On that particular afternoon, I had not seen Enright for a week or so. That is a quite long gap when a private parliamentary campaign is at its height. Moreover, he turned up twenty or thirty minutes late. That is customary: one reason why the even comparatively regular visitor to Parliament sees so much of the central lobby, and one reason why those he sees there are there so much, is that the life of a Member of Parliament makes private punctuality totally impossible. On that afternoon then, I sat thinking with some despair about local electricity and half-watching an organized party of middle-aged ladies from East Grinstead curtsy every time a Conservative privy councillor crossed the arena.
Suddenly Enright materialized. He clutched my arm without greeting and said: “I’m not satisfied about this thing, I’m not satisfied at all.”
“You mean the minister’s answer?”
“I do. Blast the little runt is what I say. I’ve been thinking, Grover-Stacey, and I’ve made up my mind. I’m really going into it. Up to the neck.” For some reason, we had never become Walter and Jocelyn to one another, as nowadays happens so quickly at Westminster because the Members fear, above all, to be accused of snobbery. I daresay it is one more proof that a friendship between us there really was.
“Come with me,” continued Enright. “I want to have a word with you by ourselves.”
He led me out of the mêlée, up stairs, down long passages, and up more stairs. In the end, he pushed open a door marked “Pipe Office.” A uniformed man inside touched his cap and vanished. Clearly there had been prearrangement, but it was of a kind to which I had become accustomed.
“Sit down,” said Enright. “Now I want to say right away that if you reveal a word of all this, you’ll be skinned. I don’t mean by me, of course, but skinned you’ll be.”
“I quite understand,” I replied.
So, obviously, I cannot impart exactly what he did say. The critical point, and this I feel I can disclose, was that he felt we had been so slighted that he was resolved to embark upon special methods. They included putting in jeopardy his receipt of the party whip, which for a modern M.P. is not only professional suicide but social ruin also; and they included certain other proposals which would never have so much as entered the minds of any other Member of Parliament I have met. Not that there was anything wild or revolutionary about these proposals. What they called for in the main was simply a degree of refusal to compromise, a willingness to risk a certain unpopularity . . .
“It’s perfectly splendid of you,” I said, “and all of us should be eternally grateful. But there is one thing.”
“What’s that?” Enright’s left foot, tightly shod, was on one of the Gothic chairs. His forearm, supporting his sharp, woodcut head, rested on his angular knee.
“Speaking entirely for myself, I think I ought to say that I am not sure whether local electricity, important though it is, justifies these risks. I am not sure that it is big enough.” The shaggy baggy shape of Bessemer was in my mind’s eye.
Enright concentrated his gaze upon me even more intently.
“Maybe it isn’t. Indeed, it certainly isn’t. But I’ve got to start somewhere.” He removed his foot from the chair and stood erect. His cast of face and his pale gray suit against the colored glass in the cusped window, through which a little sunlight straggled, made him look like an Arthurian knight in armor. “You don’t know what it means to be a Member of Parliament and still have feelings, thoughts of your own, even ideals, conceivably even something really creative in you.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
“I have an idea that you perhaps can—up to a point. But you I regard as a friend—pretty well my only one just now. Do you mind my saying that?”
“Of course not. It’s very nice of you.”
“Not all that nice. I’m a ruined man and dangerous to be associated with. That’s why I’m going to have a real go at things. Because not even you can have any idea of the utter futility and frustration. No, those are weak words. It is something worse than either of those things. Something that most people have ceased even to feel. Ever. You have to be me and you have to be here—here always, I mean, tied here—to know. Still, thank you, my dear chap, it’s extremely good of you to bother.”
I wasn’t altogether sure what he was thanking me for, but I replied by saying how sure I was now that local electricity would really go places.
It was on the very next day, as so often happens in life, that the renewed faith which Enright had given me was specifically diminished.
Among all the Members of Parliament who had at one time or another offered their support, even though in most cases only on condition that we compromised almost totally, a single one had actually paid a subscription and joined us: an M.P. named Chalkman. It would be absurd to complain that the number was not larger: Members of Parliament cannot sensibly be expected to subscribe financially to every cause they take up, and it would often not be in the best interest of the cause itself for them to do so. This general philosophy, moreover, received strong support from the actual case of Chalkman. Having paid up, he did nothing more for us and rather ostentatiously left the merely parliamentary battle to others. What Chalkman did was to visit our general office at unproclaimed though frequent intervals and to stay a long time. This he happened to do on the day after Enright’s rededication.
Chalkman, a fat, wheezing, formless figure in very old clothes that smelled faintly and never varied, used to potter round lifting everything up and looking underneath it, and reading all the carbon copies and memoranda and letters from other Members that he could put his hands on.
“Take no notice of me,” he would say. “Don’t let me stop you working.”
Needless to say, he never showed the slightest grasp either of what the Society was really aiming at or the current condition of the campaign in Parliament or elsewhere. Every time he asked for both things to be explained to him. The explanation, and answering his questions, always took at least an hour. At the end of it, Chalkman regularly summed up: “I have said it before and I shall always say it. The thing to do is to trust the people.” He then shambled out—well, ten or fifteen minutes later—none the wiser and with no excessive expression of gratitude or even courtesy.
Hardly a man to be swayed by, you would think, and yet one felt that where Chalkman trusted the people, they probably trusted him, so that he was likely to be a man of the kind with whom ultimate power lay. For richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. Even for the future of local electricity.
“Who looks after you now down at the gasworks?” Chalkman asked on this occasion.
“Mr. Enright, mainly,” I replied. “You may remember that he followed Mr. Biggles as chairman of the Local Electricity Committee. The new secretary is Mr. Barker.”
“Barker is fairly sound,” said Chalkman, “but however did you get hold of Enright?”
The two things that Chalkman knew about Parliament were the rules of procedure and the daily standing of every individual Member, whom to latch on to, whom to shun.
“Mr. Enright has been helping us for some time now.”
“Yes, but who found him? Where did you meet him?”
“As a matter of fact, I met him myself at a party given by our member, Mrs. Havengore, of Leicestershire. He was a friend of hers.”
“I have said it before and I shall say it again. Never accept offers from Members of Parliament met only socially.”
Chalkman was always right about things like that, and I began at once to feel disproportionately depressed.
“Some people say the exact opposite,” I replied ineffectively.
“No doubt they do. It takes a long time to learn about Parliament even when you’re a Member of it. If you’re not, it’s impossible to learn. I’ve been a Member for thirty-four years and five months, and I’m still learning every day. Well, you’ll do no good with Enright.”
My heart sank a little lower.
“He seems to me to have already do
ne more for us than any other M.P. has ever done.”
“No doubt he has.”
“What’s the objection to him?”
“He’s out of the running for office and therefore he carries no weight. He thinks he can override or get round the customs and traditions of Parliament, which is the greatest mistake an M.P. can possibly make. He tries to rely on what he considers to be personality, whereas in Parliament soundness is the only thing that counts in the long run. And with the electorate too, I may add.”
Chalkman then put his large handkerchief to his nose and tumultuously expelled what must have been several ounces of mucus, whooping it up again and again.
I was still further lowered. It was quite obvious that what Chalkman had said was true, and he had not even mentioned Enright’s private affairs. I found it impossible to go through the motions of argument.
“I advise you to make a change,” said Chalkman, gasping for air.
“You don’t mean that Mr. Enright is likely to lose his seat?”
“No, I don’t mean that. He’s not popular with the voters, as I’ve said, but we shall see that he doesn’t go because we don’t want him turned loose on the world.”
“Why not?” I asked as naïvely as I could. It was a thing I had never understood.
Chalkman smiled like the wise old man he was.
“You know the saying that if you can’t beat them, you join them?” I nodded. “In the same way, if you distrust them, you hold on to them. That’s Parliament.”
“I see.”
“Now,” said Chalkman, his eyes glazing, “tell me. I’m not sure that I’ve ever completely understood. Tell me what this Society of yours is really up to.”
You know how it is: doubts lead, even unconsciously, to one’s avoiding the person doubted. Also the whole tone of Enright’s discourse to me in the Pipe Room seemed to leave the next step to him. It appeared hardly in key for me to ring him up and read him a communication I had just received from the town clerk of Romsey, as I otherwise should have done. Finally, it seemed possible that Enright was wishful at the moment, and having explained himself to me, to go it strictly alone.
Anyway, the next time I found myself in the central lobby it was to see a different M.P. His name was Jupon. If this had been today, so to speak, you would have heard of him; but nowadays Members of Parliament, other than Members like Chalkman, come and go and are fundamentally anonymous, so that Jupon had been forgotten. At that time he was ascending and was generally regarded as an opportunist, especially as he was the kingpin of a small trade union that clamorously excluded itself from the TUC. Indeed, I was doubtful, after Chalkman’s monitions, whether he was the right kind of M.P. for me to see at all. But he had written to me very politely, saying that the ideal of local electricity had appealed to him since his primary school days, that he thought offbeat causes of any kind had a value of their own, and that he would like to talk to me if I could spare the time. And here I was.
Jupon was not merely late, but very late. I was seriously thinking of departing and writing to him saying, with dignified regret, how busy I was, when I noticed a woman in a black dress on a bench opposite me. She was beautiful enough to make me think again, for the moment, about going.
I began, as one does, to stare furtively at her. She was a very pale blonde, and her face was almost as white as her dress was black. She sat very tensely, as if waiting for news of life or death. Of course that is a common sight in the central lobby.
I suppose that another ten minutes passed before Jupon at last appeared. I had not spoken to him until then. He went into full detail of why he was late, taking perhaps a further ten minutes. I realized throughout that first encounter with me that words never failed him, and as I think back about him, words are almost all I can recall, wave upon wave of self-sufficient, overwhelming words. One struggled at least to remain within one’s depth, but the waves rose higher and higher, denser and denser, greener and darker, so that in the end one could escape only by waking up. Anyway, even Jupon’s first apology for being late so enveloped me that I failed to notice the departure of the woman in the black dress. As we trailed off to the snackbar (the young Harold Wilson was there, carting his famous fish and chips round on a little tray), I simply observed that she was gone and noticed also that the entire green bench on which she had sat was empty, although all the other green benches were packed tight.
I don’t know when exactly it first occurred to me that this woman in the black dress might be Enright’s wife. Really the only evidence was the locale and the hair; but the former clue came to appear more weighty as I began to see the woman again and again. I saw her more than once in the Distinguished Strangers Gallery, which suggested that she must have influence, and listening to the dullest of debates, insofar as comparisons in that respect are meaningful. Perhaps she wasn’t exactly listening. I saw her several times more in the central lobby, always seated on a bench alone, though never once did I chance to notice her either come or go. I saw her occasionally in the passages, but always when there was a crowd, and always the back of her only. But, now I come to remember, there was a third clue, and the biggest: the woman always wore the same black dress. This it was which more than anything convinced me that there was something rum about her. There was also the fact that whenever I saw her, she was by herself. Her general appearance made this unlikely, though it is true that she continued to look stricken.
These varied glimpses of the woman were spread over three or four weeks, during which I was visiting Parliament constantly. I look back upon it otherwise as the period of my Jupon servitude. I think that Jupon, rising man though he was, found it difficult to keep himself in listeners; who had to be unflagging, not hopelessly unintelligent, and reasonably in his power, certainly not rivals or competitors of any kind. I am sure that at monthly or six-weekly intervals he had to endure the loss of even those who, like me, had passed the original test. Some of the others may well have had to take a costly cure at this point, but I had been spared from having to attend to Jupon’s actual words by my increasingly acute preoccupation with the appearing and disappearing woman. I had found a quite new interest in Parliament, it struck me one morning.
Jupon, as may be gathered, belonged to the opposite side of the House from Enright’s side, but Enright continued silent and invisible, while Jupon, during one’s weeks with him, consumed all the time and energy which a single person could be expected to allot to Parliament, and much more. I did, however, one morning receive a letter from Enright: “Dear Grover-Stacey, Don’t think I’m falling down on the job. I’m trying something new which I can’t tell even you about. When I surface again, we must meet. Keep your pecker up, we’ll knock them yet. Always yours, W.E. PS. Remember me to your wife.” Enright had never met Virginia, but he often spoke of her warmly.
Immediately I had opened my post, I had to dash off to meet Jupon. It was the hour for the committees which consider the different bills, taking evidence upstairs for days at a time in a slow mumble. Parliament was almost cloistral. It is extraordinary, as all agree, how beautiful the Palace of Westminster can be at such times, when one can hear one’s steps echo in Speaker’s Court, when William Rufus’s great hall is for treason and tragedy, not trippers, when the sirens of the river tugs boom and shriek through the empty corridors and spinning traceries, making the whole vast fabric seem translucent and insubstantial. To the contemplative visitor, the Palace at such times seems to be made of crumbling crystal or of falling water. The charivari of the central lobby has become a saraband.
I sat there that morning watching the host of cleaners stacking up the garbage and heaving it into rubber-tired handcarts with large crowns painted on the sides. It appeared that Jupon was late. I sat thinking, as always, of local electricity, but also, more dreamily, of Parliament, the great Mother of us all, so ancient, so moving when one is not doing actual business with her, even so beautiful with, around me, those towering symbolizations of the four constituent
kingdoms in statuary and colored glass. Apart from the cleaners, who at Westminster are but as the technically invisible stagehands in an Eastern play, I was alone. It was the first time I had ever been alone in the central lobby. When the great clock struck, the whole building shook, and all the cleaners looked at their watches. Outside it was pelting. The rain smashed against the ornate windows high above me, far, far up.
It seemed as if a bird had got in. I was sure that something was flying round under the vaulting of the distant stone ceiling. I could not see the bird because until the ornate brass lights are turned on, the central lobby is dark at the best of times and that day was heavily overcast. Still I could hear the thing quite clearly. It flew with a dry, rustling, even rattling sound, making a very quick stroke with its wings: it occurred to me that it ought logically to be a rather heavy bird with slightly insufficient flying capacity. One sometimes thinks the same of a fat old bluebottle. I then began to think, with the same logic, that it might suddenly fall on me, and that is a thought which no one likes. I could hear the sound of flight first in one place, quite distinctly, then, with equal distinctness, in another. The flying object, though still invisible to me, seemed to make a remarkably local disturbance of the upper air.
I considered the cleaners. They gave no sign of noticing anything, not even me. Doubtless they were not paid to extrude strange flying things. They were, however, almost finished and about to trundle away the trucks packed high and hard with yesterday’s rubbish. The cleaners seemed committed without reservation to this task. The Palace has methods for securing to itself only the best of everything such as cleaners.
As they were rumbling slowly off (the loaded carts seemed to be really heavy), I looked upwards again. I could now have sworn that there were two birds. The central lobby is big, and there were quite clearly two separate areas of disturbance and twice the noise. At the best, there is always something upsetting about a flying creature which is trying to get out. It is a phenomenon at once frightening and humiliating. I have to admit that all I did was to sit there paralyzed, and that the paralysis simply grew more leaden. I felt disgust and fear creep out from my stomach and spine and soak through my body. I can remember feeling the same in infancy and in war. The things above me were becoming more and more noisy. The dry, clacking sound was growing sharper. Unable to escape through the painted, devotional glass of the windows, they were descending, nearing the floor, whirling round me, cutting me off.
The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Page 31
