Michael Dobbs - The Final Cut

Then there was ice. Urquhart drew back, allowed her hands to fall and deliberately broke the spell that tied her to him. Why, she would never know, and Urquhart would never admit, even to himself.

For how can a man admit to such things? The guilt he felt for others he had taken in such a way, used, discarded, left utterly destroyed. With the passage of time he felt himself being drawn towards the day of his own judgment and such things bore more heavily on his mind. Some might even mistake it for conscience. Or was it merely the knowledge that in the past such entanglements had caused nothing but grief and turmoil, confusion he could do without in a world which, thanks to Thomas Makepeace, had suddenly grown far more complicated?

Yet there was something else which turned his blood cold. The gnawing dread that Francis Urquhart the Politician had been constructed on the ruins of Francis Urquhart the Man. Incapable of children, denied immortality. A desert, a barrenness of body that had infected the soul and in turn had been inflicted upon Elizabeth, the only woman he had ever truly loved. The others had all been pretence, an attempt to prove his virility, but in the end a pointless exercise, a scream in a sound-proof chamber.

And, as she stood before him, desirable and available, he was no longer sure he could even raise his voice. The end of Francis Urquhart the Man.

Francis Urquhart the ageing Politician stepped back from temptation and torment.

'Best that we keep you as my good-luck charm, eh?'

In the Cypriot capital the crowds streamed through the entrance gates for an evening with Alekos, a young singer of talent from the mainland who had built a remarkable following amongst Greeks of all ages. The young girls swayed to the rhythm of his hips, old women fell for the voice which dripped like honey on dulled ears, the men won over by the manner in which he crafted the images and emotions of Hellenism into music of the Greek soul more powerful than a first-half hat-trick by Omonia. He had flown from Athens for a special concert in support of the Cyprus Defence Fund. Few of the several thousand enthusiasts at the open-air auditorium gave a thought to how a concert could raise money for the CDF when all the tickets had been given away, as had the large number of banners which were being waved above the heads of the emotion-gripped crowd. We Shall Not Forget, the refrain in memory of the victims of Turkish invasion, was thrust high alongside other soul-slogans such as Let Us Bury Our Dead With Honour, British – Give Back Our Bases and, yes, even Equality With Orchids.

The Bishop was much in evidence, cloaked dark in the seat of honour and surrounded by a hard-working team of his theological students. Theophilos was well pleased. Even the occasional outbreaks of alcoholic excess brought on by the heat and the ready supply of beer he bore with paternal fortitude. For three hours Alekos and his supporting musicians stirred, scratched, tickled and whipped their passion; as the night grew deeper, he reached for the refrain of Akritas Dighenis, a tale of heroic defiance against the foreign foe, of cherished memories from the mists of time and, above all, of victory. They sang and swayed with him, lit matches and candles, their faces illuminated by hope in the darkness as the tears flowed freely from men and women alike. Alekos had them in his palm.

'Have you forgotten?' he breathed into the microphone, his voice stretching out to touch every one of them. 'No,' they sobbed. 'Do you want to forget those who died?' 'No..

'Who gave their lives for a free Cyprus? Some of whom lie buried in unknown graves?' His voice was firmer now, goading.

(Later when he heard the reports, Hugh Martin was to wince at how Alekos in one emotional sweep had entangled together the subject of British graves with the Turkish invasion.) 'No, no,' they replied, with equal firmness.

'Do you want your homeland given away for British military bases?'

He stirred the muddy waters of old hatreds like a shark's tail. In the darkness they began to lose their individual identities and become as one. Greek. Full of resentment.

'Then will you give your homeland away to bastard Turks?' 'No! Never!'

'Do you want your sisters and daughters to be screwed by bastard Turks, like your mothers were when the bastards invaded our country?' His clenched fist beat the night air, his bitterness transmitting to others. 'NO.'

'Do you want your President to sign a treaty which says it's all right? All forgotten? All over? That they can keep what they stole?' 'NO,' they began to shout. 'NO. NO. NO.' 'So what do you want to say to the President?'

'N-O-O-O-O!' The cries lifted through the Nicosia night and spilled across the city. 'Then go and tell him!'

The doors were thrown open and thousands swarmed out of the auditorium to find buses lined up to take them the two kilometres to the Presidential Palace, whose guards they taunted, whose gates they rocked and whose wrought-iron fencing they festooned with their banners. By the light of a huge pink Nicosia moon, the largest demonstration in the city since the election came to pass, and twenty-three unwise arrests ensured that the stamping of angry feet would continue to grab headlines for days afterwards.

Like every other detail of the concert, even the encore had gone to plan.

'Gaiters and gongs again tonight.' Urquhart sighed. He had lost count of the number of times he'd climbed into formal attire on a summer's evening in order to exchange inconsequential pleasantries with some Third World autocrat who, as the wine list rambled on, would brag about his multiple wives, multiple titles and even multiple Swiss bank accounts. Urquhart told himself he would much rather be spending his time on something else, something more fulfilling. But what? With a sense of incipient alarm, he realized he didn't know what. For him, there was nothing else.

'I see they're pegging out the lawn for that wretched statue.' Elizabeth was gazing out of the bedroom window. 'I thought you'd told Max Stanbrook to stop it.' 'He's working on it.'

'It's preposterous,' she continued. 'In a little over a month you will have overtaken her record. It's you who should be out there.'

'She wasn't supposed to lose, either,' he reflected softly.

She turned, her face flecked with concern. 'Is all this Makepeace nonsense getting you down, Francis?' 'A little, perhaps.' 'Not like you. To admit to vulnerability.'

'He's forcing my hand, Elizabeth. If I give him time to organize, to grow, I give him time to succeed. Time is not on my side, not when you reach my age.' With a silent curse he tugged at his bow tie and began again the process of re-knotting it. 'Claire says I should find some way of calling his bluff. Fly the flag.'

'She's turning out to be an interesting choice of playmate.'

He understood precisely what she was implying. 'No, Elizabeth, no distractions. In the past they've caused us so much anguish. And there are voices everywhere telling me I shall need all my powers of concentration over the next few months.' 'People still regard you as a great leader, Francis.'

'And may yet live to regard me as a still greater villain.'

'What is eating at you?' she demanded with concern. 'You're not normally morbid.'

He stared at himself in the mirror. Time had taken its undeniable toll; the face was wrinkled and fallen, the hair thinned, the eyes grown dim and rimmed with fatigue. Urquhart the Man – the Young Man, at least – was but a memory. Yet some memories, he reflected, lived longer than others, refused to die. Particularly the memory of a day many years earlier when, in the name of duty and of his country, he had erred. As the evening sun glanced through the window and bathed the room in its rich ochre light, it all came back. His hands fell to his side, the tie unravelled again.