Children of the Master. Andrew Marr
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more money flowed out of the council coffers into Petrie building projects. He had a Mastermind brain, right enough: special subject? Aye – planning permission.
Davie chose to distribute a little of his wealth to his party during the Miliband years. Largely because of a long-standing feud with the local Scottish National Party, he helped fund the ‘Better Together’ campaign against independence in 2014. Close call, but. His Nationalist minister friend from Edinburgh rang him at home and warned him that he was making a big mistake: a new Scottish state would be looking at major house-building projects, and would remember its friends. David told him where to go – ‘Aye, right, and awa’ to Kelty with you, Minister.’ (They used to say, and not so long ago, that when the devil had finished building Hell, he used the rubble for Kelty, in Fife.)
For Davie and his kind, the referendum marked a complete change. It started with comments in the pub about the Labour Party being shoulder to shoulder with the Tories. Then there was some nasty business. A woman put up a ‘No’ poster in her window, and her neighbour, whom she’d known since they were girls, came round chapping at the door.
‘Planning on staying long, Elsie?’
‘Whit d’ye mean, Sally Catherine? All my life.’
‘Aye, but your kind willnae be welcome round here after the eighteenth. Just a gentle word.’
Or so the story went. Davie never met ‘Elsie’, and no one could say exactly where she lived.
More worrying were the ‘question time’ sessions in the school, heaving with yes supporters, and the spread of ‘Scotland, Be Brave’ posters in shop windows, a daft, sexy girl in a kilt, wi’ red hair; and a general feeling in the coffee shops and pubs of the town that it was nobler to be Yes than No. Was he still even on the right side? Once upon a time, no Catholic would have dreamed of going anywhere near the damned Nationalists, but that sleekit Alex Salmond seemed to have won the archbishop round somehow. These days, if you boasted a season ticket at Celtic Park, you were almost certainly a ‘Yes’ man. So Davie’s moral and political planet began to crumble at its little green edges.
There was even talk that the SNP would take the constituency from Labour for the first time ever. They were certainly digging in up north in Glasgow, though hereabouts there was a strong local party, still with the old inherited NUM discipline. Lanky Boswell, Davie’s second cousin, who’d gone on to uni in Dundee, and come back as a primary teacher and raving Nat, would seek him out some nights in the pub after work and give him gyp.
‘See here Petrie, you’re a good guy. You just haven’t been paying notice, and you find yourself on the wrong side. Folk around here don’t like you playing footsie with the Tories. They just want – no bedroom tax, keep the health service going, dinnae grind the faces of the folk on welfare – all the things you want too, I know, Davie. Whit’s the problem?
‘The London Labour Party’s corrupt, just pale-blue Tories. It’s not too late to come over. We’re a broad church and we’re friendly folk; you ken most of us already.’
Davie would respond with his old lecture on the ‘Tartan Tories’ and the importance of solidarity, and of building social democracy right across the United Kingdom; but he found himself almost wearying of his own arguments. The truth was, the ‘Yes’ folk had made some bloody good points. Quite a few local party members had defected. Inside, Petrie was still angry and bored, but when it came to politics, it was all too obvious that time was short. If he was a Labour man, it was time either to do the necessary or to get off the pot.
I don’t know what charisma is. Nobody does. But it comes from God, and it makes power tolerable.
The Master
Caroline Elizabeth Phillips’s seemingly effortless success in life had been based on two things. The most important was her irresistible likeability. Whenever she walked into a room, whether it be the lounge bar of a pub or, later on, a dreary, low-ceilinged political meeting room, the temperature rose. People who had been down in the dumps found themselves smiling; misery-gutses discovered they just wanted to be liked. This, apparently, was charisma. She’d had it since she was a toddler. She was the kind of small child whose hair every adult wanted to ruffle. She smiled, they smiled back. Easy. Sometimes she almost glowed. Yet her father, Thomas Phillips, was a dourly forgettable man of business. People struggled to remember his name even if they were closely related to him. Her mother, Simone, was sharp-tongued and energetic, but, like her husband, essentially bland – bland with lemon sauce. Between them they had produced a source of light. It was as surprising as if two affable Burgundian peasants had given birth to a saint, complete with spangled wings, or as if a pair of Brummie shopkeepers had spawned a multi-coloured dragon. Of course you’d have to know the family to understand just how extraordinary it was. In photographs, Caro looked pretty enough, but not remarkable. In the flesh, her oat-coloured radiance entranced everyone lucky enough to come across her.
Caro disapproved of the word ‘lesbian’. ‘For one thing, it denotes an islander, it’s inappropriately geographical … And beyond that, people make assumptions,’ she had told her mother (who certainly did). ‘They think they know what music I like, my political opinions, how I decorate my house. They think lesbians are driven by sex, and have “pashes”. Lesbians wear lesbian clothes, and eat lesbian food, and watch gloomy Nordic lesbian films about gloomy Nordic lesbians. Well, if even part of that’s true, then I’m not a lesbian. I’m an old-fashioned, friendly, meat-eating, Christian woman who happens to love other women. Not even that. An other woman.’
That other woman, Angela, had been known as ‘Pep’ when Caro first met her – tall, dark, and only just a teenager. Pep stood for pepperoni, which stood for pizza, which stood for pizza-face. Angela had suffered from relatively mild acne. That was the kind of humour their school specialised in.
To a visitor, this school looked warm, even cosy. Based around a 1930s country house in Sussex, originally constructed for a shipbuilding tycoon, it had many acres of games pitches, and modern outbuildings. Queen Eleanor’s prepared the daughters of wealthy commuters for Russell Group universities. From the outside, it might have been a spa resort or an affluent golf club. The main building had a pleasantly arts-and-crafts feel to it; with its long, sloped roofs, high chimneys and cream pebbledash, it spoke of a conservative-minded, late-in-the-day architectural admirer of Ruskin and Morris. ‘Pleasant’ was a word that was often used of it. Just like Sussex itself, Queen Eleanor’s was … pleasant.
But behind the fresh cream paint and the well-kept hedges, the school was not what it appeared. Its pupils were mostly sturdy, normal, healthy-looking girls with their hair in clasps, their gleaming metal orthodontics and their knees the colour of turnips. But there is nothing on this small green planet as dangerous and terrifying as English schoolgirls in packs. On the surface, serge and cheesecloth. Below it, claws and fangs, the splash of blood and the muffled squeal. Girls left this lovely school prepared to throw themselves into abusive relationships or starve themselves to death, or if they’d done pretty well, settled for decades of dogged, surreptitious alcoholism. A girl might come to Queen Eleanor’s with a straight back and a clear eye; she would be lucky to leave without slouching – hating herself, curled up, sarcastic. Emotional survival in this pleasant – so, so pleasant – place, with its choir which did Purcell, and its glossy, neatly-lettered rolls of honour, was harder than in the drab council estates of Ayrshire.
What about the families? Powerful men who knew about the world – barristers, accountants, company directors – sent their daughters there. In due course, later on, they would idly wonder why little Sarah, Penelope or Tessa had become so sullen, so thin and so uncommunicative on the family’s annual skiing holiday to Val-d’Isère. What had happened to the once-easy conversations around the breakfast table? Once in a while, a particularly bold father might clear his throat and ask Julietta or Tamara whether she was happy. In response he’d be confronted by a face as white as a sealed envelope, or a shrug of skeletal shoulders. He