‘You’re quite sweaty, aren’t you?’ she says, dabbing at his cheeks with a soft brush. She leans closer but makes no eye contact, instead looking at his face in an assessing manner, as if he were a saucepan on special offer at Le Creuset.
‘That’s better,’ Maisie says, standing back. ‘Now what are we doing with your hair?’
Richard is nonplussed.
‘Side parting?’ Maisie says. ‘Brush it through a bit?’
‘Yes please.’
He’s grateful someone else has taken charge.
‘So what are you on to talk about, then?’ she asks, taking out a wide-toothed comb and running it through. It’s a strange kind of intimacy. Make-up artists didn’t usually brush his hair, given its regrettable sparseness. No woman has touched him like this since … he was about to say Hannah, but she would never have been caught dead brushing his hair, so it was probably his mother.
‘The Tory leadership election.’
‘Righto,’ Maisie says. ‘You’re a politician, then?’
‘Yes,’ he replies, disappointed she hasn’t recognised him.
‘I don’t mean to be rude, but …’
Ah, Richard thinks, the classic opener for someone who is about to be.
‘… I don’t like any of them. That Graham Bunn is scary, isn’t he? He hates everyone! And his pores are terrible.’
‘I don’t disagree,’ Richard says. ‘Not about the pores, I mean. I don’t know about pores.’
‘Trust me,’ Maisie says grimly. ‘And Ben Fitz … whaddya call him? Fitzherbert.’
‘Fitzmaurice.’
‘That’s it. Yeah. Fitzmaurice. He’s too smooth for my liking. Too smooth by half.’
Maisie reaches for a pot of hair gel. Richard is about to tell her not to use it but it’s too late, she’s slathering it across his head, pressing firmly down on any stray bits.
‘And what about that guy caught with his trousers down watching porn in his own office?’ She cackled. ‘You couldn’t make it up. Dirty little bugger, do you know what I mean?’
The silence that follows is broken only by the low-volume chatter emanating from a wall-mounted television. It’s tuned in to the morning chat show that precedesHarriet Seeker on Politics. On screen,a woman in a gimp mask and leather-strapped bondage vest is saying ‘Look, it’s just a way of life at the end of the day,’ and the two presenters are nodding their heads sympathetically.
‘Actually,’ Richard croaks, ‘that was me.’
‘Oh my God,’ Maisie says, her hands temporarily suspended above his head. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I get it. It was a stupid mistake.’
He doesn’t make any excuses, doesn’t lapse into his usual spiel about ‘what red-blooded male hasn’t …?’ and doesn’t try and win her over. He’s tired of all that.
‘Do you know what?’ Maisie says, resuming her gel application but with more softness this time. ‘I actually respect you for saying that. Just owning it. Not trying to squirm your way out of it like they normally do. Politicians, I mean. You’re alright, you are.’
She squints at his reflection in the mirror opposite, then gives him a pat on the shoulder. He is mildly astonished. Is it really as easy as that? All the months of trying to say the right thing, explaining but never entirely apologising; all the carefully crafted media appearances and speeches designed to resurrect his flailing reputation; the new haircut, the Nehru jackets, the minor celebrity status conferred by reality TV; the fraught alliance with Ben Fitzmaurice, the great white hope of the Tory Party who had promised him chancellor but who had forced him to compromise almost all of his own principles … and … for what? It turns out all he has to do is say what he actually thinks.
‘OK, you’re done, sweetheart,’ Maisie says. ‘Good luck!’
A man called Mike comes to fit him with a lapel microphone. Richard is about to make a joke about his name but thinks better of it. He’s been on the receiving end of too many jokes about his own to find it funny anymore. Then he’s ushered onto the set – a white table, two metal-framed black leather chairs either side of it. Harriet is already seated in one and is speaking intently into thin air but then Richard notices the earpiece and realises she’s talking to the producer.
‘Yep,’ she is saying. ‘Yep, got that one. OK. Uh-huh. Hahahahaha. As if. Yes, I know.’
She grins at Richard, mouths ‘one sec’ at him and he tries to ease himself into the chair, which seems to have been expressly designed for discomfort. He experiments with crossing one leg over the other, then decides against it. Cody, his stylist, had warned him against creasing his suit unnecessarily.
