In a sense it was all the fault of the Department for Regional Infrastructure and Development, and in another sense it was Diggory's fault for pouring half a cup of coffee into Ari's briefing pack. In a third, very real, sense it was just another consequence of anthropogenic climate change. The wonk from Regional Infrastructure had come by the previous night to say, Ari, darling, your department's going to have to speak to its own Bill clauses, and Ari had sworn at a number of inanimate objects and got to it. He'd enjoyed himself, in a masochistic sort of way. It was what the job was about, at an essential level: distilling a raft of policy and legislative issues into a tight fifteen pages with a tricolour scheme and judicious use of eighteen-point font. Energy and Efficiency had fifteen clauses in the Bill, concerning funding, technical specifics and operation of new wind farms. By the end of the night, Ari knew how to pronounce ‘praseodymium' and ‘Darrieus turbine' and felt that for once he had a grasp of an issue before it had had a chance to blow up excitingly in his face.
Then the Committee for the Order of Business and Legislation switched the order of proceedings, Diggory fumbled his latte all over Ari's three-colour indicative scheme, and the minister's private secretary rang to say she wanted advance briefing before she had to go to the dispatch box and could Ari please, for the love of God, hurry the fuck up.
"Sir," said parliamentary security at the College Green gate, "I understand the urgency, but you've got to come through security the same as everyone else. Short of making you strip naked in public in October—"
"We'll do it," Ari said, instantly. Diggory squeaked. "Look, I'm a departmental official, I'm supposed to be in a briefing right now. Diggory's no trouble to anyone, he's only twelve."
Diggory, who was twenty-two, looked outraged.
"Jesus Christ," the security guard said. He took Ari by the hand like a wayward toddler and led him and Diggory past the public queue, to the peers-and-MPs-only fast track. "Belt, watch, shoes, pass."
"Just to be sure," Diggory said, "you're not actually making us take off all our clothes?"
"Not that we wouldn't enjoy that," the security guard said, gesturing at his two colleagues, "but no. Get on with it, you'll miss your proceeding."
Even the kid didn't need telling twice. He and Ari threw their coffee-soaked papers and electronics through the scanners, grabbed their belts and watches without putting them back on and sprinted into St Stephen's Hall. Yaz, the minister's private secretary, was waiting at the top of the steps, the red light through the stained glass offsetting her rage nicely.
"That's right, Ari, carry your watch rather than look at it, that helps," she snapped. "And if either of you loses your trousers between here and the Residence Room, I will have you both strung up by the balls, I swear to God."
No one lost their trousers on their way to the Residence Room – which was just as well; the BBC's political editor was in the upper gallery and looked up with interest at a pack of sprinting officials – but Ari paused at the threshold. Take two breaths, Lil said inside his head, a calming trick from playing reels and strathspeys. He opened the door.
The minister looked up from her phone. "Oh, how exciting," she said mildly. "It's my department. I wondered if I still had one."
"I apologise, minister," Ari said. "We had trouble with security."
"Never mind that," the minister said. "Sit down there. Good man. Now someone tell me something about these damn-fool Regulations."
"Clauses, minister," Eilidh said, and Ari started paying attention to the world around him rather than to the Northern Infrastructure Bill. The Residence Room, rich and plush with its seventeenth-century tapestries, was familiar; so was Diggory, Ari's policy assistant as of six not-very-competent weeks ago; so was Yaz, who had been the minister's private secretary for all her tenure at Energy and Efficiency. Eilidh, Ari's assigned departmental lawyer, had got here on time and had apparently been managing to make small talk with the minister while they waited. Ari made a mental note to buy her a sugary drink with cream.
The stranger was sitting opposite Ari, scruffy but composed. Dark eyes, an amused, almost sneering, expression, a bright red scarf that clashed horribly with ginger hair. Ron Weasley without the freckles or humility. Ari had been a departmental civil servant his entire working life and knew what he was looking at. "Spad?"
"Special adviser, please," the minister said, also amused. "This is Julian Elwin. Jules, this is a whole bunch of people from my department."
"Hi," Diggory said awkwardly; Eilidh muttered something; Yaz knew everyone without being introduced.
Ari wasn't feeling inclined towards niceties. "Are you here for the briefing, Mr Elwin? Do you have some sort of expertise in respect of wind farms?"
"Wind farms, yes!" the minister said. "How terribly thrilling they are. Could someone tell me something about them before the heat death of the universe? You, Ari. Talk."
"The Northern Infrastructure Bill," Ari said hesitantly, "is a cross-departmental bill covering a number of issues related to infrastructure, procurement, transport and climate change."
It was the first sentence of his briefing, recited verbatim, and it made him feel better. So, strangely, did the ticking clock. What with lattes and security and the general vagaries of the British political system, he now only had fifteen minutes to bring the minister up to speed on the policy area before she brought the legislation to the House of Lords.
It took him ten of the fifteen minutes to talk through the Bill: that it was being brought by the Department of Regional Infrastructure as a whole but sprawled over so many topics that each subject area would need to be covered separately; that their department, Energy and Efficiency, would be covering the wind farms; and that the minister – Ari's minister, Baroness MacKay of Forth and Rosyth – would need to handle the relevant portion for the second reading debates.
"Thank you, Ari," the minister said when he was done, and Ari exhaled in relief and glanced at the watch that was still in his hand. Three minutes or so before they'd need to head down. "And thank you for the briefing pack, which contrary to what Yaz may have told you, I have read. A question on page twelve, please, about the different legislative scrutiny at the second reading."
The spad said, "What's the second reading?"
He was half-smiling as he said it. Ari was caught on the hop, speechless. Before he could say something incredulous about how someone who didn't know what a second reading was could be sitting in this room, with these people, at this time, Diggory piped up. "It's when they go through the Bill in the House and then all the peers discuss it. After they've gone through it all and debated it goes to the committees."
He was clearly delighted to have a question he could answer. The minister shuffled her papers. "On page twelve," she said.
Yaz's phone buzzed and the annunciator screen flipped over. "We're up," Ari said. "Diggory, you know what to do?"
Diggory nodded. He didn't – no one who hadn't done it really knew, and this was Diggory's first time – but he'd had the training, such as it was. The spad caught Ari's eye and smiled as they filed out of the room. Ari didn't smile back.
The Lords Chamber was as full as it ever got. It was a Christmas-tree bill, hung with all sorts of ornaments – renewable energy, funding for social enterprise, something exceptionally dull about the Settle-Carlisle Railway – and every element of it was the pet issue of some peer or other. The minister approached the dispatch box with her usual easy confidence, while her officials – Ari, Diggory and Eilidh, plus Yaz – trundled into the box, a narrow space that barely fit all of them with only a tiny ledge for their papers. The minister was at the front of the government benches, with the assembled rows of peers opposite her and to her right, leaning forwards from their red leather pews. The box was set back against the wall, a short distance behind the minister and nominally invisible. For a horrible moment, Ari had thought the spad was coming with them, but he had peeled away from the group in the hall and headed up to the public gallery. Ari had watched him go, his attention caught by the spad's measured, unhurried way of moving, as though the halls of power were passé to him.
"My lords, it is a pleasure to speak to these provisions of the Bill," the minister said, and Ari felt the quiet rush of adrenaline. He'd done a dozen of these sorts of debates during his career, each one different, heady with tradition and the great matters of state. Something deep inside him thrilled to it, every time.
Diggory was obviously sweating, murmuring provisions of the Bill under his breath. Ari thought he would either be baptised by this, tempered by it, or sink.
In theory, the procedure was simple. The minister spoke uninterrupted to start, giving an opening speech outlining the principles of the Bill clauses and what the government hoped to achieve. From Ari's previous experience, she would take what he had written and ad lib happily off the basic gist of the thing. Then she would yield to the other peers in the chamber: some with pre-prepared questions, some with reasonable ad hoc comment, some here to have some fun at the government's expense. The minister usually quite enjoyed it. Every question that came in would need to be answered by Ari and Diggory and checked for legal accuracy by Eilidh, before being handed down to the minister by way of the parliamentary clerk.
"Remember," Ari whispered to Diggory, "get the question down, note the peer asking, I'll do the answer, Eilidh's always the last person to touch it. Yaz gives it to the clerk to carry down. Got it?"
Diggory nodded, shaking. The minister finished her closing speech. Baroness Carlyle of the Opposition bench stood up and said, "I'm grateful to the minister for her cogent explanation of the intent of the Bill clauses and we welcome the government's commitment to renewable energy."
You're welcome, Ari thought, now ask your question. When it came, at the end of a prepared speech that was less excoriating than Ari had expected, it was: will the wind farm create jobs?
The minister could do that one in her sleep. Ari scribbled some statistics down just in case, Eilidh ticked to clear it and the minister turned it into a smooth, eloquent I'm-so-grateful-to-the-noble-lady-for-asking.
Another question on the heels of the first. Does the government care to comment on the significant quantity of delegated powers in this Bill?
Diggory looked shellshocked at the pace required but managed to write something in the available thirty seconds. Eilidh amended it slightly. The minister took the sheets from the clerk and kept on talking as though she'd studied the subject all her life rather than for a single morning. Why has this taken so long? What is the long-term strategic purpose of this Bill? Has the government economic service been consulted? Has the minister any intentions of renationalising the grid? Does the government have any comment on divergent European policy?
They were in the rhythm of it now, Diggory handling the questions, Ari the answers, Eilidh checking, Yaz passing on, the minister spinning it all into gold. Ari risked a glance upwards, burning five precious seconds. The spad was peering down from the front of the public gallery, hands on the railing, mouth open. Good, Ari thought viciously. Be impressed at what you could never do.
Then Lord Millais of Arnfield stood up and said, "Is the minister unconcerned about Opposition Amendment Eleven?"
Ari handed over the answer about replacements for European subsidies and looked wildly at Eilidh; Eilidh stared blankly back. On Ari's left, Diggory had realised that this wasn't the usual controlled panic but something over and above it. "What's—" he began.
"We don't know," Ari whispered back. The parliamentary clerk had gone down to the dispatch box, dropped off Ari's previous note, and was coming up for the next answer.
Eilidh held Ari's gaze a second more, then bent her head and began scribbling. Ari dared hope she had a plan. The minister was reaching the end of the previous answer, her crisp diction starting to peter out for lack of notes. She turned her head to Ari, itself a faux pas: MPs and peers were supposed to keep up the fiction that the officials in the box were invisible. Ari met her eyes and gestured to Eilidh. One more minute.
Eilidh held up her sheet of paper. She'd had about ninety seconds – a lifetime in box terms – and had produced three full sentences, then crossed them all out in hard pencil. One word remained: WRITE.
"Fuck," Ari said under his breath. He took the note from Eilidh and handed it to Yaz for the parliamentary clerk.
The minister glanced at the note and said smoothly, "In response to the noble lord, Lord Millais, I note his question and I will be happy to write out to the noble lord in order to give it the detailed consideration it warrants."
"If I may interrupt the minister, whose lack of immediate comment on such a significant and unprecedented point," Millais began, but the minister was a pro and charged right on.
"Turning to the noble lady Baroness Carrington's question, on the details of the Darrieus turbine specification, it is of course state of the art, and while I am not au fait with the ins and outs of the technological wizardry involved—"
Diggory, bless his eager heart, had fielded that one while Ari had been preoccupied. Eilidh had cleared it without even looking at it, but Ari didn't care about that, letting the technical detail wash over him. The specifications question was the last, save for a couple of procedural ones the minister could do without help. She cobbled together a short closing speech on the wind farm clauses taken as a whole – the Regional Infrastructure minister would take care of the closing speech summing up the entirety of the Bill – and finally yielded to the next department.
Out in the corridor, Ari leaned against the wall, trying again to reach for calm. Counting breaths, like Lil had taught him, while the adrenaline drained away, leaving him light-headed and thirsty. Traditionally, officials didn't eat or drink before going into the box. "All right," he said, after a moment. "What the hell is Opposition Amendment Eleven?"
"I should know," Eilidh said, still sounding panicky. "I did know at one point. I thought I advised."
"It doesn't matter if you did or not," Ari said, the words coming out more harshly than he'd meant. "What I mean is, we probably ignored you like we always do."
She managed a watery smile and threw her papers down on an ornate wooden table, trying to flick through them quickly. "It's here," she said, looking up from the briefing pack. "Page twelve, Opposition Amendment Eleven. It's the same as section four of the Act. Ari, didn't you write this yesterday? Why don't either of us remember it?"
"Pages eleven to fifteen is a standard insert," Ari said, mentally kicking himself for not rereading it. "We did it six months ago after the last Withdrawal Act, it goes in every briefing pack."
He'd been leaning over her shoulder to see, but thought better of it, leading the way down the corridor back into St Stephen's Hall. They shouldn't be having this post-mortem in the House of Lords where there might be a journalist behind any corner.
"Tomorrow," Ari said, as they gathered their discarded scarves and coats. "Ten o'clock, meeting to discuss it, me, Eilidh, possibly Prashant? Also the Regional Infrastructure Bill manager, maybe Susanna"—the more senior civil servant Ari reported to—"and you too, Diggory. Set it up, please."
Diggory made a dutiful note on his phone. Something was stirring at the back of Ari's mind, struggling to bring itself into view. The heavy door opened on the other side of the hallway and the spad came down from the staircase to the public gallery. The arc of light coming down from the roof made him look less like Ron Weasley and more like a passing vision from Titian.
Ari stared at him, and the thought landed in his mind like a chunk of granite.
Page twelve, the minister had said. It was the question she had been going to ask before the spad had pointlessly interrupted, before they'd run out of time.
"Chaps." That was the minister, having emerged from the chamber via a pause to gossip with her fellow peers. "I understand I'm writing to that bastard Millais about Opposition something-something-or-other?"
"Yes, minister," Ari said, cringing. "I'll draft a letter for you to sign."
"Thank you." She gestured for Ari to walk with her, waiting until they were out of earshot of the spad and the other officials before speaking. "Ari. Don't get me ambushed like that again."
She didn't wait for him to reply, heading on towards her next order of business for the day, with Yaz scurrying after her to tell her what it was. The spad followed them, with another smile at Ari as he went.
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, looking 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 frequencies, 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?"
Jules looked across at him, frowning. "You mean… what would I want a memo on? Um. Probably something on other forms of renewable energy generation, not just wind power. You could do hydroelectric and solar, not that you get much sun in Scotland and Northumberland, but someone should do the analysis alongside wind."
"Other types of renewable energy," Ari said, doubtfully. "This isn't an energy bill, it's infrastructure. Wind farms are only a few clauses of it. We haven't got the scope or the political will to expand."
Jules shrugged. "It's not the only thing the department will ever do, though, is it? And I'm going to piss off after this Bill so you'd better use me while you've got me."
"Fair point." Ari nodded. "All right, go away and do that, and I'll give you some other stuff later today. Thanks again for the memo."
Jules smiled as he went out, his lovely natural grace apparent even just in the space between Ari's desk and the door. Use me while you've got me, whispered a suggestive voice in Ari's mind, that clearly needed dousing with cold, energy-efficient water. He didn't have time for either personal animosity or misfirings of his neglected libido. He went back to wind turbines.
Requests for meetings petered out and turned into requests for documentation. Ari kept working on the submission while contending with Regional Infrastructure, who wanted explanatory notes and delegated powers memoranda; with the Committee for the Order of Business and Legislation, who wanted indicative timelines; and with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, who wanted an eighteen-page letter responded to point by point. It was shifting to late autumn, the sky glowering over St James's Park by the mid-afternoon, so Ari started looking up from his desk to find he'd missed the daylight. He adapted press briefings; he dealt with possible groupings for amendments; he passed unremarkably from darkness to darkness. Two weeks in, he was drowning sufficiently to spread all the papers out on a massive canteen table, trying to get a handle on everything with some help from Eilidh. It seemed to work as an approach, until Jules interrupted to ask why he didn't use a desk or a meeting room rather than do this surrounded by ground coffee and day-old sandwiches.
"Because," Ari said, driven momentarily past endurance, "we have no money. We have no desks and no meeting rooms and no money. Don't you know the first damn thing about public service?"
"Got it," Jules said. He went to the counter and came back with a miniature Mars bar, which he tossed onto the explanatory notes under Ari's nose.
"What's this?" Ari said, thrown off a train of thought involving statutory purposes.
"My baby niece yells at me like that, too," Jules said. "When she gets hungry."
"Ooh, the spad bites back," Eilidh said, delightedly, which Ari ignored. He ignored Jules too, but looked up several hours later to find he'd eaten the Mars bar without noticing, so the explanatory notes had bits of chocolate on them as well as yellow highlighter, and smelled sweet.
Regional Infrastructure had a structural rethink and asked for updates to everything. Eilidh bought espresso for Ari and he bought whipped-cream drinks for Diggory and Diggory brought in doughnuts for all of them. Jules seemed embarrassed the first time he offered round a box of small, brightly-coloured macarons, and was surprised when Ari loved them. The next time Jules saved some especially for him before he put the box out for the rest. Without consciously deciding to, Ari had begun throwing tasks to Jules the way he did to everyone else. Diggory, draft the delegated powers memoranda; Yaz, check the minister's schedule; Jules, go down to legal and peel Eilidh off the ceiling.
"I don't answer to you," Jules had said the first time, before doing what needed to be done without complaint. The second memorandum on broader alternatives to wind power landed on Ari's desk a fortnight after the first. He filed it with a promise to himself that he would read it soon, then sent Jules to find out why the justice impact team were taking the length of a galactic revolution to sign off on the criminal offences. His security clearance had chosen this time of all times to fall due for renewal, which meant a wasted morning in a windowless room, answering questions that started with have you ever been a member of a proscribed organisation and ended with to the best of your knowledge, have you ever appeared in pornography.
"What did you even say?" Jules asked later, laughing. "Oh, yes, sorry I forgot to mention it, here are some subscription services you might find interesting?"
"Yes," Ari said, relying on his years of civil service training in keeping a straight face. He held it long enough for Jules's expression to start going blank, and then had to put his hands over his mouth.
"You bastard," Jules said. "I was about to be non-judgemental and supportive of your choices."
"Really?" Ari asked. "Non-judgemental and supportive?"
"Yeah, actually. Fuck off."
"I'm not a former Soviet agent, either," Ari said, enjoying himself for the first time in weeks. "Or having sordid affairs with married backbenchers."
"They could do worse than you," Jules said, inspecting him with a critical eye. "Maybe don't join the KGB, you're not cute enough for that."
Ari laughed and turned to the criminal offences. Jules had got them cleared while he'd been occupied by his security clearance. Another thing to mark as done.
Late November. The civil service choirs began rehearsals in earnest, and the string ensemble practised accompaniments. Eilidh came into Ari's office humming "O Come All Ye Faithful", and asked if he would think about coming to the carol concert this year. "You don't have to take part," she said. "Just come and listen."
Ari shook his head and she didn't press. He left the door open to listen to the music filtering in, and closed it when he couldn't bear any more.
More press briefings; more memoranda. More doughnuts and coffee. More headaches. They still had a departmental box of painkillers and caffeine pills left over from the Withdrawal Acts, which Ari made use of with a liberal hand. Jules caught him at it, late in the evening when it was just the bill team haunting the department like restless ghosts. "At least take them with water," he said, fetching some with his usual half-there smile. Ari had started to read it as fond, rather than sneering.
"You are extremely annoying," he said, then drank from the mug Jules gave him and went back to work.
Five weeks after the second reading of the Bill, Eilidh marched into Ari's office waving a document and said, "How sweet the goddamn sound."
Ari bounced out of his chair and knocked a half-eaten day-old doughnut off his desk. "We're ready," he said. "We're ready to sub up?"
"Finance, legal, press," Eilidh said, counting off on her fingers. "Cleared, cleared and cleared. You misspelled ‘piezoelectric' in para thirty-four but I'm going to pretend I didn't see it. Press the fucking button."
Ari pressed the button, feeling a sense of anticlimax – the hours and hours of work on the submission had culminated in a seven-page document, sent to the minister's private secretary by email – but shook off the feeling as Eilidh took him by the arm. Despite his protests that they still had a whole entire actual bill to be working on, she dragged them to the pub – the Speaker again, a tiny, packed place in Perkin's Rents, full of civil servants and the rest of the Westminster village. There was a division bell behind the bar and BBC Parliament on the TV above the upturned bottles. Eilidh and Diggory fought their way to the bar while Ari peered with interest at a subtitled debate on a set of post-exit agricultural Regulations.
"Ari, what's wrong with you," Jules said, as Eilidh returned briefly with two drinks and went back for the second batch. "Stop watching BBC Parliament and drink your—whatever the hell that is. Alcoholic peach lemonade?"
"Eilidh said I'd regret letting her choose for me," Ari said, feeling dizzy from the heat and press of people. Jules had put his hands on Ari's shoulders, turning him physically away from the screen. Another one of those measured, graceful movements, but with real strength beneath it. Ari swallowed hard, his mind filled with a barrage of passing impressions from the last few weeks: Jules smiling at him in all those hideous meetings; Jules perched casually on the edge of Ari's desk, leaning over him to point at something in a document; Jules at the end of each long day, leaving him with a gentle touch on the shoulder and an exhortation to go home and sleep.
"Eilidh is usually right," Jules said. "You're off the clock, don't watch the damn debate."
"I'm never off the clock," Ari said, but he didn't turn back to the debate. Another memory, unbidden and awful: the rehearsals for the carol concert, two years before. He and Lil had been playing the accompaniment in the upstairs room of the pub, so it sounded to the punters below like a visitation from angels. Ari thought for a mad moment of telling Jules about it. He sneezed and the moment passed.
"Yeah, about that," Jules said. "So obviously I know you're not married or seeing anyone or whatever—"
"Obviously?" Ari interrupted.
"Well, you're a grumpy bastard, aren't you," Jules said affectionately. "Plus you never leave the office. Don't you have a cat or some house plants to go home to?"
"I had a yucca," Ari said. "It died in a tragic accident. Nothing anyone could have done."
Jules elbowed him. They were so close together, Ari observed, as though from a great distance outside himself; the crush, the noise, the overheated air were all pushing in on them, conspiring them into a hand's breadth of space. Ari could smell the spices in the mulled wine Jules had been drinking, cinnamon and star anise almost close enough to taste. His head was swimming with exhaustion, and a horrible sense that something was slipping out of his control.
"Seriously," Jules said softly. "Don't you do anything but work? Isn't there anything else?"
"There used to be," Ari said, helpless to stop Jules from asking this, not sure if he would be able to avoid answering honestly, truth spilling out like salt on a table. "Before."
"Before what?" Jules said, but didn't wait for an answer, curiosity displaced by sudden, appalling kindness. "Ari, are you all right?"
"Yes," Ari said, with an effort. He was thinking of the way home from here, of the deep, murky water of the Thames, of the lights of the city reflecting in the tar-black surface. "I'm fine."
"Ari," Jules said, disbelieving, but Ari couldn't stay for whatever came next. He picked up his coat and scarf and went out into the night.
Jules had the next few days as leave, falling conveniently after the submission to the minister had gone up. He tried to ignore the thought that he hadn't arranged it with any such convenience in mind, having never expected anything in the spad job to take precedence over his own plans. It was hard to imagine now that he might have missed the last frantic days of clearances for the submission and the massive amount of work it entailed. But he hadn't missed it, he told himself with satisfaction, and was able to squire his mother to a matinée of Tosca without feeling the need to check his work phone in the interval. After the performance he found his mother a taxi and was surprised when she pulled him into it as well. "Now, I'm sure you can make time for dinner with your elderly parents," she said happily, as the taxi moved swiftly towards the Strand. "Your father's dying to hear all about your new job. And we've got a surprise for you, too!"
Surprises, from his mother, were usually desserts: macarons for preference, or miniature fairy cakes, or delicate Japanese patisserie. Dinner with his father would no doubt be tediously focused on Jules's own rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to Make A Mark, or Prove Himself, or however he was putting it these days, but Jules hated to disappoint his generous, loving mother. She worried that he didn't eat enough nutritious food, and that the new raincoat is very handsome, dear, but is it quite warm enough? She had even been known to ask him awkwardly if he'd met any nice boys lately, which was an infinite improvement on anything his father had ever said or done. Jules settled back into the taxi. He'd go through with it for his mother's sake. If there were macarons for tea he'd keep them for Ari.
Ari, who had swept out of the Speaker the night before as though pursued by something unseen. In the light of day it felt melodramatic to think about, but in the moment it had made Jules shiver. He put it out of his mind, concentrating on reassuring his mother about his vegetable intake and on enduring the evening.
When the taxi pulled in at the house in Muswell Hill, all the lights were blazing inside and there were other cars in the drive, suggesting this was more than a quiet dinner with his parents. Jules helped his mother out of the taxi with a sense of deep foreboding. As he turned the key in the front door he heard his father call genially, "That'll be the boy now."
Jules froze in place at the sound of the answering voices. Lord Elwin appeared in the hall, beamed at the sight of him and ushered him into the drawing room. "You remember my old pal Tibs, don't you, Jules?"
"Er, yes," Jules said, shaking hands with his father's school chum Tibs, otherwise Lord Ettrick of Standlake.
"And of course, you know Liz!" his father boomed.
Liz. Jules looked up at Baroness MacKay of Forth and Rosyth.
"Minister," he said involuntarily, hideously embarrassed; he didn't know if spads were meant to show that kind of deference to their ministers. He'd picked up the habit of address from Ari and the others. Behind him he could hear his father chuckling to his friend at how the boy had gone native in no time flat. Jules thought that if she laughed, or clapped him on the back and said call me Liz, he might choke on his next breath.
But the minister just smiled warmly, patted his arm and said, "Jules, it's good to see you."
It made him feel a little better, enough to paste on a smile and say, for his mother's benefit, "What a nice surprise."
Dinner was excruciating. Jules pushed peas around his plate and listened to some of his father's more well-worn anecdotes, all of which seemed to end in some reference to the japes he'd had in the House of Lords back in the day. He never mentioned how he'd come to lose his right to sit, the subject swept under the carpet for more than two decades now. Jules had been seven at the time and remembered the ranting and raving. Unlike in the case of Baroness MacKay, his fellow peers had not seen fit to reinstate Lord Elwin post-reforms as a continued asset to the institution.
The minister didn't speak much, but he knew she was observing everything like the consummate politician she was. Jules thought of the contrast between her and her department, and his bumptious, irritating father, and found the juxtaposition humiliating.
He was trying to think of ways to excuse himself early when his father suddenly turned to him. "Of course, Jules will have some yarns of his own by now!" he said. "Perhaps he's run into old Lord Wootton, who used to keep white rats in his ermine sleeves! Come on, Jules, surely you've got some stories."
Jules thought about the days that had stretched into weeks without his really noticing. He thought about Eilidh skidding around in slipper socks because they'd been at work for hours and she'd long since ditched her heels; about teasing Diggory after another misadventure in internet dating; about the civil service choir and string ensemble being banished to rehearsals in the basement, so the building's air ducts thrummed with the sound of discordant hallelujahs.
Most of all, he thought about Ari. Still brusque and intolerant, still holding himself and everyone around him to the highest of standards, but Jules had come to appreciate that there was a sense of humour somewhere underneath it all. And he'd come to appreciate the first part, too. Ari had had high expectations of him, and Jules had wanted, almost despite himself, to meet them.
Ari, whom he'd been mindlessly attracted to since the day they met; who had seemed, in that heady, wine-scented moment, close enough to kiss.
Fuck.
"Not really," Jules croaked, his mouth dry at this realisation. "I, er, I haven't been there that long."
"From what I understand, my department is keeping him busy," Baroness MacKay said swiftly. "It's not like it was in your day, John. All of that running around like naughty schoolboys! These days they have to do real work, isn't that right, Jules?"
Jules gave her a grateful look. "Yes, that's right," he said. "Busy, busy."
"What do they have you working on at the moment?" she asked, preventing Jules's father from saying anything else. "I might as well get the sneak preview."
Jules pulled himself together enough to answer her sensibly. "Alternatives to wind as a source of renewable energy," he said. "Hydroelectric and solar for starters."
"It's not an energy bill, it's infrastructure," Baroness MacKay said. "We don't have the scope to expand."
It was exactly what Ari had said, and Jules gave her the answer he had given Ari. "The Bill isn't the last thing on climate change the department will ever do, is it?" he said. "I know there's the problem with Opposition Amendment Eleven, but surely it can't limit us forever."
"Opposition Amendment Eleven," Baroness MacKay said thoughtfully. "I do recall. I think I saw something about that in my red box yesterday."
Of course she had, Jules thought, wondering why he was surprised: the submission they had worked so hard on had been intended for her. Once cleared and sent to her private secretary, it had gone in the red box for her to review.
"The sub doesn't cover expanding the scope," Jules said, wondering what had become of the second memorandum he had prepared. "I have mentioned it to Ari, but I think he's preoccupied with Amendment Eleven."
"Ari is a sweet boy, but he does have a tendency to get stuck in details," the minister said. "So, you want me to do more than just wind farms, do you? A nice full spread of renewable energy initiatives?"
"Er," Jules said, realising for the first time that that was what he'd been saying to Ari, under the cover of a minor supplementary memorandum. "Yes, I suppose I do."
The minister smiled. "Let me think about it, Jules. In principle I'm not opposed to the expansion of the department's policy objectives, it's the procedural consequences, as you say. What if we tell Regional Infrastructure where to go and try to do something freestanding of our own? Would that sidestep the two-thirds majority requirement?"
"I'm not sure," Jules said, making a mental note to ask Eilidh this. "I can find out."
"Shop talk," Lord Elwin said to Tibs, not quite approving. He didn't like it, Jules thought cattily, when people in his hearing used too many long words.
"Careful, Jules," Tibs said, hearty as an Aga range. "Before you know it you'll be just like the penny pinchers and the bureaucrats."
The minister ignored him. "Find that out, and then let's give it some more consideration," she said. "I'll need to respond to the submission in its current form, so be quick if you want me to think about something else."
"Thank you," Jules said, only just stopping short of thank you, minister. "I'll come back to you as soon as possible."
"Now then, no more politics at the table," Jules's mother said, with a glance at his father, but Jules thought she sounded pleased.
Conversation did turn away from politics after that. Jules was afraid they were going to go off on a tangent about Brexit, but his mother moved that along to a discussion of the production of Tosca. Jules hadn't had more than a couple of bites of his dinner but was grateful when his plate was swept away. To his relief, the party broke up soon after dessert, which was a very nice apple strudel that Jules couldn't find it in himself to enjoy. He made his excuses as soon as the guests had left, claiming that he had some work he needed to get done before the morning.
"Don't take it all so seriously, lad," his father said in response, which made Jules think of Ari, dozing off on top of a pile of briefing papers. His father, Jules decided, wouldn't know what it was to take something seriously if it scuttled out of an ermine sleeve and bit him.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to," he said, more sharply than he'd intended to. "If I'm going to make my mark in this department."
His father was uncharacteristically silent as Jules gathered up his outdoor things and headed out. His mother stopped him on the threshold and pushed a ribbon-wrapped box at him. "I got them in Covent Garden," she said. "I know how much you like them."
More macarons. Jules tucked them away in his coat pocket. "Thanks, Mum," he said, kissing her cheek.
She held onto his arm. "You should share them with a special friend," she whispered confidentially, and despite everything Jules was smiling when he stepped out into the frost.
The next day dawned bright and clear. Jules felt at a loss, vaguely thinking to get a start on his Christmas shopping, not sure if he shouldn't just go into the department anyway and see if he could get an answer to the minister's question. While he was thinking about it, Diggory called and apologised for bothering him at home. "It's just," he said, "we, Eilidh and Yaz and me, that is, we thought you might have heard from Ari."
"Heard from Ari?" Jules repeated. "Isn't he with you?"
"He hasn't been in for a couple of days," Diggory said. "And, er. We're kind of worried."
Jules thought of the last time he'd seen Ari, disappearing into the night. He was out the door before he'd even hung up the phone.