‘Why don’t you take me along and let me be the judge of what’s the best night out?’
She smiled, unable to stop herself. ‘Where to?’ she purred, ‘Charles and Nigella’s or back to mine?’
‘Oy, you little minx. Are you flirting with me?’
She slapped him on the arm and put her glass on the table. ‘Absolutely not. And anyway, I think Nat might freak if I turned up with you as Friday night entertainment.’
Matt tried to smile at the mention of Nathaniel Montague, whom he’d only met twice but regularly saw gurning in the Daily Mail diary pages.
‘You have a point,’ laughed Matt, filling his flute to the rim and stuffing his mouth with a handful of Japanese rice crackers. ‘He scares the bejesus out of me.’
As Matt disappeared to ‘find some more snacks’, Camilla felt a tall presence at her shoulder. ‘Are you staying around for a little while or are you dashing off?’ asked Charles McDonald, in a manner that wasn’t so much a question as a request.
‘I haven’t got to be anywhere until about eight p.m. Why?’
He gently put his hand on her shoulder, steering her towards the door conspiratorially. ‘Shall we go somewhere quieter?’ he said, ‘I need to talk to you about something you might find interesting.’
Camilla felt her stomach flutter as they went down the staircase to her office on the second floor. This had to be the talk about improving her workload, she thought. Charles stopped Camilla at the door and picked up her Armani coat from the hat stand.
‘I think we should get out of here,’ he said, holding up her coat. ‘This is fairly confidential. Walls have ears, and all that.’
The Pen and Wig, tucked away in a side street behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was the perfect barrister’s watering hole. Dark and Dickensian, its stools were upholstered in faded red velvet, while caricatures of corpulent judges sat holding court around the bar. It was busy, full of lawyers killing time before they returned to wives and children in Victorian villas in Wandsworth Common. Not exactly the ideal place for a private chat, thought Camilla, as Charles fetched her a gin and tonic from the bar. Still, if he was about to increase her caseload, or move her to the more prestigious upper-floor offices, it was probably best if he did so out of the earshot of the other tenants.
‘Thank you so much for your acknowledgement of my work earlier,’ she said, impatient as always to cut to the chase. ‘Hopefully you’ll see that I’m ready to move up to lead counsel soon.’
Charles paused, putting his orange juice down carefully. ‘Actually, it wasn’t chambers I wanted to talk to you about,’ he began, fixing Camilla with his gaze and leaving a dramatic pause. It was a technique Camilla had seen him use to devastating effect in court when he was about to annihilate someone under cross-examination.
‘Camilla, you’re almost certainly the most ambitious law student I have ever interviewed for pupillage,’ said Charles. ‘And, believe me, we’ve had a lot of gung-ho lawyers through the doors of Cornwall Chambers.’
‘Isn’t everyone super-ambitious when they’re twenty-two and trying to get into good chambers?’ she smiled, relieved that she hadn’t been brought here for a dressing-down.
‘I suppose. But I always found it strange with you, with your background. We’ve had a lot of public school- and Oxbridge-educated barristers in this chambers, but I’ve always been suspicious of taking on the truly privileged ones.’ Charles whispered the word ‘privileged’. ‘Lazy bastards, a lot of them.’ He stopped.
‘Which is why I was hesitant to take you on, Camilla.’
Beginning to wonder where this conversation was going, Camilla began swirling the ice cubes at the bottom of her glass around and around.
‘Do you remember when I took you out for lunch in your first week?’ asked Charles.
Camilla remembered it well. It was to Wilton’s in Belgravia. She was the only woman in the restaurant and she ate pheasant when she knew she should have ordered the fish. It was the first time she had felt small, scared and a little out of her depth. Rather like now, in fact.
‘Do you remember that Michael Heseltine was sitting in the next booth and you became terribly excited?’ said Charles.
Camilla smiled. ‘I think I even said hello.’
‘I think you might have been a little drunk, actually. Don’t worry,’ he chuckled, lifting his orange juice. ‘Lunchtime drinking never agreed with me, either. But I remember thinking at the time, why is this girl so excited about meeting Heseltine when she must have met dozens of high-ranking political sorts through her family? I think your father was a Lords’ frontbencher at the time, wasn’t he? You had a fierce look in your eye and you told me that Heseltine had once said the president of the Oxford Union was the first step to becoming prime minister. And that’s the reason why you went for it, and won it.’
‘Actually, I think he said it was a chore that had to be suffered,’ remembered Camilla, thinking back to the months of Machiavellian plotting required to secure the prestigious Oxford office, and then the weekly attendance at one fatuous debate after another.
‘And anyway,’ she continued, ‘it didn’t quite work out that way for him, did it? So much for the Oxford Union plan.’
‘He didn’t do so badly,’ said Charles, his voice serious, ‘he got deputy prime minister. And I think you, Camilla, could do just as well.’
Camilla stopped and looked at Charles intently.
‘Politics? But what about the law?’
‘Ach, do you really want to be a QC?’ said Charles dismissively. ‘Would that be the end of a satisfying career for you?’
Camilla knew she had to tread carefully. But the truth was, the law didn’t put the fire in Camilla’s belly. Yes, she was good at it. She had the discipline and the intelligent, incisive mind to reach the very top of the profession, and once she knew she was good at something, she didn’t stop until she was the very best she could be. But Camilla wanted more, much more.
‘It’s something I have thought about,’ she replied truthfully. ‘But I’ve still got my work here and I’m not even thirty.’
‘Don’t even begin to bring age into it,’ chuckled Charles. ‘Did you know I ran about, gosh, thirty years ago now?’
She shook her head. ‘I assumed the law was your life.’
‘Many barristers are frustrated or failed politicians,’ laughed Charles. ‘I’m one of the failed ones.’
‘So what happened? You’d have been excellent.’
‘I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine when I ran for parliament. I won a Tory nomination OK, but they made me fight some unwinnable seat in South Wales that had been held by a Merthyr Tydfil teacher for twenty years. I didn’t have a chance with my Edinburgh accent.’ He started shaking his head at the memory.
‘I can’t imagine you gave up that easily, though,’ said Camilla, leaning forward, fascinated and excited at the same time.
Charles shrugged. ‘Well, I did. I was making good money in fees, my name was being mentioned as a future silk, and that’s nice when you’re married with a couple of kiddies with a big fat mortgage to pay. Truth is,’ he said slowly, ‘it gets too tempting to stay put in the law. Who wants to trade a five-hundred-thousand-pound salary for fifty thousand as an MP? I didn’t. And maybe now I regret it.’
Camilla looked at the sad expression on Charles’s craggy face and wondered how it was possible for a successful man to have such a huge, unfulfilled ambition. And suddenly she felt a desperation, a desire to reach that pinnacle Charles had so regretted turning away from.
‘Isn’t your wife chairwoman of a Conservative Association