‘I really like your office, ToTo,’ said Madison.
‘Please don’t call me ToTo.’
‘Why not? It’s cute. And you’re cute.’
As I’d known only too well, if it was election time, it was Madison time. Right on the button she’d arrived from Washington to tell Santry’s how to run the Conservative Party’s election campaign. She’d done it eight years earlier; she’d done it four years earlier; she was doing it again. The considered view in the office was that Madison had achieved little in earlier campaigns except to get up people’s noses, bend their ears, trample on their toes, and mouth off. The considered view of Madison Wixey was that she’d won two elections already and was about to win a third.
Again, I had nothing to do with the campaign. As a senior account director, though, I had a large office and my own drinks cabinet, replenished at the agency’s expense. The joys of executive life. My office became a refuge for the campaign team. It was somewhere that they could let off steam when the pressure became too great.
There was always one day during an election campaign – ‘headless chicken day’, we called it at Santry’s – when the sun fell out of the sky, dead dogs rained down on the pavement, and the man with the sandwich board who proclaimed the end of the world to be nigh was hailed as a savant.
Headless chicken day retained its unique place in the pantheon this time, but most other days were chicken-with-its-head-sort-of-dangling-by-a-tendon days. And into my office they would troop, singly, cigarette in mouth, to ask whether there happened to be whisky or vodka in my cabinet. They would sit in the armchair with glazed eyes, saying little or nothing, drumming their fingers, rubbing their faces. Then, ten minutes later, glasses empty, they would leave.
The most frequent visitor to my office was Madison herself. She needed to let off steam too. I became the little key you twist in the top of her radiator. Her days started before dawn and didn’t end till past midnight. In the early evening, though, there was a lull. Out in the big world, the daytime campaign was winding down and the post-mortems and the TV debates had yet to begin. That was happy hour for Madison.
Neither of us mentioned our brief tryst in New York. On my side that was because I hoped it would prove to have been an aberration. I couldn’t say what it was on her side. The campaign was so full-on that conducting an affair during it was out of the question. Once the campaign was over? With luck, she’d slink off back to Washington.
Still, I wasn’t allowed to forget. It wasn’t by chance that she called me ToTo. She’d first bestowed the soubriquet in the hotel bed in New York. The use of the affectionate name – at least I assumed it was affectionate – was to be my remembrance of things past. Madison’s Madeleine.
She seldom talked about the election during our soirées and she didn’t drink much either. However, there was always a point to a conversation with her. The challenge was to discover it early and pre-empt it. One evening, about a week into the campaign, she came up with a sharp one.
‘Why are you still here?’ she asked. ‘In New York, no one stays at the same agency longer than a year or two at most. You’ve been here eight years.’
‘Eleven,’ I said.
She was standing in the middle of the room, looking down on me. She didn’t flop in an armchair like the others. She paced the room. It was her form of relaxation.
‘I guess you don’t have much ambition.’
‘Possibly not,’ I said.
‘I want to offer you a job, ToTo. You’d be terrific at it.’
Various evasive strategies were at the back of my mind, ready to be primed once I knew what I needed to evade. Mostly they involved an armed response unit to deal with the suggestion of a renewed affair. But I had no strategy in place to counter this advance.
‘What?’
‘I told you in New York what I was going to do. When I plan to do something, I do it. In America, lobbyists run the system. No one’s doing that in London.’ She came over to me and rested a hand on my shoulder. ‘Between the two of us, ToTo, when the election’s over, I’m not going back to Washington. I’m staying in London and starting a lobbying consultancy here.’
This was the first time anyone had offered me a job unsolicited. I’d had two jobs. In both cases, I’d applied for a vacancy, been interviewed and received an offer. No one had ever said: ‘Tony Gethyn, I think you’re terrific, why don’t you come and work for me?’ I couldn’t imagine what had possessed Madison to say it now.
‘Look, Madison. I’m grateful. But I don’t know why you think I’d be any good at lobbying. It’s about the last thing I’d consider doing.’
‘That’s why you’d be good at it. I’m abrasive. I’m in-your-face. I don’t apologize for it. That’s why I’m successful. I can persuade people to pay me to lobby for them. I know I can. But I need someone who can soothe them, keep them sweet, calm them down. You’d be perfect.’
There are some things in life that you long to do, that you dream about doing, but which you know are never going to happen. Then there’s the opposite. Things that have an inevitability about them. Things that are going to happen whether you want them to or not. Bullets with your name on them.
Madison’s offer came at a time when I had become disheartened by my indecisiveness about making changes to my life. Yet I still had no idea what I wanted to do. The offer involved politics, which had always interested me. And it didn’t imply a long-term commitment. Perhaps I could try it for a while and, if I didn’t like it, I could do something else.
There was also the fascination with Madison, and not only in the obvious sense. As far as I could gather, she ran a consultancy that did not consult. She may have had a few American clients, maybe not. A senior Washington journalist had never heard of her. Now she was planning to start up from scratch in another country. She would need an office. She would need money to live on. She would need to pay me. How?
When you watch a great illusionist, you know it’s an illusion. You know you’re having the wool pulled. Yet you can’t help believing.
