The Sound of Trumpets

by John Mortimer

  ‘You don’t seem to have liked him very much.’ The Leslie Titmuss rasp, emotionless and only slightly amused, filled the air.

  ‘I didn’t. And if you wanted to know the reason, I wouldn’t tell you. Not even if you were here from the Daily Fortress with a cheque for a cool 50K.’

  ‘I respect your secrets and I certainly wouldn’t offer you money for them.’ The Titmuss voice had now acquired its note of throaty sincerity.

  ‘Thank you for that, Lord Titmuss. I’m very grateful.’

  ‘I only wonder how your husband managed to drown in the pool. It must be quite a hard thing to do. Even if he could only swim a few strokes.’

  ‘I told you. He was incompetent about the house.’ She gathered up the folds of her négligé and rose into the air like a monstrous swan. ‘Put a washer on the tap in the en suite bathroom? Forget it!’ She sailed away to the drinks table and recaptured the Cointreau bottle.

  ‘Had he knocked himself out on the side of the pool or anything like that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I didn’t examine him all that closely. The years when I used to examine Peter Millichip closely were over. If you want to know the truth.’

  ‘But you found him, in the pool?’

  ‘I woke up early. The damned birds round here make such a racket. They’ve got no consideration, have they? I opened my bedroom window and there he was. Floating.’

  ‘So you rang for the ambulance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘I rang Sir Gregory.’

  ‘Why him?’

  ‘Peter Millichip always said, if he ever got into any sort of trouble, the first person to ring was the Party Chairman.’

  ‘And he was in trouble?’

  ‘He was dead.’

  I must be, Agnes said to herself, mad even to think about such a thing. Of course I’m old, past it, out of the race; this is because I’m a woman and our shelf-life is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt. At my age, at the age I’ve reached, I’m expected to be on the boards of charities and babysit for the grandchildren. And he has a young wife who is beautiful, I have to admit, even though she has conscientious objections to most types of food and fans the air with her hand if I dare to light up a fag. If he were married to me he would dream of fucking her and would do so with only an occasional twinge of guilt whenever the opportunity arose. Married to her, the idea of fucking a woman seventeen years older than himself and something like twenty-seven years older than his wife would seem merely bizarre.

  Given all that, why did he look at me the way he did when I carried salad across the kitchen to his wife? Why was he so delighted to discover that Paul Fogarty’s gay? Why did he look disturbed and interested when I told him the use we had for Tom Nowt’s old hut? He sort of quivered. Imagine that! A man who can fight for Socialism and the just society in complacent Hartscombe quivering when he heard that long, long ago, I made love in a hut in the woods. What’s he doing now, I wonder.

  She was in bed with a cigarette and a cup of tea and had a vision of Terry and Kate, engaged in early-morning love. She saw Kate’s face, flushed with youthful enthusiasm, and decided to get up before she could imagine her clear and girlish whimper of pleasure. She decided to open the bookshop, rearrange the entire fiction section and not think about Terry again, at least until lunch-time. As she made this decision she told herself, ‘I hope to God he doesn’t guess any of this. If he did he’d laugh at me and I’d feel a complete idiot.’

  Lying in the chipped bath in the upper reaches of Penry’s house, in water which was rapidly cooling and had never been really hot, looking at the greying cream walls and the mugs over the basin full of assorted toothbrushes, Terry thought, ‘At least she admires me.’ He found this flattering because Agnes didn’t give away admiration easily. Since the evening of shepherd’s pie she had come to the office to stuff envelopes and had volunteered to go out canvassing again. He had called at the bookshop and she’d made him coffee, and her rapid assessments, not only of his opponent Willock and the Lib Dem woman, but of Penry and the M.P. Nabbs were brief and withering. He was delighted to discover that he was one of those rare beings of whom she approved, himself and the prison governor, but Paul, happily, could now be dismissed from the equation. And Agnes’s approval came from a long line of authorities, from the C.N.D. marches and the books on her shelves, Orwell and Tawney and E. P. Thompson and perhaps even, although he was more doubtful about this, Oscar Wilde. More than that, politics with Agnes, usually a grimly serious bussiness having much to do with committees of local activists and Nabbs’ Party line, became entertaining, glamorous, almost raffish. Agnes, of course, had no idea he was lying in a cooling bath thinking about her, that he thought about her now most of the time and that, even in the grim surroundings of the W.R.F. works she had come, naked and available on the floor of a hut, into his mind. Had she known all that, he was sure, she’d have laughed in his face.

  ‘This is Terry Flitton, your Labour candidate. Time for the train. Time for a change!’ Kate Flitton, now commuting to the S.C.R.A.P. office in London, heard her husband, like the voice of God, booming across Hartscombe station and smiled contentedly. She shared none of the pessimism of Penry or Nabbs. For her Terry’s victory was as inevitable as the banning of cigarettes in public places, the minimum wage and the end of fox-hunting. She was the child of schoolteachers, a father and mother who moved quietly, smiling with confidence, about the bright classrooms of a successful suburban comprehensive, convinced that the truth was great and would prevail once the Nativity play was abolished in favour of the enactment of multi-ethnic legends and Afro-Caribbean history took the place of grim reminders of Henry VIII and the British Empire. They didn’t, as they always said, push their only child towards their dearly held beliefs, but they allowed her to absorb them, together with a diet strong in pulses, which contributed to her perfect health. She also grew up with a beauty which provoked dangerous and anarchic thoughts in men, but her quiet certainty on almost every subject cooled and often disconcerted them. What her friends and contemporaries called ‘having sex’, or even ‘a bit of a fling’, she would call ‘a commitment’, a word which produced serious thoughts, and sometimes hesitation, in the men to whom she took a fancy and who found her, at first glance, extremely desirable.

  There were a good many of these males, both at the school in which her parents resolutely showed her no favour and at London University. She got her first job in the press office at S.C.R.A.P. and helped in arranging press interviews and television appearances for Terry whenever a rain forest was threatened or the oceans seemed capable of overheating. He was always polite to her, sometimes charming, but it wasn’t until he drove her home after he had done ‘Any Questions’ in Grimsby that it happened. They were both in a high mood, the adrenalin flowing after the way Terry had put down a junior Foreign Office minister (‘Hot air from politicians will do nothing to reduce global warming’). She paused and raised her face to him before she got out of the car, and he kissed her with the expertise he had acquired thanks to his ten-year start in life. He went upstairs to the flat she shared with two girls in Tufnell Park. By the morning they were well on the way to making a commitment.

  Three years had passed, during which they would both have called themselves happy. Kate’s commitment was as single-minded as religious faith, and freer from doubt. Terry was proud of the youth and beauty of his wife and allowed himself to enjoy the envy of all the men in S.C.R.A.P. who had promised themselves and each other, at lunch-times in the pub, to seduce Kate, from the first day she appeared in the press office. And Kate had no doubts about her husband, although she had noticed, in the last year, moments when he lost interest in falling trees. He seemed, even when they were alone together, to be following thoughts she couldn’t guess at, pursuing distant dreams or engrossed in secret discontents. Although he never complained, she had the feeling that the universe was
no longer enough for him, and he was ready for the more particular and immediate concerns of Hartscombe and Worsfield South. Victory in the by-election, Kate assured herself, would be quite enough to make her husband happy during the years to come.

  So she sat, contented, waiting for the train to jolt into life as the Hartscombe commuters, dark-clothed, determined, unsmiling people carrying briefcases and newspapers, hurried down the platform. She saw a surprising number of them stop to accept leaflets from a woman in a leather jacket, who smiled at the many she seemed to know. Kate recognized Terry’s new friend, who had made a salad for her and grated cheese and brought it with the careful cheerfulness with which a nurse would approach the terminally ill. This woman was, she supposed, important in the constituency. Clearly she had a lot of friends, which was why Terry had turned on all his charm for her. Kate just hoped that, when the seat was won, they would have no more suppers in the overheated kitchen where everyone drank too much and vegetarianism was made to sound like a disease only to be spoken of in whispers. Now she saw Terry come up and join the woman, and the dark figure of Nabbs was hovering in the background. The woman left then, and she saw a smiling Terry approach a couple of business girls, who stopped, listened to him and smiled back.

  Then the door of the carriage opened and the woman was there, pushing a leaflet at her. ‘Terry Flitton. Your Labour candidate. Have you thought about voting for him?’ she said, and then, ‘Oh, it’s you! How stupid of me. It must be encroaching Alzheimer’s.’ It only proved what Kate had suspected all along, that when it came to working for the Party, Agnes Simcox was a complete amateur.

  Officers of the Inniskilling, the Guards regiments, the 52nd and the Royal Artillery, together with allies from the 1st Prussian Army Corps and Kellerman’s Cuirassiers, the enemy being represented by the Emperor’s Old Guard, were being carefully dusted by the Chairman of the local Conservative Party and returned to the glass shelves of the illuminated cupboard where they pranced in attitudes of deathless war. Sir Gregory was just cleaning up a major in the reserve cavalry (under the command of Lord Uxbridge) when his wife trilled from the doorway, ‘Darling, Lord Titmuss has come to pay us a call!’

  ‘Thank you, Dorothy. Nothing secret, but I’d like a confidential word with Leslie. Politics, you know. Don’t want to bore you to death.’

  So, dismissed with unusual politeness, Lady Inwood left the two men together.

  Titmuss found another hard chair and sat. He had kept on his dark overcoat, telling them he’d only be staying a few minutes.

  ‘Campaign’s going well, I think.’ Sir Gregory put the little, bright, sabre-waving horseman lovingly back on his shelf. ‘We’re relying on you to finish it off. Like the Old Guard.’

  ‘The Old Guard, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, lost the Battle of Waterloo.’

  ‘Of course.’ The Chairman looked flustered. ‘Not a particularly happy phrase, I’m afraid. But you’ll help us win it. Willock’s a first-rate candidate.’

  ‘Is that your opinion?’

  ‘I expect you heard him on local radio?’

  ‘I denied myself that pleasure.’

  ‘All about juvenile crime. How it doesn’t do to mollycoddle the little buggers. What happens, even if they do get locked up, which is rare? Television. Compact-disc players. Erotic pin-ups in every cell. From all I can see, it’s a damned sight more comfortable than Eton!’

  ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.’ The Titmuss smile was particularly glassy. ‘I never went to Eton. And this young man Flitton. Do you think he’s a good candidate?’

  ‘I think he’s making some serious mistakes.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I expect we’ll get him for being soft on crime. I hear he’s making friends with the do-gooder who runs the young offenders’ lock-up. Willock’s line plays much better on the housing estates round Worsfield. Murder and mayhem stalk the streets round there, as you well know.’

  ‘I don’t know. But you’re a constant visitor to the Worsfield housing estates, are you, Chairman?’

  ‘To be quite honest with you, Leslie, I’ve never been there in my life. But I can assure you, Tim Willock’ll make a bloody good constituency M.P. Just as good, in his way, as Peter Millichip.’

  ‘You thought Millichip was good?’

  ‘First-rate.’

  Titmuss looked amused, in a way that the Party Chairman found strangely alarming. ‘I’ve been talking to his wife. I don’t think she’d agree with you.’

  ‘You’ve been talking to Linda?’ Sir Gregory folded his duster neatly and moved to put it away in the bottom drawer of his study desk. ‘Terribly nice girl, but fighting a losing battle against Cointreau, you noticed?’

  ‘I never noticed that she was particularly nice, and certainly not a girl.’

  ‘You don’t mince your words, Leslie. Perhaps Millichip wasn’t up to your high standards of public service. But I’m sure Willock’s an excellent replacement. As you know, he was a parliamentary secretary before he lost his seat.’

  ‘A parliamentary secretary who voted in the leadership election of 1990.’

  ‘Well. All M.P.s did that. Including you, Leslie.’

  ‘Some of us’ – Titmuss was looking steadily out of the study window in a way that the Chairman found unnerving – ‘did our duty. That’s not what I came to talk to you about.’

  ‘Of course not.’ The Chairman seemed relieved. ‘Now, how can I help you?’

  ‘Not me. I just wondered. How did you help Linda Millichip?’

  ‘Help her?’

  ‘She relied on you, didn’t she? I mean, she rang you and not the police or the ambulance. When she saw her husband floating …’

  ‘She did, yes. Of course I went round at once.’

  ‘How good of you.’

  ‘What else could I do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Was he in the pool when you got there?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘She’d left him there?’

  ‘Well, I don’t expect she could fish him out exactly.’ Perhaps it was the dreadful memory that made the Chairman take refuge in dry, nervous laughter, which he stifled almost before it escaped him.

  ‘Was he dressed?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, I thought he might have been doing something round the pool and fallen in accidentally. Did he have his clothes on?’

  ‘No. No clothes.’

  ‘Just swimming trunks?’

  ‘Well, actually …’ The Chairman hesitated. ‘He had nothing on at all.’

  ‘He swam naked?’ Titmuss made it sound like an accusation.

  ‘Well, it was pretty early. Before anyone arrived. I mean, the cleaning lady, or the gardener.’

  ‘So you were the first on the scene?’

  ‘First, after Linda.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course. So you rang for the ambulance?’

  ‘For the police. It was too late for anything else.’

  ‘Because he was dead.’

  ‘I’m afraid he was. All that came out at the inquest.’

  ‘I looked up the report in the Sentinel. It talked about a naked body with some bruising.’

  ‘Not serious bruising.’

  ‘But some on his wrists. How did that happen?’

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea. But the verdict was …’

  ‘ “Accidental death!” ’ Titmuss managed to put a pair of mocking inverted commas round the words. ‘Well, of course, there are all sorts and kinds of accidents.’

  ‘It came as a shock to us all. Deeply distressing.’ Sir Gregory tried for a quick summing-up.

  ‘It must have been.’ Titmuss had risen and was standing looking out at the wintry, leaf-littered garden of the grey-stone rectory Sir Gregory had bought when he retired from the diplomatic service. ‘Distressing for you?’

  ‘Well, naturally’ – Sir Gregory became more modest about his share of grief – ‘even more distressing for Linda.’

  ‘But not distressin
g for Millichip.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’d escaped, hadn’t he? He’d gone off somewhere and put an end to all his troubles.’

  ‘I suppose you could say that.’

  ‘You employ a very good gardener.’

  A boy was scraping up leaves between two short planks of wet wood and lifting them into a barrow which was overflowing with crisp golden shapes that floated away on a sudden gust of wind. He was an energetic boy with a tuft of hair and a pale, indoor face. An older man, perhaps a gardener or a driver, stood watching him.

  ‘Oh, him.’ The Chairman had joined his visitor at the window. ‘I have him out from the Skurfield Young Offenders’.’

  ‘I thought you were all for treating them like members of a chain-gang. Lock ’em up and throw away the key.’

  ‘Oh, they get pretty tough treatment when they come to me. No mollycoddling. I get a decent day’s work out of them and a bit extra. And of course they get work experience. One likes to do something for the lads.’

  ‘That’s very kind of one,’ said Lord Titmuss.

  Chapter Nine

  The horse Balaclava had, Terry thought, a mad appearance, with a rolling eye and strong yellow teeth exposed in a sneer. ‘I’m putting you up on Balaclava,’ Betty Wellover at Hartscombe stables said. ‘You look strong enough. Don’t take any nonsense from him!’ Terry wondered what sort of nonsense she had in mind and decided it was the wild rush to death against impossible odds suggested by the horse’s name.

  Betty Wellover had a brick-red complexion, hair that looked as if it had been gnawed by rats and a voice raised as though she were trying to attract the attention of someone far away in a high wind. ‘Agnes tells me you’re going to fight Hartscombe for the Reds,’ she yelled, as Terry clambered aboard the horse, which now stamped and stirred, impatient for the bugle and the order to charge.

  ‘I’m going to win Hartscombe for the Reds,’ Terry panted.

  ‘What’s your position on hunting, then?’ It was the question he had been advised to avoid. A wrong answer, he feared, might cause a furious Miss Wellover to whip up Balaclava and send him galloping suicidally into the traffic. He played for safety with, ‘We’re going to allow a free vote. It’s a matter for the individual conscience.’