SOPHIE
22 October 2016
Three
It is the Mail that has the story. They have to wait until the first editions to learn quite how bad it is.
The PM’s director of communications, Chris Clarke, is there: pacing the floor, phone jabbed to his ear or glued to his hand, his ratty face tense with anticipation; small eyes narrowed either side of a sharp nose that is dulled with the grease of too many takeaways and the grey exhaustion of countless early mornings and late nights.
She cannot bear him. His estuarine twang; his self-importance; that strut – the strut of a short man for, at five-foot-nine, he is dwarfed by her husband. The knowledge that he is indispensable to the prime minister. ‘He has the common touch: keeps us in check, knows what we lack – and how to counteract that,’ James once said when she’d tried to articulate her instinctive distrust. She has no barometer by which to measure this former News of the World journalist, from Barking. Single, without children but apparently not gay, politics genuinely appears to consume him. In his late thirties, he is that unfathomable cliché: married to his job.
‘Fuck’s sake.’ He is skimming the story now on his iPad, while waiting for the fat wad of a Saturday paper to be delivered; mouth twisting in a sneer as if there is an acrid taste in his mouth. Sophie feels a surge of bile rise up as she catches the headline, ‘MINISTER HAS AFFAIR WITH AIDE’, then the standfirst: ‘PM’s friend in trysts in the corridors of power.’
She skims the first paragraph, the words coalescing into something solid and impossible. ‘Britain’s most fanciable MP had sex with his female aide in a lift in the Commons, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal.
‘James Whitehouse, a junior Home Office minister and confidant of the prime minister’s, conducted his affair with his parliamentary researcher in the Palace of Westminster. The married father-of-two also shared a room with blonde Olivia Lytton, 28, during the party conference.’
‘Well, that was fucking stupid.’ Chris’s voice cuts through the silence as she struggles to master her feelings and consider how to sound controlled and cogent. She cannot manage it and stands abruptly, revulsion swelling like a tide of sickness as she walks quickly from the room. Hidden in the kitchen, she leans against the sink – hoping the desire to throw up will ease. The chrome is cool to her touch and she concentrates on the shine and then on a picture by Finn: one of the few she has deemed good enough to be pinned to the fridge. It shows four stick figures with huge smiles, the father figure towering over the rest of them: 50 per cent taller than his wife; 100 per cent bigger than his son. A six-year-old’s view of the world. ‘My famly’ scrawled in magenta felt tip.
Finn’s family. Her family. Tears brim but she blinks them back and touches her wet lashes to prevent her mascara smudging. No time for self-pity. She thinks of what her mother would do: pour herself a double whisky; take the dogs for a bracing, blustery walk along the cliffs. No dogs here. No remote coast path on which to lose one’s self, either: or hide away from the press who, if the past indiscretions of other ministers are anything to go by, will soon be circling outside their front door.
How to explain this to the children, expecting to go out early to ballet and swimming? The cameras. Perhaps a reporter? Finn can be fobbed off – but Emily? The questions will be endless. But why are they there? Is Daddy in trouble? Who’s that lady? Mummy, why do they want a photo? Mum, are you crying? Why are you crying, Mummy? Just thinking of it – the fact they will be exposed to this very public embarrassment and scrutiny; and that she will need to reassure them while the questions continue, incessant – makes her retch.
Then there will be the snippets of information heard and only half-understood in the playground and the looks of pity or ill-disguised delight from other mothers. For a moment, she considers bundling the children into the car and driving them to her mother’s, in deepest Devon, hidden down endless, high-banked lanes. But running away implies guilt – and a lack of unity. Her place is here, with her husband. She fills a glass from the tap; takes a couple of sharp, hard swigs – and then walks back into the front room to discover how she can shore up their marriage and help to rescue his political career.
‘So – she’s a classic woman scorned?’ Chris Clarke is hunched forwards, scrutinising James, as if trying to find an understandable explanation. It strikes Sophie that perhaps he is asexual. There is something so cold about him: as if he finds human frailty inconceivable – let alone the messy foolhardiness of desire.
‘I had told her our fling was a mistake. That it was over. She’s not quoted directly, is she, so she can’t have gone to the papers?’
‘She works in Westminster. She knows how to get the story out.’
‘ “Friends of . . .”?’ James looks pained as he glances down at the reams of type about himself.
‘Exactly. “ ‘He used her. She thought it was a proper relationship but he treated her abysmally . . .’, a ‘friend’ of Miss Lytton said.” ’
‘I’ve read it,’ James says. ‘No need to go on.’
Sophie sits then, on the sofa opposite her husband and to the right of the director of communications. Perhaps she seems masochistic, wanting to know each detail, but ignorance isn’t an option. She needs to understand exactly what she is up against here. She tries to reread the story – taking in the ‘friend’s’ description of what Olivia endured; reading about a lift taken in the House of Commons. ‘He pressed the button between floors and the ride took some time.’ She can imagine the smirk as the reporter chose the double entendre; the sniggers, hastily suppressed, or raised eyebrows of some readers – but though the words smite her with their crudeness, the facts, in their entirety, make little sense.
She looks up, aware that Chris is still talking.
‘So the line to take is: You deeply regret this brief affair and the pain you have caused to your family. Your priority now is to rebuild those relationships.’ He glances at her as he says this. ‘You’re not going to be springing any surprises on us, are you, Sophie?’
‘Like what?’ She is startled.
‘Announcing that you’re leaving. Putting your side of the story. Moonlight flits?’
‘Do you need to ask?’
‘Of course I do.’ His gaze is appraising.
‘No, of course not.’ She manages to keep her tone neutral: not to reveal that yes, of course she had thought of fleeing, of disappearing down a rabbit hole of lanes far away from London and her new, painful reality; or betray her anger that he has guessed at this.
He nods, apparently satisfied, then turns to her husband.
‘The problem, of course, is a) that you were in a position of power; and b) this allegation that you shagged on government time. At the taxpayers’ expense.’
‘The party conference isn’t funded by the taxpayer.’
‘But your business as a minister in Her Majesty’s Government is. And the idea that you were getting down and dirty in a lift when you should have been helping to run the country looks problematic, to say the least.’
‘I can see that.’
She looks at James then: a sharp glance of shock that he isn’t denying this; that he is acknowledging this description. The director of communications smiles and she wonders if he takes pleasure in belittling them like this. It is self-aggrandising: by putting them in their place, he validates himself; reiterates his importance to the prime minister, she can see that. But there seems to be more to it than this: more, even, than his journalistic revelling in a good story. For all his political dirty tricks – for he has a reputation for being ruthless, someone who will hold on to a kernel of gossip and threaten to wield it at the most effective moment, much like a government whip – he seems to be personally judgemental about this.
‘So, the key is to refuse to comment on details. This is tittle-tattle, the details of which you refuse to be drawn on. In your statement you will stress that in no way did this brief error of judgement affect your ministerial business. You will not be drawn into denials: they have a way of coming back to haunt you. And you will not elaborate. Stick to the line: deep regret, brief affair, priority your family. Deflect and dismiss but don’t deny. Understood?’
‘Of course.’ James glances at her and offers a smile, which she ignores. ‘And there’s no need to offer my resignation?’
‘Why would you do that? The PM will make it clear if he wants that – but he doesn’t abandon old friends, you know that, and you’re one of his closest.’ Chris points to the iPad and the Mail’s copy: ‘It says so, here.’
‘Yes.’ James seems to visibly straighten. Tom Southern and he go back to Eton, and Oxford, their adolescent and adult lives inextricably entwined since the age of thirteen. This is the one positive to hold on to: the prime minister, known for being almost fatally loyal, will do everything he humanly can before letting his oldest friend down. Sophie clings to this thought: Tom won’t hang James out to dry. He can’t: it’s not in his nature; and, besides, he owes him too much.
‘He reiterated that earlier.’ James clears his throat. ‘Conveyed his support.’
Sophie feels her breath ease out. ‘So you’ve spoken?’
He nods but refuses to be drawn. Theirs is an exclusive relationship. The drinking rituals, the schoolboy debagging, the shared holidays in their twenties in which they plotted Tom’s political career and one for James later, after he’d gained some experience in the real world, melding the two men together in a way that twelve years of marriage and two children apparently still haven’t done as indestructibly for her and James. And the curious thing is that Tom – whom she still can’t think of as the most powerful man in the country; whom she can still remember getting hog-whimperingly drunk at one of their late-twenties holidays in Tuscany – is the more dependent one. It is less apparent since he’s become PM but still, she knows there is an inequality there – perhaps only discernible to her. He is the one who looks to her husband for advice, yes, but also relies on him, she knows, to keep his secrets.
‘With the PM’s support, you should be fine.’ Chris is brisk. ‘Sex doesn’t have to kill a career these days. Not if the issue is closed down quickly. Lying does. Or rather, being caught lying.’ He gives a sniff, suddenly fastidious. ‘Also, you’re hardly some poor fool caught with your hands down your pants, filming yourself on a smartphone. There will be an element among the older, male voters who will see a quick knee-trembler with a young filly as perfectly understandable.’ He sneers. ‘No one’s business but yours as long as it’s brushed aside swiftly and doesn’t reoccur.’
‘What about an inquiry – into my having a relationship with a party employee?’
Sophie’s insides clutch tight. The thought of an ongoing internal investigation, pored over by the press, who could chivvy and harry and complain about lack of accountability or a whitewash, was chilling. It could destroy his career but it would also wound them: stoking the subject when it needed to be buried deep.
‘Did the PM mention that?’ Chris is sharp, his ratty eyes – a pale opalescent blue – widening.
James shakes his head.
‘Then there’s no need. This is a foolish affair, quickly forgotten – as long as you’ve told me everything?’
James nods.
‘Well. You’re part of the inner sanctum. If this moves off the front page quickly, there’ll be no need for anything further at all.’
She feels like laughing. James will be fine because he is the right type; he has done nothing illegal; and he has the prime minister’s patronage. She glances past him to the bookshelves on which Hilary Mantel’s pair of Cromwell novels sit: stories of an era in which a mercurial king’s favour was all. More than four centuries have passed and yet, in Tom’s party, there is still a flavour of life at court.
She lets her eyelids lower, trying to block out thoughts of a 24–7 news agenda and of the pack mentality that takes hold when a story gains traction on social media. News, these days, spins so fast. But all will be well, Chris said, and he is a realist, a cynic even: there is no reason for him to offer false reassurance. None at all.
She opens her eyes and finally looks at her husband.
But his classically beautiful face, with its high cheekbones and strong jaw, and those crinkled lines at the outer edge of his eyes that tell of a love of the outdoors and a propensity to laugh, is drawn; his expression closed to her.
He looks at the other man, and she spots something uncharacteristic: just the tiniest flicker of doubt.
‘I just hope you’re right.’