Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  Helga considered.

  “I donno. You see, not much is going on at all, so when it start I’m not sure. Very low-temperature romance, like people think the British always have. They never sleep together at the flat, you know. So when it start, I can’t really say.”

  “Where do they sleep together, then?”

  “Outside,” said Helga. Sutcliffe looked puzzled for a moment. Hyde Park was one thing for Helga and her boyfriend, quite unthinkable for Penelope Partridge and hers.

  “She means away from home,” explained Seymour.

  “That’s right. He rings. And then three or four hours later—very clever, Mrs Partridge—she says, ‘Oh, Helga, I shall be away for the weekend,’ and gives me very generous time off in compensation. Which gives the game away, because Mrs Partridge is not generous by nature, oh, by no means!”

  “Does he come round often to the house?”

  “Before, fairly often. Recently, not. Today the first time for—oh, two, three weeks. They talk on the telephone.”

  “And do you hear what they say on the telephone?”

  Helga giggled, like Isolde in skittish mood.

  “Of course. She has a loud voice when she talk into the telephone, like she was calling to dogs.”

  “What do they talk about?”

  “Well, sometimes they plan these . . . meetings.”

  “Dirty weekends,” said Seymour, as if he were supplying a technical term to a novice.

  “Yes. Then the voice goes very low—so equally I know. Otherwise she talk normally. The other day what they talk about is this hut in Yorkshire.”

  “Cottage,” said Seymour.

  “What did they say about that?” asked Sutcliffe.

  “She said: ‘Well, if it gets too awful at the hotel, you can always borrow the cottage.’ ” (Helga’s imitation of her voice was not too accurate, suggesting that Denmark did not boast of too many of the Penelope Partridge type). “Then she say ‘Wise? That’s for you to decide. I can’t see anybody commenting if you say that the widow of the late member has let you borrow the place. I shan’t be using it, that you can be sure of. It’s in the hands of the agents, but until it’s sold it’s yours to use if you want it.’ Only I think she said ‘at your disposal,’ which makes it sound like garbage.”

  “And did he accept?”

  “I don’t know. I think they leave it up in the sky.”

  “Air,” said Seymour.

  Sutcliffe bought them both enormous tankards of lager, enlisted Helga as a spy for any future happenings of interest in the Partridge household, and then went on his way. The case was beginning to be a case, beginning to get accretions, have reverberations. He was beginning to think he might be able to justify a trip up to Yorkshire.

  • • •

  While he was clearing out his desk next morning, Sutcliffe had an important phone call. He knew it was important because of the number of people who spoke to him before the caller himself actually came on. It was, a Roedean voice informed him, from Conservative Central Office, the Chairman himself who wanted to have a talk (quite informally, of course) with him.

  “Superintendent Sutcliffe?” said the Chairman, trying to sound like a serious politician.

  “Yes.”

  “Look, you know the last thing we’d do is interfere with a genuine police investigation. But this really does seem over the edge. The PM is absolutely livid, I can tell you. Apparently you’ve been positively harassing the poor little widow of James Partridge. Now, really, I can’t think that can be necessary. In fact, I thought the whole business was dead and buried. Why isn’t it? I tell you, with the by-election starting officially in a week, dragging this thing out as you are doing begins to seem politically motivated.”

  “Does it, sir? I’m sorry about that.”

  “Well, it does. Yes, it does—to the PM too, let me tell you. I mean, this poor lady, Mrs . . . er . . . Partridge, in the stress of the moment, fails to mention that she and her husband were temporarily living apart. And now, five or six weeks after he dies, you feel fit to take the matter up. I mean to say, does it matter?”

  “We think it does, sir. And it’s not just that.”

  “No?” (A faintly hollow sound to that “no?”)

  “You don’t, I suppose, approve of lying to the police, sir?”

  “Good heavens, Superintendent, you know that our party—”

  “Mrs Partridge lied to the police about several matters. That she assumed her husband had gone to his separate bedroom, and so on.”

  “Little things, Superintendent. In the stress of the moment.”

  “The statements were repeated at the inquest, sir. And there’s another thing—”

  “Yes?”

  “This is in confidence, sir. Though of course you may repeat it to the PM if you think fit.”

  “Ye-e-es.”

  “We are investigating a connection—a close connection, if you understand me—”

  “Yes.”

  “—between Mrs Partridge and another politician in your party.”

  “But, good heavens, Superintendent—of course morality in domestic life is absolutely vital, but in this day and age—”

  “The gentleman is your candidate for the constituency of Bootham East.”

  “Oh Lor’,” said the Chairman.

  Chapter 6

  Campaigning(I)

  The Unicorn Hotel had acquired a new attraction since Antony Craybourne-Fisk’s first visit at the time of his selection. In the dining-room there was now a Sicilian called Gianni: sallow, with black crinkly hair and appalling teeth, he exuded self-love. He toted a dangerous pair of eyebrows at Antony on the first morning as he took his order for bacon and eggs, and he toted them again when he brought him two boiled eggs and a rasher of bacon on a separate plate.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” muttered Antony, but he did not send them back. It was unlikely that Gianni would prove to be a constituent of his—or indeed that he would ever go so far towards expressing approval of anyone other than his delectable self as to put a cross by their name on a voting slip—but Antony was in a hurry. Antony had a campaign to begin.

  Antony had fought a seat before, a hopeless constituency in East London (though not as hopeless, he said to himself, as Bootham East was in every respect except its winnability as a parliamentary seat). If Antony was willing to put himself in his agent’s hands, at least for the first days of the campaign, it was not through inexperience, but because he felt himself here on terra incognita, a Captain Cook among natives who might turn out to be friendly or unfriendly, but who looked horribly other. Thus, when Harold Fawcett said they were going to spend the day touring the constituency with the loudspeaker van, getting out now and then at auspicious spots to meet the natives, Antony acquiesced.

  “It’ll give people a chance to get to know you,” Harold said.

  “Quite,” said Antony. And me a chance to see the constituency, he thought, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. But it couldn’t be put off for ever.

  And so they drove, down from campaign headquarters into City Square (“We all know this is a government that has set its sights on the right targets,” boomed Antony, in a voice that had somehow acquired a classless ring), along the High Street and up towards Kitchener Road (“with a leader whose courage and firmness is admired the world over”); from Kitchener Road into the new private estate of Arden Grove, with its shoddy houses with ridiculous pimples pretending to be bay windows (“I don’t deny we’ve had to take difficult decisions, even unpopular ones”), and from the mortgaged horror of Arden Grove into the borderline respectability of early postwar council estates in Raynwood Terrace, Raynwood Crescent, Raynwood Avenue and so on, testament to the poverty of imagination of the council officers who had dreamed up the estate (“I realize that many of you are not having it easy, but would you respect a government that bought you off with cash handouts?”). That last bit was unwise: many of the inhabitants of Raynwood estate would certainly vo
te for a government that bought them off with cash handouts.

  On they went. From Raynwood View they descended into Somertown Fields, a council estate of flats and houses constructed with untried materials in the early ’sixties, and already rickety with numberless ailments, physical and social. Antony, seated on top of his open van, gazed around him with barely concealed horror at the boarded-up dwellings, at the gardens crammed with disused cars, at the front doors ripped off their hinges, at acres of broken bottles, discarded lemonade cans, sweet wrappers, broken toys and old clothes (“What this government represents is the possibility of a new start”). Men in pyjama tops or dirty T-shirts barely covering monstrous bellies stood idly smoking in doorways, while women lounged round seedy shops cackling as they gossiped, and filthy children played in the gutters and jeered at passing cars.

  “Here,” said Harold Fawcett to the van driver; “we’ve come beyond constituency boundaries. This bit’s Bootham South, not Bootham East.”

  “Bloody fool. Turn around. Let’s get out of here,” said Antony, in tones that were flung electronically all over Somertown Fields.

  • • •

  Jerry Snaithe was up early, and so were most of his helpers. His agent’s house was too small to act as a convenient campaign headquarters for such a vital by-election, so they had rented a largeish house five minutes from Bootham’s centre. Here they got things just as they liked them. Jerry did most of the directing, watched by Fred Long, the party agent, who had seen candidates come and go, and had seen through most of them. Jerry had brought with him a hard core of party activists from London (who were already raising the hackles of the locals), and he assigned them to various campaign officials, or gave them little rooms and long titles of their own. Five people, led by a bossy lady in spectacles, staffed the main office on the first floor, through which callers could be filtered to the various functionaries for the campaign (Publicity, Meetings, Canvassing, and so on). But before one could even get to the formidable five, one had to get past a gentleman Jerry placed at the bottom of the stairs. An unemployed miner, he was massive and T-shirted, with snakes entering naked ladies tattooed up and down each arm and around his throat, and manners that would have been considered uncouth in nineteenth-century Arkansas. To warn off unnecessary approaches to this representative of working-class macho at its least acceptable, Jerry had a large notice made for the front door, which read:

  NO MEDIA PERSONS ALLOWED

  BEYOND THIS POINT

  RING BELL AND WAIT

  He taped this up with his own hands, and was pleased to be photographed by a media cameraperson as he did so. When all this preparation had been completed, Jerry stood in the hall with Fred Long and rubbed his hands.

  “Right,” he said, “now we’re ready to go.”

  “First stop City Square,” said Fred. “How do you think we should arrange it?”

  “I thought I’d go round for a bit, shake a few hands, then get up on the van and give a five-minute speech.”

  “Fine. What are you going to talk on?”

  “The need for open government,” said Jerry.

  • • •

  Oliver Worthing, the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, woke on the first morning of the by-election with a stale taste in his mouth, and a sense of listlessness that seemed to permeate every limb of his body. He had indulged, the previous evening, in a half-bottle of Hungarian Riesling, but surely that could not account for the fact that he was today so lacking in fizz? Perhaps, he told himself, he did not really want to fight the campaign. Perhaps his political ambitions had been sated by fighting Bootham at the General Election. I fought it quite well, he told himself, to buck himself up, but maybe once was enough. Then he thought with a sinking heart of the immensely greater media coverage there would be on this occasion. For three weeks politics would mean Bootham. For three weeks he would be a national figure. Please God let me speak briefly and to the point, said Oliver to himself. Please God let me not go on.

  Why on earth do I, an unbeliever, say “Please God,” even in my thoughts? Oliver asked himself. He cast round in his mind for Social Democratic divinities, and composed a short prayer to Shirley. This made him feel much better humoured, and he got up. He washed and shaved and sat unconscionably long on the lavatory seat. His toilet-roll packet promised him “A New Experience in Toilet Tissues,” and he was wondering why he could remember so little about his earlier experiences in toilet tissues. The fact that they had left so little impression made him feel guilty. Almost anything could make Oliver Worthing feel guilty.

  His children, for example: should he phone his children? There was no particular reason why he should do so on the first day of the campaign: he had phoned them three days ago, and Wendy, his ex-wife, didn’t particularly like his phoning them too often, though she never said anything. But would the children expect it? Would they feel he had failed them if he didn’t? He went on in this way as he prepared a boiled egg and toast and a mug of instant coffee. By now it was ten minutes after the time he should have left for campaign headquarters, so the decision made itself.

  Arriving late at the decrepit first-floor offices due for demolition that had been loaned free to the SDP by a local businessman in a passing fit of “a plague on both your houses,” Oliver Worthing found that everybody else had got there early and was frantically busy. Whether anybody was co-ordinating with what anybody else was doing, or whether they really knew what they themselves were supposed to be doing was less clear, but there was lots and lots of enthusiasm. They were mostly middle-class young people, few of them obvious voter-repellants, but Oliver was also pleased to note a Sikh, a couple of disaffected miners, and a middle-aged lady who would almost certainly turn out to be a spokesperson for gay rights. Good, thought Oliver: a representative cross-section.

  Finding out what he was supposed to be doing was more difficult. Finally they decided to do the obvious thing at this stage in the campaign—tour the constituency with a loudspeaker, and then set up an impromptu meeting somewhere central. One of the miners proved an excellent driver, knowing the constituency like the back of his hand. The only problem was to get him to drive slowly. A very tiny zing entered Oliver’s veins as they went from street to street: this was his place, he had lived here for years, and by God the people needed something doing for them. When by chance their paths crossed with Jerry Snaithe’s loudspeaker van, Oliver managed to get in a cheeky “You don’t want a carpet-bagger in this constituency, do you?” and then added, for good measure: “Well, you’re in luck, because you can give two of them a good kick up the pants on February 27th.” And when Jerry Snaithe countered with “I’m the only candidate who’s fighting this election on the issues,” Oliver saw several people in the street groan. For a bit he felt quite good. The zing was perceptibly increasing.

  They had the impromptu meeting outside the Corn Exchange. Oliver did his usual stuff about “Time for a change—people are sick of Tweedledum and Tweedledee—extremists in control in both parties” and so on. Then he asked for questions. There was by now quite a good little knot of spectators, and a man at the back of them shouted, “Are you in favour of closing down uneconomic pits?”

  Oliver knew the right answer to that one; it was “yes.” It was the short answer too. It might not please the questioner, or the miner who’d driven him round, but it was the honest answer. But it was also a harsh one, and Oliver had never found it in him to be a harsh man.

  “This is an appalling dilemma,” he began. “We have to weigh up the social factors, the dereliction of mining communities with their age-old traditions and solidarities . . . whereas on the other hand, the community as a whole, which has to bear the economic costs, has the right to expect . . .”

  As Oliver went on, and on, and on, the little knot of spectators evaporated, to go about their everyday business.

  • • •

  “Mother?” said Antony Craybourne-Fisk.

  “Yes, who is it?”

  �
�You only have one child, Mother.”

  “Oh, Antony,” said Virginia Mavrocordatos, known to her friends and her wine-merchant as Ginny. “How are you?”

  “Fine. Mother, I’m standing.”

  “You’re what, dear?”

  “I’m standing for Parliament.”

  “Oh, Par-li-a-ment. I thought . . . What on earth are you doing that for, darling?”

  “Well, it’s the sort of thing one does.”

  “Not nowadays, darling. Nobody does. It’s a positive hothouse of mediocrity. And the dress-sense of the members! Well, if you must, I suppose. It must be your father coming out in you.”

  “I didn’t know father was political.”

  “But of course he was, darling. Member for . . . that Midlands place, wherever it was.”

  “That was Harold, Mother. Your second.”

  “Oh, of course, darling.”

  “Best to get the little details right. Mother, I was wondering about Granny.”

  “Who?”

  “Granny Masterson. Your mother.”

  “Oh, Mumsie.”

  “I was wondering: is she all right?”

  “What on earth are you suddenly wondering about her health for? You haven’t seen her for years.”

  “It’s just that this constituency I’m standing for is in Yorkshire. Wasn’t Granny Masterson born in Yorkshire?”

  “Yes darling . . . Wakefield, can you believe it? And she was in rep there for positive ages—Sheffield, or Rotherham, or Darlington, or somewhere like that.”

  “Better and better. Is she all right?”

  “Of course, dear. As far as I know.”

  “Not senile or an alcoholic or anything?”

  “Of course not, dear.”

  “How long is it since you saw her?”

  “Saw her? Oh, positive ages. But I spoke to her on her last birthday—or was it the one before?”

  “And she sounded all right?”

  “Perfectly all right. Positively spry. We had a good slanging match, so I know.”

  “Splendid. Right. And she’s still in that home?”