A Week in December Read online

  Poor kid, Rob thought. What on earth had his parents been thinking?

  At six o’clock, Olya returned from a shopping trip to Sloane Street and started to run a bath in her hotel suite. She poured in three bottles of free gel to let them foam beneath the pounding water and plugged her music player into the sound system, where it played the Best of Girls From Behind, her favourite band. She knew they were meant for younger kids, but she didn’t care; and in any case, she was only just twenty herself.

  Olya chucked her jeans and underwear on to the king-size bed and walked naked to the bathroom. It sometimes felt a little strange to take her clothes off without a photographer present. She instinctively felt herself flex and smile a little for the camera; she had put on three or four pounds since she’d been in London and thought it suited her. She would have liked to see how it might have looked in the hands of a good snapper – these slightly fuller hips and thighs. Olya had never understood why men wanted to photograph her. Her anatomy was no different from that of the other girls in her village, nor of those she’d met when she joined an agency. Everything was in the right place, and there was no extra fat on her, but more than that ... It was merely youth, she had eventually concluded; it was no more than the fact (not much prized by the eighteen-year-old she then was) that she had no lines, no looseness, and that the legs and breasts, so ordinary to her, were, in the eye of the photographer, teeming with some sort of priceless vigour. She felt disappointed by this understanding, as though she had been sold short; and it had made her a little vain, she had to admit, as now she tried to convince herself that she was not just young but truly beautiful.

  The important thing, meanwhile, was to keep hold of ‘Tad’, as she called him. She had had lovers before him, but never a boyfriend. She had slept with her first boy when she was only fourteen and had later been persuaded it was necessary to oblige the head of the model agency and most of the photographers who had shot her. But Tadeusz Borowski was the first man who seemed to think it necessary to pursue her, as if she had the absolute power to reject him. They had met at a party in London, during the weekend he had been summoned from his French club for his medical; she was a hostess on behalf of the car company that was sponsoring the evening. He telephoned the next day, sent flowers and, when the club wanted to meet his wife/partner/girlfriend, he asked Olya if she would come along. Spike had thought the club wanted proof he wasn’t gay; in fact, Mehmet Kundak just liked to check he was not taking on, through marriage, some prima donna like Sean Mills’s endlessly tiresome Zhérie.

  Olya, unaware of either the gay or the bitch issue, thought Spike already loved her. She dressed in a new coat, chic and restrained, and made sure that Mr Kundak understood how devoted she was to her boyfriend. Her attitude, and Spike’s enthusiastic gratitude after he had signed up, had kick-started their affair in passionate terms. Olya had not known that sex could be so enjoyable, or frequent. She had initially seen Tad as the next male rung in a longish ladder that would take her step by step from poverty in the Ukraine to some sort of comfortable life in a European capital. His gallantry confused her. She hardly knew what to do with his affection, or with the troublesome feelings it awakened in her.

  She sang along with Lee and Pamilla and Lisa in the bath. She had no idea what was happening to her, but it was exciting. Who were these people whose house they were going to? An MP? What did that mean? What did it matter? Her Tad would look handsome and would have the best clothes, because she’d bought some for him that afternoon. And in case she felt shy because she didn’t speak much English, there was a small bag of top-quality cocaine on the dressing table.

  As Olya rose from her bath, Sophie Topping slipped into hers, careful to keep her newly washed and dried hair away from the water.

  Sophie closed her eyes and pictured all of London under the winter sky. In her mind’s eye, she focussed on individual rooms throughout the capital where people were now starting to turn their thoughts to the evening ahead. John and Vanessa Veals in their stucco-fronted, pillared mansion, John probably on the phone to some market out of hours, Vanessa thin and alone, applying make-up in their giant bedroom ... Poor Clare Darnley, counting her money for the bus fare ... Gabriel Northwood in his chambers, surrounded by wigs and dust (she didn’t know where he lived but pictured him always among the red-ribboned briefs) ... Simon Porterfield, grandly deflecting questions on the home phone from some impertinent journalist about the suicide on It’s Madness, with Indira gazing on regally in a sari ... R. Tranter, emerging from some grim burrow the wrong side of the North Circular ... The al-Rashids, facing Mecca on their knees for a bit of Allah-bothering before calling up the chauffeur ... Richard Wilbraham, the Leader of the Opposition, perhaps just back from being an unlikely man-of-the-people for the press cameras at a football game ...

  And all the babysitters, all the baths and showers; all the useless gifts of chocolates and candles and bath oils they were readying to bring her; all the blow-drys and the hairdos and the party dresses ... From Havering to Holland Park, from Forest Hill to Ferrers End, from Upminster to Parsons Green, the individuals would shortly leave their flats and houses, fragrant and hopeful, bang the doors, and go like invisible cells into the bloodstream of the city, whose heartbeat tonight was beyond all doubt in one place only: in the North Park home of the country’s newest Member of Parliament.

  Roger and Amanda Malpasse were almost ready to go. Roger was checking that the French doors on to the terrace were locked, while Amanda was settling two whippets and a pug in the kitchen of their flat in Roland Gardens. These three were her responsibility; the lurchers and the yellow Labrador – Scholes, Butt and Beckham, Roger’s dogs – were too big for London and were left in the Chilterns under the vague supervision of a housekeeper.

  ‘Time for a primer, darling?’ said Roger, pouring himself some gin, adding a drop of bitters and, on reflection, a dribble of dry Martini. He took it into the kitchen to fetch ice.

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ said Amanda.

  ‘You sure? Just a pub one maybe?’

  ‘No thanks. Do you like this dress?’

  ‘Yes, lovely. Have you seen a lemon?’

  In Roger’s vocabulary, there were many different kinds of drink. A ‘primer’ was a preparation for a social event, or ordeal. Essentially philanthropic, its aim was to render him benign, so that from the moment he arrived he could be a good guest. A ‘phlegm-cracker’ would be the first of the day, and not a serious one – a small glass of white wine, perhaps, left over from the night before, taken after mowing the huge lawn in the country. A ‘heart-starter’ performed the same function, but a shade more vigorously; it often entailed gin. A ‘sharpener’ preceded food.

  Roger’s favourite drink was a ‘zonker’, and his evenings at home would consist of two zonkers before dinner, then wine with. The zonker itself might be a champagne cocktail – a finger of three-star cognac, a lump of sugar, a single drop of bitters and a tumblerful of very cold biscuity champagne; or it might be a dry martini or a straightforward whisky with ice and soda. The zonker was the king of drinks; its opposite was the dismissive ‘just a pub one’, which involved barely dampening the bottom of the glass.

  ‘Do we know who’s going to be there?’ Roger said, taking his drink through to the sitting room, and checking his pockets to make sure he had his keys.

  ‘It’ll be a show-off do with the Wilbrahams and that education woman. What’s her name?’

  ‘Dillon. I’m missing the football.’

  ‘I’m sure you can record it, darling.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. Have you seen the zapper? Don’t say Bumble’s had it again.’

  ‘Plus the usual book-club people, I imagine,’ said Amanda. ‘I think Sophie will’ve pulled out all the stops. She’ll try to impress Wilbraham and suggest that Lance is a natural for the shadow cabinet. He’s very good on immigration and all that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roger, ‘But do you think we could ever really have a Home Secretary
called “Lance”?’

  He patted the keys in his pocket again.

  Amanda Malpasse, tightly slender in her green satin sheath, was staring out of the window at the street. She liked this time of day, when the traffic subsided and the restaurants and pubs had not yet filled. You could almost sense the capital breathe in and brace itself. This part of London had barely changed since she first glimpsed it on a daring weekend out from school in Hampshire. She and her friends had eaten hamburgers in the Fulham Road and drunk wine from straw-covered bottles. From where she stood at the tall window she could see two restaurants with swarthy waiters in red shirts who might have stepped out of the same decade. They were poised now for the evening’s work: attentive, flirtatious, looking after racy couples no longer in the first exuberance of youth – men who’d clawed back just enough from a divorce to raise a glass to lined blonde consorts: women with what Amanda’s French friend Hélène called ‘des heures de vol’ – hours of flight time, like just-serviceable airliners decommissioned by their European owner and bound for Air Congo.

  With a sigh, Amanda turned back. They’d go home, these paired-off people, to a flat and then, and then ... Wake to a London morning, congratulate themselves on sex, on living, nose the car out of its slot in the residents’ bay ... None of them could know, in their routines, what she had known. Her youth. One day, it would come again.

  ‘Come on, then, you bony old mare. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes, I’m ready,’ said Amanda. She was happy enough with Roger, really.

  ‘Have we got an address for these crashers?’

  ‘Yes, it’s in my bag.’

  ‘Right-ho,’ said Roger. ‘Hang on, have you got the keys?’

  They were still in his pocket, it transpired, and a few minutes later, as they drove up Gloucester Road, Roger said, ‘God, I can’t believe it’s almost the C-word again.’

  ‘I know,’ said Amanda. ‘I remember when I was five and we moved house. I thought Christmas would never come. There seemed to be about a decade between each batch of presents and reindeer. I did love it, though.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Now it seems I barely have time to get the decorations up into the attic before it’s time to get them out again. It seems to come round every three or four months.’

  ‘I know,’ said Roger, wistfully, as he slowed for a pedestrian crossing. ‘I think I preferred it when it was an annual event.’

  Roger always drove the car when they went out on the grounds that Amanda would drive it back; this arrangement, while appearing to be a modern and equitable division of labour, enabled Roger to drink as much as he liked.

  As they turned up Campden Hill Road, he said, ‘Right. Now fill me in. It’s Lance and Sophie, isn’t it? How do we know them?’

  ‘Sophie,’ said Amanda, adjusting her make-up in the mirror of the sun visor, ‘I met at Judith’s Christmas fund-raiser last year. She asked me to sit on the committee of the children’s hospice thing. We met them both that night at the Simpsons’.’

  ‘Is she the one who looks like Mr Gorbachev?’

  ‘No, that’s Elsa Thingy. Sophiee’s a bit plump, animated, tends to wear pink or turquoise. Always has a lot of bangles on.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Roger, ‘the one with the Edward Heath vowels. I had an absolute basinful of her after dinner.’

  ‘Yes. And he—’

  ‘I’ve seen him on television, haven’t I? Earnest but a bit dim.’

  ‘Yes, he worked for Allied Royal for a long time. I don’t think he was ever a high-flier, but he put away his ten million or whatever and then started some little “boutique” fund with a friend.’

  ‘I see,’ said Roger. ‘And what have they got on the children front?’

  At this moment, they had reached the foot of Ladbroke Grove where the traffic lights at the junction with Holland Park Avenue had a double phasing to allow right turns. As Roger manoeuvred into the Grove, he found a bicyclist with no lights coming towards him through the box, going against not one but two red traffic signals, balancing his almost-static bicycle with smart pedal work as he forded through the twin stream of green-lit cars and lorries, then, as death brushed either shoulder, fishing a mobile phone from his pocket and initiating a call. While the traffic braked and swerved round him, he put both feet down so he could shake his spare fist more vehemently against them.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier for him just to throw himself under a Tube train?’ said Roger. ‘Anyway, the Toppings’ children.’

  ‘There’s a boy who was supposed to be very brilliant and was going to Cambridge to read maths and philosophy, called Thomas, I think. And then it turned out he got a B in one of his A levels.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Roger. ‘I didn’t know you could still do that.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Amanda. ‘So I think he’s off somewhere else. And then there’s a girl. I can’t remember her name. Bella maybe.’

  ‘They mostly are. If in doubt, Bella.’

  ‘And then a nice little boy called Jacob or Jake.’

  ‘Any subjects I should steer clear of?’ said Roger.

  ‘Lance is thought to have had an affair with his secretary, so better not mention that.’

  ‘I thought politicians were allowed to do that.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Amanda, folding back the sun visor.

  ‘But the Deputy Prime Minister, what’s his name. He use to have her on the table, zip up, then chair the meeting. And that was considered absolutely fine.’

  ‘Was it?’ said Amanda.

  ‘I believe so. They didn’t bat an eyelid. He didn’t resign, didn’t lose a week’s pay, nothing. The PM said it was fine. Maybe it helped the fellow gather his thoughts. Such as they were.’

  They crossed the Harrow Road, and London came at them through the car window: the pavements and the shopfronts washed in grey by the colour-flattening effect of the sodium street lamps, then a flash of muted red from the tyre-dealer and the universal yellow of the Chinese takeaway. The army-surplus supplier had gone from the corner after two decades, and in its place there was a white-goods showroom with a chilly cut-price display. Two used-furniture stores were unlit; the redbrick church was dark, though the poster for salvation was illuminated: God Said, I Shall Return.

  The years of statistical ‘boom’ had left no visible mark on the modest shopfronts or the long orderly terraces that ran up to Kensal Rise. It might have been the night the FTSE peaked or the day the early 1990s’ recession touched its nadir; there was no way of knowing from tidy streets that hadn’t really changed since 1945.

  Or, as the Malpasses’ car moved carefully over the cold black surface of the road, past the Golden Coin Laundromat, it might even have been the precise moment at which the final straw, laid twenty-four hours earlier by a nervy trader in New York, had broken the back of the world’s banking system.

  In Havering-atte-Bower, Hassan al-Rashid locked the door of his bedroom and fired up his computer. It was time for one last look through babesdelight.co.uk. He clicked on ‘Olya’ and went to the final picture, number ten. He opened ‘Stegwriter’ and double-clicked ‘Scan’. The membrane displayed by Olya’s separating fingertips was devoid of messages. It was just a young woman’s flesh framed by white-painted fingernails. No word, and no chance of turning back now, Hassan thought.

  He was surprised by his own response. Had he really hoped for a last-minute cancellation? He felt ashamed of the possibility. Surely his dedication to righteousness was strong. He did then what he always did when he thought he might waver: he thought less about eternal truth – the unprovable word of the invisible God – and more about Iraq. Those British politicians who had invented an excuse to invade a Muslim land, sending back their own spies’ professionally accurate report and telling them to rewrite it so it said what they wanted; then cutting and pasting a student essay from the Internet in the hope that it would give some spurious backing to their pre-decided course of action ... Surely this was t
he most despicable deceit that even the West had yet descended to?

  It made him almost sympathetic to the Americans. They had been so shaken by the Twin Towers that they no longer knew what they were doing. The country had had a nervous breakdown with the wrong man at the helm; their hapless president was an ex-drunk without a map and almost, it seemed, without an education. That was the American tragedy. But the British ... They had been entitled to hope for better things. Their leaders had at first seemed better educated – though each had later been found out. In what seemed to Hassan a morality tale of almost crude simplicity, a fatal arrogance had convinced each that he was infallible, and neither had understood the lessons of history – neither the political lesson, in the case of former Mesopotamia, nor, as it now turned out, the financial one, when they had boasted that they alone in history had tamed the market. And then to justify their invasion of Iraq, they had just lied and, knowingly, lied and lied.

  Remembering this, Hassan felt stronger again – strong enough to let his eyes linger on the rest of the page of babesdelight. After all, he was allowed to ‘look’: the book said so. And he would see no more women’s bodies now until he entered paradise.

  He stared with valedictory affection at the green eyes of a girl who looked back over her shoulder as she stood on a step outside a barn and thrust her rear towards the lens. Her hair had that shine of recent shampoo and her eyes a friendly look, neither cowed nor anxious; the round swell of her right buttock, not model-thin but healthily plump, had minute red dots in one place, as though she might have received a friendly smack or kept on a wet swimsuit a minute too long. In another shot she held her breasts up to the camera, smiling, as a peasant girl might hold up apples from her father’s orchard at market. He would miss girls, he thought, whatever the nature of the afterlife the Prophet had promised him.