Free The Madness of July by James Naughtie Page B

weekends together. But she enjoyed them, stags of a common age including Ruskin and Sorley, who’d both slipped ahead of him by virtue of having started earlier, and the likes of Forbes and McIvor who were at his level, waiting for the next jump to a cabinet seat, and looking for a helping hand from anywhere. Sparger too, although he had once propositioned her when drunk, whispering all the while that music made him cry. But Francesca knew that one day their band of brothers would break up and there would be pain. Their life of rivalry made that a certainty, the fervour of the moment coming from the knowledge that it would pass.
    Because she loved the risks of the stage, the life of politics worked on Francesca. Flemyng’s friends confided in her in ways that she found surprising, leaving their own wives in ignorance, and within months of Flemyng falling for her she’d been adopted by the gang. Forbes had shared the story of his failed marriage; Ruskin his desire for children and his wife’s distance from politics. She kept their secrets.
    With her husband she’d developed the honesty that he needed. Her love for him, which had grown, obliged her to be tough. He wanted nothing less, and she could often see in his eyes, behind the dancing smile, an appeal for an openness between them that might one day be uncomfortable. He’d told her that without it he feared that he would drift, and maybe fall.
    There would be politics around the table later. Francesca opened her window in search of some air, checked her clothes, and responding to the chatter from the cobbled street below, set off in search of strong tea to ready herself.
    *
    Back in his office, Flemyng dived into a red box of paperwork and sat alone. He was told that Lucy would be delayed so he took relief in his work. He spoke to the Beirut embassy, composed a message for Damascus about his September visit, and re-read a hostile Treasury paper on the cost of embassy entertaining in North Africa. The note on tactics from the official representing him at the following day’s budget wrangle seemed to do the job, so he scribbled a quick note of thanks and support, read the daily batch of embassy telegrams, which took an hour, and put away the last of his papers. Lucy hadn’t returned. He asked her assistant to let Ruskin’s office know they could talk the next morning, and made sure that the message would be passed on immediately. A letter of thanks to his party chairman in the constituency, and he was done. There was time for a quick shave and shower, in the poky bathroom he shared with the minister next down the pecking order, and he thought he had won himself some thinking time.
    Instead he was summoned to a meeting, for the second time that afternoon. ‘Thomas Brieve rang,’ Lucy’s assistant announced through the doorway. Because she was junior, she used his full name.
    Brieve. Prime ministerial foreign affairs adviser and, in Flemyng’s mind, the most obnoxious of the new breed. Fixers appearing in ministerial offices, confidants hired to do their masters’ business round the clock, and known for their lapdog loyalty. Brieve was their model – a Cerberus at the gate who sent unwanted ministers on their way, the boy scout who followed the paper trail wherever it went, the man who never missed a meeting. His memos, Ruskin would say, were like toxic lava from a volcano: get in its way and you’d be swallowed up. Tom Brieve, although his skinny, angular frame was physically unsettling and he had a boyish manner that multiplied the effect, had power. Gatekeeper and enforcer, he had secrets stuffed in his pockets. But Francesca was always surprised by Flemyng’s reaction to him, and puzzled. Brieve hardly seemed like Rasputin, she had said after first meeting him. Nor even Machiavelli. Flemyng said that she would be wise not to bet on it.
    She remembered, however, how he had spoken of his own awkwardness and confessed that he felt it lifting in her presence. He