The tannoy crackled and whined. Nick was at the far end of the field, dawdling behind a group of local lads, and pretending to admire a stall of primitive local pottery. The mayoress made a very dull speech, but it rode on the goodwill of the audience, and on the expectation that it would be over much sooner than it was. Families rambled with a half-attentive air across the grass. Her chain could be seen, the glint of glasses, and her bright-blue, white-bowed prime-ministerial dress, on the low platform; and Gerald, standing behind, with beaming impatience. She said something unfortunate about not being able to get a celebrity to open the proceedings this summer, but at least the person they had got was on time—"unlike a certain star of the airwaves last year!" After this Gerald leapt up to the mike as if seizing the controls of a bus from a drunk.
There was applause, not easy to measure, lost in the open air; as well as one or two shouts and klaxon-squawks to remind Gerald that though he had a large majority there were still constituents unsedated by council-house sales and tax cuts. "I liked it when they had Derek Nimmo," a woman said to Nick. Nick knew what she meant, he absorbed people's gibes about Gerald without protest, but still felt the old secret pride at knowing him. He gazed around, followed the Carter boy's amazing arse with his eyes, smiled loyally at Gerald's jokes, and sensed in them a mixture of piety and condescension rather like his own. He felt so decadent here. And how could you honestly expect Gerald, at the door of the Cabinet, in the Lady's favour, an amusing speaker from the floor of the House, to bother very much for an audience of squalling kids and deaf pensioners? Catherine said Gerald despised his constituents. "If only you didn't have to be MP for somewhere," she said, "Gerald would be completely happy. You know he loathes Barwick, don't you." Nick had laughed at this, but wondered if his "dear ma and pa" were in fact exempt from the loathing. "This is a classic English day," Gerald was saying now, "and a classic English scene." And Nick appealed against Catherine's judgement. Surely something else is happening, beneath the cheerful imposture: it can't help mattering to him—as he speaks these platitudes he comes to think they're fine words after all, he's caught up on a wave of rhetoric and self-esteem. He told a joke about a Frenchman on a cycling holiday that went down well; and as he wound up, at just the right time, he managed to suggest that far from being a rich businessman who came down from London to loathe them he was in fact the spirit of Barwick, the Pickwick of Barwick, opening the fete to them as if it were his own house. He cut the tape, which demarcated nothing, in a decisive lunge: the sliding snap of the shears could be heard over the microphone.
After this Gerald was led off on a quasi-royal tour of the fete, his style hampered by the mayoress, who fell naturally into the role of consort. Nick wanted to keep an eye on who was going into the Gents, but felt the pull of the London party too, and strolled over to join Penny. "That went well," he said.
"Gerald was excellent, of course," said Penny. "We're not very pleased with the mayoress." They watched the mayoress now, at the jam stall, looking at the prices as if they were trying to cheat her, and might need beating down; at which Gerald, who didn't know the shop price of anything except champagne and haircuts, impulsively bought two jars of marmalade for a fiver and posed with them for the local press. "Hold them up a bit, sir!"—and Gerald, always reassured by the attendance of photographers, cupped' them in front of him, almost lewdly, until Penny came forward, silent agent of a wish, and took them from him; he held on to them for a moment as he passed them over and murmured, "Je dois me separer de cette femme commune."
At the tombola he bought ten tickets, and stood around waiting for the draw. The prizes were bottles, of all kinds, from HP Sauce to Johnnie Walker. He hadn't dressed for the country at all, and his keynote blue shirt with white collar and red tie, and his double-breasted pinstripe suit, stood out as a dash of Westminster among the shirtsleeves and jeans and cheap cotton frocks. He nodded and smiled at a woman beside him and said, "Are you having a good day?"
"Mustn't grumble," said the woman. "I'm after that bottle of cherry brandy."
"Jolly good—well, good luck. I don't suppose I'll win anything."
"I don't suppose you need to, do you?"
"All right, Mr Fedden, sir!" said the tombola man.
"Hello! Nice to see you . . . " said Gerald, which was his politician's way of covering the possibility that they'd met before.
"Here we go, then! HP Sauce, I expect, for you, isn't it, sir?"
"You never know your luck," said Gerald—and then, as the hexagonal drum was cranked round, "Something for everybody! All shall have prizes!"
"Ah, we've heard that before," said a man in gold-rimmed glasses who evidently fell into the category of "smart-alec socialist," the sort who asked questions full of uncheckable statistics.
"Nice to see you too," Gerald said, turning his attention to the numbers.
"Hah!" said the man.
The cherry-brandy lady won a half-bottle of Mira Mart gin, and laughed, and blushed violently, as if she'd already drunk it and disgraced herself. Lemonade, then Guinness, went next. Then Gerald won a bottle of Lambrusco. "Ah, splendid . . ." he said, and laughed facetiously.
"I understand you like a drop of wine, sir," said the tombola man, handing it over.
"Absolutely!" said Gerald.
"Don't keep it," whispered Penny, just beside him.
"Mmm . . . ?"
"One doesn't keep the prize. Doesn't look good . . ."
"Looks bloody awful," Gerald muttered; then boomed considerately, "I don't feel I should snatch victory from my own constituents." Shy cheers were sounded. "Barbara—can I persuade you . . . ?"
The lady mayor seemed to register at least three insults in this proposal: to her status, to her taste, and to her well-advertised abstinence. Nick had a hunch too that she wasn't called Barbara. Wasn't she Brenda Nelson? The bottle lay for a moment in Gerald's hands, as if tendered by a mocking sommelier. Then he passed it hastily back to the trestle table. "Give someone else a treat," he said, with a nod.
Still, the feeling that he ought to be allowed to win something had clearly taken hold of him. Seeing his chance, craning round as if he'd lost someone, he struck out by himself through the crowds. Penny trotted patiently after him, clutching the marmalade, and then Nick, some way behind the wake of laughter and agitation that followed Gerald's passage.
The sport of welly-whanging was unknown in the Surrey of Gerald's youth, as it was of course in contemporary Notting Hill; the only wellies he ever touched in middle life were the green ones unhoused from the basement passage for winter weekends with country friends. But at Barwick, which still had a regular livestock market and loose straw blowing in the street, the welly, black, leaden-soled, loose on the heel, was an unembarrassed fact, and whanging it a popular pastime. Gerald approached the flimsy archway made of two poles and a banner, beneath which a white chalk crease had been drawn. "Put me in for a go!" he said. He had the expression of a good sport, since he was new to the game, but a glint of steel showed through.
"That's 25p a whang, sir, or five for a pound."
"Ooh, give us a quid's worth," said Gerald, in a special plummy voice he used for slang. He groped busily in his pockets, but he'd spent all his change already. He got out his wallet and was hesitantly offering a £20 note when Penny stepped forward and put a pound coin on the table. "Ah, splendid . . . " said Gerald, observing a couple of teenage boys who weren't making an effort—the boot plonked to earth a few feet in front of them. "OK . . . !"
He took the boot and weighed it in his hand. People gathered round, since it was something of an event, their MP, in his bespoke pinstripe and red tie, clutching an old Wellington boot and about to hurl it through the air. "Know how to whang it, then, Gerald?" said a local, perhaps kindly. Gerald frowned, as though to say that instruction could hardly be necessary. He'd seen the ineffectual lob of the boys. He took his first shot from the chest, in muddled imitation perhaps of a darts-player or shot-putter, the sole to the fore. But he ha
d underestimated the weight of the thing, and it landed between the first two lines. "You've got to really whang it," said a sturdy but anxious-looking woman, "you know . . ."—and she made a big arcing gesture. The boot was handed back to him by a little boy and he tried again, with a barely amused smile, as if to say that taking advice from working-class women in headscarves and curlers was all part of being their MP. He dutifully imitated her windmilling gesture, but perhaps because of the restriction imposed at the top of the arc by his tightly tailored jacket, he let go of the boot in a twirling spin—it turned over two or three times in the air before thudding to the grass. "Now that's a bit better," someone murmured "Now you're getting there!" Another man called out hectically, "Up the Conservatives!" Nick realized with a soft shock that there was a lot of goodwill for Gerald among the crowd, as well as the common sense of delight at seeing a famous person perform even the simplest task; and Gerald seemed to draw on this for his third attempt. He unbuttoned his jacket, an action which itself was greeted with approval, and sent the welly in a vigorous underarm lob, still wastefully high, but landing beyond the twenty-yard mark. There was applause, and varied advice, as to where to hold the boot, at the top or halfway down or at the heel, and Gerald obligingly tried out the different grips. The fourth go was as wildly wrong as a return off the edge of the racket in tennis. There was some exasperation among the onlookers, again mixed in with a kind of solicitude, and a very ironic voice, which turned out to be that of the smart-alec socialist, said, "That's all right, you have to be prepared to make a fool of yourself." For his final shot, with a sharp snuffle as he let go, Gerald sent the missile in a long low arc, and it landed and bounced wobblingly aside in the uncalibrated zone beyond twenty-five yards. The boy ran in and stuck a blue golf tee at the point of contact. There was applause, and pictures were taken by the press and the public. "I hope I've won a prize," Gerald said.
"Ah, you won't know yet, Gerald," said a helpful local. It was an extension perhaps of the bogus camaraderie of election time, the blind forging of friendships, that constituents felt free to call their MP by his Christian name, and in Gerald's face a momentary coldness was covered by a kind of bashfulness, bogus or not, at being a public property, the people's friend.
"Mr Trevor," murmured Penny at his elbow. "Septic tank."
"Hullo, Trevor," said Gerald, which made him sound like the gardener.
"Five o'clock," Mr Trevor said. "That's when we'll know: one that's thrown the farthest wins the pig." And he pointed to a small pen, previously hidden by the crowd, in which a Gloucester Old Spot was nosing through a pile of cabbage stalks.
"Goodness . . ." said Gerald, laughing uneasily, as if he'd been shown a python in a tank.
"Breakfast, dinner and tea for a month!" said Mr Trevor.
"Yes, indeed . . . Though we don't actually eat pork," Gerald said, and he was turning to move on when he saw the man in gold-rimmed glasses approaching the oche and weighing the gumboot knowingly in his hand.
"Ah, Cecil'll show you a thing or two!" shouted out the woman in curlers, who maybe wasn't Gerald's friend after all—you never knew with these people. Cecil was slight, but wiry and determined, and everything he did he did with a thin smile. Gerald waited to see what happened, and Nick and Penny closed in and tried to talk to him about something else. "I bet he knows some trick," said Gerald, "what . . . ?"
Cecil's trick was to take a short run-up, and then with a complete revolution of the arm to send the welly flying as if to a waiting batsman—it was a dropper, the boot descending steeply to a spot a yard beyond Gerald's final mark; the boy ran out and pressed in a red golf tee. Then Cecil had another trick, which was to throw it underarm, lofting it not too high, and bringing it down short of the first shot, but still beyond the blue tee. He had a grasp of the weight and direction of the thing, the trajectory, no mid-air wavering or tumbling. He refined and varied these methods, and with his last go went a good three yards over his own record. Then, wiping his hands, his smile twitchily controlled, he walked over and stood not next to but near Gerald. "Ah, shame, but there you are," said Mr Trevor. "Still, if you've no use for the animal —"
Gerald said breezily, "Oh, damn the animal," and looked from Penny to Nick, and then to the bristlingly insouciant figure of Cecil. He began to remove his jacket, with tiny quick head-shakings, his colour rising, making a joke of his own temperament, frowning and smirking at once. "I feel that can't be allowed to pass without a firm rejoinder," he said, in his humorous but meaningful debating tone. There were cheers, and also a few whistles, as his jacket came off and blue braces, dark sweat-blooms, were revealed: a sense, depending on how you looked at it, that Gerald was being a terrific sport or that he was making a fool of himself, as Cecil had said. Penny, always vigilant, took his jacket with an eyebrow-flicker of caution, but enough of a smile to be publicly supportive. Then she had to search in her bag for another pound coin.
"So you've won a pig!" Nick's mother said, bringing Gerald through into the sitting room at Linnells. "Goodness . . ."
"I know . . . " said Gerald. He still looked a bit flushed from the effort, in need of a shower perhaps, hair smeared back, a bit barmy still with adrenalin. "It went to five rounds but I got him in the end. I won convincingly." Dot Guest glanced about the densely furnished room, gestured at one seat after another, and seemed to feel that the house was too small altogether for Gerald. He kicked against things, he was untamed, it was almost as if the pig had come barging in after him. He went to the window at the back and said, "What a charming view. You're virtually in the country here, aren't you."
Courteously, and very timidly, clearing a space on a side table, Dot murmured, "Yes . . . we are . . . as good as . . ." and then looked up gratefully as Don came in with gin-and-tonics on a silver tray. Gerald had entirely forgotten about the field.
"Well, what a day, who'd have thought it," he said: "welly-whanging: another string to my bow." And he flung himself down in Don's armchair as if he lived there, just to put them at their ease. "Thanks so much, Don"— reaching up for his drink. "I feel I've earned this."
"Where is the pig?" Nick's father said.
"Oh, I've given it to the hospital. One doesn't keep the prize, obviously, on these occasions. Good health!"
Nick watched them all take refuge in their first sip. He felt ashamed of the smallness of the drinks, and the way his father had made them in the kitchen and brought them in like a treat. His parents looked at Gerald proudly but nervously. They were so small and neat, almost childlike, and Gerald was so glowing and sprawling and larger than local life. Don was wearing a bright red bow tie. When he was little Nick had revered his father's bow ties, the conjuror's trick of their knotting, the aesthetic contrasts and implications of the different colours and patterns—he'd had keen favourites, and almost a horror of one or two, he had lived in the daily drama of those strips of paisley silk and spotted terylene, so superior to the kipper ties of other dads. But now he was made uneasy by the scarlet twist below the trim white beard; he thought his father looked a bit of a twit.
Dot said, "We're lucky you had time to come and see us. I know you must be terribly busy. And you're about to go away, aren't you?" It was one of her "professional" worries, all parts of the great worry of London itself, along with fainting Guardsmen and the tedium of being in The Mousetrap, as to how MPs coped with their massive workloads; it was something Nick had been asked to find out when he moved in. His conclusion, that Gerald didn't do the work at all, but relied on briefings by hard-working secretaries and assistants, was considered cynical and therefore untrue by his mother.
Gerald said, "Yes, we're off on Monday," and gave a great shrug of relief. Nick could see him, bored and suggestible, start brooding at once on the superior pleasures of the manoir.
"I wonder how you fit it all in," Dot said, "all the reading you must have to do. It worries me—Nick says I'm silly . . . You probably never sleep, do you, I don't see how you could! That's what they say about . . .
the Lady, isn't it?"
Nick had inculcated his parents with Gerald's form the Lady, but was embarrassed to hear them use it in front of him. He seemed to take it as a tribute, however, both to her and to himself. "What, four hours a night?" he said, with an admiring chuckle. "Yes, but the PM's a phenomenon—terrifying energy! I'm a mere mortal, I need my beauty sleep, I'm not ashamed to say."
"She looks beautiful without any sleep, then," said Dot piously, and Don nodded his agreement, too shy, as yet, to ask the question that burned in them both: what was she like?
The Line of Beauty Page 27