The Final Cut. Michael Dobbs

CHAPTER SIX

       I regard being called a hypocrite as something of a compliment. It means I can see both sides of the question.

      ‘I hate memorial services. The cant. The falseness. The empty phrases and hollow praise. I hate memorial services.’

      Urquhart was in one of those humours again. He had stamped impatiently as he had waited at the east door of St Margaret’s Church to be escorted by the rector, and his face had been set in stone while walking to his appointed pew, past the acquiescent, nodding faces with their spaniel smiles and synthetic sympathies worn above black ties and scarves. They had thought his countenance denoted sadness, distress at the loss of such a good friend and colleague as Freddie, Baron Warburton, and indeed his emotions were fractured, but not in pity for others.

      The turbid mood had begun the previous night when he had opened his red box to discover that his press officer, thinking it might be appropriate, had enclosed a few of old Freddie’s obituaries. The bloody fool. Reading that Warburton’s passing marked ‘the end of an era’ and that he had been ‘the last of F.U.’s dirty dozen’ had done little to enhance the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm about either the press or his press officer.

      ‘Can’t stand it, Mortima. They hound a man into the grave then, soon as he’s dead and gone, reach for their sopping tissues and try to prove what a great man he was, how his loss somehow threatens culture, the country, civilization as a whole. The only reason I kept Freddie was because he followed like a lamb. Everybody knew that. But now he’s a dead lamb they speak of him as a lion. Not a single mention anywhere that his veins had been swept quite clear of blood by alcohol. Nor of that little tangle in Shepherd Market, when two ladies of the night abandoned him without either trousers, wallet or his Downing Street pass.’

      ‘He was loyal, Francis.’

      ‘I had his balls in a vice, Mortima, of course he was loyal!’ Urquhart brought himself to a sudden halt, closing his eyes. He’d gone too far. He should be used to honouring the dead at Westminster, there had been so many over the years, but such memories only brought out the worst in him. ‘Forgive me. That was unnecessary.’

      ‘Forgiven.’

      ‘It’s just that…what will they say about me, Mortima? When I’ve gone?’

      ‘That you were the greatest Prime Minister of the century. That you rewrote the record books as well as the law books. And lived a long and contented retirement.’

      ‘I doubt that. How many great leaders have ever truly found contentment in retirement?’

      She searched for a name, but none came to her.

      ‘I don’t want to grow old and bitter, after all this has gone. I just don’t have a vision of myself retiring, being replaced. Ever.’ He waved a hand at her. ‘Oh, I know I’m being pathetic but…retirement for me isn’t filled with long summer evenings but endless nights dancing with ghosts. The ghosts of what might have been. And of what once was.’

      ‘I understand.’

      ‘Yes, I know you do. You’re the only one who does. I owe you so very much.’

      She sat beside him now, in the church of St Margaret’s at Westminster, which stood in the lee of the great Abbey, as they listened to the choristers singing a plaintive anthem. Mortima’s eyes were fixed on the young treble soloist, a boy of perhaps twelve with fair hair falling across his forehead and the tender voice of an angel that filled the church like the rays of a new sun. What a difference it might have made, he considered, if they had been able to have children; it could have touched their lives with a sense of immortality and brought music to their souls. Yet it was not to be. She had bound the wound until it scarred and toughened, never complaining, though he knew the hurt at times cleaved her in two; instead she had invested all her emotional energy in him and his career. Their career, in truth, for without her he could not have succeeded or sustained. For Mortima it had been a barren crown, a sacrifice in many manners far deeper than death, and all for him. He owed her everything.

      The choir had finished and she looked round at him, a fleeting softness in her eye that he knew brimmed with regret. How much easier retirement would be to contemplate, had they had children. Instead all they would leave behind them were a Library and the fickle judgement of history. Apres moi, rien. Once he had thought that would be enough but, as the years passed and mortality knocked, he was no longer sure.

      ‘Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men…’

      Clerical hyperbole and half-truth, a momentary suspension of political life in the pews behind him while piously they honoured death and, like birds of prey, plotted more.

      ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure…

      Men sang such tunes in sleepy ritual then woke to ignore them so blithely. Yet, on the day of reckoning, what would be his own case? He suffered a pang of momentary doubt as ghosts crowded into the shadows of his mind, but then he was clear, as he had always been. That what he had done was not for himself, but for others, for his country. That the affairs of men require sacrifices to be made, and that the sacrifices which he had made had always been motivated by public and national interest. Sacrifice of others, to be sure, sometimes in blood, but had not he and Mortima made sacrifices of their own, two lives devoted to one cause in the service of others?

      ‘…that all things may be so ordered and settled by their endeavours, upon the best and surest foundations, that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations.’

      Crap. Life was like setting sail in a sieve upon a wild and disorderly sea. Most people got sick, many drowned.

      ‘In silence, let us remember Frederick Archibald St John Warburton.’

      Best damned way to remember the man. In complete bloody silence. But it was not the way Urquhart intended to go.

      ‘Thy will be done on earth…’

      And there he drew the line. No, that was not good enough, never had been good enough for Urquhart. Some men used morality as a crutch, an excuse – always the men who failed and achieved nothing. Morality was not the way through the swamp but the swamp itself, waiting to ensnare you, bind your limbs, drag you under. Great empires had not been built or sustained on such poor footings, or the British people protected from the plottings of envious foreigners by prayer. In the end, those who honoured weakness were weak themselves. A great man was judged by how high he climbed, not by how long he could remain on his knees.

      When the time came, he would not go in silence, he would depart with so much clamour that it would echo through the ages. Francis Urquhart would be master of his own fate.

      ‘Amen.’

      Geoffrey Booza-Pitt revealed an unusual degree of self-consciousness as he faced his Prime Minister across the desk of the Downing Street study, hands clasped together, knuckles showing white and a smile seeming painted and fixed. It was not unusual for him to seek a private audience and, within limits, Urquhart encouraged it; Geoffrey was a notorious gossip and adept at stealing others’ ideas, which he could either claim as his own or abandon with ridicule depending on the reception given to them by his master. He was without personal doubt or hesitation the finest ankle-tapper in the Cabinet, displaying fastidious team loyalty in public while dextrous at sending his colleagues sprawling in front of goal, usually clipping them from the blind side and always with an expression of pained innocence. A useful source of information and amusement for Urquhart, who relished the sport.

      Urquhart had assumed that Booza-Pitt would be laying the ground for a change of responsibility at the next reshuffle. Geoffrey was a young man constantly on the move; ever since he had kicked open the door of the pen with a series of brilliant pyrotechnic