Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller. Andrew Marr
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love affairs, described with an earthy, sensuous detail that in those days was very rare from a woman, had made her rich. First editions of her early books now changed hands for thousands of pounds, while the paperbacks could be found, squeezed between Jackie Collins and Margaret Drabble, on bookshelves across North London. To her daughter, this literary celebrity was incomprehensible.
Jen’s life only began to make sense to herself when, aged eleven, she was dispatched from London to go and live with her mother’s sister, a stern, quietly religious woman married to a dentist in Devon. Hundreds of miles away from the nearest literary party, she enjoyed the clipped lawn and the piano lessons in a large, oak-timbered room that smelled of old fires and damp Victorian sofas. She loved her school, the biology and chemistry lessons in particular, and made a group of friends, quiet, serious girls like herself. She collected stamps, butterflies and even football cards. For days – even weeks – at a time she felt herself happy.
Oxford was another fresh start, a place of wonders. A natural scientist, in both senses, Jenny found herself being pulled towards politics during the short-lived Johnson administration. Repelled by the beery and yobbish advances of young men who proclaimed themselves socialists, or even revolutionaries – and not simply because her political heroine Margaret Thatcher had herself been a scientist – she joined the Conservative Party. Jen believed in reason and efficiency. She didn’t much care about the European Union one way or the other – that would come later. Her politics did not make her universally popular. But, confronted by the self-righteous arguments of the college lefties, she prided herself on never losing her temper, and on hitting back with carefully memorised figures and quotations. She was quickly spotted.
In her second year Jen switched from ‘nat sci’ to PPE, and became an active Tory student, elbowing aside moist-palmed, stammering young men as she rose through the ranks of the Union, until in her final year she was elected its president. Nothing could have mortified her mother more. In college she was known universally as ‘June’, which she had assumed was the result of a mishearing, until one evening in the student bar she overheard a girl explaining to her friend, ‘No, not Jen. June – cold and bright.’ When her mother, a regular in the letters pages of the Observer and a prominent campaigner for the arts, came to speak at the Union, Jen did not attend. By then she had led the winning side in many Union debates herself.
So it came about that after university the girl who had assumed that she would spend her adult life as a laboratory assistant or a research scientist went instead to work at Conservative Central Office. In that boys’ world she was recognised as brilliant but difficult. She had spent a happy year working for the man – now much heavier and with silver through his wiry hair – who would become prime minister. But a disastrous love affair with a young, married MP who managed to keep his seat despite his exposure in the press, ended in her leaving that job both sadder and wiser.
It was then that she was snapped up by Olivia Kite, who recognised her brilliance and made her the number-cruncher and analyst-in-chief for the increasingly powerful Eurosceptic group inside the parliamentary party. Slim, pale, and with her mother’s shining hair, Jennifer Lewis continued to be much admired – though mostly from a distance.
Who could ever have predicted that cold, bright June Lewis and Lucien McBryde, the tousled, coke-snorting lobby hack who had once been thrown off the prime minister’s battle bus, having been caught in the toilet, red-eyed, with crusty nostrils, would experience such an instant and intense mutual attraction? He was dishevelled, she meticulously shevelled. He disreputable, she shinily reputable. He a dark and ragged squiggle of a man, she as beautifully balanced as a complex quadratic equation. That both of them felt the same inside, both having been ruined by a selfish and indifferent parent, was something few people could have guessed. To a friend, Jen had explained: ‘He was the last person on earth I was ever likely to fall for. That’s why it happened.’
The sex, when they eventually got round to it, was intense and revelatory. (The shift from the time when people ‘had’ each other to when they ‘did’ each other had been the subject of a conversation between Ken Cooper and Robson McBryde.) In bed Jen experienced the only area of his life in which Lucien was not selfish. Two bodies became one. Away from bed, their friends said admiringly and jealously, each became more engaging and lovable.
Perhaps the happiest day that either Jen or Lucien would know in their lives centred around a lunch in a chaotic and cheerful Italian restaurant by Victoria station. No wedding, but a wine-and-pasta-fuelled meeting of two writing tribes, it was hosted in their honour by Robson McBryde. Racy literature and fervid political journalism acknowledged each other, and made dignified bows. Jen’s mother performed many of her most successful anecdotes, and was grudgingly admired by the wary elderly journalist, while their two children, both secure and both feeling that they knew who they were at last, looked on.
‘Luce, let’s never ever have a wedding anniversary,’ Jen had said as they teetered back up the street towards their respective offices. ‘Let’s celebrate this date as our special day, and come back here for years and years.’
Lucien had said nothing in reply. For once, he couldn’t speak. He was still trying to come to terms with this strange new feeling – not drunkenness, not ‘a rush’, but something calmer and more delicately coloured: perhaps it was happiness.
But nothing happy ever lasts. Just two months after the pair of them had been bound together, unable to keep their hands off each other, driven to nuzzle in public places and to stifle their conversations with kisses, London began one of her amazing changes of costume. For a few weeks her temperature rose to that of Paris, and even Rome. Magnesium glares splashed across her glass towers. Down in her shaded alleys and half-lit canyons, her citizens shucked off their grey woollens and padded jackets. Torsos, suspiciously tanned or thickly hairy, were openly displayed. Unhappy cats found themselves sharing urban gardens with pot-planters and barbecue-lighters. Damp pavements, now dried, hosted families of chairs and little tables, and brightly-coloured young people sat outside pubs and restaurants. The smells of charcoaling meat and fragrant tobacco filled the air. Dogs gambolled deliriously in the public parks. Annually, the people of London became inmates released from prison into a brighter world of possibilities. And amid all this chirruping and fluttering, Lucien and Jennifer had a terrible, terminal row. Like most of the worst rows, it seemed to blow up out of nothing at all. Yet it ripped their oneness apart forever.
Lucien had casually mentioned that an ex-girlfriend had asked him to supper. For no particular reason, he had never told Jen about this girl before. Jen froze, then snapped at him. Lucien went cold, and sneered at her. In an instant Jen found herself looking at him differently. Who was he, this stranger? Her face zipped shut, her melting eyes turned to ice, and when Lucien finally brought himself to look at her properly after a long silence, he found he barely recognised her either.
In the bitter public argument that followed, both spat out plosives and fricatives like shrapnel. Each, suddenly feeling sick inside, had been in subconscious training for this combat of ugly words, this tournament of misery, for weeks. Never conversationalists, they now discovered in one another a genius for invective. After twenty minutes they were standing silent and stiff-legged, like mannequins, at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall, before turning and hobbling off in opposite directions. By the time evening fell Jennifer had taken her things out of Lucien’s Notting Hill basement flat, and gathered a group of sympathetic friends to empty wine bottles and shred his already tattered reputation. His addictive personality had been too much for Jen. It had been slowly pushing the walls of her ordered life apart. Now she tugged them firmly back together again.
Lucien had been damaged the more severely. In the days that followed he realised that the first person who had ever made him feel like a fully functioning adult human being had walked away. He tried to comfort himself with the memories of earlier lovers and the promise of new erotic freedom, but felt nothing stirring at all, except irrepressible self-disgust. He thought about throwing himself off Hammersmith Bridge. But he was not a jumper.
Perhaps the break-up was inevitable,