Goodfellowe MP

by Michael Dobbs

  The finger hovered indecisively. ‘Mind you, that really is a wonderful vintage you’ve …’ And the rest was lost in a tremulous moan which began to soar like the song of a nightingale through the night sky, rising almost beyond reach before it came slowly to rest and finally died.

  They lay silently on the bed for several minutes, looking down the river to the bonfire of ambitions which was the City, ablaze with electric flames that reflected from the dark and turbid waters of the Thames.

  She crooked her neck. ‘Blast. You’ve ruined my nail.’

  She held up her finger. The nail was bitten clean through.

  Corsa took it as a compliment. ‘I’ll buy you a weekend at a health farm so they can repair it for you.’

  ‘A weekend? You could buy the entire bloody farm using nothing but the small change from the money you’re asking for.’

  He rolled back from her, examining. ‘Somehow, of all people, I never expected you to mix business and pleasure.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘What the hell was the last half-hour?’

  ‘You exaggerate. Eighteen minutes.’

  ‘So that was the voice of complaint I was just listening to?’

  She pulled the sheet protectively around her body and examined the bitten nail once more. ‘I’m here for two reasons, Freddy. The first is because I met an actress in my aerobics class a few weeks ago – can’t remember her name. Don’t suppose you can either. But she knows you well enough.’ She rolled over so that she was facing him, running a finger up the line of his navel, slowly, all the way to his lips. Her voice smouldered like sulphur. ‘She told me you made her feel useful. I thought to myself, anyone who could make that foolish young girl feel of any use whatsoever must have a talent.’

  ‘Was it … Anthea?’

  ‘No. Can’t remember, but definitely not Anthea.’

  ‘And the second reason?’

  ‘Because this afternoon I and the other members of the consortium agreed to your absurd plan. If the newspaper titles come up, we’ll help you buy them.’

  ‘And Granite?’

  ‘Not alone, not on its own, but as part of the package. When the others are available, we’ll take a chunk of Granite as well.’

  His whole body shivered. His breathing quickened as though being transported once again into ecstasy, except this was much, much better. She had brought him everything. The money to save Granite, to paper over all his shortcuts and save his fraudulent hide. But even more, to make him the biggest player on the field. The game was on, and he had just rewritten all the rules. The bonfires of the City seemed to burn with a renewed brightness; he hoped his bankers were sitting right in the middle of the flames.

  She tried to hide her smile as she watched his passions flare once more. ‘It’s all business, you see. I’m here in your bed simply to reassure myself that – how can I put it?’ Her finger retraced the path down from his lips, more slowly. ‘To make sure you could deliver on your promises.’

  ‘And your verdict?’

  ‘Anthea – whoever – was a silly girl. Too easily convinced.’ He could feel her broken nail digging into him. ‘I’m a natural sceptic, Freddy. I’d like to come to a more mature conclusion. So do you think you could run that past me again? Do that to me just one more time?’

  He withdrew the sheet that she had wrapped tightly around her. ‘With that amount of money, my love, I could do it to the whole world.’

  Goodfellowe had been sitting for the first five minutes of the morning examining the usual stack of daily drudgery that Mickey had left on his desk. Which way up to start, he wondered? Top to bottom, maybe dealing with the important matters first? But that would only make progress seem ineffably slow. Or from the bottom up, getting through the first three inches of dross at a pace and glowing in the illusion that he was doing his job? The phone butted through his contemplation of duty.

  ‘I’ve got a lady from The Kremlin on the line,’ Mickey announced cheerily. ‘Won’t tell me what it’s about. Says it’s personal.’

  Memories of torn credit-card vouchers buzzed around his head like angry wasps. ‘Did you tell her I was in?’ he demanded.

  ‘Did I tell Justin that last night’s overtime was worked out at the Hippodrome?’

  He paused. What would the caller be after? No, it couldn’t be money. Not yet. Not even his cheques bounced that quickly. Caught between the whirlpool of his curiosity and the rock represented by his constituents’ correspondence, he decided to swim for it. Mickey put her through.

  ‘Mr Goodfellowe, this is Elizabeth de Vries.’

  He recognized the voice. Now he thought about it, the tones were delightfully modulated and just a little breathy. Almost like an actress. And the theatrical name. But a touch too experienced still to be waiting on table, he thought.

  ‘I’m sorry about the credit card,’ he started in, ‘some silly computer blunder …’

  ‘No, it has nothing to do with that. It’s … I hope you’ll forgive me, I may be about to make a fool of myself, but you left a tip with the cloakroom attendant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which turned out to be your suit button.’

  Mercy, was there no end to the humiliation?

  ‘It’s just that I know how difficult suit buttons are to replace, and I thought it was worth calling to let you know where to find it.’

  ‘That is … a generous thought,’ he muttered, wincing.

  ‘If you’re coming in for lunch or dinner soon …’

  Anguish. ‘My diary’s rather full at the moment.’

  ‘Never mind. You seemed to enjoy your glass of wine and we’re having a wine-tasting in a couple of days. Perhaps you could spare half an hour?’

  ‘What sort of wine?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Does, actually.’ At last Goodfellowe had discovered an opportunity to fight back. ‘You see, as a backbencher I get precious little chance to indulge my principles, so when the opportunity arises I tend to get very stubborn. Cling to them like a drowning man.’ A good analogy, he thought. How often he had felt he was being swept along by irresistible currents and disappearing slowly from sight. ‘In my humble view the Common Agricultural Policy as directed by our masters in Brussels is little short of a Criminal Rip-off Agricultural Policy. So I sulk, stamp my foot. And I won’t drink any of its wine. Silly, I know, but we politicians have to find some way of exercising our consciences, otherwise they get rather rusty.’

  Her laughter was like a brisk shower. He felt refreshed.

  ‘You’re in luck, Mr Goodfellowe. I often think my wine supplier did special duty for the KGB. Has the best vodka in town, and seems to have discovered where all the good Eastern European vintages are being hoarded. Georgian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, even a little Czech. Would that meet with your principles?’

  ‘Superbly.’

  ‘Well, bring your principles along and we’ll see if we can reunite them with your button.’

  He sighed. ‘Sadly, and after much patient resistance, I’m afraid that suit is no longer for this world. With or without its button. My daughter was most insistent on the matter.’

  ‘We women can be such bullies.’

  ‘Somehow they tend to run my life for me. Only fair, I suppose, while I rush around the backbenches saving the world from extinction.’

  More infectious laughter. ‘So, Mr Goodfellowe, we girls at The Kremlin shall expect you here at the wine-tasting. And no excuses.’

  ‘Can I have the name of the manager or owner? I’d like to thank him.’

  ‘Shame on you. And still more shame.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What happened to those principles of yours? The rust seems to have rotted them right through.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I was only asking after …’

  ‘Mr Goodfellowe,’ she chided gently, he thought in a slightly Irish brogue, ‘I am the owner.’

  The motorcycle being ridden by the Chancellor of
the Exchequer had wandered off line. With a desperate flick of the machine he tried to negotiate it back onto the firm pavement but the tyres were already scrabbling in the rubble of the roadside, their grip gone. He panicked, his limbs froze and he failed to release the throttle. Fool. Into oblivion at full speed – thus he had lived his entire life. Hopelessly out of control, he was drawn towards the crash barrier at the side of the long left-hand turn into Glen Helen, striking it with a fearsome blow which sent the machine spinning wildly into the stone wall on the other side of the road. Beside him the Transport Secretary let forth a whoop of triumph, celebrating by putting his own bike into an outrageous wheelie.

  At about the same desperate moment the Opposition’s Spokesman for Defence Affairs had finally got the hang of the joystick and put in a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree barrel roll in his attempt to lock onto the enemy F-14s that were scavenging through the clouds ahead of him. Another flick of the controls, a bead of sweat, then a sighting dead ahead. At last the target indicator blinked hungrily. Contact! He fired the tracer, his thumb squeezed tight until the nail went white, and the first Tomcat went spinning out of sight. Then a second. Easy! It was as he was lining up on the third that a wire brush of warning scraped up his spine. Damn. They had locked onto him, too. He had no time for fear, only regret. Their first missile blew out his starboard engine and then the cockpit screen in front of him shattered. The machine began a slow turning dive, like a duck shot from the sky, and for a moment he was held upside down, his glasses slipping. Then a searing orange-red flash surrounded him as he exploded.

  Game over.

  The basement of Hamley’s, the best-stocked toyshop in the world, reverberated with the sounds of fun – the roars of motor-mania, the noise of failure and despair, the blast of air hockey tables, all but drowned beneath milk-curdling screams of interplanetary aliens being cut to ribbons with lasers as flashing signs warned of ‘strong animated violence’.

  ‘Just like the House!’ exulted the Opposition Defence Spokesman as he climbed out of the 360-GLOC Master Blaster cockpit, brushing down his suit as though it were full of shards. ‘Except in this place you get a chance to come back from the dead.’

  ‘Give me Questions any time,’ the Chancellor threw at him, easing himself off his TT superbike, still glassy-eyed with excitement as he reached for another sip of champagne. ‘You need to be no older than fourteen for this lot.’

  ‘As he said, just like the bloody House,’ the Transport Secretary agreed, as parliamentary friend and foe set off in search of more Sega sensation.

  The party was being thrown to mark the retirement of Rupert Cramp, the Westminster lobby’s most senior correspondent, and the ardent teenagers who normally set up camp in Hamley’s basement had been replaced by an equally ardent but entirely less agile contingent of statesmen, editors, scholars, wits, pundits and politicians, all of whom seemed to have left their middle-age reserve in the cloakroom and were now intent on fulfilling some of their wildest dreams. Mostly these focused on the machines, although a growing number were turning their attentions to the tastefully clad hostesses as alcohol began to dull the dexterity if not the drive. In the midst of the crowd ‘Duke’ Frobisher, Westminster’s most barbed sketchwriter, stood locked in battle with the Creature from the Swamp; an entire cohort of politicians from all parties cheered to a man as their tormentor became impaled upon the creature’s tusks and, accompanied by suitably gruesome stereophonic sound effects, slowly sank beneath the mire.

  Goodfellowe was enjoying the revelry – and the champagne, which was green and dry and plucked from vines six thousand miles away from France on the floor of the Napa Valley. He hadn’t been invited but Lillicrap had and insisted that Goodfellowe accompany him, practically dragging him by the arm from the Smoking Room. Goodfellowe used to get invited to such gatherings as a matter of course; nowadays his only consolation was in the amount of postage he saved on the replies. Yesterday’s Man. He couldn’t deny it hurt, like running his soul up against a cheese grater, leaving little scraps of self-esteem behind, not just because of the loss of attentions and courtesies but because he was now stripped of power, the opportunity to make a difference. And if he couldn’t make a difference, what was he doing in Parliament?

  He dismissed such naive self-indulgence from his mind as Lillicrap guided him over to a table where, through a plateful of lobster tails and quails’ eggs, a woman was expounding on the wickedness of discrimination between the sexes, ‘You have to agree, don’t you?’ she turned on the newcomers.

  ‘I’m a Whip,’ Lillicrap objected, recognizing a powder-room Puritan and waving his hands in the manner of a referee stopping play. ‘We’re not allowed opinions.’

  The woman cast eyes of inquisition at Goodfellowe.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a case well worth dwelling upon,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of fish roe.

  ‘Dwelling-schmelling!’ the woman accused, seeking succour in her glass. ‘You male politicians are about as much use as ringlets on a rabbi. Useless decoration.’

  ‘And I do hope you’re enjoying the party,’ Goodfellowe added, irked, but his coolness only appeared to encourage her.

  ‘Fancy phrases, fine promises – anything so long as it wins you votes and doesn’t involve you in actually doing anything.’

  Goodfellowe considered ignoring her. It would have been the most tactful alternative, but Goodfellowe’s schooling had been badly fragmented and he always assumed he’d missed the relevant lesson on tact. Instead he decided to tell her what he thought.

  ‘That is silly.’

  ‘Silly?’ Her voice rose an octave, summoning her wits to battle. ‘Tell me, what do you politicians do in that place?’

  ‘We try to help.’

  ‘Help who? Not people like me you don’t.’

  ‘I’m a politician, not a consultant psychiatrist.’

  Her finger, crimson of nail and encrusted in gold, was jabbing at his heart. ‘You’re a public servant. We pay you to do what we tell you, not to be offensive.’

  ‘No. You put me there to do what I promised you I would do. No more. You’ve bought my time in that palace of entertainments, not my mind.’

  ‘You’re sent there to do what we tell you.’

  ‘No. Otherwise you might as well simply sit in front of the television screen and decide every issue by pushing buttons. Trial by Teletext. Sentence by Sky. Do away with Government and let Gallup take over.’

  She threw back her head in contempt. ‘That’s nothing more than an argument for arrogance. Ignoring the people.’

  ‘And that, since you insist on pressing the point in the middle of what was otherwise an entirely social occasion, is an argument for indulging yourself every time you wake up with a migraine or discover your husband’s just employed a secretary twenty years younger than you are.’ He paused. ‘Or maybe thirty.’

  ‘Are you deliberately trying to be impertinent? Is this how you treat women?’

  ‘When I came to sit and enjoy my drink I thought you were trying to tell us there shouldn’t be any difference. Or have I persuaded you otherwise?’

  ‘God, you men are so bloody arrogant. And you’ll never get my vote again.’

  ‘A fact which I suspect will come as a considerable relief to us both. Now, since other people have come here to enjoy themselves I suggest that one of us leaves. Which is it to be?’

  ‘Damn pity,’ Lillicrap intervened. ‘We were all enjoying that.’ Others around the table agreed, chortling their encouragement. The woman suddenly realized she had become a spectacle, grabbed her handbag and without another word left.

  ‘Sorry,’ Goodfellowe apologized. ‘Just occasionally I get fed up being the world’s punchbag.’

  ‘Don’t apologize when you clearly don’t mean a word of it.’

  A guest was extending his hand. Lillicrap effected the introductions. They shook.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you, Mr Corsa.’

  ‘Freddy, please. We’d all be
en trying to find some way of getting rid of the old crow. Should’ve known we’d need a shotgun.’

  And they whiled away many minutes enjoying the banter and the spectacle of grown Ministers making deliberate fools of themselves until Corsa glanced at his watch.

  ‘Come on. Allow me to blast apart your good standing on the machines just once before we go,’ Corsa encouraged. ‘What’s it to be? You choose. Super Vixens?’

  ‘Might be good practice for my constituency AGM,’ Goodfellowe pondered. ‘Better still, let’s try Alien Interlopers. Particularly if one’s wearing scarlet lipstick …’

  So they had sought out the machine, hustled the controls and spent several contented minutes dismembering toad-like holograms which were pursuing an astronaut.

  ‘Tell me – I’d appreciate your opinion. We’re thinking of taking on Wes Phibbs as a columnist. I know he’s fashionable, an item on all the chat shows, but is he a good idea?’

  Goodfellowe hit another alien and edged himself ahead on the scoreboard. ‘Well, his parents were born in Trinidad and he’s impeccably politically correct, so perhaps that’s a good recommendation for a modern opinion-former. Doesn’t stop him being a shit.’

  Corsa sighed in disappointment. ‘That’s the lump in the custard: he’s so damned predictable. No freshness. What I’m looking for is someone who can do the sort of job you just did – getting past the sticky labels to the heart of a thing. Not covering it in second-hand sarcasm.’

  Green alien gore had momentarily washed across the screen, obliterating the view, which returned to show a final alien about to pounce upon the unfortunate NASA spaceman. With a stream of tracer Corsa cut the creature in two.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Goodfellowe offered. ‘The press wins. As always.’

  ‘And insists on having the final word,’ Corsa mused, using one last burst to obliterate the astronaut, too. ‘No prisoners.’ He turned purposefully to his partner. ‘I don’t suppose you would care to become a columnist.’

  ‘I’m a politician.’

  ‘Which puts you in touch with matters of the moment. You’ve the experience of a Minister, and an approach that is highly individual. Some would say bloody cantankerous. Sounds about right. For a columnist.’