by Sue Townsend
Alexander said, “The Party Party.” He imagined the words as slogans on billboards and posters draped in streamers and balloons. It could give respectability to the vilified phrase ‘champagne socialist’. On the other hand, it was bollocking naff.
Malcolm Black gave a dismissive bark of a laugh. “The Party Party, so good they named it twice, eh.”
“It would certainly appeal to the young, don’t you think?” said Samuelson, who had demolished his roof and was now massaging each finger in turn.
Malcolm Black said, “I wouldn’t care to lead a party that felt it had to repeat two words in a two-word title. Bearing in mind the demographics of the future, in that we’re all going to live longer, maybe we should appeal to the elderly—my own preference is that we call ourselves Old Labour.” He looked around and waited for a response, but nobody met his eye. Each man was thinking about his own political future.
∨ Number Ten ∧
FOURTEEN
The Grimshaw was a former lunatic asylum that had been converted in 1987 into a character hotel. A group photograph of the last lunatics to live there before they were turned out to live in the community hung on a panelled wall in the majestic reception hall. A framed straitjacket provided another amusing touch.
The owner, Clive Bostock, stepped forward to greet Jack and the Prime Minister. He was wearing tweeds the colour of Oxford thick-cut marmalade. His greeting was so effusive, with handshakes so warm and so long, that both Jack and the Prime Minister wondered if this little man with a bushy grey moustache could be a close friend they had failed to recognise.
Mrs Daphne Bostock was equally delighted to see them; she appeared to be enthralled by the details of their journey and was apparently agog at Jack’s observation that they were lucky the rain had kept off.
Clive Bostock poured the guests a glass of sherry from a decanter kept on the reception desk. Jack was longing to get into their room and take his shoes off, but when he asked if he could register and proffered a credit card Bostock waved it away as though it was a stick of dynamite and said, “Good God, man, you don’t need to pay now, you’re our guest. Now, let me show you around the house and introduce you to the dear people who help us run the place.”
“We don’t like to differentiate between us and the staff,” said Daphne. “We’re just one big happy family.”
They were taken down a long corridor to the vast kitchen where half a dozen surly Eastern Europeans stopped their work to shake hands. Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw one of the workers make an obscene gesture behind Mrs Bostock’s back.
Mr Bostock talked without needing to draw breath. “When Daph and I first saw this place it was a mess, wasn’t it, Daph? Roof fallen in, brambles in the isolation cells, but we saw the possibilities. It had been a dream of ours to run a truly hospitable hotel, one where the guests could come and go as they pleased, could wander into the kitchen and help themselves to a bit of cheese and a chunk of fresh-baked bread, where meals were taken with the family, where guests could read the papers in our drawing room and watch the box with Daph. You won’t find a mini-bar in your room, no, none of that nonsense; if you fancy a tipple you come down and jolly well help yourself. We run an honesty bar, though we do ask you not to finish a bottle if you can help it, in consideration of the other guests.”
Jack’s heart sank; he glanced at the Prime Minister and noticed that, like Daphne Bostock, he had lipstick on his teeth.
“You won’t find a breakfast-menu card to hang outside your door like those anonymous chain hotels, either. Breakfast is taken in the kitchen. Most people opt for the continental, though, if you insist, a full English can be arranged—but we need to know the night before so that the cook can come in especially on the early bus. Some of our guests feel so at home here that they wash up after meals and take the dogs out. Most people make their own beds and whiz a lavatory brush round the bowl.”
Jack looked out of the window and saw in the distance a man mowing a lawn. He wondered if he was a paid employee or a paying guest.
They were shown to the Ophelia suite. On the way along the first-floor corridor they had passed the King George III suite and rooms named after famous lunatics of the past.
The suite comprised three small, interconnecting rooms. One of the rooms, a large walk-in closet, still had bars at the window. Rolls of pink and green rose- and chintz-patterned drapes had been swagged around the window and bed. Hideous articles of furniture stood defeatedly against the walls.
A depression settled on the Prime Minister and he felt his smile begin to slip. He fought to keep it in place and went into the bathroom to see how he was doing. He knew that if his smile went he would be lost, swamped by childhood unhappiness and adult anxieties. The smile kept him together and formed a protective ring around him, like the toothpaste advertisement had promised.
Jack said, “Why don’t you have a soak in the bath with some of that bubble stuff you nicked from The Falls?”
The Prime Minister had emptied the basket of aromatherapy oils and herbal extracts and other toiletries into the bottom of his travel bag. Jack had watched him at the time and thought that he’d never before seen anybody quite so excited by these small gifts.
Jack turned the bath taps on but nothing came out. He waited impatiently for a few moments, then a thin stream of lukewarm water trickled out of the hot tap.
The Prime Minister waited nearby with a little bottle of Lavender for Stress bath oil. He yearned for a long soak in a scented bath now that Jack had mentioned it, and when it became obvious that he was not going to get it he blamed Jack. It was not fair to do so, that was clear, but Jack had made a sort of promise and had then sort of broken it.
In the violent row that followed, Jack shouted, “You can bloody well talk about broken promises—what about your bloody promises not to raise taxes?”
Other cruel things were said that both men almost immediately regretted. Jack was the first to apologise and said he would ring down to reception and complain to a Bostock. He dialled from the large institutional-looking phone by the bed. There were various extensions to choose from. He pressed the Reception button and waited; the phone rang but nobody answered. He tried other extensions, including one marked ‘Electro-convulsive Therapy’. An American voice answered: “Sissy Klugberg.”
“There’s no hot water in the Ophelia suite,” said Jack.
“We don’t gotten hot water either,” she answered.
Jack asked, “You’re a guest, are you?”
“Well, I guess so, but my husband’s been out there trimming the lawns almost since we gotten here, so…”
Jack interrupted: “Mrs Klugberg, do you have washing facilities in your room?”
“No, we don’t have a bath tub or a shower. We’re in the Napoleon room and Mrs Bostock explained that Napoleon didn’t allow Josephine to wash. I guess it’s some kinda reason…” Her voice trailed off as she once again tried to fathom Mrs Bostock’s explanation for the lack of any washing facilities. “Oh. Mrs Bostock reminded me that we had chosen to stay at a character hotel and that cold-water baths were responsible for forming the British character.”
Jack said he looked forward to meeting Sissy and her husband…
“Glade,” supplied Sissy.
Apparently a gong was going to be struck to inform guests that they should be dressing for dinner; another would be sounded when dinner was about to be served.
Once again Jack thought longingly of the Holiday Inn. He wanted to lie on the bed in his underpants eating the vegetarian choice from room service and watching CNN.
♦
Poppy Clare lay on her back in her cot and practised kicking with her fat right leg. Her gaze was fixed on a clockwork mobile which turned slowly above her and played the ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’; it had been a gift from the President and First Lady of the United States.
As each component of the mobile came into sight she stretched out her short arms in a spirited attempt to grab the cowb
oy boot, the Stetson, the oil rig, the heifer, the cactus, the star, the yellow rose and the big fat dollar sign.—
The clockwork mechanism would keep it turning for eleven minutes, then it would stop and Poppy would start to cry. She was learning that if she made a loud enough sound somebody would come into the room. The best person was her mother—she had the milk and the soft breasts and the warmth—but Estelle was good too. Estelle would pick her up and throw her in the air and would dance with her in the mirror and pretend to be her mother.
Su Lo was kind to her and she was the one who took her into the outside world and showed her the trees and allowed her to feel the wind and the sun on her face.
Daddy smelled nice but he held her too tight, as though he was afraid he might drop her and do her harm.
The mobile started to slow down, the notes of the music becoming more widely spaced, and Poppy knew it would stop soon. She began to whimper then grizzle, then she heard Su Lo say through the little speaker of the baby alarm next to the cot, “Hello, Poppy, I can hear you, Poppy. Mummy can’t feed you any more, Poppy; she is sick and her breast milk is full of medicine. So I am here in the kitchen, Poppy, making you a nice bottle of Cow & Gate. You will soon get used to it, Poppy.”
Poppy didn’t know what a bottle was—milk had come from only one source before: her mother. All she knew was that everybody in her world was kind.
The mobile stopped and Poppy became still and watched as the big fat dollar sign swung slowly to and fro above her head.
♦
The Prime Minister sat at the table which served as both dressing table and desk, and began to compose a poem called ‘Pamela’.
Who is Pamela, who is she?
He crossed it out when he realised that there was a famous poem with more or less the same construction.
He didn’t know why Pamela had come into his head at all. She lived near Bourton-on-the Water with her husband, Andrew, an unpleasant man who did something with dogs, but Edward hadn’t seen her in three years. When Edward had become Prime Minister his sister had sent a card of congratulations. On one side was a picture of a ferocious-looking Dobermann, and on the other she had written:
Dear Ed,
So you’re top dog now. Congratulations. Let’s make a bargain—you don’t talk about me and I won’t talk about you.
Love Pamela.
Jack said, “I’m sorry about this; we should have gone to a Holiday Inn.”
The Prime Minister smiled into the mirror and said, “The Bostocks are tremendous people and this is a tremendous place, everything is tremendous. I’m enjoying myself tremendously.”
Dinner was served in the converted laundry, now a dining room. Mr Bostock carved a gristly lump of meat and distributed pieces of it on cold plates to the guests.
The Prime Minister had dressed for dinner in his sequinned sheath dress and looked almost womanly in the dull light given out by the low-energy bulbs in the wall lamps.
The surly kitchen assistants came and went with various dishes of tepid root vegetables. A heavy stone-ground loaf weighed down a wooden board.
Glade Klugberg, an American man in a tartan cashmere jumper, said, “This is just great.”
His wife, Sissy, said, “We have nothing like this in the States.”
Jack asked, “Will there be hot water in the morning?”
Clive Bostock said, “That depends on the vagaries of our somewhat eccentric boiler, I’m afraid, Mr Sprat.”
Jack swallowed a morsel of the filthy food and said, “At 260 quid a night I don’t expect there to be vagaries, I expect there to be hot water.”
Silence fell at the table until Daphne Bostock said, “This isn’t the Holiday Inn, Mr Sprat.”
Jack answered, “I know, every Holiday Inn I’ve stayed in had hot water twenty-four hours, round the clock.”
Clive Bostock gave a little laugh and said, “Really, Mr Sprat, one might almost think you had a fetish about hot water.”
The Prime Minister looked down at the table found by the Bostocks in the old occupational-therapy department. It had been used for basket-making and other soothing handicrafts. He hated this sort of conflict. He could cope with the unpleasantness in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, abstractions that didn’t touch him personally, but right now in the Bostocks’ dining room he felt that he should mediate in some way. Bostock reminded him uncomfortably of his father. “Personally I think that hot water is a bit, y’know, overrated.”
“Quite,” said Clive Bostock. “At my school only the nancy boys whined for hot water!”
It suddenly became imperative to Jack that he beat Bostock over this hot-water issue. He felt as if he and Bostock were at Wimbledon on the centre court, so he hit the ball back to Bostock, saying, “The toughest man I ever knew was Mitch Bates, a captain in the commandos; he used to take a hot bath twice a day.”
Bostock hovered on the base line for a split second then rushed to the net and sliced the ball back. “I believe it’s been scientifically proven that too much exposure to hot water weakens the sperm. Excuse me, ladies.”
Jack caught the ball and smashed it back. “Mitch Bates has got twelve children, eight boys and four girls, all of them over six foot tall.”
Bostock failed to get to the ball in time and Jack muttered to himself, “Game, set and match.”
Daphne Bostock left the table and went out into the kitchen, where she could be heard shouting at the foreigners that they must make coffee and take it into the drawing room.
The Prime Minister was refusing to speak to Jack or to look him in the eye. He had been ridiculously pedantic about the hot water. What was the matter with him? The Bostocks were the salt of the earth.
The Bostocks led everyone into the drawing room. Jack noticed a pair of Clive’s socks lying on the carpet next to the empty fireplace. Daphne’s embroidery lay on the sofa, and photographs of gormless-looking Bostock children and grandchildren stood around in silver frames. A huge television was showing Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
“Sit down and make yourselves comfy—you’re friends of the family, remember?”
Jack noticed that the Bostocks took the most comfortable chairs and that, when the coffee was brought in by a mournful-looking woman called Eva, Clive Bostock poured a cup for himself and his wife first.
Jack infuriated Clive Bostock by answering all of Chris Tarrant’s questions correctly and winning a million pounds. The Americans were impressed. Glade said, “Hey, what are you, some kinda genius, fella?”
Jack was equally surprised. Until tonight he hadn’t realised that he knew that panama hats were originally made in Ecuador.
“Jack is a product of Britain’s comprehensive-school system,” said the Prime Minister.
Daphne Bostock wrinkled her nose as if the word ‘comprehensive’ was a bad smell and was in the room.
Jack said, “Edwina, if you think they’re so great why don’t you send your own children to a comprehensive?”
“We scrimped and saved to send our children, Mark and Gillian, to a good private school,” said Mrs Bostock.
Jack took a sip of coffee and said, “It’s years since I’ve tasted acorn coffee.”
Bostock took this as a compliment. Jack motioned to the Prime Minister that it was time they went to bed. As they were climbing the stairs they heard Clive Bostock’s voice booming out telling Glade and Sissy that Robin Hood had invented acorn coffee in Sherwood Forest in the eleventh century.
When they got to their room Jack rang Norma. She said she couldn’t talk for long because she’d got company, and in the background Jack could hear young voices and the occasional burst of laughter. She told Jack that James was like a son to her and Jack felt a surge of jealousy. Norma said her dinner was getting cold, so Jack let her go and put the phone down after reminding Norma that she could ring his mobile at any time. She said, “Thanks, but I don’t suppose I’ll bother.”
Jack had wanted his mother to ask him how he was; he sometimes missed such sma
ll attentions. He took the zip-up shoe-cleaning kit from his bag and cleaned his brogues and the Prime Minister’s high heels. He asked the Prime Minister what he’d like to do tomorrow.
“I want to see Pam,” the Prime Minister said. MI5 had warned him when he became leader of the Opposition that his sister was a ‘cause for concern’. He wanted to know why. Suddenly he wanted to talk to her about their mother.
∨ Number Ten ∧
FIFTEEN
Norma had a houseful again. “It’s like the United Nations in here,” she said to James, looking around at the boys and girls sitting in the front room eating chips off white polystyrene trays. Norma had asked James to fetch her a bit of cod, but James had come back with a piece of battered trout and told her that cod was now a luxury fish that only the rich ate.
“The world’s gone bleedin’ mad!” she said.
She had buttered a sliced loaf and cut the bread nicely and placed the halves on a dinner plate decorated with a silver doily. She had offered the plate around and the boys and girls had made chip sandwiches. They had all said please’ and ‘thank you’ and most of them had made use of the kitchen towel she had provided in place of serviettes.
James teased her and said that his young friends were nesbits who’d been dragged up and didn’t appreciate such refinements, but Norma could tell that he liked these things himself.
There were a few things that Norma didn’t like about these evenings, and one of them was all the swearing. It was fuck this, fuck that, them fuckers and fucking everything else. One girl had said ‘motherfucker’ in Norma’s presence and she had rounded on her angrily and shouted, “You foul-mouthed little bleeder. Mother is a special word; it’s mothers what bring life into this world!”
James had made the girl apologise. Norma was proud of him; all the boys and girls seemed to be a little bit afraid of him and did more or less what he told them to do. He was a natural leader. He had explained to Norma that since the youth club had closed on the estate the local boys and girls had nowhere to go in the evenings. It was much better for everyone concerned if they came to Norma’s and smoked a bit of dope, instead of walking the streets and getting into trouble.