The Sound of Trumpets

by John Mortimer

  Listening to the phone-ins on the ‘Breakfast Egg’ in his office, Paul Fogarty called Clifford and made sure, for the fifth time, that Slippy Johnson had been safely in his cell at the time of the supermarket assault. And Agnes, warming her hands on a mug of black coffee, rejoiced because Terry had, against all odds, pointed out the route to Utopia.

  Spirits were not high in Penry’s office. An opinion poll had given Tim Willock an eight-point lead, and Des Nabbs was drafting a Private Member’s Bill to ban fireworks.

  At the weekend Kate and Terry went canvassing. Their little band of helpers knocked on doors, and when they met at the end of the street they were quieter than usual. The tide of hope on which Terry had launched his campaign had retreated, leaving him beached on the hard rock of the Hartscombe mugging. Doors which had once opened to him stayed shut, although inside ‘Match of the Day’ could be heard booming. When the doors were opened, reluctantly, they were held almost closed, to create a slim channel for voices at one with the phoners-in to the ‘Breakfast Egg’:

  ‘Heard you on the radio and I didn’t agree with that at all.’ ‘Tim Willock. That’s the one that’s got my support.’ ‘Keep the little buggers marching. Make the little sods dig out deep holes and fill them in again.’ ‘Clever chap, that Kenny Iremonger. Got the better of you there, didn’t he?’

  Des Nabbs joined them to announce, with gloomy satisfaction, that he’d been down all the streets between Queen Alexandra Road and Tow Path Lane and Terry’s face had vanished from no fewer than thirty-nine windows. Tim Willock, framed in blue, seemed to have taken over the high street; only the Dust Jacket bookshop remained ostentatiously loyal to the cause.

  Terry found support from where, perhaps, he least deserved it. ‘In their hearts they know you’re right,’ Kate told him. ‘Those kids know nothing better than a society that told them all you need for human happiness is a mortgage, two cars and a holiday on the Costa del Sol. If the Chairman’s wife got mugged she should blame it on her ghastly government.’

  ‘I don’t think they mugged her for a holiday on the Costa del Sol.’

  ‘Stick to the message. That’s all you’ve got to do.’ Kate was quietly impatient with what she thought was a moment of unnecessary doubt. ‘Think of the committee meeting last night. They were rock solid behind you, Terry.’

  He tried not to remember all fifteen members of the local Party crouched uncomfortably at children’s desks in Skurfield school. The grey-haired couple who could hardly get a sentence out without mentioning Nye Bevan, the aloof lady who’d opened the gourmet cheese shop in Nunn’s Courtny and sat shivering in her poncho, a young couple of house agents who’d heard that property boomed during the Harold Wilson era and were prepared to bet on that happening again, the dedicated band of door-knockers and envelope-stuffers who were not particularly looking forward to another day at the front. Nabbs, addressing the meeting, had decided to guillotine all discussion. ‘Some of you,’ he rasped, ‘may have seen a bit of rubbish in the form of a leading article in the Sentinel expressing criticism of our candidate’s views on the treatment of juveniles. Some of you may have tuned in to the candidate’s chat on the “Breakfast Egg”.’ Here the committee nodded, as Terry thought, gloomily. ‘All I have to tell you is that the treatment of juveniles will be decided by a Labour government after the general election, which the Tories can’t postpone much longer.’ Here the couple who remembered Nye Bevan were seen to smile vigorously. ‘I suggest we deal with this matter shortly. Will anyone who wishes to criticize the candidate at this stage please show in the usual way.’

  Only one hand was raised, that of the cheese-shop owner who, in the accents of old Bloomsbury, suggested a law to make the provision of organically grown meals compulsory in the Youth Offenders’ Institution, it having been demonstrated by science that an injection of pesticides and chemical additives into the food chain led, invariably, to an increase in crime. This suggestion having been ruled irrelevant and out of order, the motion standing in Nabbs’ name was carried, he told the meeting, ‘unanimous’.

  Terry remembered these events, and that Penry had looked particularly cheerful. Was his agent, Terry worried, relieved because the awesome possibility of victory had vanished and life in the local Labour Party could return to its normal state of peaceful protest?

  Now, having knocked on the last unsympathetic door, he was grateful to Kate for her invincible certainty. She was faithful to him, and he had been unfaithful to her, but that seemed, as they stood together at the end of a windy street, to be an event far from the steady progress of their lives. It had been a dream, a momentary diversion, a night out, a party he shouldn’t have gone to, something she need never guess at, even if the worst was going to happen and they had to go back to London, back to S.C.R.A.P., and wait and hope for a more sympathetic seat than Hartscombe and Worsfield South. They had walked together to the last of a row of Victorian cottages, now bright with the neon sign of a fish and chip shop. They went in to buy supper and mingle with the natives and hoped to find someone who didn’t listen to the radio and who might be inclined to vote Labour. So Terry, his confidence ebbing away, forgot the other woman who also had faith in him.

  ‘What the hell,’ Agnes asked herself, ‘did I think I was up to?’ She sat in the bookshop behind the window still decorated with the Labour candidate, vainly trying to read an interminable tale of espionage and sudden death. The elderly people of Hartscombe, whose lives were, on the whole, singularly uneventful, loved to lose themselves in a world of treachery, moles, double-crossing, scenes of sex and torture and unexplained bodies found floating in the canals of Amsterdam. She hadn’t, had she, taken up with Terry simply because his wife had objected to her Gauloise? Had she, though? ‘I’m allowed to smoke and I can also fuck your husband.’ She tried this accusation, presented the arguments forcefully and acquitted herself. Unpredictable she might be, but not, thank God, trivial enough to have sex as a result of an argument about a cigarette.

  But what was the song she’d heard on the car radio? ‘Common People’. Was that about her, an ageing middle-class snob, the doctor’s daughter, the famous novelist’s ex-wife, sniffing around the town wanting to have sex with common people? Was the Labour candidate in the coming by-election her bit of rough trade? She made herself think about it seriously and wasn’t convinced. To begin with the director of S.C.R.A.P., with his two-piece suits, and one, she had noticed, fashionably unstructured, was hardly rough trade, in spite of the factory-worker father, spoken of, perhaps too prominently, in his election leaflet. Besides which, you had, hadn’t you, to be a stinking great snob to want to talk about ‘common people’. Although she would admit to smoking too much and drinking, sometimes, without particular restraint, although she indulged in irrational dislikes, used to enjoy knocking things and had, no doubt, fucked around more than was called for, she refused, absolutely, to own up to being a snob.

  She had been attracted to Terry, she told herself, because there was a sort of innocence about him, a kind of purity which had touched her when he first came into the bookshop and was confirmed, as far as she was concerned, by his fearlessly unpopular answers on the ‘Breakfast Egg’. He had behaved like a man who knew he was right and didn’t care what those with time on their hands to phone in thought about it. Was there something, she asked herself, about her beliefs which made her think politicians admirable only if they lost gallantly? She considered this charge and dismissed it also. One of the reasons she had taken to Terry was because he was determined to win, and she longed to cheer his victory when the returning officer read out the number of votes cast.

  ‘But be honest’ – Agnes could be fairly tough with herself – ‘don’t kid yourself, because at your time of life, it’s not seemly.’ From the moment she directed Terry’s attention to the top shelf of old-style Socialist literature she had fancied him, she had to admit, something rotten. There had been times in her life when she had found herself, almost to her surprise, sleeping around, a
s they called it in the seventies. They were times when she was passionately in love, first with one Simcox brother and then with another. Those were years when sex was an everyday part of her life like breakfast, reading books, going to the movies and hunting, in the morning, for the last one in a packet of fags. Then came times during which, as her father would say of similar periods in his own life, she lay fallow. This restful activity was inappropriately interrupted by a farmer, a television presenter, a persuasive ear, nose and throat specialist from Worsfield and a barrister so self-regarding that she decided he needed no other company. For some time the man she loved most was a gay prison governor whose tastes and terms of employment cut him off from sex of any sort. She had wanted Terry and taken him to Tom Nowt’s hut in order to put ideas into his head.

  What about Kate then, the beautiful young wife she knew all about from the outset? Kate, she told herself, and she was perhaps prejudiced enough to find the answer convincing, was perfectly safe. Agnes was not daft enough, surely, to imagine that Terry would leave a wife for whose beauty he was envied for a woman who, given an early teenage pregnancy, might have been his mother. Anyway, he wasn’t going to tell Kate. He was far too sensible to risk a row, a scandal, perhaps talk of a divorce before polling day. Kate was the candidate’s wife, he would stand with his arm round her waist as they both raised their arms to acknowledge the cheers, and then she would be the Member’s wife and never know anything of the suggestion made in the hut in the woods. And so the three of them would live on in safety and protection, two in knowledge and one in ignorance.

  None of these comforting thoughts relieved her loneliness. Since the ‘Breakfast Egg’ broadcast Terry had fallen silent, was away somewhere else when she turned up for knocking on doors and seemed to be avoiding her.

  If he were to lose, Terry was afraid, it wouldn’t be the work of the Tories but through the efforts of children. Since the mugging of Lady Inwood they seemed to have cornered the news, squeezing the progress of a home counties by-election out of the daily papers. A twelve-year-old was said to have achieved his hundredth burglary, a raiding posse of children managed to strip a multiscreen cinema of a length of carpet, twelve seats and a machine for making popcorn, a fourteen-year-old boy fled to Bermuda with his supply teacher, a Citizens Advice Bureau in Leeds was set on fire, the tyres were removed from a school bus in Luton and sold to buy dope, a boy said to be helping the police with their inquiries was found to have hanged himself, the entire skeleton of a dinosaur was dismantled and removed by children from a museum in Huddersfield, and a twelve-year-old girl on a package tour got secretly married to a Turkish policeman. The children of England, it seemed, were desperate to prove Tim Willock right, and in order to do so had boarded the Tory bandwagon.

  Terry had been to a Saturday antiques market in Hartscombe town hall. The stall-holders, wearing scarves and bobble hats and mittens, crouched behind their stuffed birds and wispy antique dresses on coat hangers, their china statuettes and garden cherubs and trays of military buttons, barely returned his greetings. A notice at the door read ‘Unaccompanied children not admitted.’

  As soon as possible he had left the stall-keepers and the elderly customers picking over their dusty relics and was walking beside the river. Midday struck from the church clock, starting up a colony of rooks, floating like scraps of burnt paper on the wind from the bare trees on the opposite bank. In the distance, crossing the road, he made out the threatening figure of Des Nabbs, who was after him, no doubt, with the party line on No Increase in Taxes, for their evening’s talk to the Chamber of Trade. As the polls descended, he feared, the old pro would claim increased power over him, and soon every word he uttered would be censored. To avoid his gloomy control and feeling, anyway, in serious need of a drink, he took refuge in the Water-Boatman and, having negotiated the dark staircase to the downstairs bar, was greeted with unexpected smiles, a warm handshake and a heartfelt, ‘Thank you for talking sense to them at last!’ from the Governor of the Skurfield Y.O.I.

  Paul and Agnes were together in the downstairs bar. It was his day off and everyone had gone to the antiques market and deserted the bookshop. They were drinking rum and had ordered sandwiches. Agnes held up her face to Terry, and he kissed her cheek. He remembered the bedroom over the old surgery, the piles of books, the bottle of champagne on the floor, the cold sheets and the windows looking out on the river; the one sure success, he felt, of his election campaign so far. He was glad to be with friends.

  Red-beef sandwiches came, and they ordered more rum and Simcox bitter. ‘Bloody children!’ Terry was almost ready to laugh. ‘If only they’d co-operate and give us a chance to get into government.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Paul admitted, ‘they’re all little Tories at heart. Great believers in private enterprise and the free-market economy. But thank you again for the “Breakfast Egg”.’

  ‘It wasn’t a huge success with the audience,’ Terry had to tell them. ‘We’re down nine points now in the Sentinel poll.’

  ‘You don’t mean you regret it?’

  He knew he could give Agnes only one answer unless he wanted the smile over the glass of Simcox to turn to what he feared might be merciless contempt. ‘Of course not. It had to be said. I just hope … we can go on to other issues.’

  ‘It had to be said.’ Paul Fogarty was very hopeful. ‘And when they think about it they’ll know you’re right. Boot camps are just an expensive way of turning out tougher villains. You get a much lower reoffending rate with some sort of treatment in the community …’

  ‘You said it’ – Agnes had little interest in the economy of boot camps and not, it must be said, detailed views about care in the community – ‘because you have to. Because you’ve got the map with Utopia marked on it.’

  However long and dangerous the journey, Paul was prepared to drink to Utopia. As they raised their glasses to this remote and inaccessible resort the door on to the landing stage opened and there, among the ducks who came squawking out of the icy river, a dark-haired girl in a padded jacket raised a camera, which flashed at them triumphantly.

  ‘I’m June Wilbraham from the Sentinel,’ she said. ‘I saw you come in here. Lovely old bar, isn’t it? I knew you wanted a picture.’

  Terry remembered telling Penry that the Water-Boatman would provide a photo opportunity for him drinking with the voters. That seemed a very long time ago.

  He supposed he should have expected it. On his way back to Party headquarters the phone bleated in his pocket. He stood outside Boots with the little instrument to his ear, and the voice which came rasping out of it seemed unusually amused.

  ‘You really need help, don’t you? There’s still time. Just about. Why don’t you turn up around six? Rapstone Manor. Park at the back of the house and use the tradesman’s entrance. No one’ll notice you. Tell your gang you’ve got a date with the doctor. Nasty attack of foot in the mouth disease.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘So, you fell for it! The Left’s passion for defeat. So much more comfortable, isn’t it? Lie on your back and let them walk over you, so long as you can complain eloquently of the terrible injustice of the world.’

  ‘I wasn’t doing that.’

  ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, then?’

  ‘Saying what I honestly thought.’

  ‘That is pure self-indulgence! A dangerous luxury which you can only afford when you retire to write your memoirs. That’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘Saying what you mean?’

  ‘And doing what I want.’

  ‘Which is … ?’

  ‘Trying, against all the odds, to get you back into the bloody battle! Top up your dry little Socialist soul with a gallon or two of fighting spirit. Do my best to cure your fear of success. Sit over there, where I can see you. I shan’t be offering you a drink.’

  Had Terry, in fact, come like a man driven to the doctor? Not the regular G.P. who had shaken his head, not held out much hope but advised him to st
ay at home and keep taking the tablets, but the brilliant old sawbones who had, so the legend went, stretched out the invalid England on the operating table, applied the knife ruthlessly and produced a new, muscular, slimmed-down and energetic entrepreneur. Or had he been out of his mind to answer the mobile’s command?

  What was he doing exactly, risking the admiration of Kate and Agnes, courting a vote of censure from the Worsfield Central Committee, a report to Walworth Road from Nabbs and the certain end to a once-promising political career? He could hardly be blamed for losing a safe Tory seat. There would be compensations. The love and sympathy of the two women. The party for the supporters: ‘Thanks for all your tireless help and we damn nearly made it.’ The sausage rolls and the real ale and ‘The Red Flag’ in its entirety, sung now with greater confidence in defeat. That wasn’t what he had come to Hartscombe for; it was a party he never intended to be at. So he had told Penry that he wanted to go home early and get ready for the Barbarians’ dinner. He had taken Nabbs’ written orders for his after-dinner speech and driven down the lanes to Rapstone Manor feeling like a villain, hardened perhaps by boot camps, taking a get-away car to the scene of the crime.

  It was dark when he drove round to the back of the house and parked among the trees. There was an area of rural mess, a wired-in chicken run, a broken-down Transit van, dustbins and a locked door. He knocked and waited impatiently, as though afraid of watchers in the bushes, and then he heard shuffling footsteps, the door opened a crack, and the pale face of an elderly woman was staring up at him, apparently finding it difficult to suppress laughter.