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“All right, well, he’s a businessman at least. Surely there must be part of him that understands?”
“It’s not that he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want you to make a mistake, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not. Mum gets it. Even though the press are bound to give her stick about it, she knows I have to find my own way.”
“Alexia thinks the sun shines out of your arse and always has,” Roxie said coldly. “She’d support you if you said you were off to join a Muslim Brotherhood training camp in the Kashmir mountains.”
Michael frowned. He hated it when his sister called their mother by her first name. The rift between mother and daughter was obvious enough, but somehow that little verbal tic seemed to underscore it.
“She loves us both, Rox.”
Roxie rolled her eyes.
“She does.”
“Well, she has a funny way of showing it.”
Teddy found Alexia in her study. Sitting at the desk, an empty water glass in front of her, she was staring into space, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger.
“Are you all right?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Fine.”
She forced a smile. Beneath the perfectly coiffed, politician exterior, Teddy could see how tired she looked. Alexia had been in her midtwenties when they met and her late twenties when they married, in a small Catholic chapel off Cadogan Street. Back in those days she was a raving beauty in the classic seventies mold. Very slender, with long, coltish legs and a mane of straggly blond hair that streamed behind her like the tail of a comet when she moved. But she was ambitious even then, and she’d changed very quickly, cutting her hair and adopting a more sober, suit-and-heels dress sense when she ran for her first London constituency seat. Mrs. Thatcher had been elected leader a few years before Alexia De Vere became an MP, but the British Conservative Party remained a hostile place for a woman, especially one from a lower-middle-class background. Marriage to a British aristocrat had certainly helped Alexia’s chances. Teddy had relinquished his peerage so that his young wife could have a shot at the Commons, but Alexia remained a De Vere, and De Veres had been part of the Tory establishment since time immemorial.
Teddy wasn’t stupid. He was well aware that his name and his money and his family connections were a big part of the attraction for his brilliant, beautiful, pushy young bride. But he admired Alexia, and he loved her, and he was more than willing to offer up all that he had on the altar of her career. Before they met, Teddy De Vere’s life had been grand, privileged, and deathly dull. Marriage to Alexia Parker had made it an adventure.
Sitting at her desk tonight, Alexia looked every inch the powerful, competent, wildly successful woman that she had become. From her subtle Daniel Galvin highlights, to her immaculately cut couture suit, to the diamonds glinting discreetly at her fingers, ears, and neck, Teddy De Vere’s wife was a woman to be reckoned with. Watching her, Teddy could have burst with pride.
Home secretary. That was quite something.
We did it, my darling. We proved them all wrong.
Of course, the De Veres had had their fair share of trial and of tragedy, both as a couple and as a family. Teddy was intelligent enough to realize that the relationship between Alexia and Roxie would probably never recover, any more than his darling daughter’s shattered legs. It had started so long ago, almost as soon as Roxie entered her teens, but of course that awful business with the Beesley boy had made it a thousand times worse. And Alexia had never been the touchy-feely type, the sort of mother who could give her daughter a hug and say “there, there.” Teddy also knew that Alexia spoiled Michael rotten, partly in compensation for all that she’d lost with Roxanne. It drove him mad sometimes, but he understood. Teddy De Vere prided himself on the fact that he had always understood his wife. They were two sides of the same coin, he and Alexia. He loved her deeply.
“We missed you at dinner.”
“Did you? I couldn’t tell for all the yelling.”
Walking up behind her, Teddy rubbed her shoulders. “I’m sorry things got so heated. Where did you disappear to?”
“Someone was at the gate, asking to see me. Jennings didn’t like the look of them, but by the time I got there, they’d gone.”
Teddy scowled. “I don’t like the way these loonies keep following you around.”
“We don’t know it was a loony. It could have been anyone . . . a constituent, a reporter.”
“Did you get him on tape?”
Alexia didn’t blink. “No. The CCTV was acting up.”
“Again?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“For God’s sake. What is wrong with that damn system? Can’t you get MI5 to keep an eye on things, now that you’re running the bloody country?”
Alexia stood up and kissed him. “Relax, darling. It was nothing. I’m sure I’ll be given all the security I need, but we don’t want to live like prisoners, do we?”
