A Scandalous Man

London, Spring 2005

HARRY BURNETT’S STORY

Harry Burnett finally got around to switching on his mobile phone after he had watched the news bulletin.

Amanda’s text read:

‘Someone tried to kill father. Or poss. suicide. No way 2 know 4 certain. Am in Tetbury. Police here 2. Facts not clear. Huge mess. Call me asap. Love A xx.’

He dialled her number.

‘Aitch! Thank god!’

‘Tell me.’

‘Where have you been? I’ve been desperately …’

‘Working. Sorry. Phone’s been off. Just found out … Shitty, shitty day, already. Tell me.’

‘The police called. A couple of hours ago. His cleaner found him lying on the carpet first thing this morning, fully clothed. Suit. Shirt. Tie. Pills of all sorts scattered by his side and an empty whisky bottle. Wrists slashed and a kitchen knife by his side. I came straight over. I’m at his cottage now.’ She stopped gabbling and took a deep breath. ‘Aitch, they are not sure whether it’s suicide or maybe murder done up to look like suicide.’

‘I heard,’ he said.

‘Attempted suicide. Attempted murder,’ she corrected herself and started gabbling again. ‘He’s at the hospital in Gloucester having his stomach pumped and a blood transfusion. I can’t see him until later and nobody can tell me what his chances are. The police wanted me here at the house in case they have questions, but I’m like, well, maybe I don’t have any answers.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘Mooching. It’s as if they think they ought to be looking for something, but haven’t a clue what it might be. It’s terrible, Aitch! Terrible, I …’

‘Who would want to kill him now? Twenty years ago, maybe you could understand it. He had enemies. But now?’

‘No idea,’ she replied. ‘The police are saying – you know – Inspector Morse-type bullshit – “keeping an open mind”. “Exploring all avenues.” But bottles of pills? Whisky and knife wounds? And they’re pumping his guts for a drugs overdose? So what does it sound like to you, Aitch? A mistake? He wasn’t the mistake type. Or the cry-for-help type.’

‘He wasn’t the suicide type either,’ Harry said.

‘What is the suicide type?’

‘I don’t know – but not him. He’d have done it years ago if he had any shame, but he didn’t because he hasn’t. It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘How would you know?’ Amanda shot back. ‘You are hardly the expert on what makes sense. Or on our father’s character, for that matter.’

Harry wondered what percentage of telephone calls with his sister ended in a row. He guessed at fifty-fifty.

‘Maybe,’ he conceded. ‘But all I ever remember was Mr Stand-On-Your-Own-Two-Feet, Rugged Individualism, every day is full of opportunities, seize it while you can blah, blah.’

‘I don’t see …’

‘He’d never top himself, Amanda. Never.’

‘People change, Aitch. You have.’

He let it pass. People change. His father used to say that all the time, as if he could actually talk in italics. People change. It was one of his favourite parables. Father loved his parables. Harry had seen the clip on TV.

‘It’s a flip-flop,’ some smirking BBC television interviewer was hectoring Robin Burnett when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

‘Certainly, it’s a change in direction,’ Robin agreed smoothly.

‘A change in direction?’ the interviewer repeated, his voice dripping with scorn. ‘This government has just done a complete economic U-turn and …’

‘John Maynard Keynes,’ Robin Burnett interrupted, ‘was once asked why he had changed his mind about some aspect of economic policy. And do you know his reply?’

The interviewer opened his mouth like a goldfish.

‘Well, do you?’ Robin Burnett persisted.

‘I …’

‘No?’

Robin Burnett was on top form, intimidatory, like a pike about to swallow the goldfish. He leaned towards the interviewer and wagged his finger.

‘Keynes would thunder, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” And then he would say, “and what do you do, sir?” So, what do you do, Mr Day?’

And Robin Burnett laughed. The interviewer was crushed. Harry thought it was funny that his father would quote Keynes at all, given his views on Keynesian economics, but there you are. The TV viewers would laugh too.

‘Painkillers,’ Amanda was saying.

‘What?’

‘Painkillers. What he swallowed. Co-proxamol. Is that a name of a painkiller? And paracetamol. And some other –ol. Oh, yes, alcohol. I knew there were three –ols. Whisky. The police said it was The Oban. That would be father. Nothing but a good malt.’

‘That saves us identifying the body,’ Harry suggested. ‘If he had a bottle of The Oban beside him, it was him all right.’

‘Harry!’

She only ever called him ‘Harry’ like that when she was upset. ‘How can you talk like that when …’

He wanted to avoid tears.

‘I mean, Amanda, just as you suggested, if he did try to commit suicide, there would be a good malt whisky involved in the story somewhere,’ Harry replied emolliently. ‘That’s all.’

‘Anyway, Aitch,’ Amanda recovered, ‘the police are wandering around in white suits. Forensic officers, they call them. And then there’s something else. They asked me to check out father’s house in London.’

Harry blinked.

‘He hasn’t got a house in London.’

‘Exactly what I told them. Just the cottage in Tetbury, I said. So then this police officer says, very suspicious now, “Oh, really, Miss Burnett?” And he does something with his eyebrows while he’s saying it, like he regards me as a total toss-pot. And then this other one asks how often father visits his flat in Hampstead.’

‘His flat in Hampstead?’ Harry echoed.

‘Yes,’ Amanda went on. ‘They showed me papers scattered all around the floor where they found him, photographs of this mansion block and utility bills with a Hampstead address and the name Robin Burnett on them. The police need to check it out. Today, they said. And they want one of us – which means you, Aitch – to go along. I’ll stay here for a bit and then go to the hospital. One of us should be at the hospital in case he …’

‘Dies,’ he said brusquely.

‘Recovers,’ she corrected him. ‘In which case, I’ll call you. And if he dies, then I’ll also call you. You go check out the Hampstead place, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Harry agreed.

She gave him the details.

‘And you?’

‘I want to get out of here before the TV crews arrive. It’s already on the radio. “Disgraced Thatcher minister gravely ill.” Something ghastly like that.’

Oh, god. Harry’s heart sank. Disgraced Thatcher minister. His father’s life and career reduced to a headline. That headline. The nightmare really was starting again.

‘Funny thing,’ Amanda said, ‘after the card he sent me last week.’

‘The card?’ Harry felt numb. He knew he was sounding like an echo.

‘I kept it. Here, in my bag.’

He could hear her rustle around.

‘Pretty picture. Birds in clouds and blue sky. Inside a few lines of Persian poetry about birds having to fall before they can fly, for “in falling they’re given wings”. Sweet. Let me read the message … “I hope that one day you and Harry will understand everything.”’

‘Understand everything?’ Harry repeated, twisting his face.

‘“… because to understand all is to forgive all.”’

‘Yeah,’ Harry scoffed. ‘Well, what I understand is …’

She interrupted.

‘“… and that because you were only children at the time, you could not possibly understand, so you can not forgive.” More stuff like that, and then there’s a bit at the end when he asks if I would be prepared to listen to him if he told me the whole story. The words “whole story” were underlined. He said the time was right.’

‘His time, maybe,’ Harry said. ‘My time was right years ago. Did you reply?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, fine. I called him and he sounded pleased. We were going to meet. Then he asked if you would come along. I said there was no point in asking you. Your mind was made up.’

She sounded thoughtful.

‘Correct,’ he answered. ‘My mind is made up.’

‘But maybe you have a point, Aitch. It doesn’t make sense to write something like that and then try to kill himself, does it? Perhaps someone tried to make it look like suicide …’

Harry scoffed.

‘Nothing about him ever entirely made sense. More importantly, how much do you think it’s worth, this place in Hampstead? A million? Two?’

‘Harry!’

‘I mean, Hampstead.’

‘Harry! You should not talk like that and you should not even think like that. Instead you should visit him in hospital and … and … forgive him. It’s not too late to change things.’

She hung up.

‘But it is too late,’ Harry said aloud. ‘Too late for me, anyway.’

He swore quietly under his breath. The previous week Harry had also received a card from his father, though he had not bothered to mention it to his sister. It contained a similar invitation to meet and hear the ‘whole story’. Harry’s card had a different poem on the front, a few lines of Yeats’ poetry about ‘too long a sacrifice’ making ‘a stone of the heart’. Did his father know that he was working on a translation of Yeats into Czech? How?

Maybe it was a lucky guess. Maybe Amanda told him. Either way, Harry had put the card into his shredder, without replying. Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.

‘Oh, when may it suffice,’ he muttered to himself as he walked into the bathroom to take a shower, to wash himself clean of his impure thoughts. ‘Disgraced Thatcher Minister,’ he said out loud, ‘gravely ill.’

Pimlico, London, 1987

Almost twenty years earlier, Harry was just eight years old, and the scandal involving his father had just broken in the newspapers. Harry was standing in the hallway of the family house in Pimlico, chewing at the sleeve of his grey and blue school uniform. Saliva stained the jacket cuff. He listened, a small, cornered animal. Nothing. But he knew they were out there. Waiting. They were always waiting. Packs of them. He wanted to find a burrow and bury himself under the warm earth. His father called them ‘the Wolves of the Forest’.

‘But without the morality or solidarity of the wolf pack,’ his father would thunder.

Harry could see their yellow eyes glowing with hunger. He knew that to the wolves he himself was just a small piece of meat. A snack. His father was the main meal. But that fact did not make Harry any more comfortable. Saliva foamed on Harry’s cuff. He closed his eyes and swayed from side to side. In his mind he could see them now, waiting and watching and filming, howling with their notebooks and microphones pointing towards him, leaning back on their haunches on the pavement outside the house, licking their chops and ready to snap as he and his father emerged. Harry’s knees knocked rhythmically. He gripped his canvas school bag. His name was printed in red block capitals. Underneath he had written in big black inky letters: ‘Her name is Rio!!!’ And: ‘Duran Duran!!!!’ And: ‘Atomic!!!! Blondie!!!’

The wetness of saliva was on his wrist. His mouth tasted of wool. A sudden noise outside made him twitch. The pack was getting restless, scratching, snarling, biting on the doorstep. Suddenly one knocked at the door, and another rang the bell. Harry wondered what primitive instinct, what ordering of wolf society enabled them to decide who would do the knocking and who would do the ringing, and when. He tried to figure out if there were rules. He made notes in his diary, scientific observations of times and intrusions over the past week since the siege began. It started at seven in the morning, never before. It continued until nine at night, never later.

‘Too late for their deadlines after that,’ his father explained, when Harry told him about his observations, though Harry did not know what a deadline was.

‘And of course the pubs are still open. The watering holes for the wolves, Harry.’

‘But what do we do?’ Harry’s older sister, Amanda, asked. ‘How can we just make them go away?’

‘We do nothing,’ their father advised. ‘They can’t get in. And when we go out, we will do it quickly. Walk straight to the car, look ahead, not to the side, and hold my hand. Say absolutely nothing. Ignore them. They’ll leave us when they realize there is nothing for them here. Nothing.’

Harry’s eyes widened with fear. Ignore them?

‘Remember the Three Little Pigs?’ his father suggested. ‘The wolves can huff and puff but they can never blow the house down. We are safe here. Completely safe.’

Safe, Harry thought. He had learned at school that safety and shelter were the two most basic human needs, ahead of food and love and comfort. Harry dreamed of safety. His burrow. His castle. He had read about the Persians surrounded by the forces of Genghiz Khan, the Seljuk hosts at Byzantium, English castles under siege in the Wars of the Roses and Italian cities besieged in the interminable wars of the Middle Ages. He marvelled at tales of attackers using catapults to throw plague victims or diseased animals inside the walls, the earliest form of biological warfare. The doorbell rang again. It had a particular urgency, as if a catapulted plague victim had thudded into the hallway.

‘What new hell is this?’ his father bellowed from up the staircase, and then called down in a softer voice. ‘Just ignore it, Harry. Believe me, they really are a lot less comfortable out there than we are in here.’

So Harry ignored it, with all the success of the Persians ignoring the Mongol hordes. He hopped from foot to foot in alarm.

‘Wait there,’ his father called down again. ‘I’ll get Amanda. We’ll go to the car together in about ten minutes and I’ll drop you off at school. Then I have a meeting with the Lady.’

Harry waited by the mirror. He knew who the Lady was. It was the Prime Minister. She was his father’s boss, which was good. He always called her ‘the Lady’. And the Lady was not pleased with his father, suddenly. Which was bad. Not pleased at all. And then Harry heard the claws on the flap of the letter box. A pair of eyes scanned across the hall. They were not yellow, as Harry had expected, but blue, cornflower blue. The brightest blue Harry had ever seen, like those on a husky-type dog that had once jumped up on him in Holland Park. He stared back at the cornflower blue eyes, transfixed. There was a voice where he almost expected a bark.

‘Here,’ the voice said. Mellifluous. What his mother would call ‘well spoken’. Then, more loudly: ‘Over here.’

Harry looked at the eyes in the flap. Said nothing.

‘Hello, young fellow-me-lad. How are you?’

Nothing.

‘I’m Stephen Lovelace.’

Nothing. Then Stephen Lovelace named the newspaper he represented. It wasn’t any of the newspapers they had delivered in the mornings. Harry decided it must be one of the smaller ones. His father said the Lady called the smaller ones, ‘Comics for Grown-Ups’. He thought that was very funny.

‘You must be Harry,’ the voice said.

Yes, Harry thought. I must be Harry. Still he said nothing.

‘You’re big for an eight year old.’

Harry was puzzled now. He most definitely was NOT big for an eight year old.

It irritated him. This pair of bright blue eyes in his letter box were connected to a mouth which knew things about him – his age – and yet which was saying things about him which were obviously not true. Why would he do that, this Stephen Lovelace person? The eyes in the letter box reminded him of something. He frowned. Not a wolf, after all. Not even the bright blue eyes of the husky-type dog in the park. No, it was the hypnotizing stare of the snake, Ka, in the cartoon of Jungle Book. Harry felt woozy.

‘Listen, Harry,’ Stephen Lovelace said, eyes whirling. ‘My paper wants to do all right by you and the family, put your dad’s side of the story. So can you tell your dad we just want to hear his side, that’s all. He can name his price. You got that?’

Harry nodded.

‘Want to repeat that?’ Stephen Lovelace said, his eyes swirling in the letter box. ‘Your dad’s side of the story …’

‘His side of the story.’

‘… and name his price.’

‘Name his price.’

‘You’re a clever boy, young fellow-me-lad.’

This irritated Harry even more. How would the eyes in the letter box know that? Did this Stephen Lovelace spy on him at school? Perhaps people who worked in newspapers, especially the small ones that the Lady and his father called the comics for grown-ups, perhaps these people knew everything about you. Ooooooh! That made Harry feel strange. Did they spy on him when he did something bad, like picking his nose? Or farting? Without warning, the letter box shut. The eyes of Ka disappeared. His father came down the stairs with Amanda in tow, her schoolbag hanging from her shoulders.

‘Right,’ his father said. ‘Time to … to … what’s that on the floor?’

They looked down at a pool of liquid spreading out under Harry’s shoes on the parquet flooring.

‘It’s wee,’ Amanda said, half in amazement, half in triumph. ‘Harry’s peed himself!’

Harry thought he saw steam rising from the pool of liquid by his feet, though he might have imagined it. He burst into tears, not because of what he had done, not because his crotch and trousers were wet and uncomfortable, sticking to his legs, not even because his sister was joyous in his humiliation, but at the thought that the bright blue eyes-in-the-letterbox called Stephen Lovelace might have seen him do it, and that he would write about it in his newspaper, the small one, the one the Lady called a comic for grown-ups. And he knew something else. He knew he would remember those eyes. Forever.