I wore my one suit.

‘Very good of you to join us, Mr Barson-Garland,’ said Sir Charles, shaking my hand in courtly style. ‘How absurd of me, I can’t keep calling you that. Ned hasn’t told me your Christian name.

‘Ashley, sir,’ I said, as Ned buried himself in confusion and the menu.

I talked a lot over dinner. Not so much or so greedily as to appear to monopolise the conversation or to boast, but enough to impress.

‘You seem to know a great deal about politics,’ said Sir Charles over the cheese.

I shrugged with open hands as if to suggest that, while I may have picked up the odd pebble of interest on the shore, like Newton I was all too aware of the great ocean of knowledge that lay undiscovered before me.

‘I don’t suppose this would interest you…

There and then he offered me a summer job as his political researcher.

‘A great deal of it is really not much more than a kind of secretarial work,’ he warned. ‘But it is, I think, an unrivalled opportunity to find out how the system operates. If it works out over the summer, I’ll be happy to keep the place open for when you leave here in late autumn. Ned tells me that you are sitting Oxford entrance next term too.’

‘Father, that’s a brilliant idea,’ Ned gasped admiringly (as if it hadn’t been his idea in the first place! How big a fool can he possibly take me for?). ‘I’m Pa’s biggest disappointment,’ he added, turning to me. ‘Never could summon up much interest in politics.’

‘Sir Charles,’ I said, ‘I don’t know how to begin to thank you…

‘Tshush, tshush,’ said Sir Charles, waving a hand. ‘If you’re as good at the job as I suspect you might be, then the thanks will be mine. Do I take it you accept?’

‘Well, sir. I live in Lancashire. I don’t have any…' Lancashire, indeed. I was used to saying that. Any ‘shire’ sounded better than Manchester.

‘I’m hoping you will consider staying in Catherine Street. It’s a small house, but has been a political one for over a hundred years. It has its own Division Bell, not that you will hear it ring much at first. The House doesn’t sit over the summer. If you’re still with us next year however, you’ll get so used to its ringing that you’ll want to sabotage the damned thing. Isn’t that right Ned?’ He waggled an eyebrow at his son in a way that suggested some private joke.

‘When I was a boy I used to get really hacked off by that bell,’ Ned explained in answer to my questioning look. ‘The House sits at the weirdest times and it was always waking me up at two or three in the morning. So one night I wedged a piece of cardboard between the bell and the clapper. Pa missed a vote and got into a bucket load of trouble.’

‘I passed a quarter hour in the Whips’ Office that I shall never forget,’ said Sir Charles.

Ned added to me in a pretend whisper, ‘He still says that nothing the Gestapo did to him in the war came close.’

‘It’s true I tell you, absolutely true.’

Ned was letting me into his life. A life in which casual mention of Division Bells and sticky moments with the Gestapo came as easily as references to buses and episodes of Dallas came to my family. Had I not seen that little four-leafed clover flutter from my diary, such generosity should have warmed and enchanted me. Since I knew exactly where it came from I was not fooled for a second.

They found me a flat in Kensington which I share with a researcher from Conservative Central Office. Flats in Kensington seem to be a staple currency of this world. There is a lazy sense of –

Between the two sounds of the front door opening and the front door closing Ashley had swiftly returned the diary to his briefcase, opened a copy of Hansard and begun copying one of Sir Charles’s speeches into a notebook.

He heard the sounds of people moving up the stairs and wondered if his not coming halfway to greet them would Look strange. Could he pretend not to have heard their arrival? He decided not.

‘Ned?’ he called over his shoulder from his desk. ‘Ned, is that you?’

‘Ash!’

Ashley was standing shyly at the desk with a look of pleased surprise on his face as Ned entered the room in the company of a girl and boy of about the same age, both darkly handsome and deeply tanned.

‘This is Portia. Actually you’ve met.’

‘How do you do?’ said Ashley, with becoming gravity. ‘We have indeed met. The Hard Rock Café, although you won’t remember me – your eyes I think were elsewhere.’

‘Of course I remember. Hi!’

Portia shook his hand. Ashley had not had time to wipe it against his trousers and he looked at her closely to see if she reacted to what he knew was the unusually moist clamminess of his palms.

‘And this is Gordon, Portia’s cousin.

‘How do you do?’ said Gordon. Ashley registered with amusement the fact that English Portia had made do with ‘Hi’ while American Gordon preferred a formal ‘How do you do?’ It always amused him when people presented themselves as the opposite of what they were.

‘Surprised?’ said Ned, biffing Ashley clumsily on the shoulder. He too was tanned, but in that lightly golden style of the fair-skinned, as if anything more would be foreign and in poor taste.

‘Well, your father did say that you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.'

‘The trip, er, ended early in fact,’ Ned’s face looked troubled for a moment. ‘We all decided to take the night train from Glasgow.’

‘Really?’ said Ashley, who knew this perfectly well.

‘Anyway,’ said Ned brightening. ‘I was in London in time to meet the Fendemans off their plane at Heathrow. Not bad, eh?’

‘What a pleasant surprise for them,’ said Ashley.

Gordon was looking awkwardly around the room. Ashley had the feeling that he felt out of place. Indeed, the electrical sparks that crackled between Ned and Portia were little short of embarrassing even for Ashley.

‘The old man been keeping you busy?’ said Ned tearing himself away with an effort from Portia’s smile.

‘It’s been fascinating. Truly fascinating.’

‘You work for Ned’s dad, right?’ said Gordon.

‘That’s right. In fact I ought really … well, actually, here’s an idea… I don’t suppose you’d like to come with me? I’ve got to go over to the House now. Maybe I could show you round?’

‘The House?’

‘Of Commons. Parliament. Of course, only if it would interest you…’

‘Sure. That sounds great.’

‘What a brilliant idea!’ Ned grinned with pleasure. ‘Ash, that’s completely decent of you. I bet Gordon would love to see where it all goes on. The cradle of democracy and all that.’

‘Very well then. I’ll just get my briefcase,’ said Ashley, prickling with annoyance at Ned’s fatuous remark. ‘Cradle of democracy’ indeed. Did he not know that Americans regard Washington as the cradle of democracy, just as the French did Paris and the Greeks Athens, and no doubt the Icelanders Reykjavik, each with as much reason? Such typically casual arrogance.

‘Er, we’ll stay here, if that’s okay,’ Ned was saying. ‘Portia has to be at a job interview at four. The Knightsbridge College. Thought I’d … you know, take her there.’

‘Something good?

‘It sounds grand but it just means teaching foreigners how to say “This tomato is too expensive”,’ Portia said. ‘It does pay better than the Hard Rock Café, though.’

She and Ned were holding hands now. It was apparent that every second Out of each other’s arms was agony to them. Ashley supposed that much of the agony came from a traditional lovers’ quandary that they were too dull-witted to interpret. They wanted to conceal their passion but they couldn’t understand why they also wanted desperately to show it off.

Ashley felt an intense desire to be violently sick.

‘Thought it best to leave them to it,’ he said, closing the front door and looking up at the top-floor window with what he trusted was a reasonable approximation of laddish worldliness. ‘They’ll be at it like knives before we’ve taken two steps.'