by A. N. Wilson
‘I’ve hardly ever met him.’
‘But he was your proprietor.’
‘I never really got to meet him.’
‘Astonishing. It’s late. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about Lennie. But will you do this for me, Rachel?’
‘I’ll do anything for you, Vivyan.’
‘Done,’ said Lord Longmore, throwing down the crossword puzzle on the other side of the fireplace. ‘Time for bed.’
TWENTY-ONE
Mary Much was fond of quoting Lord Beaverbrook’s doctrine that one of the secrets of running a successful newspaper was, from time to time, ‘to put a ferret in the cage’. It meant that a happy paper such as, under Tony Taylor, the Legion had broadly been was not necessarily a good paper. Nor was a mini-dictatorship, such as Worledge had run for a few disastrous months, conducive to good journalism. Everyone agreed, however, that the appointment of two men who detested one another, Worledge and Blimby, to run the new combined titles had been an inspired idea. The jolly, pointless energy which the Legion had possessed under Taylor, and the savagery which it tried to adopt under Worledge were combined, under Blimby, to produce a winning formula. Day after day, the Legion was breaking stories, attracting attention by its opinion columns, its gossip, its bold new layout, its photography.
The carnage – Mr Blimby called it cutting out dead wood – of two hundred and fifty redundancies affected the lives of the journalists themselves but was barely noticed by the readers. ‘Dr Arbuthnot’ – a page which had been ‘drifting’ since Aubrey Bird’s accident in the multi-storey car park – was now being edited by Seamus Ahearne (‘Creevey’ from the old Sunday Legion). He bullied his three young assistants, ripped up their copy, swore, drank, sweated: now half the world seemed addicted to the tittle-tattle he purveyed. The sports coverage was said by those interested to have improved immeasurably. The rough politics remained roughly the same, but the hiring of a new young political commentator made the paper look serious.
It was by no means clear which was the ferret – Worledge, or Mr Blimby. Worledge had scoured his contract when he heard the bad news. The very last thing he had wanted to do was to work under Blimby. His lawyer had to tell him that the contract did not entitle him to the huge redundancy he’d hoped for. In the event of the Daily Legion and the Sunday Legion merging, it said, he would be offered at the same salary a post commensurate with his abilities. Working as deputy to Blimby was a personal humiliation but he could not claim it was the sack.
The two – perhaps they were both ferrets – snarled at one another inwardly but they maintained a studied politeness. Each man felt forced by the reorganization to prove to the other that he was not as incompetent as the other supposed. Worledge reined in his cruder prejudices. Blimby, to prove to Worledge that he was a real man, despite his voice and stature, insisted on the paper being tougher. Stories which he would have deemed beneath his dignity when editing the Sunday – TV personalities found in brothels, errant clergymen, implants in the chests of famous actresses – now consumed his interest. He wanted to get there before Worledge in all these traditionally red-top areas of concern. Equally, he hugely enjoyed going to Number Ten and bellowing to the Prime Minister the terms on which the new Legion would be supporting him for re-election. The shopping list was a catalogue of incompatibilities – low taxes, and a huge increase of spending on health. Defiance of Europe in every single resolution of the Council of Ministers, while expecting Britain to be seen as a Big Hitter in the European Game. Support for Bindiga against the anarchists. Determined to be more bullish than Worledge, but with a sharper, more intelligent edge, Mr Blimby pored over every ‘opinion’ piece, and had developed the habit of making all the columnists (except, of course, Martina Fax) alter their copy.
The ‘Father Fagin’ story had faded away like smoke in the previous fortnight. Everyone agreed that Worledge had bungled it. There were rumours that the boy in question was mentally unbalanced. It was quite possible that the story would go away altogether were it not for a series of quite unrelated chances. Blimby dined with Martina and Lennie and Mary Much one night: he gave them dinner at his club. (The joy of being the editor of a daily was that he only needed to go back to Sal at weekends, if then; he had taken a small bachelor pied-à-terre in St James’s.) They’d discussed a wide range of issues, and it was only at the end of the meal that the subject of Zinariya arose. Some liberal paper had carried an article that week about opposition to Bindiga mounting in Britain, and it had strongly hinted that the allegations made against Father Vivyan had been part of a smear campaign. The article was written by Rachel Pearl – not a name familiar to Mr Blimby, but Martina filled him in.
‘She’s an embittered Jewess. You know how they can be bitter?’
Mr Blimby had crumbled his Stilton with an embarrassed air.
‘Vengeance is mine,’ said Lennox. ‘That’s the Jewish God for you.’
‘She used to be L.P.’s squeeze,’ supplied Mary Much.
The eighteenth-century portraits in the Coffee Room of Mr Blimby’s club stared disapprovingly.
‘He dropped her – she’s just taking her revenge on the Legion. How pathetic can you get?’
‘How’s L.P.’s life these days, would you say?’ Mr Blimby enquired.
The two women looked at one another.
‘He’s a bloody fool,’ said Martina.
‘It’s tragic,’ moaned Mary Much. ‘Who’d ever’ve thought. I mean, L.P.’
‘What’s he done now?’ asked Blimby.
Mary Much mimed exaggerated yawns.
‘So boring. Jokes not funny,’ supplied Martina in case he hadn’t understood.
‘You should watch him,’ said Mary. ‘Maybe there’s a case for using him a teeny bit less.’
‘He’s spreading himself too thin,’ boomed Mr Blimby, as if he was the first to have noticed the phenomenon.
‘But his bimbo’s article wants smashing on the head,’ said Lennox Mark. ‘If we can’t make that story against Father Vivyan stand up, we’re going to look like cretins.’
‘It’ll stand,’ said Martina.
The dinner happened during a week when there was not much in the way of news. True, a civil war in the Congo had killed two million; the Israelis and the Palestinians were engaged in further exchanges of conflict; there was a threatened nuclear war between India and Pakistan and the economy of the Argentine had imploded. But none of these tragic events seemed sexy enough at morning conferences to be made into stories. At the next such conference, Blimby looked down the table. Ahearne, always a bit groggy before eleven, Peg Montgomery, L.P. and the rest stared eagerly towards him. Blimby knew what they said about him behind his back. He knew that Mary Much’s nicknames for him, the WBG or Titch, were in common circulation. But since he had become the boss, and sacked two hundred and fifty people, the survivors looked at him with timid respect. No one, he kept telling them, was indispensable. Journalists – a phrase of which he was proud – had a ‘sell-by date’. Those who had survived the purges were on their mettle and they produced better stuff in consequence. (By ‘better’, Mr Blimby meant crueller.)
‘Peg?’ he roared at the next morning’s conference. ‘What interviews have you got for us?’
With a distinctly wobbly cigarette, the Killer Interviewer named the star of a television soap opera.
‘Is this going to shake the nation?’ Blimby enquired.
‘The show is watched by fourteen million people,’ growled Worledge.
‘The point is,’ said Peg, ‘it’s the first time in the show that a married man has come out as a gay.’
‘Is that something we want to encourage?’ barked Blimby.
‘Good point,’ grovelled Worledge, who never watched the programme and had not known that this was the reason for Peg’s interview. She floundered and began mentioning a TV cook known for alcoholism, a TV ‘impressionist’ whose second marriage was near its end, and a plucky TV weather-girl battling with breast cancer.
‘
Don’t you expect our readers to do anything except watch the fucking TV?’ shouted Mr Blimby, and he produced Rachel Pearl’s Guardian article from a folder.
TWENTY-TWO
‘Soup?’
‘Please.’
‘Pea soup?’
‘Wonderful!’
‘Then sausages, onion gravy, mashed potatoes?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘And, a little cabbage, I think,’ said the Brigadier, writing the word out in full with his sharp pencil on the pad before him.
‘That’s our plan of battle,’ he told the waiter, handing him the pad. ‘And we’ll have a little of the …’
‘Luncheon cup, sir?’
‘Yes, please.’
It was the third or fourth such luncheon. Sinclo had begun to find them a reassuring punctuation to life.
It had come as no surprise when Blimby gave him the sack. Now that Rachel was no longer in the office, he had come to loathe everything about his job at the Legion. The day after he had collected his P45, he had gone down to Crickleden to offer his services as a volunteer at the vicarage. It was the Brigadier’s suggestion that he did so. He had hoped to use it as an opportunity to make things right with Rachel, but she appeared to have left at the same time as the Mad Monk.
All sorts of rumours ran round the parish. Some said that Father Vivyan had been sacked for paedophile activity. Others said he had eloped with Rachel. Some said the police had tried to frame him for political reasons. Sinclo no longer knew quite what to think. He discovered, to his dismay, that he was more painfully in love with Rachel than ever. The fact that she now believed him to be some sort of low-level gutter journalist who had set up the arrest of the Mad Monk, arranged for the presence of television cameras, etc. made him anxious not merely to put her straight, explain the true state of things, but also to lay his heart at her feet, tell her that he knew she wasn’t in love with him, but that he would wait, be patient, hope for love to grow … Even as he said the words in his head, their hopelessness, their actual absurdity, was quite clear to him, but he could not stop himself loving, and hoping.
‘So what have you been doing down in Crickleden?’ asked the Brigadier between his first two slurps of the (quite excellent) pea soup.
‘A certain amount of football,’ said Sinclo. ‘They have some seriously good players.’
‘This would be the Happy Band?’
‘That’s right.’
‘All black?’
‘Well, no. Most of the indigenous Band are black, of course, the Crickleden boys, but there are about eight Bosnian kids who are also really good.’
‘Albanian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just footer? Nothing …’ The Brigadier peered carefully at his soup spoon as if it contained some rare specimen of pond life.
‘There’s this fellow, Thimjo. He’s about my age, I suppose, late twenties, early thirties.’
‘He’s not in the youth club, surely?’
‘He’s not, but he more or less runs the Happy Band. He does teach them some pretty sophisticated survival techniques. I don’t know if he got it from the Mad Monk, or whether it’s his own idea. But a couple of nights a week, those boys are learning martial arts from him which would be deadly stuff if they were the SAS, quite frankly. And there’s another thing. He has an armoury.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve got into his camper-van. One evening when they were all at supper, I broke in. There were about twenty weapons in there – some of them taped to the top of the Formica cupboards in the little kitchen arrangement, others stuck to the underside of the bunk beds. Pistols mainly.’
‘Tokarevs?’
‘Yes.’
Sinclo had told himself by now not to be surprised by the Brigadier’s omniscience. Sometimes, however, it was hard not to be surprised.
‘There are dozens of these semi-automatics in circulation,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Some are old Red Army issue, others are slightly more modern, made in China. You think he’s teaching the boys how to use them?’
‘They don’t need much teaching. This is Crickleden, not South Ken.’
‘Quite,’ said the Brigadier and ate silently for a while.
Then the older man added, ‘You see, if you think about the little disturbance which we overheard after our first lunch together …’
‘The Hans Busch explosion?’
‘I think the reason Special Branch haven’t come up with anything on that is quite possibly very simple.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s possible,’ said the Brigadier, ‘that there’s nothing to come up with. You see, when we were working against the Irish, we had something to go on. There were some – not many, but some – of the Republican leaders that I almost came to like. Some of them were first-class commandos, and very brave. And you knew where you were, to a certain extent. To a certain extent. They had an objective – it was some form of Socialist Republic of a United Ireland. They knew they’d never get it, exactly, but they knew that if they went on bombing, they could destroy the Orange case: they could make the notion of a divided Ireland, and six counties ruled by the Protestant elite, seem implausible. They were entirely successful in this aim. Triumphantly so. Now they are part of the Joint Assembly there. And they knew that the first requirement was to destabilize, to undermine the confidence of the British Government. Again, in spite of our best endeavours in the Armed Services, the Republicans were totally successful. We kept telling every Prime Minister – Callaghan, Mrs Thatcher, Major – that we could manage. If all this was was a terrorist war, we could contain it, even win it. But of course, the political will wasn’t there on the British side, which was why the IRA and friends were so successful. Now these people – the Crickleden mob … I think we can assume in some way they were responsible for blowing up Busch.’
‘Behind it.’
‘As it were,’ drawled the Brigadier.
Partly out of nerves, partly because he found it genuinely funny, Sinclo almost spluttered his remaining mouthful of soup.
‘The Irish were exposing the lack of political will in the British for a purpose. What if these chaps just want to expose the emptiness? As PMs go, you can’t get a much emptier vessel than the present incumbent.’ The Brigadier’s eyes momentarily looked at the ceiling and he smiled to himself. ‘What’s going on in Crickleden, like so much of the other crime in London, it might just be empty anarchism, you see. Motiveless in a sense.’
‘What about your theory that the Mad Monk is waging war on the last remaining vestiges of capitalist society, or some such?’
‘I don’t think I quite put it like that, my dear fellow.’
‘You thought he might be a mastermind?’
‘He’s driven, isn’t he? Or he was, until this latest fiasco.’
‘Well, we always called him the Mad Monk.’
‘You don’t have any sympathy with religion?’
Having finished his soup, the Brigadier leaned back and put his rosy head on one side. He contemplated this lack of interest, as a curiosity. Or so it seemed as he smiled at his young friend.
‘That’s true, I suppose,’ murmured Sinclo apologetically.
The first time he had ever lunched with the Brigadier, the old boy had compared the Mad Monk to some holy man he’d met in India. Evidently, there was some sense in which the Brigadier took religion seriously. Yet this was a matter about which Sinclo felt bold enough to speak up.
‘It’s all hooey, surely? The legends and so forth? Don’t all religions prey on the unhappy feelings of people, their fear of death, their loneliness, their dread of rejection, and offer them consolations? Isn’t that what the Mad Monk has been doing all his life? On one level, he’s been doing good. On another, he hasn’t cared to mix with his social or intellectual equals. He has preferred to play God, first in an African shanty town, then in an armpit like Crickleden, with old ladies and nutters and poverty-stricken immigrants coming to him out of desperate
need. Have you see the notices he’s put up in that shrine place—all about the Virgin Mary being worshipped there in the Middle Ages, and so on?’
‘I did read them when I went down to the morning service one Sunday.’
‘Rum stuff – I mean, you expect that sort of thing in Spain or Greece, but Our Lady of Crickleden!’ He began to laugh again.
‘You’re not saying that Vivyan is a hypocrite, are you, an out-and-out fraud?’
‘Of course not, no, no – er …’
‘What then?’
‘I just think … Ego-trip’s an awful cliché, but I think … he’s been on the most colossal ego-trip all his life. And he can’t see … how it looks … And I think it’s possible … Well, sometimes families see things other people don’t see. We always called him the Mad Monk. Suppose he is off his trolley? Suppose he’s organizing some gang of boys to cause mayhem in London? Suppose it has something to do with his feelings of anger against Lennox Mark?’
‘Or Lennox Mark’s feelings of anger against him,’ said the Brigadier. ‘What enrages me is that The Daily Legion – of course you couldn’t stop them, my dear fellow, but they came up with all this nonsense about boys …’
‘Is it nonsense?’
‘We don’t know, do we? And thanks to the newspaper wading in, we might never know.’
‘They seem to have gone quiet for a while,’ said Sinclo.
‘For a while. As you say. Ah, here come the sausages.’
TWENTY-THREE
They’d sent Peg Montgomery. That was how important this thing had become. Lily d’Abo was a level-headed professional woman when faced, in the wards, on a day-to-day basis with life-and-death decisions. In family life she had always been a woman of robust common sense. But when confronted with a journalist whom she had been reading for years, over her Club chocolate orange biscuits and morning coffee, her judgement left her.
Instinct began to fight back almost at once, but Lily, reflecting afterwards on her day with the famous interviewer, could see how it was that men and women whom she’d hitherto despised for their lack of willpower could be led astray. Gamblers who ruined their family for a foolish speculation on a horse; philanderers who wrecked their career for an afternoon with some painted lady; drunks, exhibitionists, compulsive eaters.
