Glass Houses - Softcover

Sandra Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743295838 ISBN 13: 9780743295833

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

About the Author

Sandra Howard has quickly established herself as a highly successful commercial novelist. Married to the former leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, she was also, in the l960s, one of the UK's leading fashion models. Sandra lives in London and in Kent.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

'I'll go for them,' Barney offered. He was good in the mornings, even after a heavy night's drinking. Victoria found it irritating, though she wasn't entirely sure why.

'No I will. I feel like it - I want to,' she said rather desperately, knowing he would have pottered and been ages, wandered up to the King's Road for croissants, probably, and chatted up a girl over a quick espresso. She had to see the papers: they'd been tipping her for a job in Government and it was three days after a General Election, the moment of truth, the weekend when MPs were tensely waiting for calls.

She left, feeling a sense of release at being out of the house. It was a dewy October Sunday morning, pale-gold, as though the sun were behind gauze, and the air was still, with no noise of traffic. She was so on edge. Downing Street wouldn't call, she wanted it too badly; it was like waiting and hoping for a lover to propose.

Looking back at the yellowish-brick Victorian house with its hollygreen front door, she thought it had been a lucky buy, years ago, just before a property boom. They were small terraced houses and aside from the elderly couple next door, Hartley Street was popular with rich divorcées and young City couples with a first child. The front gardens had bay trees, camellias, solanum, and clipped box: typically chic Chelsea. Theirs let the side down a bit, though the Penelope roses were still flowering and a stout hydrangea was turning a glorious autumnal red.

The corner shop was in a parallel street and run by the Vhadi family. Victoria went in under the blue awning sheltering the fruit and veg and gathered up five Sunday papers, resting their weight on the tall counter.

'A lot of reading there, Mrs James,' Mr Vhadi said, smiling, halfeying a youth swinging open the cooler-cabinet door. 'Congratulations on the Election result, by the way.'

'Thanks very much. I'm glad it's all over.'

'I read they might be making you a Minister.' He sounded curious.

'You shouldn't believe all this stuff in the press,' she laughed feeling the strain. He was methodically easing the papers into a flimsy carrier and she burst out, 'Don't bother, I don't need the bag,' but he carried on and handed it over with blandly friendly eyes.

Turning back into Hartley Street, she had to negotiate a lumpy old woman with long straggly grey hair like a wizard's, whose two muscular mongrels were pulling on leads. Her black matted sweater was covered in stains and it was easy to imagine a lonely life in some squalid block of flats with drunken neighbours and dropped needles on the stairs.

But she had her dogs. And her life might be just as she chose, Victoria thought, giving the woman a brief flutter of a smile then carrying on, feeling an inarticulate anger welling up in her that the same couldn't be said of her own.

If the call from Number Ten actually came, it would be bittersweet, a thrilling chance, a whole new artery of opportunity, but Barney would react badly. Every breakthrough, every threshold reached, it was always the same. Even in her barrister days he'd been resentful: it was so wearying and debilitating. He liked having an achieving wife and talked proudly, almost as he would about the size of a fish he'd caught or a new car. He wanted it both ways, she thought despairingly. Politics, for some reason, particularly rubbed him up. Winning Southampton East so unexpectedly five years ago had been a bad night, certainly no warm words or celebrating.

The press had got wind she might be knocking out a Junior Minister and had turned up in their droves. Barney had been all smiles and kisses at the count - 'my wife the MP!' - but later, at home, he'd shown his darker side. His worst eruptions could be counted on her fingers; she understood them but they were indelibly etched and not something to share.

Would the call come? 'Downing Street here, Mrs James.' Her adrenaline fired up with fresh coals. Barney was so perverse. He would mind almost as much if it didn't come; he cared in his own way, and after all the press build-up he'd hate facing his grey-suit solicitor colleagues at Simmonds & Key with no news.

She thought about loss of privacy. Ministers were shielded by the Private Office but also glaringly exposed. Barney liked the limelight though and her long hours, that so suited his lifestyle, would be even longer. There would be compensations. Her constituents made a big fuss of him, too. 'You're such a tease,' old ladies would say. 'Such a one!' They all adored him.

People did. His hair was the butter-yellow of a young child's and always sexily in his eyes; he was constantly throwing it back. He should never have been born blond, Victoria thought irritably, going in at the gate of number sixteen, her stomach taut as a drum.

She was greeted by tempting smells of sizzling bacon and freshly brewed coffee. She felt grateful that Barney loved cooking - he was a natural - and he took wonderful photographs too, beautifully composed like paintings. But any list of his talents, she thought sarcastically, had to include his women - he had a particular gift there. It was a fundamental problem; their relationship lacked constancy and a sense of completeness, that Plimsoll Line of trust. It had done since the very beginning, sixteen years ago, even before their daughter Nattie was born.

Victoria went down the flight of stairs that led straight into the big knocked-through kitchen, a good space where they did all their living. There was the television, bookshelves and an old blue-check sofa at one end, glass doors to a patio with a vigorous fig tree at the other, and on the wall opposite the stairs, set into a chimney breast, was the small wine-red Aga - Barney's most successful extravagance. All his herbs, oils, cookbooks and copper pots were on alcove shelves and the kitchen was always snug. When Nattie was home for Sunday lunch or school holidays she would sit on the Aga's sturdy silver rail with her feet on a chair and phone all her friends.

Barney put the bacon in to keep warm and came to take the papers. He thumped them down on the kitchen table. 'God, you've bought an entire tree! No nice fresh croissants - or did you forget?' He knew the shop never had any.

'Don't be so loud, I want to hear the radio,' Victoria said crossly. They were talking about Chris Hartstone and Cabinet jobs. Chris had been Shadow Health Secretary in Opposition and she his junior.

She stood listening. 'Hartstone will get Health, that's a no-brainer,' a political commentator was saying. 'And Victoria James will probably go there too, I'd say. They worked well together in Opposition. She's relatively inexperienced, but has just the media-friendly image they're keen to promote.'

Barney was propped on his arms reading a football report but taking it all in, she was sure. He straightened up and grinned, slightly edgily. 'There you are - home and dry.'

'Don't do this to me, just don't!'

He kissed her lightly on the lips. 'You'll get in on looks alone,' he murmured, getting more into the kiss then, when all she wanted to do was read the papers.

'We should call and see if Nattie's coming out.'

'I just did; she's not. She's having lunch with Maudie and her parents at that new place in Newbury, the one written up for its amazing crèche - her parents have that afterthought, remember?' His teasing grin was back; he'd looked a bit piqued at her unresponsiveness. 'Couldn't we have one? Ministers can have babies in office, can't they?'

Victoria ignored that. 'You might have waited till I was here,' she complained. 'I wanted to say hello.' Nattie was home from school most Sundays though, and perhaps it wasn't the perfect day for a relaxed family lunch. God, the waiting was awful.

Barney kissed her again, pressing hard on the seat of her jeans. She brought his hands round and held on to them. 'Not now, love, let's have breakfast. I'm starving!'

'Lucky you never put on weight,' he threw back, going to the Aga. 'Just think of all those lunches and dinners you'll soon be eating...'

'Are you being deliberately cruel?'

He produced the food and she could finally look at the papers. All the political pundits had her down for a job in Health or Culture.

Her life would be so changed. She thought of the long slog, the speeches to handfuls of people in cold village halls, late sittings, occasional praise; was it all about to be worth it?

Her father, a doctor, had been found guilty of euthanasia in the distant past, but far from a brake on her progress, it had given her curiosity value, a slight notoriety. John Winchwood had had a keen interest in politics and shared it; as children, she and her older brother Robert had argued hotly about issues such as Greenham Common and Star Wars. Excited by the idea of advocacy, she'd been set on the Bar; politics as a career simply hadn't entered the frame. That had happened accidentally, one of those capricious fancies of fate - a nerdish boyfriend taking her to an Oxford Union debate, a thought-provoking speaker and the seeds of interest sown.

She remembered the Union Chamber seeming like a smaller, slightly moth-eaten House of Commons, and being surprisingly seductive, with its old brown-leather benches, not the green of the Commons or the Lords' red, although the President's chair could have rivalled the Speaker's. The pimply little incumbent of the day had looked quite lost in it.

An Ethical Politician is a Contradiction in Terms had been the motion and invited grandees had taken part: a journalist who had wittily mined the rich seam, and a politician - one of those called the best Prime Minister the country never had - who'd defended with passion. Political decisions taken for the greater good, he'd said, but perhaps causing loss of jobs, for instance, might seem harshly uncompromising but it was ethical, the moral thing to do. He was dismissed as an apologist yet in Victoria he had aroused some hidden spark. That evening, her life had swung like a weather-vane and...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0743295838
• ISBN 13: 9780743295833
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352