The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

“I had no idea I was entertaining an Enoch Powellite,” he said huffily.

“For crying out loud,” I said, “I’d like to know if it’s bottled tan, if so where would I get it, I want to be more attractive to the opposite sex and I have to start somewhere.”

“You look like a convict with that haircut.”

“It wouldn’t be my choice,” my mother said. “I mean the tan, the haircut goes without saying. Take a look at her palms when next you see her. If it’s fake they’ll be cocoa-colored in the cracks. Beauty queens have that dilemma. So Valerie says.”

Valerie was her hairstylist. She was a formidable permist and neighborhood capo, the Cesare Borgia of the tail comb. My mother had been trying to bring us together. I didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken. As if it were me who stood to be questioned. “I’m going to bed.”

“I hope you won’t have one of your dreams, pet.”

“Kissy-kissy,” said my father, offering, under the kitchen strip light, his bristling cheek.

* * *

AFTER CHRISTMAS, I stayed on in the office while plans were made for my future. Something had gone amiss at university. Though no actual bloodshed. We won’t go into it here.

Early in the new year we were in court with an assault that was exciting by our standards. The landlord of a pub in Ancoats was accused of battering one of his customers. The prosecution was ready to say their man had been drinking peaceably at the bar when he felt a call of nature whereupon the landlord willfully misdirected him into the backyard, followed him out and booted him around, unprovoked, among the barrels, finally opening a gate and precipitating him into a drear and filthy ginnel. There stood none other than a uniformed constable, straight and true, who witnessing the gash on his head hastened to take his statement in his ready notebook, in which, by the light of a streetlamp that had just wandered into the ginnel, he wrote an immediate and circumstantial account.

The landlord had brought half his regulars along as witnesses to the mildness of his character. A more cutthroat crew you never saw. There was a great deal that was peculiar about the police account of the night but the landlord, an energetic young Irishman, wasn’t helping his case by causing a disturbance in the corridor outside the courtroom, shouting and hallooing and offering to buy a drink for everyone in sight. “Win or lose, sir,” he shouted at Bernard Bell, who was prosecuting, “stroll in at any time and name your pleasure.”

I had to duck myself, to avoid one of his glad hands. I looked up, steadying myself to follow my papa into court, and to my surprise saw Nicolette appear and then hover at the other end of the corridor. She was frowning, looking about, but when she spotted me she put on a dead-eyed simper. She had some papers in her hand, and she fluttered them, as if suggesting she was on Kaplan business, but somehow I knew she had come to look for my father, I think it was the way her eyes kept roaming, roaming around. “Double gin for you, princess,” the landlord proposed, reeling past her on a policeman’s arm. The policeman’s face said, now do you see why we opposed bail?

When the landlord, who was a likable sort after all, gave his version of the evening, there was some sniggering from the clerks around me, and roars of laughter from the public gallery. Potts, who was sitting and was known for having every element of humor left out of him, threatened to clear the court, so there was soon a hush. But I can’t give an account of the case as, just as the police officer took the stand, I felt a kick in my stomach, something like a cloven hoof, and I had to fold myself double to scrabble in the bag at my feet, edge past my father, nod to Potts and back reverently out of the court in the direction of the lavatories. My father, who was now attuned to the biology of young women, gave me a sympathetic glance as I went. I turned at the door, glanced up, and saw that Nicolette was perched in the gallery, squeezed on either side by the landlord’s friends, who bounced silently in their seats at every sally in the court below.