armstrong said. “That gives us something to work on.”
He spoke to Frank Bishop, Whispering Frank the cricket lover, the kindly protection officer with whom Elizabeth and he had forged the closest relationship. Frank was on the verge of retiring and was “up” for this new job. Dennis the Horse, also close to retirement, could be paid an additional retainer as a “backup man,” to stand in for Frank when he was unwell or on holiday. “I’ll have to run it by the wife, of course,” Frank said, and that seemed only fair.
Frances D’Souza had a “chum in MI6” who told her that the spooks were well aware of Elizabeth’s pregnancy and knew that as a result they had “three years maximum to sort this out.” The idea that their baby was making policy made him smile. MI6, Frances’s chum said, had been showing the Foreign Office evidence of the extent of Iranian terrorism, “ten times as much as anyone else, the Saudis, the Nigerians, whoever” and as a result the British government now agreed there was no point in being nice to Iran, the “critical dialogue” was garbage, and all investment in and trade with that country had to cease. The French and Germans were stumbling blocks, but MI6 believed that the new “tough line” would “bring the mullahs to their knees in about two years.” I’ll believe it when I see it, he thought.
And always the wings of that giant blackbird, the exterminating angel, beating close at hand. Andrew called to say that Allen Ginsberg had inoperable liver cancer and a month to live. And even worse news. Nigella called. John Diamond had throat cancer. Doctors were trying to be reassuring. It was “curable, like skin cancer on the inside,” with radiation therapy. They had successfully treated Sean Connery for it seven years earlier. “I feel very unsafe,” Nigella sadly said.
Unsafe was a feeling he was familiar with.
Isabel Fonseca had spoken to Elizabeth and offered her mother’s beautiful garden in East Hampton, with the dazzling field of pink, lilac, purple and white cosmos behind it, as a place for the wedding, and that sounded perfect. But a few days later Elizabeth did what people always did and read his journal when he wasn’t there and found out about his day in Paris with Caroline Lang and then they had the painful conversation people always had and Elizabeth was the one feeling wretched and unsafe and it was his fault.
They talked for the next two days and slowly, with setbacks, she began to be able to put it away. “Once I felt so confident with you,” she said, “I felt nothing could come between us.” And, at another time, “I don’t want any more trouble in our relationship. I think it would kill me.” And, later still, “It’s become really important to me to be married, because then you won’t have been unfaithful.” “You mean, in our marriage?” “Yes.”
She dreamed about his infidelity and he dreamed about meeting Marianne in an organic supermarket and asking her for the return of his possessions. “I’ll never give them back,” she said, and wheeled her cart away.
The shock, the pain, the weeping, the anger came in waves, and then subsided. She was only a month away from giving birth. She decided the future was more important than the past. And forgave him, or at least agreed to forget.
“What was it you said your mother had instead of a memory, which helped her put up with your father?”
“A forgettery.”
“I need one of those as well.”
The general election had been called and apart from one rogue poll Labour were maintaining a 20 percent lead over the Conservatives. After the long sullen Tory epoch there was an excitement in the air. In the last days before the Blair victory Zafar began to do his A levels and his parents crossed their fingers, and Rab Connolly announced that he was off to look after Mrs. Thatcher and would be replaced by Paul Topper, who seemed smart and nice and eager and a bit less prickly than Rab. Meanwhile the European Union was offering to send ambassadors back to Iran without even bothering to get the slightest assurance about the fatwa. Iran, ever the more cynically skillful player, retaliated by not sending its ambassadors back, and barring the German envoy “for the time being,” just because it felt like doing so. He turned his thoughts away from politics and went to the first, and very cheering, table reading of his Midnight’s Children scripts at the BBC.
Journalists were nosing around the baby story, many of them convinced the child had already been born. The Evening Standard called Martin Amis. “Have you been around to see it yet?” He found it ridiculous to be asked to keep the secret, but in this matter Elizabeth agreed with the police. Meanwhile, a favored name was emerging. “Milan,” like Kundera, yes, but it was also a name with an Indian etymology, from the verb milana, to mix or mingle or blend; thus, Milan, a mingling, a coming together, a union. Not an inappropriate name for a boy in whom England and India were united.
Then it was election day and nobody was thinking about their baby. He sat at home and could not vote, because he was still unable to register without giving a home address. He read in the papers that even homeless people had been given a special dispensation that allowed them to cast their ballots; but there was no special dispensation for him. He put bitter thoughts aside and went to his friends’ election night parties. Melvyn Bragg and Michael Foot were having one again, and this time there would be no awful anticlimax. The lawyer Helena Kennedy and her surgeon husband, Iain Hutchison, were having one too. The results came in: It was a big victory for Blair’s “New Labour.” Joy was unconfined. Party guests told stories of strangers talking happily to one another on the Tube—in England!—and of taxi drivers bursting into song. The skies above were clear again. Optimism, a sense of infinite possibility, was being reborn. Now there would be much-needed welfare reform, and £5 billion for new council housing to help replace the public housing stock that had been sold off to the private sector during the Thatcher years, and the European Convention on Human Rights would finally be incorporated into British law. Some months before the election at an arts award show he had challenged Blair, who was rumored to be uninterested in the arts, and by his own admission read books only about economics and political biographies, to recognize the arts’ value to British society, to understand that the arts were “the national imagination.” Blair had been at that ceremony and had responded that it was New Labour’s job to excite the nation with its imagination, and tonight, in the glow of the election victory, it was possible not to see that reply as an evasion. Tonight was for celebration. Reality could wait until morning. Years later on the nig
ht of Barack Obama’s election to the American presidency, he would feel those feelings again.
The three-thousandth day of the fatwa arrived two days later. Elizabeth was looking exceptionally beautiful, and the due date was very close. Clarissa’s car was broken into and her briefcase with all her credit cards in it was stolen, along with a pair of Zafar’s sunglasses, to which the thief had obviously taken a shine. And that night they went to a victory party given by the Observer for Tony Blair in a place called Bleeding Heart Crypt, a gathering that the newspaper’s Will Hutton called “a laying on of hands.” At the party the new Blairite elite welcomed him and treated him like a friend—Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Margaret Beckett, the two Tessas, Blackstone and Jowell. Richard and Ruthie Rogers were there, and Neil and Glenys Kinnock. Neil drew him close and whispered into his ear, “Now we’ve got to make the buggers do it.” Yes indeed. “His” side was in power again. As Margaret Thatcher liked to say: Rejoice.
On the way to the victory party Dick Stark handed him a letter from Frank Armstrong asking him to “rethink” all his plans. He didn’t want the new child’s existence to be publicly acknowledged, he didn’t think the wedding was a good idea, he didn’t want Elizabeth’s name to be on the book she had coedited. It was a shaming aspect of his life that policemen felt able to talk to him like this. He sent a restrained reply to Armstrong. Police strategy, he said, must be based on what was humanly and decently possible.
He made the mistake of going on Q&A with Riz Khan on CNN, and the questions were uniformly hostile. From Tehran he was asked for the millionth time if he had “known what he was doing,” and from Switzerland a man asked, “After insulting the Brits, Thatcher and the queen, how can you still live in England?” and from Saudi Arabia a woman called in to say, “Nobody should pay you any attention, because we all know who God is,” and to ask, repeatedly, “But what did you gain from your book? What did you gain?” He tried to answer all these questions lightly, with good humor. This was his fate, to face hostility with a smile.
His phone rang. A woman from the Daily Express said, “I hear congratulations are in order, and your partner is expecting a baby.” The Sunday Times sent him a fax. “We hear you have had a baby! Congratulations! Notable development! Of course we won’t name the mother or child for security reasons but (a) how are you going to manage to be a parent? (b) will there have to be more security now?” Armstrong’s desire to keep the baby secret was an absurdity and he wished Elizabeth wasn’t feeling secretive as well. Damn it, he thought, they should just be open about it, and then there would be less of a story. When the press thought something was being hidden from them, it only made them hungrier. The next day the Express ran the story, although it omitted Elizabeth’s name. Who cares? he thought. He was glad it was out in the open, and the story was perfectly pleasant and well-wishing. One less secret. Good. But Elizabeth was angry, and the stress levels rose. They were not understanding each other’s sentences, misunderstanding each other’s tone of voice, squabbling over nothings. He woke up at 4 A.M. to find her crying. She was fearful about Carol’s health. She was alarmed about having her name in the papers. She was sad about his infidelity. She was worried about everything.
And here, right on cue, was Helen Hammington, singing the same old song. If the house was blown the cost of the protection would be tripled, she said. “But in the final analysis, and on the basis that it’s at your request, Joe, and as long as you understand that it’s irreversible, we are prepared to go ahead with your plan to remove the protection team, and the choice of Frank Bishop as your man has been approved.” That part, at least, was reasonably constructive. But from that point on things took a turn for the worse. “We don’t want Elizabeth’s name to be on this anthology of yours,” she said. “That, to be frank, horrifies us. Can it be changed, even now? Can it be blotted out?” He said, if you want a public scandal, that’s how to create one. “She could be followed,” said Paul Topper, the new guy. “If I was told that Elizabeth was living with you I could find you in one or two weeks using one or two men.” He tried to remain cool. He pointed out that when the protection started he had had a wife, whose name was very well known, whose picture had been on the front pages of every newspaper, and yet she had come and gone freely from his various bolt-holes, and the police had not thought it a problem. So now he had a fiancée whose name was not very widely known, whose photograph had never been published. It was unreasonable to turn her into a problem.
Then he said a whole lot more. He said, “All I am asking is that this British family be allowed to lead its life and raise its child.” And he also said, “You can’t ask people not to be the people they are and not to do the work they do. You can’t expect Elizabeth not to put her name on her own work, and you must accept that our child is going to be born, and will grow up, and have friends, and go to school; he will have a right to a livable life.”
“All this,” Helen said, “is being discussed at very high levels of the Home Office.”
On May 24, 1997, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the “official candidate” in the Iranian presidential election, was heavily defeated by the “moderate,” “reform” candidate Mohammad Khatami. On CNN young Iranian women were demanding freedom of thought and a better future for their children. Would they get it? Would he? Would the new people in Iran and England finally solve the problem? Khatami seemed to be positioning himself as a Gorbachev figure, who could provide reform from within the existing system. That might well be inadequate, as glasnost and perestroika had been. He found it hard to be too excited about Khatami. There had been too many false dawns.
On Tuesday, May 27, Elizabeth went to see her gynecologist, Mr. Smith, at 4 P.M. As soon as she got home, around a quarter past six in the evening, very rapid contractions began. He alerted the protection team and grabbed the bag that had been packed and ready in their bedroom for over a week and they were driven to the Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where they were given an empty corner room, Room 407, which was, they were told, where Princess Diana had had both her babies. Labor progressed rapidly. Elizabeth wanted to try to do it without drugs, and, with her usual determination, managed it, though the demands of childbirth made her uncharacteristically cranky. Between contractions she ordered him to massage her back but the instant they began he wasn’t allowed to touch her and she wanted him out of her field of vision. At one point she exclaimed comically at a midwife named Eileen, “Your perfume makes me sick, I hate it!” Eileen very sweetly and uncomplainingly went away to wash and change.
He looked at the time and suddenly thought, He’s going to be born at midnight. But in the event the boy arrived eight minutes early. At eight minutes to midnight Milan Luca West Rushdie was born, seven pounds, nine ounces, with huge feet and hands, and a full head of hair. Labor had taken just five and a half hours from start to finish. This boy had wanted to get out, and here he was, slippery on his mother’s stomach, the long grayish umbilical cord looped loosely around his neck and shoulders. His father took off his shirt and held him against his chest.
Welcome, Milan, he told his son. This is the world, with all its joy and horror, and it waits for you. Be happy in it. Be lucky. You are our new love.
Elizabeth called Carol and he called Zafar. The next day, Milan’s first day of life, he was visited by his brother, and by his “extra uncles,” Alan Yentob (who canceled his schedule at the BBC to come to the hospital) and Martin Amis, who came with Isabel, their daughter, Fernanda, and Martin’s son Jacob. It was a sunny day.
The Special Branch officers were excited, too. “It’s our first baby,” they said. Nobody had ever become a parent before while under their protection. This was Milan’s first “first”: He was the “A” Squad Baby.
He had been helping Bill Buford put together a special “India issue” of The New Yorker and a special group photograph of Indian writers had been arranged. He found himself in an Islington studio with Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Arun
dhati Roy, Ardashir Vakil, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, and Romesh Gunesekera (nobody was sure why a Sri Lankan writer had been included, but oh well, Romesh was a nice fellow and a good writer). The photographer was Max Vadukul and it wasn’t an easy picture for him to take. As Bill wrote afterward, Vadukul had been “desperate to herd an edgy group into his frame. The results are illuminating. In the pile of pictures [Vadukul took] there are variations on a theme of muted panic. There are looks of self-consciousness, of curiosity, of giddiness.” He himself remembered the group as pretty good-natured on the whole, even though Rohinton Mistry (mildly) and Ardu Vakil (more stridently) took Amit Chaudhuri to task for the stereotypical views about the Parsi community Amit had expressed in a review of one of Rohinton’s books. Amit was the only one of the eleven writers who didn’t come to the lunch afterward, at Granita restaurant on Upper Street, scene of the legendary Blair-Brown leadership pact. He told Bill afterward, “I realized I didn’t belong in that group. Not my sort of people.” Years later in an interview with Amitava Kumar, Arundhati Roy felt they hadn’t been her sort of people either. She “chuckled,” she told Kumar, when remembering that day: “I think everybody was being a bit spiky with everybody else. There were muted arguments, sulks, and mutterings. There was brittle politeness. Everybody was a little uncomfortable.… Anyway, I don’t think anybody in that photograph felt they really belonged in the same ‘group’ as the next person.” He remembered her as having been pretty friendly and happy to be there with the rest of them. But that was probably a mistake.