A Scandalous Man. Gavin Esler
was by his side. She must have been ten. It was a time for explanations.
‘Besides, I had other duties.’
Harry was bewildered.
‘What other duties?’
‘Well,’ Robin Burnett nodded sagely, ‘duties to the country as a whole.’
It sounded big stuff to an eight year old. Other duties. To the country as a whole. Fifty-seven million British people were depending on his father, not counting Harry, Amanda and their mother.
‘Harry, you must understand that on the day you were born I absolutely had to be in Gloucester.’ Robin Burnett explained that he had been elected that day as a Gloucestershire MP as part of the 1979 Thatcher landslide. ‘And then I had to go to Number Ten because the Lady summoned me to brief her. And that meant I must …’
When Harry thought back, he remembered that his father ‘must’ go off to Washington or Bonn or Paris or Brussels. He always ‘had to’ do his paperwork, what he called ‘my boxes’. Harry recalled some words from Schiller: ‘Kein Mann muss muessen,’ which translated literally as ‘no man must “must”.’ Nobody has to do anything. Except his father.
‘Why were you not there in the hospital when I was born?’ Harry demanded. ‘When I was sick?’
‘These were different times,’ Robin Burnett explained. ‘Men left childbirth to women. The best you could do was stand outside and pace up and down and smoke cigarettes. It was a different world.’
Robin Burnett made 1979 sound like some far off period in medieval history. Perhaps, Harry had come to realize, it was. In 1979, Year Zero of our current predicament, people worried about things as peculiar to us now as the Black Death or the Turks at the Gates of Vienna. In 1979, the Cold War would last forever. The Soviet Union would invade Germany. There were nervous TV dramas about a nuclear war followed by a nuclear winter. Nobody had heard of Global Warming. The Big Scare was precisely the opposite, a nuclear Ice Age. In February 1979, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown. Militant Islamists hijacked the Iranian Revolution and seized the American embassy, holding diplomats and their families hostage for more than a year. Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. British trades unions were out of control. Inflation. Unemployment. Strikes.
This strange alignment of the planets brought us Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of Soviet Communism, the rise of the Taleban and al Qaeda, and – eventually – the whole mess we’re in now, everything from 9/11 and the London and Bali bombings to the so-called War on Terror and several wars with Iraq. And of course, the Masters of Our Current Predicament, George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
Harry sat down in the Underground train on his way to Hampstead. Suddenly half a dozen teenagers jumped in behind him. They were wearing hoodies or baseball caps and eating foul-smelling hamburgers and chips, shouting at each other with their mouths open, sitting with their feet in unlaced trainers on the seats. One of them had a boom-box and cranked it up. Hip-hop. Another scratched something on the glass of the train window with a bottle opener. Harry looked away. It was the Art of London Zen. What was happening was not really happening. If you did not look at it, it did not exist. A couple of stops later, the teenagers finished eating their burgers and chips. They rolled the wrappers into balls and threw them at each other, then headed and kicked them around the floor. They wiped the grease from their hands on the seats. Two of them started doing pull-ups on the commuter loops hanging from the roof of the train. Harry and the other passengers stared out the window at the Tube blackness. He wanted to scream at the teenagers to sit down. For god’s sake, behave. But he said nothing. There had been half a dozen stabbings on the Northern Line since the beginning of the year. One of the victims had been cut open from his ear to his chest and then photographed on the attackers’ mobile phones as he lay bleeding on the floor.
‘Happy Stabbing, yeah?’ one of the attackers had yelled at the other people in the carriage, then they started slapping people and photographing that too.
Harry stepped out quickly at Hampstead, leaving the gang of teenagers in the carriage behind him. Relieved. Feral beasts. There was a newsagent’s stall with two billboards. One said: ‘Iraq War “In Good Faith” – Blair.’ The other: ‘Election Called for May 5.’
Harry asked the newsagent for directions to his father’s apartment block.
‘Hampstead Tower Mansions?’
Blank look.
‘Heath View Road? Do you know it?’
The man was fat and balding, with a comb-over of greasy brown hair. He grunted and continued sorting his papers. The grunt could have been a yes, or a no, or a fuck-you.
‘You know it?’ Harry tried again. This time the grunt was definitely a fuck-you.
‘You wanna know somefink get one a’these.’
The man nodded his greasy hair towards a stack of London A to Z guides, then turned away. Harry bought an A to Z, cursing under his breath. He handed over a ten pound note. The change was returned slowly and without a word. Harry looked at the newsagent’s flabby, white, unshaven jowls.
‘Somefink else I can do for you?’ the newsagent snapped.
‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘You could die.’
He took the map and walked out. The newsagent mumbled curses of his own. Harry searched for the address and began walking towards the heath. The apartment was part of a red-brick Victorian mansion block facing south. It sat squat like a fort. He climbed the steps to the front door and into an entrance hall lined with polished brass panels and tinted mirrors. The jade-coloured marble floor was spotless. The concierge was formal, black tail-coat and white shirt. It was like stepping back into the London of Charles Dickens.
‘Good evening, sir. How may I help you?’ Harry cleared his throat.
‘My name is Harry Burnett. I …’
‘Ah yes,’ the concierge interrupted. He beamed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Mr Burnett. I’m due to go off duty, but I wanted to help in any way that I can. I am so sorry about what has happened to your father.’
The concierge proffered a hand and they shook formally.
‘Sorry?’
‘Yes, ever so sorry, sir.’
Harry blinked and then savoured the moment. He could not remember ever meeting anyone sorry about his father before.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured.
‘How is he?’
‘Still alive is all I know,’ Harry responded.
‘A bad business.’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘I’m Sidney Pearl, chief concierge here at Hampstead Tower Mansions. Anything I can do for you, just ask. Anything.’
‘I’d like to look around the flat while I wait for the police, if I may.’
‘Of course.’
He gave Harry the keys.
‘Thank you, Mr Pearl.’
‘Sidney, please.’
‘Thank you, Sidney. Please call me Harry. The police are on their way…’ He checked his watch. ‘They should be here any minute.’
‘I shouldn’t bet on it,’ Sidney responded. ‘Always late in my experience. Last time I called them to report a spot of vandalism, they arrived two days late. Do you want to go up now – or perhaps have a cup of tea? I’ve just made myself a pot.’
Tea sounded a good idea.
Harry wanted to hear more from the only living human being he had ever directly encountered who showed respect for Robin Burnett. The concierge nodded towards the leather armchairs in the hallway