I kept answering the phone to someone named Carl, who needed to talk to Miranda about business. She’d always take the calls upstairs in the bedroom. As I put down the receiver I’d hear her greet him, an unfamiliar warmth in her voice, a breathiness. Was he her lover? It wouldn’t have surprised me. There were so many secrets between us that one more wouldn’t really have made a difference. I felt happy for her: she deserved someone who could share her ambitions, her hopes for the future. She certainly deserved better than me. Yet this new mystery, this sense of possibilities away from our shared life, suddenly made her seem desirable again. It was like some bad behaviorist joke: me
in the dunce’s cap, salivating on cue. I found myself watching
her as she dressed to go to the office, her trim bottom wiggling
into a pencil skirt, the nape of her neck as she twisted sideways
to brush her hair.
One evening I was in the living room, half watching Pat Ellis
on the news. I had a bottle in front of me on the coffee table, a
Portuguese red that I was trying to make last. Miranda came in
and sat down beside me on the sofa.
“Want one?” I asked, trying to sound playful.
She shrugged. “Why not?”
“Really?”
She nodded. I muted the TV and went to fetch her a glass. She
took a couple of sips and set it down on the coffee table. She looked
very tired. A sudden deep silence fell between us, a mutual ease I
didn’t want to break.
“How was London?”
“Fine. Busy.”
“I can’t remember who you were meeting.”
“No reason for you to remember. Someone was showing me
retail units.”
“Retail?”
“I haven’t decided yet, but I think we’ll open a little boutique.
Somewhere to showcase the new range.”
“That’s a big step.”
“Not so big. Not since the investors came on board.”
“Where would it be?”
“I was thinking King’s Road, but Carl says Notting Hill would
be better.”
“So was it Carl who was showing you the shop?”
“Carl Palmer. I’ve told you about him.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He’s in property. He’s been very helpful.”
“He rings here a lot, your Carl Palmer.”
She looked defiant. “Does he?”
I held up my hands. “Forget it. Sorry.”
Anger and hopelessness played over her face. She took a deliberate gulp of her wine. “We’ve got a lot to sort out, Mike. But let’s not get into accusations. Not when we’re actually having a nice time.”
“You’re right.”
“Look, why don’t we go out for once? I feel like I’m suffocating.”
We drove to a Greek restaurant where we treated each other with such care and formality that we eventually made ourselves laugh. Carl Palmer was with us at the table, floating beside Anna Addison, balancing her, giving our conversation the brittle lightness that comes when two people are colluding with each other, working hard on the deferral of pain.
The next morning we woke up wrapped round each other in bed. Miranda smiled at me warily. We had a truce. It was soon afterward that she first mentioned the idea of a birthday party.
October from the study window: Miranda brutally stabbing at the garden with a trowel. February brought her a reward of daffodils, great clumps of them lining the beds, paper-white and sunshine-yellow. I spent hours at my desk, the desk I didn’t use for anything anymore, watching them quiver in the rain. In the evenings I followed Pat Ellis on the news. There she was, nine months into the new era, standing beside her leader wearing a scarlet jacket and an optimistic smile, like some kind of political redcoat. There she was, surrounded by hand-picked representatives of the topic of the day, addressing the concerns of Junior Police Officers or Minority Community Representatives or Victims of Antisocial Behavior. Whatever her gang was up to, she was right in the middle of it, retailing euphoria, glad-handing rock stars.
When the telly started spewing pictures of fox hunters pushing policemen in Parliament Square, I laughed so hard I almost fell off the couch. Oh, I was living in a topsy-turvy world all right, a mirror world of flash and spin and graphic design. Politics was just lifestyle. Even the scandals seemed to be about home improvement. Miles’s
taunt came back to me: yes, this was the opposite of carving out a Utopia, the opposite of whatever I’d been fumbling for all those years ago. Thoroughly pragmatic, blandly ruthless, always up for a cocktail party. The bloody prime minister was five years younger than me, whichever birthday I counted from.
Then the Home Secretary got himself in a pickle over immigration and the pundits started mentioning Pat Ellis as the coming woman. One day I was half listening to the radio at God’s, watching that rare thing, an actual customer, scanning the poetry section, when I realized Pat was talking in my ear. It had long been her belief, it transpired, that the end of the Cold War necessitated a change of focus in Britain’s intelligence services. She buried it in jargon, smoothing the edges with euphemism and talking with great seriousness about people trafficking and animal rights activists and other contemporary threats to state security, but the underlying message was a budget cut, a reduction of influence for the spooks.
People think Fascism doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just a cartoon perversion, a repertoire of sketch show mannerisms: uniform fetishism, short hair, lining your pencils up in a row on your desk. But the Fascists didn’t go away after the Second World War. I don’t just mean skinheads, though even they’ve burrowed underground, talking about multiculturalism, dressing like breakfast-television presenters. There’s always been a part of the British establishment that identifies its own interests with the interests of the state. They’re unsentimental about human life. They have creatures like Miles to do their bidding.
Whoever Miles represented, whichever clique or tendency or faction, I knew that to them, someone like Pat Ellis was just a blow-in, a temporary occupant of a chair. They wouldn’t hesitate to remove her if they thought she was a threat. The only question was whether they took her speech seriously.
Back in i97i, the defenders of British liberty didn’t bother to camouflage themselves. As union unrest grew and middle-class leftists talked about revolution around Hampstead supper tables,
there were rumors of an imminent military coup. In Northern Ireland, young men and boys were being rounded up and placed in camps. Detainees spent hours or days hooded and shackled in stress positions while loudspeakers played white noise into their cells. There were stories of mock execution, prisoners forced to run gauntlets of baton-wielding soldiers.
In a peculiar way, I felt relieved by the news from Ireland. Internment confirmed what I’d always felt was true: inside the democratic velvet glove there was an iron fist. To the imperial dreamers who still ran our country, this was just another colonial police action, rounding up a few natives to keep the rest in line. To us it looked like the beginning of the slide toward the gas chamber.