The Final Cut

  Justice. British justice. And if it entailed screwing the French into the bargain, then the bargain was all the better for it. Rodin could rot in hell.

  It had developed into a silent tussle of wills. The BBC cameraman kept adjusting the angle repeatedly in order to gain an uncluttered view of the Prime Minister and his announcement in front of Number Ten - it was, after all, Urquhart's moment - but the new Foreign Secretary was intent on basking in the sunshine of television lights and the reflected plaudits. With the persistence of an outbreak of measles the rotund outline of Bollingbroke kept insinuating itself into the picture until he was standing to attention, suit buttons straining, immediately behind the Prime Minister's right shoulder. Urquhart's Praetorian Guard.

  One of the private secretaries had suggested that perhaps the statement should have been made to Parliament rather than to the media, but Grist -good Grist, whose instincts were so sound - had captured Urquhart's mood. On the doorstep of Downing Street there was no Leader of the Opposition to throw up supercilious questions and comment, no former-and-recently-fired Minister to claim part of the credit, nothing to prevent Urquhart from occupying the top slot on the lunch-time news all by himself. Except for Boilingbroke. Maybe next time they would truss him to a chair.

  Thus had a grateful nation been given the opportunity to witness F.U. expressing his delight at turning closed minds into the open hands of friendship, accepting the accolade of Statesman. Formally inviting the leaders of both Cypriot republics to fly to London in eight weeks' time for the signing of the final and definitive peace accord - and thus providing him with another glorious media binge and guaranteed victory in an arena where no other British politician could even enter.

  Francis Urquhart. Man of Peace.

  In a small floral-patterned room on the top floor of 10 Downing Street, at the eastern end of the living quarters which are so small, so unbefitting the head of a major Western government, and so very English in their understatement, Elizabeth Urquhart sat at the Regency desk which had once been her grandmother's. She pushed aside the letters she had been answering and with a small key unlocked the drawer, taking from it her private address book. There was a slight tremble to her fingers, the sense of anticipation she had known when riding to hounds as they were about to down a great stag. An inward struggle between excitement, fear and - conscience? The hand reached out, no longer for crop or reins but the telephone, the one she'd installed many years before when they had first moved in. The telephone which did not go through the switchboard. Her phone, for her purposes. The quarry had been cornered, there was good news she wished to share. But not with too many people.

  'I regret, Mr President, that the air-conditioning plant has broken down again.'

  A knot of anxieties had tangled around the aide who was soaked in sweat from his recent spittle-scattered brawl with the engineering supervisor. It had been to no effect, the temperature was still rising rapidly into the eighties. The two fans he had placed in the comers of the room seemed to have negligible impact on the heavy Nicosia air, which smelt and tasted as though it had been breathed many times before.

  Nures, a man of passion and varied temper, seemed to bear no trace of ill will. He had removed jacket and tie, sipped sweet mint tea and was mopping his receding brow with a large red handkerchief. He was also poring over a map, and exulting.

  'Soon we shall have new air conditioning - all of us. And new roads. Schools. Homes. A new airport, even. No longer to be outcasts.' His dark eyes shimmered with hope. 'A fresh start.'

  'We have much to be grateful for,' the aide offered damply, trying to push along the unexpected tide of good humour.

  'And good friends,' Nures responded, 'to whom we owe more than gratitude.'

  Theophilos wrenched the towel from around his neck and with an impatient wave of his hand dismissed the barber.

  'What's your problem?' Dimitri badgered as the door closed. He was seated at the monitor on the Bishop's ornate mahogany desk, his thick fingers tapping out instructions on the keyboard. The screen sprang to life. 'Market's up, it likes all this talk of peace. And Swiss interest rates rose the other day. It's been a good week for us.'

  'Political capital, that's what we must watch, little brother,' Theophilos replied, scratching the roots of his newly trimmed beard. 'If we are to rid ourselves of this fool of a President we need a taste of chaos. Peace at his hand is about as welcome as an outbreak of cholera.' He glanced at his watch. A television interview in ten minutes. He exchanged the Rolex for a plain leather band and climbed back into the dark bishop's cassock, hanging around his neck the heavy crucifix, once more the simple man of God.

  'So what are we to do?'

  'Pray. To God in Heaven and any other gods you can find in the back of your closet. Get down on your knees. Humble yourself. And beg that the Turks will be caught trying to fuck us up once more.'

  The telephone warbled. From the rear seat of the Citroen limousine on the congested streets of Paris, the businessman stretched to answer it, listening carefully. He said nothing, his attention focused absolutely on the message and its consequences, which were clear. The quarter of a million dollars he'd already handed to - what was the name of that Turkish quisling? He'd already forgotten - had been thrown away, the gamble had been lost. And it hurt. Even in the oil business, a quarter of a million unreceipted dollars makes a heavy hole in the petty cash account. Yet that was the least of the pain, for it seemed certain that he was about to lose more, far more. Thousands of millions of dollars' worth of lost opportunity. Oil by the seaful. It seemed he would never get to drill his wells.

  He replaced the receiver without a word, hearing it latch gently into place. The darkened glass and heavy noise insulation of the limousine cocooned him from the chaos on the street beyond. This was a sheltered world, a world of privilege and security, protected from the outside. Except for the phone. And the messages it brought.

  He was a controlled man, emotionally desiccated, with his appetites reserved for only one thing. Oil. The Earth's milk. More precious to him than his own blood. With a rage as silent as the engine at idle and his fist balled like a mallet, he began pounding the leather arm rest, heedless of the pain, until it broke.

  She rolled to one side and, as the sheet slipped across the contours of her body, he felt himself shaking inside once more. Until he had met Maria he hadn't been sure quite where his loins were, now they seemed to be everywhere, vibrating with an extraordinary energy every time he undid a button or clasp. In Maria he had found an ideal partner, a woman of natural curiosity and wit who was not afraid to acknowledge the shortcomings of her experience and was anxious to overcome them. They were explorers, trekking together through new territories and relishing the joys of discovery.

  He was surprised he felt no guilt, for he knew now that his marriage was over. It was form with no substance, his wife the absentee landlord of his loyalties, his house no longer a home, and it was not enough. He had tried many things to fill the void in his life - ambition, esteem, endeavour, achievement - but nothing would work while he was alone. The presence of Maria Passolides in his world - and in his bed - had made him realize that.

  As she propped herself up on the pillow, he watched transfixed as a bead of sweat trickled its way from around her neck past the creases of olive skin between her breasts. 'What are you thinking, white man?' she asked, amused.

  With the point of his little finger he traced the passage of the droplet, which had made a sudden rush for her navel. 'I'm thinking about what I can do for you.'

  Her eyes closed as his finger slid slowly past her belly button, her breath quickening. 'Christ, what did you have for breakfast?' she panted. The blood was beginning to rush once more, her body desperate to make up for so much lost time.

  Reluctantly his finger side-tracked, diverted to the outside of the thigh and then was gone. 'Not this,' he muttered. 'You came to me for help. About the graves.'

  'Sure,' she said, 'but why the sudden hurry?' S
he sought his hand but he rolled back to give them both some breathing space.

  'We have little time left’ he continued. 'If we don't get an answer during the next eight weeks, before the peace agreement is signed, it will never happen. After that no one will be interested, not in this country. Something else will be in the news. They'll say they've done their job, wash their hands. Cyprus will go back to being a faraway island where it might be nice one day to take a holiday in search of young wine and old ruins. Nothing more. It must be now, or we'll never find the answer.'

  'So what do we do?'

  ‘We make a fuss. Put on some pressure. Try to stir up a few old memories.'

  Instinctively, as she thought about his words, she pulled the sheet up to her neck. Over the last few days she'd tended to forget the reason why she had originally sought his help, distracted by the discovery of how versatile his help could be. They had made love in his kitchen chair that first time and in her exuberance she had torn off the arms. After they had finished laughing she had volunteered to take it back to Habitat, but then she changed her mind, deciding she would never be able to keep a straight face when inevitably they asked how it had happened. Somehow she felt sure everyone would guess simply by the way she smiled. So they'd pushed the pieces into the comer and tried the other kitchen chair, and the Chesterfield in his study where her damp skin stuck to the leather and made a ripping sound as it peeled off. He'd only invited her to bed his wife's bed - when it seemed there was something more than sweating flesh behind his willingness to see her. He'd not offered help in exchange for sex any more than she had offered sex for his help, but their separate motives were becoming more intertwined and confusing, so much so that she'd had to be reminded of her original purpose in knocking on his door. She felt a pang of guilt, but orgasms could be so distracting. And such fun.

  'If only I'd met you while I was still Foreign Secretary this might have been so much easier,' he said wistfully. 'I could've unlocked some doors from the inside rather than having to kick them down from out in the street.'

  'But then you would be deceiving me officially instead of personally.'

  'What do you mean deceiving you personally?' He sounded affronted.

  'That cup of tea you offered me the first day we met and you invited me into your kitchen? I still haven't had it.' She leaned over and kissed him before rolling out of bed.

  'Now get up, Makepeace. There's work to be done.'

  Evanghelos Passolides sat alone in his darkened restaurant. The last diner had long gone and he'd made a perfunctory effort at cleaning up, but had been overcome with melancholy. He felt deserted by everything he loved. He hadn't seen Maria for days. And his own Government in Nicosia was about to give away a large chunk of his beloved homeland to the Turk. Was this what he had fought for, what George and Eurypides had died for? He sat amongst all the memorabilia, drunk, an empty bottle of Commanderia at his elbow. A glass was lying on its side, the table cloth stained red with droplets of what many years before might have been blood. He sobbed. In one hand he held a crumpled photograph of his brothers, two tousle-haired boys, smiling. In the other he held a much burnished Webley, the pistol which had been taken from the body of a British lieutenant and with which he had always promised to exact his revenge. Before he had become a cripple.

  Now it was all too late. He had failed in everything he had touched. Others were heroes while life had stripped him of honour and all self-respect. He sat alone, forgotten, an old man with tears coursing down his cheeks, remembering. Waving a pistol. And hating.

  FIVE

  A man's place in history is no more than that - one place, a single point in an infinite universe, a jewel which no matter how brightly it may be polished will eventually be lost amongst a treasury of riches. A grain of sand in the hour glass.

  For Urquhart, this was a hallowed scene: the shiny leather bench scuffed by the digging of anxious nails, the Dispatch Box of bronze and old buriri polished by the passing of a thousand damp palms, the embellished rafters and stanchions which, if one listened carefully and with a tuned ear, still echoed with the cries of great leaders as they were hacked and harried to eclipse. Every political career, it seemed, ended in failure; the verdict of this great Gothic court of judgment never varied. Guilty. Condemned. A place of exhortation, passing approbation and eventual execution. Only the names changed.

  In recent days, whenever he turned away from the lights, there were voices in the shadows which whispered it would one day be his turn to fall, a matter only of time. As he sat on the bench they were at it again, the whispers, growing assertive, impertinent, almost heckling him. And through them all he could hear the voice of Thomas Makepeace.

  'Is my Right Honourable Friend aware' - the constitutional fiction of friendship passed through Makepeace's lips like vinegar - 'that the Greek Cypriot community in this country is deeply concerned about the existence of graves which still remain hidden from the time of the war of liberation in the nineteen fifties . . . ?'

  Old memories like embers began to revive, to flicker and burn until the crackle of flames all but obliterated the words with which Makepeace was demanding that the British Government lay open its files, reveal all unreported deaths and burial sites, '. . . so that the tragedies of many years ago can finally be laid to rest?'

  For a moment or two the House observed the unusual sight of the Prime Minister sitting stiffly in his seat, seeming unmoved and unmoving, lost in another world before cries of impatience caused him to stir. He rose stiffly to his feet, as though age had glued his joints.

  'I am not aware,' he began with an uncharacteristic lack of assertiveness, 'of there being any suggestion that graves were hidden by the British . . .'

  Makepeace was protesting, waving a sheet of paper, shouting that it had come from the Public Record Office.

  Other voices joined in. inside his head he heard contradiction and confusion, talk of graves, of secrets which would inevitably be disinterred with the bones, of things which must remain forever buried.

  Then a new voice, more familiar. 'Fight!' it commanded. 'Don't let them see you vulnerable. Lie, shout, wriggle, abuse, rabbit punch on the blind side, do anything - so long as you fight!' And pray, the voice might have added. Francis Urquhart didn't know how to pray, but like hell he knew how to fight.

  'I believe there are great dangers in opening too many old cupboards, sniffing air which has grown foul and unhealthy,' he began. 'Surely we should look to the future, with its high hopes, not dwell upon the distant past. Whatever happened during that ancient and tragic war, let it remain buried, and with it any evils which were done, perhaps on all sides. Leave us with the unsullied friendship which has been built since.'

  Makepeace was trying to regain his feet, protesting once more, the single sheet of paper in his hand. Urquhart silenced him with the most remorseless of smiles.

  'Of course, if the Right Honourable Gentleman has anything specific in mind rather than suggesting some stampede through old archives, I shall look into the matter for him. All he has to do is write with the details.'

  Makepeace subsided and with considerable gratitude Urquhart heard the Speaker call for the next business. His head rang with the chaos of voices, shouts, explosions, the ricochet of bullets; he could see nothing, blinded by the memory of the Mediterranean sun reflecting off ancient rock as his nostrils flared and filled with the sweet tang of burning flesh.

  Francis Urquhart felt suddenly very old. The hour glass of history had turned.

  'Go for it, Franco,' the producer encouraged. He sat up in his chair and dunked his cigarette in the stale coffee. This could be fun.

  Behind a redundant church which had found a new lease of life as a carpet warehouse in a monotonous suburb of north London lies the headquarters of London Radio for Cyprus, 'the voice of Cypriots in the city,' as it liked to sign itself, ignoring the fact that the four miles separating it from the City of London stretched like desert before the oasis. Describing the basement of Nu
mber 18 Bush Way as a headquarters was scarcely more enlightening - LRC shared a peeling Edwardian terrace house with a legitimate travel agency and dubious accounting practice. It also shared initials with a company manufacturing condoms and an FM wavelength with a Rasta rock station that fractured ears and heads until well after midnight. Such are the circumstances of community radio, not usually the cradle for budding radio magnates and media inquisitors. LRC's producers and interviewers struggled hard to convey to their small but loyal audience an air of enthusiasm even while they did daily battle with second- and third-hand equipment, drank old coffee and tried hard to remember to turn on the answering machine when they left.

  Yet this item had legs. The girl was good, somewhere behind those lips and ivories was a brain, and the old man was a fragment of radiophonic magic, his voice ascending scales of emotion like an opera singer practising arias. Passion gave him an eloquence that more than made up for the thick accent; what was more, in its own way the story was an exclusive.

  'Remember, you're hearing this first on LRC. Proof that there are graves left over from the EOKA war which are buried deep within the bowels of British bureaucracy . . .'

  The producer winced. Franco was an arsehole from which a stream of incontinence poured forth every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, but he was cheap and his uncle, a wine importer, was one of the station's most substantial sponsors.