Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

“You met him, darling, didn’t you?” Mrs. Harriman asked Winston. She pointed to Reagan, before he disappeared from the screen.

“Yes, Mummy. A year ago last spring.”

“With that awful woman.”

“Yes, Mummy. The Milk Snatcher. The Grocer’s Daughter.”

Pamela saw little likelihood that Mrs. Thatcher, the new leader of the Conservative opposition, would get any closer to Number 10 than Reagan had gotten to the White House.

“Remind me, Winston. What did the two of them discuss?”

“It was a sort of tour d’horizon .” His face darkened as he used the diplomat’s phrase. Anything French reminded him of his neglected childhood, when his mother, finished with Randolph, had decamped for Paris and Rothschild. “It was mostly foreign policy, I seem to recall. And I do remember—” He suddenly smiled, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“What is it you remember, dear?”

“What Mrs. T. said to me afterwards.”

“And what was that?”

Winston hesitated a moment, and grinned. “ ‘Poor dear, there’s really nothing between his ears.’ But she liked him nonetheless.” Mrs. Thatcher, like his mother, was a man’s woman, flutteringly susceptible in the midst of all her drive to the simplest sort of boyish charm.

“Go into the bathroom, dear.”

“I beg your pardon?” It was as if he were once again a little boy, weekending at Chequers and being told to have a pee before going in for his audience with the Old Man.

“Look above the toilet,” Pamela said.

Ave, annoyed by the chatter, motioned for Winston to turn the volume up, which the young man did before obediently heading into the little half-bathroom off the den they were in. Once there, he found what his mother had intended for him to see: a framed poster for Mr. President , the Irving Berlin musical that Leland had produced in the early sixties. Pamela’s son was mystified as to why she would be urging him to look at this instead of, say, the two Matisses in the hallway. He walked back into the den.

“They actually thought of Ronald Reagan for the lead,” his mother explained. “Leland had heard that he was a passable singer. He and Josh Logan seriously considered hiring him.”

Winston could think of nothing to say.

“I’m afraid Reagan couldn’t have made the show any worse,” Pamela reflected. Robert Ryan had turned out to be as awful as Irving Berlin’s senescent songs. And no one wanted to look at Nanette Fabray playing a first lady when they could see Jackie Kennedy, the real thing, on their TV screens.

“Come sit next to me, dear, and let’s listen to this speech with Ave.”

The camera took a final shot of Reagan. The losing candidate cocked an eyebrow. What did the gesture mean? Was it a sign of Reagan’s sudden, if momentary, engagement? Was it acting, or an indication that he’d just stopped acting? Pamela was not able to tell.

While Ford cleared his throat, the camera swept from skybox to podium, briefly catching the winsome, clapping presence of Shirley Temple Black, who, the anchorman explained, was now the nation’s chief of protocol.

Now that would be a fine job for Jimmy Carter to give Pamela Harriman. She looked over at Ave. Was it too late for him to buy it for her, with a great boxcarful of Union Pacific cash?

—

With his right hand, Christopher Hitchens paddled the little white ball against the wall. With his left, he reached for a glass of whiskey resting on the Ping-Pong table. He was alone, at three a.m., in the basement of the New Statesman ’s offices in Great Turnstile, having come down here after getting bored correcting the final proofs of his latest article.

Three years shy of thirty, and a half dozen out of Oxford, Hitchens was becoming, in truth, a bit bored with himself, no matter that he was now climbing the masthead of his youthful dreams, laying down column inches inside the same London weekly through which Shaw and Orwell had spoken up against capitalism and cant. Over the last eight months, the New Statesman had dispatched him to Spain’s nascent and unpromising half-democracy; to a pro-PLO conference in Colonel Qadaffi’s Tripoli; and to the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein, who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser…Make a note of the name , he’d written.

Quoting himself came naturally, and why not? Hitchens made and won arguments with a style as crisp and springy as this Ping-Pong ball, in a voice that belonged untransferably to its owner. Whether deployed in Lisbon or Milan or Jerusalem, it worked with a devastatingly quiet self-assurance. As he had learned never to turn up the volume in conversation, so had he mastered the art of never resorting to italics on the page.

For all his recent foreign travel, it was domestic affairs that now called him back upstairs. Until his friend Fenton returned from holiday, Hitchens was charged with writing the “Spotlight on Politics” column. In Saturday’s issue, once he fully sharpened this recalcitrant proof, he would be bringing readers news of how Mrs. Thatcher’s “brittle schoolmarmish accent” was, half against her will, being marinated into something more plummy by a team of media coaches. If they succeeded, the results might help grease the lady’s path from mere opposition to Number 10.

During the past few weeks he’d done so well with Fenton’s column that there was talk of sending him to the fall party conferences — Labour in Blackpool and the Tories in Brighton. But the mere thought of those two vacation locales gave him, the son of a naval officer, a feeling of seaside-sickness, not from any undulation of the ocean, but from the second-rate twirling of all the tiny Ferris wheels and carousels. Even now, when it came to amusements, his countrymen seemed to do it up beige instead of brown. Larkin may have been mildly encouraged when British “sexual intercourse began in 1963,” but thirteen years on, there were still times when one could scarcely notice, let alone get, any. People here seemed continually to detumesce amidst the browned-out and guttering GNP, whereas in distant New York, which had eschewed austerity for gaudy, flat-out bankruptcy, the orange shag carpets were alive with all things venereal and inviting.

He envied Cockburn, who at this minute was over in the States covering Gerald Ford’s convention. A bland enough affair to be sure, but enlivened — he now learned from a perusal of his colleague’s just-arrived copy — by a measure of Barnum-like spectacle: John Dean, erstwhile snitch and newly appointed correspondent for Rolling Stone , was dodging Republican fists in Kansas City; and Miss Elizabeth Ray, the congressional secretary famously unable to type, was on the scene to offer the nonstenographic services she’d once reserved for a Democratic committee chairman.

Ronald Reagan, it seemed, had “at least offered the politics of the conservative imagination.” That was Cockburn’s gentle envoi to the patent-leather loser, and more than he deserved, thought Hitchens. Reverend Carter — a toothier, disco version of the Jazz Age Coolidge — would of course be the one to end up ruling the Day-Glo republic.

A part of Hitchens wished to be there instead of, well, here — where at 3:25 a.m. the radio, instead of being alive with paranoiac Yanks calling in on one subject or another, was broadcasting music so lugubrious it might be announcing the death of an East Bloc leader. Let anyone dare toss him the Johnsonian chestnut about how a man tired of London was tired of life and he’d toss it right back: he was tired of London because he was ready for life, of a louder sort than seemed available here. ( Thinking in italics was permitted.)