The Sound of Trumpets

by John Mortimer

  ‘Something like that.’ Terry was still smiling.

  ‘And you would agree that to have such beliefs, without doing anything to put them into practice, is pure emotional self-indulgence?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Terry felt he had taken a step on to dangerous ground. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the only point in having such beliefs is to affect society, as you would say, for the better?’

  ‘Well,’ Terry conceded, ‘that must be right.’

  ‘And the only way you can affect society is by winning elections. You and your Party.’

  ‘In a democracy, yes.’

  ‘Well, we’re living in a democracy, aren’t we? This isn’t bloody Iraq.’ Lord Titmuss, having decided to adopt the winning ways of a pussy-cat, seemed to feel a constant temptation to turn back into an alligator.

  ‘No. Of course we’re in a democracy. Thank God!’ Terry reaffirmed his credentials.

  ‘Then if you want Socialism, beat Willock!’

  ‘That’s what I intend to do.’

  ‘And if you want Socialism, don’t mention the word during your campaign. Or at least only use it to abuse it. Willock’s lust for Brussels, you might say for instance, will lead us straight to one-state European Socialism. Government interference in industry. The death of freedom.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly say that.’

  ‘Because you don’t want to win?’ Titmuss seemed about to sneer.

  ‘Because it wouldn’t be true to my beliefs.’

  ‘Of course it would.’ His Lordship sighed and rose wearily to his feet as though about to explain an obvious point to a particularly thick House of Commons. ‘You’d be doing your beliefs the greatest possible service. You’d be giving them the chance of a lifetime. Then, if you beat Wee Willie and your Party wins the next general election, you can come up red as roses. Be as bloody Socialist as you like!’

  There was a silence as Titmuss moved away to a far end of the boardroom, so far that Terry had to raise his voice. ‘You’re prepared to take that risk?’ he bellowed.

  ‘I’m prepared to take any risk,’ Titmuss called back, ‘for the sake of punishing the likes of Wee Willie Willock!’

  Terry thought about it and felt he had to say, ‘That’s extraordinary!’

  ‘Not extraordinary at all. Revenge is one of the few remaining pleasures of old age.’

  He got something off a table set against the wall and returned to sit knee to knee with Terry. ‘Do you know who you remind me of?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me!’

  Terry, unflattered, asked why.

  ‘Both of us. Pushy young men. Pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. Believing in ourselves and knowing we were going to take power away from the toffs and use it for ourselves. My father was a clerk in Simcox Brewery. Every night of his life, when he’d finished up his tea, he’d push away his plate and say to mother, “That was very tasty, dear.” I know what your father did.’

  ‘He worked here.’

  ‘So you say.’ Titmuss had collected a copy of Terry’s election leaflet and now quoted from it. ‘ “Terry Flitton is a local boy made good. His father was a worker in W.R.F., who spent his life on the shop-floor.” Excellent working-class origins! By the way, you don’t mention the fact that your father became some sort of personnel officer. Middle management. No doubt voted Tory. You kept that dark, didn’t you?’

  ‘There wasn’t the space to go into every detail.’ Terry realized the lameness of this excuse.

  Then he felt the Titmuss hand on his knee and heard Leslie’s reassuring voice. ‘Of course, you lied. Exactly what I should have done myself. I think we can work together. But for the moment …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re just another Labour no-hoper. You agreed that this conversation would be entirely off the record. If you mention it to anyone I’ll deny every word and no one will believe you.’

  ‘That’s probably true.’

  ‘Good. You’re beginning to show some political sense. At last.’

  ‘But we can have the switchboard?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Of course, it’s got nothing whatever to do with me.’

  As Terry left, Lorraine asked him how it had gone. ‘Very well,’ he told her. He had no intention of running his campaign under the orders of an enemy general, long ago retired, but having been asked to do so was none the less flattering. Titmuss had, whatever he said, spotted him as a potential winner. If he could ever be persuaded to endorse Terry openly the publicity would be the most astonishing news of the week. Meanwhile he had given away nothing and taken over part of the telephone exchange in the great organization which had fed his family and produced enough traffic cones to clog the motorways of England.

  As he drove away from the cone factory he remembered that Agnes had invited him and Kate to supper. With the optimism of many men in such situations he hoped that the two women would get on together.

  Agnes said, ‘I really am terribly sorry.’

  Terry said, ‘No, really! There’s no reason why you should have known.’

  Kate said, ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance.’

  Agnes said, ‘Could I just give you some of the potato off the top of the shepherd’s pie?’

  ‘Isn’t it cooked with the meat?’ Kate was doubtful.

  ‘Well. Yes. If I have to be honest.’

  ‘Then, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not.’

  ‘She’ll just have some of the vegetables,’ Terry said. ‘That’ll be all right, won’t it, Kate?’

  ‘Absolutely! That’ll be perfectly all right.’

  ‘You can’t just eat cabbage! That would be horribly dull. Couldn’t I run you up an omelette?’

  ‘Well, I’m terribly sorry. But I don’t eat eggs.’

  ‘Really?’ Paul Fogarty looked at Kate as if she were a new and interesting inmate of his Young Offenders’ Institution. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Cheese!’ Terry said it like a man who has found the solution to a problem which had been troubling the world. ‘Kate eats cheese! Don’t you, darling?’

  ‘Absolutely! A slab of cheese would be marvellous. Don’t bother to grate it or anything like that!’

  ‘Are you a vegetarian too?’ Paul Fogarty asked Terry when Agnes had gone off in search of cheese.

  ‘Oh no. Terry’s carnivorous!’ Kate used the word solemnly, as though it were an unfortunate complaint, like incontinence or asthma.

  ‘So you cook him meat?’ Paul was determined to get to the truth of the matter.

  ‘No. But he wolfs it down when he’s out to dinner. Like tonight.’

  ‘I do want to see Skurfield Young Offenders’ – Terry did his best to get the conversation off the Flittons’ eating habits and back to social issues – ‘From all I’ve heard, you’re doing a marvellous job there.’

  ‘Imagine I’m running a hospital.’ Paul was offering wine to Kate, who put her hand over her glass. ‘The boys are ill and I want them to come out cured. Tim Willock wants to turn it into an infected area, a place where they’ll catch far more serious criminal diseases. I’d be interested to know what your position is?’

  ‘We’re tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime,’ Terry came out with the Party line in a way that Des Nabbs would have been proud of.

  ‘Presumably you only have to worry about the causes.’ Paul Fogarty, with half-closed eyes and his head on one side, was gently probing. ‘Get rid of the causes and you’d get rid of crime, wouldn’t you say? I mean, you can’t separate them, exactly. You read Darwin, I suppose? On the survival of the fittest?’

  ‘Of course,’ Terry answered, although it was not strictly true.

  ‘If you’re a chimpanzee you do well if you can push a stick into a hole. Better if you can bring it out covered with nice succulent ants. Best of all if you can indulge in a few primitive acts of deception. The process of evolution in the South London jungle.’

  From the moment they had arrived for dinner (‘
Nothing in the least grand. Just shepherd’s pie in the kitchen,’ Agnes had said) Terry had felt strangely threatened by the governor of Skurfield boys’ prison. Paul Fogarty had seemed to be master of the household, so much in charge, opening and pouring out the wine, lighting candles in china candlesticks on the kitchen table, filling the butter dish from the fridge, that Terry was driven to the uncomfortable conclusion that he was Agnes’s lover. He was suitably older, intelligent and with a face creased by experience. Terry felt a stab of unreasoning and unexpected jealousy and was at first inclined to argue with Paul, to challenge him and win. But Agnes clearly wanted her new friend and her old friend to like each other, so he smiled encouragement at the prison governor and agreed with him.

  ‘Of course you’re right,’ he said, looking across at Agnes, in black silk trousers and a white shirt with full sleeves, who was grating cheese, over and above Kate’s demands, and making a salad. ‘Get rid of inner-city squalor, hopeless schools, no chance of a job, and boredom and you’d go a long way …’

  ‘Boredom!’ Paul agreed. ‘That’s the problem. What can we find that’s more interesting than joy-riding and nicking car radios?’

  Agnes was coming back to the table, holding the salad bowl in both hands, looking down at it as though it contained precious liquid which was not to be spilt. Terry breathed in the warmth of the kitchen, the smell of herbs and wine and olive oil, and thought of how many things in his life there were of far greater interest, and might provide even more dangerous excitement, than the tedious theft of car radios. He watched Agnes put down the bowl on the table and help Kate to salad, smiling as though seeing to the comfort of an invalid or a child. Then she sat, poured out wine for both of them and he drank, feeling irritated by Kate, whose hand was forever closing her glass to pleasure. Paul was asking him how the campaign was going.

  ‘It’s pretty successful. W.R.F. are giving us part of their switchboard.’

  ‘Big business behind you? Willock’ll be furious.’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it? My dad worked on the shop-floor and there was I sitting in the Chairman’s office, kindly allowing them to help us.’

  ‘Don’t let them seduce you.’ Agnes’s hand was on his arm. ‘I hope you didn’t make any promises.’

  ‘Absolutely none. It’s an offer with no strings attached.’

  He didn’t tell them he hadn’t told Penry, or Nabbs the gloomy M.P., who it was who had been waiting for him in the Chairman’s office. He had come back with a deal, a token of favour from the business community, and they had looked at him with a new respect. Only he knew that the arch-enemy, the harsh voice of right-wing realpolitik, had spoken to him and offered him advice. It was absurd, of course. The old man was past it, off his trolley, soured by years as a hermit in the wilderness. Terry scarcely knew why he had come away flattered, proud of the secret he was careful to keep. Sometime, who knows, he might be able to make use of the old devil. It would be a fitting end to Titmuss, if the old war-horse were harnessed to the great Labour bandwagon.

  ‘Agnes said she showed you round our rural heartland. What’s left of it.’ Why did Paul have to say that? Terry looked to see how Kate took the news and was relieved to see her eating salad, apparently unperturbed.

  ‘I volunteered to do a bit of canvassing,’ Agnes told Kate, ‘among the lonely ladies who drink brandy with their elevenses.’

  ‘It’s beautiful up there towards the Rapstone Valley,’ Paul told them. ‘The best way to see it’s from a horse. I don’t know if either of you ride?’

  ‘Ride?’ Kate shook her head and laughed, as though she had been asked if she spent much time at the spinning wheel or potted meat. ‘Well, not a lot actually. Terry used to. Before I met him.’

  ‘Not very well.’ Terry had, in his last term at university, fallen in love with a girl who turned out to love horses. She had taken him riding and, with the fear washed away by the years, he remembered the experience as strangely erotic.

  ‘Ride up to Hanging Wood and look down the valley. If you turn your back on Fallowfield Country Town, it’s still breathtaking.’

  Terry wondered if Paul Fogarty kept a horse stabled in the prison yard, fed and watered by the young offenders. ‘No. Betty Wellover at Hartscombe stables lets me take out her hacks. She’s got a boy at Harrow with marked criminal tendencies and I think she wants to keep in touch with me in case he ends up as our guest in the Y.O.I.’

  Terry stayed late at Agnes’s, ignoring Kate’s sighs, yawns and occasional reminders that he had to be out early canvassing the next day. After Paul had left to go back to prison, and when Kate was in the loo, he was, for the first time in that long evening, alone with Agnes. He asked, ‘What is Paul, exactly?’

  ‘Well. He’s governor of the Skurfield nick.’

  ‘I know that. But what is he as far as you’re concerned?’

  ‘My friend. About my best friend, I suppose.’

  ‘Only that?’

  ‘Only that. What did you think?’

  ‘The way he opened the wine and got the butter out. The way he knew where everything was. I thought perhaps he was your lover.’

  ‘Hardly.’ She was laughing at him. ‘He’s not exactly that way inclined.’

  The governor was gay, Terry was relieved to discover.

  ‘Don’t say that to anyone, will you?’ Her hand was on his arm again. ‘It’d be all up with his job if the prison service knew. So ridiculous! He cares about the boys more than anyone. Quite platonically.’

  ‘Of course not. I won’t breathe a word.’

  ‘Bless you.’ Her face was near his, and he thought she might have kissed him gratefully, but there was a sound of rushing water and Kate returned to the room.

  ‘ “You can’t just eat cabbage. That’d be terribly dull.” I could see what she had me down as – a really boring cabbage-eater.’

  ‘She offered you an omelette …’

  ‘To “run me up” one! With a sort of symbolic sigh. Just because I don’t like chewing on dead animals!’ Kate, cleaning her teeth, was calling from the bathroom. Terry was already in bed. He thought of pointing out that an omelette isn’t necessarily made with dead animals, but decided against it. Too vigorous a defence of Agnes, he was afraid, might betray his feelings and even arouse Kate’s suspicions. She came into the bedroom, smiling, her hair and eyes shining. ‘We won’t have to ask her back, will we?’

  ‘I think we’ll be too busy.’

  ‘That’s right. You’re going to be much too busy and important.’ She was in bed now, her legs wound about his, her head on his chest. ‘If she came we could have pasta. Then I’d offer to run her up a chop at the last moment, with a heavy sigh. Should I do that?’

  ‘I shouldn’t bother.’ The idea of a comfortable friendship between Kate and Agnes would have to be abandoned. In future the carnivore and the vegetarian would have to be entertained separately. Terry switched off the light and, while Kate slept, lay for a long while staring into the darkness.

  Chapter Eight

  The Millichips’ living-room was done out in clear pastel shades, filled with eau-de-Nil sofas, white rugs, white-legged, glass-topped occasional tables and paintings of boats in Mediterranean ports. In this room Linda Millichip moved silently, like a huge and extremely expensive yacht, gliding from her moorings. Her solemn, frequently sulky little-girl’s face was supported by a formidable body, swathed in the folds and frills of a white négligé. Jewels, twinkling in the autumn sunlight, nestled in her ears and were embedded in the flesh on her fingers. As she watered green and white house plants, breathing heavily, there was a barbaric splendour about Linda Millichip which had in no way been shared by her husband, the late and not much lamented Member for Hartscombe and Worsfield South. Since his death all traces of his existence had been removed from the house, and not a single framed photograph, not even a snapshot, of him remained.

  She was interrupted at her task of nourishing the camellias with a mixture of Phostrogen and tepid water by a
n insistent tapping at the French windows. She looked up, blinking in the low sunlight, and narrowed her eyes to focus on the blurred outline of a tall man, darkly dressed, with a high, naked forehead. She opened the glass doors to admit him.

  ‘This is a private visit,’ he began, with an air of mystery he seemed to relish. ‘So I came round the garden way.’

  ‘Do come in, won’t you? What will you have? Tea? Coffee? A drink or something? It’s not too early for a drinkie, is it? As I say, it’s never too early! And won’t you make yourself comfortable on the sofa?’

  ‘Thank you. I prefer a hard chair.’

  ‘What can I pour for you then?’ Linda set off towards the white-legged, glass-topped drinks table, on which the bottles had their names on porcelain labels which they wore like necklaces.

  ‘Nothing. I’ll take nothing, thank you. I’ve had a substantial breakfast. As I habitually do.’

  ‘Well, then. I’ll have to take a teeny one for both of us.’ She poured a slug of Cointreau in the bottom of a brandy glass and made herself luxuriously comfortable on the sofa, plumping cushions before she was finally settled. Lord Titmuss, meanwhile, loomed above her in an upright chair he had pulled over from the wall. ‘I got your letter,’ she told him, ‘when Peter died.’

  ‘I would have written more,’ Titmuss told her, ‘if I’d known more. I never got to know your husband well. Tell me about him.’

  ‘He was a complete pain in the backside.’ Linda raised her drink to her lips, and he saw her face, for a moment, distorted in the glass balloon. ‘But we mustn’t speak ill of the dead, must we?’

  There was a silence, in which Titmuss registered no surprise. ‘Was he a good swimmer?’ he asked.

  ‘He wasn’t a particularly good anything. He made money, of course. But that’s fairly easy, isn’t it, if you happen to be born into a family of merchant bankers? I don’t think they trusted him with anything that required more than simple adding up. No good about the house. Ask him to mend a fuse? You’d be wasting your time.’