Sidney Sheldon’s The Tides of Memory

“I’ll tell you on two conditions.”

“Conditions?” She frowned.

“Actually three conditions.”

“Three?”

“Three.”

“And they are?”

“The first is, don’t shoot the messenger.”

Shit, thought Alexia. He must have heard something bad. Really bad.

“I would never do that. Go on.”

“The second condition is that you call me Teddy. ‘Edward’ makes me sound like such a stiff.”

Alexia laughed. “Okay. Teddy. And the third?”

“The third is that you agree to have dinner with me on Friday night.”

Alexia considered for a moment. She already had a date on Friday night, with a dancer from the Royal Ballet named Francesco. Her gay colleagues at the pub were beside themselves with excitement about it.

“Lucky you,” the Coach and Horses landlord had cooed, staring unashamedly at Francesco’s crotch in the promotional pictures Alexia showed him. “He certainly carries all before him, doesn’t he?”

“It was love at first tights!” Stephane, the bar manager, giggled.

By contrast, Edward De Vere—Teddy—looked like a gauche little schoolboy. Ruddy-cheeked, awkward, and painfully reticent around women, Teddy was the archetypal British upper-class male, and not in a good way. And yet he had plucked up the courage to ask Alexia out. And he was funny. And a member of the Carlton Club. More important than all of this, he knew why Alexia was being blackballed by Westminster MPs and he wasn’t going to tell her unless she agreed to have dinner with him.

“All right, fine. I’ll have dinner with you.”

“On Friday.”

“Yes, on Friday. Now, for pity’s sake, what did you hear?”

Teddy De Vere took a deep breath.

“Clive Leinster told the entire House of Commons bar that he slept with you and you gave him crabs.”

“I … he …” Alexia spluttered, too outraged for speech. “Fuck! How dare he? The lying little …”

“I’ll pick you up at seven.” Teddy beamed. “We’ll go to Rules.”

RULES WAS UNLIKE ANY RESTAURANT ALEXIA had ever been to. Since moving to London, she had occasionally been taken out to smart establishments where they served champagne and oysters, and where pretentious maître d’s lorded it over their wealthy clientele by denying them the best tables.

Rules was in a different class to any of those places. Yes, it was expensive, but the menu read like a boarding school lunch board: toad in the hole, spotted dick, jugged hare, steak and kidney pudding, jam roly-poly. The average age of the waiters must have been eighty if they were a day, all of them men and dressed as if they’d walked off the pages of a Dickens novel, in long black aprons and stiffly starched shirts. Everything about the place, from the overcooked vegetables, to the smell of beeswax on the polished wood floors, to the cut-glass accents ricocheting off the walls, was as upper-class English as Buckingham Palace.

The moment she walked through the door, Alexia realized two things.

The first was that she did not belong here.

The second was that Teddy De Vere did.

“You’re not still miffed about the crabs thing, are you?” Teddy asked, in a voice Alexia could have wished were at least a decibel lower.

“No, I am not miffed,” she whispered back. “I’m furious. Everyone knows the only way in to the Commons for a woman is as a secretary. I’m wildly overqualified, but now, thanks to that asshole, I don’t stand a chance. I mean, as if anyone could give Clive Leinster crabs! As if he isn’t alive with them already, the revolting little pervert.”

Teddy De Vere chuckled. “You know you have a marvelous way with words, Alexia. You should be a politician.”

Alexia prodded her unappetizing Yorkshire pudding. “One day.”

“Why not today? There’s a seat going begging in Bethnal Green.”

Alexia laughed. “It’s not begging for me.”

“It could be,” Teddy said seriously. “I put some feelers out at the Carlton Club the other night, in between spying for you. They’re looking for someone different to contest that seat. A ‘younger, more modern face’ was how Tristan put it.”

“Tristan? As in Tristan Channing?”

Teddy De Vere nodded. “We were at Eton together.”

Of course you were. Tristan Channing ran Conservative central office. He was the closest thing to God within the party. “Young and modern is one thing. But do you really think a woman from my background has a chance in that seat?”

“Why not?” Teddy shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? Forget all this nonsense about being a secretary and throw your name in the hat. What’s the worst that can happen?”

It was hard to believe that that conversation had taken place more than thirty years ago. And now here she was, home secretary. I always had ambition. But Teddy was the one who pushed me. He gave me the confidence and he opened the doors.

“Home Secretary? Commissioner Grant has arrived.”

Alexia’s permanent private secretary, Sir Edward Manning, broke her reverie. Immaculate as ever in a bespoke three-piece suit, with his hair smoothed flat against his scalp, Edward smelled faintly of the same Floris aftershave that Teddy wore.

“About bloody time. I’m supposed to meet the Russian ambassador at four-fifteen, you know. My day just got completely squeezed.”

“I know, Home Secretary. This shouldn’t take too long.”

A couple of influential Russian oligarchs based in London were spitting teeth at the new regulations Alexia had proposed to Parliament, designed to close tax loopholes for the super rich and to prevent Russian money from being laundered through the City. As a result, the ambassador had demanded a meeting, and Sir Edward had granted it. Russian oligarchs were not the sort of people whom the Home Office wanted as enemies. Commissioner Grant was going to have to cut to the chase.

“Home Secretary, I do apologize. We had a developing situation to deal with in Burnley this morning, a possible Islamic terrorist cell.”

Commissioner Grant was in his late forties, overweight and altogether unattractive, with a pale, doughy face, piggy little eyes, and thin lips that he permanently wetted with a nervously darting tongue. Next to Edward Manning he looked horribly disheveled in a crumpled nylon suit, his cheap Tie Rack tie splattered with coffee stains.

Alexia was not reassured. I hope his mind is less disordered than his dress sense.

“Is this something I need to be aware of?”

“Yes, ma’am. The threat has been neutralized but your office has been given a full briefing.”