“How nice to see you, Minister,” he said, cutting through the laughter.
Pat Ellis looked momentarily nonplussed, then nodded curtly and continued her anecdote. She was talking about a visit she’d made to some facility in Holland, what she’d said to the director, what he’d said to her. The young man at her side, obviously some kind of aide, frowned at us.
Miles plowed on. “You remember Chris Carver, don’t you?”
The minister broke off again and smiled at us, a neat and practiced smile, which gave the impression of warmth without masking her irritation. “No, I’m sorry. You’ll have to remind me.”
“Chris Carver,” repeated Miles. “Think back.”
I looked at Pat. She used to have long chestnut hair, which she often wore in a scarf. It was gray now, bunched up in a tight, unflattering perm. She was dressed in business uniform, like all the people around her, a dark suit, a string of pearls doubled over the mottled skin of her neck. I’d seen her the previous day, of course, and before that on television, but I was unnerved to find myself so close to her. I couldn’t find a trace of the nervous, hardworking young woman I’d once known — crushingly sincere, easily moved to tears. The features were the same, the long nose and the large widely spaced eyes, but the thin-lipped mouth (which I’d kissed once, in the middle of a drunken party) had a twist of placid vanity, the curdled self-assurance of the professional politician. She looked at me blankly, complacently, not recognizing me. Then she made the connection. I could see it happen, the loss of traction, the sudden skid on the ice.
“No, I’m sorry, Mr. — uh. .”
“Carver,” repeated Miles.
For a moment she was completely speechless. She looked at the floor, then at her assistant. Everyone was waiting for her to say something. Reluctantly she turned her eyes back to me and her expression was momentarily unguarded, almost warm. I realized, bizarrely, that somewhere inside she was pleased to see me. Then a flash went off. Miles’s young thug had taken a picture. Instantly, the barriers slammed down. She looked about, coldly furious, trying to spot the photographer. I opened and closed my mouth. I wanted to say something, to disrupt the trap Miles was setting.
“Sorry, Pat,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Yes,” interrupted Miles. “My apologies, Minister. I thought you knew each other.”
He grabbed my elbow and steered me away, leaving Pat Ellis behind us, hissing into her assistant’s ear. Miles’s thug was on the other side of me, his hand on the small of my back, propeling me discreetly but firmly toward the exit. Angrily, I shook them both off, a violent gesture that made people turn and watch. “Excuse me, are you with the press?” asked one of the PR women, when we reached the door. “This is a private event. There’s no photog- raphy.” Miles made an inconclusive hand gesture at her as we brushed past.
We got into the car. The driver put away his game and pulled out onto the street. “Well,” said Miles, keying a text message into his cell phone, “a bit crude, but we’ll just have to see if she takes the hint, won’t we?”
While I tried to understand what had just taken place, Miles relaxed into his seat, received an answer to his text, read it, and slipped the phone into a jacket pocket.
“What hint?” I asked quietly.
“Put it this way. There are some people it’s just not appropriate for the next Home Secretary to know. That is, if she wants to be the next Home Secretary.”
“I keep telling you, she had nothing to do with anything. I didn’t see her or Gavin after 1969.”
“Well, you say that, Chris. And, of course, you could well be telling the truth. But if you were a journalist, the possibility would certainly be worth following up, wouldn’t it?”
“You can’t give this to the press.”
“Why not? I’d say it was in the public interest.”
“Why not? Please, Miles, you keep saying you’re my friend. Think about my — my wife. Our daughter. Our daughter knows nothing about any bombings. Think what this would do to her.”
“Yes, I do understand. You’re Michael Frame, suburban family man, and you were rather hoping it would stay that way. But you must have known, Chris. Sooner or later it was going to come out.”
“But why? You’re not the police. This isn’t about bringing me to justice or anything straightforward like that. Whatever job you’re doing, I know you don’t give a shit about justice. What did Pat Ellis do to you, Miles? She must have done something.”
“To me? Nothing at all. It’s just politics, Chris. Real, grown-up politics, not the kind that starts by carving out a Utopia and then hammering at the world, trying to make it fit. If she’s going to get the top job, she’ll have to make sure all the stakeholders are satisfied. Simple as that. No mystery. No conspiracy theory. If everyone’s happy, then this all goes away. There’ll be no need to bring you any deeper into it and you can fuck off back to Sussex. But if Mrs. Ellis doesn’t play ball, she’ll find the media beginning to focus on certain issues of character.”
I stared out of the window, and Marylebone Road was just a jumble of planes and reflections. Miles sighed, adopted an avuncular expression, and squeezed my shoulder, one — two — three, an autistic mime of sincerity. “I am your friend, Chris. Really. And as your friend, I think you should tell your family. They deserve to be let into this as gently as possible.”
I wanted to kill him, to smash his face to a bloody pulp. “And
what am I going to let them into, exactly? That Daddy’s a terrorist and he’s going to prison?”
He shrugged blandly. “Not necessarily. Everyone knows this all happened a long time ago. Yes, you did certain things, but — well, the context has changed. People are quite pragmatic, these days. I won’t pretend that there won’t be pressure for an — um, judicial dimension, but there are ways you could make the climate as favorable as possible. If you had something to give, for example.”
“Give?”
“Oh, God, Chris, don’t be obtuse. If you could find something a little more concrete to say about Pat Ellis, you could help yourself considerably.” He looked sharply at me. “Unless you have something else?”
“Such as?”
“It might help for you to tell me what happened. In your own words. Who did what. A lot of that period is still rather murky.”
I said nothing, though Anna’s name was hanging in the air.
Miles put me on a train at Victoria. I slumped in a window seat and was pulled out of London, moldering suburban stations scrolling past as I ate a clammy sandwich and thought about powerlessness. Not about abolishing power, let alone seizing it. Having it trample over you, take the substance of your life and grind it between its teeth. Miles demanded a burnt offering: Pat Ellis or Anna or me. Because he was powerful he would have one. Heart and entrails, sizzling on the fire. I scrunched up the sandwich packaging, stuffed it into the bin behind my seat. Seeing Pat Ellis had taken me back into our own private gray area. Of course there was one: in every situation involving two or more people, there’s always a gray area, a few halftone specks at the border of the black and the white. 1969 wasn’t the last time I’d seen her. It was late in the summer of 1971.
I don’t know what kind of figure I must have presented. When she answered the door of her basement flat, in one of the hilly streets around Tufnell Park, she looked shocked. I’d turned up
unannounced. Someone had been watching the place for a few days and we knew Gavin would be at his chambers. We’d judged her the more sympathetic of the two, the one more likely to help.
She invited me in, not without a trace of reluctance, and we drank mint tea, sitting on her sofa in front of a rug littered with wooden blocks and rattles and stuffed toys. She introduced me to her son, Robin, who was almost a year old. I played with him for a while, making faces and letting him grip my fingers. Pat asked what I’d been up to and I asked her if she still considered herself a revolutionary. I can’t remember what formulation she used in her reply, but she was noncommittal. I got the impression I was making her nervous, because she kept finding excuses to get up and walk around, fetching things from the kitchen, fussing with Robin. She asked again what I’d been doing and I told her (as planned) that I was living in Leeds and was in contact with certain comrades who were facing criminal charges arising out of their clandestine work. The baby began to cry and she picked him up, walking up and down, rubbing his back. She asked what kind of charges.