Division Bells Read online

  Ari curled his fingernails into his palms, waiting for the wave of humiliation to pass. It didn't.

  ___

  Jules's father, Lord Elwin of Evesham, had wanted his son to go into the church. This being impossible on account of the boy's temperament and homosexuality, following his father's footsteps into Parliament was the next best thing. To his great relief, Jules had failed on two attempts to be selected as Conservative candidate for Evesham and failed on a third occasion to be its Labour candidate. He had been contemplating retirement to a Tibetan monastery, or at least returning to a quiet life of freelance environmental policy, when Baroness MacKay of Forth and Rosyth, the sister of an old pal of someone-or-other who knew Lord Elwin at school, offered to take his wayward son on as a special adviser. "Wonderful opportunity for you," Jules's father had said. "Put all that hard-won expertise to use."

  Jules hadn't wanted to say that his expertise consisted of four years' intermittent work at a medium-sized climate change charity and didn't really constitute a basis from which to advise the government on the subject. Neither had he wanted to say that he'd be much happier to keep beavering on for Time Remaining, who let him send in his analyses by email and didn't demand he talk to people. For the most part, he was just grateful his father hadn't patted him on the back and congratulated him on finally serving his country. On his first day on the job, Baroness MacKay asked him to sit in on meetings concerning the Northern Infrastructure Bill, a broad-ranging piece of legislation containing several vital Department of Energy clauses on wind farms in Scotland; on his second day, he sat in the public gallery and watched the debates on the Bill. When in doubt, which was often, he nodded and smiled at people. He hadn't yet found a permanent desk nor any actual indication of what he ought to be doing, but so far it hadn't been overly taxing and he hoped things would become clearer with time.

  On day three, he was summoned by a senior civil servant called Arjuna Gupta, who brought him into an office on the dilapidated top floor of the department and said, "Well, you really fucked that up for us"—and that was when everything became a lot less straightforward.

  "I'm not sure," Jules tried, as the silence stretched out. "I mean—I don't know what—"

  Gupta leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. "Of course you bloody don't know. Of course not."

  Jules met his gaze. "Mr Gupta, I really don't know what you're trying to say, so if you could try it in plain words that would be very helpful."

  He'd never been good at faces; it was just occurring to him that this was the same man who'd been in the briefing the day before. Ironically, Jules had liked him, the day before; he had seemed to know what he was doing, a quality Jules appreciated in others all the more for not having it himself.

  "Seriously?" Gupta said. "Thanks to you taking up the minister's time yesterday just so you could have a first-year-undergrad explanation of the second reading of a bill, we didn't get to answering her question on Opposition Amendment Eleven, and then we all got trashed for it. Answering her questions, you may recall, is what ministerial briefings are for."

  "That wasn't my fault," Jules said, stung by the unfairness of this. "What if she hadn't asked the question at all? You would still have got, er, trashed."

  "Not you," Gupta said impatiently. "It's not us and you. We're all trying to get the Bill through. Are you on the team, or not? Think seriously about that question, spad."

  "I don't answer to you," Jules said suddenly. "You're just a civil servant."

  "Christ." Gupta rubbed his eyes and leaned forwards. "Of course you don't answer to me. That's what I don't like about spads, you know. They don't seem to answer to anyone. But the minister has brought you on for some reason, and old-fashioned as it might sound I'm here to do her will. So if you want to get au fait with bill procedure without getting close and personal with Erskine May, I'm at your disposal, for what it's worth."

  "Oh," Jules said. It didn't seem the right moment to ask who or what Erskine May was. "Okay?"

  Gupta sighed. "And if you want to help sort out this Opposition Amendment Eleven mess, the first meeting is at ten in the canteen."

  There was a long pause. Jules stared at Gupta, taking him in properly. He was younger than his manner made him seem, probably not very much older than Jules's late twenties. He was of Indian descent, very expressive, with large, intense eyes. Just Jules's type, annoyingly.

  "Well?" Gupta asked.

  "I'll come," Jules said. It wasn't pleasant to admit it to himself, but his only other option was to find his desk, wherever it was, and wait for someone to give him something to do. Incomprehensible as he might be, this terminally fractious civil servant sounded like he was offering something that would at least fill the time. In his heart, Jules knew he wouldn't last in this job for long. It might as well be diverting while he was here.

  "Fantastic," Gupta said, not at all like he meant it. "That's it, that's all I wanted to say. Go away."

  Jules stood up, happy not to prolong this interaction any further. "Good morning to you, Mr Gupta," he said, prompting another of the man's bone-rattling sighs.

  "Ari," he said. "Not Arjuna, that's just what they make me have in my email address. And you're—Julian?"

  "Jules," Jules said, and somehow wasn't surprised when Ari rolled his eyes.

  "Jules. Fine. I said go away."

  Jules smiled wanly and left the tiny meeting room, ambling down the institutional green corridor lined with framed prints of power stations. He had time to get some coffee, read a text from his mother – hows it all going darling? ur father v proud – and settle at the back of the ten o'clock canteen meeting, which consisted of eight or nine people in hard plastic chairs arranged in two rows in front of a flipchart. Jules wondered why no one had thought to stage this in an actual meeting room.

  "Order, order," Ari said. "For my sins, I'm chairing. Diggory is minuting. You all know what happened yesterday. Eilidh, you get the joy of explaining it."

  A tiny black woman in a viper-green dress stood up and went to the flipchart. "I'm Eilidh, I'm the lawyer," she said, in the tone of one confessing to a regrettable disease. Jules's slow-moving brain reminded him that she'd also been in yesterday's briefing. "Do we all remember the Withdrawal Acts?"

  There was a chorus of subdued laughter. Jules was grateful he didn't have to ask a question about that, at least. The European Withdrawal Acts were the contentious, constitutionally unprecedented pieces of legislation that had, in the end, brought about an equally contentious Brexit. Jules remembered the whole affair vaguely; at the time of the referendum he'd been enmeshed in his university finals. He couldn't, at this remove of time, remember if he'd voted.

  Eilidh waited for the amusement to die down before she went on. "Well, those of you who were here then will recall the difficulties we had getting the last Bill through the Lords. One of the last-minute concessions, which didn't gather a lot of attention at the time, was Lords Opposition Amendment Eleven. It was inserted as section four of the Act."

  This time there was a slight murmur of recognition, audible over the surrounding clink of cutlery and rattle of plates. Even at this intermediate time between breakfast and lunch there were still other people in the canteen, mostly eating and reading at the same time, getting crumbs over their papers. Again, Jules wondered why they had to have the meeting amidst egg salad sandwiches and very loud espresso machines.

  "What the amendment did," Eilidh went on, "was change the scrutiny procedure for post-exit legislation. When we amend provision that was originally transposed EU law by way of primary legislation, we now need a two-thirds majority. And our wind farms amendments – as noted by our noble friend the Lord Millais – will be the first post-exit piece of legislation to fall into this category."

  She'd lost Jules at "scrutiny procedure". But the others had got it, whatever it was. There were more murmurs and some hissing through teeth.

  "So, for the non-procedure obsessives among us," Ari said, loo
king directly at Jules, "what this means is that in order to pass these clauses of the Bill, we need more than 430 votes in the Commons. The government currently holds 330."

  "Oh," Jules said, grateful for the explanation.

  "So, we have three options," Ari said, reaching for a marker pen and scribbling on the flipchart. "Firstly, we can accept we're done for and withdraw our clauses from the Bill. Second, we can alter the clauses so they no longer make substantial amendments to the European regime and merely tweak it a little. That way we can avoid Amendment Eleven and get it through with a simple majority. Or, thirdly, we can go for it, and somehow win 430 votes in the House." His tone indicated his opinion of that option. "Any questions?"

  Diggory raised a nervous hand, which made Jules smile. "What happens next?"

  "Good question," Ari said, and Jules imagined what the minute would look like. Diggory asked a good question. "The Bill made it through its second reading without a vote, as you know. It goes to committee in about six weeks. Basically, Lord Millais gets a holding response and we take those six weeks to decide what our policy is going to be on the subject. Anything else?"

  There was a pause. Then a woman in the front row asked, "How did we miss it?"

  It wasn't a peremptory tone, but it demanded a straight answer. Jules suspected this was Ari's boss.

  "Another excellent and pertinent question," Ari said. "Eilidh advised on it in relation to the Withdrawal Acts back in July. We read her advice, filed it, did a standard insert for all briefing packs, and no one has read them or thought of it since."

  It was said with humour, but with real apology. Among his other flaws, Jules decided, Ari apparently had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.

  "Not to mention," said someone else, and then seemed to forget what he was saying.

  "Yes, Prashant?" Ari said.

  "Not to mention," the man said again, in immensely leisurely tones. "Lord Millais called it Opposition Amendment Eleven because that will be the term under which he remembers it. If he had only, ah… well. It is now section four, to give it its proper name."

  He trailed off and didn't speak again. Presumably he meant that Ari and Eilidh would have recognised it if it had been referred to correctly. Jules was irritated again that Ari had tried to blame him for this, and then irritated at himself for caring.

  "Any other questions?" Ari asked.

  "Yes," Jules said, surprising himself. "What tweaks would we make, in option two?"

  "Good question," Ari said again. "The truth is, I don't really know. The original European provision – Eilidh, slap me if I'm wrong – sets out the technical specs of the wind farms and the substance of the relevant subsidies. If we tweaked it within that framework, we could build new wind farms but probably couldn't make them substantially different from the old ones. Is that it?"

  Eilidh nodded. "Essentially, yes."

  "Do we have more information on that?" Jules asked, a dim memory surfacing from his old job. Time Remaining, the climate change charity he'd freelanced for, had been conducting research into wind and hydroelectric power in Scotland and Northumberland. "What level of energy efficiency would we be sacrificing by not updating the technology?"

  "No idea," Ari said. "Why don't you liaise with stakeholders and do me a memorandum on it? Get it cleared, please, and let me have it by the end of the week."

  Jules blinked, too startled by this sudden instruction to ask what "cleared" meant. After a second, he noticed Eilidh smiling at him, indicating herself. Legal clearance, that must be it. He smiled back at her.

  "Do we sub up?" asked someone else on the front row.

  "Yes, of course," Ari said. "I'll email you all about that. Jules, that's a submission to the minister, if you don't know. We'll put the options to her and see what she decides."

  "Thanks," said the questioner, who Jules couldn't see. "How come we've got a spad on this?"

  Jules felt himself blush as the others turned to him. Strangely, he was more embarrassed just by the way Ari was looking at him again, by the focused attention of those steady, bright eyes. The man really was compelling, in a scruffy-bureaucrat kind of way, not least because of his ability to hold a room without seeming effort. Jules noted the fact and filed it away as unhelpful at this time.

  "We've got one because the minister thinks we need one," Ari said briskly. "And we'll make him welcome and draw on his expertise as necessary. Any more questions?"

  Jules was relieved that there weren't any. When the meeting broke up, he caught Ari by the shoulder on his way out of the canteen. "Thanks for helping me," he said. "I, er, I'll do your memo."

  "Yes, you will," Ari said. "You're breathing our air and using our stationery, you'll make yourself useful."

  "Yeah," Jules said, thrown by this. "Right."

  "He's a prick, don't mind him," Eilidh said confidentially, patting Jules on the arm and glaring at Ari. "We're going for after-work drinks tonight at the Speaker, you should come."

  "Don't invite the spad to the pub, Eilidh, please," Ari said, putting on his coat in a melodramatic sweep. "We don't know where he's been."

  He looked at Jules over Eilidh's shoulder, his eyes wickedly alight. Jules smiled at what seemed like blatant flirtatiousness, then shook himself for imagining things. He followed them both upstairs.

  ___

  The Opposition Amendment Eleven submission took priority, Ari told everyone, sending out his promised emails in the knowledge that he was engineering his own drowning by paperwork, but so did the Bill.

  "Basically, everything takes priority?" Diggory asked, with no apparent sarcasm.

  "Basically," Ari said, buying him another latte. "I mean, it's nice if you know what your policy is before you implement it but we left that kind of luxury behind in the late 2000s."

  In practice, it meant that the department was putting together the sub but also proceeding as though the Bill clauses would go forward unamended, and that meant doing all the thousand things that a bill entailed: briefing papers; explanatory memoranda; impact tests; legal analyses; meetings with the Regional Infrastructure Bill manager; planning meetings; meetings with Better Regulation; papers on economic consequences; more briefing papers; more memoranda; more meetings. Ari started eating lunch at his desk; then eating dinner at his desk; then not eating lunch and dinner at all, grabbing food on his way from meeting to meeting or when walking dazedly home at night. After the first week, Jules sent in his wind turbine efficiency memorandum. Ari called him in, threw the memo on the desk, and said, "Well, in a shocking turn of events, this was actually useful."

  He really thought so. The analysis of the difficulties in adhering to old European wind turbine standards had run to twelve pages with footnotes. Ari had made a mental note to tell Jules to stop writing as though he was about to be assessed for his dissertation, before acknowledging to himself that he'd be abjectly grateful for the detail when a peer asked the minister to comment on the environmental impact of praseodymium photovoltaics. A significant number of peers came to the Lords as captains of industry and ate blueprints for breakfast.

  Jules bristled visibly. "I'm glad to hear it. Look, Ari, you've made it abundantly clear you think I'm a waste of oxygen, so if you could just tell me if you need anything else and let me get on with my day, that'd be great."

  Ari replayed the conversation in his head, and put a hand to his forehead. "Jules, I'm sorry. I know I have a bee in my bonnet about spads but this is a substantial contribution and I appreciate it."

  "You're welcome," Jules said, guarded. "Why do you hate spads so much, anyway? I'm honestly curious," he added. "I've never been one before, I wouldn't know."

  Ari waved at the empty desk chair next to his – Diggory was away at a training session on Handling Vexatious Correspondence – and rested his head on his hands for a moment. He had a full-on, vision-blurring, teeth-grinding headache and neither the fluorescent lighting nor paragraph 33(a)(ii) of the sub, on the stability of high-voltage transmission freque
ncies, were helping. "I've been doing this job a long time," he said, at last. "I was here long before this minister came along and I'll be here for her successor. I serve the government of the day. I resent a special adviser, swanning in as a political appointee, here for six months of telling me that I'm doing my job all wrong."

  Jules considered this. "Don't you get stuck in a rut, though?" he asked. "You do things the same way as you've always done them just because you've always done them like that, and a special adviser can shake you out of it?"

  "That is, in fact, the reasoning," Ari said. "Like I said, it's a bee in my bonnet. Anyway. Thanks for your help. I'll email you with what you might do next."

  Jules nodded, relinquished Diggory's chair and went to the door. He paused on the threshold, turned back and came to sit on the edge of Ari's desk, not in but right next to his personal space. Ari sat back slightly, overwhelmingly conscious of Jules's closeness, the rustle of his shirt fabric and the soft sound of his breathing.

  "If it makes you feel better, you're right about me," Jules said. "I'm here because my father thought, well, if he couldn't be a hereditary peer any more, and I couldn't get elected as an MP, then I might as well get in as a special adviser. There's nepotism for you."

  "Your father?" Ari paused. "Elwin. Lord Elwin of Evesham?"

  "Very good." Jules whistled appreciatively. "He lost his right to sit after the reforms. Not that he ever did anything before that, he's basically a hereditary cadaver. Anyway, he pulled family strings to get me appointed, I'm actually useless, there's the truth of it."

  Ari shook his head. "This isn't useless," he said, indicating the wind turbines memorandum. "You were working with Time Remaining before, weren't you? The climate change lobbyists?"

  "Yeah," Jules said, surprised. "I was commissioned by them. Compiling data on renewable energy metrics, mostly."

  "All right," Ari said, clasping his hands, determined to think through the headache. It didn't help that Jules was still right on the edge of his desk, close enough for Ari to feel his body heat. "If you were me, what would you ask you to do next?"