Goodfellowe MP

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘You go drinking with … older boys.’ He seemed barely able to get the words out as visions of teenage decadence and the back seat of his first Hillman Minx crowded his mind.

  She laughed at his discomfort, sparkling like a spring dawn. ‘Oh, Daddy, you’re such a dinosaur. Don’t worry, I’m not going to disgrace you. I don’t do drugs, and I’m no silly slapper.’

  ‘Slapper?’

  ‘How would you like me to put it? A girl who lets her guard and everything else down for a miserable rum and coke.’

  His eyes had become like oysters, swimming in confusion. His little girl …

  ‘I’m not like that,’ she said sweetly. ‘In my case it would take at least two rum and cokes.’

  She was laughing at him again, but not cruelly, merely teasing for his inability to be anything other than a father. As she continued to splash the bath water at him he was rescued by a woman who appeared at his elbow. She apologized for the situation of the table. ‘We’re very fully booked. I’ll make sure you have a much better table next time, Mr Goodfellowe. So what can I get for you?’

  Sammy frowned at the menu. ‘Have you got anything which isn’t dripping in blood?’

  ‘Would you prefer cremated meat or simply something vegetarian?’

  ‘I’m a veggie.’

  ‘Are you?’ her father asked, startled.

  ‘If nothing on the menu appeals, will you leave it with me?’ the woman offered. ‘Chef does something with a stir-fry and home-made noodles which ought to get this place a Michelin star.’

  ‘Sounds fine. Come on, Daddy, let’s make it for two. Spirit of adventure.’

  ‘I’ll have the lamb. Medium rare. And a half-bottle of something red and Californian.’ He felt in need of a drink.

  The woman finished taking the order and apologized once more about the table. ‘We’ll do better for your next visit, I promise. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mr Goodfellowe.’ And with that she had disappeared.

  ‘She fancies you, Daddy.’

  ‘Don’t be preposterous.’

  ‘Daddy, we girls can tell.’

  He glanced after the woman but she had already gone. What was her name? He couldn’t even recall what she looked like. Preposterous.

  ‘How long have you been a veggie, anyway?’

  ‘’Bout six months.’

  ‘Truly? I didn’t know.’ He paused. ‘Quite a lot I don’t seem to know about my daughter, one way and another. Seems we’ve a lot of catching up to do. Look, it’s Easter in a couple of weeks. Let’s make some time together then, Sammy.’

  ‘I hate being called Sammy. It’s Sam.’ Her jaw tensed into a premeditated position. ‘And I’ve got other plans for Easter. Julie Rifkind’s parents have invited me to their place in France.’

  ‘But …’ He searched for an argument. ‘The cost.’

  ‘No cost. They’re driving. It’s all free.’

  ‘Your job at the pizzeria. They’re expecting you.’

  ‘Stuff the pizzeria. I want some fun.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘It’s a chance to practise my French.’

  ‘I’d hoped we could be together this Easter.’

  ‘Are you going to take me to the South of France?’

  ‘I thought … we could go and visit your mother. Together. You haven’t been for so long. I hoped we might get her to give you the locket herself.’ It was moral and material blackmail, a father’s duty.

  ‘Mummy won’t have the slightest idea whether I’m there or not. And the locket’s not my style anyway. I’ve changed my mind.’

  Goodfellowe shuddered. The locket had become a symbol of the competing demands made upon him by wife and daughter; it had been tormenting him for days. Now she had thrown it away in a single offhand phrase. His world was spinning; he thought it might topple off its axis. The last piece of the universe which had once been his family was beginning to disintegrate.

  It had been so different, five years ago. Then he had been a successful politician, surrounded by Ministerial red boxes and a devoted family. Elinor. Sammy. And poor Stevie. He’d thought it almost idyllic. Yet as he had scratched away at his soul throughout the endless nights since then he had come to realize how much he had taken for granted. The charge up the political slope with a wife at his side and children on his shoulders. Their unquestioning support. And particularly their immovable presence.

  Then it had all disappeared, all except for Sam. They had been holidaying and he’d promised to take Stevie swimming. But Ministerial boxes take no account of holidays or promises made to energetic thirteen-year-olds, and he’d been buried in papers at the time he should have been with Stevie. Elinor had remonstrated, they’d argued, and she had been forced to take Stevie swimming in his place. Perhaps it would have made no difference if he had been there; perhaps Stevie would have been too adventurous and the riptide would have dragged him under in any event; but what does a man do when his only son goes out to play and never comes back? What can he do, except blame himself? Just as in turn Elinor blamed herself. She had seemed to recover physically from the ordeal, but on the anniversary of Stevie’s death she had taken herself off to her room and had never again participated in a world which had taken Stevie away. Involutional melancholia, the doctors called it. First they had tried to cajole and persuade her back to normality, then stuffed her with pills, even though there was nothing physically wrong with her. She was simply inconsolably wretched, worthless, hating herself and all aspects of life without Stevie, and that included hating her husband. She had moved from bedroom to back room, then to stays in hospital, finally to the psychiatric nursing home, the best that Goodfellowe could afford – better even. Yet the size of the bills did nothing to diminish his own torment. The guilt of a father who should have been there, saving his child, not stroking his red box and its ambitions.

  He had been left with only Sam. Now even she would not be there for him.

  ‘I particularly wanted to spend this Easter with you. For us both to visit your mother. She deserves it.’

  ‘And I deserve France.’

  ‘That may be just a fraction selfish, young lady.’

  That was too much for her. ‘Selfish? Is it any more selfish than sending me away to school? Shuffling the responsibility onto others?’

  ‘It’s a very fine school. It costs … hell, it doesn’t matter what it costs. What else could I do?’

  ‘Show you loved me.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘All I wanted was a bit of time, Daddy. Can’t you see? I had no mother, no brother. I needed a father, not a boarding school. But you never had time for me.’

  ‘Sammy …’

  She ploughed right through him. ‘I’d get more time with you if I were one of your whining constituents. You make time for everyone else in this world but me. So now I’m making time for myself, doing what I want to do. For once. I’m going to France. Whether you like it or not.’

  The meal was arriving and they paused to save general embarrassment. It was true, he reflected. He’d given up his Ministerial office to sort out his personal life, yet he had only immersed himself in other work to dull the pain, to exhaust himself so that he could somehow sleep at night in the frozen wastes of his bed. How could a single parent living half the year in Westminster take care of a teenager? She had to go away to school. Yet had he in truth also sent Sam away because she reminded him of all the things he’d lost?

  They began their meal in silence.

  ‘It’s not been easy for me,’ he started again. ‘I’ve tried to do my best for you. Perhaps you don’t realize the sacrifices I’ve had to make.’

  ‘Oh, I do, Daddy.’ Her eyes were beginning to rim with tears. ‘Every time I want to take piano or horse-riding lessons, and you say no. Every time I have to borrow a pair of shoes even to appear in a fashion show. Every time I spend my holidays working in the pizza parlour wondering what my friends are up to in Florida or the Far East. I think I understand your sa
crifices very well indeed.’

  ‘Look, I can’t afford to take you off on trips.’

  ‘Then why, for Christ’s sake, are you trying to stop me taking myself?’

  Her voice had risen, his voice too; others were noticing. He began to be grateful they weren’t sitting in the centre of the restaurant after all. She knew about wounds, how to be on the receiving end; now she’d learnt how to inflict them. If this was growing up, he didn’t care for it.

  ‘Watch your language,’ he growled.

  She was sobbing, silently.

  ‘You want some pudding?’

  She shook her head, wiped her eye, wouldn’t look at him. ‘I want to go.’

  He was going to argue with her but could think of not a thing to say. He waved for the bill.

  Its arrival gave him more pain. His whole week’s allowance gone in one disastrous hour. Enough to have bought her two pairs of shoes. Then the woman was at his elbow once more. A telephone call for Mr Goodfellowe. He followed her to the small bar, where she apologized. She had deceived him. There was no telephone call but, a private word, there was a problem with the credit card. The terminal was rejecting it. Rejecting him. Even the machinery was joining in.

  He seemed to have lost the will to fight back, even to concoct a pathetic excuse. It was over the limit again. He paid by cheque and left with his cheeks burning. He desperately wanted to get out of this place and leave all its memories behind.

  As he collected their coats he fumbled in his pocket for a coin, thrusting it at the cloakroom girl.

  Only later did he realize he had given her his button.

  With heavy head – the Californian Cabernet had driven deep, especially without cheese – and with still heavier heart, Goodfellowe found a place on the green leather benches behind his Front Bench. During his days at the Dispatch Box he had been in the very midst of the battle, at the point of the Opposition’s bayonet charge, so close he could almost smell the fried onion. Now he was drawn back from the front line, a soldier no longer expected to lead but simply to obey, to do the right thing, whatever and whenever his generals required. Cannon fodder. Yesterday’s Man in an arena which had time only for the moment. It was galling enough to a man with pride, let alone opinion, and the many fine moments when he had led his own oratorical charge against the Opposition had been cast into the pit of history. Now he rarely spoke, content to growl and grumble from a sedentary position – ‘sitting on my principles’, as he described it to Mickey.

  The Opposition had called the debate, on environmental policy, and their benches were crowded. While the Environment Secretary prepared to marshal the Government’s defences at the Dispatch Box, Opposition Members affected an appearance of nonchalance, waiting for the moment to turn from indifference to ridicule. Gangling legs were thrust forward, boots first, as though ready to trample on whatever argument was put before them. Boots placed well in front of brain. Some were even propped up on the Clerks’ Table in a manner which would have caused outrage in any other club, but the sporting of soles along the Front Bench was an ancient privilege whose origins stretched back into the mists of time, probably to Eton.

  Goodfellowe rubbed his blister, slowly hardening inside its leather shell. You could tell a lot about a politician from his shoes, he reflected. The youthful sound-bite rebel whose shoes were usually covered in mud, not from service in the parliamentary trenches but from lingering around the lawns of College Green where the television cameras were to be found. The fashionable militant, usually an academic, wearing his Caterpillar boots with pride as though he stood ever ready to join the hunger march from Jarrow, even though Caterpillars cost £130 a pair. There was the patent leather of the man who spent too much time shopping for his shoes and his politics in Brussels, and the rural brogue which spoke of countryside and old-fashioned courtesy, a Member to be relied upon, a man who regarded the serving of his constituents and the thrashing of hunt saboteurs as a public duty. Nearby one could find soft Italian loafers, the mark of the made-by-Armani man, all professional style with soft Italian suits that covered little but soft Italian principles. And brown suede shoes, brothel creepers, like conjoined eyebrows the mark of a man intended for the gallows, or perhaps for lunch at the Groucho Club. But mostly the footwear was simply a little too old and frayed, the polish of earlier days faded by wear. They were dull, some downright scruffy, the sign of men in constant distraction who were too busy saving the souls of others to worry about their own.

  The shoes along the Front Benches told their own story of the day. The debate had been called by the Opposition to coincide with the publication of a report from The Earth Firm, a prominent pressure group, whose conclusions were damning in their indictment of the Government’s failure to meet its stated environmental commitments. Line after line of Government election promise had been analysed, and page after page of detailed denunciation had been handed down, an effective piece of pressure group propaganda that had conjured lurid headlines. During the morning not a single volunteer could be found from the Government Front Bench to be dragged to Broadcasting House for the ritual radio flogging, but the Opposition rhetoric had been savage, comparing Ministers to ‘vultures picking their way through the remains of their manifesto to see if anything still survives’. Elderly spinsters fled in terror from their breakfast tables. Those of sterner constitution anticipated the afternoon and the delights of witnessing a Minister being keelhauled before the House.

  All the components for the humiliation had been brought together. The report. The emotive issue. The accusation. The flight from evidence to exaggeration with images of infants being poisoned and withered in the womb. And the time of punishment had arrived. The Opposition spokesman rose with fire in his breast, his colleagues tapping their shoes on the green carpet in expectation. He made much of the report, and then some more, charging the Government with craven pandering to pressure. They have become slaves to the vested interests,’ he thundered. Opposition MPs cleared their throats and stamped their soles in approval.

  Only one thing was missing. At such close range, bayonet to bayonet, it is usually difficult for condemned politicians not to show some response to their impending fate. A certain sallowness of cheek. Maybe a smile that is made of frost and looks ready to shatter. A flicker in the eyes that betrays, if not remorse, then anguish. But not this Minister, not today. She sat diminutive behind the Dispatch Box, squeezed between the men, adjusting the pleats of her dress, whispering to a neighbour, rummaging absentmindedly in her handbag, even enjoying some of the Opposition’s gallows humour. And all the while she smiled serenely, as though listening to a church sermon.

  It wasn’t natural. Something was wrong. The Opposition spokesman began to lose his stride. All along the Opposition Front Bench the shoes began twitching in discomfort, as though every member of the Opposition team had dressed in a hurry and put on a pair too small for them. They fidgeted. Scratched. Then it was her turn.

  ‘It is often said, Madam Speaker, that a politician should never be caught in public with either his morals or his mistress, since in the end he will need to betray both of them. This afternoon has been a splendid example of such masculine folly.’ From behind her came roars of support. At the moment none of her backbenchers had the slightest idea what she meant, but it was enough that she had come out fighting.

  ‘The Opposition has taken for its bible this … report.’ She held it up for the inspection of the House as though expecting someone to make a bid, before flinging it down upon the Dispatch Box. ‘And we shall judge it by the morals and many mistresses which may be revealed.’

  More anticipation, more shoe-shuffling. Then she held in her hands a copy of the Evening Herald, displaying it with pride. Members strained forward to catch its contents.

  ‘Since the Opposition is so notoriously shortsighted, I shall read it for them. The headline says: “Eco-Chief A Cheat.”’

  She read out the relevant details, savouring them, repeating many of the best, bang
ing her pointed finger against the Dispatch Box for emphasis. Opposition feet stopped fidgeting, stopped moving at all. Rigor mortis had set in.

  ‘And so it seems, Madam Speaker, that the author of the report in which the Opposition places so much trust is not the paragon of truth and virtue we had been led to expect. It seems he has been living with two different women, neither of whom is his long-abandoned wife. He has been claiming two lots of dole money, in spite of the fact that he draws a considerable level of expenses from The Earth Firm to fund his duties as a professional agitator. In addition, he also draws disability benefit, although his sad and obviously enervating disability doesn’t apparently prevent him spending most of his time chained to trees.’

  She waved her copy of the Herald. It was the turn of the Government benches to stamp their feet, like Zulus appearing over the ridge.

  ‘It never ceases to amaze me how these professional protesters have the strength to get on their bikes and cycle around the country in search of any discomfort other than a proper job.’

  More cries from the warriors behind. She fixed her opponent across her half-moon glasses.

  ‘The Honourable Gentleman should take care. He seems to be climbing into beds which are already too crowded.’

  Game, Set, Debate. The parliamentary sketch-writers had rarely had such rich pickings. ‘Opposition Lost Up Amazon,’ one was already scribbling. ‘Bedtime for Bozo,’ hacked another.

  From his perch up in the Visitors’ Gallery, Corsa turned to his companions with a face flushed with contentment. Beside him Cars and Nuclear sat silently. Both were lost in serious thought.

  She took her finger from her mouth. ‘Success hasn’t changed me,’ she said. ‘I feel no different now I’m earning four million from when I was only earning two.’

  ‘Shuddup.’

  The finger went back in, but only for a while. ‘My mother always told me that men who offer you champagne after five usually end up trying to drink it from your navel.’

  ‘Will you be quiet and concentrate?’