She sighed and then looked up from his chest to his face. His mouth was set in a stubborn line; he was so beautiful.
‘Okay, but don’t engage with them. Don’t argue with them. Speaking to them like I did in the car was a mistake. They’re … easier to handle if you don’t respond. Trust me.’
‘Okay, baby,’ he whispered back a little too easily; then he stole a brief, hard kiss and dropped one of her hands but kept the other as he walked her towards the entrance.
*****
‘Ah, the prodigal daughter!’ Mr Tinsdale, the party whip, cried as Millie was steered towards a group of Tory ministers and supporters inside the entrance to the ballroom. ‘We were beginning to think you were a figment of your dad’s imagination.’
The group all laughed and Millie managed to force a small smile. There must have been about ten of them, mainly older men but with some women and two younger ministers. The youngest she recognised as the Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change, Barclay Lucas, who’d been in the news relentlessly for the last few months as an avid supporter of cold fusion and the energy revolution – which was in direct opposition to her father, who unfortunately held the higher office and had succeeded so far in stalling the process. A green Tory was a rare thing indeed and Mr Lucas had been very vocal about making the UK carbon neutral over the next five years. The press loved him. It didn’t hurt that his looks were catwalk-worthy and his relationship status was single. Instead of chuckling like the rest of them, Mr Lucas was staring at Millie’s father like he was something he’d scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Millie liked him instantly.
Her mother gave her a sharp elbow in the ribs and her body jolted slightly into Pav, who still had her hand in his. He glared over her head at her mother and opened his mouth to say something. Desperate to head him off, Millie forced a smile and made her mouth form words.
‘Yes … um … I exist,’ she told the group, drawing more faint chuckles. ‘I’m Camilla.’
Silence. She bit her lip. Her conversational reserves were totally depleted. She felt her throat close over.
‘And you’re a doctor, Camilla?’ Mr Tinsdale pushed, staring at her in a strangely assessing way.
‘I’m a radiologist,’ she managed to get out through her tight throat. Pav squeezed her hand.
‘Oh, so you’re one of the chaps … er, sorry … chapesses who sit in the hospital basement and look at x-rays all day?’ Millie was about to nod but she stopped herself at the sound of Pav’s irritated voice.
‘Well,’ he said, drawing out the word as he unleashed the most charming smile in his arsenal on the assembled group. ‘I guess shedoesdo that, when she’s not extracting actual blood clots from the arteries of the brain to restore blood flow for the stroke team, or inserting nephrostomy tubes into my patients to drain their obstructed, infected kidneys and save their lives, among many, many other things. Then, yes, I guess she does sit in the basement a fair bit, making sense of complex scans and images whose interpretation is beyond the capabilities of every other speciality.’
There was a long pause, during which a few throats were cleared and Millie noticed Barclay Lucas’s small smile.
‘Pavlos Martakis,’ Pav added, extending his hand to Mr Tinsdale, who gave him a tight smile and shook it with obvious reluctance. ‘I’m Millie’s partner.’
‘You’re a urologist?’ Barclay Lucas put in.
‘Yes, I met Millie at the hospital. Never been to one of these political shin-digs before and … between you and me,’ he mock-whispered, ‘I’m not actually a Tory, but even a die-hard Jeremy Corbyn fan does what needs to be done for his missus.’
Barclay Lucas stared at Pav for a moment before he let out a bark of laughter. For a man who was rarely photographed even smiling, it was quite a sight.
‘You’re married?’ Mr Tinsdale asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Pav, giving Millie’s hand another squeeze as she turned wide eyes to his profile.
‘Yes, well,’ her father cut in quickly, ‘as you can all see my daughterdoesin fact exist, and being a professional working in the NHS she’ll be a huge asset to the campaign next summer.’
‘Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself, David?’ Barclay asked, his smile dropping and the more familiar icy expression replacing it. ‘We haven’t even had the first-round ballot yet. The Prime Minister only announced she was stepping down last week.’
‘Of course, of course, old boy,’ David blustered. ‘But I think we can all agree that …’
The ringing in Millie’s ears cut off her ability to hear any more and she took an involuntary step back. She felt her vision narrow as the sweat started forming on her back. Her father really was going to go for the leadership of the Conservative party. He was going to run for Prime Minster. Everything made sense to her now: the insistence that she attend this fundraising dinner tonight; the threats her mother had made to get her here. They needed her to be the dutiful daughter during the campaign. They needed her for his image.
But Millie couldn’t be photographed; she couldn’t be on camera beside her father on a stage for the whole country, the whole world, to see. Her head started shaking from side to side in a reflex action of denial. ‘Excuse me,’ she whispered as she yanked her hand from Pav’s and turned to run to the nearest toilet.
Chapter 28
You’d be surprised what people will believe
‘Camilla, you get out of there this instant.’
Millie pressed her head against the cool wall of the cubicle and tried to block out her mother’s voice. The very little she had managed to eat that day had made a dramatic reappearance a moment ago, and she was still shaking from the effort of all the retching. She concentrated on slowing her breathing and employing her cognitive behavioural therapy techniques.
‘Stop,’ she whispered into the small space. Thought-stopping was something that was normally fairly effective when she was with Anwar or alone in her house and able to shout it out loud without fear of being overheard. The idea was that when you went into a negative thought spiral that was out of your control, actually vocalising a command for it to stop would work. In the past she’d pinched her forearm at the same time to help, and more recently flicked the elastic band on her wrist; but she’d had to forgo that tonight with her outfit. So just whispering ‘stop’ whilst you were on your knees of a posh toilet cubicle with your hostile mother only feet away was not the best circumstance for maximal efficacy.
