The ghostly outlines of Turkish rugs lingered on the bare wooden floors. Where once there had been elegant reproduction antique chairs and polished occasional tables, there were now rows of hurriedly-assembled flatpack desks and plastic chairs. Cables coiled in every direction from computers and printers set up throughout what had been the dining room, the sitting room and the second kitchen. Piles of cardboard boxes filled with files and labelled with thick ink marker teetered in the corners.
Maps of parliamentary constituencies, graffitied with numbers and names, had been pinned onto the walls, and flatscreen televisions were in every room, permanently broadcasting the BBC and Sky news channels. During working hours the rooms were full of smartly dressed young people crouching over their desks with serious expressions, their heads pressed to phones, their necks eternally cricked even as their fingers danced on keyboards. Outside, the background noise was hum and whoosh, living rural England; inside, it was tap and mutter.
At first Olivia Kite’s decision to move the headquarters of the No to Europe, Democracy First campaign away from Westminster and into the expensive country house where her marriage was ending had seemed inexplicable. In fact it was a stroke of genius, distancing the campaign from the political establishment in London, and fusing together its couple of hundred dedicated staff out in the sticks. Their sequestered camaraderie meant that their movement had come to feel like a popular insurgency – and so, in a way, it was. Greece had exploded, Spain was dividing, France was on the march; and now it was Britain’s turn. Far away from elderly, cynical Whitehall, this was a Spitfire summer. For the men and women serving under Olivia Kite, Danskin House was Fighter Command.
The house was not in fact quite as remote as it might have seemed. Just beyond the forest of oak and Scots pine that surrounded its formal gardens and strip of parkland was a busy coastal town, with a good road link to the M11, along which an endless stream of lorries trundled, bringing cars from Germany and containers full of almost everything else from China. Its railway station required only one change from Liverpool Street, and the local taxi drivers had become accustomed to cabinet ministers and minority party leaders, never mind television journalists and other hangers-on, arriving off the morning and evening trains with a self-important air and asking for ‘Mrs Kite’s place’.
Despite the container ships that arrived in the port every few hours, the European Union was deeply unpopular in this northern corner of Essex. Union flags flew from pubs and public buildings, and Mrs Kite, partly because her husband’s reckless infidelity was a rich source of local gossip, was hugely popular here.
As for Olivia herself, she had recovered her domestic territory and stamped it with her own political identity; her skulking, pirouetting husband was beginning to feel like a stranger in his own home. Lionel, their eldest son, who was going through an REM phase, referred to his father simply as the Oaf. ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’ echoed along the upstairs hallway as Olivia stared at her husband’s froggy face flushing in the garden and thought, ‘No, it bloody isn’t. Stamping on his face with stiletto heels, before burning all his dreams in front of his staring eyes, ripping his fingernails off one by one and humiliating him in the newspapers … that would be the best revenge. But if that’s not an option, I suppose living well is an acceptable second choice.’
Olivia was the Cavalier commander. But she had no intention of losing her head. She had more of Oliver Cromwell about her than any languid Stuart. Jennifer Lewis, by contrast, definitely had the looks of a Cavalier lady: a long, serpentine body, delicate, pale features and hair for whose colour there was no adequate description – corngold and copper, silver birch with licks of flame. With her green eyes and large, capable hands, however, she was a fighter too, and an eager footsoldier in Olivia Kite’s parliamentary insurgency. Olivia treated her almost as a daughter, and relied very heavily on the younger woman’s uncanny grasp of numbers and down-to-earth political sense.
Through the frantic weeks of the referendum campaign Jen was at her boss’s side most of the time, expressionless, taking calls and giving orders. But today her provocative eyes seemed lost in thought. She couldn’t get her mind off her last meeting with her former lover, the newspaper reporter Lucien McBryde. A man with a considerable talent for self-destruction, he now seemed to be falling apart at a spectacular rate. Texts she had received over the weekend told her he had been leaving her messages, even now, through their very private system.
Two nights previously, Lucien McBryde had been walking slowly up St James’s Street, deep in thought. (Not deep enough: this was his last weekend alive, although he wasn’t aware of that fact. Had he known, he would more consciously have drunk in the salmon-coloured light on the sides of the buildings, the indistinct urban scent of late summer, the kestrel hovering over St James’s Palace.)
Samuel Johnson held that to live a good life meant acting morally as if you were about to die, while conducting your daily business as if you were going to live for another fifty years. Lucien McBryde failed on both counts.
Morally, his main failings were idleness and irresponsibility mitigated by charm, an addiction to a stimulating powder, and another to stimulating, strong women. In his defence, he would point out that while many men regarded them simply as complicated and expensive instruments for their own pleasure, he was a genuine admirer of women – their smells and tastes, the way they walked and the way they talked – and that they tended to sense this. ‘I am essentially a male lesbian,’ he would declare.
In his professional life, McBryde acted as if he had an endless, charmed life, with unlimited possibilities for second chances and eleventh-hour renegotiations. His tax returns, bills, investments, pension and passwords were in an entirely chaotic state. For the best part of a decade Lucien McBryde had lived blissfully from day to day. But his supply of rising suns and golden sunsets was about to run out.
Tonight, McBryde had a nagging toothache. Eventually his tongue located it. Pain sought pain. Probing the back of his palate, he thought back to the events of two months before, when his father had died and his own life had begun to spin out of control.
Old Robson McBryde, Lucien’s widowed father, had been a hard man to love. In Lucien’s case, this was perhaps partly because they were closer to two generations apart in age than one. But it was mainly because his father was an impossible man to live up to. With a face like an American bald eagle, hacked and fissured by many decades of concentration and humour, Robson McBryde was a legend in Fleet Street and beyond – the wartime hero who pursued a career as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, reporting on the first Gaza camps for the Guardian with a ferocity which led (thanks to a quiet word from a major advertiser to the paper’s impeccably liberal editor of the day) to his summary dismissal on the unspoken charge of anti-Semitism.
Robson migrated to other newspapers as a pitiless moralist in the foreign affairs field, churning out endless lucid and fact-packed columns on the immorality of British foreign policy across the Middle East and beyond. As early as the Suez debates of 1956 he was cited in the House of Commons as an authority, and regarded as the then prime minister’s personal nemesis in the press.
Lucien had grown up in the menacing shadow of his father’s moral certainties. It had been a boyhood of newspapers flattened out on the breakfast table and fingers stabbed down angrily in emphasis, of after-school harangues and sad shakings of the head over his lack of interest in current affairs and, more generally, his academic performance. Old Robson, a liberal and Fabian of the old school, would never have raised his hand against a child, yet in his perpetual disappointment, punctuated by occasional door-slamming tantrums, the old man proved a brutally destructive humanitarian, a Guardian-reading human-hater. His son, lying on the floor with his chess set or watching television, had dreamed of being taken in and adopted by the parents of his best friend Jonathan. They were kindly people, of no known opinions.
The father had never regarded the son as his intellectual equal. Lucien’s attempts to impress him, whether through his school essays or in conversation, tended to result only