Friends in Low Places

by Simon Raven

  “There has been a death,” said Stern. “Have you not eyes to see and ears to hear?” He rocked slowly backwards and forwards and began to wail more vigorously than ever.

  “It’s quite obvious,” said Weir, “that either Lord Canteloupe, or myself as his representative in the Commons - ”

  “ - Edwin Turbot must be publicly exposed - ”

  “ - The nation has a right to the truth - ”

  “ - We have a right to what we found,” said Peter Morrison to Fielding. “We should take it into our own safe keeping.”

  “What shall I do?” said Fielding to Captain Detterling.

  “You’re the umpire.”

  Fielding looked at Tom Llewyllyn, who was silly with rancour; at Alfie Schroeder, who was bubbling with outrage; at Peter Morrison who smiled with open, honest, boyish charm; at Lord Canteloupe, who stood splendid and proconsular upon the boards; and then he looked at Detterling, who shook his head.

  So Fielding walked over the Gregory Stern, where he sat cross-legged upon the floor, and dropped the letter into his lap.

  “You’re the other umpire,” he said. “You decide.”

  “There is nothing to decide,” said Stern. “This man” - he pointed up to Canteloupe - “represents government here. He must have it.”

  He rose to his feet, walked to the stage and passed the letter up to Canteloupe, who received it with a bow and stood examining it with care. Carton Weir executed a little dance of triumph. Stern went out into the rain. Canteloupe looked up from the letter and glared at his audience.

  “What is there left,” he said, “at the end of the day? A piece of paper which proves a debt. But it is not a debt owed to any of us here. Let the dead do their own dunning - if they still want to collect.”

  He stepped down off the stage and stalked towards the door. Nobody said anything or tried to stop him, though Carton Weir, for one, was writhing with frustration. But like the rest of them he silently followed Canteloupe, into the rain, down the steps of the Maison Bingo, past the dinette and the discussion centre, until they came to the camp incinerator.

  But the camp incinerator had ceased to burn.

  Still nobody said anything. They all followed Canteloupe back past the discussion centre and the dinette and the Maison Bingo; down a long row of caravans; past the caravan inside which Gregory Stern was comforting Isobel Turbot; past more caravans; past the showers, and into the toilets, where Lord Canteloupe tore the des Moulins letter into tiny shreds and then, with a great clanking of hardware, flushed them for ever down the drain.

  11

  VERDICTS

  _____________________________________

  “WELL?” SAID Tom to Alfie, as he drove him through the slowly brightening afternoon to pick up his luggage and catch his train.

  “You’ve got your answer,” said Alfie, “which is more than a lot of people get. You know what happened and why. So why not leave it at that?”

  “You were as angry as I was.”

  “Certainly. But the proof’s gone - halfway up the Bristol Channel by now. No good being angry if there isn’t any proof. Simply makes you look a fool. Not much good being angry even if you have got proof: you only get ulcers and die young. What is there left,” he said, in passable imitation of Canteloupe, “at the end of the day?”

  “But whatever Alfie says,” said Tom to Patricia that night, “I should do something. There’s a duty here. What Canteloupe did was a conjuring trick, sleight of hand. I know I should do something.”

  “What?”

  “Find a copy. Swear I’d seen the original before it was destroyed. Expose your father.”

  “They wouldn’t believe you,” Patricia said.

  “I should still try.”

  “Why? Make us all unhappy, ruin yourself very likely, for something that happened years ago.”

  “A woman’s attitude.”

  “A woman who loves you.”

  “There were bullets, bombs. Men died.”

  “Scandal won’t bring them back.”

  “Canteloupe said something of the kind. But I hadn’t expected you to be so complacent.”

  “A woman’s attitude. If once things are right with her ....”

  “And are they?”

  “Now,” she said. “The night, after the wedding, I was shocked. Not by any particular thing which had happened, but by . . . the farce of it all. Everything seemed to lack dignity. It had been ... a festival of clowning and bad taste. But now . . .”

  “Yes. Now?”

  “I see how silly I was. None of it had anything to do with us. I should just have taken you in my arms and shut it all out. I think that’s what Isobel was trying to do in her own disastrous way. . . . What will happen about Isobel?”

  “Detterling and Stern are taking care of that. They’ll quieten her down, and then she’ll just tell the police that Lewson’s car skidded on the corner. She probably imagined the other thing.”

  “I’m not sure. It’s the sort of - ”

  “ - Who’s making trouble-now? I wish I knew what to do . . . about your father. There’s a duty.”

  “There’s a duty owed to me,” Patricia said. “Come to bed now.” She came up behind him, put her arms round his neck, and kissed the curls at the back of his head. “I’m your first duty from now on. You can decide in the morning what to do about my father . . . my father and yours.”

  “I must say,” said Sir Edwin the next morning, “everything seems to have fallen out very conveniently. Master Lewson was never any good. Poetic justice, you might say. And provided Isobel doesn’t persist in saying his death was her fault ...”

  “She was hysterical. Nobody else saw what happened. There was a sharp bend, a wet road. ... I think you’ll find Detterling and the police between them sort all that out without any trouble.”

  “Good. So . . . . I am to be grateful to you, Tom?”

  “I told you what happened, sir. You’d better be grateful to Lord Canteloupe. And to Patricia.”

  “To Patricia?”

  “She has had the last word over this. You see, sir, I want her to be as happy as possible. There will be a lot to make her unhappy as time goes on, because she cannot understand that a writer’s first love will always be his writing. I can’t and won’t alter over that; but I love her so much that I must concede something. Let’s say that I’m making Patricia a wedding present of my moral conscience . . . for what it’s worth.”

  “In return for which she will take second place to your writing?”

  “Yes . . . though she doesn’t yet know it.”

  “A very fair compromise,” said Sir Edwin. “But I wonder whether you’ve got your priorities right?”

  “I don’t think that you of all people are qualified to judge.”

  “I’m not judging. I’m just wondering. Have a piece of butterscotch?”

  “No thank you, sir. If it’s all right with you, Patricia and I will leave for our honeymoon tomorrow.”

  “My dear boy. . . . But of course. And may all joy attend you.”

  “Thank you. Just one more thing,” said Tom, “before I go.”

  “Yes?”

  “Now that the letter is no longer a factor . . . now that there is no pressure . . . what will you do about Bishop’s Cross?”

  “You mean . . . I’m now free to let them choose Morrison?”

  “Yes.”

  Sir Edwin began to feel the funny new kind of excitement which had first come over him during the disastrous conclusion of the wedding and had reappeared several times since,

  “Do you really mind which I choose?” he asked.

  “As you know, I've always favoured Morrison,” Tom said.

  But then he frowned, remembering that Peter’s behaviour at Westward Ho! had not been quite as he would have wished. There had been a degree of opportunism: Peter had made an oddly disagreeable impression ... as of a man trying to sell places in the life-boat of a sinking ship? No, not quite that, because whatever
Peter was up to, it had been in accordance with the rules. It was more as though Peter, given privileged notice of war or famine, had been quietly flying the country under pretence of a routine business trip.

  “Well,” said Sir Edwin, “I've been thinking about that. You know, it’s not really for me to interfere. I shall leave Percival and his committee to get on with their own job.”

  Sir Edwin had spoken the truth to Tom; from now on he was going to leave Percival alone. But he did not mean by this quite what Tom thought he meant. To Peter Morrison, who had solicited an interview with him in London, Sir Edwin was more explicit.

  “I suppose, sir,” said Peter politely, “that now there are no more complications, I can consider myself sure of your support.”

  “No, you can’t,” the Minister had said. “I'm leaving it all to Rupert Percival. As I always should have done.”

  “It comes to the same thing,” said Peter. “Rupert Percival has always been behind me.”

  “He isn’t now. Before these . . . complications, as you call them, were finally dealt with, Percival had been instructed, and had agreed, to choose Lloyd-James. I don’t propose to countermand the order.”

  Peter bit his lip.

  “May one ask why not?”

  “One may,” said the Minister, feeling the thrill of excitement, of liberation, that had been affecting him more and more often over the past few days. “The answer is simply this: you’re too damned wet. Lloyd-James is pretty foul, I grant you that. But he does things. He doesn’t sit around moaning about his honour. He gets on with it.”

  Sir Edwin thought of what Lord Canteloupe had told him over dinner at White’s the previous night. “I won’t teach my grandmother to suck eggs,” Canteloupe had said: “But remember this. When it comes down to brass tacks, one’s better off working with shits. They’ll kick you in the ghoulies as soon as look at you, but one knows that and can be ready for it. It’s these chaps who have scruples that really kill you dead. They’ll drop you in a sewer to drown when you least expect it, and then go round whining that it was their moral duty.”

  “It’s the whining I can’t stand,” Sir Edwin now said to Morrison. “I’ve put up with so much of it for so long. Now I’ve come to a time of life when I won’t put up with any more. I don’t say I like Lloyd-James, but in one very important sense I know just where I stand with him: he’s like Nature itself - he has few liberal sentiments and no moral ones. I find this singularly refreshing.”

  “He’s a religious man,” said Peter with insinuation, “a Roman Catholic.”

  “Exactly so. Of all religions, Catholicism is the least liberal and the least moral. I’m going to enjoy having Lloyd-James in the House. It’ll be like having one of the Borgias. As for you Morrison,” the Minister said, “you’re a kind of social Bowdler. You take all the spice out of life. Give me that bald bastard from Gower Street any day of the week.”

  This last phrase was, of course, Canteloupe’s, but Peter Morrison neither knew nor cared about that. Deeply hurt, he rose, bowed to Sir Edwin, and went off to spend the afternoon at Lord’s. There he met Captain Detterling, who, when told what had happened, was less than sympathetic.

  “You know your trouble?” Captain Detterling said, “You’re like an officer in my regiment who could never have a crap when he was out in the field. You know why not?”

  “No,” said Peter miserably.

  “Because he thought his men would cease to respect him if they found out he had an arsehole just like theirs.”

  “So it seems,” said Somerset Lloyd-James to Carton Weir, “That everything’s in order after all.”

  Carton Weir was not at all pleased with the way in which things had turned out. Canteloupe had thrown away a winning hand, and now he, Carton, was back in Square One -being, as ever, deferential to Lloyd-James. Still, things were as they were, and he had been in the game long enough to make the best of them with a good grace.

  “If you ask me, my dear,” he said, remembering what Vanessa Salinger had told him at the wedding, “Sir Edwin’s going a bit funny. Change of life.”

  “Do you think that’s why he’s settled for me at Bishop’s Cross? Out of sheer perversity?”

  “One reason. And then Canteloupe’s been pushing for you. Apparently he’s very pleased with those bits you’ve written about him in Strix. He thinks you’re the sort of man we need in Westminster these days. ‘Someone who knows how to play it rough,’ he told me: ‘train us all up a bit to cope with the Ruskies’.”

  “I’m obliged to Canteloupe for his good opinion. He doesn’t exactly play pat ball himself. I keep wondering why he destroyed that letter. I should have expected him to make use of it.”

  Weir suppressed a spasm of ill temper.

  “Very simple, dear,” he said. “He told me later. ‘I like a rough game,’ he told me, ‘and even a foul one, but I won’t risk having the entire stadium blown up’.”

  “A balanced view, on the whole. I think,” said Somerset, “that when Professor Constable leaves the board of Strix next month we might do a lot worse than Canteloupe. If we can square it with the Articles, of course.”

  “Come, come, sweetie,” said Weir rather nastily: “you’re not going to let those boring old Articles upset you? Why not take a lesson from Canteloupe and just tear them up?”

  “I’ve told you before,” said Somerset severely: “you will never attain to really responsible office until you suppress your taste for silly jokes.”

  “Cup of tea, love?”

  “Thanks, Tessie,” said Fielding Gray.

  “Getting on well?”

  “Not too bad. Stern’s very pleased with what I’ve done so far.”

  “Is it true about Mr. Stern . . . that he’s going to marry that Isobel Turbot?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Well, well. Next thing we’ll have to find someone for you.”

  “I’ve got someone, Tessie.”

  He thought tenderly of Maisie. It now seemed certain, despite the Salvadori arrests, that she was going to be left alone. Maisie had been very marginal. As for Burke Lawrence and Jude Holbrook, God alone knew what had happened to them ...

  “You know, love, you can always bring her here,” Tessie was saying.

  “I like going to her place, Tessie. I’m very happy here, but it makes a nice change to get out for a blow now and then.”

  “I suppose so, dear. What’s her name?”

  “Maisie.”

  “And her surname?”

  “Do you know,” said Fielding, “I’ve never thought to ask.”

  “So Mark Lewson’s dead,” said Angela Tuck to Max de Freville in Menton. “Killed in a car crash, it says here.”

  “Requiescat ,” said Max. “He wouldn’t have been happy with that Turbot girl for long.” .

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “He was like me. He enjoyed being unstable. People like Mark and me, we get tired sometimes and think we want to settle, but after a bit we find security unbearable. That’s why I enjoyed being a gambler in the old days but got fed up with being a big-time organiser ... just sitting there and taking the five per cents. It was a bore not being able to lose.”

  “So in the end you just didn’t bother to collect . . . . When are you going to get bored with me, Max?”

  “Pretty soon, I’m afraid. You were splendid for time out. But as a regular thing . . . no.”

  “Swine.”

  “Sorry. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of going to Venice for a few weeks. There’s been one hell of a stink about a chap called Salvadori, and I want to see what I can find out. It was one of the things on which none of my highly paid informants ever got a proper grip. It seems poor old Lykiadopoulos was badly beaten up by one of the henchmen - perhaps he’ll be able to give me a line.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No. You’re my rest cure. I’m well again now.”

  “When will you be back?” Angela said.

  “When I ne
ed another cure.”

  “I might not still be here.”

  “Women like you are two a penny,” Max said: “frustrated mothers.’’

  “You know, there’s one-big difference,” said Angela bitterly, “between you and Mark. He was a man; when you’d been to bed with him, you knew it.”

  “Heigh-ho,” sighed Max de Freville: “as good an epitaph as any, I suppose.”

  The Alms For Oblivion sequence, published for the first time in chronological order:

  Fielding Gray

  Sound the Retreat

  The Sabre Squadron

  The Rich Pay Late

  Friends in Low Places

  The Judas Boy

  Places Where They Sing

  Come Like Shadows

  Bring Forth the Body

  The Survivors

  Friends in Low Places :

  ‘The title of Simon Raven’s Friends in Low Places is extremely suitable. Low is the operative word. I never in all my reading ... met lower rats than the rats in this haute politique inbroglio’

  YORKSHIRE POST

  ‘I’ve no hesitation in picking Friends in Low Places as a winner’

  SUNDAY CITIZEN

  ‘There’s that “unwholesome” writer at it again, weaving a nasty fascinating tale of corruption and intrigue in political and journalistic circles’

  QUEEN

  In Friends in Low Places we find Simon Raven’s upper-class rogues pursuing with undiminished brio their sordid, frolicsome paths to power, pleasure and final damnation...

  Sir Edwin Turbot, high-ranking Tory minister ... lascivious Angels Tuck, talking unspeakable pillow-talk ... bumbling Lord Cantaloupe, founding culture-camps for Fitness, Family and Faith. Motto: Strength through Self-Indulgence ... gigolo Mark Lewson, trading his youth to the rich and aged, finally getting his comeuppance ... saturnine Gregory Stern, publisher of Britain’s Bright Young Things, all wired teeth and fiddling fingers ... gambler Max de Freville, unnaturally fascinated by corruption in high places ... unscrupulous Somerset Lloyd-James, still editor of Strix ... golden-hearted Maisie, always ready to pander to a customer’s special requirements.