Goodfellowe MP

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘You don’t know that I can write. I don’t know that I can write,’ Goodfellowe argued, feeling flattered and clearly turning the matter over in his mind.

  ‘If the writing needs a little polishing, I have a menagerie of journalists who can write. Trouble is, all too few of them can think. That’s the job spec.’

  It was growing late, they began to drift upstairs to the exit.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, Mother.’

  Goodfellowe’s curiosity dissolved in distress. They had emerged to discover Regent Street awash in a sudden cloudburst.

  ‘I came by bike,’ Goodfellowe explained ruefully. ‘Collapsible. Bit like the Government’s majority.’ He gazed at the malevolent skies. ‘By the time I make it back to Westminster I shall have come to resemble the Alien Interloper rather more closely.’

  ‘I suppose it’s up to the Herald to rescue the Government yet again,’ Corsa insisted, hailing his chauffeur. ‘Just shove your wheels in the boot. Plenty of room. Consider it a bribe.’

  Like a magic carpet the Rolls-Royce appeared before them, the bicycle was ceremoniously settled behind and Goodfellowe found himself travelling back to the House in splendour. They were accompanied by an early butterfly which had been beaten into confusion by the rain and had sought refuge inside the car. It perched on the back seat, drying its wings.

  ‘Look, Tom, consider my offer. It would give you a great platform to air your views, and we’d pay you well. Say fifteen hundred a time? Entirely informal, whenever you felt the muse strike. But if you wanted I could guarantee a spot once a month. Doesn’t even need to be political. We could ask you to do a few travel pieces – you know, our intrepid columnist reports from the slopes of Saas-Fee, or why not bugger off to the beaches of Bali? The more exotic the location, the more our readers like it. We pick up all the bills. And take someone if you want, your daughter, a friend, whoever. It’s all the same to us, makes no real difference to the cost. What do you think?’

  Twelve times fifteen hundred equalled … Goodfellowe found that his breathing had become very shallow. Perhaps he wasn’t in the back of a Rolls, perhaps this was simply another exotic mind machine parked in Hamley’s basement and Bali was nothing but a riot of virtual reality. But Sega-world was always sunny, never dripping with rain.

  ‘Do you believe in Fate?’ Goodfellowe asked. ‘Things being drawn together?’

  ‘Don’t think I do. Fate, fortune, luck – you make it yourself.’

  ‘Most of the religions of the Orient believe in Fate, often through the conjunction of stars and planets or the intervention of any number of gods.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I have the feeling that Fate might have brought us together this evening, Freddy.’

  ‘Who knows? Does that mean you’ll think about the offer?’

  Nearly twenty thousand a year? Free holidays with Sam? An end to his nightmares, just for voicing his views? ‘Yes, I’ll think about it. Very carefully.’

  They had drawn up beside Westminster Hall. Goodfellowe climbed out, marvelling still at the change of fortune that had suddenly appeared in his life. This was really how the other half lived, tossing around tens of thousands as if they scarcely mattered, because they didn’t. The chauffeur, who was wearing a far better suit than Goodfellowe, helped him extract his bicycle from the boot. He felt like throwing it away, hurling it back into that old world of problems and pressures which now was all but gone. He could be his own man. Independence!

  ‘Goodbye, Tom.’

  They shook hands.

  Thank you, Freddy.’

  Goodfellowe watched as his new saviour drove away. Corsa looked round in the back seat to return the wave, offering almost a formal salute and a smile. The press man also noticed the butterfly, exercising its wings. He crushed it in one hand.

  Mickey had left his letters for signing and his messages in two orderly piles on his desk. Although she was young she had never let him down and he signed the letters without a second glance and, indeed, in many cases without a first glance. Impossible any other way. He received on average some two hundred letters every week, forty every working day and on days like this substantially more. Most were farmed out to government departments or ombudsmen or The Benefits Agency – yes, particularly The Benefits Agency – or a local authority office for reply. Mickey would provide a covering letter for him to sign, which might be his only contact with the problem. The letter he was signing now was in reply to a protest that the lawns in the local park were not being mowed as diligently as once they were. What did she except him to do, cut the bloody thing himself? He scribbled his signature impatiently. The next reply was to a regular complainant in which he explained that since she could still walk half a mile to her local betting shop he had no intention of supporting her application for disability benefit. Disability benefit? If it covered having to put up with pains in the backside he’d be a millionaire.

  Sixty-three letters were signed. Sixty-three constituents would know by the weekend that their Member of Parliament had personally scrutinized their problems and called the appropriate agency to account. Practically none would be left better off, an entire Swedish mountainside would have been stripped of its leaf cover, more methane produced than by a thousand over-stretched cattle, and democracy would have been done. Politics had become a spectator sport. Meanwhile Macedonia burned, Tanzania starved, China was imploding and Brussels regrettably wasn’t. He needed a drink.

  ‘Hello, Tom: I’m glad you could make it. But you’re a little early.’ Elizabeth de Vries was radiant in the subdued lighting of The Kremlin. ‘It’ll give us a chance to enjoy a glass ahead of the crowd.’

  He smiled in apology, wondering to himself why he’d rushed. Not just the wine, welcome as it was. Perhaps it was the unfinished business of the lunch with Sam, or simply the unique red-draped atmosphere. The basement restaurant glittered. Mirrors hung in heavy gilded frames and candlelight flickered across the polished Muscovite memorabilia – a bust of Lenin, a varnished chunk of the Berlin Wall, a plumed headpiece of the Imperial Guard. There was even a drilled-out and decommissioned AK-47 assault rifle set like an exclamation mark alongside a dark and brooding Orthodox triptych of immense depth – all remnants of an inspired trip Elizabeth had begun only hours after the Wall had come down. She had set off with her new divorce papers and a vintage but stubborn Ford Transit from which she had lived and shopped and almost starved for five weeks, returning with a concept for a new restaurant which eventually had come to life behind the oppressive grey brick walls of a basement in Marsham Street. Two earlier establishments on the site had appeared and fled in rapid succession, customers deterred from entering by the inauspicious exterior. Elizabeth de Vries, with a cheap lease and rich marketing skill, had turned its forbidding aspect to allure, flooding the place with vodka and high spirits and determined in its first two months of operation to ensure that everyone left laughing.

  ‘I failed,’ she admitted to Goodfellowe as they relaxed over a glass of Balkan Zilavka. ‘You didn’t enjoy your lunch here.’

  ‘You noticed.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t.’

  ‘My young daughter – well, not so young. You have children?’

  ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to be sorry in The Kremlin, Tom. I don’t permit it.’ Her eyes were the colour of Seville marmalade, round and impish – very direct, he thought, particularly for a woman – and she had raspberry-plum highlights in her dark hair which matched perfectly with the surroundings. He wondered how on his first visit he could have been so blind, for without doubt this was her world. She and The Kremlin were one, sparkling, tasteful, a hint of dark mystery and a generous helping of fun.

  The fun had continued throughout the wine-tasting. Sweet Tokays from the laval dust of Hungary, a Czech Sauvignon with more acid than enterprise, a powerful Georgian Naparevli red with w
hich they had cursed the bones of Stalin, and finally dessert wines full of peaches from the Crimea to toast the memory of the Light Brigade. He’d forgotten that he’d already had a session at Hamley’s; by the time he had finished he thought he could hear the tramp of Stalin’s commissars drawing up behind.

  ‘You didn’t finish your last lunch. Stay for dinner?’

  For a moment he was torn, taunted by a mixture of conflicting appetites and confused by hopes of financial independence as a top columnist, but he had learnt never to live off promises and he hadn’t yet written a word. ‘No thanks. Work to be done.’

  ‘But I insist,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘You’re not going to tell me you’d prefer to eat at another restaurant?’ She gesticulated theatrically like an abandoned maiden cursing the gods, then burst into laughter. ‘Please, Tom, be my guest, keep me company – on one condition, that you accept my apology for the inevitable interruptions I’ll get during the evening. We waitresses are a pretty frenetic bunch of girls.’

  ‘You’re mocking me.’

  ‘Only a little.’

  ‘It’s politicians who usually have to apologize, always dashing away in mid-course for votes. But this evening they’ve let us off the leash.’

  ‘Good. You’ll stay.’

  By the time he was ready to leave, Goodfellowe was thoroughly relaxed and a little drunk. With the encouragement of a fine wine whose origins the following day he could not even recall they had celebrated his new career of sand and snow, and indulged only a little his sadness at losing office. Over a final glass he had explained a few of his difficulties with Sam, and with yet another she had reassured him that teenage girls are genetically constructed to find cause, any cause, for retaliation against their parents. Her care and consideration exceeded by a perceptible distance the bounds of mere hospitality and for a moment he thought she might regard him as some sort of damaged dog, a charity case, but by then he was too numb to mind.

  ‘I think I may have to leave my bike behind,’ he suggested as she saw him to the door.

  ‘Having a man’s bike chained overnight to a girl’s railings could do terrible things for her reputation,’ Elizabeth teased. ‘Let’s fetch it inside. The bike can stay. You can’t.’

  Their farewells were exchanged in laughter and he made his way back home in an imprecise manner that came not solely through exhaustion but also exhilaration. He felt warmer, more relaxed and comforted than at any time he would normally allow himself to remember. He climbed the stone stairs, too tired to make himself any tea or fold his clothes, too elated to care, and threw himself into bed.

  The cold sheets struck him like an arctic bath. He knew Elizabeth had genuinely enjoyed his company, Sam had suggested as much. And with a flash of ice-green clarity he realized how much he had delighted in hers. It wasn’t the wine or the money or the meal that had left him feeling elated, it was Elizabeth. Capital E.

  He wanted more. But he couldn’t have it, wasn’t allowed. He was married. As he slipped between the sleepless sheets, he hated himself for it.

  Sam’s surroundings that evening had been considerably less elegant. The old Wooton Minster Methodist Hall had undergone many refurbishments during its hundred-and-thirty-year existence but the works had all been relatively superficial; when the chill autumn winds blew the door continued to rattle, the draughts still searched out the corners and ghosts continued to moan softly in the rafters, just as they had in grandma’s time. Yet it was clean and cheap and such things still mattered to the local organizations that used the hall, particularly to the Art Club, many of whose members were pensioners with a keen eye for value. They brought their own tea and coffee and biscuits and set the room to their own requirements, arranging the chairs to form a broad circle at the warmest end of the room. In the middle of the circle they placed a chair for the model over which was draped an old red crushed velvet blanket. The Club regularly attracted fifteen or so enthusiastic artists who were never late. Neither was Sam.

  Art had become a powerful motivator in Sam’s life. She possessed an ability to see below the surface of things, particularly of people, and capture their spirit on paper in a manner which defied the conventional limits of two dimensions. Her art gave her a very special dimension. At every turn in her life, with her father, at her school, she found only restrictions, rules that seemed intended to control her and deny her self-esteem and independence to the point where often she felt no better than an anonymous package placed upon the remorseless conveyor belt of teenage life. Yet through her art she found one outlet no one was able to control, which allowed her to express herself, to release the emotions which often she couldn’t even articulate but which somehow she was able to reveal most vividly on paper. It was more than a skill, it was also a safety valve, a means of raging against the night and of conjuring up the loves and sweetness for which she had no other outlet. Jenny Ashburton, her art teacher, had been quick to recognize both the talent and the torment. ‘You can’t draw if you don’t feel, Sam. Don’t be afraid of your emotions, the only thing you have to fear is hiding them.’

  So Sam had drawn, beyond the abilities of any other pupil and beyond the resources of the school’s formal art classes. With the encouragement of Mrs Ashburton, she had joined the local Art Club as its youngest and most enthusiastic member, finding adult friendships as well as drawing experiences she could not get within the walls of Werringham. Experiences like Thursday-evening life classes.

  Sam joined in the good-humoured bustle as the members grabbed their own pitches, setting up their easels and donkeys in their favoured positions, erecting the small spotlight which would look down upon the model’s chair and plugging in the fan heater, then setting out the crayons and colours. They had no instructor, couldn’t afford one, yet they found more than adequate compensation in the shared enthusiasm for their endeavours and the fact that here for the next two hours they would be able to escape the demands and monotony of the lives they left outside the door.

  They were ready. Except for one small detail. The model hadn’t arrived.

  Mrs Manley-Peys, the organizing secretary, looked at her watch. ‘She’s a new one,’ she announced; ‘perhaps she’s having trouble finding the hall.’

  ‘She only has to ask someone,’ Mr Frunz commented. ‘It’s the only hall for miles.’

  ‘Give her another five minutes,’ Miss Jardine offered optimistically.

  So they had given her five minutes. Then another five. Slowly, as they waited, the atmosphere began to drain away, the sense of fun and adventure turning to mild irritability. She wasn’t going to turn up.

  Mrs Manley-Peys drew back thin, irritated lips. ‘Such a pity. Can’t seem to rely on anybody nowadays. Thank goodness we didn’t pay her in advance.’ She pondered over the biscuit tin in which their evening subs had been placed. ‘I suppose we’d better give everyone their money back.’

  Expressions of disappointment came from all sides. They wanted the evening and the adventure of drawing, not their meagre subs returned.

  ‘Mrs Manley-Peys, how much do we pay the model?’ Sam enquired.

  ‘Quite generously, I think, in the circumstances. I know it can get a little draughty at times, but most of the models seem to truly enjoy it. Find it relaxing, almost therapeutic.’

  ‘Yes, but – how much?’

  ‘Twenty. Ten pounds for each hour. This is such a disappointment,’ she continued. ‘One or two evenings like this and you find club members beginning to drift away. Do you think she’s had a breakdown or something?’

  But Sam was no longer listening. Ten pounds an hour was almost four times as much as she was paid for sweating the evenings away at her local pizzeria. Twenty represented an entire weekend’s income. It was a world of confusing values. And she had the trip to France coming up for which she knew her father would give her no pocket money.

  ‘We’ve still got to pay for the hall,’ Mr Frunz was complaining, examining the biscuit tin. ‘A complete waste.’


  ‘No it’s not,’ Sam interrupted.

  ‘You want us to draw thin air, young lady?’

  ‘No need, Mr Frunz, you can draw me. I’ll be the model tonight.’

  FOUR

  The Easter recess spent at his home in Marshwood had been unnaturally quiet for Goodfellowe. No Sam. That meant no quarrels and brooding silences, to be sure, but also no opportunity to indulge in quiet moments of parental pride which made the pain worthwhile. He even lacked the customary contact with Beryl, something for which he shed no tears, but it caused him to wonder if she were up to something. She usually was.

  He rattled irrelevantly around the empty family home, during the day taking advantage of the clement weather to hack his way through the wildlife park that once had been his country garden – a pointless exercise, but it was good for the soul – and during the long evenings attempting to drown the emptiness by rereading favourite novels and turning the stereo volume up so that the windows rattled. It didn’t work, Mahler, Mozart, not even Manilow. As the light began to fade so did his mood of stoicism, soon to be undermined by alcohol. Self-pity began to take hold. Nights stretched before him like an empty desert where sleep was as elusive as rain, and he began to fear their arrival, knowing that being left on his own in the company of his emotions was dangerous. On Easter Day itself he found himself in Sammy’s room trying to make contact, to find some anchor for his feelings. He sat on the end of her bed with its familiar coverlet, surrounded by the posters of dolphins and pop stars that littered the walls and the cuddly toys crowding along the shelves, imagining he was telling her a bedtime story. He even started reading the first few lines of Black Beauty, out loud, before he choked. Black Beauty was six – no, eight years ago, a time of innocence. Before their world fell apart. The radio alarm stood blinking in rebuke on the bedside table; it hadn’t been reset in months, not since the last power cut. Sammy wasn’t here. He wasn’t making contact, only trawling through times past and lost like some hapless archaeologist. Tears fell – he’d rediscovered the need for crying – until they gathered on the tip of his chin and, drop by gentle drop, spattered across the pages of her book.