‘I certainly don’t remember taking any advice to behave like a Tory.’ Terry did his best to look as amused as the audience. ‘That’s a perfectly ridiculous suggestion!’
‘Politics is often ridiculous,’ Titmuss went on, ‘and very rarely sublime. Perhaps young Mr Flitton recalls making a speech containing a lot of soft, do-gooding rubbish about murderous young yobs just being the product of our unfair society. Didn’t you say they deserved nothing less than a holiday in the Caribbean at the tax-payers’ expense?’
Again the audience laughed with pleasure, drowning Terry’s angry denial of ever having mentioned holidays in the Caribbean.
‘You know, Kenny’ – the audience fell silent, anxious not to miss more of the Titmuss one-liners – ‘I advised him to drop the rubbish about society and come out for teaching the little louts a lesson they wouldn’t forget. Of course he took my advice.’
‘Tough on crime. Tough on the causes of crime.’ Terry repeated the mantra.
‘You might remember, Terry’ – Titmuss leant back in his chair and contentedly sipped water – ‘you even warned the voters about the sexual tendencies of a particular do-gooding prison governor.’
‘Was that on your advice?’ Kenny asked.
‘I took the view that the voters had a right to know. Yes. So I instructed Terry accordingly. As I say, he jumped to it.’
But now the audience was silent, apparently as surprised as Terry looked. After allowing a dramatic pause Kenny turned slowly to him and asked, ‘Is there any truth in the suggestion that you were simply carrying out the instructions of an ex-Conservative Cabinet Minister?’
‘Of course not!’ Terry was trying to sound light-hearted and unconcerned. ‘Lord Titmuss is a constituent and a man of immense political experience. Naturally I was interested in getting his views. But I certainly came to my own decisions. Without any outside influence whatsoever.’
‘Your own decisions?’ Titmuss was now gently teasing. ‘On the hunting issue, for instance?’
Terry was silent, dreading the laughter which he suspected was coming.
‘What was your position on hunting exactly?’ Kenny asked.
‘His position was,’ Titmuss was delighted to answer the question for Terry, ‘hanging on to his horse’s mane for dear life, as I understand it. He’d gone out for a quiet little trot and got involved in the hunt before he could help it. His horse ran away with him before he could even shout “Tally-ho!” ’
The audience’s laughter started then, slowly at first but gathering power, like the horse Balaclava.
‘You remember, Terry’ – Titmuss’s shoulders were shaking in his heroic effort to suppress laughter, which added considerably to the audience’s amusement – ‘you were going to tell the truth about that? But when I told you it would make you sound a proper Charlie you wisely changed your tune. You said you’d gone hunting deliberately. To inspect the evidence. So you could take a detached view of blood sports. From the top of a runaway horse …’
Even Kenny was laughing now. He recovered as soon as he could and said, ‘Well, Mr Flitton. What’ve you got to say about that?’
‘D’ye ken Terry Flitton? With his coat so pink!’ Titmuss uttered the call loudly to the ceiling, as Terry could think of nothing better than, ‘It’s a gross exaggeration.’
‘Are you really saying,’ Kenny went on to ask, ‘you advised Terry Flitton throughout his campaign?’
‘Oh, I admit sometimes he got off the lead. He went off on little expeditions of his own. Usually ill advised. Like the silly business of trying to pretend his father was one of the workers, when he was really a perfectly respectable middle manager.’
‘It’s quite untrue. My dad was always treated as shop-floor. Not third-floor.’
‘The records at his workplace are perfectly clear. I happen to have brought them with me in case there was an argument.’ Titmuss pulled from an inside pocket the documents Terry had seen once before, fluttering in his hand. ‘It’s under the general heading “Management Personnel”. “Robert Flitton, Manager in Charge of Human Resources”. Oh, and by the way, I brought your note. “I have decided to denounce P.F.” That’s Paul Fogarty. The prison governor. Such a good pupil, Terry Flitton. He consulted me all the time.’
Titmuss, it seemed, kept everything, even the note Terry had put through his door on the night of As You Like It. He saw only one way out. He stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought I was asked here for a serious political discussion. Not for a series of comic anecdotes about a distant by-election. I think I shall go now.’
And Terry went, out of the studio and down the maze of corridors until he found the reception and pushed his way out of the glass doors into the cool night air, and nobody stopped him.
‘You seem to have lost your guest.’ Titmuss was amused.
‘He’ll be back.’ Kenny was confident. ‘But just until he comes, Lord Titmuss, what’s your view of the present government?’
‘Conservatism and water.’ The laughter was over, the rasp had returned to the Titmuss voice. ‘A pretty innocuous tipple. But we’re brewing a new spirit in the Tory Party. There are young men coming up who can lead us back to what Britain was. Exciting, adventurous, and where the brave risk-takers are rewarded.’
‘And your view of Terry Flitton who, as I understand you to be saying, was really your creation?’
‘A footnote. In the history of the Labour Party. There because of me.’
But footnote or not, Terry never came back.
At the moment when Lord Titmuss was being asked this question a Ford Granada car, stolen from a resident’s parking place outside a solicitor’s house in Clapham, was driven over the bridge at Hartscombe. It contained six youths who might, as in a school reunion party, all be called O.B.S.Y.O.I.s, or Old Boys of the Skurfield Young Offenders’ Institution. They were all, in varying degrees, drunk. Four of them had taken part in the attack on Lady Inwood in front of the supermarket, and though wearing the faces of Donald Duck, Popeye, Elvis and Madonna for the purposes of that enterprise, they were now revealed, less glamorously, as Dane, Robbo, Winston and George. The driver was Alaric Inwood, one time Rosalind, now in command of a special mission which he had taken some trouble to organize. He drove carefully, having no wish to attract the attention of the police. Sitting next to him, already a little dizzy from gulps of rum and tins of lager passed round in the car, was Slippy Johnson, taken from his safe house in South London, where he was growing increasingly bored, and tempted by a night out with old mates and a bit of clubbing where, Alaric had told him, the girls were all panting to be taken into the toilet.
They turned left over the bridge and along a road which turned into a track beside the river. The lights from Rambo’s sparkled on the dark water, and they could hear the thud of the music. Inside the noise was deafening, the lights flashing dazzled him, the girls’ faces came near to Slippy, laughing, shaking back their hair, their skin white and the lipstick almost black, smelling of powder and perfume, and passed him by. Alaric had a hand on his shoulder, and his mate, his friend, his Rosalind, said, ‘Good this, isn’t it?’ And Slippy replied, ‘Yes. Real good!’ and, drinking the Godfather Alaric handed him, started to laugh wildly and for no reason at all. ‘Quiet, Slippy. You wait quietly. I’ll find you a girl.’ Alaric vanished into the shadows and didn’t come back for a while. The others approached him from time to time, some with girls clutching their waists, to hand him further Godfathers. ‘Compliments of Al, you jammy bastard!’ It seemed to him that, as time went on, the lights grew brighter and the music louder and then, quite suddenly, both stopped, and they were out on the moonlit tow-path, all the old Skurfield boys in a huddle with a smaller number of girls one of whom took his arm, and he looked down into a solemn, pale face and a bright bell of well-washed hair. ‘That’s Carol,’ Alaric was shouting. ‘Chat to her, Slip, and she’ll be yours for free.’ Slippy smiled but could think of nothing to say as the whole group straggled towards Hartsco
mbe lock.
The sound of the weir seemed to Slippy as deafening as Rambo’s music. They all stopped, looking across the shallow steps over which the water foamed and flashed, phosphorescent as the clouds blew past and a half-moon appeared. It was Winston who first jumped on to the rail of the slender walkway and, with his arms stretched out like a tightrope walker, trod delicately, sure-footed in white trainers, all the way to the lock and the opposite bank. This performance was repeated by George, Robbo and Dane and was greeted with loud cheers from Alaric and the girls. And then Slippy heard threatening voices. ‘Go on, Slippy. You can do it, Slip. It’s good, mate. Good as a space walk.’ And then, most threatening of all, ‘Slippy won’t do it! He’s scared of water! Scared! Scared! Scared of water! Don’t wash! Don’t shower! Can’t walk! Can’t swim!’ Slippy heard the voices rising above the sound of the weir. Carol’s face was looking up at him, laughing. ‘You’re not really scared, are you?’
‘No, of course he’s not!’ Alaric answered for him. ‘Old Slip’s not scared of anything, are you, Slippy?’
And then Slippy felt Alaric’s hand take his gently, other hands were on his arms, and he felt himself hoisted up, as though he were flying, and his feet landed on the white rail over the walkway.
He took three unsteady steps forward, and then the hands left him. Suspended in space, he heard feet running on the boards of the walkway, shadows vanishing towards the opposite bank of the river. He tried to hurry to join them, dizzily, from where he stood. And then he trod on air and fell, hard against the stone shelf where the force of the water pushed him, rolled him, a drunken boy, and dropped him in the deep green water, where he stayed and sank, all his secrets with him.
Chapter Thirty
‘It’s over,’ Agnes said. ‘It was always over.’
‘We had a great week,’ Jilly Bloxham said. ‘Business is booming. What do you mean, it was always over? Last time we talked it was going great guns.’
‘Like a man fathering a child when he’s very old. He’s not going to see very much of it. That’s decided at the moment of birth.’
‘You’ve finished it?’
‘No. I told you. It was finished already. But he got angry with me. So he went.’
‘Angry with you?’
‘Yes. To tell the truth, rather splendidly angry.’
‘Because you smoke too much? Drink too much? Because he thought you had your eye on someone else?’
‘None of that. He told me I believed in … what I believe in, just to make myself feel good and self-sacrificing and noble, and I was quite safe because I wouldn’t have to do anything about it.’
‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ Jilly, going through the till receipts, said it casually. ‘We all know that.’
‘Do you?’ For once, in a long time, Agnes was laughing. ‘It came as quite a shock to me. When he pointed it out.’
‘So he started the quarrel?’
‘No. No, I suppose I started it.’
‘That night?’
‘Long before. When we got back together. I told him he was a shit because of the terrible thing he said about Paul. But a shit I quite liked fucking.’
‘He must have loved that!’
‘Well, no. He didn’t much. But that last night. The night he was angry and left me. He didn’t seem much of a shit then at all.’
‘You think he told you the truth?’
‘Part of the truth, perhaps. Perhaps we’re both right, or neither of us. Anyway, let’s go and have a drink in the Boatman.’
‘Will he be there?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. I shouldn’t think he’ll ever see me there again.’
‘Have you got money, or do I rob the till?’
‘No, I’ve got money.’ Agnes laughed again. ‘Money’s about all I have got.’
So she went out of the shop, and a flash of light made her shut her eyes, and so she appeared frowning and confused in the newspaper.
From the time she saw Kate come into the restaurant, consult the girl at the desk and then walk through the tables, her head high, her jaw set, looking neither to the right or left, like some beautiful young, starry-eyed revolutionary marching to the barricades, June Wilbraham knew that she would get a piece which would end her allegiance to the Hartscombe Sentinel and land her safely on a centre spread in the Daily Meteor.
When Kate sat and the waiter asked about a drink she said, ‘Mineral water. Still not sparkling.’ June hoped she was determined to keep sober enough to tell all.
‘Mrs Flitton. Kate, if I may. I’m June. Please don’t feel you have to talk about it. I’m not putting any pressure on you, I want you to understand that. I’m not one of those journalists who want to squeeze things out of people and ask awkward questions. If you don’t want to discuss it, O.K., we’ll talk about your wardrobe and what you’re planning for the holidays. But if you want to, and it’s entirely up to you, you can be sure I’ll write the piece in the most sensitive way. I know you’ve been having the usual problems of a politician’s wife.’
‘Not the usual problems,’ Kate said. ‘She’s an old woman.’
‘That is unusual.’
‘I think it’s sick.’
‘You say your husband is suffering from a sort of illness?’
‘I think that’s the kindest way of putting it.’
‘And you want to be kind?’
‘Not particularly.’
June Wilbraham breathed a sigh of relief. The prospects for the interview were excellent, so she got the ordering out of the way and switched on her tape recorder. ‘You don’t mind this? It makes some people nervous,’ she said to Kate as the red light glowed.
‘I don’t mind at all.’
‘I understand we’re talking about Agnes Simcox.’
‘Yes. We’re talking about her.’
‘Had you met her? I mean, were you all friends?’
‘I met her once. We had supper with her. She patronized me. I suppose, at her age, she thought of me as a child. Oh, and when she was at the next table in a Chinese restaurant and she puffed smoke in my face. I was with my husband and I’m sure she did it quite deliberately.’
‘After that they met secretly?’
‘Secretly, yes. When he was pretending to go down to his surgery. The days when he was meant to be helping his constituents with their income support and their rehousing and their child benefit and long-delayed operations, he was helping a well-heeled Champagne Socialist unhook her Wonderbra.’
‘Does she wear one of those?’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘And is she well off?’
‘I think her father left her money. I heard about that. Her father was a local doctor, which doesn’t mean she’s healthy. Smokes like a furnace.’
‘And drinks champagne?’
‘Drinks anything she can get hold of, I should imagine.’
‘And she’s a Labour supporter?’
‘Well, she talks about it a lot. Terry said she keeps a row of Socialist books in her shop. You know the sort of woman. Adores the working classes but doesn’t want any of them coming to supper.’
‘What do you think Terry saw in her?’
‘God knows. Perhaps he thought she was somehow a cut above him. More sophisticated. Worldly. Terry’s quite a simple soul really. Perhaps he thought she was like one of those old bats that used to go bicycling with the Fabian Society. He always spoke about her with a kind of awe, as though she were an ancient monument. Which she is, of course.’
‘But was he smitten?’
‘Apparently. He’d do anything she wanted, so it seems. She even got him up on a horse! I don’t know who he thought he was. Squire Flitton. Lord of the bloody manor. The horse ran away with him, bang in the middle of a bunch of blood-sports enthusiasts murdering a fox. He’d probably have put on a top hat and a silly red coat if she’d asked him.’
June looked at the subject of her interview, her head on one side like a sympathetic nurse. �
��You’re very hurt?’
‘Not so much hurt as disgusted.’
‘Could you forgive him?’
They were silent then, as the waiter changed the plates. Then Kate said, ‘I might have forgiven him. If it was some girl from the office, someone we both knew. Someone of my age, or his own even. But she’s old! It’s not acceptable behaviour. Not in this day and age.’
‘Does he want you back?’
‘He says he’s finished with her. I don’t see that makes any difference. By the way, when you write about this you needn’t do it sensitively. Don’t bother to be sensitive at all.’
As Kate stabbed at her food, June thought that she had never seen anyone so angry. She was not much older than Kate but she thought she saw in her the fury of a child. A confident child who had done well and grown up to be beautifully at ease in a world she had inherited, confident in herself, only to meet some horrible and mysterious betrayal which she couldn’t understand and could only avenge through the little tape recorder that glowed beside her empty wine glass.
‘A photographer’s coming after lunch. I hope you don’t mind?’ June asked gently.
‘No. I don’t mind.’ And then, ‘Have you photographed her?’
‘Yes, but don’t worry. She’s coming out of her shop, frowning and certainly not looking her best.’
Terry’s world had gone silent. Only a few days ago, it seemed, it was full of noise, people calling out to him, greeting him, telling him he looked well, asking his advice or giving him theirs, asking him to consult his diary. It had been full of meetings, committees, focus groups, deputations, prisons to visit and, often late at night, discussions with Kate about the unexpected bombshells and booby traps of government. But when he got back from ‘Confrontations’ and Lord Titmuss, Kate was asleep in another room.
The next morning Kate was gone without a note, without a message, without a sound, and when he rang S.C.R.A.P. she ‘wasn’t at her desk’ or was ‘out of the office’ or ‘in a meeting’, and she never rang him back. In the Home Office it was as though he had ceased to exist. People avoided his eye and hurried past him in corridors. His secretary looked at him, he thought, with pity, and was more than usually attentive, as though his condition was incurable. Hannah didn’t speak to him, never sent for him, and a message, delivered by way of his secretary, asked him not to attend his usual committees. His appearance on ‘Confrontations’ was widely reported and with considerable amusement in such headlines as LABOUR MINISTER WAS PUPPET ON TORY STRING and I KEPT LABOUR PRISONS MINISTER IN CUSTODY! LORD TITMUSS’S STARTLING REVELATION. So far as the government was concerned, the result was to ignore him.
The Sound of Trumpets Page 24