Chapter 4
Ludo
Honestly, I didn’t expect to walk into the newsroom to a round of applause, but it was a nice touch. Even if that round of applause came from just one man, and that one man was my godfather, the Sentinel’s pensionable theatre critic, Ben Diamond.
“Encore, darling boy!” he shouted, standing at his desk and clapping enthusiastically. I curtsied, extending my arms like Margot Fonteyn taking her final curtain.
“Did you watch me, then?”
“Watch you? Darling boy, I was transfixed. Not since Olivier last graced the National’s hallowed stage has South Bank seen such a gilded performance. Five stars. Absolutely five stars.”
“You didn’t give Olivier’s final performance five stars,” I said.
“Quite true, dear boy. Don’t quibble.”
I grabbed Uncle Ben’s hands and squeezed them, partly in a gesture of appreciation but also because I wasn’t sure he’d stop applauding otherwise.
It didn’t matter how awful you felt, how bad your hangover was, or how violently you’d just vomited all over a sex symbol, Uncle Ben could make you feel as fit and confident as a young roebuck in the first spring of his physical peak.
At eighty-eight, Uncle Ben was joie de vivre personified.
The man could walk into a morgue and have the bodies up and dancing the foxtrot within five minutes.
He was so beloved in our family that we all called him Uncle Ben. Even my father.
“I finally went to see the Lord Lucan musical last night,” I said, as Uncle Ben lowered himself back into his chair.
“What did you think?”
I leant in conspiratorially.
“Is it terrible to say that I was relieved when he finally killed the nanny?” Uncle Ben’s roar of laughter filled the newsroom. “That Australian accent was terrible,” I said.
“Darling, they’re lucky it hasn’t caused a diplomatic incident,” Uncle Ben said. “Australia House keeps inventing emergencies to stop the high commissioner from seeing the show. Last week they told him Shaftesbury Avenue was flooded.”
He laughed until he coughed, and I waited for him to pat the phlegm back down into his chest. The man had been smoking at least a dozen cheroots a day since, well, the days when men smoked cheroots.
So, his lungs weren’t what they could be.
His eyes watered with the effort, and it sent his neck scarf skew-whiff. I leant over to straighten it.
“Tell me, dear boy, who did you see the show with? Did you take a sweetheart?”
I didn’t mean to sigh quite so heavily.
“Definitely not a sweetheart, Uncle Ben,” I said.
My brother, Jonty, was meant to be my date to the show, but he’d flaked on me in favour of attending some very Instagrammable opening of some very TikTok-able new rooftop bar in Kensington with a bunch of other influencers.
I’d seen the show by myself, my coat folded neatly on the empty seat beside me.
It was only after the show, feeling jolly lonely, that I had been cajoled by a series of texts into joining Jonty and his chums at Maxime’s.
“Not seeing anyone special, then, darling boy?”
“Only you, Uncle Ben. Are we still on for Yentl on Friday?”
“Kamuvan, my boy. Of course!”
Someone called my name across the news floor. I was wanted in the small conference room. Uncle Ben gave a playful salute farewell.
* * *
In the conference room my father sat at the head of the table in his trademark dark-grey three-piece suit.
He thought the suit gave him the air of authority and dignity.
I thought it made him look like an East End gangster dressed up to impress a jury.
Dotted around the table were the rest of the politics team, faces buried in notepads, newspapers, and laptops.
No round of applause this time. My father didn’t even stop to say a simple “well done.” I slid into a seat next to the Sentinel’s political editor, Ford Goodall—a man blessed with both the name and the personality of a clapped-out transit van.
“We were just assigning follow-ups to the power plant story,” Ford said. “Penny is already on her way up to Leicester for local reactions. I’ll be digging into whether there are any questions of corruption, because I’ve had a call this morning that suggests there might be—”
“Oughtn’t I do that one?” I said, feeling somewhat indignant that what promised to be the meatiest follow-up to my story was being given to someone else.
“No,” Ford said. “We’ve got something else in mind for you.”
My father leant forward, his reading glasses swinging in his hand.
“We thought, given it is Wednesday, and given the situation in Leicester is highly likely to come up, you might like to—”
“Write the PMQs sketch?” I interrupted, beating my father to his punchline. “Are you serious?”
From the first day I joined the politics team, two long months ago, I had been begging to be allowed to cover Prime Minister’s Questions.
The hurly-burly of a full House of Commons chamber, the cut and thrust of the debate, the pantomime of jeering and sneering from the back benches—it was as close as politics came to theatre, and I loved it.
But Penny was the Sentinel’s sketch writer, and there was no way she was going to give up that prestigious little gig unless she was dead or, well, unless someone had arranged for her to be on a train to Leicester.
“We’re serious,” my father said. “We think you’re ready.”
Neither hours in the gym nor highly invasive plastic surgery could have made my chest swell more than it swelled in that moment.
I was elated. Adrenaline was shooting throughout my body.
If cocaine was as strong a drug as a few of words of praise from my father, no wonder people got addicted to it.
I’d be slipping off to the bathroom to snort lines of my father’s approval off grubby toilet seats whenever I could.
“I’m ready. Thank you.”
Ford suggested I make tracks over to the Palace of Westminster right away, so I could be ready in plenty of time.
PMQs started at midday, and it was already gone ten.
I had my Westminster pass, and I’d been up to the House before, but Parliament was a rabbit warren and it was easy to get lost, distracted by history, or trapped under falling masonry.
I had just stood to leave when I remembered something I needed to tell my father.
“Before I forget,” I began, sounding splendidly casual, as if this was the kind of thing one forgot. “I was talking to Krishnan Varma-Rajan this morning.”
“We saw the interview, Ludo,” my father said. He sounded stern again. He was jotting something down on his notepad and didn’t look up.
“You don’t like him?”
“If you’re telling me you’re dating him, then I think you can do better than an overflowing bucket of cock grease like Krishnan. Your mother and I would be very disappointed.”
I wasn’t quite expecting this level of contempt, but it augured well for what came next.
“That’s just as well,” I said. “Because I may have, ever so slightly, and with some considerable vigour, vomited on him.” At last, Father stopped scribbling and looked directly at me.
“Thank goodness for that,” he said. “Your mother thought you were flirting with him. You had us worried.” This was not the response I was expecting.
“Has he… complained, or anything?” I asked.
“He won’t complain,” Father said with certainty. “He’ll turn up here hoping to use it as leverage to get the column he’s been bugging me about for the past two years. At which point I shall vomit on him myself.”
He might have been emotionally stunted by the English boarding school system and harder to please than a Stasi interrogator, but it was always reassuring to know that, when push came to shove, Father had my back.