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.Once you know what it is, how it feels, how much more of it do you really need or deserve?When the time came for us to head off to Lisbon, Lottie kissed Sadie and Bobbie on their foreheads.‘Don’t wait too long to bring them back, darling,’ she said.‘I just love the energy they bring to the place.’‘Why don’t you come to see us in Britain?’ I was trying to load our ever-expanding arsenal of children’s belongings into the back of the taxi, the driver none too keen to help.Lottie snorted.‘Britain’s gone to the dogs, darling, people like me don’t belong there.’‘You’re starting to sound old, Lottie.’ It was meant to be a joke but didn’t quite work.‘I’ve still got some life in me, the question on my mind is whether you have, my girl.’ She gave me a hug before I got into the back of the car.That Christmas Rosie landed herself a job at the Treasury on the communications team.It annoyed Rav and riled me, too, because it just seemed so symptomatic of Oliver Drake’s administration; mediocrity constantly rising to the top.Those who conformed to groupthink seemed to flourish while anyone who displayed original thought was deemed somehow dangerous.I wondered whether James had put in a good word for Rosie with the Chancellor; if he had, neither of them mentioned it when we took her out for a curry in Westminster to celebrate.I barely ate anything, watching instead how incredibly rude Rosie had become towards Rav, constantly denigrating him in front of us.‘You’re just too all over the place for this game,’ she’d told him as we were waiting for the bill.‘You need to work out what you’re best at, then get on with it.Whatever that is.’‘Come on, Rosie, Rav’s not had it easy,’ said James.‘It never is, and just wait until Drake falls over,’ she replied.‘How long do you think a lightweight like him will last - a year? Two at most.’ She often answered her own questions in that way.It reminded me of Lottie, perversely, even though the two were at opposite ends of my value system.Perhaps Rosie had picked up the habit from Lottie on her trip to Naviras, that wouldn’t surprise me given Rosie’s whole personality was little more than aggregated mimicry.The start of the following year saw the first signs that Britain was running out of energy.The price of gas leapt without warning, the government was trying to find a way of keeping people’s bills down covertly.James and I discussed it one night in bed as he was going through his ministerial papers.He just snorted and said they were merely managing decline.‘It’ll take years to work this out,’ he said, not looking up from his work.‘And before that, things’ll only get worse.’‘This all seems very sudden,’ I said.Energy prices had been a running sore for years, but prices tended to fall in the spring, not rise.‘We’d no idea in opposition how bad things were,’ he said quietly.‘A few of the old guard warned us, but you always think they’re just itching to interfere.Turns out they were right.’‘So we’re screwed then?’‘Well,’ he closed his ministerial box and looked across at me.‘What this country needs is a government that lasts the distance.No short-termism.I doubt whether Drake can pull that off, not with a majority so small.’ His lips brushed against mine before he turned off the bedside lamp and lay on his side, facing away from me.Time seemed to accelerate, as it often does when you’re too busy to catch your breath and assimilate things.I felt like I was being pulled along each day by an invisible force; the alarm at five fifteen, an hour of going through constituency casework before it was time to get the kids up, feed them, dress them, get them to daycare and nursery.Instructions for Paula scrawled on the whiteboard in the kitchen before a dash to the office, the whole process more or less repeated in reverse ten hours later.The only obvious punctuation was my twice-weekly visit to Dad, normally on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons.With nothing to do or say during those hours, they were my sole chance to reflect.I wasn’t particularly happy, but was certainly a lot less unhappy than before.It was normal, which was surprisingly comforting as long as I ignored the nagging feeling that I’d have to come down at some point.I found out Lottie was missing on a Tuesday in October, when the number for Casa Amanhã flashed up on my phone.I answered it expecting her to speak, instead it was Carolina, who’d come back from college in Lisbon.‘Ellie, have you spoken to Lottie in the last two days? She went to collect some flowers to paint but she hasn’t come back.’It was eight thirty in the morning and I was standing at in the hallway of our house in Eppingham, about to set off for work.By that point James was renting a bolt-hole not far from Parliament, Initially he’d stayed there only once or twice a week, then it became three nights away, sometimes four.He’d been moved in a recent reshuffle from prisons to immigration, far more demanding with urgent case reviews cropping up constantly.Sometimes a dangerous foreigner who’d been placed on the watch list would go missing and James’s phone would ring in the middle of the night.For all our sakes it was better for him to have somewhere in London to sleep, he’d insisted.I continued to talk to Carolina as I made the short walk to the constituency office.‘Where’s your father?’‘He went to look for her; he borrowed a car from the beach bar.He told me to call you, but it took me a long time to find your number.’‘And she didn’t mention anything about going away to him, I suppose.’Carolina said Lottie hadn’t mentioned anything to Luis, who’d asked around the village to see if anyone knew where she’d gone, nobody had a clue.I texted James when I got to the office; Call me, it’s urgent.He didn’t reply for more than an hour, eventually calling me just after I’d arrived at work.‘Hi, what’s up?’‘Lottie’s been missing for two days,’ I said quietly, not wanting the constituency staff to hear.‘Carolina called me earlier.’‘That’s what’s urgent?’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece to talk to someone in the room with him.When he removed his hand from the phone he said he was incredibly busy, couldn’t it wait until the evening? ‘Maybe she’s gone to visit someone.You know how batty she is.’‘She hardly ever leaves the village, James.And there’s no way she’d go off this, not without telling someone at the house.’‘Well maybe it’s a surprise or something.Look, L, I’m really caught up in something here.Try not to worry.There’s not much we can do about it from here, anyway.’That evening the Casa Amanhã’s number came up on my phone again.It was Carolina, saying the police had found the wreck of Lottie’s car at the bottom of a cliff down the coast.It was somewhere I’d been before, a dangerous track which served as the back road between two of the less-frequented beaches south of Naviras.Tourists never used it, nor did anyone with the slightest bit of sense because it didn’t have a barrier on the outside edge.It was a hundred foot drop.The local police had investigated the cliffside track and concluded she’d come around it too fast and plunged off.The car had burst into flames on impact, there hadn’t been much of a body left to recover, nothing left really of the car either, save for some twisted hunks of metal and melted rubber.‘I have to go out for her funeral,’ I’d said to James on the phone.‘Well, I hope you’ll understand I can’t come.’ He was somewhere in Parliament, there was a hubbub of noise surrounding him.I almost pleaded with him to make the journey with me.‘Look, I know she was a good friend, and I’m sorry.’ In the background the Commons division bell rang.‘We’re in the middle of a crisis, L
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