by Simon Raven
“Roughly,” Percival replied.
“Well. We . . . would find young Morrison ... an embarrassment.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes. Indeed. Some years back he made a lot of trouble through that Young England Group of his, and we reckon he means to do it again. If he comes back.”
“If he comes back.”
“Well, will he? I’m asking you.”
“That,” said Percival, “is for the committee to decide.” Full stop. Percival turned his eyes back to the Quantocks. “Look,” Sir Edwin said. “At five o’clock this evening I have to attend a Cabinet Meeting, at which I must report on an important new proposal to do with the constitution of the Upper House. Instead of preparing what I shall say, I am sitting here talking to you. What does that suggest?”
“That you want something.”
“We want something. To be precise, Somerset Lloyd-James returned at the General Election. And don’t tell me it’s for your committee to decide, because we both know better.”
“Why do you want Lloyd-James?”
“I’ve told you. We want someone intelligent, and the only other intelligent chap you could choose is Morrison, and Morrison will be a bloody nuisance. I’m appealing to you for the good of the party.”
The Minister sat back, fixing Percival with what he secretly thought of as his “Dunkirk” expression.
“Perhaps,” said Percival, “it would be for the good of the party, in the wider view, to be made to accommodate a bloody nuisance.”
“Not as bloody as this one,” said the Minister between his teeth.
“I see.” said Percival. And he did see. From the start he had thought it odd that a senior Minister should be paying him court in person; and now, watching Sir Edwin as he gritted his teeth and sucked the life out of a third toffee, he realised, very broadly, what was afoot. Quite accidentally, he had become involved in a big game; without knowing why or how, the quiet country solicitor had been set down in a seat at the Centre Table where there was no limit - none at all - to the stakes. For some reason, the Minister was trying to pretend that it was still an everyday, friendly affair, and the chips were only marked at a fraction of their real value -presumably to prevent him, Rupert Percival, from knowing the true amount of his winnings and claiming them in full. Alastair Dixon had been right when he said there was nothing which Percival wanted for himself; but this did not mean that Percival was prepared to sit back and be robbed. If they asked him to join their game, then, as a matter of equity, he must be told the real terms of reckoning and, as a matter of principle, he must be paid out in full. In short, the one thing which Rupert Percival did want was a proper degree of respect.
“Let’s pretend we’re starting again at the beginning,” he said pleasantly, “and that when you say ‘confidence’ you mean it. Even we provincial lawyers have our pride.”
The Minister smacked his lips as if relishing this rebuke. It seemed that Percival had a price after all: the truth. How very singular. Hoping for the best, he decided to go some way to meet it.
“Lloyd-James,” he said, “is a crook. Therefore we would have settled for Morrison, nuisance value and all. But unfortunately Lloyd-James is too good a crook. He’s got hold of something that could smash us to pieces, and he wants Bishop’s Cross in return for holding his tongue.”
“What has he got hold off?”
“Some regrettable facts about Suez. Which reflect on several gentlemen still in office.”
“He can prove them?”
“On balance, yes.”
This was enough for Rupert Percival. Although a lawyer’s instinct is to ask for chapter and verse, Percival had always been a lax lawyer and preferred to deal in generalities. Again, by issuing a general confession of wrong-doing Sir Edwin had shown him sufficient regard; gentlemen need not concern themselves with details.
“The thing is quite simple,” Percival said: “Lloyd-James must have his way.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me the truth at the beginning?”
“I suppose I thought you’d be shocked.”
“I,” said Percival, “am a pragmatist. Like everyone else, I always suspected there was something fishy about Suez. But what is past is inevitable. Recrimination, retribution will not mend it. A good recovery has been made. Why ruin the party’s prospects for a dead issue?”
“Some people would say it was still very much a live one.”
“Moralists.”
“So . . . Lloyd-James will be chosen?”
“Yes.”
“Your . . . loyalty . . . will not go unnoticed.”
Percival nodded. He did not particularly want his loyalty to be noticed, but it was only fitting that it should be.
“Don’t let me detain you,” he said rising. “You’ll want to be starting for London. I hope you have a satisfactory Cabinet Meeting. And I should say how much I sympathise with you over this sad affair of your daughter.”
“Like you,” said Sir Edwin, who had been much heartened by the outcome of the discussion, “I take a pragmatic view. Once a thing has happened, one should regard it as inevitable. That way there is comfort both for heart and head.”
When Somerset handed over the des Moulins letter, Holbrook said casually:
“Don’t tell anyone that you’ve given it to me, will you? We don’t want any more childishness.”
By way of reminder, he struck Somerset in the small of the back with the edge of his open palm. Although the blow was light and the pain small, it seemed to Somerset to jar his very bowels, slyly hinting at an immensity of possible anguish.
“You see?”
“You needn’t worry,” Somerset gasped at him. Lord, can this be happening to me, your servant?
Holbrook nodded. “There’s a good boy,” he said.
When Holbrook left Somerset, he returned to Maisie’s flat and used her telephone to put through a call to Venice. While the exchange made the connection, Maisie said:
“You realise you’ve just lost me one of my best clients?”
“Can’t be helped. It was Salvadori’s idea to use your flat. It was just bad luck that the chap we wanted was a customer of yours.”
“You tell Salvadori to think of some other place for his dirty work.”
“You tell him,” said Holbrook, grinning.
“I’ve never met him. I’ve only - ”
But at this point the exchange rang to say that Venice was on the line. Holbrook waved Maisie out of her sitting-room, and then listened for some minutes to the instructions, which were given him in a simple code, for his return.
After this he gave Maisie some money, which cheered her up a bit, and took a taxi to Buttock’s Hotel, where he packed his two small suitcases. He had paid his bill in advance and had no mind to hang around saying good-byes; but as it happened he ran into Fielding Gray on his way out.
“Just off?”
It was the first time that either had spoken to the other.
“Yes, London is getting too hot.”
“It’s certainly been an exceptional summer,” Fielding conceded. “Already the grass in the parks is drying up.”
“Yes. High time to leave.”
He walked urgently into the Cromwell Road and hailed a taxi.
“Ill-mannered tyke,” said Tessie that evening: “going off without saying anything.”
“Tom did warn you,” Fielding reminded her, “that he wasn’t much of a chap.”
“Poor Tom,” Tessie said. “Fancy that little madam choosing , his wedding day to run off. It says in the paper that the honeymoon’s been indefinitely postponed.”
“I expect he’s busy helping Sir Edwin clear up the mess.”
“The more fool him. He was always too soft-hearted. If he’s not careful that Turbot lot’ll drink the life’s blood out of his body.”
In Tiverton, two days later, Mark Lewson said good night to Isobel, who would be sleeping in a youth ho
stel, walked back to his hotel, and went into the bar for a drink.
“And now,” said a cheery, unctuous voice from the television set, “Wessex Line-Up. Local news and views from Salisbury to the Dart.”
“My fiancé was on Wessex Line-Up once,” said the middle-aged barmaid to Mark: "he belonged to some funny religious lot who thought the world was going to end.”
“Oh?” said Mark politely, thinking of Isobel and the lonely night ahead.
“Yes. So one day they all went up a hill, waiting for the Son of Light to come and find them there, and the Telly got to hear of it first. My fiancé broke it all off because I laughed at him about it later, what a lot of right fools they all looked praying away in their white nighties in front of this telly camera, and nothing to show for it. It was bad of me really.” She snivelled. “I shouldn’t have laughed like that. I shouldn’t have, should I?”
“Perhaps not.”
Mark, judging that he had heard the more amusing portion of this story, shut her off by turning to watch the television set.
“. . . Her Royal Highness,” the unctuous voice said, “had a particular word for ex-Sergeant-Major Cruxtable, the Camp Physical Fitness Officer.”
Her Royal Highness appeared grinning toothily up the nostrils of an obese but otherwise presentable man in a track suit. The ex-Sergeant-Major seemed about to say something, when Her Royal Highness was whisked smoothly away by a determined-looking man with a bruiser’s nose and a bowler hat.
“The Marquis Canteloupe, Parliamentary Secretary for the Development of British Recreational Resources, showed Her Royal Highness round the rest of the Westward Ho! Caravan Site.”
Lord Canteloupe and another man, identified by the commentator as Camp Commandant Hookeby, helped H.R.H. into a gleaming caravan, from which she emerged two seconds later with gestures of enthusiasm.
“After the party had visited the nursery-creche (picture of a fully accoutred but questionably sober matron recovering from a curtsey), the delightful modern-style dinette, the discussion room and the Maison Bingo, the Princess welcomed the first arrivals.”
Two coaches came up a track, and Lord Canteloupe stepped forward with Hookeby and Cruxtable to help the campers out. This went well, for Canteloupe showed undeniable panache and the picture of Cruxtable carrying a baby revealed only his top half, so that the viewers could not see him aim a vicious kick at a puppy. H.R.H. simpered and waved by the gate; some sturdy and wholesome family groups moved past her with cheerful deference; the Matron appeared, walking with commendable steadiness, to make a fuss of a pregnant woman; and a man in peaked hat and spotless white coat (the refuse man with the haemorrhoids, if only the audience had known) started to distribute ice-creams among the children.
“Aaaaaah,” went the barmaid.
“Westward Ho!, first site of many planned, is in the unspoiled Quantock Hills, a holiday-makers’ paradise. Let’s hear what Lord Canteloupe had to say in his address of thanks to Her Royal Highness at the end of this proud and happy day.” Canteloupe appeared on the steps of the Maison Bingo; he looked strained but was plainly still well under control.
“Your Royal Highness’s gracious presence at this opening”
- gruffly, chivalrously, rather movingly the old scoundrel repeated what Carton Weir had written for him - “has, among so many other values, a symbolic one. Your youth and beauty (a quick shot of H.R.H.’s splendiferous teeth) remind us that this camp exists, above all, to bring the glow of health and happiness into the fair cheeks of our young. And not only the young in years but also the young in heart. (‘That’s modern English for senile,’ Weir had explained. For Christ’s sake don’t leave it out. “The old folk” are all the rage just now.’) Yes, for the young in spirit as well as for the young in strength there is an honest welcome here. Come one, come all ... to Westward Ho!”
“That’s what I like,” the barmaid said: “not forgetting the old folk.”
But Mark wasn’t listening. He had had an idea: if Isobel and he hired separate caravans on Canteloupe’s site, they would be together and yet seemingly apart. They could “meet” in the natural course of events without anyone’s knowing of their prior connection. And what better hiding place than among a crowd of lower-class holiday-makers? They need wander no more: they would go to the Quantocks the very next day and there bide out time until Sir Edwin’s surrender appeared in the Personal Columns of The Times.
It was Max de Freville’s custom to hold a special gambling party in late July or early August every year in order to mark the end of the season. This year he had announced the party for much earlier, for the end of June. When the guests arrived they found, instead of the usual sumptuous canapes of caviar and foie gras, slices of dry bread covered with Cheddar cheese; instead of champagne, bottled beer; instead of a properly appointed Chemmy cloth, a plain kitchen table on which lay two packs of greasy cards. However, since Max’s prestige was immense and since this evening he moved easily among them talking in his usual manner, they were reassured after a time and imagined that he was playing some kind of joke. Perhaps he had devised a transformation scene to amuse them: the cheese and beer would suddenly disappear through the floor, to be replaced by refreshments even more succulent than usual; the splintering surface of the kitchen table would somehow be metamorphosed, at the touch of a switch, into luscious green baize. . . .
And so, when Max announced, as he shuffled the greasy cards, that this evening they would be playing Slippery Sam for threepenny stakes, there was a good-humoured laugh all round.
“I mean it,” he said.
This time the laugh was rather awkward.
“Threepenny stakes,” he shouted. “Cash”
All his energy left him then. He let the cards fall to the table and sagged back into his chair.
At this stage his guests at last realised something of what had happened. With low murmurs of deprecation they moved off into the night: sooner or later, they told each other, the end had been bound to come; Max had had a sensational career, but it was over now, and they must look for someone else to fill his place. As Jonathan Gamp summed it up for them, “He made more money than was decent, my dears, and now God’s being puritanical about it.”
Of the guests, only Captain Detterling, who had watched Max rise all the way from scabby poker games and postdated cheques to undisputed pre-eminence, remained behind to comfort him; and this he did more out of curiosity than affection, though there was affection too.
“What’s all this about?” he said.
“An idea I cribbed from Shakespeare. ‘Timon of Athens’.”
“Has everything gone?”
“Oh no,” said Max lightly. “But things were beginning to break up. People weren’t paying - they thought I had so much that it didn’t matter. And besides, I was bored.”
That makes sense, thought Detterling; but all the same there’s something disastrously wrong. His eyes.
“So I’ve deposited a nice little sum,” said Max, still speaking lightly but staring straight before him, “in France. Thank God Angela persuaded me in time. I shall go to her now and settle with her there in Menton.”
“You always said she couldn’t be a permanent thing.”
“I can give it a try. Move on if it’s no good.”
Silence. Fascinated, Detterling watched the eyes bulge, as if they were about to explode out of their sockets.
“How much I achieved,” Max suddenly shouted. “Nobody achieved as much as I did.”
He put his head down on the bare wooden table and started to weep.
“You were the most famous gambler in Europe,” said Detterling, soothing him.
Max raised his head and brushed the tears away. His eyes subsided, deflated and wizened balloons, back into his head.
“You don’t understand,” he choked. “It isn’t that I’m proud of. It’s the other thing. Given time, money,” he blubbered, “my network would have encompassed the whole world . . . the universe.”
; “You did very well as it was.”
“Yes, you could say that. There just wasn’t enough money. Mind you,” he said, with a temporary return to calm and rational discourse, “I’d been neglecting my business, letting the debts go, not bothering to attend the games myself. The accountant warned me but I wouldn’t listen . . . because, you see, I was so absorbed in the other thing. Every day, letters, cables, phone calls, messages by hand ... from all over Europe. I was really beginning to see the pattern behind it all. But it’s useless now.”
His eyes began to swell again. I must get him to a hospital, Detterling thought; he can’t go off to France like this. But once again Max’s eyes subsided.
“Where was I?” he said.
“You were neglecting your business interests ... in favour of your very expensive private correspondence. So the money was running down?”
“So the money was running down. But there wouldn’t have been enough anyway. There wasn’t enough money in the whole kingdom to pay for all I wanted to know.”
“How much did you know, Max?”
For hour after hour Max told him. He told of facts established, connections proved, of policies and plots uncovered; of men made wealthy overnight, of men who lay down in the fullness of power and woke with a prison cell for their only empire. Much of it was speculation, much fantasy and much sheer madness. But here and there Detterling recognised a fragment of probable truth; and one such fragment, explaining several odd things which had lately been brought to his notice, was the story of the des Moulins letter and its sale by Lewson to Somerset Lloyd-James.
For Max, this crazy outpouring of what he knew or thought he knew acted as a kind of purgation. Despite the insanity of much of what he was saying, his manner was now consistently calm, his eyes no longer dilated at short intervals. Even so, Detterling judged that he should be given into medical custody; but before he could do anything about this, Max was gone. Perhaps he had anticipated Detterling’s purpose. At all events, he had excused himself on the ground of wanting a pee; and when, fifteen minutes later, Detterling went to look for him, the house was empty and Max’s car no longer parked in the square outside.