Читать книгу A Scandalous Man - Gavin Esler - Страница 9

As soon as Amanda rang off, Harry Burnett called the Metropolitan Police on the number his sister had given him. To his surprise, someone answered almost immediately.

‘Hello, my name is Harry Burnett and …’

‘You are Robin Burnett’s son, Harry Burnett?’ the voice interrupted.

‘Yes.’

The last time Harry had called the Metropolitan Police was six months before. He had been mugged in a park near Fulham Broadway. The muggers had stolen his iPOD and run off towards the Peabody Estate, a housing estate so rough it had become almost a no-go area. That time, the police telephone rang for forty-five minutes without any police officer managing to answer it. That time, Harry had given up. This time was different. Instant access. Suddenly, he realized, he was Somebody. Or the Son of Somebody.

‘Yes. I’m Harry Burnett,’ he confirmed. ‘My sister said you were interested in meeting me at my father’s flat in Hampstead?’

The detective said yes, he was indeed very interested to meet Robin Burnett’s son at his father’s flat in Hampstead.

‘Can I check the address with you?’ Harry said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve never been there. Until a few moments ago I didn’t even know my father owned a flat in London.’

‘Oh?’ The officer sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘And – um – why is that?’

‘Because … because I have not talked to my father in years.’

‘Oh.’

The policeman confirmed the address and they fixed a time. Harry checked his watch and decided to head to the flat immediately. He walked towards Fulham Broadway Underground Station marvelling at how his father’s name opened doors for him, and how even the affable TV reporter had known about his father’s most precious political gift, right from the very beginning, of perfect timing.

The beginning was 1979. Harry thought of 1979 as Year Zero. A lot of things happened in Year Zero, including Harry, who – in tribute to his father’s impeccable timing – was born on the same day that Mrs Thatcher was elected Prime Minister.

‘The Lady will just love it,’ Robin Burnett told Harry’s mother, Elizabeth, when he suggested they schedule her Caesarean section for polling day. ‘The Lady just loves the idea of traditional families. The more babies the better.’

‘Oh, good,’ Elizabeth responded. ‘Obviously I am pleased to go through with surgeon-assisted childbirth on a day that best suits the future Prime Minister.’

Robin Burnett did not respond to sarcasm. Perhaps he did not even hear it. Besides, he and the Lady were busy with other matters. She celebrated her historic election victory, that May of 1979, and immediately offered Harry’s father a place in her government. Harry, meanwhile, was throwing up in hospital. It took the doctors twenty days of head-scratching to figure out what was wrong and then to operate and put it right. It meant, coincidentally, that when nowadays the TV networks show library pictures of Mrs Thatcher’s election victory they are also showing TV footage of the day of Harry’s birth. He had seen it so often, it was as if he had witnessed it first hand.

In the TV library pictures from May 1979 the Lady is always radiant, twin-sets, pearls, handbags, surrounded by pale-faced, earnest-looking men wearing bad spectacles. Flag-waving crowds cheer the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Hurrah! Hurrah!

She smiles quizzically, cocking her head to the side, trying not to look too pleased with herself, but Harry can tell that she is very, very pleased with herself. She has a helmet of blonde hair which manages to be stiff and wavy at the same time. Then she quotes the words of St Francis of Assisi, as if speaking to a class of particularly slow-witted children.

‘Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy.’

Every time he saw the TV clips, Harry thought: that was Mrs Thatcher, wasn’t it? Love. Faith. Hope. Light. Oh, yes, and joy. Mustn’t forget the joy.

Rejoice. Rejoice.

As they went through the divorce, Harry’s mother told him that during those first twenty days of his life, Robin Burnett visited the hospital just three times, and never for more than fifteen minutes. She kept score. She said she ‘counted him in, and counted him out.’

‘The hospital was the best place for you,’ Robin Burnett defended himself.

Harry was by this time eight years old. The scandal had broken and their father sat him on the sofa in the large drawing room of their house in Pimlico. Amanda was by his side. She must have been ten. It was a time for explanations.

‘Besides, I had other duties.’

Harry was bewildered.

‘What other duties?’

‘Well,’ Robin Burnett nodded sagely, ‘duties to the country as a whole.’

It sounded big stuff to an eight year old. Other duties. To the country as a whole. Fifty-seven million British people were depending on his father, not counting Harry, Amanda and their mother.

‘Harry, you must understand that on the day you were born I absolutely had to be in Gloucester.’ Robin Burnett explained that he had been elected that day as a Gloucestershire MP as part of the 1979 Thatcher landslide. ‘And then I had to go to Number Ten because the Lady summoned me to brief her. And that meant I must …’

When Harry thought back, he remembered that his father ‘must’ go off to Washington or Bonn or Paris or Brussels. He always ‘had to’ do his paperwork, what he called ‘my boxes’. Harry recalled some words from Schiller: ‘Kein Mann muss muessen,’ which translated literally as ‘no man must “must”.’ Nobody has to do anything. Except his father.

‘Why were you not there in the hospital when I was born?’ Harry demanded. ‘When I was sick?’

‘These were different times,’ Robin Burnett explained. ‘Men left childbirth to women. The best you could do was stand outside and pace up and down and smoke cigarettes. It was a different world.’

Robin Burnett made 1979 sound like some far off period in medieval history. Perhaps, Harry had come to realize, it was. In 1979, Year Zero of our current predicament, people worried about things as peculiar to us now as the Black Death or the Turks at the Gates of Vienna. In 1979, the Cold War would last forever. The Soviet Union would invade Germany. There were nervous TV dramas about a nuclear war followed by a nuclear winter. Nobody had heard of Global Warming. The Big Scare was precisely the opposite, a nuclear Ice Age. In February 1979, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown. Militant Islamists hijacked the Iranian Revolution and seized the American embassy, holding diplomats and their families hostage for more than a year. Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. British trades unions were out of control. Inflation. Unemployment. Strikes.

This strange alignment of the planets brought us Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of Soviet Communism, the rise of the Taleban and al Qaeda, and – eventually – the whole mess we’re in now, everything from 9/11 and the London and Bali bombings to the so-called War on Terror and several wars with Iraq. And of course, the Masters of Our Current Predicament, George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

Harry sat down in the Underground train on his way to Hampstead. Suddenly half a dozen teenagers jumped in behind him. They were wearing hoodies or baseball caps and eating foul-smelling hamburgers and chips, shouting at each other with their mouths open, sitting with their feet in unlaced trainers on the seats. One of them had a boom-box and cranked it up. Hip-hop. Another scratched something on the glass of the train window with a bottle opener. Harry looked away. It was the Art of London Zen. What was happening was not really happening. If you did not look at it, it did not exist. A couple of stops later, the teenagers finished eating their burgers and chips. They rolled the wrappers into balls and threw them at each other, then headed and kicked them around the floor. They wiped the grease from their hands on the seats. Two of them started doing pull-ups on the commuter loops hanging from the roof of the train. Harry and the other passengers stared out the window at the Tube blackness. He wanted to scream at the teenagers to sit down. For god’s sake, behave. But he said nothing. There had been half a dozen stabbings on the Northern Line since the beginning of the year. One of the victims had been cut open from his ear to his chest and then photographed on the attackers’ mobile phones as he lay bleeding on the floor.

‘Happy Stabbing, yeah?’ one of the attackers had yelled at the other people in the carriage, then they started slapping people and photographing that too.

Harry stepped out quickly at Hampstead, leaving the gang of teenagers in the carriage behind him. Relieved. Feral beasts. There was a newsagent’s stall with two billboards. One said: ‘Iraq War “In Good Faith” – Blair.’ The other: ‘Election Called for May 5.’

Harry asked the newsagent for directions to his father’s apartment block.

‘Hampstead Tower Mansions?’

Blank look.

‘Heath View Road? Do you know it?’

The man was fat and balding, with a comb-over of greasy brown hair. He grunted and continued sorting his papers. The grunt could have been a yes, or a no, or a fuck-you.

‘You know it?’ Harry tried again. This time the grunt was definitely a fuck-you.

‘You wanna know somefink get one a’these.’

The man nodded his greasy hair towards a stack of London A to Z guides, then turned away. Harry bought an A to Z, cursing under his breath. He handed over a ten pound note. The change was returned slowly and without a word. Harry looked at the newsagent’s flabby, white, unshaven jowls.

‘Somefink else I can do for you?’ the newsagent snapped.

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘You could die.’

He took the map and walked out. The newsagent mumbled curses of his own. Harry searched for the address and began walking towards the heath. The apartment was part of a red-brick Victorian mansion block facing south. It sat squat like a fort. He climbed the steps to the front door and into an entrance hall lined with polished brass panels and tinted mirrors. The jade-coloured marble floor was spotless. The concierge was formal, black tail-coat and white shirt. It was like stepping back into the London of Charles Dickens.

‘Good evening, sir. How may I help you?’ Harry cleared his throat.

‘My name is Harry Burnett. I …’

‘Ah yes,’ the concierge interrupted. He beamed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Mr Burnett. I’m due to go off duty, but I wanted to help in any way that I can. I am so sorry about what has happened to your father.’

The concierge proffered a hand and they shook formally.

‘Sorry?’

‘Yes, ever so sorry, sir.’

Harry blinked and then savoured the moment. He could not remember ever meeting anyone sorry about his father before.

‘Thank you,’ he murmured.

‘How is he?’

‘Still alive is all I know,’ Harry responded.

‘A bad business.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘I’m Sidney Pearl, chief concierge here at Hampstead Tower Mansions. Anything I can do for you, just ask. Anything.’

‘I’d like to look around the flat while I wait for the police, if I may.’

‘Of course.’

He gave Harry the keys.

‘Thank you, Mr Pearl.’

‘Sidney, please.’

‘Thank you, Sidney. Please call me Harry. The police are on their way…’ He checked his watch. ‘They should be here any minute.’

‘I shouldn’t bet on it,’ Sidney responded. ‘Always late in my experience. Last time I called them to report a spot of vandalism, they arrived two days late. Do you want to go up now – or perhaps have a cup of tea? I’ve just made myself a pot.’

Tea sounded a good idea.

Harry wanted to hear more from the only living human being he had ever directly encountered who showed respect for Robin Burnett. The concierge nodded towards the leather armchairs in the hallway as he disappeared into his private kitchen.

‘Please, make yourself at home.’

Sidney emerged a few minutes later, smiling, with cups and a plate of bourbon biscuits.

‘The burglar alarm in the flat is off,’ he said, placing the tray in front of Harry. ‘I turn it off for the cleaners. I will re-set it when you leave. Your father was very particular about his security. I’m pleased to say he trusted me. Trusts me. He called this his “Place of Safety”. I like to think of it like that. A haven, if you will.’

Harry waited for an explanation. There wasn’t one. Sidney picked up his own tea-cup and smiled again.

‘You knew him well?’

Sidney shrugged.

‘For many years I have had the pleasure of knowing your father in my professional capacity. We are neighbours, so to say. My wife and I have a flat in the basement here. Very handy, it is. Otherwise we would certainly never be able to afford Hampstead, prices being what they are. Your father was – is – a great man, Harry. I hope you don’t mind me saying so. I am sure he will pull through.’

‘Thank you again,’ Harry responded, now somewhat embarrassed. ‘Why do you think he called this his “Place of Safety”?’

Sidney Pearl looked thoughtful.

‘I am not sure that I could answer that, except to say that many of our owners put a lot of store in their privacy. And who can blame them? We have television people here, business people, politicians. Celebrities, so to say. These kind of people have no privacy nowadays, do they?’ Sidney nodded at the window, ‘Not out there, in that world. It’s a fishbowl. Always someone trying to sneak a picture or ask an impertinent question. I sometimes think there is no such thing as privacy any more for anyone who seeks to serve the public. But in here in the Mansions, well, it’s different, isn’t it? Safe. And after… well, you know … after it all blew up around your father, I suppose that a lot of things happened that made him … cautious.’

‘Yes,’ Harry agreed. ‘A lot of things did happen.’

‘They hunted him, sir.’ Sidney Pearl sounded aggrieved. ‘They hunted him like it was a sport.’

‘Fox-hunting and politician-hunting,’ Harry replied. ‘Traditional British blood sports. Ought to be banned.’

They agreed it was an awful business. Harry sipped his black tea and sucked a bourbon biscuit. Sidney Pearl put his own cup to the side and busied himself with a ledger on the desk.

‘May I ask you something, Sidney?’

‘Of course. Anything at all.’

‘You said my father was a great man. Why was that exactly?’

Sidney Pearl looked surprised, as if the answer was so obvious it did not bear repeating.

‘Well, he changed this country, didn’t he? He – and others like him – got us back to work, got the unions off our backs, made us feel it wasn’t all hopeless.’

Now it was Harry who looked surprised.

‘Oh, you’re too young to remember, a young man like you.’

Harry agreed.

‘I was born in 1979. On the day Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister. My sister jokes that I am one of Thatcher’s Children and that if I’d been a girl my father would have called me Maggie.’

‘Were you born that day? Were you indeed?’ Sidney beamed. ‘Well then, until the moment you arrived among us this country couldn’t do anything right. Our cars were rubbish. I had a British Leyland. Montego it was. Named after a Bay in Jamaica. Very fancy. Only it leaked oil in my driveway and wouldn’t start in the winter. Chap next door had Japanese – a Honda. We laughed at him at first, but it didn’t leak anything, ever, and started every morning without trouble. Nowadays the Japanese have a car industry and we don’t. Tells you something, doesn’t it? People were always on strike. The buses, the trains, the council workers. Your father helped turn it all around. On top of that he is a gent, a real gent. Invited me and the family to the House of Commons. Several times, it was. A big man always has time for the little people, if you get my meaning. The cleaners, the gardeners. Your father always had a kind word or two. He has character, Harry. And character is destiny, isn’t that what they say?’

Harry finished his biscuits in silence. The man Sidney Pearl had just described was a complete stranger to him.

‘Why don’t you go up to the flat,’ Sidney said. ‘I’ll send the police on, when they arrive. If they ever do turn up. You can’t be certain, can you, with any of the public services nowadays? You get what you pay for.’

Harry thought for a moment and then did as he was told. He wanted to look around the home of a person of character. A big man. A great man. And he wanted to see what a Place of Safety might look like.

The elevator was retro. It had criss-crossed metal doors, glass panels, 1920s art deco in style, but it moved up the shaft to the top floor silently, with twenty-first century efficiency. The doors opened on a marble-white corridor which Harry noticed smelled of disinfectant. The hallway was lit by gleaming chandeliers. The carpet was rich, thick and blue. Everything seemed very clean, especially compared to the grime of the Tube.

‘A Conservative party carpet,’ Harry muttered jovially. ‘Rich, thick and blue.’

He had the sensation that he was bouncing on a trampoline, jumping in the air like a child on Christmas day, as he approached the apartment door.

‘My inheritance,’ he whispered.

There were two locks. Harry twisted the keys and eventually managed to get the door open. A yellowish glow from the sun was falling on the windows. They faced out towards the heath. Harry took a deep breath and walked quickly around. It was bigger than he had imagined. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, three reception rooms, a hall and an enormous modern kitchen, granite and sherry-coloured wood with German appliances. Harry stood for a moment gazing in wonderment. He did not know much about property prices, but the apartment would be worth at least two million pounds, probably more. Three million. Hampstead prices. And it did not look like anything his father would ever buy.

Besides, how could he afford it? Robin Burnett had not earned anything, as far as Harry knew, since the scandal broke. He had resigned immediately from the government and quit as an MP. He had no job. He had written no memoirs. There was no deal with the press. No income. Despite the offers from the newspapers, from Stephen Lovelace and the others – or perhaps because of them – Harry’s father had defiantly refused to write his side of the story. No kiss, no tell, for almost twenty years. Or at least, not by him. The only quote Robin Burnett was known to have given on the scandal was typically opaque. He was challenged by a TV crew on the doorstep of his Pimlico house as he left it for the last time.

‘Those who speak, do not know,’ he said. ‘Those who know, do not speak.’

‘What do you mean by that, Mr Burnett?’ the interviewer shouted.

‘Res ipsa loquitur,’ was all they got by way of explanation. The thing speaks for itself. As far as Harry knew, that was his father’s last public statement to anyone about anything, and typical of his father, it was in Latin.

Immediately in front of Harry in the apartment there was a striking antique mirror, full length, with pitch pine surrounds. Harry had seen a mirror like that before. In another hallway.

In another life, during his childhood in the house in Pimlico. As he stared at it, the memories shaking his bones, the telephone rang. He followed the noise and found the phone in the main room of the apartment, on a table next to a baby grand piano.

‘It’s Sidney Pearl, Harry. The police have just called. They say they do not think they can make it today. Can you believe it? Two shootings of teenagers in South London. Bad traffic. The election being called. Some kind of security alert. Bomb scare. Every excuse in the book except that the dog ate their homework. They wondered would it be convenient to call at the flat tomorrow morning, and meet you then?’

‘Of course, of course,’ Harry responded, wondering why London had become such a city of private wealth and public inadequacy. ‘Give me their number and I’ll …’

‘I’ll call them back if you wish. Save you the trouble. They were suggesting around ten tomorrow morning?’

Harry felt relief. Someone was looking out for him, for the first time in years. A place of safety.

‘Yes, Sidney, around ten. And Sidney …’

‘Yes?’

He hesitated.

‘Thank you for being so kind.’

‘Don’t mention it. It’s all part of the service. The least I could do for Robin Burnett’s family.’

Harry put the phone down, relieved. If the police were not racing across London to meet him, then presumably they did not think Harry himself had anything important to say about whatever had happened to his father. Good. They were right about that, at least. Harry took his shoes and socks off. He walked barefoot through the apartment, taking a quick mental inventory of his inheritance. Walnut dining table. Nice. Three thousand pounds. Plus eight chairs. Five thousand? Baby grand piano. Very nice. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? He wasn’t sure. He touched the keys. Beautiful tone. Modern flatscreen TV and DVD player. Leather sofa and chairs. Shiny table tops. The master bedroom overlooked the heath. Another bedroom set up as a study. Harry looked out and noticed a bench at the side of the heath facing towards him. A young woman with spiky hair was sitting on the bench, gazing towards the apartment, lost in thought. There was something – he could not think of the right word – cheeky, perhaps, or defiant – about the way that she looked up towards him. Harry pressed his face to the glass.

Suddenly, as if alarmed, the woman snatched at a rucksack on the bench beside her and turned away, moving quickly out of sight behind the trees towards the heath ponds. Harry stepped back, puzzled. He had caught her doing something wrong, this strange spiky woman. She was guilty, though he could not guess the crime. How odd. Harry returned to the main room and spotted a tray of malt whiskies, six or seven good ones. Oban, Bowmore. Glen Moray. Macallan. Plus a couple in the distinctive green-labelled bottles of the Scotch Whisky Society. At last. Signs of his father in residence. Gin. Vodka. A crystal ice bucket. Beside the tray of liquor, a big black and white photograph in a silver frame caught his eye. He snatched it up. It was of the father he remembered, taken in his prime about twenty years ago. Big shouldered, athletic build, tall, with a shock of black hair. Wearing a dinner jacket. But it was his father’s companion who really startled Harry. She was strikingly beautiful. She was younger, in her early thirties. She had thick dark hair, tied in a chignon, and she was bedecked in a glittering ball-gown, her eyes brimful of intelligence. And there was something else. The woman and his father were laughing. The photographer had caught them at precisely the moment their eyes engaged. There was no doubting the expressions on their faces. Harry looked again at the face of the woman, and at his father. Then he called his sister.

‘Leila Rajar?’ Amanda’s voice rose to high pitch.

‘Yes.’

‘You are sure it’s her?’

‘Absolutely. Yes. It’s Leila Rajar.’

‘But how could he be with Leila Rajar?’

Harry did not know.

‘The American TV news woman?’

There was only one Leila Rajar.

‘Yes, the American TV news woman. I’m holding the picture in my hand right now,’ Harry insisted. ‘This is either Leila Rajar or it’s her body double.’

‘But how can you be sure, Aitch?’

Harry grew exasperated.

‘How can I be sure of anything?’

Harry watched Leila Rajar read the news most nights on satellite TV. Leila Rajar had just been signed up by CBS News for a contract reported to be worth $22 million a year, making her the best-paid newsreader in history.

‘How can I be sure I am talking to you? It’s her, Amanda. She’s got darker hair in the photo than she has now, and she must have been about thirty when it was taken. She’d be fifty-something now. But it’s her all right. And she is heart-stoppingly beautiful.’

‘What about him?’

‘He looks as he did in those photographs from after the Falklands War, when he was promoted to Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The cat that got the cream. Except for one thing.’

‘What one thing?’

Harry looked at the picture and tried to sum it up.

‘He is glowing.’

‘Glowing?’ Amanda scoffed. ‘Aitch, have you been drinking?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then what do you mean by …’

‘I have never seen him look so … happy. Amanda, she is in love with him, and he is quite definitely in love with her. It’s as if there is something warming them both from within.’

Harry took a deep breath. Until he said the words, it had never occurred to him that his father might love anyone other than himself.

‘What?’ She sounded shocked.

‘Love, Amanda. It makes him look … younger.’

‘Younger?’

‘And nicer.’

She raised her voice. ‘Nicer?’

‘Vulnerable.’

There was a long pause.

‘But Leila Rajar!’ Amanda broke in eventually. ‘How would he know Leila Rajar?’

Harry shrugged.

‘All I’m doing is looking at one moment between two people captured at one two-fiftieth of a second twenty years ago in black and white.’

‘Exactly my point, and …’

‘It’s enough. Really it is. They love each other.’

Amanda went silent.

‘Fuck,’ she said.