Page 6 of The Unlikely Heir

I walk up the Grand Staircase. Black-and-white portraits of every prime minister in the history of the UK line the walls. My photo will be added here when the public decides they no longer want me to serve them and my term finishes.

I walk up the steps to the third floor, where my private residence is located.

My flat is as lifeless as a morgue. It’s been this way for over a year, but it still shocks me to come home to such stillness.

There’s nothing living here, not even a pot plant.

As I walk in, the picture on the wall opposite the front door catches my attention.

It’s an ugly landscape of Southend-on-Sea’s pier. For years it had pride of place in my nan’s front room, a reminder of our yearly holiday spent in a caravan at the beach. It was the one luxury of our life, the thing we looked forward to all year, building sandcastles on the pebbly beach, the indifferent weather often sending us scrambling into the arcades, the cafes where everything on the menu had a picture as if you needed a reminder of what bangers and mash and mushy peas looked like before you ordered it.

Nan gave the painting to me as a wedding present when Garett and I got married. It had stood out on the present table among the silver gravy jugs and crystal champagne flutes, wrapped in cheap wrapping paper with a bow clumsily made of twine.

“I don’t want you to ever lose sight of your roots,” she’d told me.

As if I could ever forget.

I am the child of a single mother who hadn’t paused long enough in a fumbled encounter in the alley behind the Rose and Shamrock in Brentwood to get a full name from the guy she was entwined with. Grant, she thought, or maybe Graham. It had definitely started with a G. He’d been a bricklayer or maybe a plumber. Something that involved his hands because she could remember the rough feel of them against her skin.

Which is far more information than I needed when I was eight and asking for clarification about my origins.

My mother had absconded from her parenting duties early, so I’d been raised by my grandparents. Nan had been rewarded for years of hard work serving ungrateful kids in a school cafeteria with a retirement raising a headstrong grandson while caring for an invalid husband.

My grandad had been a miner, sacrificing the functioning of his lungs for his work, so the background noise of my childhood was his wheezing and the hum of his oxygen machine.

“Come on, Ollie, do John Cleese now,” he’d say to me in his broad Yorkshire accent. “That’s a lad.”

And I’d put on my best Basil Fawlty accent. “Well, if you don’t like duck, you’re rather stuck, hahahaha.”

Grandad would laugh, which would inevitably lead to a coughing fit, bringing Nan out of the kitchen to glare at us both, although her top lip would twitch. Always a sign she was secretly amused.

“This lad will be treading the boards one day, you mark my words,” Grandad would say when he’d recovered enough to speak.

While I hadn’t ended up following the acting career my grandad predicted, my gift for imitation had definitely come in useful. Within a week at Oxford, I’d replaced my broad Essex vowels and dropped consonants with a more socially acceptable mid-England accent.

It wasn’t just my voice. I was a quick study of social conventions, learning how to slide between different groups in society effortlessly. I had grown up working class, had a middle-class education, and ended up marrying someone from the upper class.

The ability to straddle the full spectrum of British society, plus a deep-seated need to fight injustice, spurred by the memory of every wheeze of my grandad, had drawn me from my initial legal career into politics.

It does seem dizzying that a council-estate Essex kid who’d grown up receiving free school meals was now in charge of the country.

It really is the best part of democracy.

Sometimes I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in a reflective surface when I’m at a state banquet or strolling through Parliament, and instead of seeing the leader of the country, the man I’ve grown into, I’ll see little Ollie from Essex staring back at me. And I’ll get the same feeling I had when I was six and knocked off my feet by a wave at Southend-on-Sea, tumbling over and over, not knowing what way was up or down, until my nan’s arms plucked me from the ocean.

Now, I head past the painting to my study, which is where I spend the majority of my time when I’m in my flat. At some point, I’ll head to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich, but right now, I dive straight for the bottle of scotch in the bottom drawer of my antique oak desk.

I lean back in my chair, undoing the top button of my shirt, loosening my tie, and contemplate the bottle and glass before me. I feel every second of my thirty-nine years right now.

This is when I miss Garett the most. After a day like I’ve had today, not having someone else to talk things over with.

For an insane, crazy second, I imagine calling him in his love nest in Fulham, wrenching him away from whatever fun and games he and his young Italian lover, Riccardo, are engaged in, just to talk to him.

“Hey, I know we separated because you called me a heartless bastard who always put my job ahead of you, and as a bonus, you implied I’m incapable of love, but can you just listen to me while I complain about the day I’ve had? I’m dealing with the potential fall of the monarchy. Who would have thought it would happen during my reign as prime minister? Do you think I should be helping to keep alive an institution that pillaged one-third of the world for its own benefit, or should I do everything in my power to speed the demise along?”

But I don’t lift my phone. Instead, I pour myself a drink.

ChapterFour