Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller. Andrew Marr
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No sooner had the PM announced this than Olivia Kite, on behalf of the get-outers, issued a press release declaring that she too admired Lord Briskett, whom she regarded as an authoritative and independent voice, and that she would give him the same level of access to her team.
The political commentators said that the PM’s decision to give contemporary history what Briskett had called ‘the ultimate ringside seat’ was evidence of his great confidence about the outcome of the referendum. His evident conviction that he would win, and that victory would be the ultimate vindication of his premiership, was itself damaging to his opponents. Olivia Kite had had little option but to make Briskett as welcome in Prince Rupert’s tent as in Cromwell’s.
Basking in this hot limelight, Briskett moved lightly. He wanted to do all the work himself, so far as he could. He had brought in only his protégé Ned Parminter, a shy but brilliant PhD student who, Briskett thought, might one day be a significant contemporary historian himself.
Parminter, with his wiry black beard and intense dark eyes, looked like an Orthodox priest in civilian clothes. Although he shared Briskett’s urbane sense of humour, his romantic English patriotism had a fanatical streak.
Together, the two of them made up a balanced ticket: Briskett’s delight in Westminster gamesmanship inclined him towards the larger-than-life, principled yet unscrupulous figure of the prime minister. Parminter, a specialist in the seventeenth-century development of Parliament, was a natural Olivia Kite supporter. They had, of course, never discussed their allegiances on this matter between themselves.
Now the two of them were on their way to meet the prime minister himself. As the train wriggled through West London towards Paddington, Briskett leaned forward in his seat.
‘You’re seeing that … girl, Ned, after our rendezvous?’
Parminter scratched his beard under his chin, a sign of anxiety, before slowly replying. ‘She’s invaluable. She’s across everything in the Kite campaign. She reads all the emails, all Kite’s texts, on her official BlackBerry and her personal one. She’s copying us into every piece of traffic.’
‘And does the ever-lovely Mrs Kite know this?’
‘Apparently. I think she must. Jen’s nothing if not loyal, so I guess Kite’s fine with it.’
‘Good girl. Good for you, too.’
‘There is one other thing. It’s a bit odd. She also seems to know rather a lot about what’s happening on the other side. Far more than she ought to. Hidden channels in Number 10, perhaps.’
Briskett rubbed his hands with pleasure.
‘Really? Sleeping with the enemy, is she? Delicious. At a moment like this, what is happening in each HQ is our primary concern. Let us wallow, Ned, in the panics, the little feuds, the unwarranted pessimism and the foolish overconfidence. But in a sense, what matters most is what is harder to discover. I mean, what is happening between the camps. It’s there that the deepest secrets lie. And what is this fascinating creature’s full name, Ned?’
‘Jennifer Lewis. But she prefers Jen. I’ve known her since uni.’
Briskett exhaled an irritated hiss.
‘You mean you’ve known her since you were up at Oxford, Ned. I really cannot understand this squirming self-abasement about “uni”. It would be a different matter if it were Keele, but I assume – given her youth and prominence – that she was at Oxford too. Or, poor girl, Cambridge?’
‘Somerville.’
‘Hmm. PPE?’
‘PPE.’
‘Well …’
The two men lapsed into silence until the train was almost at Paddington.
But Jennifer Lewis was not going to make her appointment with Ned Parminter that afternoon. Some fascinating new polling results had come in overnight which called for a few late changes to the campaign, so she was more than sixty miles to the east of London, crunching numbers in the gorgeous surroundings of Danskin House. Olivia Kite, meanwhile, dressed only in a short, almost see-through kimono, walked between the rows of campaign volunteers checking the messages on her mobile phone. Nobody even thought about taking a picture. They were a tight, loyal team.
After breakfast Olivia changed the kimono for a vibrantly-coloured Issey Miyake suit; she made a point of dressing up for every day at work in her own home as if she were being presented to the king at Buckingham Palace. He had, after all, called her half a dozen times in the course of the campaign. Some of their conversations had run on late into the night.
Danskin House was the beating heart of the nationalist movement. It was rebel camp headquarters, as much a symbol of defiance of Westminster as Oxford had been when King Charles I had raised his standard there almost four centuries previously. Yet it was an odd place for British patriotism to take its stand. The house was vaguely Renaissance in shape, and was hung with Dutch tiles. Its roofs and turrets glittered pale blue and orange. It boasted an Italian garden, complete with eighteenth-century reproduction Roman statuary, and a Greek temple overlooking a lake. Inside, a long hallway was decorated with suits of German armour and some quite good paintings, not least by the Dutchman Pieter de Hooch and the Spanish papist Murillo. What had once been an insanitary Tudor patchwork had been extensively rebuilt in Northern European style after the Glorious Revolution – the glazed tiles, the statues, the limewashed inside walls.
The house’s current master, Olivia Kite’s husband Reeder, was half American and half Egyptian. Yet, because it happened to nestle alongside a tiny Essex river, Danskin had long since become an emblem of Englishness, featuring in Jane Austen television documentaries and Christ Almighty, a recent Hollywood adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox.
On this particular morning, a dim boy leaned on his rake in the grounds and watched a procession of cars crunch along the gravel drive, then disgorge their passengers between the pillars and into the main entrance of the house. He spat on the ground. He may have been a fool, but he was not so stupid that he didn’t know what was going on.
In the formal garden to the rear of the house, Reeder Kite strolled past the chipped and forlorn Venus and the amputee Adonis and arched his back against the late-summer heat. Already-blown roses oozed a sensuous, sickly scent, intensifying when it met the livelier stench of a trellis of sweet peas around the sundial. Butterflies and bees drifted over borders of rich, moist soil, thickly strewn with astrantia, allium and abelia, mildly invaded by vetch and willowherb. Fertility was everywhere.
Reeder scratched his inner thigh, probed himself, and wondered how soon after lunch he could escape back to London, where his mistress would be idling in her mews flat. He admired his new Nike trainers, his still-strong legs, then tensed his gut – there were still a few muscles there – thrust his arms out in front of him and squatted down. At that moment Olivia happened to glance through the window, and saw her near-naked husband performing his strength and balance training. He looked, she thought, like a walrus attempting ballet.
There was a curious mismatch between the temperatures inside and outside the house. Within its walls, Danskin felt as cold as death. Over the past few months the woman in the mews house in London had destroyed whatever human warmth had once been found there. The effect of Reeder’s adultery had spread like an icy mist, floating down corridors and lurking under beds. Olivia no longer ransacked his email inbox or stabbed her way through his mobile phones, but had instead redirected her fury into a last spasm of energy in the referendum campaign. Each morning the family exchanged chilly platitudes over the breakfast table. Protracted silences and accusatory glances had replaced the former veneer of civility.
As if to echo the dismantling of the family, the main downstairs rooms had been cleared of pictures, books and domestic clutter. Boxes of old photographs, football boots, scented candles, CDs and