‘Thank you so much for your acknowledgement of my work earlier,’ she said, impatient as always to cut to the chase. ‘Hopefully you’ll see that I’m ready to move up to lead counsel soon.’
Charles paused, putting his orange juice down carefully. ‘Actually, it wasn’t chambers I wanted to talk to you about,’ he began, fixing Camilla with his gaze and leaving a dramatic pause. It was a technique Camilla had seen him use to devastating effect in court when he was about to annihilate someone under cross-examination.
‘Camilla, you’re almost certainly the most ambitious law student I have ever interviewed for pupillage,’ said Charles. ‘And, believe me, we’ve had a lot of gung-ho lawyers through the doors of Cornwall Chambers.’
‘Isn’t everyone super-ambitious when they’re twenty-two and trying to get into good chambers?’ she smiled, relieved that she hadn’t been brought here for a dressing-down.
‘I suppose. But I always found it strange with you, with your background. We’ve had a lot of public school- and Oxbridge-educated barristers in this chambers, but I’ve always been suspicious of taking on the truly privileged ones.’ Charles whispered the word ‘privileged’. ‘Lazy bastards, a lot of them.’ He stopped.
‘Which is why I was hesitant to take you on, Camilla.’
Beginning to wonder where this conversation was going, Camilla began swirling the ice cubes at the bottom of her glass around and around.
‘Do you remember when I took you out for lunch in your first week?’ asked Charles.
Camilla remembered it well. It was to Wilton’s in Belgravia. She was the only woman in the restaurant and she ate pheasant when she knew she should have ordered the fish. It was the first time she had felt small, scared and a little out of her depth. Rather like now, in fact.
‘Do you remember that Michael Heseltine was sitting in the next booth and you became terribly excited?’ said Charles.
Camilla smiled. ‘I think I even said hello.’
‘I think you might have been a little drunk, actually. Don’t worry,’ he chuckled, lifting his orange juice. ‘Lunchtime drinking never agreed with me, either. But I remember thinking at the time, why is this girl so excited about meeting Heseltine when she must have met dozens of high-ranking political sorts through her family? I think your father was a Lords’ frontbencher at the time, wasn’t he? You had a fierce look in your eye and you told me that Heseltine had once said the president of the Oxford Union was the first step to becoming prime minister. And that’s the reason why you went for it, and won it.’
‘Actually, I think he said it was a chore that had to be suffered,’ remembered Camilla, thinking back to the months of Machiavellian plotting required to secure the prestigious Oxford office, and then the weekly attendance at one fatuous debate after another.
‘And anyway,’ she continued, ‘it didn’t quite work out that way for him, did it? So much for the Oxford Union plan.’
‘He didn’t do so badly,’ said Charles, his voice serious, ‘he got deputy prime minister. And I think you, Camilla, could do just as well.’
Camilla stopped and looked at Charles intently.
‘Politics? But what about the law?’
‘Ach, do you really want to be a QC?’ said Charles dismissively. ‘Would that be the end of a satisfying career for you?’
Camilla knew she had to tread carefully. But the truth was, the law didn’t put the fire in Camilla’s belly. Yes, she was good at it. She had the discipline and the intelligent, incisive mind to reach the very top of the profession, and once she knew she was good at something, she didn’t stop until she was the very best she could be. But Camilla wanted more, much more.
‘It’s something I have thought about,’ she replied truthfully. ‘But I’ve still got my work here and I’m not even thirty.’
‘Don’t even begin to bring age into it,’ chuckled Charles. ‘Did you know I ran about, gosh, thirty years ago now?’
She shook her head. ‘I assumed the law was your life.’
‘Many barristers are frustrated or failed politicians,’ laughed Charles. ‘I’m one of the failed ones.’
‘So what happened? You’d have been excellent.’
‘I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine when I ran for parliament. I won a Tory nomination OK, but they made me fight some unwinnable seat in South Wales that had been held by a Merthyr Tydfil teacher for twenty years. I didn’t have a chance with my Edinburgh accent.’ He started shaking his head at the memory.
‘I can’t imagine you gave up that easily, though,’ said Camilla, leaning forward, fascinated and excited at the same time.
Charles shrugged. ‘Well, I did. I was making good money in fees, my name was being mentioned as a future silk, and that’s nice when you’re married with a couple of kiddies with a big fat mortgage to pay. Truth is,’ he said slowly, ‘it gets too tempting to stay put in the law. Who wants to trade a five-hundred-thousand-pound salary for fifty thousand as an MP? I didn’t. And maybe now I regret it.’
Camilla looked at the sad expression on Charles’s craggy face and wondered how it was possible for a successful man to have such a huge, unfulfilled ambition. And suddenly she felt a desperation, a desire to reach that pinnacle Charles had so regretted turning away from.
‘Isn’t your wife chairwoman of a Conservative Association somewhere?’ asked Camilla.
‘Esher,’ he replied. ‘Do you know Jack Cavendish?’
She nodded again. ‘Well, my father knows him. Tory MP for Esher, right?’
‘Yes, but who knows for how much longer?’ Charles responded softly. ‘A whisper has started that Jack is going to stand down at the next election, which could be as soon as May next year.’
‘Is Esher a safe seat?’
‘Not by a long shot. His majority has been whittled down to a couple of thousand. But if he does stand down, the party will be inundated with CVs. It’s a wonderful seat for somebody. Wealthy, close to London …’
Camilla could barely contain her excitement at where this conversation was going. ‘What sort of candidate is the party looking for?’ she asked, trying to keep her cool.
‘Someone capable of winning a campaign. Someone like yourself, Camilla.’
‘How do you know I’m a Conservative?’
‘Oh dear,’ laughed Charles, suddenly embarrassed. ‘I assumed like father, like daughter.’
Truth was, Camilla was political without having any particularly strong party affiliation. Some of her opinions swung to the right, others were squarely towards the left.
But in her mind, politics wasn’t about policies, and there was very little between the three major parties now anyway. To her, politics was about power. It was the thought of the respect and authority that turned her on. The glamour of her heels clicking down the corridors of Westminster, the credibility she would get when compared to Cate and her fancy magazines or Venetia with her over-decorated society houses. More importantly, to the outside world she would no longer just be a satellite in Serena’s Stardust-sprinkled universe.
‘I voted Tory in the last election,’ she replied, without adding, ‘only just.’
‘Then you have everything you need to win