The Bell Ringers by Henry Porter

Author:Henry Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2009-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

20

The Otherness of the Other

After arriving at Chequers, Kilmartin was kept waiting for an hour sitting on a Jacobean chair in the Stone Hall beneath the portrait of an unidentified Edwardian woman. Scotch and water, a bowl of cashew nuts and magazines were brought to him on a tray by a member of the Chequers staff. It was hardly the atmosphere he expected. The place was quietly frantic. At least two meetings seemed to be in progress. Doors were opened and closed. People passed from room to room, nodding to him on the way. He stretched his legs and looked at the paintings. When he asked if he could see the Chequers library, he was told it was being used for a presentation.

He had rather old-fashioned notions about the English country house weekend, a sense, particularly at Chequers, that the affairs of state should be conducted at a more leisurely tempo with good conversation, wine and ideas – the big picture. Even in wartime the place had been maintained as an emblem of English civilisation. Hitler strutted before the inflamed skies at the Berghof while Churchill pottered in the Rose Garden in his siren suit. But Chequers in the twenty-first century had become a hive filled with the dreary hum of consultants and technocrats who knew nothing but work and targets and their own ambition. As he came through the front door, he had noticed a room on the left filled with young people working at screens. The security procedures at the gates and at some bollards, which rose automatically in the middle of the drive as he approached the house, had been unusually heavy.

He was on his guard and when Dawn Gruppo asked him to follow her to a large conference room, and with the certainty that the prime minister did not want to consult him on the politics of Tajikistan, he girded himself as though for a difficult border crossing. In fact Temple did not want to talk to him at all. In the room, sitting in four adjacent seats on the far side of the table, were Andrew Fortune, a man who introduced himself as Ferris, Christine Shoemaker and another man of about forty who gave only his first name – Alec.

Producing a show of bonhomie, Andrew Fortune gestured him to a seat opposite them and offered him a drink, which Kilmartin declined.

‘JT will be along shortly,’ Fortune said, ‘but he did just want us to have a word by way of preparation. Sorry to have kept you. Things are rather hectic.’

Kilmartin nodded amenably.

‘This is in the nature of catch-up. The prime minister has asked us to find out how things stand.’

‘In what way?’ asked Kilmartin. What bloody amateurs they were. If they wanted to lull him into indiscretion they shouldn’t arrange themselves like a board of inquiry; if they hoped to force some sort of confession from him, Chequers was not the place. What he read into this hastily convened interrogation was panic.

‘On the thing you came to see me about in my office last week.

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