The Sound of Trumpets

by John Mortimer

  Terry’s career advanced further when he went to a party given by the Elizabeth Fry Society on the terrace of the House of Commons. He made it his business to keep up with prison reformers as well as governors and probation officers, and also with those in his Party who believed in three convictions and that’s your life. He was listening to a grey-haired and puzzled woman whose son was doing time for a rape, when Hannah Mortlock came up to him, a huge green star winking like some Ruritanian Order on her trim black jacket, and said, ‘Well done you for Hartscombe. Take me to lunch some time. I want to know all about our Shadow Home Office team.’ When Terry said he’d been asked to think up some new ideas, she was enthusiastic. ‘The tabloids are telling the Great British Public they can’t put their noses out of the door without being mugged, raped and probably buggered. They’ll expect us to tell them the answers.’ They were sentiments he’d last heard expressed, less vividly, by Tim Willock during the Hartscombe by-election. And then Hannah said, ‘How’s old Eric doing, in your opinion?’

  It was the first time since he had taken his seat that anyone in the House had asked Terry for his opinion. He smiled and said, ‘Oh, Eric’s great fun. He keeps talking of selling policies like pounds of Brussels sprouts.’

  ‘I know. It’s rather worrying.’ Hannah looked serious. ‘No one buys Brussels sprouts by the pound any more. They come in packets, don’t they, in the Asda freezer? In fact greengrocers’ shops have definitely had their day. Keep in touch.’ After that, she smiled at him in corridors, occasionally spoke and once instructed him to take her to lunch in a restaurant near the House. She ordered oysters and steak tartare, discussed her husband (in merchant banking), opera and which members of the Conservative Cabinet it would be possible, without taking painkillers, to go to bed with. Her pager went before the pudding, and she left him to pay the bill.

  On the day after the general election Terry hung about near the telephone in his London flat. When it rang he leapt at it, answered breathlessly and was noticeably short with the friends, people at work or well-wishers who wanted to congratulate him at length and chat. When Kate was rung by two of her girlfriends he, unusually, lost control, shouted and told her to get off the line. It wasn’t until seven o’clock in the evening that it happened. He picked up the telephone, now resigned to the backbenches, and heard a girl’s sprightly voice say, ‘Is that you, Terry? Number Ten here. I’ve got the Prime Minister for you.’

  When the call was over he yelled triumphantly for Kate. He was Minister with Responsibility for Prisons, and the Home Secretary, he was not particularly surprised to hear, was not Eric the green-grocer’s son but Hannah Mortlock M.P., the Prime Minister’s close political adviser.

  Looking back on it, Agnes thought of her period of exile as a ridiculous overreaction.

  Had it been worth it or, more accurately, had Terry been worth it? She had spent a large part of her savings and often missed Hartscombe, the sun rising out of the mist, the grey bridge and the damp smell of the swollen river. On the other hand she had turned a golden brown, being as reckless about the rays of the sun, feared by so many who covered themselves with various creams or even wore special clothing designed to block out its death-dealing rays, as she was about inhaling nicotine. Moreover, she had, she thought, on the other side of the world, achieved some sense of proportion. Out of his sight she could at last see Terry for what he was, someone to be understood if not forgiven. She could now, she felt in her more optimistic moments, grow up, even if that meant sooner rather than later growing old.

  Henry Simcox, the angry young novelist who had been her husband before he turned into a crusty old blimp and left her, had a publisher, a gentle and sensitive soul who could no longer stand the brutal behaviour of such authors as Henry and who had retired to live in a house among the cork trees to the north of Toulon. Agnes, whom he had always fancied and frequently invited to stay, fled at first to this house, lay in the sun, cooked in a kitchen which smelt of olive oil and burning logs and lost count of time. Then, because she missed him and because she felt she had to atone for the unforgivable attack her lover had made on him, she went to stay with Paul Fogarty. In fact, Terry’s words, which had shattered their affair, had hardly damaged Paul. The prison service had either wilfully ignored or else forgotten them and the job in Australia was still open. There was a house outside the boys’ prison near Avalon, handy for the North Sydney beaches where the sun shone most of the year. Agnes joined him, officially as his housekeeper, some suspected as his mistress, but in truth as his friend, nursing him after a wound which had hardly proved fatal. She spent her days in delicatessens and becoming expert on such wines as Devil’s Lair Chardonnay and Plantagenet Shiraz. And then she told Paul she was going home. He drove her to the airport, and they kissed, two friends who might never, for all their promises to each other, meet again. So she came back to Hartscombe, cleaned her house, helped Jilly with the bookshop and didn’t go looking for Terry when he, after so long, had given up looking for her.

  She knew she’d meet him some time, and the idea no longer made her nervous. And yet she felt a faint tremor of excitement, a feeling that life might become more interesting, when she accepted the invitation to Linda Millichip’s cocktail party.

  At the party Betty Wellover from the Hartscombe stables looked round the crowded room and said to her hostess, ‘How Peter would have adored a party like this! In your beautiful home.’

  ‘You’re quite wrong,’ Linda Millichip told her. ‘This wasn’t the sort of thing that turned Peter on at all.’

  ‘Oh, really? What sort of party did Peter like then?’

  ‘I think,’ Linda Millichip was smiling but not in a kind way, ‘he liked to enjoy himself on his own.’

  ‘Oh. A very private sort of person, was he?’

  ‘On that subject,’ Mrs Millichip said firmly, ‘my lips are permanently sealed.’

  ‘All the same’ – Betty Wellover thought it wise to ask no further questions – ‘we do miss him terribly.’

  ‘There, my dear,’ Linda told her, ‘you speak entirely for yourself.’

  June Wilbraham from the Sentinel, who had been invited along to take photographs, heard this conversation and decided, as a good journalist, that she should set about finding out exactly what it meant.

  Having been called a complete shit, Terry stood smiling, looking round the room, checking up. Kate was out of earshot, talking to a small group of youngish wives, women he had canvassed and whose votes he had won in what was left of the rural areas. She was at ease, speaking with a new authority, saying something that made them laugh, and she laughed with them. At the French windows which opened on to the terrace and the swimming pool, a new guest had arrived. Lord Titmuss was talking to a young man with dark, carefully arranged hair, wearing an open-necked shirt and a sweater and laughing, as Kate’s audience laughed, at some solemn sarcasm from his Lordship.

  Terry turned back to Agnes and said, as though they were alone and her partner Jilly, standing close to her, didn’t exist, ‘We must meet again soon.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know why.’

  ‘I want to find out what happened to you.’

  ‘Let’s say, I had a long convalescence. I’m better now.’

  ‘You were ill?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got over it completely.’

  ‘Then I’ll ring you.’

  ‘We’re terribly busy in the bookshop these days. Aren’t we, Jilly?’

  ‘Oh, rushed off our feet.’

  Terry had the uncomfortable feeling that Jilly Bloxham was also laughing at him. As he left with Kate he had to pass Lord Titmuss, who said, ‘So, they’ve given you a job.’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s a great honour, to be in the government.’

  ‘Not so much of an honour, I think you’ll find, as the way they have of making sure you keep your mouth shut. Do you know young Garth Inwood?’

  ‘We haven’t met.’ The young man held out a hand. ‘You lot must be pretty cock-
a-hoop, for the moment.’

  ‘The public showed quite clearly what it wanted.’ Terry took the hand but returned it as soon as possible to its owner.

  ‘Conservative lot at heart, aren’t they, though, the Great British Public?’

  Terry was disturbed to see that Titmuss was looking at this youth who, he thought, could be dismissed as some over-eager, upper-class twit, with something like pride.

  ‘Young Inwood’s keen to set out on the bumpy road to political fame,’ Titmuss said. ‘Just as you were not so long ago. You two have got a lot in common.’

  So, it seemed, Titmuss had found a new pupil, another plaything. Terry was thankful he was now out of that chilling shadow and that he was his own man entirely. He took Kate’s arm, and they left together.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘Well, now you’ve got power, what’re you going to do with it?’

  It had taken Terry and Agnes some time to get into a position where such a question might even be asked. He had left her at Mrs Millichip’s party and, although she had told him how little she thought of him, she was perversely displeased that he hadn’t stayed with her longer. However, when the phone rang in the bookshop the next day she had known that it must be him and grabbed it before Jilly could get to it. He would be down at his surgery the following Thursday, he told her, and how about a pint of Simcox and sandwiches in the downstairs bar at the Water-Boatman? It would be quite like old times.

  ‘It wouldn’t be at all like old times,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  She turned her back, lowered her voice and hoped that Jilly wasn’t listening. ‘I believed in you then,’ she said. ‘I suppose I loved you, in some ridiculous sort of way.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I told you exactly what I think of you now.’

  ‘So you won’t come for a drink in the Water-Boatman?’

  ‘Why not? I don’t get so many free drinks nowadays.’

  After that she was surprised he turned up or that she bothered to go. But he did; they both did.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ she said in her most uninterested voice when they met again after so long. She sat on a bar stool and, keeping quiet, lit a cigarette.

  ‘I wish I could explain,’ he said after a silence. ‘Why I did it.’

  ‘I wish you could. But you can’t.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea.’

  ‘But you adopted it.’

  ‘It was someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Someone who was advising me.’

  ‘They thought it was a certain vote-winner, to say Paul was going to lust after juvenile offenders?’

  ‘Not that exactly.’

  ‘Then what exactly?’

  ‘They wanted to distance me.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘From Paul, I suppose. From his friends.’

  ‘You mean from me?’

  ‘Perhaps they had that in mind.’

  ‘Then they certainly succeeded. I distanced myself. To the other end of the world.’

  She told him what she had done. He took it as a compliment. Such a precipitate flight over such a vast distance was surely, wasn’t it, a sign of love? He said, ‘But now you’re back.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘We’re both back. Drinking in this bar by the river. We can go on where we left off.’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I told you. Because now I know you’re a shit.’

  He looked at her, pained and deeply disappointed. He thought she must have changed her mind when she agreed to meet him and now, it seemed, she hadn’t changed her mind at all. ‘Because I said what I said?’ he asked, as though suggesting her judgement was unfair.

  ‘Because you said what no decent, honourable person would ever have dreamed of saying.’

  That silenced him, and she smiled, apparently sorry for him, and said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Paul’s got a good job, and it’s better I know exactly what you’re like. Some people are quite fond of shits. Some people even fall in love with shits.’

  He looked at her, by no means cheered up. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘No particular reason. It’s just a general truth, that’s all. A well-known fact about human nature. Was it your wife?’

  ‘Was what my wife?’

  ‘Your wife who wanted to separate you from Paul’s friends?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He came back to life and was positive again. ‘Kate knows nothing at all about us.’

  ‘Now, there’s not much to know.’

  ‘She never knew. And she mustn’t.’

  ‘Of course not.’ She smiled again, as though humouring him. ‘It’s something that happened at another time. In another world. A sort of dream. Nothing to do with us at all.’

  ‘I could never explain it to Kate.’

  ‘Of course you couldn’t,’ she agreed.

  ‘I only wish I could explain it to you.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘Why I said that. About Paul. The day before the election.’

  ‘You said it because you wanted power,’ she told him.

  ‘Yes. That’s it.’ He was eager to agree with her. ‘You understand!’

  It was then she said, ‘Well, now you’ve got power, what’re you going to do with it?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What about Socialism?’ She was, he was sure, only teasing. ‘I’m not asking much. Don’t let’s go mad. Just a taste. A very small one, with ice and lemon and absolutely drowned in Perrier water. I mean, I don’t want to be greedy, but couldn’t you do something quite small?’ She looked inside her sandwich. ‘Like nationalizing mustard.’

  He looked at the yellowing photographs of old rowers, at the barman crouched, as though in prayer, over the racing pages. Through the glass door he could see sunlight flash across the river and a single sculler, his body seeming far too heavy for the slip of a boat, the long oars just touching the surface of the water, so that the whole contraption looked like one of those skimming insects which have only a day to live. Perched on a bar stool, he saw a new arrival, the elderly cherub Andrew Poyser, reading the Literary Review. Terry’s voice sank to a low murmur, and he said, as though it were some secret and sexual suggestion, ‘Boot camps.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Junior glasshouses. Short sharp shocks. Yelling sergeant-majors. Square-bashing. Banging up. Solitary. No privileges. For the Young Offenders at Skurfield.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen?’

  ‘It might. The Tories had the idea. Our Home Secretary seems to find it rather sexy. But as Minister with Responsibility for Prisons, I’ve got the power …’

  ‘To stop it?’

  ‘Paul Fogarty would have hated boot camps, wouldn’t he? The idea of military police, put in charge.’

  ‘Of course he hates it.’

  ‘So I can stop it, for his sake.’

  ‘And for the boys also, perhaps.’

  ‘So that’s something I can do, with what power I have.’

  ‘Let’s get this clear.’ She looked at him. ‘You attack Paul in public. Put his whole career in danger. He leaves the country, and now you want to stop the Skurfield boot camp. Just to please him.’

  He said, very quietly, not to be overheard, ‘And to prove something to you as well.’

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘What exactly do you want to prove to me?’

  ‘That it was worth it. Getting me elected.’

  ‘Worth all that trouble?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It seemed that she had difficulty suppressing laughter. Then she looked at her watch, said she had to get back to the bookshop and finished her drink.

  ‘Shall we meet again?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s been very amusing,’ she said. ‘And I don’t really see why not.’

  He let her go and paid the barman. As he followed her the pink face and watery blue eyes looked up from the Literary
Review and the writer said, ‘Snug little place this, isn’t it? Just right for an intimate conversation.’

  ‘I suppose you want to poke your nose into my sexual proclivities?’

  ‘Not at all, Lord Titmuss. I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you would. I know your sort. Open the newspaper any day of the week now and what do you find? No news. Not a scrap of news. Newspapers don’t deal in news any more. What you buy is assorted opinions, usually with a little snap of one of you girls at the top, and mostly dealing with the matter of sexual proclivities.’

  ‘Quite honestly, Lord Titmuss, we want a straight interview with you about your distinguished political career.’

  ‘Just as well. For I have to tell you, young lady, my sexual proclivities are completely dormant. Permanently hibernated. Let us say, lost interest entirely, which is a fact that will save both of us a good deal of anxiety.’

  June Wilbraham wouldn’t have dared admit it to the legendary politician, but her ambition was to end up with her photograph at the head of just such a column as he had described in a classy Sunday newspaper. In her sad moments, when she saw the years stretch out in front of her and feared she would end her days on the Hartscombe Sentinel, she told herself that her nose was too long, her chin too sharp and her eyes too close together for such a photograph to be printed, but when she was in an optimistic mood and thought of what could be done with a wide grin, a concealing fringe and soft focus, she knew she would get her column in the end. She owed it to herself for all her hard work in the provinces, and she owed it to her father ‘Pud’ Wilbraham (so called because of his insatiable appetite for baked jam-roll and Black Forest gâteau) who had, for many years, been a crime reporter on the Daily Planet until he was promoted to the Tittle-Tattle column, where he became known and loved for his outrageous, frequently libellous and often funny stories about the great and the good. He had lately been fired and replaced by an Old Etonian who specialized in revealing the bonking habits of television personalities. June’s father, now unemployed, wandered sadly round the bars of Fleet Street and Ludgate Circus, trying to pretend that the newspapers hadn’t moved to the Isle of Dogs. He would boast to similarly abandoned hacks of his June’s magnificent start on the Hartscombe Sentinel and her imminent ascent to a national daily. It was her dad’s suggestion that June should write perceptive profiles of local celebrities for the Sentinel, and her editor, a sleepy little man whose Rambler column dealt largely with gardening hints and bird-watching, liked to have the rest of his paper written for him.