Fifty-First State Read Free Page B

locked the door, cleared the table at which Joshua and Julia had been sitting, put everything on a trolley, ran it through the swinging baize doors to the kitchen, then hurried upstairs past the private dining rooms on the first floor and up to the top of the house. There was a small room off the landing where hanging racks held the waiters’ and waitresses’ black suits and dresses. He whipped out of his suit and was just doing up his other trousers when his boss, the owner of Sugden’s, came out of his flat, pale as a vampire, in his usual purple smoking jacket. William had heard the sound of a television from behind Jack’s front door, but had quite hoped, at this hour, to avoid an encounter. He took his jacket from a hanger.
    â€˜Everything all right, William?’ asked Jack.
    â€˜Pretty good,’ William answered. ‘Twenty covers, not bad for a weekday, and table six had three bottles of Bollinger. One card was refused so the diner paid cash.’
    â€˜Who was that?’
    â€˜Edward Jeffreys,’ William told him.
    Jack nodded. ‘There’s a divorce pending. Pick up anything about an election?’
    William shook his head. Jack said, ‘Fine.’ It was not the fate of a great nation that concerned the restaurateur. It was that during the course ofan election campaign, normally lasting something like six weeks, the restaurant would be largely empty. The clientele would be in their constituencies, campaigning, or burning the midnight oil to produce statistics or publicity. They would be studying graphs, poring over newspaper leaders, monitoring broadcasts, creating smears, awaiting the results of opinion polls, all involved in the short but tough episode that is a British election campaign.
    â€˜Good,’ Jack said. ‘That’ll keep the private rooms full.’
    A group wanting to dine in private, to plan and conspire, would often take one of Sugden’s two upstairs private dining rooms. This was filling Jack Prentiss’s bank account. From time to time the cabal from one dining room would bump into members of the group they were conspiring against on the landing separating the two dining rooms. William had once asked Jack why secret meetings were so often held in this less-then-secret restaurant, a stone’s throw from Parliament and Whitehall. He said the conspirators could have kept their secrets more secret if they’d met in a Little Chef on the M1.
    Jack had told him, ‘You’ve got to remember that when Parliament’s in session politicians can’t breathe the air more than a mile from Westminster.’
    William started downstairs.
    â€˜All-night bus?’ Jack called after him. William had the impression that Jack sometimes got lonely at night, with only his porcelain collection for company. Sometimes he tried to detain him in conversation, which William, after a long shift and yearning for home, didn’t always welcome.
    â€˜How’s Lucy?’
    William looked up at Jack. ‘I’m not sure. She’s usually in bed when I get back and she’s often gone to work when I get up.’ He added, ‘I think it’s her in the bed – but it might be the woman next door, for all I know.’
    Jack laughed. William didn’t like it. As he left, relocking the door behind him, William reflected that shift work was hard on marriages. His boss’s life proved it. Two – or had there been three? – of Jack’s marriages had foundered. William had decided his would not. At the first sign of trouble he’d leave and look for another job.
    He set off through the darkness to his bus stop in Whitehall. He had joined the governed, rather than the governors now: an old man carrying a black plastic bag wandering down to the river to find somewhere to sleep; a group of cleaners chatting in a foreign language on their way to the tube station. Two bemused teenagers wandered down the wide and empty