He was also a keen Instagrammer and had already amassed nearly five thousand followers since his election to the Willowbury and Stavenham seat, but he still had yet to get to grips with Twitter, and relied on Helen, who was ten years younger, and far more in tune with social media, to handle that and the official Facebook pages. Social media had its advantages, and its disadvantages, as he knew from being one of the first students to adopt it at university. He was part of a generation that had some of their memories on actual, printed photographs and a lot more stored in the ethereal world of online and digital. Everything he did, now more than ever, would be under scrutiny. If he’d been more reckless in his university days, he felt sure he’d have been more concerned, but he was fairly certain there weren’t going to be any skeletons leaping out of closets at an inconvenient moment.
Certain numbers of his colleagues had not fared so well at the hands of social media, though. He still felt a pang of sympathy for one former party leader, whose apology for a poor policy decision had been memed, autotuned and posted on YouTube for all to see. It was an occupational hazard these days.
Wandering back into his office, he picked up the paper file that Rachel had left him to take a closer look. Leafing through the press cuttings, the leaflets and the copies of letters that she’d sent to Hugo Fitzgerald and other MPs, it was clear she didn’t just have a mother’s knowledge about her son’s condition; she, by necessity, had become a bit of an expert on drug funding, policy and procedure. She could probably teach him a thing or two.
Sitting down at his desk to read, he became engrossed in the file, and was only distracted by his email notification ping some time later. Helen had collected as much information as she could, including links to the most relevant debates in Parliament. Hansard, which was the official record of debates of the UK Parliament, had an open-access digital archive stretching back a hundred years, making searching it for incidences where the issue had been raised in the House an easy matter. Charlie was shocked to see that the funding of the new drug had been raised numerous times over the years. Cystic fibrosis was a condition that affected seventy thousand patients worldwide, ten thousand in the United Kingdom alone, and one which seemed in desperate need of more publicity, understanding and, most of all, effective treatment. Given the inevitable stints in hospital that patients had to endure, anything that prevented costs escalating in that way had to be a bonus, surely?
A number of MPs had taken up the cause, according to the records of debate in Hansard, but Rachel was right, it had stalled over the past year or so. Could he – should he – take it on? It was at times like these he wished he’d been in the House a little longer. While he was a nodding acquaintance to some of the more local MPs, the job was often an isolating one, and he hadn’t yet formed an effective network in London. The party helped, of course, but even within that, there were always shifting loyalties and alliances. Someone who supported you one week could change their mind the next. It was like being in a huge class, back at school, at times, and Charlie was acutely aware that as a rookie MP, in his first term of office, he was vulnerable, even with a so-called safe majority in his constituency.
But wasn’t it his duty to put his constituents first? Surely, that should override all other concerns. And Rachel was a voter, after all. Jotting down a couple of things to check out, he then glanced at his iCal diary and, with a jolt of pleasure, realised he had a free couple of hours. He should be cracking on with some more paperwork, but since it was such a glorious day, he decided to get out and stretch his legs. He knew that free time was precious, as constituency work and work in the House could get extremely intense, especially in the run-up to the summer recess. Time where he could just get out and soak up the atmosphere of his new home would be scarce, so he was determined to make the most of his free time.
As he wandered out of his office, he called to Helen. ‘I’m off for an early lunch. I’ll be back in a bit.’
‘Okey-dokey,’ Helen said, not glancing up from her computer. ‘Have you got your phone on you in case I need to get hold of you urgently?’
‘Yup,’ Charlie replied.
Helen might be a lot younger than him, but she still sounded like his mother at times. It was only fair that she reminded him, though. He’d already left his phone in Jack Winter’s coffee shop on the High Street once, and been roundly bollocked by Tom Fielding for it. Although it was fingerprint-locked, he used it to check his emails, and so there was a fair bit of sensitive material on there. Things must have been simpler back in the old days, he thought, when all you had to worry about was the paper contents of your briefcase or ministerial red box and documents actually crinkled when you folded them, instead of flying off into the ether electronically.
Walking along Willowbury High Street, though, almost timeless in its abundance of weird and wonderful shop fronts, Charlie felt as though he had, at least, come to the right place to live. There was definitely something in the air, and not just the medicinal herbs.
14
‘You know when you say something in the heat of the moment and then spend the next fifteen hours regretting it?’ Holly said as she passed Rachel a glass of wine from the bottle she’d brought over to her sister’s house that evening.
‘Not really,’ Rachel teased. ‘Since Callum and I got divorced my only real conversation is with Harry most of the time, and he’s pretty immune to me putting my foot in it!’
‘Fair enough,’ Holly replied. ‘But, your lack of actual adult conversation aside, I’m sure you must sort of know what I’m saying.’
‘What have you done?’ Rachel raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you’d managed to curb your foot-in-mouth tendencies since you became a respectable business owner?’
‘Most of the time, yes, but these were, er, slightly unusual circumstances.’
‘Are you talking about Charlie Thorpe and his lack of trousers by any chance?’
Holly laughed, in spite of herself. ‘How did you guess?’
‘So, what have you said to him?’
Holly shook her head. ‘Something really stupid.’
‘Spill.’
‘I might have, er, invited him to Sunday lunch at Mum and Dad’s place this weekend.’
Rachel nearly spat her wine out in amusement. ‘You did what? How bloody square are you?’ She put her wine glass down on the coffee table in front of her, since it was dangerously close to spilling. ‘I mean, ask him out for a drink or a coffee, or even a walk up Willowbury Hill, but to Mum and Dad’s for lunch?’
‘I know.’ Holly felt her face start to burn. ‘Maybe it’s because, for some reason, he makes me feel as though I’m that nineteen-year-old kid again, but it just came out. And now we’ve both got to sit around the table on Sunday with Mum and Dad, and you and Harry, of course, and make polite conversation after he fell on top of me in his pants.’
‘Well, when you put it like that…’ Rachel collapsed into giggles back into the cushions of her sofa. ‘And he actually said yes?’
‘Yup,’ Holly groaned. ‘Do you think I should call him and cancel it?’
‘Wouldn’t be very polite of you,’ Rachel said reasonably. ‘And the fact that he’s agreed to it suggests he wants to come. Unless, of course, he looked too terrified to say no?’