Perhaps she betrays that tiny uncertainty, because Emily is unconvinced. “I don’t believe you,” she hisses. “You were always with him in London. Even when he was here, you would text and call at all hours.”
Jasmine has always been abstemious in troubling her boss on weekends and during “family time”. It occurs to her not all those texts and calls were actually from her. If Richard had been conducting an illicit affair, what better camouflage than to claim they were work? But pointing it out is unlikely to help the situation.
“I was in the office. I wasn’t by his side all day and Ineverstayed in his London home,” Jasmine protests, but the other woman isn’t listening.
“You think you’ll take over? Stand instead of him? Well, I can guarantee you won’t. I will do everything in my power to make sure they never choose you!” Pleased with her threat, Emily turns her back and slams the door behind her.
The short exchange has so many implications. The horrible, personal insult, Jasmine is inclined to put down to the woman’s emotional turmoil in the wake of her loss and the discovery of her husband’s flagrant infidelity. Unlike some, Emily had never been a political wife. Not sharp or witty or erudite, and knowing that, she had always been content to focus on her home and her family. She made the mandatory appearances at his side when a plus one was required, but was always on the train home the following morning. Emily had no other focus in life than her son and her husband. To discover how much of her faith has been misplaced must be awful. Jasmine finds she has only sympathy for the woman, despite her wounding words.
The threat, Jasmine also discounts. Emily is not well-enough connected to do any damage, and the Labour Party will need to put up the strongest candidate they can find for the seat in the wake of the scandal that is inevitably coming. Besides, Jasmine finds people tiring. She has never had any wish at all to represent a constituency in Parliament. The power behind the throne, Atlee to Churchill, Campbell to Blair, formulating policy and proposing strategy is her joy, not pressing flesh and placating the desperate.
What hurts her the most is Sean. How had Emily known she was in Hayburn and at the Constituency Office, not at work in London? While Sean hadn’t taken part in his mother’s attack, Jasmine is certain the person who drove her, who stayed in the car waiting, was her son. It feels like a betrayal of their friendship, that he might believe she was involved. It is what upsets her most.
And Jasmine knows that worse is to come. The identity of the woman with Richard Exmore that night was not released with the original story. She was, after all, an innocent by-stander, although Jasmine might scoff at that description. Although she had been nameless with the first announcement, everyone knew it could not last. Standard crisis management was to get ahead of the story, release the details, control the narrative, but the masters at Labour headquarters had been unable to deflect attention or re-frame the tale. Short of another war breaking out in a previously peaceful European country – preferably Ireland or France, somewhere nearby – or the emergence of a faster-spreading, deadlier virus, the story was going to break.
By the end of the first day, the press realise Richard had not died alone. The story is no longer simply a portly MP unsurprisingly dying of a heart attack. It is impossible everyone who knows the name of his lover will withstand the fervour of the British tabloids in pursuit of the more salacious angles of this tragedy. Money will be offered, pressure applied.
TheMailgets it first – it is the only paper to carry it in its print versions but all the news apps have it by morning, scurrying to make up ground. The pack is off. The name is out and everyone waits: Jasmine, the Labour Party, the family.
When Jasmine wakes in the cold pale hours before dawn and checks her phone, she almost cries. Richard’s lifetime of service and his constant efforts to improve the lot of his constituents will be sunk by this nebulous iceberg spun of whispers and insinuations. Despite the early hour, her first instinct is to call Sean, her old employer’s son, once her friend.
“Have you seen the news?” she asks, voice full of wary concern. She is relieved he even answered. There was a risk he would reject her call.
“Yep.”
“Is your mum safe?” Despite Emily’s rant at her, Jasmine has seen enough since she started working in the political world not to wish the horror of press intrusion on anybody.
“Yep.”
“Are you okay?” There is no point in asking how Emily is. How would anyone feel to find their trust and their love betrayed? Sean, at least, had always had a more cynical relationship with his father. He often felt Richard had prioritised politics over family.
“Yep.”
Jasmine tries to break the terse answers. “What are you going to do today?”
“Hide.”
She gives up. Maybe it is too soon. “I’m here if you need me. Give everyone my love and take care of yourself.”
“Will do.”
And he is gone.
A lot of relationships will be damaged by the scandal. That she and Sean are caught up in it is unsurprising. The family wonders exactly how much she knew, how much she hid, how far she was complicit. The more vehemently she protests her ignorance, the more others will presume her knowledge. The extraordinary unpleasantness of the conversation with Emily the day before is seared into her brain for eternity. But Emily will not be the only one to believe her implicated in Richard’s affair. The biggest question is how far people think her treachery by association may go?
Richard’s lover, Irene Peters, born Irina Petrova, is a beautiful woman. Put her picture next to that of Jasmine’s late boss – balding, rotund, his suit, as ever, slightly shabby – and it is hard to believe, on her part, it was a love match. The press doesn’t even need words to build the story. Her birth name was common enough in Russia to have given Jasmine faint hope they would not have uncovered more, but in reality, she always knew this hope was in vain. Irene is beautiful, she is Russian, and she is also the daughter of a man who is a childhood friend of the Russian Premier. A man long suspected of links to the Russian FSB. Why would such a woman be interested in an inauspicious Member of Parliament from an obscure northern constituency?
For nearly two decades, Richard Exmore, Jasmine’s late – and at this moment, unlamented – employer, had faithfully served his constituents. He was a local, from a working-class background, and he had started his working life in a factory before becoming a Labour councillor and subsequently an MP. He had championed the hospitals, the schools, and the public services people relied on.
He had been one of the hundreds of MPs who lived and worked, quietly ignored by most of the population. Few outside Westminster could have named him or his constituency. Even within his own constituency borders, more residents would have failed to recall his name when questioned than not. They voted for the Party, not the man.
For all that, Richard had been a good MP. Until his death, Jasmine would have sworn he was also a decent man. She and Richard had worked well together. Then along came Irina. Richard was obviously no longer able to defend himself, but even if he had been, Jasmine doubted he could have. She had worked closely with the man for years and even she had wondered sometimes what on earth his wife had seen in him. Richard was steady and kind but a little bombastic and a lot boring. He was not destined for an office higher than backbench MP. There was little remarkable about him. Except that in among the constituency surgeries, the fundraisers in support of the local NHS and the debates in the Commons, Richard Exmore also sat on the Parliamentary Select Committee for Arms Export Controls. In one little nook of his constituency sits a large factory making arms, and factories mean jobs – a subject close to Richard’s heart. Suddenly, Irina no longer seems like an indiscretion; now she seems to bring the stench of corruption at best, treason at worst.
Before she even gets out of bed, Jasmine reads the coverage in every major paper and a few of the online-only ones, too. She checks the coverage in the US media and even skimsBildandLe Monde. Finally, she unlocks the Pandora’s box that is social media.
The mainstream media, wary of falling foul of the libel laws, have been careful to hint. To put two statements together which imply cause and effect but do not actually state it. Such as, Richard Exmore died in bed with his young Russian-born mistress. Autoerotic asphyxiation is known to carry a risk of inadvertent death. And, as if the taint of treachery were not enough, suddenly half the country think Richard Exmore’s cause of death was far more salacious than years of Emily Exmore’s excellent but salt-and-fat-laden cooking.
No such restraint inhibits the denizens of the internet. Jasmine only has to read a handful to see how badly this is playing. She does not have the stomach to continue reading for long. Anyone who believes the general populace has moved on from the Victorian attitudes of prudishness, hypocrisy and jingoism, need only read a few of the posts on social media to be thoroughly disabused.
