Sweet Jesus, he thought.
He clenched a fist and pounded it hard against his thigh. He felt his eyes burning and he told himself that his contact lenses were reacting to the heat from the cooker and the pungency of the simmering onions and garlic. Then he called himself a spineless liar and stopped what he was doing and lowered his head. He was breathing like a distance runner, and he tried to be calm. He brought himself face-to-face with the truth: He didn’t yet have the facts, and until he had them, he was pouring precious energy into rage. Which would serve him ill. Which would serve Charlie ill.
Right, he thought. Yes. Good. Let’s be about our business. Let’s wait. Let’s see.
He pushed himself away from the cooker. He pulled from the freezer a packet of fettuccine. He had it completely unwrapped and ready to drop into the boiling water before he realised that he couldn’t feel its cold on his palm. The realisation made him release the pasta so quickly into the pot that a geyser shot up and spat against his skin. That he could feel, and he took an instinctive leap away from the cooker like a novice in the kitchen.
“God damn,” he whispered. “Fuck it. God damn.”
He walked to the calendar that hung on the wall next to the telephone. He wanted to make sure. There was always a chance that he hadn’t written down his week’s schedule for once, that he hadn’t left the name of the restaurant whose chefs and waiters he’d be overseeing that day, that he hadn’t made sure his whereabouts were available to Mrs. Maguire, to Charlie, to his wife, that he had failed to allow for the odd emergency when his presence would be a desperate necessity…. But there it was in the square marked for Wednesday. Couscous. Just as the day before had Sceptre written across it. Just as tomorrow had Demoiselle. Which meant that there was no excuse at all. Which meant that he had the facts. Which meant that his rage could rage at will, fists crashing through cupboards, glasses and dishes smashing to the floor, cutlery hurled against walls, refrigerator dumped and its contents mashed beneath his feet….
“They’ve left.”
He swung around. Eve had come to the doorway. She removed her glasses and polished them wearily on the black silk lining of her jacket. “You didn’t have to make anything fresh,” she said with a nod at the cooker. “Mrs. Maguire probably left us something. She would have done. She always does for—” She stopped herself by returning her glasses to her nose.
For Charlotte. She wouldn’t say the two words because she wouldn’t say her daughter’s name. Saying her daughter’s name would give him an opening before she was ready. And she was a bloody politician who bloody well knew how to keep the upper hand.
As if a meal were not in the midst of cooking in that very room, she went to the refrigerator. Alex watched her bring out the two covered plates that he’d already inspected, carrying them to the work top and unwrapping Mrs. Maguire’s Wednesday night offering of macaroni cheese, mixed veg, and boiled new potatoes dressed with a daring dash of paprika.
“God,” she said, staring down at the lumps of cheddar that pockmarked the agglutinant gobbet of macaroni.
He said, “I leave her something for Charlie every day. All she has to do is warm it, but she won’t. ‘Fancy names for muck’ is what she calls it.”
“And this isn’t muck?” Eve dumped the contents of both plates into the sink. She flipped the switch and let the disposer eat its fill. The water ran and ran and Alex watched her watching it, knowing that she was using the time to prepare herself for the coming conversation. Her head was bowed and her shoulders drooped. Her neck was exposed. It was white and vulnerable and it begged for his pity. But he wasn’t moved.
He crossed to her, switched off the disposer, and turned off the tap. He took her arm to swing her to him. She was rigid to the touch. He dropped his hand.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Just what I told you. She disappeared on the way home from her music lesson.”
“Maguire wasn’t with her?”
“Apparently not.”
“God damn it, Eve. We’ve been through this before. If she can’t be relied on to—”
“She thought Charlotte was with friends.”
“She thought. She bloody fucking thought.” Again he felt the need to strike. Had the housekeeper been there, he would have gone for her throat. “Why?” he asked sharply. “Just tell me why.”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. She turned. She cupped each elbow with her hands. It was a choice of position that cut her off from him more effectively than had she moved to the other side of the room. “Alex, I had to think what to do.”
He felt gratitude for the fact that she at least didn’t try to expound on her previous lie of things happening too quickly, of there being no time. But it was a meagre gratitude, like a seed that fell onto barren soil. “What exactly is there to think about?” he asked with a deliberate, polite calm. “It seems a simple four-step problem to me.” He used his thumb and three fingers to tick off each step. “Charlie’s been snatched. You phone me at the restaurant. I fetch you from your office. We go to the police.”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“You seem to be quagmired somewhere on step one. Is that right?” Her face didn’t change. It still wore its expression of complete sangfroid, so essential in her line of work, a tranquillity that was quickly obliterating his own. “God damn it. Is that right, Eve?”
“Do you want me to explain?”
“I want you to tell me who the fuck those people were in the sitting room. I want you to tell me why the fuck you haven’t called the police. I want you to explain—and let’s go for ten words or less, Eve—why you didn’t seem to think it important to let me know my own daughter—”
“Stepdaughter, Alex.”
“Jesus Christ. So if I was her father—obviously defined by you as provider of a sodding sperm—I’d have merited a call to let me know that my child had gone missing. Am I getting it right?”
“Not quite. Charlotte’s father already knows. He’s the one who phoned me to tell me she’d been taken. I believe he’s arranged to have her taken himself.”
The pasta water chose this moment to boil over, gushing in a frothing wave down the sides of the pot and onto the burner beneath it. Feeling as if he were slogging hip-deep through porridge, Alex went to the cooker and carried through the motions of stirring, lowering the heat, lifting the pot, setting a diffuser into position, while all the time he heard Charlotte’s father, Charlotte’s father, Charlotte’s father roaring round the room. He set his stirring fork on its holder carefully before he turned back to his wife. She was naturally fair-skinned, but in the light of the kitchen she looked deadly pale.
“Charlie’s father,” he said.
“He claims to have received a kidnapping note. I received one as well.” Alex saw her fingers tighten on her elbows. The gesture looked to him like a girding of mental or emotional loins. The worst, he realised, was yet to come.
“Keep going,” he said evenly.
“Don’t you want to see to your pasta?”
“I haven’t much of an appetite. Have you?”
She shook her head. But she left him for a moment and returned to the sitting room, during which time he numbly stood stirring his sauce and his pasta and wondering when he’d feel like eating again. She returned with an opened bottle of wine and two glasses. She poured at the bar that extended from the cooker. She slid one of the glasses in his direction.
He realised that she wasn’t going to say it unless he forced her. She would tell him everything else—what had apparently happened to Charlie, at what time of day, and exactly how and with what words she had come to learn about it. But she wouldn’t speak the name unless he insisted. In the seven years he’d known her, in the six years of their marriage, the identity of Charlotte’s father was the one secret she hadn’t revealed. And it hadn’t seemed fair to Alex to press her. Charlie’s father, whoever he was, was part of Eve’s past. Alex had wanted only to be part of her prese
nt and her future.
“Why’s he taken her?”
She answered emotionlessly, a recital of conclusions she’d already reached. “Because he wants the public to know who her father is. Because he wants to embarrass the Tories further. Because if the Government continues to be faced with sexual scandals that erode the public’s faith in their elected officials, the Prime Minister is going to be forced to call a general election and the Tories are going to lose it. Which is what he wants.”
Alex homed in on the words that chilled him most and told him most about what she’d kept hidden for so many years. “Sexual scandals?”
Her lips curved mirthlessly. “Sexual scandals.”
“Who is it, Eve?”
“Dennis Luxford.”
The name meant nothing to him. Years of dreading, years of wondering, years of speculating, years of calculating, and the name meant absolutely sod bloody all. He could tell that she saw he was making no connection. She gave a sardonic and self-directed chuckle and walked to the small kitchen table that sat in a bay window overlooking the back garden. There was a rattan magazine holder next to one of the chairs. It was where Mrs. Maguire kept her lowbrow reading material that entertained her through her daily elevenses. From this rattan holder Eve took a tabloid. She carried it to the bar and laid it before Alex.
Its masthead was a blaze of red into which garish yellow letters spelled out The Source! Beneath this masthead three inches of headline screamed Love-Cheat MP. The headline was accompanied by two colour photographs, one of Sinclair Larnsey, MP for East Norfolk, looking grim-faced as he emerged from a building in the company of a cane-wielding elderly gentleman who had Constituency Association Chairman incised all over him, the other of a magenta Citroën, under which ran the caption: “Sinclair Larnsey’s mobile love nest.” The rest of the front page was devoted to Win A Dream Holiday (Chapter 1), Breakfast With Your Favourite Star (Chapter 1), and Cricket Murder Trial Coming (Chapter 2).
He frowned at the tabloid. It was tawdry and noisome, as it no doubt intended to be. It howled for attention, and he could imagine it being scooped up by the thousands as commuters sought something diverting to read on their way to work. But surely its very shoddiness declared the level of impact it might have on public opinion. Who read this sort of shit, anyway, aside from people like Mrs. Maguire who could not exactly be described as a major intellectual force in the country.
Eve was walking back to the rattan holder. She rooted out three more copies of the tabloid and laid them carefully on the bar before him. PM’s Latest Skeleton: Top Aide on the Take! took up one entire front page. Tory MP Mistress X4! decorated another. Royal Flush: Who’s Keeping the Princess Warm at Night? leapt from the third.
“I don’t get it,” Alex said. “Your case is different to these. What are the newspapers going to crucify you about? You made a mistake. You got pregnant. You had a baby. You’ve raised her, cared for her, and gone on with your life. It’s a non-story.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What’s there to understand?”
“Dennis Luxford. This is his newspaper, Alex. Charlotte’s father edits this newspaper and he was editing another one just about this disgusting when we had our little—” She blinked rapidly and for a moment he thought she would actually lose her composure. “That’s what he was doing—editing a tabloid, digging up the most salacious gossip he could find, smearing whomever he wished to humiliate—when we had our little fling in Blackpool.”
He tore his eyes from her and looked back at the papers. He told himself that if he hadn’t heard her correctly, he wouldn’t have to believe. She made a movement, and he looked to see that she had taken up her wineglass and held it in a toast, which she did not make. Instead, she said, “There was Eve Bowen, future Tory MP, future Junior Minister, future Premier, the ultra-conservative, God-is-my-bedrock, morally righteous little reporter making the two-backed beast with the King of Sleaze. My God, what a field day the papers will have with that story. And this one will lead the pack.”
Alex searched for something to say, which was difficult because all he was able to feel at the moment was the coating of ice that seemed to be growing rapidly round his heart. Even his words felt deadened. “You weren’t a Member of Parliament then.”
“A fine point that the public will be more than willing to overlook, I assure you. The public will take great tickling pleasure imagining the two of us slinking round the hotel in Blackpool, hotly setting up our assignations, I spread-legged on a hotel room bed, panting for Luxford to plumb my depths with his mighty organ. And then the next morning rearranging myself to look like Miss Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt for my colleagues. And living with the secret for all these years. Acting as if I found morally reprehensible everything the man stands for.”
Alex stared at her. He looked at the features he’d been looking at for the past seven years: that unruffled hair, those clear hazel eyes, the chin too sharp, the upper lip too thin. He thought, This is my wife. This is the woman I love. Who I am with her is not who I am with anyone else. Do I even know her? He said numbly, “And don’t you? Didn’t you?”
Her eyes seemed to darken. When she responded, her voice sounded oddly removed. “How can you even ask me that, Alex?”
“Because I want to know. I have a right to know.”
“To know what?”
“Who the hell you are.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she met his gaze for the longest time before she took the pot from the cooker and carried it to the sink, where she dumped the fettuccine into a colander. She used a fork to lift a strand of it. She said quietly, “You’ve overcooked your pasta, Alex. Not the kind of mistake I’d expect you to make.”
“Answer me,” he said.
“I believe I just did.”
“The mistake was the pregnancy,” he persisted, “not the choice of partners. You knew what he was when you slept with him. You had to have known.”
“Yes. I knew. Do you want me to tell you that it didn’t matter?”
“I want you to tell me the truth.”
“All right. It didn’t matter. I wanted sex with him.”
“Why?”
“He engaged my mind. Which is the one thing most men don’t bother to try when it comes to seducing women.”
Alex grasped onto the word because he needed to grasp it. “He seduced you.”
“The first time. After that, no. It was mutual after that.”
“So you fucked him more than once.”
She didn’t flinch from the word as he would have liked her to do. “I fucked him for the length of the conference. Every night. And most of the mornings as well.”
“Brilliant.” He gathered the tabloids together. He replaced them in the rattan holder. He went to the cooker and grabbed the pan of sauce. He dumped it into the sink and watched it burble into the disposer. She was still standing next to the draining board. He could feel her proximity, but he couldn’t face her. He felt as if his mind had received some sort of death blow. All he could manage was, “So he’s taken Charlie. Luxford.”
“He’s arranged it. And if he publicly acknowledges the fact that he’s her father—on the front page of his paper—then she’ll be returned.”
“Why not phone the police?”
“Because I intend to call his bluff.”
“Using Charlie to do it?”
“Using Charlotte? What do you mean?”
This he could feel at last; and he revelled in the sensation. “Where’s he got her, Eve? Does she know what’s going on? Is she hungry? Is she cold? Is she mad with terror? She was snatched off the street by a total stranger. So are you concerned with anything besides saving your reputation and winning the game and calling this bastard Luxford’s bluff?”
“Don’t make this a referendum on motherhood,” she said quietly. “I made a mistake in my life. I’ve paid for that. I’m still paying for it. I’ll pay till I die.”
“This is a child we’re talking
about, not an error in judgement. A ten-year-old child.”
“And I intend to find her. But I’ll do it my way. I’ll rot in hell before I do it his. Just look at his newspaper if you can’t decipher what he wants from me, Alex. And before you condemn me for my gross self-interest, try asking yourself what allowing a fine sex scandal into the papers would do to Charlotte.”
He knew, of course. One of the greatest nightmares in political life was the sudden appearance of a skeleton that one had believed long and safely buried. Once that skeleton dusted off its creaking bones and made its debut in the public eye, it turned suspect every action, remark, and intention of its owner. Its presence—even if it did no more than hug the periphery of the owner’s current life—begged that motivations be examined, comments be placed beneath a microscope, footsteps be dogged, letters be analysed, speeches be dissected, and everything else be nosed as intimately as possible to try to detect the scent of hypocrisy. And this scrutiny didn’t end with the skeleton’s owner. It tainted every member of the family whose names and whose lives were also dragged through the mud of the public’s God-given right to be kept informed. Parnell had known this. Profumo likewise. Yeo and Ashby had both felt the scalpel of scrutiny incise the flesh of what they had considered their private lives. Since neither her predecessors in Parliament nor the Monarchy itself was exempt from public exposure and ridicule, Eve knew that she would not be an exception, and certainly not in the eyes of a man like Luxford who was driven by the mutual demons of his circulation figures and his personal loathing of the Conservative Party.
Alex felt weighted by burdens. His body demanded action. His mind demanded understanding. His heart demanded flight. He was caught between aversion and compassion, and he felt tattered by the battle of their antagonism within him. He fought his way to compassion, if only for the moment.