The Partridge Kite

by Michael Nicholson

  Think nothing of the doors, Mr McCullin. It’s a little fetish of mine, something I’ve done since I was a child. I feel protected by a lock. No one can just “walk in”, just “arrive”, if you understand.’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Tom. The man sat down but Tom ignored his gesture and continued standing.

  ‘Mr McCullin, I know you are an agent of sorts. I know you were employed on a casual basis by what is cryptically referred to as SSO. I know also that you have been making “inquiries” of certain members of my Trust. Activities which of course concern the Trust in no way at all.’

  Tom stood and looked but said nothing. The carol singers outside launched into the final chorus of ‘Royal David’. The descant all but drowned the theme.

  The man began again. ‘It is important for me to know whether. . . Damn their bloody eyes!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Will they never stop their blasted noise?’

  He jumped from his chair, ran to the window and slammed the shutters tight, ramming the iron bar into place so viciously that paint from the frames flaked off and fell on to the cushions of the window-seat.

  His eyes bulged in his small white face and the blue veins in his temples stood out as if they were varicosed. The broad smooth dome of his large forehead glistened with sweat. He began breathing deep and regular, filling his lungs with oxygen to help dissolve the hate and fury in his blood.

  For that instant he had lost control, forced into violent anger by the sound of a carol.

  He sat down again. Slowly, carefully, he opened the fingers of both hands wide and then flung them together with a slap, interlacing them and bending the fingertips over the knuckles so hard that both hands went white with the pressure. He looked into the fireplace where a small fire was burning. He had quite forgotten Tom.

  An unlikely man to be Governing Secretary of what publicly had always seemed such a gentle Society, the British Heritage Trust.

  But then, what was not generally known about him was that he had many moods like this. Psychopathic urges that were only just kept under control by an understanding doctor and the drugs he prescribed. Doctor and drugs between them had managed to control the more destructive of the many masochistic practices he frequently indulged in. The scars that covered his body were now only infrequently joined by new ones. He was indeed a private man, whose acts of violent self-abuse and the devices he used to perform them astonished even his psychiatrist, who had seen much in his profession.

  He continued staring into the fire. His chest had stopped heaving and the skin on his temples was smooth again. He began picking at a scab on the back of his left hand, digging into the hardened dull red sore with his thumb-nail. Blood began to trickle from the broken crust. Most certainly an unlikely man to be concerned for so long with British flora and fauna, stately homes and their diminishing legacies!

  Frederick Broughton Wilde was forty-seven years old. His Christian name was given him by his Austrian mother, his surname by a man who crossed Matabeleland, Mashonaland and Manicaland at the turn of the century to help make Rhodesia safe for Cecil Rhodes and his doubtful company of commercial adventurers. What was not generally known about him was the enormous amount of his own inherited wealth he had, over the past eight or more years, contributed to various funds - funds which all shared a common trinity of hatreds: Race, Religion, Colour. Although he had been careful not to join them, his support of them had been constant.

  In the past five years, for example, he had given nearly a quarter of a million pounds to the National Front. He had financed, to a greater extent, their successes in the past two General Elections, increasing their seats in the Commons from nil to fifteen.

  He was a member of CORDON; acknowledged by the Chairman and Board Directors to be a vital part of it and essential to the process of the coup itself.

  Naturally he, like so many of the top men involved, knew the coup was imminent and knew its objectives. But again, like the others, he did not know when or how it would be achieved.

  He had infinite faith in the Chairman, and in all the years he had been actively and closely involved in CORDON he had never once doubted its inevitable success.

  So he had not been unduly surprised to receive instructions by telephone the previous afternoon to contact a Tom McCullin of SSO, invite him to the house in Hobart Place, where very few others had ever entered, and put to him the suggestions relayed from CORDON Headquarters by what to Wilde was evidently a dictaphone machine. But he must not - the negative was emphasised twice by the machine - he must not use the Alert number to confirm Tom’s acceptance. CORDON would know if the plan was under way.

  And in keeping with the discipline he exercised in all such matters concerning CORDON it never occurred to him to ask why. Obedience in all things at all times was a CORDON rule he had long learnt to respect.

  ‘Please excuse me, Mr McCullin,’ he said, looking up from the fire. ‘I have been under a great deal of strain recently, and for a private man like myself the intrusion of noise is the least bearable thing.’

  ‘But,’ Tom said, ‘you live at the comer of one of the noisiest streets in London. And you live in the front room, which must be the noisiest in the whole house. If it’s so painful, why not move?’

  The grey watery eyes looked back at him. There was something in the expression that Tom thought he recognised but couldn’t describe.

  Wilde said nothing. But his large eyes nestling in heavy pouches of creased grey skin showed the man’s satisfaction that his endurance of pain should be recognised so completely by a stranger.

  ‘Your investigations,’ he said, not answering Tom’s question, and speaking in a quiet calm voice as if the past minute had never taken place, ‘your investigations could be extremely damaging to the Trust if they ever became public. My information is that you are attempting to connect certain political activities with it. Almost, as it were, as if the Trust was some kind of front for political extremists.’

  He cocked his head at Tom, like a chicken. But Tom said nothing. He watched the water in the man’s eyes welling into the outer comers and begin streaming into his crow’s-feet.

  ‘I must be frank with you, Mr McCullin. Your activities are causing us much concern. Can you imagine the embarrassment if any part of your investigation was picked up by the national Press? The Trust would never recover. Contributions and legacies would stop and a very fine and honoured national institution would suddenly cease to exist, and with it some of this country’s finest treasures. Posterity would damn you for it.’

  ‘Mr Wilde,’ Tom said, ‘I am making inquiries about some of your members, all, as it happens, committee members. We think your Trust is a protective disguise, a front for something very political and very extreme. We consider you all very dangerous men who are preparing to attempt a very dangerous experiment. Something the Government and people of this country are not prepared to accept.’

  ‘Well, Mr McCullin, I don’t know what you mean by a “dangerous experiment”. But your knowledge and research must be quite superhuman if you can presume to talk for the people of this country. You may well know something of this present Government, a small group of unrepresentative men whose political philosophy is well known if not entirely well supported. But to know the minds of the British people! Well, that is indeed an extraordinary achievement.’

  ‘If I can’t, Mr Wilde, then neither can you! And neither can any single group of ambitious men.’

  ‘And what is this Government, Mr McCullin, if it is not a single group of men perverted by ambition? You talk of dangerous experiments. Once upon a time men experimented with something that was later defined as Democracy. Where is it now in the scheme of things? Whatever happened to its seniority? There was a time, not so long gone, when it was revered above Christianity. But where is its place today in the politics of your Government?

  ‘What is the Prime Minister today if he is not an
elected monarch, and, as the system is now, unthronable? And what is his Cabinet if it is not a caucus of sophists whose careers depend entirely on the grace and favour of their Prime Minister King? A Government by the People? Of the People? For the People? No, Mr McCullin! Twelve men and two women in Cabinet who nod their heads at every Prime Ministerial decision made from that dingy house in Downing Street. Decisions that are irreversible, unnegotiable, and rubber-stamped by the whipped clowns in the Commons, who no longer have the wit or energy to contest them.

  ‘We are governed, Mr McCullin, by small men. Men without a sense of history, without a sense of duty, who no longer recognise the obligations of inheritance, whatever their form. Who no longer care about our final plunge into a new dark age of Philistinism. They are men entirely without honour.

  ‘Our politicians are like bedsitting-room dwellers, squatters who muck along from day to day, careless of who has lived there before them or who comes after.

  ‘But stupid or evil, careless or clumsy, the end is the same. They are about to destroy the very nation of people who helped pioneer Democracy, a people who spread their tongue and their charm to every comer of the world.

  ‘I do not believe, Mr McCullin, that they care one bit for those precious English things, freedom above all, that we have for so long taken for granted as our birthright. But I do know they are now about to fritter that birthright away in the name of Socialism.

  ‘If I were to talk of the mind of the British people, Mr McCullin, I would first listen to their despair, sense their helplessness. And ask what they can do.

  ‘What can outraged decent people do if they are to survive? Must they prepare to adapt themselves to the weapons of the Philistines? Must they be forced to do all those vulgar things that a vulgar age will ensure their voices being heard? And by so doing join their ranks?’

  He had spoken non-stop, without a pause or a breath it seemed, all the time looking directly into Tom’s eyes. The eyes held him. The pupils tiny pin-pricks of black in a watery grey. No eyelids blinked to break the stare.

  Tom might have been shocked had he not expected it. And by expecting it he found it that much easier to absorb. How exactly Wilde and Linklater and the rest shared the same creed! Their speeches might have all been written by die same one man from a central speech-writing desk. Their appeal was the same, touching on every prejudice, every pretension every man had ever held. Fertilising them, fusing them into their arguments, which then seemed to be everyone’s own, writ large.

  ‘Mr McCullin,’ he said, ‘I talk as one of the despairing. A simple private man who does not involve himself in politicians or any of their accompanying dangerous experiments.

  ‘But let me tell you, on behalf of those who do, that what you have undertaken is dangerous to you. It is dangerous to all those you work with. . . and all those you play with.’

  He paused deliberately.

  Yes, thought Tom, I’ve got it.

  Wilde went on, ‘But I am instructed to offer you a way out.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Tom.

  ‘An honourable way out, Mr McCullin, in which the motives of the people you are investigating can be explained to you in such way that you may feel your pursuit is no longer necessary.’

  Tom said nothing.

  ‘Would you be prepared, Mr McCullin, to meet, as anonymously and as protectively as you wish, a person who is in some small way involved in many of the things you seem so concerned about?’

  ‘You have a roundabout way with words, Mr Wilde. You mean, will I meet a CORDON member?’

  The grey eyes didn’t move. Nothing moved. Except for the tiny trickle of water from the tear glands. Wilde was not going to answer.

  ‘Where?’ asked Tom. ‘When?’

  Tomorrow. Five o’clock. Selfridge’s. He will be waiting for you on the fifth floor, in the toy department. He’ll meet you at the model railway counter directly opposite the lifts, to the left of the Father Christmas Grotto. If it sounds melodramatic, I assure you it’s not meant to. And if you would rather change the time or location you need only say so now.’

  ‘How will I recognise him?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll recognise him without difficulty, Mr McCullin.’

  ‘But how? What is his name? What does he look like?’

  ‘You know his name. And you know what he looks like.

  His is the last name on your list, Mr McCullin. The one that follows mine!’

  Tom left the house with the black shiny door and saw Fry’s Range Rover on a meter opposite. The carol singers had moved to the other side of Grosvenor Gardens and were well into ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ on behalf of the little child in Bangladesh. Fry pulled out into the flow of traffic as Tom jumped in, and went across the lights towards Buckingham Palace Road and Pimlico. He glimpsed the lanterns on the pavement but couldn’t hear the singing above the traffic and the whine of his gearbox.

  Nor did he see the man standing at the corner a yard from the carol singers, his face suddenly lit up as a lantern swung in the wind.

  A military-looking man with a cauliflower left ear and an umbrella held like a scabbard at his side.

  ‘It’s a trap.’

  ‘Of course it is!’ said Tom.

  ‘And you’re going?’

  ‘What else would you do?’

  Fry had begun to drive down Victoria Street thinking they were both going back to the Department. But Tom asked instead to be driven west.

  ‘They’ve shown themselves,’ he said. ‘Do you play poker Fry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, of course you don’t!’

  Fry was driving badly. Tom braced himself against the hard plastic fascia as Fry braked sharply, not seeing a car in front turning right.

  ‘What protection will you take, Tom?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘But that’s absurd. You don’t know how many they’ll have. You must take more. We ought to have one in every corner.’

  ‘Who they’ll see, just as soon as we place them! And then

  they’ll try some other way. No! We’ll go in together, let them know it’s just two. Anyway, you don’t expect an OK Corral gunfight in Selfridge’s toy department, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know what to expect, Tom. You’ve never underestimated them before, but if they’re only expecting the two of us then it seems to me they are pretty damned certain of taking us.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘And remember, Tom, they know who we are and what we look like. We only know one of them!’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Just the two. Fry. You and me. Five o’clock. Model railway counter. Tomorrow.

  ‘And I’ll be staying out of my flat from now on,’ he said. Tor a few nights, anyway, precaution, nothing else. You might want to do the same thing. Let’s meet up in the morning, usual time; and get me a Browning, will you, and whatever you like to use, but make sure it’s mobile, for Christ’s sake!’

  They had manoeuvred their way through the evening rush-hour traffic and were now crossing Sloane Square into King’s Road, going west. Tom asked to be dropped off just beyond the Fire Station at the comer of Sydney Street.

  Fry knew what it meant. Tom was seeing Kate. Her flat was at the river end of Beaufort Street, only a five-minute walk away.

  Tom!. . .’ Fry began as Tom got out.

  ‘Yes?’

  Fry paused. ‘Nothing. Just good-night!’

  What else could he say? He wasn’t supposed to know them as lovers. And as far as he knew, Tom didn’t know he had ever been to Kate’s flat. So what could he say? What he felt? That he desperately wanted to see them both together tonight? To enter that warm flat again? To sit on the edge of the white goatskin rug and drink Geneva gin with hot water? To smell Kate’s scent and feel his face burning from the fir
e in the old Edwardian grate. To be one of three people eating, drinking, talking together. To be more than just one.

  He did a violent U-turn, holding up traffic in both directions. Two dozen obscenities were shouted at him but he didn’t hear.

  Tonight he had arranged to drive to Farnham for dinner with his mother. She would be expecting him, would have turned on the central heating especially for him. She would already have underdone the joint and overcooked the vegetables. The same standard meat, veg, and gravy browning she had served up all her life and his.

  They would sip coffee and eat milk chocolates. And she would talk in her soft apologetic way of the trivia that enveloped her. Of the boredom that was slowly and very effectively killing her. There are many ways of dying, she had once said, and suburban euthanasia is just one of the more painful.

  But not tonight. He could not face her and listen to her dying tonight. Not so obviously and dreadfully alone with her in that dark brown house smelling of boiled cabbage and furniture polish.

  He would sleep on the bunk in the Duty Night’s office and cook himself an omelette on the Baby Belling.

  From there he would telephone his lies to her and she could put the plates back on the shelf and the food back into the fridge for another day, perhaps.

  And then cry herself to sleep in the cold pink bedroom that overlooked the allotments and the railway line.

  Tom didn’t tell Kate about the rendezvous at Selfridge’s the next day. He couldn’t go through the don’ts and danger routine again.

  So instead they made love on the floor. It was simply done and all over in less than five minutes. They didn’t even bother taking their clothes off. It was lazy, comfortable, proper and very satisfying. Tom’s balls still ached, but the drugs worked wonders.

  He didn’t move. One of her arms was tight around him, the other stroked his hair, her finger-nails massaging his scalp.

  ‘Sometimes, McCullin,’ she said, very softly, ‘you make me feel like.. .’ Her voice trailed off.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘You remind me of the dreadful Australian joke,’ she said, eventually, ‘. . . the one where the fellow says to his girl, “How about a fuck” . . . and she says, “I don’t feel like it now”. . . and he says. . . “Well, d’you mind lying down and letting me have one?”’