Fifty-First State by Hilary Bailey Page A

night of freedom.’
    â€˜I didn’t tell you they were coming tomorrow,’ Lucy said.
    â€˜You didn’t have to,’ William said. ‘I’m good for a week, Lucy. But after that we’ll have to think long and hard. And Charlie stays.’
    They went to the restaurant and tried not to talk too much about the imminent arrival of Lucy’s parents.
    Manderton, Oakdene Avenue, Bromley, Kent. August 25th, 2015. 3.30 p.m.
    Joshua Crane was only too pleased, on the afternoon of the day after his return from a month’s holiday with his family in Italy, to be rung up by Edward Gott and invited to a last-minute meeting over dinner at Sugden’s. Standing in the French windows of their long living room, he told his wife Beth, who was sitting by their pool maintaining her tan, ‘I’ll have to go to London. The election.’ In fact, he was keen to get to Chelsea to discover if his girlfriend was back. She’d told him she would be holidaying with friends, unspecified, in Goa while he was away giving his wife what he thought he owed her – a month in four-star hotels in Italy, with shopping trips to Rome and Milan thrown in. But knowing Saskia, she might just as easily have gone to Cape Cod, Saint Tropez or Thailand. She might have found a new boyfriend or even got married. He’d tried phoning her at midnight from the bottom of the garden the day before, but had only reached her answering machine.
    Beth Crane looked up from her magazine and said, ‘I can’t see why. Your seat’s safe. And I don’t suppose they’re going to ask you to stand for leader.’
    This squib, after a month of the same, made Joshua revise his plan to be detained in London overnight and turn it into being detained there for several days. When he was with Saskia he always claimed to be staying in Batter sea with his old friend, a fellow MP, Douglas Clare. Douglas, without approving, covered for him. Although Beth was, of course, right that the dinner with Gott could not concern any really important matter. The Party Chairman, Graham Barnsbury, who had been hastily appointed election co-ordinator, had already rung him in Italy and briefly checked he would be supporting Alan Petherbridge for leader.
    â€˜Perhaps something’s come up,’ he muttered to Beth.
    She sat up and began to file her nails. ‘Try to get back as soon as you can. While the boys are still on holiday.’
    She wasn’t demonstrating any desire for his company as a husband. No surprise there, thought Joshua, piqued. He sometimes feared that his wife guessed something about the affair with Saskia. In morbid moments he wondered if she knew everything about it. He concealed his mobile phone bills, but she could have obtained copies – she might even have hired a detective.
    He had accepted that after twelve years of marriage, during which he and Beth were supposed to have drawn closer, they had only discovered more things about each other they did not like. Beth made no effort to bridge the gap (why should she, if she knew he’d been unfaithful to her since she’d been pregnant with Marcus, their first child?). She repelled Joshua’s few remorseful, bumbling efforts to improve matters. Joshua wondered if Beth was patterning her own marriage on her parents’, which was distant. Perhaps she just didn’t like him. Perhaps she knew or guessed about all his infidelities over the years and believed that if she weakened, and tried to trust – even love – him once more, she would suffer even more when he betrayed her again. But when he considered making a clean breast of it to his wife and offering to start again, his courage failed. He doubted if Beth would forgive; he doubted if he would remain faithful to her even if she did. The marriage had become a marriage of convenience, with Beth enjoying the good standard of living and kudos which went with being an MP’s wife and