Wandering through the rainy West End streets, he thought of death and, as he had done so many times in the past, pictured his funeral. Whereas in the past he had relished the idea – oh! The weeping parents and stunned schoolmates and extravagant sorrow of creative companions, not to mention the big black mammy singing heart-wrenching spirituals just like in Imitation Of Life – now it depressed him. Because now there was no one to weep for him. He had nothing but a badge saying ‘THE FLEET’S IN’ in his pocket when he entered Bette’s that night. Not so long ago he’d been walking these streets full of hope and pink champagne with money in his pocket and a song in his heart – ‘I Am What I Am’ from La Cage Aux Folles, to be precise – on the lookout for a tasty takeaway boy. Now, as he walked into the bar, he realized that he would have to become one of these boys. Not forever, just until his career got off the ground and ascended the heavens, up where he belonged.
Joe Moorsom was something of a loner. His strict adherence to his socialist principles excluded him from the perks and privileges that others in his party indulged in without a care, such as pairing with Tory MPs to avoid attending votes, membership of all-party social clubs and the cheap and excellent alcohol provided the copious Commons bars.
His solitary nature extended even to his relationship with his wife and children. On weekends he returned to his northern constituency and his family, but invariably these days it ended in tears. She wanted more of his time, more of his attention.
‘We hardly know you any more. You don’t seem interested in the kids and you certainly aren’t interested in me. What’s happening to us, Joe? We seem like strangers to each other. I can’t go on like this much longer.’ These exchanges always fizzled out with a vague mutual agreement to talk about it ‘next time’.
Like all solitary people Joe Moorsom had a secret. Publicly, there was the success story: the coalminer’s son who became the youngest-ever official of the National Union of Miners; the education at Ruskin College, Oxford; the pretty daughter of the NUM; baron he married; the two highly photogenic children. He was only twenty-six when he won his seat in Parliament.
Now thirty-five, he was respected by those who didn’t agree with him and loved by those who did for his blunt talk, his quick wit and his refusal to compromise his ideals. Much was made of his council flat in a hard-to-let highrise in the Elephant and Castle, a far cry from the regulation Labour grandee pied à terre in Pimlico. But in recent months his popularity had grown with the rise of public concern over child abuse; he was the chairman of the Child Protection Group and as the organization achieved a higher profile people stopped thinking of Joe Moorsom as just a plain-speaking breath of fresh air on Any Questions? More and more, it seemed very likely that he might be given a post in the next Labour government.
Privately, he considered his life an unqualified failure. All his life he had been haunted by the fact that, left to his own devices, he was profoundly homosexual.
Much as he loved the mining village he came from and despite the scores of speeches he had made on the inhumanity of smashing whole communities with pit closures, he knew that the kind, narrow-minded mining families, his own included, could never have accepted him as a practising homosexual in a month of May Days. It was only at Ruskin college that he dared be himself.
He was a Brasenose boy up from Harrow: privileged, right-wing and frivolous, everything Moorsom loathed. But the physical attraction made mincemeat of his ethics. After six idyllic months, though, the Brasenose boy transferred his lavish affections to the Old Etonian son of a West African chieftain.
At the age of twenty-one, at a TUC conference in Blackpool, he met Jill. She was working class, a socialist and very serious; everything Moorsom loved.
And every single time they made love, he had to do it from behind so that he could successfully convince himself that she was the Boy.
The night was wet and cold and the bar seemed warmer and more welcoming than usual. Recently Moorsom had taken to stopping in at Bette’s most evenings just to nurse a beer and watch the boys. He never felt the need to approach any of them; just being there was enough.
As his reputation grew, pictures and pieces about Jill and the children were beginning to appear in more papers and magazines every month. He was camera-shy, at his best live at rallies, his second best on radio. But Jill had the homely glamour of the TV commercial’s ideal wife, and the children were going from cuteness to beauty with no sign of an awkward adolescence. Not since the early days of the Kinnocks had there been such an attractive political family.
Of course he was pleased with the way things were going. But the attention his family was getting, and the good free publicity that resulted from it, made him feel even more of a hypocrite. What would these bedazzled journalists say if they knew that the dashing Joe Moorsom hadn’t slept with his lovely wife more than ten times in the last two years?
He sighed into his beer and, looking up, saw the boy. He was sitting on a barstool wearing jeans and a leather jacket, his fine brown hair curling in a silky pageboy around his hollowed cheeks and his long fringe tickling his eyelids. He kept blowing it to keep it out of his eyes. Every time he did so, his raspberry-pink lips puckered and pouted alarmingly. He knew this, which is why he did not take the more convenient course of cutting an inch off his fringe. He was not pouting now, though, as he searched through his pockets.
‘I know it’s here somewhere,’ he insisted to the barman, who was built like an Irish stevedore and dressed like an Italian starlet. The barman rested his chin on his hands and smiled sleepily. ‘Can’t you touch one of these gents for it? Losing our knack, are we?’
‘It’s just cheap plonk, for God’s sake! You’d think it was Krug the way you’re carrying on!’
The boy, as Moorsom had known he would, had the loud, proud, spoiled voice of a Southern Counties only son. He was looking around the bar now, and his eyes alighted on Joe’s. He smiled.
Joe looked away.
The boy slipped off his stool and came over. ‘I thought I’d better say aloha’ – he smiled – ‘because you look like the strong and silent type. Look, I’m dreadfully sorry to bother you but I stupidly came out without my credit cards and that terrible old cow behind the bar won’t let me have it on tick. Could I borrow the money from you? Cross my heart you’ll get it back.’ He could have been the Brasenose boy’s younger brother.
‘What are you drinking?’ Moorsom muttered.
‘Pink champagne, please,’ said the boy quickly. He called across the room, ‘A bottle of your best pink, my good man,’ and accompanied the request with a triumphant middle finger sticking up out of his right fist.
‘I can’t stay,’ Moorsom blurted. He took out two ten pound notes and put them on the table. ‘Enjoy your drink.’
‘Are you for real?’ Rupert’s eyes widened. What a find – a shy one. He seemed a little common and Northern, but he thought nothing of giving twenty quid to a complete stranger, so he must be a live one. Probably one of those screamingly repressed self-made Northern businessmen with a wife and two veg. A sugar daddy! – how incredibly camp. And fortuitous. ‘Look, don’t go for a minute.’ He put his hand on Moorsom’s arm and smiled up at him the way he had seen Lana Turner do so many times on rainy BBC2 Hollywood matinee afternoons. ‘They say drinking alone is the first step towards alcoholism. You wouldn’t like my liver on your conscience, would you? Just think of the little thing, all pink and pristine. Just say the word and you can save it.’ He blew his fringe out of his eyes, with all the puckering and pouting that entailed. ‘Please.’
Moorsom stared helplessly at the boy. All these years of working for other people, marrying for other people, living for other people. Didn’t he have a right to have something for himself? As he sat down his voice was weary. ‘OK.’ But he felt as though a huge weight had been lifted from the back of his neck. At first Rupert refused to believe that Moorsom lived in the Elephant and Castle. He thought it was a rich man’s little joke. By the time t
hey were crossingBlackfriars Bridge, he believed him. He pouted in the cab, he sulked in the lift and when he saw the size and spartan interior design of the flat he broke into a loud wail of anguish and fled into the bathroom.
But when he came out he was smiling, and holding an open copy of the Sunday Best. ‘What an amazing coincidence! I’m in showbiz, too!’
Moorsom looked resignedly at the centrespread. There, in glorious Technicolor hypocrisy, stood himself, Jill, Debbie and Michael, lined up and smiling proudly in their modest Northern semi. ‘JOE MOORSOM – MARXIST WITH A MORTGAGE, REBEL WITH A CAUSE’ blared the headline.
He had cringed at the headline the first time he saw it, too, when Sue had shown him the layout. But she had laughed at him patiently. ‘It’s what our readers want from their politicians, Joe. To their mind anyone with a mortgage and 2.5 children couldn’t possibly be an enemy of the people.’ She rustled the layout importantly and impatiently, but he could see she was hurt. She had been pleased with herself when she had shown it to him. ‘Look, if you don’t like it just say the word and I’ll write a piece which says you eat small children for breakfast, want to publicly disembowel the royal family next time Labour win power and believe that Britain should sign the Warsaw Pact. I’m really sorry if you think I’ve done some smarmy PR job, but I thought your real interest was changing things. And you can’t change things unless you’re in the mainstream. And that means photographs of the kiddies, and the wife, and the house, and all that irrelevant garbage. I’m sorry, but I didn’t make the rules. I’m just trying to help you because I think the things you believe in are the right things.’
‘Sue, I’m sorry. I’m just an old hippie.’
She laughed at that, the idea was so ridiculous.
‘It’s great – it really is. It’s just hard for me to think of myself as this person.’
She was a clever girl, and well thought of as a journalist, so he let it go – what did he know?
Now he knew his feelings of dread had been justified as Rupert gazed calculatingly at the paper. ‘How old is little Michael?’ he asked dreamily.
‘Twelve.’
‘Oh, isn’t that nice? In a couple of years he’ll be the right age for you to . . .’
Moorsom lashed out at him and was surprised to feel his wrist caught in a thin iron grip. ‘I am a trained ballet dancer,’ Rupert hissed. ‘My body is a deadly weapon. Rough stuff comes extra.’
‘Extra?’ Moorsom slumped back in his chair, rubbing his wrist.
‘Au naturellement. You didn’t think we were going to the chapel and going to get married, did you, dear boy? Oh no. You’re a Labour MP, it says here, and you care about poor people and the redistribution of wealth. Well, I’m one and I want some of yours.’ Rupert jumped on to the bed, bounced and flung out his arms. ‘Now come here and show me the honourable member.’
He looked so beautiful, and so familiar; the breathing image of the boy whose face Moorsom had carried in his mind for the past seventeen years. He sat on the bed. ‘I want to ask you one question and I want you to answer me truthfully. How old are you?’
‘Old enough.’
‘Seriously.’
‘I’m eighteen.’
‘It’s still illegal.’
‘So is everything delicious.’ Rupert smiled at him. ‘Now you have to answer me honestly. Tell me what you’d like.’
‘Just . . . I feel awkward saying it.’
‘Go on, silly.’
‘Just . . . act as if you love me.’
Rupert began to unbutton the man’s shirt. ‘Love comes extra,’ he said.
Sexual enchantment doesn’t affect only the lives of those experiencing it. It affected Joe Moorsom’s secretary and researchers, with whom he now flirted mercilessly. It affected his wife and children, on whom he now lavished long-distance affection. And it affected Susan Street when she received a huge bunch of orchids at work one Tuesday morning with a card saying, ‘LUNCH! CANCEL EVERYTHING! JOE’ and felt obliged to forgo lunch at L’Escargot with a notoriously entertaining and bitchy actress in favour of a working-man’s cafe in Farringdon – the only place Joe could go to eat without suffering the indigestion of guilt.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked, poking moodily at a fried egg.
‘The big one, I’m afraid.’ He laughed modestly.
She sprayed tea all over her egg. ‘You’ve been given a place in the Shadow Cabinet!’
‘What a one-track mind you have, Susan!’ he said impatiently. Couldn’t she tell? Wasn’t it obvious? ‘I’ve fallen in love.’ He lowered his voice. ‘He’s wonderful, Susan.’
‘And you’re telling a hack?’ She was genuinely alarmed.
‘No, Susan,’ he said patiently. ‘I’m telling you. As a friend.’
She shook her head and pushed her plate away. ‘Oh, Joe. Oh, no.’
He was red now, with anger and embarrassment. ‘Susan, I really thought I could tell you. We’ve had a few evenings when you’ve got drunk and told me about your . . . past, some of the things you got up to. I really thought you’d understand. There’s no one else I can tell. I come from a mining village. I’m married to an NUM woman, I’m sponsored by the NUM. Don’t you see how impossible things are for me?’
‘I’m sorry, Joe – I’m really happy for you. I’m just worried. With everything that’s happening for you right now . . .’
‘I appreciate your concern,’ he said coldly.
The lunch ended in less than ten minutes and he disappeared quickly, leaving Susan to pay the meagre bill. Which was unusual, because he always paid his half, insisting that there was no such thing as a free lunch.
She wondered how he had come by the misapprehension that there was such a thing as free fuck.
One person unaffected by the sexual enchantment of Joe Moorsom was Rupert Grey. After the initial relief of not being destitute and prostitute had faded, and after a week lying in bed reading Smash Hits, Rupert was bored. He was not allowed to answer the phone. He was never taken anywhere. Joe was starting to look less like a sugar daddy and more like a jailer. It was worse than home sweet home.
‘But you’re in showbusiness!’ he protested when Joe suggested yet another evening nursing a king prawn marsala in front of EastEnders. ‘Show people don’t live like this! They lead grand and glamorous lives!’
‘Rupert, I am not in showbusiness. I am a politician. A Labour politician.’
‘You get on TV, don’t you?’
‘Now and then.’
‘Then you’re in showbiz. Like Robin Day.’
‘Rupert, if I wanted to live in the way you suggest, which I don’t, I couldn’t. I don’t even take all of my salary. I draw a miner’s wage and give the rest back to the party.’
Rupert threw back his head and screamed with frustration. ‘You SUCKER!’ That night in bed he said he had a headache.
‘I want to go one of those restaurants I’m always reading about,’ he announced the next day. ‘Langan’s, Lockets, the Gay Hussar. He tittered. ‘I especially like the sound of the Gay Hussar.’
‘Rupert, I don’t GO to those places.’
‘Then maybe I’ll find myself someone who does.’
‘Please don’t say things like that, angel. Oh look, my speech.’
Rupert turned moodily towards the TV. There was a news film of Joe Moorsom taken two nights ago in Cleveland.
‘Society can no longer expect the under-funded and over-stretched social services to save children from abuse and exploitation – society must take a long hard look at itself. Silence is no option – only an aid and a comfort to the great sickness within ourselves. The great threat to our children today is no longer the anonymous man with the bag of sweets but the silent mother, the sick father and the scheming relation. For too many of this supposedly civilized nation’s children the place where they should be protected and precious is a place of torment. If the torture of children happened in Latin America, we would call it fascism; if it happens here, we call i
t home life. But our houses cannot be home while children are being tortured in them. Only the truth shall make our children free – and only their freedom will give us the right to call ourselves a civilized country once more. Thank you.’
‘Lovely speech, darling,’ said Rupert over the wild applause.
‘Thanks.’
‘Angel?’
‘Yes?’
‘How much do you think the papers would pay for a story informing them that the nation’s most prominent protector of children from sexual abuse is fucking a fourteen-year-old?’
‘But you told me—’
‘I was lying,’ the boy answered happily. ‘But even if I was eighteen, it would still be illegal.’
‘Illegal, but not obscene.’
‘OH! So I’m obscene, am I!’
Joe Moorsom looked at the boy he loved standing there in pink ankle-socks and a turquoise satin turban with a fake emerald jammed into his navel and thought that, yet again, honesty was probably not the best policy. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Thanks a lot.’ The boy looked at him coldly. ‘Listen, Joe, it’s been a lark. But I don’t think we’re compatible. I can’t waste the best years of my life in a council flat on the fourteenth floor. I think I should move out quite soon.’
‘Rupert!’ Moorsom caught him by the wrists. ‘Don’t say that!’
‘Shall if I want!’ The boy lit a Sobranie. ‘Though of course, I shall need some help.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Money, silly!’
‘A loan?’
‘Oh, no. That’s all cold and formal and nasty. No, I shall want palimony.’
‘But I’ve only known you for three weeks!’
‘Ah, yes. But to quote your good self, they’ve been the happiest weeks of your life. We’re talking quality of time here, not silly old quantity.’
‘Palimony . . .’
‘Just think of it as wealth redistribution, JoJo.’
The palimony demands grew day by day, fuelled equally by Rupert’s wild imagination and greed. The combination proved lethal. Rupert refused to believe that anyone who appeared on TV was not immensely rich. At first he would just chant at Moorsom, ‘A flat in Cheyne Walk – a charge account at Fortnum’s – a Gaultier suit—’ and then the little yellow sticky notes started going up:
Ambition Page 8
