Personal(86)

It’s all pretty fluid at the moment.

We drove the length of the driveway, and parked on the gravel near the door, where there was another armed policeman on duty. The house jutted in and out in places, where afterthought additions and extensions had been tacked on, but it was basically rectangular, much wider than it was deep. Not that it would be cramped from front to back. Far from it. I was sure it would be plenty spacious. But the proportions were dominated by the long, scattershot facade. No question about that. The place looked like four shoeboxes laid end to end. Maybe oak trunks long enough for front-to-back rafters were hard to find in Queen Elizabeth’s time. Her dad had just built the Royal Navy. Lots of oak ships. Whole forests had been cut down.

We got out of the car, and Bennett nodded to the second cop, who nodded back, and then Bennett hustled us inside, impatiently, like he was embarrassed to be seen with us in public. Or maybe he was worried about rifle sights. Maybe he didn’t want to stand next to me in the open. He had survived Paris, and he didn’t want to get nailed in London.

The door was most of a tree, nearly five hundred years old, banded with iron and studded with nail heads as big as golf balls. Inside I saw dark panelling, almost black with age, waxed and gleaming, a worn flagstone floor, and a huge limestone fireplace. There were oak settles and tapestry chairs, and electric bulbs in iron candelabra. There were oil portraits of solemn-faced men in Tudor costumes. Bennett took a right-hand corridor, and we followed him, ultimately into a room that had been modernized with white paint and an acoustic ceiling. Beyond it was another room, similar, but smaller, with a large door in its end wall.

Bennett said, ‘That’s the side entrance. That’s where your president’s tent will be. We imagine they’ll all use it. From there they can come through here, with secure onward access to anywhere they need to be. Every room has natural light, but they’re all big, and all seating is in the centre, so in no case does anyone need to get close enough to the windows to be visible from outside. The impromptu walks on the lawn and the photograph are the only points of weakness.’

We walked back the way we had come, but we took a right-hand turn well before we got to the hallway, into another corridor, this one with a creaky wide-plank floor, which led to a narrow room laid out left to right in front of us, which had nothing in its far wall except French doors, not at all correct for the period, all glass from top to bottom, with the patio beyond.

Bennett said, ‘They use this like an anteroom. They come in, they line up, they count heads, they make sure they’re not leaving someone locked in the bathroom. Then they step out.’

I stood there for a second, where they would, as if I was one of them, and I looked ahead through the glass. We were right of centre, in terms of the building’s symmetry, and the patio was built in a gentle curve, which meant we would be stepping out somewhat to the side of the deepest part. Which was OK. It would make the collegial cluster look geometrically authentic, rather than politically desperate. And it meant the shallow steps to the lawn were slightly closer, which would give the short guys less distance to hustle the tall guys. Presumably the photographers would be penned to the right, which meant the house would be at an angle in the background, which was better than a head-on brick wall, like a mug shot.

I put my hand on the handle, and I wondered if I had sold them short, by imagining their forced guffaws and their fake bewilderment, at having to change gears so quickly. Maybe it wasn’t fake. In the tent, in the side door, through the secure access, not close to a window, these guys lived with close-order security every minute of their lives, maybe to the point where stepping out to an open-air patio was indeed a bewildering thing to do. Stepping out, shuffling slowly, head high, eyes nowhere except on some other guy equally scared, then standing still, facing front, chest out, smiling, not moving, a high sky above, and who knows what in the distance.

It’s not the same with a sniper out there.

I opened the door, and I stepped out, and I stood still.

The early morning air was cold and a little damp. Underfoot the patio was made of mid-grey stone, which was worn with age and smoothed by rain. I walked to the exact centre of the paved area, and I stood straight and faced front, and then I turned half left and stared in that direction, and then back to the right, and then I walked slowly forward to the lip of the steps to the lawn, like a diver at the edge of the board, and I stood with my hands behind me, chest out, head high, like I was in a photograph, or in front of a firing squad.

Ahead of me was a broad sweep of lawn, and then the back wall, and then a scrubby piece of common land, and then a safety fence, and then the M25 motorway, which could have been eight lanes at that point, rushing right and left in the far distance. And right there and then I abandoned Bennett’s motorway idea. No just-in-time delivery. Not a viable location. Traffic was fast and heavy. Heavy in the sense of flow and per-minute density, and heavy literally. Some of the trucks were huge, and the biggest were in the inside lane, and they were all going fast, immense rushing bludgeons through the air. Trees far beyond the shoulder were thrashing about. A parked truck would be battered by slipstream. A platform built high inside would feel it badly. It would rock and judder, more or less continuously, with peaks and troughs at unpredictable intervals. Range would be about three-quarters of a mile, which meant a rock or a judder worth the thickness of a dime would see them miss the house altogether. Not a smart spot. Dismissed.