by Tom Stoppard
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE sees that he is going about this the wrong way.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Wait a minute. (Rapidly.) The best thing is forget Claridges, Crockford’s and the Coq d’Or altogether.
MADDIE: Right. Forget Claridges, Crockford’s, Coq d’Or— forget Claridges, Crockford’s, Coq d’Or——
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: And if anyone asks you where you had lunch on Friday, breakfast on Saturday and dinner last night, when you were with me, tell them where you had dinner on Friday, lunch on Saturday and breakfast yesterday.
MADDIE: Right! (Pause. She closes her eyes with concentration.) (Rapidly.) The Green Cockatoo, the Crooked Clock, the Crock of Gold—and Box Hill.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Box Hill?
MADDIE: To see the moon come up—forget Crockford’s, Claridges, Coq d’Or—remember the Crock of Gold, Box Hill, the Crooked Clock and the Green Door——
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Cockatoo——
MADDIE: Cockatoo. Crock of Gold, Crooked Clock, Green Cockatoo and Box Hill. When was this?
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: When you were really with me.
MADDIE: Right. With Cockie at the Green Cockatoo——
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: No not with Cockie at the Green Cockatoo.
MADDIE: —not with Cockie at the Green Cockatoo, the Old Cook, the Crooked Grin, Gamages and Box Hill.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE (wildly): No—look. The simplest thing is to forget, Claridges, the Old Boot, the Golden quorum can be any number agreed upon by——
(This is because MCTEAZLE is back.)
MCTEAZLE: Douglas is on his way back. (Hanging up his hat.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: I’ve got to have a drink.
(He leaves, forgetting his bowler hat, as MCTEAZLE closes the door. MCTEAZLE starts speaking at once. The italicized words correspond to COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE’s momentary reappearances, in the first case to take a bowler hat off the hatstand and in the second case to change hats because he has taken out MCTEAZLE’s hat the first time.)
MCTEAZLE: Maddiening the way one is kept waiting for ours is a very tricky position, my dear. In normal times one can count on chaps being quite sympathetic to the sight of a Member of Parliament having dinner with a lovely young woman in some out-of-the-way nook—it could be a case of constituency business, they’re not necessarily screw-oo-ooge is, I think you’ll find, not in ‘David Copperfield’ at all, still less in ‘The Old Curiosity Sho’-cking though it is, the sight of a Member of Parliament having some out-of-the-way nookie with a lovely young woman might well be a case of a genuine love match destined to take root and pass through ever more respectable stages—the first shy tentative dinner party in a basement flat in Pembridge Crescent for a few trusted friends—Caxton Hall—and a real friendship with the stepchildren—people are normally inclined to give one the benefit of the doubt. But the tragedy is, as our luck would have it, that our gemlike love which burns so true and pure and has brought such a golden light into our lives, could well become confused with a network of grubby affairs between men who should know better and some bit of fluff from the filing department—so I suggest, my darling, if any one were to enquire where you may or may not have spent Friday night or indeed Saturday lunch time or Sunday tea time, forget Charing Cross, the Coq d’Or and the Golden Ox.
MADDIE: Charing Cross, Coq d’Or, Golden Ox. Charing Cross, Coq d’Or, Golden Ox. Charing Cross, Old Door, and the Golden Cock——
MCTEAZLE: —Ox——
MADDIE: Ox.
MCTEAZLE: The Coq d’Or and the Golden Ox. Not the Golden Cock and the Old Door.
MADDIE: Not the Golden Cock and the Old Door but the Golden Ox and the Coq d’Or.
MCTEAZLE: And don’t forget: Charing Cross.
MADDIE: Don’t forget Charing Cross.
MCTEAZLE: I mean forget Charing Cross.
MADDIE: Forget Charing Cross——
MCTEAZLE: Plucky girl——
MADDIE: Plucky girl—Charing Cross—Olden cocks.
MCTEAZLE: But not with me.
MADDIE: Not with Jock at the Old Cock——
MCTEAZLE: Door. (This is because the door has opened.)
MADDIE: Old Coq d’Or—not with Jock.
(CHAMBERLAIN has entered.)
MCTEAZLE (hurriedly): Hello, Douglas.
(CHAMBERLAIN is repellently full of zest and heartiness. He also carries an armful of papers which he dumps on the table. He treats MADDIE with open, crude lechery.)
CHAMBERLAIN: Hello!
MCTEAZLE: This is Mr. Chamberlain. Miss Gotobed is going to be our clerk.
(CHAMBERLAIN advances on MADDIE who backs off behind her desk and starts opening drawers to look busy.)
CHAMBERLAIN: What?!—that luscious creature is our clerk! Impossible! Where’s her moustache? Her dandruff? Her striped pants?
(MADDIE reflexively slams shut her knicker drawer.)
What an uncommonly comely clerk you are! My name’s Douglas. I hope you don’t mind me saying that you’re a lovely girl—I don’t mind telling you that if I wasn’t married to a wonderful girl myself with two fine youngsters down in Dorking and an au pair to complicate my life, I’d be after you and no mistake,
(During the rest of this speech, MADDIE pushes past CHAMBERLAIN, goes over to her coat and takes a copy of the Sun from her pocket. She returns towards her desk.)
my goodness yes, it would be private coaching in a little French restaurant somewhere, a few hints on parliamentary procedure over the boeuf bourgignon, and then off in the Volvo while I mutter sweet definitions in your ear and test your elastic with the moon coming up over Box Hill.
(As MADDIE passes the steps, he gooses her so thoroughly that she goes straight up them, still holding the Sun. CHAMBERLAIN slaps a sheet of paper on her desk.)
Have you an order of business? (He turns aside.) Well, well, here we are without a quorum and I thought I was going to be late. (To MADDIE.) You’ll know, of course, that a quorum is a specified number of members of a committee whose presence—God bless them—is necessary for the valid transaction of business by that committee—got it? Good.
(CHAMBERLAIN opens the Daily Mirror to the pin-up page. MCTEAZLE helps MADDIE down the steps; her skirt comes away in his hand.)
Strewth!
(After the freeze MCTEAZLE tries to shove the skirt at MADDIE who has sat down primly behind her desk, but COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE enters so MCTEAZLE sits on the skirt.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Do we have a quorum?
CHAMBERLAIN: Hello, Cocklebury-Smythe.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: So glad you could come, Chamberlain. You know Miss Gotobed?
CHAMBERLAIN (over-reacts): No.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Mr. Chamberlain—Miss Gotobed.
CHAMBERLAIN: I meant I didn’t know her,
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Of course you don’t know her. All we need now is our Chairman. I wish he’d get his clogs on.
(The door opens and WITHENSHAW, the Chairman, enters. He is a Lancastrian. He also carries newspapers and a brief case.)
WITHENSHAW: There’s trouble in t’Mail.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Mill.
WITHENSHAW: Mail. (He throws the papers and his brief case on to the table.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Oh yes.
WITHENSHAW (at MADDIE): And who have we got here?
MADDIE: I’m the clerk. Miss Gotobed.
WITHENSHAW: And I’m Malcolm Withyou! (He laughs uproariously.) Malcolm Withyou!—’ee you’ve got to be quick—Malcolm Withenshaw, Chairman of Select Committee on Promiscuity in High Places. Have you got an order of business? (He snatches Chamberlain’s piece of paper off her desk.) ‘Forget Golden Goose, Selfridges——’
(MADDIE snatches the paper out of his hand and hands him in the same movement a sealed envelope from her bag.)
MADDIE: This is for you.
WITHENSHAW (generally): Before I saw bloody paper I was going to congratulate you all on a clean bill of health. You can’t have a committee washing dirty linen in the corridors of power unless every memb
er is above suspicion. (On which he produces from the envelope a large pair of Y-front pants which he immediately shoves back into the envelope.) The wheres and Y-fronts, the whys and wherefores of this Committee are clear to you all. Our presence here today is testimony to the trust the House has in us as individuals and that includes you Maddiemoiselle. (To MADDIE.) Though you have been completely unaware of it your private life has been under intense scrutiny by top man in Security Service, a man so senior that I can’t even tell you his name——
MADDIE: Fanshawe.
WITHENSHAW: Fanshawe—and you passed test. (He has been looking around for a place to put his pants, and decides on MADDIE’s desk drawer.) Indeed the fact that you’ve jumped over heads of many senior clerks indicates that you passed with flying knickers. (This slip of the tongue is because he has discovered the knickers in the drawer; he drops them back and slams the drawer.) So it is all the more unfortunate to find stuff in the press like following: Thank you Cockie.
(COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE reads from the Daily Mail.)
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: ‘On the day the Select Committee on Moral Standards in Public Life is due to reconvene I ask— was it wise for one of the members to be seen holding hands under the table with a staggeringly voluptuous, titian-haired green eyed beauty in a West End restaurant at the weekend? And if so, was it modest to choose the Coq d’Or?’
(Meanwhile, WITHENSHAW has finished scribbling a note.)
WITHENSHAW: Right. Bloody smart alec. Still, least said soonest mended. (He tosses the note, which is on white paper the size of an old-fashioned £5 note, on to MADDIE’s desk.) Now then, I think you have received prior copies of my draft report, and we’ll go through it paragraph by paragraph in the usual way——
MCTEAZLE: Excuse me. Are we now in session?
WITHENSHAW: What’s quorum Miss Gotobed?
MADDIE: Is it a specified number of——
CHAMBERLAIN (hurriedly): Four, Mr. Chairman.
WITHENSHAW: Then we’ll kick off. Get your pencil out, lass.
MADDIE: Do I have to write down what you say?
WITHENSHAW: I can see you know your way around these committees, Miss Gotobed. You do speed writing I suppose?
MADDIE: Yes, if I’m given enough time.
WITHENSHAW: That’s all right. You just tell us if we’re going too fast. Here’s a copy of my draft report, and appendix A, B, C, and D … (He is giving her these things out of his brief case, into which he puts the envelope containing his pants.) … so it’ll just be a matter of keeping a record of amendments, if any.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Excuse me, Withenshaw, but isn’t it rather unusual to have a report by a Select Committee before the Committee has had the advantage of considering the evidence?
WITHENSHAW: Yes, it is unusual, Mr. Cocklebury-Smythe, but this is an unusual situation. As you know sexual immorality unites all parties. This Committee isn’t here to play politics. You’ll have your chance with amendments, for which you can have all the time in the world. In fact the P.M. insists on it—he doesn’t want us to rush into print, he wants a thorough job which he can present to the House the day before the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, along with trade figures.
MCTEAZLE: Isn’t that going to cause rather a lot of flak in the 1922 Committee and the P.L.P.?
WITHENSHAW: Very likely, but by that time, I’m happy to say, I’m going to be well out of it in the Lords—life peerage for services to arts.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Services to the arts?
WITHENSHAW: I’ll have you bloody know Mrs. Withenshaw and I have personally donated the Botticelli-style painted ceiling in the Free Church Assembly Hall. I’ve bought and paid for more naked bums than you’ve had hot dinners.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: I’m glad to say I’ve had more hot dinners.
WITHENSHAW: I speak sub-cathedra of course—no one else knows except Mrs. Withenshaw, and I shouldn’t have told her—she’s taken to wearing white gloves up to elbows to greyhounds. Anyway, what the P.M. wants is a unanimous report, if possible declaring—(as if remembering)—that there is no evidence that Members have engaged in scandalous conduct above the national average, or alternatively that they may have done in isolated cases, but are we going to judge grown responsible men in this day and age by the standards of Mrs. Grundy—whoever she may be—is it that old bag from Chorleywood South?
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: But what’s the report based on if we aren’t going to call any witnesses?
WITHENSHAW: What witnesses do you want to call?
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Well … I personally wouldn’t wish to call any——
MCTEAZLE: Hear, hear!
CHAMBERLAIN: Absolutely!
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: I’ve no time for stool pigeons admittedly——
MCTEAZLE: Hear, hear!
CHAMBERLAIN: Absolutely!
WITHENSHAW: There aren’t any bloody witnesses. No one has seen anything. It’s all bloody innuendo to sell newspapers in slack period.
ALL: Hear, hear!
WITHENSHAW: What with all the giant killers knocked out of Cup, and Ceylon versus Bangladesh—I don’t call that a bloody test match—the papers naturally resort to sticking their noses into upper reaches of top drawers looking for hankie panties, etcetera….
ALL: Hear, hear!
WITHENSHAW: I tell you, if those bloody pandas had got stuck in and produced a cuddly black and white nipper for London Zoo, it wouldn’t be us in spotlight——
ALL: Hear, hear!
WITHENSHAW: Or Mark and Anne for that matter.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Steady on, Malcolm.
WITHENSHAW: I don’t mean it would be black and white.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Can we move on?
WITHENSHAW: I was just making the point that there’s nothing to witness just because a member of this Committee is so bowed down with the burden of representing his constituency, while trying to make a decent living in his spare time, that he has to take his—homework—to lunch in a West End restaurant.
ALL: Hear, hear!
CHAMBERLAIN: Or to dinner—pilloried for a beef stew in a modest eating house with a professional appointment, for all anyone knows a vicar’s daughter worried sick about the new motorway.
MCTEAZLE: Any cynic can make it look like a hole-in-the-corner affair in an out-of-the-way nook like the Coq d’Or quite probably is, many of these French places are——
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Nor was it a case of holding hands under the table.
ALL: Hear, hear!
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Probably she was passing him the money under the table, or vice versa.
MCTEAZLE: The table under the money——
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: —him passing her the money under the table—probably a financially embarrassed lobbyist for sexual equality taking an M.P. to a working dinner.
MCTEAZLE: Women’s lib——
WITHENSHAW: One of those American bits.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Quite possibly——
WITHENSHAW: These Americans, they get in everywhere.
COCKLEBURY-SMYTHE: Far too many of them about.
MCTEAZLE: Hear, hear!
CHAMBERLAIN: Absolutely!
WITHENSHAW (to MADDIE): Would you care to take my appendix out and pass it round—I’ve something of a reputation for dry humour, you know. Yes, I once took a train journey right across America …
(He pauses at the sight of MADDIE in her slip, MADDIE has picked up the sets of appendices and come out from behind her desk and taken two steps before remembering her state of undress, she pauses at the same moment, and then decides to continue. Big Ben starts chiming the three-quarter hour. MADDIE goes round the table placing documents in front of the first couple of places. Big Ben finishes chiming the three-quarter hour.)
… but that’s another story.
(The door opens to admit MRS. EBURY. All look at her as she speaks except MCTEAZLE who tries to hand MADDIE her skirt unnoticed. MADDIE misses this, as she is intent on passing out the rest of the appendices.)
MRS. EBURY: I’m sorry to be late, Malcolm.
WITHENSHAW: Come right in, Deborah—we’re just casting our eye over the media. You’re next to me, lass.
(MRS. EBURY hangs up her coat. She also is carrying newspapers and case. To get round the table she has to pass behind the blackboard, as does MADDIE who is making slightly heavy weather of sorting out appendices A, B, C, and D for each member. MRS. EBURY and MADDIE cross over behind the blackboard but do not emerge immediately. Meanwhile the CHAIRMAN has opened the leader page of The Times and has started reading aloud.)
WITHENSHAW: ‘Cherchez La Femme Fatale. It needs no Gibbon come from the grave to spell out the danger to good government of a moral vacuum at the centre of power. Even so, Rome did not fall in a day, and mutatis mutandis it is not yet a case of sauve qui peut for the government——’ —what is ail this?—‘Admittedly the silence hangs heavy in the House, no doubt on the principle of qui s’excuse s’accuse, but we expect the electorate to take in its stride cum grano salis stories that upwards of a hundred M.P.s are in flagrante delicto, still more that the demi-mondaine in most cases is a single and presumably exhausted Dubarry de nos jours——’ bloody ’ell.
(To MCTEAZLE who has picked up the Guardian.)
What does yours say?
MADDIE (only her legs visible behind the blackboard): Forget the Golden Carriage, the Cooking Pot and the Coq d’Or. Forget the Golden Carriage, the Watched Pot and the Coq d’Or. Forget the Golden Pot, Claridges and the Watched Cook …
(MADDIE’s speech is loud until MCTEAZLE interrupts with the Guardian, but continues softly until MCTEAZLE reaches ‘tedious, or at any rate tendentious …’ where it stops, to be heard again on MCTEAZLE’s ‘Quis custodiet …’ and finally stopping on WITHENSHAW’s ‘Information’.)
MCTEAZLE (reading from the Guardian): ‘Spécialités de la Maison. The House of Commons is no stranger to scandal or to farce but it usually manages to arrange its follies so as to keep the two separate. It would be tedious, or at any rate tendentious, to give a catalogue raisonné of the, at a Conservative estimate 63 Members of Parliament, and at a Labour estimate 114, of whom the homme moyen sensuel on the Clapham omnibus might well be asking, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”’