The Sound of Trumpets

by John Mortimer

  ‘I’m looking for a seven per cent swing.’

  Penry glanced nervously at the mobile phone his candidate had put down beside the prawn crackers. Never before had he seen such a device in the possession of a Labour candidate, and he felt a grim foreboding of three weeks’ remorseless work, strategic memos, policy documents and midnight phone calls, all leading to an inevitable defeat. ‘Hartscombe’s been Conservative for years.’ He tried to say it soothingly.

  ‘Not in 1945 it wasn’t. I’ve read the history.’

  Penry put down his chopsticks and sat for a moment, misty-eyed. In 1945 he had been ten years old, with a father who worked in Army Education. He remembered ‘Roll out the Barrel’ and the pubs in Hartscombe full of singing soldiers, heralding the unexpected avalanche of a Labour victory. ‘We are the masters now’ – his father had told him what they said in Parliament. Those memories had kept him in the local Party for the long years when Hartscombe had consistently shown itself not quite good enough for Labour. ‘That was after the war,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Exactly,’ Terry told him. ‘People wanted a better life.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Penry gave himself a swig of Chinese beer, ‘quite a lot of people in Hartscombe think they’ve got it already. We don’t get many hunger marches in the Thames Valley.’

  ‘We’ve got to tell them’ – Terry slid easily into his mood of quiet persuasion, the soft tones of someone counselling the bereaved on how to bear the fact of death – ‘that they’ve got some sort of duty to the community. They’ve got to make sacrifices if we’re going to achieve social justice. It’s one of the privileges of wealth, to help those who aren’t quite so lucky. That’s what we’ve got to make them understand.’

  Penry felt an enormous relief. The presence of the mobile phone needn’t have worried him. He was back on safe and familiar territory. That was what he was used to, the way all his candidates had talked before they relaxed into comfortable defeat. He knew what was coming next, the bit about the price of a safe society.

  ‘And they’ll see that there’s a whole lot of sense in paying to end the inequality which produces crime and violence, all the things that keep them shivering in their rose gardens.’

  ‘It’s a persuasive argument.’

  ‘It’s what I believe. Sincerely.’

  Penry assessed the sincere look and found it the best he’d seen on any candidate. They could go down with dignity.

  ‘Terry’s going to win.’ Kate Flitton spoke quietly, her head lowered. She had clear blue eyes, black hair and skin with the pink flush of youth. The agent, whose wife was carrying on a barely concealed relationship with a bank manager in Worsfield, felt a pang of envy for his candidate. ‘That’s what we’ve come here for.’

  ‘Of course, we’ll do our best.’ Penry wanted to comfort her, but now she had lowered her eyes and was poking at her mixed vegetables and fried rice with growing suspicion. ‘But there was a lot of respect for Peter Millichip, he was an excellent constituency M.P. And a good deal of sympathy for his unhappy wife.’

  ‘She didn’t look all that unhappy,’ Terry told him. ‘Not in the photograph in the Sentinel. The day he died.’

  ‘Didn’t you think so?’

  Kate, still investigating her food, answered for her husband. ‘She looked angry.’

  ‘It was bad luck.’ Penry seemed to share in the general sorrow for Millichip, to whom, after the last three elections, he had had to concede victory. ‘The poor chap was only fifty-three. A sudden heart attack in the pool.’

  ‘Luck that brought me to the constituency, do you think?’ Terry was smiling.

  ‘Well, I hope that’s how it will turn out to be.’

  ‘From now on, forget luck.’ The candidate looked disturbingly businesslike. ‘We’re going to start working now! Start here. These waiters, for instance.’ He looked at the young men, two in spectacles, trotting between the white-clothed tables, carrying trays of steaming, sizzling food. ‘Have they got votes? They must live in Hartscombe. Have you done any work in the restaurants? Indian, Thai, Chinese? Ethnic groups ought to be with us.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Charlie!’ Penry called to the smiling Lin Yew Po, known to him for years as Charlie. ‘You on the electoral register?’

  ‘Ice cream or toffee apples?’ Charlie answered confidently. ‘You like Chinese tea?’ And he was about to dart away when Kate Flitton asked him to assure her that the rice hadn’t been fried in anything connected with meat. ‘No meat. Rice,’ Charlie answered her, and she was on the point of calling him back when she sniffed, coughed and flapped with her hand as though to clear a dense and poisonous fog which, having drifted across the table, was about to asphyxiate her.

  She turned towards the source of pollution. The woman had copper-coloured hair and skin that had never objected to the sunshine. She was wearing jeans, the sleeves of a blue sweater dangling over her shoulders. She had just lit a cigarette and was putting her lighter away in the pocket of her shirt. Beside her sat a grey-haired man with a creased face and bright, still hopeful eyes.

  ‘You’re smoking!’ Kate looked at Agnes Simcox, as concerned as if she were about to burst into flames.

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s allowed here. I’m afraid I’m going to go on doing it. Do you want to move? We shan’t be offended.’

  But Kate’s attention had been diverted by the excited buzz of Terry’s mobile. She contented herself with a convincing imitation of a person dying of bronchitis and slapped energetically at the air.

  ‘Yes. Yes, this is Terry Flitton. Who … ?’ And then Terry fell silent, listening with an expression of growing surprise. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘I’ve got a tight schedule, naturally. I’ll have to discuss it with my agent. I’ll call you back. What’s the number?’

  ‘Who was it?’ Kate asked, and he told her.

  ‘Lord Titmuss!’ Penry spoke in an awed whisper, as though, some ancient superstition aroused in him, he was looking around desperately for a clove of garlic or a couple of crossed sticks. ‘What’s that old crocodile after?’

  ‘Probably scared Terry’s going to win the seat.’

  Penry looked at Kate, touched by her faith, which could persuade her that her husband had the magical power of alarming Lord Titmuss. ‘Don’t go near that monster.’ Penry gave his first positive advice. ‘The Hartscombe Party would never forgive you.’

  ‘Of course I won’t.’ Terry’s fist crumpled the paper napkin on which he’d written a number. Kate was flapping at the air again with angry disapproval. Her husband breathed in a sweet and heavy smell, once the smell of France when he had been on a distant school trip, and one which had wafted through his early childhood in Jubilee Road, Worsfield. At the next table Agnes blew a smoke-ring and, turning to her companion, the Governor of Skurfield Young Offenders’ Institution, said, ‘It’s a good thing I wasn’t smoking dope. She’d probably have made a citizen’s arrest.’

  Chapter Three

  Driving along the motorway, Terry remembered the smell of Gauloises. The road was wide and smooth, designed for commuters to speed to and from London, but it had been turned, apparently by some omnipotent practical joker, into a series of narrow country lanes along which the traffic crawled between hedgerows of cones. On either side of them no work was taking place; empty stretches of highway were temptingly deserted. Only rarely did he see a solitary lorry or a little knot of men in hard hats and orange jackets looking with amusement at the growing tailback; otherwise, the cones were triumphant.

  Clarice. Terry’s mother hated her name. It sounded like ‘chalice’ and reminded her of chasubles and cassocks and other ecclesiastical paraphernalia, and brought back the smell of the vestry, the mixture of furniture polish and gently rotting hassocks, which hung in the cold air as she cut up cubes of bread for the communion service. Afterwards she sat in the pew and looked up at her father, his forehead furrowed with anxiety as he quoted the Sermon on the Mount, informing the poorer members of his dwindling congregatio
n that they were, in fact, singularly blessed. As he talked she knew that his constantly nagging worry was not the condition of the poor but whether he and her mother would get, as they had once in the past, an invitation to lunch at the Manor, or be passed over for yet another year. She was sent away to a cold Cotswold boarding school where the rules insisted that she was forever called Clarice and not any contraction, such as Clary, Clare or Clar, which she much preferred. At the end of her time at school, when her friends were playing Everly Brothers records, she rechristened herself Susie.

  Her father, having spent three tedious and almost friendless years studying theology at Keble, told her she had thrown away the golden experience of Oxford and did his best to ignore the fact that she had settled for the University of Worsfield. He still insisted on calling her Clarice, with a particular emphasis on the hated name, and was undeterred by the fact that she never answered to it or came when he called. Her mother, a flustered woman, whose vain ambition it was to please everybody, called her daughter neither Clarice nor Susie but ‘dear’, repeating the word with decreasing conviction. At university Susie found a new way of life.

  It centred round the Bricklayers Arms, opposite the Worsfield bus station. It was in the Brickie that she met Robert, Rob, sometimes Robo, spoken with heavy sarcasm and a mock posh accent when he did anything pretentious, like, after innumerable pints of Newcastle Brown, switching to a small Cointreau for each of them to ‘top off the evening’. Rob Flitton was handsome, making good use of the clear features, deep eyes and close curls he handed on later to his son. His shoulders were wide enough to put some strain on the seams of his jacket, and his voice was unexpectedly soft and high. Susie knew he worked in a Worsfield factory, and in her frequent musings she saw him beating glowing ingots in some foundry or, masked like a diver, raising a storm of sparks as he welded heavy metal. The exact nature of his employment she never asked. It was enough for her that he was one of the workers.

  She noticed him first when he smiled at her across the public bar of the Brickie. The next night she was playing darts with him and, after the final, unexpected Cointreau, they ended up in the shadows by the wall of the bus station. Her mouth was on his, the sweet taste of the liqueur mingling, and her hand was burrowing into the opening of his jeans. Never had the cold vestry and the smell of hassocks seemed so far away.

  Robert lived with his family in a terraced house in Jubilee Road, where Susie was sometimes asked for tea, a meal which her father and mother, facing each other over cottage pie and glasses of water taken with long periods of silence in the vicarage dining-room, preferred to call ‘dinner’. By contrast, Jubilee Road was ear-splittingly noisy, full of Rob’s brothers and sisters, who laughed, shouted, quarrelled, competed and made her feel, a lonely child, part of a new, garrulous and exclusive family. It was his still-handsome mother, a tall, commanding presence with red hair going grey, shouting louder than anyone else and plonking great plates of undercooked food (the potatoes especially were hard as bullets) in front of anyone who crossed her threshold, who was the boss in Jubilee Road. Rob’s father, who didn’t work but drew a pension as a result of some industrial disease, sat silent, smiling and examining his long, slender fingers, and allowed his wife to speak for him. ‘Jim’d like some more of that jelly,’ Mrs Flitton would shout, or ‘Jim doesn’t want to hear that sort of talk in his house so will you please shut up!’, and Jim would smile and nod and raise his voice to no one.

  Mrs Flitton spoke not only for her husband but for her son when she proposed marriage to Susie. ‘Robert would like it really,’ she shouted when they found themselves, on a rare occasion, alone together. ‘It’s high time he got himself settled. But he’s too shy to ask.’ The confidence of Rob’s love-making made Susie doubt this statement but she was unable to argue with the matriarch who was yelling at her. It was the happiest day in her life when she stood next to Robert, who had a carnation in a silver-paper stalk pinned to his lapel, in a civil ceremony to which she wore a white mini-skirt and stilettos, with flowers in her hair. He had just been elected a shop steward, and she loved him for the sunlight in his curls, his stiff blue suit bought for the occasion and the fact that he was now a leader in the battle for workers’ rights.

  They moved into the flat she had taken as a student, dismissing the girlfriend with whom she had shared. She had painted the walls purple and put up posters, Che Guevara, Jack Kennedy, Neil Sedaka and Joan Baez. There were bulrushes in pots, peacocks’ feathers, purple cushions and joss sticks, which left brown scars on the mantelpiece. There were burns, too, on other pieces of furniture, where Susie had put down her smouldering Gauloises. Into this room she introduced her husband, large, tidy and clearly bewildered. He slept in his Y-fronts, keeping his clothes neatly folded beside the headless bed. The chest of drawers, covered with a fringed shawl and various candles, was filled to overflowing with the dresses, satin trousers, velvet jackets and feather boas she bought at jumble sales, junk shops and charity stores but seldom wore. Six months after the wedding the newly born Terry Flitton was brought to this home in a pink plastic carry-cot. He was known as a ‘good baby’ and kept quiet at night. When Susie was feeding him from her breast his father used to retreat to the kitchen, or out to the Brickie, in unforeseen embarrassment.

  So Terry spent his childhood in a haze of incense and French cigarettes, hearing Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie and ‘The Sounds of Silence’ among the cushions and scattered clothing or, when Susie started work in a Worsfield boutique, being looked after round his gran’s, where he was shouted at, picked up, dropped, kissed, occasionally slapped and then returned to his increasingly silent mother and sullen father.

  Things began to change when Rob got promotion and they took the flat upstairs. There was a threatened strike at the factory, which was apparently doing well with whatever it might have produced. Rob the shop steward was negotiating, but also accepting invitations to meet the managing director in a private room in Meadowlands, a country-house hotel outside Hartscombe. The strike was called off and Robert got a senior post in middle management. Terry remembered the first day his father went to work in the suit he hadn’t worn since his wedding.

  He also remembered the walls turning from purple to cream. The bulrushes and scatter cushions moved upstairs to a room where his mother sat smoking something which no longer smelt of cross-Channel urinals but had the sweet reek of burning carpets. Downstairs a new suite of furniture arrived. He remembered the night the managing director and his wife (‘Call me Harry’; ‘Call me Joan’) came to supper and the long silences round the table as his mother, moving like a sleepwalker, dropped things or produced food that had gone slightly but significantly wrong from the kitchen. At the end of the meal she started to giggle like a child, shaking her head helplessly, the back of her hand to her mouth. Harry and Joan left early and after the front door had closed Terry heard the sound of blows, received with no cry or complaint. That was the night he began to hate his father.

  Robert was promoted further, to a post which would come to be known as ‘Manager in Charge of Human Resources’, where his job was to hire a few people and fire many, as the enterprise was slimmed down. For the task of firing, which apparently called for a special tone of voice, particular ‘body language’ (sympathetic and understanding) and the knack of ending the interview before the dismissed person got a chance to make a fuss, Robert received training. He often told Susie that the kids who applied for work were hopeless and no good and wanted everything to fall into their laps, and they spent their time smoking and listening to music in clubs, and he blamed it all on the way people behaved in the sixties, which was when they met and fell in love and had Terence. But Rob, so he told his wife, and his son if he was listening, had not been infected by the general lassitude, self-indulgence and loony-left politics of that decade because he’d been too damned busy making something of himself, pulling himself up by his bootstraps and generally bettering his position, and he hoped to God that the nipper (meani
ng Terry) would learn the lesson and pull himself up by his bootstraps too. Susie would listen to all this, smiling remotely, and every time he heard it Terry, who had no idea where his bootstraps were, became clearer about one thing. He was not going to end up like his father.

  He worked hard at school. He knew he was going somewhere; although he was not yet sure where, he knew it was a long way away from Robert. It was on a school trip to France that he smelt his mother’s cigarettes, going through Customs and in the zinc-covered bar where he first got drunk. When he got back from the trip and went up to his mother’s room with the present he had bought for her (a glass ball containing the Eiffel Tower in a snowstorm) he found it empty.

  ‘She’s gone. Not coming back to us. Not ever.’

  ‘She’s dead.’ Terry knew what had happened; he was sure one of his father’s blows had killed her.

  ‘Not dead but deserted. She told me there was no one else. ’Course there’s a bloke somewhere. Stands to reason. Some pot-head layabout, so they’ll live on government hand-outs. She’s a liar, son. Your mother always was a liar. She even lied about her name, can you believe it? You and me, Terry, we’ll get on just as well without her. I told her myself. You’re not needed here, I said, Susie, or whatever name you think up next.’ It was the longest speech he ever had from his father.

  So they lived together, after that, like a married couple on whom mutual hostility has descended like a blanket of snow. Rob heated the packaged food he bought in the microwave and did most of the housework. Terry sat in his mother’s room working, and he did well enough in his A levels to qualify, as she had, for the University of Worsfield. When he told his gran about this she hoped it wouldn’t give him ideas so that he became as silly as his mother.

  Robert broke a long silence to tell his son that he had voted Conservative in the election because he was sick and tired of keeping his wife’s bloke in beer and funny cigarettes. Terry joined the university Young Socialists and became known for his militant tendencies. Still silent at home, he spoke passionately and at considerable length at meetings and was known, around the halls of residence to which he had moved, as ‘Red Tel’. He made a special visit home to tell his father this. Robert counter-attacked by admitting that he had asked his secretary, a girl called Dawn Allbright, home to live with him until their position could be made legal. The divorce between father and son was now final and they hardly met again until events in the Hartscombe by-election brought them together.