The Sound of Trumpets

by John Mortimer

  ‘Winning matters most of all.’

  ‘Without beliefs?’

  ‘With beliefs. My beliefs. Not his. My beliefs and something of the Titmuss technique.’

  ‘The Titmuss technique!’ She turned away from him then and began to undo the long row of buttons on the front of the bright Japanese-waitress dress. ‘Quite honestly, you disgust me!’

  ‘No,’ Terry said, sure of himself. ‘I don’t disgust you at all.’

  They slept together that night, stretched out like a crusader and his lovely wife; but they didn’t make love.

  ‘He’s had to stop them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Director of the Prison Service got on to Paul after what you said to that weird club. The Home Secretary wants all days out for work experience stopped. He’s worried about the by-election.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Of course it is. But that’s what’s happened.’

  ‘What I said at that dinner was strictly off the record.’

  ‘Someone told the papers.’

  Terry said, ‘I can’t imagine who …’ although of course he could.

  Solemnly accusing, Agnes asked, ‘Why did you have to do it?’

  They were alone in the downstairs bar of the Water-Boatman. Outside the rain fell steadily, shining the streets and pimpling the river. His mood had risen since their last meeting, and his confidence had almost returned to its former level. His speech to the Barbarians had been greeted with unexpectedly prolonged applause. He had made a small joke about the soup and fish (‘Almost as soon as I arrived I was given two orders for wine and asked the way to the Gents!’) which was clearly considered sporting and granted more laughter than it deserved. He had made a careful selection of policies to whet the appetite of the Barbarians. Labour, he told them, was the particular friend of small businesses, but that didn’t mean that big business wouldn’t also be cherished. Taxes wouldn’t rise, but money would be spent more efficiently. The preservation of the beautiful Hartscombe countryside, round which he had had the privilege to cycle in his university days (in fact Terry had been far too hectically engaged in student politics to mount a bicycle and meander down country lanes). And then, as planned, he came to crime, cracking down on it and its causes.

  He had, he told them, said something about the causes when a guest on ‘Breakfast Egg’. Some of his remarks had been, perhaps, wilfully misunderstood. Now he wanted to make it clear that he had no time for the do-gooders’ approach. His tolerance for youth crime, he said, (‘And I want to be perfectly frank with you about this’) had sunk to zero. When they looked at such appalling incidents as the mugging of Lady Inwood they had to admit, had they not, that those involved, although young in years, were inherently wicked? (‘Evil exists, and we mustn’t be afraid to face up to it.’) This brought a heartfelt round of applause from the Barbarians; only Bishop Roger seemed puzzled by the conception.

  ‘Our hearts go out to Lady Inwood’ – Terry, reaching the end of his speech, played out his trump – ‘she has undergone a terrible ordeal. But there are, and I must say this to you’ – Terry borrowed a Titmuss phrase – ‘questions to be asked about the conduct of that heroic lady’s husband. The fact of the matter is this. These youths have been ordered into custody, for the safety of such innocent and elderly people as Lady Inwood. And custody, in my book, means lock and key. It means confinement in a safe and secure environment. It does not mean, as the Chairman of the Conservative Party seems to think, allowing young thugs to roam the countryside in order that they may weed his rose beds and sweep up his dead leaves. I am prepared to give this solemn commitment to the people of Hartscombe and Worsfield South. That sort of bending of the rules, that kind of bucking the system in the apparently noble cause of keeping Sir Gregory’s garden tidy, would not be permitted under a Labour government. The word “prison”, and I give you my word on this, is simply going to have to mean “prison”.’

  Sir Gregory had not been present at the dinner, nor was Lady Inwood; she had retreated to her sister’s place in Marbella for rest and recuperation. But as soon as Terry started on the subject of Slippy’s day out, the Barbarians were breathlessly attentive. Not a glass was raised, not a cigar was re-lit. Terry sat down in silence, until Lord Titmuss rose.

  ‘Well, guests, honoured guests and fellow Barbarians. This young lad has certainly given us food for thought this evening. I think you’ll all agree that he’s made an important contribution, and I’d like you to recognize that in the usual manner.’

  The applause which followed had exceeded, Titmuss later told him, in decibels, that accorded to Tim Willock or even the Minister for Agriculture. During the evening Terry had noticed a woman, sitting on the other side of Bishop Roger, to whom he hadn’t been introduced. She was dressed more soberly than the wives and partners, wearing a jacket and trousers, with only one large piece of modern jewellery, a red heart with a blue border, pinned like a medal to her breast. Her face was long and pale, her hair dark, and she looked what Terry’s mother would have called, derisively, ‘well groomed’. During his speech he thought she was making notes on the back of a menu. During the applause she whispered something to the Bishop, got up and left, and Terry didn’t seen her again for some time.

  So he had survived the disapproval of Kate and her disgust at the Barbarians. He blamed her for failing, quite noticeably, to join in the applause at the end of his speech. The scene in their bedroom afterwards led him to distrust, almost for the first time, the narrow intensity of her politics. There were political ideals, and there was the art of winning elections, and Kate seemed quite unable to keep the two conceptions separate in her mind. Titmuss was skilled in the art of winning elections and whatever his bizarre reason for offering it, his help might lead Terry to victory. If he gave the voters an undiluted diet of Kate’s views he was on the sure path to defeat. He remembered her flapping at the air in the Chinese restaurant and her objection to Agnes’s Gauloise, which he now found intolerant, and almost excused his infidelity. He knew that if he were going to win he no longer had to please Kate. He thought more and more of Agnes and, forgetting the content of the triumphant speech, wished she’d been there to join in the applause.

  There was a report of his speech, to his surprise, in the Hartscombe Sentinel. LABOUR CANDIDATE ACCUSES TORY CHAIRMAN OF SOFTNESS TO YOUNG OFFENDERS was repeated in the tabloids and was thought worth a short, on the whole flattering, editorial paragraph in the Daily Fortress. When he rang Agnes at the bookshop and suggested a meeting she sounded aloof and unenthusiastic. Finally she agreed to a drink in the Water-Boatman.

  When he got there he found that she was as hard on him as Kate, asking him, clearly without sympathy or understanding, ‘Why did you have to do it?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve noticed’ – feeling attacked, he took refuge in disappointed anger – ‘I’m fighting an election.’

  ‘Does that mean you have to say the opposite of what you believe?’

  ‘It means I’ve got to win.’

  ‘At all costs?’ She was looking at him, a wide-eyed stare, as daunting as a bright lamp on the desk of a police interrogator.

  ‘You want us to treat youth offenders properly. You want us to keep them out of prison. You want Paul to run Skurfield as a part of the health service and not as a penal colony? You want boys to come out cured? Do you want all that seriously?’ he asked her.

  ‘You know I do.’ It was, it seemed to her, an unnecessary question.

  ‘The only way that’s going to happen is for me to win Hartscombe. And to win it again for a Labour government in the General Election. That’s the only way. Power.’

  ‘And tell all sorts of lies to get it?’

  ‘I said what you wanted on the radio and Willock got his biggest lead in the polls. Anyway, I’m not telling lies.’

  ‘You’re saying what you don’t believe.’

  ‘There are two sides to every question.’

  ‘Are there?’
>
  ‘I was simply emphasizing the side that’s going to get us elected.’

  ‘You mean, deceiving the voters?’

  ‘You know damn well, Agnes, that if we asked the voters tomorrow, they’d have the boys who mugged the Chairman’s wife hung, drawn and quartered. You know they’re not going to vote for the Paul Fogarty treatment. But they can be persuaded to vote for someone who’ll make Paul’s dream come true. If I don’t shock them before polling day. We’ve got to live in the real bloody world!’ His words may have sounded angry, but he spoke them softly, smiling and looking, Agnes had to admit, exceptionably fuckable. ‘If we want all we’ve dreamt about, all that’s in the books on your top shelf, we’ve got to get the crosses against T. Flitton, Labour. There’s no other way of doing it.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ She was prepared to consider it.

  ‘It’s what I know.’

  ‘It’s a horrible business.’ She gave a small shiver.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m quite enjoying it.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

  ‘And we’ve wrong-footed the Tories.’

  ‘Then I suppose you think I ought to congratulate you.’ She was still not persuaded.

  ‘Not necessary,’ he told her. ‘Just have a bit of patience. Have a little faith. Shut your eyes and hold on tight. You can open them to see the size of my majority.’

  ‘And until then?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing till 3.30 in the sixth-form college. It’s only a short walk to your bedroom.’

  She took a gulp of Simcox and seemed to consider it. ‘I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Then we’ll do something together. Something you’d enjoy.’

  ‘What like?’

  ‘Go for another ride?’ He thought it would please her.

  She considered it, put down her beer mug and said, ‘All right. I’ll ring Betty Wellover.’

  So she did, and the next stage of Terry’s campaign degenerated into farce.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Leslie Titmuss heard the sound of dogs barking, the jangle and stamp of waiting horses. Leaving the memoirs, on which he had been working since dawn, he went to his study window, tightened and retied the monkish cord of his hairy dressing-gown and looked down on the grand sweep in front of Rapstone Manor.

  What he saw was a ceremony that had been going on since long before he, or the oldest local inhabitant, could remember. It had certainly been in practice when the restored Charles II rewarded the royalist Fanners with their baronetcy. It was alive in the Regency when the profligate gambler, Sir Lorenzo Fanner, took his friends and drinking companions hunting in night-gowns, with lanterns swinging from their saddles, to kill by candlelight. It had long preceded Leslie’s late father-in-law, one-time Conservative Party Chairman, Sir Nicholas Fanner, who enjoyed the meet and gave hunters an effusive welcome with mulled wine, port, brandy and slices of pork pie. When the Manor was taken over by a rabbit farm it had been suspended, but Titmuss had revived it. Perhaps it appealed to his strange and sardonic sense of humour. He had got hold of the big house, the seat of the Fanners, the Lordship of the Manor. He, the runaround from the brewery, was Lord Titmuss of Skurfield in the Peerage of England, with a coat of arms to go with it. Why shouldn’t his driveway be the meeting place for the Hartscombe Hunt?

  The Hartscombe wasn’t the smartest of hunts, and wasn’t mentioned in the same breath as the Heythrop, the Belvoir or the Quorn. Indeed, the poshest hunters said that if you hunted as far south as Hartscombe you should keep quiet about it. The most elegant followers that morning, those sticklers for etiquette who wore pink coats and top hats, were a garage manager from Worsfield, the proprietor of Pooh Corner garden centre and the owner of a string of Thames Valley hairdressing salons. Although it might be thought of as down-market by the blue-blooded fox chasers to the north, the Hartscombe meet was an exciting occasion for all concerned, particularly for the antis, the hunt saboteurs, who had parked their vans at the end of Titmuss’s drive and were consuming the packed meal provided for them by P.A.L.S. (the Pro-Animal-Life Society), sometimes leaving their vans to shout ‘Murderers!’ at the girls from the pony club or, more daringly, to stub out their cigarettes on the rumps of horses who had, presumably, defected from the animal world and gone over to the enemy. Excitement was rising in both camps at the prospect of the great pursuit, when the hunt would chase the fox, the saboteurs would chase the hunters, and a good time would be had by all.

  By all except the fox? Leslie Titmuss considered the question because it might soon have to be debated in the House of Lords, and he decided that it held little interest for him. He had grown up in a home without pets. When he was a child the sight of animals had often alarmed him, and their habits disgusted him. So far as he was concerned, how foxes lived or died was hardly a fit subject for political debate. Little as he liked foxes, he was quite sure he detested fox-hunters. It was not their killing animals he objected to but their devotion to dumb creatures. They surrounded themselves with horses, dogs, sheep, cows and poultry. They spent fortunes on vets to treat their neurotic hunters and wept when their dogs had to be put down. He regarded them, even the top-hatted garagiste, the garden-centre proprietor and the owner of the Snippers chain, as old-style Tories, nostalgic for a rural past, aping the ways of that patronizing, paternalistic squirearchy Mrs Thatcher had put out to grass. He felt all that, and yet he allowed the Hartscombe Hunt to assemble in front of his house; because, after all, he was Lord Titmuss, and that was the sort of thing they expected from a Lord.

  A pony, touched by a burning fag, reared and a girl with a ponytail and a black riding hat was thrown into the rhododendrons. A saboteur was chased back to his van by a middle-aged woman on what seemed to Titmuss a gigantic horse. What did his Lordship think about sabs? They were anarchists, of course, and anarchy couldn’t be tolerated unless it was cunningly disguised and introduced as part of a free-market economy. The sabs were lawless, irresponsible and should be cracked down on like other protesters, mercenaries and rent-a-riot hooligans. And yet he couldn’t resist a sneaking sympathy for the sabs. They were engaged in the great cause to which he had devoted his youth, getting up the noses of the toffs and organizing the defeat of those who had criticized his dicky-bow.

  The number of hunters was increasing steadily, with women and teenaged girls, farmers, market gardeners and a long-distance lorry driver with money to spare for hunting. The cries of ‘Murderers!’ grew louder and were also directed at the foot followers, grey-haired couples with rucksacks and walking-sticks, an athletic London vicar and a party of enthusiasts from the Women’s Institute.

  Nobby Noakes, a small wizened man who rode with his legs stuck out on either side of his horse as though he had dropped in from the sky doing the splits, edged his mount towards that of the brick-complexioned Betty Wellover. He was a dealer in garden furniture, wattle fencing, children’s ponies and other things well-off townies feel the need to acquire when they emigrate to the country; and he was so old that he could remember the Rapstone cottages when they were the homes of woodmen and farm labourers. He now solicited Miss Wellover in a metaphor taken from country sports. ‘I say, Betty,’ he said. ‘Any chance of a gun in your shoot?’

  She looked him over and turned him down. ‘Sorry, Nobby. I’m fully syndicated at the moment.’

  Now, as the number of horses increased, the car followers arrived, old boys from the woods in damaged Fords and dented pick-up trucks who poached, dealt in firewood and scraped a rural living. They were outnumbered by couples in tweed hats, with brandy flasks and dogs in the back of their Saabs and Volvos. Binoculars swung from their necks, and they would do their best to watch the hunt from the roadside. Their presence puzzled the antis, who weren’t sure if they were hunt supporters or prosperous members of P.A.L.S., so they didn’t shout ‘Murderers!’ at them but ‘Come to watch the slaughter of the innocent, have you, mate?’ or suchlike non-committal questions.

  The
owner of the Pooh Corner garden centre, a business which made a fortune out of those new arrivals in the countryside who like to buy their plants ready-made, was surprised to see Lord Titmuss on the ground below him, offering up a glass of mulled wine and a small segment of pork pie. The legendary politician was wearing an aged car-coat with scuffed leather and a yellowing collar, a tweed cap, shapeless grey flannel trousers and bedroom slippers. The owner of Pooh Corner said, ‘Thank you, my Lord,’ and, in some confusion, stuffed his mouth with pork pie. The truth of the matter was that Titmuss had been counting the number of the hunt followers and, looking at them simply as crosses on voting papers, thought it might be as well to have them on his side, whatever that side might turn out to be. Ten minutes later the door of a sab’s van slid open, and a gaunt face, under the shadow of a tweed cap, looked in offering wine and pie. Titmuss had also seen the growing number of antis as crosses on slips of paper.

  Politics were suspended as Blanche ‘Blanchie’ Evergreen, the Field Master, or Mistress, moved off with a white wave of dogs’ backs and wagging tails. The whipper-in and the huntsman shouted and the whole disparate regiment, half cavalry, half motorized transport in various degrees of disrepair, set off for battle, leaving Lord Titmuss on the driveway of his country seat, chewing a slice of his own pork pie. He heard the accelerators pressed, the grinding of gears, the blasted horns and shouts of the sabs and the regular beat of hooves as the horses broke into a canter. Then the sounds died away in the distance, and nothing was left but the wind in the trees and the distant hum of the motorway.

  There was the scent of a fox, which excited the hounds almost beyond endurance, as they came down towards Hookers Spinney; but they followed the scent on a long detour around the trees while the fox, whom they hadn’t noticed, escaped across a patch of scrub and darted, missing death by inches, across the motorway. For a long while the hunt was frustrated, but the hounds found a scent again after the long wet grass in Plashy Bottom, and the riders gathered speed up the bridle path to Eyles’s farm. The hounds were running fast across the high open common at Nunn’s Courtny, and the horses were at a full gallop. Sabs’ vans and the cars of the tweed-hatted supporters speeded up the narrow road which bisected the common, and faces, from old Nobby Noakes and weather-beaten Betty Wellover to the youngest pony-club girl, were blushed by the wind. And then Blanche, the Field Master, rose in her stirrups and yelled a warning. She had seen a couple of riders, a woman with a straight back smoking a cigarette and a man in jeans and a sweater, ambling across the common in front of the stampede.