Goodfellowe MP

by Michael Dobbs

  His shoulders heaved. ‘I’ve lost her.’

  Miss Rennie examined him carefully. To her eyes he looked ragged, almost second-hand, like something pushed to the back of the shelf and long forgotten, but there could be little mistaking the genuine mournfulness that now spread across him. His arms were clutched about himself, his breathing was rapid and shallow, the dark eyes, so expressive, flickered like a meteor shower that was burning itself out. He was a man of very little hope, which troubled Miss Rennie greatly. She was the proud grand-daughter of a crofter, to whom hope was life, and it was dying within this man. ‘Perhaps you should come with me, Mr Goodfellowe,’ she suggested, her tone softening. She led the way into the school, up a staircase whose rail was polished dark by the passage of a thousand young hands and through the fire doors of institutional corridors that brought them to a distant wing of the building unknown to Goodfellowe. They came to a room with a large bay window in which stood six beds. ‘Samantha’s dormitory,’ Miss Rennie explained, leading him over to the bed which stood nearest the window. The coldest in winter, the brightest in summer. Extremes. Much like Sam. Beside the bed there was little except for a bookshelf, a locker and a small wooden wardrobe with three drawers beneath it. Miss Rennie kneeled to open the bottom drawer.

  ‘I found it this morning as I was looking for clues to Samantha’s whereabouts,’ she said, withdrawing a battered black tin a little larger than a shoe box. It was – had been – Elinor’s, a simple hideaway for her most sentimental pieces which she had kept under the bed. It had disappeared some time ago, when she became ill, and Goodfellowe had assumed Elinor had simply forgotten about it or thrown it out, like so much of the rest of her life. Now it was back. He sat on the bed and opened the lid.

  Inside he found memories. Stevie’s bronze St Christopher. A much-handled pink envelope in which was a letter, probably the last, written to Sam by her mother. There was a bracelet he had given to Sam two Christmases ago. And photographs of her with two boys, young men really, neither of whom he recognized. But most of the box was filled with cuttings from newspapers and magazines which had one thing in common – Goodfellowe. They started some five years previously while he was still a rising Minister and tracked almost every turn of his career since then. If career it could be described. It was noticeable how few items were included for the last two years.

  ‘Apparently at the end of every week she collects the newspapers from the Library and cuts out every item which has any mention of you.’

  ‘I had no idea she was even interested.’ There was no disguising the tremor in his voice.

  ‘She takes very great pride in what you do.’

  He spread out the most recent cuttings on the bed cover. Small items from parliamentary reports. A photograph of him dedicating a new maternity ward. His last election address. A letter he’d had published in The Times. The drink-drive case, of course. And the front page of the Sunday Herald with the photograph of Jya-Yu. It didn’t amount to very much, recorded here for posterity.

  ‘Some of the other girls can be cruel. She’s even got into a few fights defending you.’

  ‘Fighting? For me? But I’m the one she’s always fighting with.’ The words caught at the back of his throat.

  ‘For a sixteen-year-old, love scarcely equates with unquestioning obedience.’

  ‘I seem to have let her down rather badly. There’s so much of her life at school I don’t really understand.’

  The headmistress sighed. ‘It’s a tremendous pity, Mr Goodfellowe, that you seem able to appear at our school only when there is trouble …’

  EIGHT

  As the taxi drove him back to London Goodfellowe felt much like a comet that had disappeared around the far side of the sun. Obliterated. Cast into impenetrable darkness. The fire gone. Without Sam he could not fight, without Sam there seemed no reason, nothing to fight for. She was the last thing that truly mattered in his life; now she, too, had walked away from him, just like so many others. Like Elizabeth. Like Elinor, even. And as his own father had done. Memories of his father returned to haunt him, as they always did when the ebb was at its lowest. Goodfellowe’s father had not been born to wealth, but he had found it, or rather it had found him, during the shortages that gripped the country in the aftermath of the war. He had been a small-time black marketeer in Yeovil, always finding the petrol to drive up to London with a van full of fresh farm food produce, and back again to Somerset with the batteries, tools and nylons needed by the local farmers and their daughters. At war’s end he had accumulated a little cash, which he used to buy up surplus military supplies left behind in great quantity by the Americans as they hurried home. This surplus was sold off in job lots, whole warehousefuls, always cheaply and usually in a hurry. Goodfellowe Senior often had little precise idea of what he had bought but at such knock-down prices he didn’t have a care. The deals would always pay their way, even as scrap.

  One fresh spring morning in 1946 he was woken by an insistent pounding at his door. Outside he found a US Air Force general and three full colonels, and for a moment he thought he might be under arrest, the consequence of one of his many deals too far, but instead of waving arrest warrants they produced a chequebook. There had been a problem, they explained. American factories were turning to peace-time production and a sudden and quite desperate shortage had developed of Mustang engine spares. They had sold him a warehouseful. Could they buy them back? Please?

  The deal made Goodfellowe a rich man and the proceeds, for once entirely legitimately obtained, had transformed his life. In the aftermath of war such things as manor houses, green rolling acres, even Bentleys, were cheap, and he had been able to buy his way into West Country society, though not without incensing the newly impoverished aristocracy. In the end, however, cash spoke louder than ancestral escutcheons. And life had been good. Goodfellowe had married, son Thomas had been sent away when he was old enough to one of the finest provincial schools, and the family had attempted to ignore the many whispers of jealousy and to fulfil their assumed roles amongst the Somerset landed gentry. Goodfellowe sat on the committees of many local charitable endeavours while Mrs Goodfellowe busied herself with bazaars and flower-arranging at the church, and although she could still sense the lingering traces of resentment she remained steadfast in her confidence that time would wear away the last of the barriers. Until, that is, Mr Goodfellowe was found to have ‘borrowed’ a large sum of money from one of his charities to finance another of his business deals. He always maintained that it was no more than a loan and that he intended to pay it back, every penny, and was still protesting his good intentions when they sent him down for five years. It was justice not solely for the crime, local society gloated, but for the family’s effrontery in usurping the proper order of things. The car went, so did the house along with its many trappings. They couldn’t pay Thomas’s school fees, and the school made it clear they had never truly wanted ‘his type’ around. They gave him less than an hour’s notice to pack his trunk. In full view of the other schoolboys he had dragged his belongings out across the gravel of the courtyard to where his uncle was waiting in a small Austin van to drive him away, never to return. More than thirty years later he could still remember every step of that tortured walk to the van, and his final look back at the school he had loved, to see every window crammed with the staring, pitiless faces of his schoolmates. The humiliations piled upon a fifteen-year-old boy had inevitably left their scars, made him cautious about both fortune and friendship. Good training for a political life. But they had also left him with resolve. His humiliations were the reason he had spent his life trying to reclaim the honour of the Goodfellowes. They were also the reason he had fought so hard to keep Sam at the very best of schools. He had failed in both.

  Yet, inexorably, comets reappear. As the miles passed in silence towards London and the friction of his memories grew all too fierce, the innate Goodfellowe stubbornness that had always been both his strength and his folly began to reassert
itself. What was the point of stopping the fight at the point where he had lost everything and had nothing more to lose? And should he let others mock him, as they had mocked his father? Was he simply to shuffle away with his head bowed like a fifteen-year-old schoolboy dragging his life behind him? No, not then, and not now. Not Goodfellowe.

  ‘Back to Parliament Square?’ the driver enquired as they came off the motorway.

  ‘Granite Towers,’ Goodfellowe growled. The comet was set on collision course.

  Yet Corsa wasn’t at the newspaper office. He was at the Foundation, Goodfellowe was told – in the penthouse, as it turned out. Goodfellowe had intentions of staging a dramatic, sense-stunning entrance, but the idea led only to frustration, foiled by the computerized security lock on the lift. Corsa kept him waiting for twenty minutes, deliberately, until eventually a flunky escorted him up in the glass-sided lift and, as they stepped into the penthouse, directed him to the balcony overlooking the Thames. The sun was glorious early July but a sea wind was blowing up the estuary, ruffling Corsa’s hair as he turned. He seemed relaxed, in shirtsleeves, no tie.

  ‘Tom! Delighted to see you again. And I’m so glad we were able to carry something good about you this morning. A fine story. You came out of it particularly well.’

  That smile again, the eruption of teeth, like the welcome of a cobra. But the eyes remained dissecting tools. Corsa refrained from offering a handshake.

  Goodfellowe began slowly. ‘There are no limits, no rules, in your game. No part of my life or the lives of those I love that is allowed to remain untouched by you. Nothing that lies beyond your appetites. Or, it seems, your grasp.’

  Corsa turned to look down the river towards Canary Wharf, which was sparkling like a Roman candle in the sunlight. ‘I thought politicians welcomed coverage. Most of them come crawling to me on their knees for a favourable mention. You’d be surprised how pathetic some of them can get.’

  ‘I shall fight you in every way I can.’ It was said almost serenely, as though to emphasize that this was no idle threat, but Corsa responded with passion.

  ‘Don’t. Don’t try and fight me, Tom. You won’t win, you can’t. Haven’t you realized that yet? You don’t run things any more, and you know you’ll get no help from your friends. That’s if you have any left. Surprising how fast friendships fall away in politics, isn’t it? Particularly with a gentle push from the media.’

  ‘Division. Destruction. Is that all you see?’

  ‘That’s all that sells newspapers. Tits and trouble, that’s where the money is.’ Corsa sighed patronizingly, as though dealing with a recalcitrant relative. ‘I hope you haven’t come to give me a moral lecture?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand, even get close.’

  Corsa seemed lashed by Goodfellowe’s evident contempt. His expression creased with anger, an expression that for once was not merely for effect. Somehow Goodfellowe’s words – or was it Goodfellowe himself, the man’s stubbornness, his petulant refusal to be like all the others? – had an unsettling effect upon the proprietor. His control slipped. ‘Don’t you, bloody politician, set yourself up as being so superior. Don’t you dare. The whole lot of you are of no more moral consequence than a shoal of fish. You chase the current, mouths open, constantly changing your position, your lives torn between emotions of greed and fear. Swallow the other bastard before he swallows you. Parliament has the moral sensibilities of a pool of piranha. Except you don’t have the teeth.’

  ‘And you are any better?’

  He shook his head in vigorous denial, struggling to regain his composure. ‘I never suggested that. I’m a press man, I let my editors do the moralizing. And when they begin to irritate me, I fire them. No, I never suggested we were any better. But we do have the teeth.’

  ‘And friends.’

  ‘Yes, we have many friends. Honourable, dishonourable, quite a few Right Honourables too, in all shapes and sizes.’

  ‘A size ten? Like Di Burston?’

  Corsa was back in control of himself. Suddenly he realized he had once again underestimated this man and he would need his wits around him. This was going to be more interesting than he had thought.

  ‘Or perhaps you were thinking of your friends at Hagi Entertainments, particularly when you took an axe to Wonderworld,’ Goodfellowe continued. ‘Or would you prefer to discuss your special friends in the nuclear industry.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Nuclear Reprocessors PLC.’ Goodfellowe took the gamble, he didn’t know for certain, but he could see from Corsa’s rumpled brow that he had played the right card. ‘And the other members of your little consortium. I think the piranha pool will be interested to learn how you’ve used the Herald to promote the commercial interests of your backers. Make quite a splash.’

  ‘You’ve done well, Tom. Very well.’ A hint of genuine admiration hung in his voice. ‘But it will do you no good. They were all legitimate stories.’

  ‘Published and promoted way beyond their significance.’

  ‘An editorial judgement. You can’t legislate for editorial judgement.’

  ‘It wasn’t editorial judgement. It was corruption and commercial dishonesty, stories to show favour to your friends.’

  ‘But that’s what newspapers are about,’ Corsa mocked, shrugging his shoulders with Mediterranean extravagance, ‘doing favours to your friends. The Guardian sucks up to pressure groups, the Telegraph is the house magazine for the Church, The Times flogs satellite television and the Express is astonishingly nice about their chairman’s wife. Everyone’s at it, and there’s not a morsel of law to stop it.’ He shook his head disparagingly. ‘Tom, you really have a lot to learn.’

  ‘It was corruption,’ Goodfellowe repeated defiantly, irked by the glib logic. ‘As has been your attempt to buy the loyalty of members of the Standing Committee, including its Chairman.’

  ‘Oh, the waters are deep where you have been swimming. Deep enough to drown in, unless you can prove what you’re saying.’

  ‘You paid for Breedon to go to Las Vegas, and with his girlfriend. It must have cost thousands yet not a penny is recorded in the Members’ Register.’

  ‘Correct. Could cause the Chairman a flutter of embarrassment, I suppose …’

  ‘And I’ll bet that a large number of members of the Committee have accepted your money,’ Goodfellowe interrupted, anxious to pursue his advantage.

  ‘I said a flutter of embarrassment, no more. And the same goes for any other member of the Committee with whom I might have had an understanding.’ Yes, an understanding. He savoured the word. ‘You’ve forgotten your own rules. The Register is for interests that have a political bearing. Boxing matches in Las Vegas can scarcely be described as being fundamentally political. Any more than a travel article written from Saas-Fee or Bali would have been. I will swear on a dustbin full of bibles that I bought his article, not his vote. Breedon will be all right, as you would have been. The arrangements are precisely the same as we offer to any guest writer, politician or no. All you have is a far-fetched conspiracy theory with no one to support you. You couldn’t prove a thing.’ The breeze had dropped, the balcony was warming. Corsa rolled up his sleeves nonchalantly as though he had not a care in the world. ‘And any suggestion of a grubby motivation would look extraordinarily hypocritical coming from a Member who took the trouble to write to me asking for just such a favour.’

  Goodfellowe kicked himself. He’d entirely forgotten about the note.

  ‘It would look even more bizarre when it came out – as I assure you it would – that the very same Member some time ago accepted a fifteen-thousand-pound loan from me. A loan that has still not been fully repaid.’

  ‘You?’ Goodfellowe stepped back, aghast.

  ‘I still have all the original documentation, a trail leading from my bank account to yours.’

  ‘I never knew. But why …?’

  ‘Never wanted to become a politician myself, but I decided it might be useful to own a few. So I’
m outstandingly generous when the party asks for help to bail out someone in financial difficulties. Gives me leverage. Opens doors.’

  ‘I never knew,’ Goodfellowe repeated.

  ‘And there’s not a sparrow between here and John O’Groats who’ll believe you. Start accusing me and they’ll think you’re trying to wriggle out of repaying.’

  Goodfellowe seemed to deflate. He had been living off Corsa, taking his shilling after all, and plenty of them. He felt mucky. ‘Nevertheless, I shall fight you. Someone will listen.’

  ‘Will they? You really think they will, Tom? Or do you think they’ll simply step back and fold their arms, and wish you on your way. Your way out, that is. And the reason they’ll fold their arms is to hide their own soiled hands. In politics the line between friendship and corrupting influence is so difficult to see, yet so easy to cross. You don’t know you’ve crossed it until it’s too late, by which time there’s no way back.’

  ‘I can only be grateful I haven’t joined the rush.’

  ‘Don’t stand in the way of the crowd, Tom. You’ll only get trampled.’

  A silence ensued. Corsa stared out across the reaches of the Thames as though he had lost all interest in the discussion, while Goodfellowe struggled to comprehend all the many ways in which Corsa seemed to have rustled his arguments and tied his options in knots. Eventually Corsa turned.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Goodfellowe didn’t know. He had been searching his mind for the fault line in Corsa’s defences, but had found none. ‘You’ll win in the end, of course. Even if I found some excuse for kicking the Bill out now, it would only come back next session. The best I can do is to delay, be an inconvenience.’

  The smile flickered back to Corsa’s face. That irritated Goodfellowe. Irritated him to hell.

  ‘But I think I shall try to keep my principles a little longer.’