“There’s a letter from the adoption people. A social worker will be coming to interview us soon to find out if we’re suitable candidates to adopt.”
She paused beside his chair to read through the letter again. The sunlight caught her blonde hair and Alex reached up to push it back off her face. He had fallen in love with her the moment he saw her, and he still loved her. Her unhappiness was his, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to give her the child she so desperately wanted.
“Mm…what’s this?” she asked him, holding out a cream envelope. He took it from her, his eyebrows lifting slightly as he studied the insignia.
“Minesse Management—those are the people who sign up sports stars to endorse sports equipment and the like. It’s very big business.”
“Why are they writing to you?”
“I don’t know…perhaps they’re arranging some sort of pro-am tournament and they want us to participate.” Alex opened the letter, read it and then handed it to her.
“Well, it doesn’t tell you much at all, does it?” she commented.
“No, not really.”
“Will you go and see them?”
“I don’t see why not. Advertising is always useful, although of course it depends how much it’s going to cost. I’ll give them a ring on Monday morning and see what it’s all about…” Alex stretched back in his chair, his muscles tautening, then laughed as he saw the expression in Julia’s eyes. They had always had a good sex life, although neither of them had really enjoyed those years when they had had to make love to a timetable in the hope that Julia might conceive.
“I thought you were due to play a round of golf.”
“Perhaps I’d rather just play around?” he teased her, ducking out of the way as she flapped the newspaper threateningly in his direction and then grabbing her in his arms. Even without children they had so much, but Alex sensed that Julia would never give up; they had come too far down the road to go back.
But if they weren’t accepted by the adoption people? He shivered suddenly and looked into his wife’s face. She was thinner and there were tiny lines drawn on her skin by tension. She had invested so much hope in this test-tube thing; they both had, and he had feared that she might have a complete breakdown when their last attempt failed.
She was so fragile, so vulnerable; he could feel her bones through her skin. A wave of love and compassion washed through him. He buried his face in the smooth warmth of her throat and said gruffly, “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
They went upstairs hand in hand, Julia praying that he wouldn’t sense her reluctance. Since it had been confirmed that their final attempt to conceive via the in-vitro fertilisation method had failed she had completely lost interest in sex. Sex, like marriage, was ordained for the procreation of children; knowing that there would be no children robbed the act of its pleasure; of that glowing excitement she had felt in those early days when every act of love had been enough to make her climax wildly, elated by the knowledge that this joyous climactic act was the start of human life.
That joy had faded over the years, but she had still enjoyed sex; still welcomed Alex’s body within hers, but now suddenly there seemed no point any more. No matter how many times he made love to her she would not conceive his child.
Upstairs in their room as Alex took her in his arms she closed her eyes so that he couldn’t look into them and see her rejection.
Simon Herries, Member of Parliament for the Conservative constituency of Selwick, on the northern borders between England and Scotland, received his letter just before eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.
A long meeting with a select and powerful group of Conservative lobbyists the previous evening had kept him out of bed until three a.m. and in consequence, it was well into Saturday morning before he walked into the breakfast room of his Belgravia home in Chester Square. As was his habit, the first thing he did when he sat down was to glance through his mail.
The butler had brought the mail in earlier on a silver tray, and the thick cream envelope with the Minesse Management crest caught his attention straight away.
As a politician it was his business to know those companies and institutions who discreetly funded the Conservative Party machine, and he remembered at once that there had been an extremely respectable donation from Minesse at the end of the last financial year.
Conservative Members of Parliament, in the main a product of the English public school system, are trained almost from birth to adopt the “under” in preference to the “over” statement. It is a British tradition that some say started with Drake playing bowls while he watched the Spanish Armada advancing. The “respectable” donation had in fact been close to a million pounds.
Even so, Simon didn’t open the letter straight away, but eyed it cautiously. Caution was a prime requisite of politicians, and in politics, as in every other power-based structure, favours have to be paid for.
The unanticipated cream envelope disturbed him. It was unexpected, and he wasn’t a man who adjusted well to anything that did not fall within the strict controls he set around his life.
At thirty-two he was privately being tipped, in all the secret and powerful circles that really matter, as a future leader of the Tory party. He deliberately played down his chances, smiling ruefully, adopting the role of impressed but humble student, to the political barons who had taken him up.
He had known since coming down from Oxford that nothing but the ultimate seat of power would satisfy him, but he had learned while he was there to harness and control his ambitions. Overt ambition is still considered both suspicious and ungentlemanly by the British ruling classes. Simon Herries had everything in his favour; he came from a North Country family with aristocratic connections. It was well known in the corridors of Westminster that no one could be an MP without an additional source of income—left wing politicians were financed by their trade union; establishment right-wingers got theirs from private sources. It was from trusts set up by his wife’s family that Simon Herries received the income that enabled him to live in a style which very few of his colleagues could match. As well as the Belgravia house he also owned over a thousand acres of rich farmland and an Elizabethan manor house near Berwick. The Belgrave Square house had been bought on his marriage by his new in-laws. It was conservatively valued at half a million.
He picked up The Times and turned to the first leader, but his eye was drawn back to that cream envelope.
At eleven o’clock exactly, the butler pushed open the baize-covered door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house and brought in his breakfast. Fresh orange juice, squeezed from the Californian oranges that he preferred; two slices of wholemeal bread and a small pot of honey that came from one of his own farms; a pot of coffee made from the beans that were bought fresh every day, apart from Sunday, from Harrods Food Hall and which Simon drank black. He liked his life to be orderly, almost ritualistically so. When people commented on it, Simon said it was the result of his public school upbringing.
He was as careful about watching his weight as he was about everything else. Image was important; one didn’t wish to project the glossy, too well packaged look of one’s American colleagues, of course—the voters would find that insincere, but Simon would have been a fool not to take advantage of the fact that at six foot, with a well muscled athletic build which came from public school sports fields, and rowing for his college, he possessed an enviably commanding presence.
His hair was thick and dark blond. In the summer the sun added distinct highlights, and his skin tanned a healthy brown. He looked arrogantly aristocratic. Women liked him and voted for him and for his policies, men envied and admired his success. He was known in the popular press as the only MP with sex appeal. He pretended to find the description distasteful.
His wife was probably one of the few people who actually knew how much he relished it, and why!
She