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Veerkamp was another matter. It might take Michael to get her into the White House, but the Veerkamp name had got her admitted to everything that counted in the State of New York.
    “Why there? They’re not the sort who’ll vote for me.”
    “They may - perhaps I can persuade them to. According to Scotty Reston this morning - ” she tapped the copy of The New York Times that lay on the breakfast table - “you’ll need every vote you can get tomorrow.”
    He looked at her admiringly; and with some sympathy that he hoped she would not detect. She was the perfect political wife: beautiful, with that red-gold hair that was a sensation on colour television, hard-working, always polite to the right people, never wasting her time on the wrong ones: if I don’t make it tomorrow, he thought, she is the one who is going to be disappointed. She and Old Sam.
    As if on# cue, Nathan, the black butler, came to the door of the small dining-room where the Fortes usually breakfasted. “Mr Samuel is here, sir.”
    Michael smiled to himself at his father’s punctilious formality. Ever since Michael could remember, his life had been run by his father, but once he had reached political office, first as a Congressman in Washington and then as Mayor here in New York, his father had always had himself announced when he called. Preparing for bigger things, Michael thought with slightly sour amusement: Sam would never expect to enter the White House without being announced. To Sylvia and Old Sam, Gracie Mansion was just a wayside stop on the road to the ultimate destination.
    Sylvia got up from the table, moving with the graceful fluidity of a woman who had never been awkward even as a child and which had been improved by ballet lessons and the

    watchful eye of a vigilant mother. She went forward to kiss her father-in-law as he came in the door. There was warm affection between the two of them; they were related by ambition as well as by marriage. Michael, standing off, had to admit they made a fine-looking pair: the lovely red-haired woman and the stiff-backed, white-haired old man. A pity that these days Americans would not vote a June-December couple into the White House. They had accepted the marriage of the middle-aged Cleveland and his 21-year-old bride, but that had been almost ninety years ago, when Americans had been less respectful of the office of President.
    “You’re breakfasting late. Sorry if I’m too early-” Samuel Forte had not quite managed to eliminate the roughness of his early years from his voice. He had gone to work for his father at eighteen and it had been ten years before he had been able to escape from the shouting above the job noises and the yelling at the immigrant construction workers in the dialect that they understood. He had a town house in the East Sixties, an estate an hour out of town that overlooked the Hudson and a small mansion at Palm Beach in Florida; but Astoria was still there on his tongue. You may never look back at the past, Michael thought, but you’ll always hear the echoes of it.
    “No, we’re finished. We had a late night and we’re going to be late again tonight. We gave ourselves the luxury of an extra hour in bed this morning.”
    They had made love that morning, she stifling her cries against the possibility of being overheard by the servants. They had always enjoyed each other in bed, but the demands of public life too often tired them out; and the privacy of their bedroom was always subject to the urgent phone call or the knock on the door by Nathan or one of the other servants to say there was an unexpected visitor downstairs. Michael sometimes wondered if hernia, as well as a heart-attack, was a health hazard with those in power.
    Sylvia brought her father-in-law to the table and poured him a cup of coffee. The old man sat down, carefully

    arranging the creases in his trousers, and looked up at his son. “The day after tomorrow you may not need to get up at all. I’ve been