The Sound of Trumpets

by John Mortimer

  ‘Well, what’s your individual conscience tell you? And stick your leg up, why don’t you?’ She was yanking at straps and finding new holes for buckles in the regions under Terry’s thighs.

  ‘I really haven’t made up my mind.’

  ‘Make it up then! Tell him, Agnes.’

  ‘Leave him alone.’ Agnes, straight-backed and perfectly relaxed, wearing jodhpurs, while Terry had nothing to offer but jeans, sat on a small brown horse which seemed prepared to obey her every whim. ‘He’s got more important things to do.’

  ‘There isn’t anything more important. Nothing in the world.’ With which Miss Wellover shouted, ‘Walk!’ to Balaclava, who perturbed Terry by tossing his head sideways, trembling as though in receipt of a small electric shock and lurching out of the stable yard as though making for the starting gate.

  The campaign had been going in a way which had surprised Penry and Nabbs: Terry’s face over the red instruction to ‘Vote Flitton’ sprouted not only on the Worsfield estates, not only in the windows of doctors’ and nurses’ and teachers’ houses in Hartscombe, but in some converted-cottage windows in the villages where the morning-coffee ladies had been charmed by Terry’s visits. He appeared on the ‘Breakfast Egg’ programme on Worsfield Radio and listeners phoned in to wish him well and complain that they were tired of waiting for their hip operations or fed up with having to find money for school-books and how come the late Peter Millichip got permission for a swimming pool while they were still stuck in a mobile home? Could it be because they never invited anyone on the planning committee to their holiday villa in Majorca?

  So tireless Terry visited factories and comprehensives and did ‘Question Time’ at his old university. He drank beer and sang rugby songs in the Worsfield Sports Club and drank mulled wine and discussed a new policy for the arts at a musical evening in Hartscombe town hall. He got himself twice on Home Counties Television, once to protest about the threatened closure of a geriatric ward (‘We owe our old people a debt we can never repay’) and once when he judged the Dog-Who-Looks-Most-Like-Its-Owner contest at the Skurfield Show. In the evenings, when Kate came back from London, they would grab a pizza and go out canvassing. They looked eager, attractive and anxious to be of help, and few doors slammed on them. He went to matins in St Joseph’s, Hartscombe, attended a Worsfield mosque and mass with the Benedictine community in Nunn’s Courtny. He addressed car-boot sales, sang at karaoke evenings and wore a ten-gallon hat to a country-and-western evening at the Rotary Club. In his confident moments, and Terry had very few unconfident ones, he told himself that he was taking part in the inspiring process of democracy. And as the time to polling day grew shorter his excitement, and therefore his energy, increased.

  He spent a morning at Skurfield Young Offenders’ and shared the inmates’ lunch. Now he knew that Paul was no sort of challenge, he became a friend of the gentle governor, and they discussed facing the boys with their victims, classes in car maintenance for car thieves and various alternatives to the criminalizing effect of prison. They nodded in agreement, and Terry promised to make his government, when it was in power, discover a better way, and Agnes, when she heard about these conversations, looked at him with increased approval and smiled.

  He talked to local Labour parties, S.C.R.A.P. supporters, focus groups and countryside protectors, and he still had words to spare for Agnes. The best times were when they met for a quick sandwich and a beer in the Water-Boatman, the pub by the river at Hartscombe, with its fading photographs of eights, fours and single scullers, huge young men in blazers and caps, and when the river was high the water would lap over the little landing stage and sometimes seep under the bar door. There was an old piano with yellow keys and a husky tone at which Agnes sometimes sat and sang songs her father had taught her, like ‘Abdul the Bul Bul Amir’ and ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’. When Paul joined them he knew the words too, and when he couldn’t come Terry remembered them, and when, at the end of a song, the barmaid or an odd drinker (the Water-Boatman downstairs was not popular at lunch-time) clapped, Terry thought it was no bad thing that the Labour candidate was caught singing in a pub. He asked Penry to fix up a photo opportunity for the Sentinel.

  His early experience in far-left politics at university, at a time when the political skills of Castro and Colonel Gaddafi were much admired, meant that Terry had, beneath a thick coating of charm, authoritarian instincts. He listened carefully to his Party Executive, the Lady Chairperson and even to the M.P. Nabbs and, having listened, he would make his own decisions. He hadn’t encountered much dissent so far, but if he did he intended to make it quite clear who the candidate was and who were his willing, enthusiastic but finally obedient helpers. He rose to the top at S.C.R.A.P. not only by being indispensable to the Chairman, but by deciding that those who weren’t for him were against him. And those who were against him found themselves, sooner or later, looking for jobs in other organizations.

  So when he told Nabbs that he intended to take an occasional afternoon off during the campaign, he didn’t expect any argument. When the M.P. asked ‘Why?’, he said, as shortly as possible, that if he worked eighteen hours a day he might go mad and fail to attract the voters. He had to have fresh air and exercise.

  ‘Exercise? What sort of exercise?’ Nabbs said the word as though it were a dangerous substance.

  ‘I’m not sure yet. Perhaps squash, or jogging. Riding, maybe.’

  ‘Riding?’ Nabbs was puzzled at first and then said, ‘You’ll be going out with the cycling club, then?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Terry said. ‘So it’s agreed, is it?’ He was careful to say nothing about horses.

  On this, his first ride out with Agnes, by good luck rather than good management, Terry managed to stop Balaclava getting any mistaken order to charge. When the horse walked he half-trotted, and when he trotted he broke unnervingly, as soon as he touched soft ground, into a swerving canter. Terry gripped the front of his saddle with one hand and managed to smile as though enjoying it and not fall off, although the clear blue sky of a crisp November day was visible between his legs. Luckily Agnes saw little of this. She rode in front all the time and assumed, he hoped, that he was riding as casually as she was, swaying hardly at all, sitting down at the canter and keeping, as his university girlfriend had so often yelled at him to do, her bottom on the plate.

  They took to the lanes and looked down over garden walls, on to dying Michaelmas daisies and frost-charred chrysanthemums, broken toys and quietly rotting wicker chairs. Agnes slid off her horse to open a gate for him, and he felt slighted because she hadn’t waited for him to do it for her. Through the long wet grass in Plashy Bottom, where the outskirts of Hartscombe, the untidy backs of houses and shops, were still visible, Agnes called, ‘This is where we gallop.’ Terry was white-knuckled, clutching his saddle. Divots of earth flew up from her horse’s hooves as they were going up the bridle path between the hedges to Jim Eyles’s farm, achieving what was, in Terry’s case, a sort of untidy rhythm, but a rhythm all the same. Intoxicated by his skill, he tried to shout, but found that all he got was a mouthful of wind, and no audible sound emerged. He looked down at the pigs nosing around corrugated-iron shelters and smelt the slurry on the wind at Eyles’s farm, and then the path took them out on to the high common at Nunn’s Courtny. There Balaclava, tired out, fell into a long, triumphant slope, as though back, unwounded, from battle.

  On a loose rein Agnes found a cigarette and lit it as her horse sauntered to a stop. From far off they saw the dark smudge of Fallowfield Country Town, a menacing encampment which would be lit up with a false, sulphurous daylight quite soon in the early darkness. And then they clattered through Skurfield and up the side of a ploughed field into Hanging Wood. And there, as Balaclava became lethargic and Terry’s confidence grew, he toyed with some childhood fantasies; he was Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, a knight errant, pictures in the history books his mother had given him, which still had her name and the crayon scrawls
and torn pages of her childhood. He quite forgot that he was the serious New Labour candidate, dedicated to saving Hartscombe and Worsfield South for social justice. These childish dreams persisted until the horses stopped and Agnes kicked her feet out of her stirrups in front of Tom Nowt’s collapsing hunting lodge.

  ‘So long since I looked in here.’ There was a rusty padlock hanging uselessly beside the door. Agnes pushed it open, and Terry followed her across damp and creaking floorboards. ‘It’s amazing that no one’s applied for planning permission to turn it into a desirable second home, christened it “Deer’s Leap” and put in a sauna.’ There was a work-bench under the blurred window, a table and the remains of a couch, exposing its stuffing and springs like a sheep with its stomach ripped out. There were signs of recent occupation, tins in a dark corner, a newspaper and an empty gin bottle. Terry was confident enough to think he knew why she had brought him there, and his belief was confirmed when she said, ‘Romantic little spot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Romantic enough.’ He put his hands round her face and turned it towards him. She looked up at him, amused but not at all surprised. When he kissed her he found her lips dry and felt her fingers cold on the back of his neck. They stood in a long embrace, his hands straying over her. She was quiet, breathing gently in this place where, it seemed, so much had happened to her. Inside her sweater now, he felt her straight back and moved to discover a small breast, free and unsupported. She took hold of his wrists and pulled his hands away. ‘Not here,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ He became jealous of departed men. ‘Because of who you used to meet here?’

  ‘No, you idiot! Because it’s too cold and damp and the floor’s probably covered in dirty needles. We’d be far better off at home.’

  The Stealth Missile zipped across the car park of the supermarket outside Hartscombe, causing small children to laugh and clap their hands, girls to skip as though threatened by mice and sparks to shower from the latest, most costly firework on sale for that Guy Fawkes Night.

  Lady Dorothy Inwood emerged from the self-opening glass doors; she was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a Barbour as protection against the gently sifting rain. Her grey curls had been permed that afternoon, her spectacles hung round her neck on a chain, and she pushed a loaded trolley, on which her handbag perched, towards the Volvo Estate. And then the Stealth found its target against her trolley wheels and finally exploded with an ear-splitting crack. For a second the blow to her face seemed to be a shock from the firework, but then she saw a long Pluto head and was punched in the stomach. Donald Duck, Popeye, Elvis and Madonna, bright colours against the dark sky, danced before her eyes. She heard a voice call ‘Slippy!’ and didn’t know if it was a warning or a command, and then her feet were kicked from under her and she fell to the concrete. The masked boys, whooping with triumph, danced away with her supermarket trolley and her handbag stuffed with money. No one stopped the thieves; the shoppers stood helpless and silent, as though the incident were too common for comment or they didn’t believe it had happened at all.

  It was afternoon and the swollen river was shrouded in mist, above which the bridge rose apparently without support and through which the black-beaked head of a swan occasionally penetrated. Anyone passing what was once the doctor’s house, its windows overlooking the water, might have heard, if they stood listening, two people laughing. Terry had never associated laughter with making love.

  Before they were married, stealing a long lunch-hour from S.C.R.A.P., Kate, sliding into bed with an expression of serious commitment, had warned him: ‘Please. Don’t make jokes.’ But Agnes, it seemed, had no such rules. Terry, in the white bedroom with fluttering curtains and books piled against the walls, with a bottle of off-licence champagne on the floor and Agnes naked, warm between cold sheets, her body almost unmarked by time and only her hands, quick and competent, showing the length of her experience, felt he had strolled into a world he had never known before, a place where sex was entertaining and called for skill but was not, or only at your direst peril, to be taken over-seriously.

  But when it was over, when they were damp and resting and he had got over a feeling of amazement, she lay in his arms, her head on his chest, as though she were still young enough to flatter him, and said, ‘I know you’re going to win.’

  ‘Thank you. I think I will.’

  ‘You read it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Read what?’ He was alarmed, feeling she was going to try to teach him something.

  ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism.’

  ‘Oh yes, I read that.’

  ‘It’ll be good, won’t it, if we can get to a state where we don’t have to worry about people.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Old habits die hard. He had spent his life in a political party dedicated to worrying about people.

  There was a long silence, and then she said, ‘Wilde said a map of the world which doesn’t include Utopia isn’t worth even glancing at.’

  ‘Did he?’ Terry had not remembered this and was uncertain how to react to it.

  ‘It’s what I like about you. Your map’s got Utopia.’

  ‘It’ll be a different world,’ Terry told her, ‘when we’ve won the election.’

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is what you’ve got marked on your map.’

  He felt he had been corrected, and so he thought, suddenly and uncomfortably, about Kate. But Kate was in a different world. A solid, serious world from which he was taking, and surely he deserved it, time off. There was no connection between Kate and Agnes and therefore no rivalry, so he comforted himself, forgetting that there was a connection and he was it. He looked at his watch, untangled himself and started to dress. She said goodbye to him casually, as though nothing much had happened at all.

  When he got into the street he heard a van approaching in the mist and his opponent’s voice booming, ‘Mugging in Hartscombe supermarket! Build the boot camps! Vote Willock and crack down on youth crime! For zero tolerance, vote for your Conservative candidate!’

  Terry walked on, towards Penry’s house and his political advisers.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘What my listeners will want to know is what your lot are going to do about it. How are you going to hit these lads where it really hurts?’

  ‘You mean, turn them into harder criminals?’

  ‘Mugging the Conservative Chairman’s wife outside Hartscombe supermarket! Kicking her to the ground! What’re you going to do to save respectable elderly ladies from rape and robbery?’

  ‘I don’t believe she was raped.’

  ‘Well, not this time perhaps. But there have been cases.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ve written to Lady Inwood to express my sympathy …’

  ‘Very nice of you, I’m sure. But that’s not going to stop them.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘All right. Tell us, then. What will?’

  ‘Let me tell you, Ken. We’ve got to look for causes. We’ve got to look at the schools, and the clapped-out buildings on the Worsfield estates. We’ve got to ask why this government has reduced the number of bobbies on the beat …’

  ‘And while you’re looking at all that, how many more elderly ladies have got to be mugged?’

  Kenny Iremonger, of the Worsfield Radio ‘Breakfast Egg’ show, was hatchet-faced, beady-eyed, with a small ginger moustache. He had been playing a Pulp number, ‘Common People’, smiling, shaking his shoulders in time to the music when Terry was ushered into the hot little cell which smelt, he thought, of stale sandwiches and unwashed socks. He even muttered something encouraging like it being time for a change before Pulp reached their climax and sang about going to bed with common people. But now Terry was being stared at with studied distaste by an outraged ginger judge, eager to damn him. ‘For God’s sake,’ a voice inside Terry protested, ‘it’s not fair. He’s treating you as if you were already in government.’ And then he th
ought that was, in a way, a kind of compliment. His courage returned. He was going to be in government soon, a regime which would give effect, in so far as it could, to the aspirations of Agnes Simcox and Paul Fogarty. Didn’t he owe it to her, if not to himself, to prepare Hartscombe and Worsfield South for the shock? From the dock he did his best to offer the judge a friendly smile.

  ‘Hang on a moment, Ken. You and I know there aren’t any quick and easy solutions. We’re facing the consequences of a government which has put the widest gap ever between the rich and poor, the haves and the have nots. A regime that thought money was the only thing worth having. We’ve got to start by understanding the nature of the problem. Let me tell you something interesting …’

  ‘About young thugs?’

  ‘About chimpanzees. The ones survive who can push a stick down a hole and bring up some nice juicy ants for dinner. It all depends on which particular jungle you’re born in.’

  ‘Hang on, Terry.’ Kenny Iremonger’s smile was merciless. ‘I’m going to throw you open to the public. Just try putting on the headphones.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re on about perfectly decent chimpanzees. I’d call this lot hyenas!’ ‘Six of the very best when I was at Rugby. Put me off buggery for the rest of my life!’ ‘I blame the Common Market. The teachers are powerless to hit back.’ ‘It’s the parents that ought to be in prison. I hold the parents responsible.’ ‘No children allowed out on the streets after six o’clock.’ ‘None of this would have happened if we hadn’t gone all soft in the sixties. The only things today’s teachers learnt at school was finger-painting and how to make a model kibbutz out of yoghurt pots. How do you expect the kids to have any respect?’ ‘Eight years old and of course they’re capable of evil.’ ‘Police cautions? Don’t make me laugh!’ ‘As I say, six of the very best and they’d have nothing left to smirk about.’ ‘You expect that sort of thing in Worsfield, but this was Hartscombe. In broad daylight!’ ‘Good morning, Terry. This is Colin Wythenshaw calling from Nunn’s Courtny.’ ‘Good morning, Colin. And how are you?’ ‘Perfectly fine, thank you, Terry. And quite honestly, would you be saying the same thing if they’d raped your mother?’