Page 64 of Darling
And, perhaps after a glass of wine, I might be ready to open up and tell him all about the exquisite little miracle waiting for my return across the pond.
Things are extremely bad at the office. During my sick leave, there’d been two resignations, the appointment of an interim director who had promptly quit, and a whistleblower whosestory about how the government had waved the red tape for several US weapons firms outside of existing unilateral trade agreements had made headline news. It was terrible, and after an hour of listening to the trade and foreign departments point fingers at each other, I want to tender my own resignation and never set foot in any political office again, even to use the bathroom.
“The trade agreement scandal will be forgotten by next week,” says Lewis. Since taking over my role as foreign secretary, he looks to have aged fifteen years. He’d been the environment secretary before, which had mainly involved him riding bikes for photo ops and schmoozing fishermen and farmers. I curse myself at that because it was a very ‘Adrian Brooke’ way of thinking. The Department for the Environment did great work, mainly.
“Not if the foreign secretary keeps calling it a scandal, it won’t.” Bridget Morris glares threateningly across the table at Lewis. She’s the chief advisor to the prime minister and thinks everyone in Whitehall is useless, up to and including the prime minister. I knew this because she told me. I’d often thought of her as the female Adrian. In fact, she’s the only person I’ve ever seen give Adrian a run for his money in a cabinet meeting.
“What do you think, Chris?” Lewis asks me.
I blink, refocussing my attention on the dog’s dinner at hand. “I think the office needs some stability, and any further resignations here or in the foreign department are only going to make this look worse.” This, I aim at Lewis. There are a few people baying for him to go over this weapons scandal, which I don’t support. I happen to think he’s competent and decent, and there aren’t a lot of us left. “We have a special relationship with the US, and this needs to be the line we take. Everything else is noise. Get the trade and contracts lawyers to have a look at it again, find something similar in the past to show precedent, andI’ll do the same on the other side. There will be some example of it going the other way that will make it look less… troubling in the round.”
Lewis is nodding. Bridget is watching me closely, her assistant scribbling furiously beside her.
“And the vacant post?” one of the commercial attachés asks me.
“Well, who do we have? Let me see the files.”
Lewis’s phone begins to ring then, and he curses as he looks at it. “I have to take this…” He stands and slips out of the room. The next two hours are spent arguing over possible replacements for a person I never met and didn’t know, until we have three possible candidates. We’ll fight over those tomorrow.
When I get back to the hotel, it’s close to 10pm. I’m exhausted. It feels almost like I’m back in the foreign office, which I’ve missed. I’ve certainly missed the feeling of being important, being critical to a larger operation, making decisions that have a material effect on people’s lives. Something the US Ambassador largely doesn’t have.
After a scalding hot shower, I order some toast and tea, waiting until I’m settled in bed before calling Asher. He picks up, panting and breathless, and I wonder if I’ve managed to call him while he’s working. He hadn’t mentioned another scene, but he wasn’t obliged to. Still, I can’t stop the very strange, very unwelcome sensation that comes over me as I get a vision of him being kissed and handled and fucked by another man.
“Hey, how’s London?” he asks breezily as a greeting.
“Did I call at a bad time?”
“Depends, do you consider in the middle of a 10k a bad time?”
My entire body relaxes. “Yes, very much so.”
“Guess you should hang up then.”
“Do you want me to?”
“No, I’ve stopped now. I was starting to cramp anyway.”
“The worst.”
“I actually hate running, but the gym looked way too busy when I pulled up, and I didn’t want to drive home again. So I came to the park.”
“Far better to be outside running than inside running.”
“Anyway, that’s boring. How was your flight?”
“My flight was a month ago now.”
He snorts. “Long day, huh?”
“Very. But it was positive, we put out some fires, and I was able to feel useful. It’s been a while.”
“Your current job doesn’t make you feel like that?”
“Sadly, no. Usually it’s meetings in which I’m neither the most important nor the most influential person in the room. Meetings which, if I didn’t attend, would play out exactly the same either way.”
He makes a thoughtful noise.
“Perhaps it’s my ego talking, but for many years, my career was the opposite of that. It was the kind of job where the things I said and did had direct and lasting consequences. They mattered, to a great many people, to entire nations sometimes. It’s been difficult to adjust to this… new normal.”