‘What’s the evidence for that?’ Mel from the Guardian needed convincing.
‘We shall produce full documentary evidence at the proper time,’ Willock told her.
‘And what’s the proper time?’
‘Next Wednesday’s press conference.’
‘But just before polling day …’
‘Exactly!’ Sir Gregory sat back, smiling with satisfaction and, as they passed on to the question of the danger of heart disease from consuming sausages, the Minister for Agriculture was able to breathe again.
Robert Flitton, wearing a dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, sat in a place known as the ‘sun lounge’, although there was no sun on that grey, autumn morning. He didn’t take his turn with the newspaper, nor did he pay any attention to the television, which glowed and burbled in a corner of the room. It seemed to him like a picture, hanging on the wall, sometimes a representation of snowy mountains, or wild animals, but more often of people arguing. He wondered why a picture should be so noisy and wished it could be kept quiet. Sometimes he thought that those arguing might be real people, gathered in a corner of the room and planning to attack him, and then he sat very still so that they wouldn’t notice him and would go away. These were alarming moments but most of the time he was not frightened, only a little anxious because the thoughts that flitted through his head seemed to have no meaning attached to them. They were about places he couldn’t identify and people he couldn’t remember. He saw no possible reason for these thoughts and wondered if they didn’t belong to someone else entirely, old Mrs Duckworth, for instance, who, in the chair beside him, had nodded off again. Perhaps they had spilt over from her mind. And then moments came when he had no thoughts at all, the screen in his head was blank, and he felt entirely happy. But now he was worried again. He heard a voice which, for some unknown reason, he felt he ought to recognize.
‘Dad,’ the voice was saying. ‘How are you, Dad?’
‘Yes, Dawn,’ Robert said. ‘How are you, dear?’
Although he could remember none of this clearly, or even obscurely, Robert was speaking to his second wife, Dawn Allbright, whom he had married years after Terry’s mother deserted him. Dawn had been an efficient housekeeper, he had thought at the time, clean about the place, reasonably enthusiastic in bed and, unlike Clarice, otherwise known as Susie, polite and welcoming when he brought colleagues home from the office. But Dawn had also fled, puzzled and irritated by the onset of his illness. When he put butter away in the broom cupboard and an office file in the fridge, when he called her nothing but Gladys and later completely failed to recognize her, she told Terry she could cope no longer and was going to live with an uncle in Newcastle. Then Robert was handed over to the Social Services and, at last, came to rest in Evenload, a Worsfield old people’s home, a man only in his sixties, divorced from his past and long parted from himself. He turned to where the voice he thought was Dawn’s was and saw a face which bore some resemblance to the one he looked at each morning, in the bathroom mirror.
‘Dad, it’s me. It’s your son. It’s Terry.’
‘It’s Terry,’ Robert repeated the last words obediently, although they had no particular meaning for him.
‘That’s right! You recognize me. That’s very good!’ Terry thought how handsome the old man was, his dark curls now grey at the temples but his features still clear, his pyjama collar turned up, his eyes bright and smiling although there were no thoughts behind them. He looked, his son thought, like a film star, ageing but still popular and with world-wide box-office appeal. ‘Dad. I want to ask you about your job.’
A nurse passed with a trolley and handed Robert a mug of tea, already mixed with milk and sugar, which had the spoon standing up in it. Robert said, ‘Thank you, Dawn. That’s very thoughtful of you, dearest.’ Terry declined politely when he was offered tea also.
‘Dad. About your job. If anybody asks you …’
Robert took the spoon out of his mug of tea, licked it and put it neatly in the top pocket of his dressing-gown. ‘Forms to be filled in,’ he said. ‘That’ll come in useful.’
‘Dad. You were always shop-floor, weren’t you? All your life. You were one of the workers.’
‘That pen,’ Robert asked plaintively, ‘where the hell did I put it? Forget my own name next.’
‘Remember, Dad? You may have helped out with Personnel occasionally, but you were always thought of as shop-floor. Always one of the workers, weren’t you, Dad? Remember that, if anybody asks.’
‘Oh, here it is at last!’ Robert found the spoon in his top pocket and held it between his fingers. ‘Now. Let’s get down a few particulars. Name, height and date of birth. That’ll do to be getting on with.’
Terry stood up and sighed, ‘Bless you, Dad.’ When he left, his father was smiling happily, as though conscious of a job well done.
‘So you told a lie.’ Agnes sounded not angry, but vaguely amused.
‘Not a lie. Just a slightly ambiguous statement.’
‘You seem to be rather fond of slightly ambiguous statements.’
‘Darling. Just try and remember …’
‘I know. There’s an election!’
‘Next week. And Willock’s gone one more point ahead in the polls.’
‘So it’s time to be ambiguous?’
‘Just for the moment.’
‘And when the election’s over it’ll be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You swear?’
‘Of course I swear.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because after this election there’ll be another election and after that, if we get into power, it’ll be necessary to win the next election, and the truth’s going to be postponed indefinitely. Isn’t that how it’ll be?’
He didn’t deny it directly. Instead he told her, ‘He was a shop steward who gave some advice to the personnel department. That’s all. He was always regarded as a manual worker.’
‘That’s what you’re proud of?’ Luckily she was still smiling.
‘Of course. And they can’t prove he wasn’t.’ He said that confidently, but he wasn’t sure that Willock’s case couldn’t be proved quite easily. Why had he ever said that about Robert? Was it because, like his vanished mother, he was ashamed of middle management? He had cleared so many hurdles; was it fair that he should be brought crashing to the ground by a lie nailed on the last day of the campaign? He said, ‘We’ll win, whatever cards Willock and his lot think they’ve got up their sleeves.’
‘Shits.’ Agnes kicked up a fluttering pile of leaves, almost overbalanced and held his arm. ‘They are the most awful shits.’
‘Yes.’
‘The Home Office. The prison service. Whoever it is Paul has to contend with.’
‘Of course they are. What’s happened now?’
‘Oh, it’s just a boy. Ordinary decent criminal. No violence in his record. Paul’s done a lot to help him. He’s got high hopes of finding him a decent job when he leaves. I don’t know, gardening or something like that. So the bloody jobsworth in government who decides these cruelties is going to take the boy away from Skurfield and send him to some dump in the north. Blackenstock. No education, no work experience, nothing to do outside the cells. Just banging up and suicide.’
‘I can do something about that, when I’m the local M.P.’
‘You will, won’t you?’
‘You know I will.’
‘Whatever you have to do to get there.’ She stood in front of him in the wood, her hand on his chest to stop him moving, and instead of accusing him further, she kissed him.
It shouldn’t be thought that Lord Titmuss spent his whole time and concentrated all his efforts on manœuvring the candidates and the voters of Hartscombe and Worsfield South. He had, early in his political career, amassed a considerable fortune and, when dealing in the City, had easily been able to outsmart his public-schoolb
oy associates and partners. Having bought back Rapstone Manor, his expenses were extremely small. He didn’t gamble, buy pictures, own a yacht or keep mistresses. Becoming, with the years, increasingly monkish, he could live without sex, winter holidays or works of art. He drank whisky and soda, increasingly dark as polling day drew near, ate the plainest food (and no one cooked more plainly than Mrs Ragg) and hadn’t ordered a new suit of clothes for ten years. He allowed his son a small income to supplement his earnings as a librarian and paid Mrs Ragg a little under the going rate for the district. He employed an elderly gardener and Ted Lumsden, a driver who had been with him since he was first a minister. The large Rover car was one he had bought second-hand from the government when he left it. The Lumsdens got a cottage, which Mrs Lumsden continually complained his Lordship was maddeningly slow to repair, and they had to pay their own council tax, water rates and electricity. Titmuss, however, reminded the couple of the high cost of living, the level of taxation since Mrs Thatcher had been deposed, and pretended that he was writing his memoirs to give him ‘Something to buy a crust with in my old age.’ The fact that he had so little use for money didn’t stop him wanting to make a great deal more of it. He was frequently on the telephone to his accountant and his stockbroker, and such conversations invariably served to swell his Lordship’s portfolio. He was still looking for ways to increase his wealth.
Although his life was monastic Lord Titmuss kept his ear to the ground, was an encyclopaedia of local gossip and a frequent guest at cocktail parties where he stood, a gaunt figure, listening keenly, drinking strong whiskies and consuming a record amount of finger food, wolfing sausages on sticks, vol-au-vents and avocado dip as though he hadn’t enjoyed a square meal for weeks. Some time ago he had discovered that Hanging Wood might be up for sale.
Tom Nowt’s son, living in South Africa, had apparently grown weary of nursing a chunk of the Hartscombe countryside he never saw. He had written to Nobby Noakes, who had enjoyed pints of Simcox and poaching anecdotes with his father, and asked if it were possible to find a purchaser. Nobby had mentioned the matter to a successful Worsfield builder named Chuffnel and, as they hit upon a plan which would require a considerable amount of capital, they sought an audience with Lord Titmuss.
‘This is the most desirable part of the British Isles. Seventy-five per cent of those questioned in a recent poll gave the Thames Valley as their preferred living area.’ Gerry Chuffnel was a large man with a fair moustache and hair worn just over the ears, so that he looked like a professional cricketer. He spoke loudly and enthusiastically in favour of the project. ‘Fallowfield’s just a beach-head, my Lord. Just marking out the territory. We’re going to have to meet the need for at least a thousand new homes between here and Skurfield, and the bulk of those will have to go on green-field areas.’
‘You mean a green-tree area?’ Titmuss, who disliked being called ‘my Lord’, hadn’t taken to Chuffnel; but then he didn’t take to many people, his liking for Terry Flitton being something of an exception.
‘Green-tree area! Of course. Very good, that, my Lord.’ Chuffnel forced a laugh which lasted rather too long. ‘Of course we know that it’s an A.O.N.B.’ Hanging Wood had been for years scheduled as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
‘A.O.N.B.s are going. The green belt’s a thoroughly out-of-date conception and there are motorways over most of the places of Special Scientific Interest. You know that as well as anybody.’ For the purposes of this conversation Nobby Noakes regretted nothing.
‘I thought you wanted to save the wood for your precious foxes to breed in.’ Titmuss gave Nobby a look of exaggerated surprise.
‘If this business goes through,’ Nobby was laughing, ‘I can buy a place in Leicestershire and join a decent hunt!’
After the whisky had been poured Titmuss promised to talk to his accountant, giving the impression that it would come as a surprise to him if he found he had enough cash for a couple of trees, let alone a wood and the building of so many new houses. They fixed on a date for a further meeting to inspect the merchandise.
Terry had become, Agnes thought, ridiculously cautious. It was not polling day he feared most but the day when he expected Tim Willock, at his press conference, to announce that they had proof positive, an old employee, records and wage slips from W.R.F. to convince the electors that Terry had lied about his father. He saw the statement in his election pamphlet not as a lie but as a pardonable exaggeration and an article of faith. He was proclaiming his commitment to the Man in the Street, the Ordinary Man, the Worker. Of course it could be argued that no man is ordinary, but solidarity with the workers was as much a part of Terry’s creed as calling himself a Socialist, a Democratic Socialist of course, a Socialist who could coexist with Capitalism, naturally, but a Socialist all the same, who had first won Agnes’s love by his admiration for the books on her top shelf. And he was undoubtedly the son of a worker, a man whose working-class credentials had won him the love of Terry’s mother. The fact that Robert had ended up on the third floor, managing Human Resources, was an irrelevant detail, and failing to mention it was entirely forgivable. But Terry knew that Willock, and perhaps the voters, would not forgive it.
The accusation had broken the spell of the fear of success which had kept Penry and Nabbs at a respectful distance. Now they watched over him, kept him on a tight rein and a tighter schedule, convinced that he was a candidate who, given half a chance, would make another fatal blunder. They smiled when they remembered Terry’s conviction that he would become the Honourable Member for Hartscombe. Their sole concern, now, was to avoid the sort of massacre which would earn ridicule for the Party and black looks for Des Nabbs M.P. in the Walworth Road.
Terry knew that Nabbs and Penry were watching him, and he began to believe that Willock’s men were also taking a close interest in his movements. He got the uneasy feeling that he was being followed, his conversations in pubs listened to and his movements noted down. When he visited the Dust Jacket he noticed a young man in a blazer and a grey-haired man pretending an interest in the books but in fact, he thought, standing listening. He became nervous of visiting Agnes’s house and afraid to go up to her bedroom. Once polling day was over things, of course, would be different, he told her. And she, finding herself increasingly fond of him, being what she would have had to call, if she didn’t shy away from the sentimentality of the hackneyed phrase ‘in love’, as she had not expected to be again, forgave him. She was, she had to admit it, lonely, and sitting all day in the bookshop had become a bore. It would be great if they could just have an hour alone together.
Terry had to make a speech at a business college which had been set up in a Georgian house on the river by the new proprietors of Simcox Ales. It was to be an important statement on co-operation with the private sector, and he told Nabbs that he needed to be alone to compose it. He was also desperate for fresh air and exercise. He was going to the woods and the hills.
‘Not on horseback, let’s hope.’ Nabbs gave him one of his most merciless smiles.
‘Of course not.’
‘And I’ll want to see every word of that speech before you utter it.’
‘So you shall.’ And Terry went off to the lavatory in Penry’s house, locked the door and phoned Agnes on his mobile.
So they had driven their own cars and met in the wood where they had first walked alone together, and she mocked him gently about ambiguous statements and told him about the unjust treatment of Slippy Johnson. And as they stood in the leaves, in a patch of winter sunshine, zipped up in warm jackets and muffled in scarves, she stopped him with her hand on his chest and kissed him, and he returned the kiss hungrily and held on to her as if for dear life. They found themselves not far from Tom Nowt’s hut.
‘Deer’s Leap’. Tom had called it his hunting lodge; the green and rotting shack, with its blind and broken windows, damp smell and the danger that it might have been taken up as a shoot-up centre by the more desperate Thames Valley drug-takers, had o
nce been rejected by Agnes as a refuge for love. Now, as they stood, hungry for each other after a period of abstinence, it seemed a godsent opportunity and a safe harbour. They scorned the wounded and gutted sofa and made a nest of coats and scarves on the wet floor, on to which dead leaves had drifted, and uncovering only as much as was necessary, excited by what they couldn’t see, made love with a frantic intensity and agonized delight such as they had never felt before.
Titmuss had seen a Ford Falcon which looked like Terry’s, indeed it had so little sense of discretion that it carried a ‘Vote Flitton’ sticker with a rose on it on the back window, parked not far from an old Volkswagen convertible in the road near Hanging Wood. He and Nobby had got out of Gerry Chuffnel’s Range Rover and walked among the trees they might destroy. Hanging Wood slopes, at first gently and then more steeply downhill, and Chuffnel was concerned with the expense of terracing the area. For their exploration they had found themselves splitting up like beaters, and Titmuss had been alone when he saw, between naked beech trees, a lop-sided and ramshackle hut. Outside it the Labour candidate, over whom he had already taken considerable trouble, could be seen locked in a seemingly endless embrace with Agnes Simcox, the old doctor’s daughter from the bookshop.
As they entered Tom Nowt’s hut Titmuss turned away and, walking back to the Range Rover, wondered if the time had not come to ditch Terry entirely.
Chapter Seventeen
The time until polling day seemed perilously short and crammed with events. All the candidates were asked to attend the production of As You Like It in the Skurfield Y.O.I., but only the Liberal Democrat found it convenient to be present. Neither Willock nor Terry wanted to be publicly associated with one of Paul Fogarty’s imaginative projects. The day after Alaric Inwood was to give his Rosalind, and Slippy his supporting Celia, would be the day before the vote, the morning on which Willock had promised to furnish convincing proof of Terry’s falsification of his father’s job.
The Sound of Trumpets Page 14