PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
The Sound of Trumpets
‘One of Britain’s best-loved writers … [A] special blend of wit, humanity and nostalgic English melancholy’ Charles Spencer, The Times
‘A writer with a Dickensian gift for character and rich, robust humour’ Daily Mail
‘There are an enormous number of people whose lives he made happier and better by his writing’ Melvyn Bragg, Guardian
‘A great storyteller’ Robert McCrum, Observer
‘Only Shakespeare or Dickens could have done him justice in print; only they could have unsentimentally invoked his strain of English kindness and ebullient good nature’ Sebastian Faulks
‘One of Britain’s greatest life-enhancers … a superb example to us all’ Daily Telegraph
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923, John Mortimer was a barrister, dramatist and novelist. After working in the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War, he wrote a number of novels before simultaneously following two highly successful careers as a criminal barrister and as a playwright. His most famous play, A Voyage Round My Father, has been filmed and is frequently revived. In the 1970s he invented Horace Rumpole, a character who, ‘like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal’ (P. D. James). In the 1980s he returned to novel-writing with Paradise Postponed. He also wrote four volumes of memoir, including the bestselling Clinging to the Wreckage. John Mortimer was knighted in 1998 for his services to the arts. For many years he lived in a house in the Chilterns which had been built by his father, also a barrister. Sir John died in 2009, aged eighty-five.
JOHN MORTIMER
The Sound of Trumpets
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First published by Viking 1998
Published in Penguin Classics 2010
Copyright © Advarpress Ltd, 1998
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195986-3
Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part Two
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
For Sinéad Cusack
… So he passed over, and the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Mr Valiant-for-Truth)
‘Of course government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.’
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Part One
Chapter One
A bird, one of the Red Kites restored to our skies as a result of careful breeding in the Nature Area, drifting among the grey and pink clouds of a September dawn, had the best view of the impact of recent history on the Rapstone Valley.
The most serious blot on the landscape was Fallowfield Country Town which, from the bird’s-eye view, looked like a pile of bricks which a giant’s child had failed to tidy up. There lay the towering Computers-R-Us, the monster Magic Carpet store, the multi-storey car park, the grim pedestrian walkways and the glass roof of the shopping mall, opened, somewhat grumpily, by the former Minister for Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.) and local M.P., the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss.
Away from Fallowfield the Red Kite swooped low over pockets of rural resistance, where woods enclosed an uncultivated grassland in which unusual orchids and butterflies flourished. A few nervous deer, descendants of the herd once paddocked at Rapstone Manor, pricked their way across a road and bolted into the shadows, where an awakened badger lumbered and snorted.
Pale sunlight glittered on the river at Hartscombe, a town in which the shops, hard hit by the Fallowfield supermarkets, had sunk to selling little but greetings cards and pine furniture and frequently changed hands for reasons of bankruptcy. In a house by the bridge Agnes Simcox, née Salter, awoke from an uncomfortable dream which featured death. She felt for a cigarette, lit it and blew a perfect smoke-ring at the ceiling, coughing comfortably. The house, still known as ‘The Surgery’, had belonged to two doctors, both of whom she had loved. One of them, her father, had often said that a visit to the Surgery was the first step on the road to the cemetery. She thought, not for the first time, that she must clear out the medical equipment, the trusses, crutches, stethoscopes, vaporizers, bandages, swabs and numerous boxes of free samples from drug companies which filled her cupboard under the stairs.
She stubbed out her cigarette in the saucer of last night’s cup of tea and went to the window wearing nothing but a man’s blue shirt, frayed round the cuffs. A woman just fifty, beautiful, with lines bought with laughter and trouble at the corners of her eyes, she pulled at her hair, shaping and reshaping it as she looked up at the brightening sky and saw a Kite hovering.
Paul Fogarty, grey-haired, sleep ironing out the furrows on his daily troubled face, lay naked in his bed in the Skurfield Young Offenders’ Institution of which he was the governor. He saw a line of youths, pinch-faced, matchstick-armed, with huge, sad eyes, chained together at the ankle, straining to lift huge hammers and break stones, the quarry dust turning them grey as statues. The guards were bulky men with cowboy boots and walrus moustaches, carrying bull-whips and shotguns. A boy fell and his dropping hammer cracked his skull, the blood clearing a red channel in the dust. The Home Secretary, it seemed to him dreaming, had passed new laws to crack down on juvenile crime. He awoke to the sound of the telephone and was relieved to find himself back in his bedroom, among the
primitive paintings, the curiously suggestive plaster casts and wood carvings, the framed poems descriptive of life in custody, created by the young offenders.
‘Fogarty! Didn’t wake you up, I hope. Just called to remind you about the lad Johnson.’ The voice in the governor’s ear was brisk, determined, used to command.
‘What about Johnson?’ Was it bad news? The governor felt a moment of dread, a longing to put back the telephone and, returning to bed, pull the covers over his ears.
‘You remember you promised I could have him on day release. Give the lad a spot of work experience. Teach him a trade. Weeding. You’ll remember we discussed that?’
‘I think so.’ Paul the governor remembered a visit from a senior politician, interested in young offenders.
‘Then you’ve no objection to making it today? I want to get my money’s worth, you know. Give him an early start.’
Day releases were a scheme the governor encouraged. ‘I’m sure that will be all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll alert the staff.’
‘Good. Norman, my driver, will be with you in half an hour. When will you want him back?’
‘No later than six.’
‘No problem at all. I’ll make sure he’s mugged and murdered all the weeds in the rose garden. Oh, by the way, Fogarty. I’ve given your nick my seal of approval. Happened to bump into the Home Secretary at Chequers.’
The governor put down the phone without saying thank you. No disaster had been announced, and he was glad that one of his young offenders was getting a day’s work in a rose garden. However, he could get along, as he had in the last four years, without the dubious blessing of the Home Secretary. He had a moment of unease when he remembered that the boy to be let out for the day was universally known as ‘Slippy’ Johnson. But then he relied on the impeccable authority of the voice on the telephone and stopped worrying.
At the top of a hill behind Hartscombe church a white house stood in its impressive spread. There were no surrounding trees, so it lay naked and unashamed with its newly built swimming pool flanked by columns on which the coach lamps still glowed, although the day had now broken.
A green towel, still wet, with a pair of spectacles resting on it, was draped over a plastic poolside chair. A light breeze stirred the water, causing a blue and scarlet ball to bump against the concrete. Something else in the pool moved gently. A man in his early fifties, the black hair already leaving the pale crown of his head, crammed into a leopardskin bikini, with his hands manacled behind his back, floated face downwards. The ping-pong ball in his mouth was held in place by a handkerchief tied as a gag. Although he was undoubtedly dead the Kite showed no particular interest in him but wheeled away towards its home in the Nature Area.
The next day’s papers announced that Peter Millichip M.P. had suffered a heart attack during an early-morning swim. At the general election his majority had been seven thousand, and his death would cause a by-election in the constituency of Hartscombe and Worsfield South.
Chapter Two
Lord Titmuss, since the end of his second marriage, had always slept in a single bed.
His first wife, Charlotte, had died accidentally while taking part, unwisely and, he thought, treacherously, in a Ban the Bomb demonstration. Whatever happened to the bomb, he sometimes wondered. Still around, presumably, although it seemed no longer to frighten anyone and had slipped out of the news. His second wife had, he believed, callously forced him to leave her because he would not accept her forgiveness for exercising what he knew were his matrimonial, indeed, his human rights; that is to say, employing a private detective to unearth the infidelities of her dead first husband. Women he had always found to be elusive and unreliable creatures, so when he parted from Jenny he moved into a long bed, narrow as a coffin, and had slept alone ever since.
He had, however, after the loss of his mother Elsie, who had also let him down by dying, bought back Rapstone Manor, going for a song because it now stood, as awkward and isolated as a grandmother who has strayed into a teenage sleep-over, uncomfortably close to the video shop and the Thai take-away, the Girl Power boutique, Pizza Paradise, the Handy about the House stores and the Superbowl in Fallowfield New Town.
It was a house of memories which Lord Titmuss (the First Baron Skurfield, ennobled with Mrs Thatcher’s last gasp of authority) didn’t care to recall. Presented by Edward IV to a steward with a sense of humour, the Manor of Rapstone had been in the Fanner family since the Middle Ages. It was here that the late Sir Nicholas Fanner, Chairman of the local Conservative Party, had allowed the young, ambitious and hardly likeable brewery clerk Leslie Titmuss to rise without trace. Here Leslie captured the Party from the Knights of the Shires and claimed it for the High Priestess of the Corner Shop. Here he wooed and married young Charlie Fanner, who shamed him with her premature death on Worsfield Heath. It was here that the malicious old Lady Fanner, a glass of champagne in one hand and a lipstick-smeared Silk Cut in the other, cursed and gossiped her way to the grave in a house where the downstairs rooms, with most of their contents sold, were filled with cobwebs and dusty garden chairs. It was to this house he had brought the beautiful Jenny Sidonia, who had fallen in love with him, to the bewilderment of her friends, and here he had parted from her when he was unable to put up with her unendurable mercy. So now, in his narrow bed, he slept alone and had removed from the house, so far as he could, all traces of its past.
He came down the stairs in a pair of flannel pyjamas, as broadly striped as prison clothing, and a dressing-gown corded at the waist like a monk’s habit. Although only in his fifties, the long uphill climb from ‘The Spruces’, Skurfield, by way of the brewery accountant’s office, to the Cabinet and the House of Lords, had left him exhausted and prematurely old. Walking with early-morning stiffness, he pushed open his study door, sat down at his desk, coughed and looked about him. There were no family photographs, as he had banished both his wives. He also had little pride in his son, who was a head librarian in some remote northern town, and not much interest in his son’s wife Venetia (a bloody affected name, he thought) or his two grandchildren, whose names eluded him but to whom he sent modest cheques at Christmas with strict instructions that the money should be invested and not spent on computer games, C.D.s, rollerblades or any such unprofitable trifles. So, instead of smiling women and hopeful children, the desk, the mantelpiece, occasional tables and the tops of bookshelves were loaded with heavy silver frames surrounding Titmuss and the late beloved Leader, Titmuss with President Reagan, Titmuss with Chancellor Kohl, Titmuss and the Queen Mother or Titmuss with a black leader whose name and part of Africa drifted in and out of his memory like the names of his own grandchildren. There were no, deliberately no, photographs of Titmuss with the present Prime Minister, the man he regarded as having slithered into power after the unforgivable assassination of the Great Lady.
He had a file open now, at a sheet of paper covered with the spidery handwriting which his typist found so hard to decipher. He unscrewed a fountain pen and wrote a sentence about the Slitherer. ‘When he had to kiss hands on his appointment, the Daimler drew up at the entrance to Buckingham Palace and no one in particular got out.’ He paused, bit the end of his pen, and then heard a knock at the door. It was Mrs Ragg arriving with the newspapers, which she plumped down on his desk, covering the handwritten abuse of his present Leader.
‘That’s naughty of you, sir, running about the place without your slippers! You’ll either stub your toe or catch your death.’ Mrs Ragg was a large, pale woman of uncertain age who apparently applied her lipstick in the dark, much of it smearing her teeth. Hers was the first letter he opened as a result of his advertisement for a housekeeper in the Hartscombe Sentinel. He lacked the time or the interest to consider other applications. Mrs Ragg, now staring down at his long, white, naked feet, either mothered him or, in moments of wild embarrassment, tried to flirt with him. He met either of these approaches with a stare of cold hostility.
‘Will I just run upstairs,’
she said archly, as though it were an offer of love, ‘and fetch your nice warm slippers for you?’
‘You can do what you like, Mrs Ragg. Provided you go away.’
She sighed heavily and went. He sat staring at a photograph on the front page of the Sentinel. NEW LABOUR CANDIDATE the headline read. ‘Terry Flitton selected to fight Hartscombe seat.’ The face he sat and gazed at was far younger than his and, he would have to concede, better looking, but the set mouth and deep, determined eyes made him feel that he was looking at someone he knew very well indeed.
In the Magic Magnolia three people manipulated their chopsticks with varying degrees of skill, an older man, a man in his thirties and a woman who had the confidence of youth. The older man was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches, and an orange, woollen tie. His bald scalp, glistening under the hanging lights, bright enough for a surgical operation, was fringed with greying hair, its skin corrugated like an ill-fitting, tonsured wig handed out to an actor playing Friar Laurence. He used his chopsticks best, disposing of sweet and sour pork and sizzling beef like an old China hand after long years as a patron of the Hartscombe Magnolia. ‘From all I’ve heard of you,’ he said to the younger man, who looked, under the overhead glare, even more handsome than his photograph in that morning’s Sentinel, ‘you should do better than last time. You should take a considerable bite out of the Tory majority. I look forward to your coming a very respectable second.’
‘Not interested.’ Terry Flitton stabbed with his chopsticks, showing a determination which was often successful but sometimes sent a glazed ball of sweet and sour skidding across the plate. ‘I’m only interested in coming a respectable first.’
‘You should do well.’ In the face of this uncomfortable optimism Penry, the Labour agent, tried to lead his candidate gently towards reality. ‘We’ll try and pinch a few thousand off them.’
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