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thought not for the first time. Leo and his mother shared too much of the same soul. It would do the boy a world of good when he was finally packed off to the Baverstock School for the autumn term. Leo didn’t like the idea, Fiona liked it less, but Luxford knew it would serve them both well. Hadn’t Baverstock done as much for him? Made him a man? Given him direction? Wasn’t being sent off to public school the reason he was where he was today?
    He quashed the thought of where he was today, tonight, this minute. He had to obliterate the memory of the letter and everything that had followed from the letter. It was the only way to maintain the facade.
    Still, thoughts lapped like small waves against the barriers he had built to contain them, and central to the thoughts was his conversation with Eve.
    He hadn’t spoken to her since she’d told him she was pregnant all those years ago, five months to the day after the Tory conference where they’d met. Or not met exactly, because he’d known her from the University, known her only in passing on the staff of the newspaper and found her attractive even as he found her politics repellent. When he’d seen her in Blackpool among the grey-suited, grey-haired, and generally grey-faced power brokers of the Conservative Party, the attraction had been the same, as had the repulsion. But they were fellow journalists at that time—he two years into his command of the
Globe
, she a political correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph—
and they had occasion, dining and drinking among their colleagues, to lock horns and intellects over the Conservatives’ apparent stranglehold on the reins of power. Locking horns and intellects led to locking bodies. Not once, because at least there might be an excuse for once: Ascribe it to excessive drink and more excessive randiness and forget about it please.
    But instead, the affair had gone on feverishly throughout the length of the conference. The result was Charlotte.
    What had he been thinking of ? Luxford wondered. He’d known Fiona for a year at the time of that conference, he’d known he intended to marry her, he’d set upon a course to win her trust and her heart, not to mention her voluptuous body, and at the fi rst opportunity, he’d cocked things up. But not entirely, because Eve not only hadn’t wanted to marry him, she wouldn’t hear of marrying him when he made the perfunctory offer upon learning she was pregnant. She had her sights set on a career in politics. Marriage to Dennis Luxford was not part of her plan to achieve that career. “My God,” she’d said. “Do you actually believe I’d hook myself up with the King of Sleaze just to have a man’s name for my baby’s birth certificate? You must be more demented than your politics suggest.” So they’d parted. And in the intervening years, as she climbed the ladder of power, he sometimes told himself that Eve had successfully done what he himself could not manage: She’d made a surgical cut into her memory and amputated the dangling appendage of her past.
    That hadn’t been the case, as he discovered when he’d phoned her. Charlotte’s existence wouldn’t allow it.
    “What do you want?” she’d asked him when he had finally managed to track her down in the Chief Whip’s office at the House of Commons. “Why are you phoning me?” Her voice had been low and terse. There were other voices in the background.
    He’d said, “I need to talk to you.”
    “Frankly, I don’t feel likewise.”
    “It’s about Charlotte.”
    He heard her breath hiss in. Her voice didn’t change. “She’s nothing to do with you and you know it.”
    “Evelyn,” he said urgently. “I know I’m phoning out of the blue.”
    “With remarkable timing.”
    “I’m sorry. I can hear you’re not alone. Can you get to a private phone?”
    “I’ve
no
intention—”
    “I’ve had a letter. Accusing me.”
    “That’s hardly a surprise. I should think that a letter accusing you of