Matlock's System

by Reginald Hill

Matlock, with a cool wave to the onlookers, stepped into the launch which swept away up river.

  “It is not impossible that this incident as much as anything else turned the tide for Matlock,” said the voice. “It has been suggested that Matlock himself arranged it. Whatever the truth, it created a breathing space. Matlock’s next step was a mammoth statistical attack upon his opponents. The main burden of his arguments was that ...”

  The voice droned on, the pictures flickered by. Matlock neither saw nor heard. A voice in his head and a picture behind his eyes were much clearer, much closer.

  Population had outstripped production. The causes were partly inefficient management, partly a steadily increasing birthrate, but principally the rapidly decreasing mortality rate. The country was top-heavy. He was not rationing children, he was not denying the right to procreate. He was giving the old a term to their years; an equal term for rich and poor, great and small; he was offering what could be a great boon to mankind — the chance to know the moment of one’s end and the chance to meet it with dignity and serenity.

  He was proposing that every man, woman and child in the country should be fitted with a heart clock; a minute device, fixed in the main valve of the heart, which at the end of a determined number of years, would stop.

  Euthanasia had been legalized eight years earlier. It was now an accepted part of the nation’s life.

  The heart clock involved a kind of economic euthanasia.

  What a phrase! gibed Matlock bitterly to himself. How they had all liked it. Or nearly all.

  “Let us, as we have so often done in past centuries, let us lead the world to a new kind of freedom and prosperity. And let us show that we are aware that true freedom is only possible through voluntary restriction; and true prosperity is the fruit of democratic sacrifice.”

  His thought bitter and self-mocking, had joined in perfect timing with the voice, youthful and vibrant, from his face on the screen. He covered his ears and closed his eyes, careless of the eyes he knew were watching him.

  When he looked at the screen again, he was lying naked on a table and a knife was cutting into his chest.

  The film was well edited, the whole sequence here took only five minutes.

  This had been his final card, of course. This had been his greatest gamble.

  The Age Bill had not yet been voted on. Opposition throughout the country, though slackening off, was still considerable. And within the ranks of the Unirads themselves there was not enough certainty of support to guarantee the vote.

  So Matlock presented the most bizarre Party Political Broadcast ever. It consisted of live coverage of himself undergoing the first heart-clock operation. Recorded television surgery was a commonplace; open-heart surgery, heart transplants, these were as familiar as visits to the dentist had been in mid-century. But this was something new and had hitherto uncontemplated audience appeal. Ninety- eight per cent of the television sets in the country were tuned in to the operation that February night.

  The operation went smoothly, smartly. The programme ended with Matlock opening his eyes in the recovery room. Blinking in bewilderment at the camera for a second. Then with a faint smile saying into the microphone, “That’s all it is, ladies and gentlemen. I will bid you good-night now. I must get some sleep. I have a hard day in the House tomorrow.”

  His car had driven to Westminster the following morning between cheering crowds such as had not been seen since the crowning of the King.

  His reception in the Commons was not so unanimously applaudatory. The Leader of the Opposition congratulated him on his recovery, then enquired what part of Matlock’s anatomy they could hope to see dissected in the next episode.

  When the laughter had died away, it was Carswell, not Matlock, who stood up to reply. His speech was short, but it stunned the Opposition, and a great many members of the Government too. This was too important a matter for a Government with such a small majority to push through, Carswell said. (Cries of “hear, hear,” from the Opposition.) Therefore he thought it best that the people should themselves give the answer, and consequently he had formally requested the King to dissolve Parliament.

  There had been uproar, Matlock recalled. For a man who had been calling on the Government to resign since it came into being, the Leader of the Opposition looked remarkably displeased.

  The rest was history. This became the biggest single-issue election campaign ever. Matlock’s teams were superbly drilled. No one not wholly and publicly committed to the Age Bill was put forward as a Unirad candidate. The country, in love with the hero-figure of Matlock and readily reacting to the appeal to self-interest implicit in the Bill (for all those under sixty anyway), returned the Unirads to power with a majority so large that the Government’s side of Chamber could not seat all its members.

  On the screen appeared the film of that first re-assembling of Parliament. Matlock saw himself entering the House, heard the great roar of applause which greeted him, saw himself advancing to his place on the front bench with a slight deprecatory smile on his face. Then the film stopped and held his face there quite still, until suddenly it began to expand and spread out till it covered the whole wall. Till the pores of his skin pitted his face like the craters of the moon. Till only his mouth was visible, vast, canyon-like, but still holding that vilely modest smile.

  Then it stopped. And the lights went on.

  “Hello Matt,” said Browning from behind him. “Hope you’re enjoying the show?”

  He must have slipped in in the dark. He had certainly gone out earlier. Matlock wondered how long he had been back.

  “It has some historical interest,” he said in reply.

  “Yes, hasn’t it? Great days, those. Great days. I think there are a lot of Unirads today, the young ones especially, who don’t realize how much we owe you.”

  “Perhaps you’d like me to do a lecture tour?”

  Browning roared with laughter.

  “No, Matt. I think we’ll leave it to the historians eh? Look Matt, what I’ve been trying to do with this film is to remind you of what you once were. It was you who created the modem Unirad Party, Matt. You attack us and slander us, but we’re your creation. When I was a lad in my teens and just getting interested in politics, it was you whom I took as my model. You were held up to me as the greatest thing that had happened to this country since Churchill.”

  “So we have had a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, Prime Minister. With the heat full on. It’s been very interesting. I think I must go now.”

  Browning put on his mock-penitent look.

  “I’m sorry about the heat. One of the Psychi boys suggested it. Said it would lower your resistance. Bloody tom-fool idea it sounded to me. I know the only way to destroy your resistance is by reason, Matt, boy.”

  Matlock again was almost taken aback by Browning’s frankness; then he shook his head and sighed heavily, a trifle histrionically.

  “You were right, Prime Minister, we don’t meet often enough nowadays. I find myself at times tottering on the brink of trusting you.”

  “Oh you can, Matt. You can. You must. Look, I’ll be frank. We’re in a spot of bother. Nothing really. Just a bit of shoaly water. But till we get over it I’d like you back in the Government. You can be sitting in the Cabinet tomorrow. It’ll take three weeks to get you elected, though. We can’t hurry the next by-election. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a safe seat. They’re all safe seats since you got us going, eh?”

  Matlock found himself joining in the man’s laughter. There didn’t seem anything else to do somehow. Browning stopped first and Matlock found himself laughing alone. The sound seemed thin and reedy beside the echoes of Browning’s deep-throated guffaws.

  “So you’ll do it?” said Browning.

  “No,” said Matlock. “But I’ll stop till the end of the show. You’ve got me that interested.”

  “That’s a start. What are your terms?”

  “What’s the hurry? Indeed, why do you want me at a
ll? I find it flattering, but it encourages me to oppose you rather than support you. I must be more successful than I thought.”

  “I thought you might argue like that, Matt. Don’t fool yourself. Here’s the truth. We’re in pretty deep, Matt. I’ve been to the Swiss more than once in the last five years. I’ve got to go again. But they want reassurances. They want evidence of good faith. They want all kinds of things. One of them is a cut in the E.O.L. A drastic cut.”

  Matlock began to understand. He had suspected the country was mortgaged up to the hilt with the Swiss but was horrified to learn that they were in a position to be able to command an Expectation of Life cut. Outside influence on the E.O.L. was a possibility he had always strenuously denied when he was in office. But so many other reassurances he had given had proved false in his own day that he forced himself not to feel indignant at this.

  For many years now the Age Rate had been the outward and visible sign of the state of the country’s economy. He had never intended this, but somehow it had come about. In a good year when the economy could support a heavy load at the top, the Age Rate remained high, 84, 85 years perhaps. During the great boom of the previous decade it had twice topped ninety. But the last few years had seen a frightening decline, till at 76, the country had the lowest E.O.L. in Europe (only Switzerland was not now a heart-clock economy).

  Now it was to come down still further. Browning went on speaking.

  “We’ll have to cut it. We can’t afford not to. It’ll be in the Budget, of course. I’d like you beside me when I present that Budget, Matt.”

  “How big’s the cut?”

  Browning grinned and laid a finger by his nose.

  “Now that’d be telling. But big, Matt.”

  “It can’t be too big. You’re getting a bit near the Bible Barrier.”

  As he uttered the words, he heard again briefly his own young voice sententiously proclaiming. “Three score years and ten we are promised in the Good Book. And three score years and ten we shall have whatever happens. But more than that, I promise you, much more. Eighty, ninety, eventually one hundred years can be ours if we put our house in order now.”

  Thus the Bible Barrier had been born and though it was mentioned nowhere in the Act itself, the concept was one of peculiar force.

  “Look, Matt. Even if we drop just a year, it’s a year too much for you. You can’t afford a year at your age. But come back in out of the cold and you can have another quarter of a century. You’re in great trim, I can see that. And we’ve got drugs that’ll keep you that way.”

  “I’ve never heard of any.”

  “For God’s sake, Matt, be your age, if you’ll forgive the phrase. What’s the point of releasing new drugs when the E.O.L. is seventy-six? But once in the House nothing can touch you. It’s Sanctuary, Matt. You should know. You built the bloody cathedral, eh?”

  Yes, thought Matlock, I built the whole hideous edifice. Not that the House had taken much persuading to agree that M.P.s should be outside the scope of the Act on the grounds that considerations of one’s own age should not be allowed to become a factor in the way an M.P. voted on age cuts.

  “I’ll think it over,” said Matlock and turned to the door. I really will think it over, he thought. I must think it over to discover why he is really offering me this job. There can surely be no real danger to him in this Budget. He’ll get the vote — Jesus, he has a majority of hundreds and there’s no election for two and a half years. In any case, he has the electoral system sewn up tight, the police and the army are in his pocket.

  Why has he offered me this deal?

  “I’ll think it over,” he repeated.

  “No, Matt,” said Browning. “Don’t think. You might think yourself to a wrong answer. What’s holding you back?”

  “It’s a big step,” said Matlock lightly. “Turning my back on twenty-five years and publicly reversing all my beliefs.”

  “You did it once before, Matt,” said Browning with a trace of a sneer. “Look.”

  He raised his index finger. The lights dimmed but did not go out, the poro-screen shrank to its normal size and the film began to race through. The voice was a mere gabble but Matlock needed no voice to interpret the ludicrously rapid scenes which unwound before him. He saw the Age Bill being put into effect, saw himself talking, talking, always talking, the lower jaw rattling up and down at an ever increasing speed till the whole thing became a blur. When the film finally decelerated to a viewable pace, he was still there but he was no longer talking. He was sitting with his head between his hands, listening.

  The voice which settled out of the high-pitched swirl was his wife’s. Edna.

  Dead now for eighteen years.

  “You can’t do it, Matt. You can’t. It’ll finish you. It’ll be the end of father. But you can’t destroy the Party. That’s too strong now, because of you. But it will never forget, never forgive. The Party will destroy you.”

  Matlock raised his head on the screen.

  I look older than I do now, thought the spectator Matlock.

  “I must do it, Edna, even if I am destroyed. It’s gone sour, all sour. This is not what I meant, not what I meant at all. I must resign and speak out.”

  “Speak out! What chance do you think you’ll get to speak out? Do you imagine they don’t know?”

  “You forget that I am still ‘they’, my dear.”

  Edna looked down at him.

  “You are still rather touchingly naive, Matt.”

  She was right, thought Matlock. I knew soon enough she was right. But dear God! that they could have been filming this!

  “Enough?” asked Browning.

  He nodded.

  The film froze on his face again, this time lined with weariness and despair. The lights came on.

  “I couldn’t do it twice, Prime Minister. Not that.”

  “You once would have said you could not have done it once.”

  “But I had reasons then that you cannot offer me now. Faith, conscience, a desire for atonement.”

  “You had believed in what you did. Could you not believe again?”

  Matlock shook his head wearily.

  “I did an evil and believed in it. But worst, I convinced others. I used no force, no coercion. I made them believe. That’s what I have been trying to undo ever since. You can give me no reasons for stopping doing that.”

  Browning’s voice dropped to what in another man would have been a histrionic softness.

  “Oh, but I can, Matt. I cannot persuade you to join me, perhaps. But I can give you reasons to stop opposing me.”

  “Are these threats?”

  “Only if the law is a threat. Your law, Matt. You are getting old. You must be tempted to try to escape the law. Perhaps even now you are arranging to go for Op. But it won’t do, Matt. It won’t do. You must keep your nose clean. And that means you mustn’t be an accessory to any breakage of the Age Law. And that’s what you are, every time you preach one of your little sermons, so my legal boys tell me. You encourage evasion. Do you deny it?”

  Matlock laughed.

  “I say nothing, Prime Minister. Except that in the end you have disappointed me. You threaten my freedom. Perhaps my life. I value both, more than you can know. But they are not negotiable in the long run. I will not bargain with them.”

  “I expected no less,” replied Browning. “Indeed, Matt, I expected a bit more, but that’s beside the point. No, the real thing is that you seem to have forgotten what your Law says about the penalties for evasion, or attempted evasion of the E.O.L.”

  “Hardly. The penalty shall be loss of years and any superfluity in the penalty shall be carried out, at the discretion of the court, on the wife and or children of the offender.”

  “And you could lose up to one hundred years, Matt. You can afford only six. That leaves a possible superfluity of ninety-four to share out. A stem measure. It had to be stem, remember, to make this law for all people, all classes.”

  “I rememb
er saying it, Prime Minister. It was a foolish thing to say, but at least you cannot turn it to use against me. My wife has been dead for eighteen years. We had no children. It is me you must deal with. Alone. Good day.”

  Matlock was almost through the door this time when Browning’s voice made him turn again.

  “Look at the screen, Matt. Just once more.”

  The entire wall was filled with the picture. Projected on it were two documents. The lights in the room were too bright to let the writing on them be immediately legible.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Browning. “Can’t you see properly?”

  He waved his hand and the lights dimmed once more.

  “There we are. Can you see now?”

  Matlock could see, but he could not understand. The blood seemed to be bubbling through the veins at the side of his forehead and a line of sweat arched across his upper lip.

  The top document was a certificate of marriage, dated three years earlier, between himself and Lizzie Armstrong, Spinster.

  The lower one was a birth-certificate dated forty years previously. The parents were named as Matthew Matlock and Edna Carswell. The child was a boy. Named Ernst.

  The documents faded and were replaced by two faces. Lizzie and Ernst, smiling out at him.

  “They can afford about seventy between them. That’s what we’re bargaining about, Matt,” said Browning. “Off you go now. Just think things over. See you soon.”

  Matlock stumbled through the door.

  3

  By the time he had reached the lift, Matlock had recovered sufficiently to remember the reporters whose attention he had so efficiently drawn to his arrival. They would be waiting below, eager for some meat to clothe the bones they had already given their editors to gnaw.

  Matlock had no desire to be faced with a barrage of questions at this moment. His mind was still disorganized by Browning’s threat. He knew that this particular section of the Age Law had not been acted upon more than a dozen times since it was passed, and then only in cases when the man concerned had got clean away. The first three times, the escapee had returned and the family had been released. People had begun to call it a bluff.