A Week in December Read online

  ‘Is it too late now?’ said Gabriel.

  But Loader had gone. Gabriel put his empty glass back on a tray and, taking a fresh one with him, slid from the room and went downstairs to look for a way outside. He needed air. He was also very hungry, and the raw fish had not sat well on his empty stomach. At the back of the house, he pushed open a door on to what appeared to be a study. There was a wall full of photographs of Lance Topping, taken over many years, shaking hands with famous people. Here was Lance with a fierce economist, once tipped as party leader, now teaching in the University of the Third Age; Lance with the then party leader, latterly delusional in a care home; Lance with a former Chancellor who’d lost his seat and turned to writing detective stories. Among them all, Lance was now the only serving MP.

  Gabriel felt that he had wandered into a world he didn’t understand. People like Mark Loader and, in his different way, Lance Topping were playing by different rules. And somehow money had become the only thing that mattered. When had this happened? When had educated people stopped looking down on money and its acquisition? When had the civilised man stopped viewing money as a means to various enjoyable ends and started to view it as the end itself? When had respectable people given themselves over full-time to counting zeroes? And, when this defining moment came, why had nobody bloody well told him?

  Next to the desk was a glass door that gave on to a small balcony. Gabriel undid the security locks at top and bottom and let himself out. He lit a cigarette, sucked in the smoke and swilled down some cold champagne. He saw a man sitting on a low raised brick wall at the end of the garden, all alone.

  Without thinking, Gabriel took out his mobile phone and wrote a text message to Jenni. ‘Stuck at party. Tossers. Meet tmw? Still important aspects of case 2 discuss ... G x’.

  Having pressed ‘Send’, he felt dizzy. Perhaps it was the unaccustomed nicotine – there was hardly anywhere you could smoke these days and he didn’t allow himself cigarettes at home. Or maybe it was just that the whole world had tilted and he was out of kilter with it, doomed to feel forever seasick. Was Jenni the answer? At least she seemed real. She seemed grounded, earthed. He smiled: almost all the ways in which he thought of her seemed to evoke trains or electricity. But something about that girl filled him with a sense of urgency – with a desire to live that he hadn’t known before.

  He could hear a steady, fulsome braying from upstairs. ‘There was a sound of revelry by night ...’ he thought.

  Byron. ‘The Eve of Waterloo’. The words brought back with almost painful clarity the feel of a book, Poetry Worth Remembering, the yellow cloth on his eleven-year-old fingers, the schoolroom on a hot afternoon and his striving to force the words into his memory.

  ‘Sir. Excuse me.’

  The caterer was in the study staring out at Gabriel on the small balcony with the look of a sympathetic police officer about to run in an old lag, but who, almost regretful that the long pursuit is over, has decided to give him a few more minutes at large.

  ‘Dinner is served, sir.’

  Gabriel ground out his cigarette. The man was waiting, and watching him.

  ‘It’s OK, Super.’ Gabriel could imagine him speaking into his lapel. ‘Chummy’s not going to give us any trouble this time.’

  He came quietly. Out in the hall, he saw women picking their way carefully downstairs in high heels and going across into the brightly lit dining room.

  ‘If anyone needs the toilet,’ called out Sophie, ‘it’s down at the end of the hall.’

  There was a tailback on the stairs as the guests went down to dinner, and John Veals found himself standing next to a tall, debonair man in a chocolate-coloured corduroy suit with a purple tie.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Patrick Warrender.’

  ‘John Veals.’

  ‘I saw you just having a word with one of my star reviewers in there. Ralph Tranter.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Veals. He paused. ‘Vindictive little cunt, isn’t he?’

  Patrick coughed. ‘That’s rather a quick summing-up.’

  ‘It’s what I do,’ said Veals. ‘Sum things up. And I see you don’t deny it.’

  ‘Well it’s fair to say that Ralph may have a slight problem with the ... er, the contemporary,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Christ, you can say that again,’ said Veals. ‘If he was a chocolate drop he’d fucking eat himself. Even in my business ...’

  But Veals didn’t complete the sentence, as Patrick had slipped through a gap on the stair below and made his escape.

  The cleared rooms opened on to one another through an arch, where once there had been a wall. A long table ran under it, swathed in floor-length white linen with clusters of candles and bowls of cut flowers at intervals. Sophie’s voice scraped against the hubbub as she ordered her dilatory guests to their places. A second, much less sympathetic caterer hovered by her elbow; this man was not so much deserving plod as supercilious schools inspector, who watched more in sorrow than in anger as the headmistress struggled with her charges.

  The shrill insincerity of the conversation was acting like a drug. No one wanted to sit down for fear it showed that they were not entranced by what was being bellowed at them. Almost all the guests had overcome strong competition in their fields of work, proving keener, greedier or more obdurate, so none would yield in the game of conspicuous gaiety.

  Gabriel pulled back the hired banqueting chair for Nasim (it reminded him with a brief stab of the one he’d sat on when he first met Catalina), and introduced himself to the woman on his left, Clare Darnley, who’d been the one confronting Simon Porterfield about his new TV package.

  ‘You gave him a good going-over, I thought,’ said Gabriel. ‘You should be in my job. You’d be good with witnesses.’

  Clare didn’t seem amused. ‘But do you ever watch this stuff? It’s absolutely appalling. Posh people think it’s chic to say they like it. You sound like a snob if you say what you really think.’

  ‘But you’re not afraid to?’

  ‘God, no,’ said Clare. ‘Someone has to tell the truth. This kind of television is the vicious exploitation of stupid ignorant people by cruel rich shits. It’s a disgrace to our society.’

  Gabriel bit his lip. ‘You should write a newspaper column.’

  ‘That’s the second job you’ve offered me. Do you work for an employment agency in your spare time?’

  ‘No, I do the crossword and read poetry. But I’m beginning to think that not enough clues have been devised and not enough lines of verse written to fill the deserts of vast eternity that make up my spare time.’

  ‘Marvell,’ said Clare.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why’ve you got so much spare time?’

  ‘Because I have so few cases.’

  ‘And why do—’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not fashionable. My chambers are not fashionable. No one apart from the head of chambers has much work. And one other person, a commercial silk.’

  ‘It can’t be just that.’

  ‘No, I think you’re right. I think there’s something deeper. I think that solicitors sensed my lack of enthusiasm. But that’s changing. I think I’ve turned the corner. I’ve already got four cases booked in next year. I have a case coming up in the Court of Appeal in January and I think it’s going to change everything.’

  ‘And did you vote for Lance in the by-election?’ said Clare.

  ‘No. I don’t live in his constituency.’

  ‘Neither does Lance.’

  ‘Anyway, I don’t know what he believes in,’ said Gabriel. ‘I always think of him as someone who could be in any party. He probably chose the wrong club to join at university. The flip of a coin. I think he just wants to be in power. He wants to run things.’

  ‘Well, perhaps his day will come. He’s certainly trying his socks off with Mrs Wilbraham.’

  ‘I hope it comes soon. For his sake.’

  ‘White wine or red, sir?’ The schools inspector was le
aning over his shoulder, his eye taking in the half-eaten salad, the messily torn slice of walnut bread.

  ‘Red, please,’ said Gabriel. He thought it was time he spoke to the woman on his left, Nasim al-Rashid. The subject moved naturally from why she had no wine glass to the question of religion.

  ‘Are you very devout?’ said Gabriel.

  Nasim smiled. ‘Not really. My family wasn’t at all religious. I was just an ordinary Yorkshire girl. Knocker – my husband – his family’s very religious. So is he. And my son, too. He used to sing and recite in the mosque, until he discovered politics. Now I think he’s coming back to Islam.’

  ‘Are you happy about that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Nasim didn’t look happy, though. Gabriel watched her knitted brow, her big brown cloudy eyes. She was a fine-looking woman, he thought, though somehow she seemed sad – marginalised, perhaps, as though she felt her life was one of watching others, not participating.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘The Koran’s a funny book, isn’t it? I mean, not farcical, but odd.’

  ‘Funny peculiar, you mean,’ said Nasim.

  ‘Yes. It’s so unstructured.’

  ‘He wrote it down as it was revealed to him.’

  ‘I know. By the Angel Gabriel. But my namesake didn’t have much narrative discipline. It kind of just comes at you, doesn’t it? There’s so weirdly little story. Just assertion.’

  ‘More red wine, sir? The next course is lamb.’

  ‘Yes. Still red, thank you.’

  Gabriel felt his school being marked down as ‘problematic’ by the inspector, who allowed him a bare half-glass more of Lance Topping’s burgundy.

  Gabriel turned back to Clare, but she was dealing with a man on her right; Nasim’s attention was switched to her left, so Gabriel was given a few minutes’ respite. His hearing was unusually acute, and even in the noisy dining room he could tune briefly in and out of many conversations.

  Magnus Darke was leaning across to Richard Wilbraham. ‘So what sort of limit might you set on immigration?’

  Wilbraham smiled uneasily. ‘I assume that Chatham House rules apply tonight?’

  Darke shrugged and looked pained, as though his honour had been doubted. ‘Just a rough figure.’

  Sophie Topping: ‘Don’t be naughty, Magnus.’

  Wilbraham: ‘Well, you have to understand that seventy-five per cent of births in London last year were to mothers who were not themselves born in this country.’

  Indira Porterfield: ‘Speaking as someone also not born in—’

  Spike Borowski: ‘You want beautiful football, you cannot make team from all English players.’

  Olya: ‘Yes, Tadeusz is paying much taxes.’

  Roger: ‘Yes, I’d love some more. Lance, where d’you get this burgundy?’

  No one was prepared to listen; and a look of quiet relief came over Richard Wilbraham’s face as the clamour of received ideas made it impossible for Darke to pursue his questioning.

  In the rear carriage of a westbound District Line train, Hassan al-Rashid was sitting with a packed nylon rucksack on the floor between his feet. He wore a navy blue woollen hat, anorak, jeans and climbing boots with thick socks underneath. He had shaved in order to look less threatening and he held his right hand firmly in his left. What could that hand desire, he thought, that he gripped it so tight?

  Now that the end was approaching, now that he had actually put himself on rails towards his destination, he felt calmer. The train would carry him to Waterloo, and then a second train would take him on to Glendale, where the others would be waiting. They’d be excited, he imagined; they’d punch each other on the shoulder, touch flesh and reassure, like rugby men before a game. He was looking forward to seeing his friends. It was a fine thing they were doing: a clean deed in a foul, befuddled world.

  He clung to the words of the Koran that promised eternal life to all martyrs for the simple reason that the words of the Hadiths, the collections of traditional wisdom from the Prophet’s life, were considerably less comforting. They made no bones at all about the fact that suicide was a sin and that the sinner would be doomed to repeat the act for ever in the afterlife. Hassan tried not to think about the Hadiths.

  In order to attract no suspicious glances, he stared straight ahead, though not too fiercely. He tried to look tired without being zonked; unwilling to engage with others but only because that was the way of the city. Above all, he tried to look unconcerned. He was sure his clothes must help: everyday, anonymous, but clean and of decent quality, chosen for their ability to make a curious glance bounce off them. He was Mr Londoner personified, a transient in a private daze whose every pore said, Leave me to my own small world, my virtual life: respect, and don’t come near.

  The train went so fast. Who was driving this thing? They were already out of Essex and rattling through the old East End – Stepney, Bow, Mile End, once the cockney, now the Muslim, heartland. Hassan breathed in tightly as he thought of the narrow streets above his head with the halal grocers and the market barrows, loan sharks and hijab drapers. Could they form the hard-core base, the foundation, of a second caliphate? Would they be strong enough?

  This driver was pitiless. Why such a rush? On, on, now into the financial world at Monument – then Cannon Street and Mansion House where the kafirs worked at fever-pitch twelve hours a day, shouting into telephones, hoping by their frantic betting to transfer some coins from one fund to another ... Woe betide every backbiting slanderer who amasses riches and sedulously hoards them, thinking his wealth will render him immortal! By no means! He shall be flung to the Destroying Flame ...

  For three years at college, Hassan had changed train on to the Northern Line at Embankment, but a glance at the A to Z told him the best stop for Waterloo Bridge was Temple, a pleasant station with flower sellers outside and the river just across the road. Salim had told them not to enter Waterloo by Tube as the mainline stations had too many CCTV cameras.

  Ready to walk the final ten minutes of his journey, Hassan passed his Oyster card across the reader, replaced it in his pocket, though he’d have no further use for it, and emerged into the night.

  John Veals was not enjoying the Toppings’ dinner party. He spent most of the main course sending and receiving text messages from Kieran Duffy, holding his phone beneath the tablecloth. It had always vexed him that the New York and London markets were closed at the Christian weekend. How many traders were bloody Christians anyway?

  He was also made edgy by the presence of Magnus Darke. This Darke was not a financial specialist; his column was a general current-affairs commentary with two or three different items and he could quite simply be squared away by being given a second, more reliable, piece of information by Ryman in due course. His article had been pretty well phrased and had done Darke no lasting damage. It still made Veals uneasy, though, to see this man across the table. As he pushed the lamb and ratatouille to the edge of his plate, he felt a dyspeptic unease, and it would last, he knew from experience, until the trade was successfully completed. But why the fuck would Lance Topping invite such a grimy little hack? Was Lance trying to wind him up?

  As if this was not enough to spoil his dinner, there was the further irritation of the Russian bimbo. When he first saw her across the room, Veals found he had given an automatic nod of acknowledgment; but no such answering gesture came from the girl. She looked at him as though they’d never met, raising an eyebrow that seemed to question his motives for even looking at her.

  It had taken twenty minutes of memory ransacking before Veals suddenly saw that he was searching the wrong disk. This girl was from another world. She wasn’t real; she was a screen fantasy, a laptop dancer. Fuck me, he thought. He’d never quite believed that such women lived and breathed and had existence. She was younger than she looked with no clothes on and considerably more three-dimensional. Had she put on weight? he wondered. It rather suited her. It was bad enough that Lance Topping had invited Magnus Darke, bri
nging worlds of rumour, lies and abstract prices into painful collision with what was tangible; but to have plucked this digitally pixellated tart from cyberspace and animated her to spite him ... He couldn’t tear his thoughts from the shape of her slightly-too-large breasts, which were as well known to him as the backs of his own hands.

  Veals looked back below the tablecloth to the safety of his phone’s illuminated screen.

  * * *

  Sophie Topping leaned back in her chair and let them all scrap it out. There did seem to be a gratifying roar of conversation. Magnus Darke had given up on Richard Wilbraham and now seemed to be locked in some intimate exchange with Amanda Malpasse. Roger couldn’t take his eyes off Olya’s cleavage. Farooq al-Rashid, genially exuberant on fizzy water, was making a good fist of being interested by Brenda Dillon’s plans for failed comprehensives. R. Tranter was telling a baffled Gillian Foxley about the novels of Walter Allen.

  John Veals, she noticed, was surreptitiously looking at his phone beneath the table. Like Roger, he seemed fascinated by Olya, though not necessarily in the same way. Simon Porterfield was hitting on Jennifer Loader, not something Sophie had ever seen attempted before. Perhaps Simon was interested to meet someone who had almost as much money as he did. Not that Jennifer alone could match him, but if you put her income along with her husband Mark’s ... They weren’t known as the Loadeds for nothing. Mark had offered to fund a new wing for a gallery in the city of his birth, and when they had demurred he said he’d also buy them a starter-collection of paintings to put in it.

  It was a funny thing, Sophie thought, how everyone you met these days seemed not just to be wealthy but insanely, ineffably, immeasurably rich. Hundreds of millions of useless pounds slopping out of their accounts and into hedge funds and private-equity companies who could no longer find anything worth buying with it. She used to think Lance was rich on his salary and bonus, a couple of million a year; but now she looked at him and knew for sure that by comparison he was a failure: relatively, they were almost broke. It didn’t bother her particularly. They had enough for this lifetime and half a dozen more, and it was good not to lose touch with your constituents, many of whom, she knew for a fact, did their household sums in thousands.