by MARY HOCKING
She said, ‘My husband lost the election by over eight thousand votes.’ She put one hand between her eyes and held the palm pressed there, as though trying to keep some particularly unwelcome thoughts at bay.
Lomax said, ‘Eight thousand, three hundred and two.’
‘I’ve buggered up his life.’ The scarf, which she had reduced to the size of a handkerchief, slid off her lap; she made a flapping motion at it, and then decided to let it have its freedom.
‘Isn’t that rather an exaggeration?’ Lomax didn’t want too much drama at this, or any, hour of the night.
She jerked her handbag open and he watched querulously while she scrabbled for cigarettes; she was the kind of woman who makes a total assault on the contents of a bag, instead of picking out the items which she requires. She had been biting her nails. Lomax’s mouth screwed up fastidiously. He moved his thin body uneasily in his chair. He could, in spite of his frail appearance, be very tough with people who tried to intimidate him, but he was vulnerable to the assaults of the weak. She got the cigarette going, held her head back and breathed smoke through her nose; Lomax regarded the taut muscles in her thin neck with apprehension. Sympathy could be fatal, she’d be here all night. He looked at her sternly.
It turned out it wasn’t sympathy she was after. Through the haze of cigarette smoke, her eyes studied his face with surprising shrewdness. Something about that glance made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. It was a sensation he had had before, and it usually meant news.
‘I’ve got to tell someone,’ she said. ‘I can’t go on with all this on my mind.’ In spite of this statement, she showed no inclination to unburden herself; it was obvious her mind had clouded after that one flash of shrewd calculation.
Lomax said cautiously, ‘Mrs. Ormerod, your husband’s troubles have been widely reported. They aren’t news any more.’
She gave him a long stare; he thought she had taken offence again. Then she said, ‘They say Mario Vicente bought my husband because he wanted favours from him. Geoffrey was on the council when they first met; he was chairman of the Planning Committee before he decided to stand for parliament.’
Lomax tapped his front teeth with his forefinger.
She said, ‘Do you know how that information about my husband got into the hands of the blessed virgin Moray?’
‘Yes.’ As she waited for him to go on, he said rather primly, ‘Someone sent details of certain financial transactions between your husband and Mario Vicente to Neil Moray’s office.’
‘A bloody charade!’
‘The documents were real enough, Mrs. Ormerod. I saw them. Mario made lavish gifts to your husband; he also invested money in your husband’s business and set him up in offices in Marshall Street.
‘Oh, I don’t doubt your word. You’re incorruptible.’ She delivered herself of this judgement with some contempt; it was plain that no one pleased her much tonight. Then her mind got snagged up on the harsh stuff of his incorruptibility. ‘All that fuss over the appointment of Councillor Mark’s wife as head of that school. . . . My husband tried to get Lord Cannock to sack you for what you wrote about that. Do you know what Lord Cannock told him? He’d raise your salary! Did he? You’d better be after him if he didn’t.’
It was nearly half-past three. Lomax said with some asperity ‘What about those documents, Mrs. Ormerod?’
‘They were stolen.’
‘Well, obviously someone took them,’ he said impatiently. ‘A member of your husband’s staff who had a grudge against him, perhaps.’
She looked at him, that long look again, as though she had travelled a great distance from the little world he inhabited and could scarcely remember how it worked. ‘They were stolen from our house,’ she said in an off-hand way. ‘He didn’t keep them at the office.’
‘You mean someone broke in? If so, the police will . . .’
‘Geoffrey didn’t report it to the police. They would have asked questions about what was missing.’ She leant forward and crushed the cigarette stub in the ashtray, holding it down, and then twisting it as though it was something human she was extinguishing. Dear me, Lomax thought, how fanciful one becomes at half-past three in the morning! ‘It was Rodney Cope,’ she said.
‘Rodney Cope.’ He did not get her meaning at once.
Now that she had said it, she seemed momentarily to lose interest. She flicked the packet open and took another cigarette; before she lit it, she looked round the room as though surprised to find herself in it. Lomax, who had recovered himself, thought that the sooner he got her out of here, the better; she was obviously more unbalanced than he had realised.
‘Cope certainly made brilliant use of that material,’ he said, trying to sound persuasive and firm at the same time. ‘But that is hardly sufficient reason. . . .’
‘I had an affair with him.’ She stared at Lomax with a listless resentment in her eyes which did more to convince him of the truth of this statement than any circumstantial evidence could have done. ‘I knew he was using me . . . at least, I suppose I must have known. . .’ There was no doubt, looking at her harrowed face, that this had been dragging on for a long time; she was at the nerves’ edge.
‘Mrs. Ormerod,’ he spoke gently because he was genuinely sorry for her. ‘You are overwrought. Don’t you think you have allowed yourself to imagine things?’
She shook her head, the movement was barely perceptible, as though he had held out a hope that was so futile it was scarcely worth acknowledging.
‘Your affair with him is finished, I take it?’
‘I haven’t seen him since March. I think I could take it as finished, don’t you?’
‘Does the fact that you haven’t seen him lately really mean he was using you? Might he not have lost interest? It’s the usual reason, although I know that doesn’t make it any less painful.’
‘Yes.’ After a moment during which she inspected the idea as though it was standing somewhere in a corner of the room, she said, ‘But then, it’s difficult to see what attracted him in the first place, isn’t it? Tell me, Mr. Lomax, do you think I’m the sort of woman whom Rodney Cope would find irresistible?’
‘I’m not Rodney Cope, Mrs. Ormerod.’
She got up and wound the scarf round her neck. ‘You don’t believe my story.’ She sounded unsurprised and not particularly disappointed. ‘Oh well, I don’t know what I expected, really.’ It seemed to him she was almost relieved. ‘It would be tough to take on Cope, wouldn’t it? Not like quibbling over the appointment of a head teacher. I can see that.’
Lomax let her go. He began to sort through the papers he had mis-arranged on his desk and came across Todd’s profile on Rodney Cope. He read it through again. Todd had not liked Cope. Cope had been to Eton and had had a short but colourful career in the Scots Guards: a deadly combination, guaranteed to light the fuse of Todd’s hatred. Lomax did not run a newspaper for the purpose of allowing his staff to give vent to either their prejudices or their obsessions. Nevertheless, most of the information given about Cope was factual, and his manner and style of speaking had been accurately, if a trifle bitchily, recorded. Of course, it was written in the slick, laconic style young Todd so admired, and it was less original than many of the more quietly written appraisals which had appeared from time to time in the Gazette; but it made an impact – one wanted to kick either Cope or the writer. The Gazette had standards. Its material was, in a modest way, well-written and well-presented and this was appreciated by the more erudite of its readers; but what kept up its sales was the fact that in a town not noted for candour in public affairs, it had never refused to print unpalatable facts or been afraid to criticise the more powerful elements in Scotney society, be they local councillors, the tycoons who invested in property, the gangsters who ran protection rackets, or the accommodating policemen. Reluctantly, Lomax decided that this was no time for his own personal obsession with style to take precedence. He was not superstitious, but the fact of Cope being brought to his
attention twice in one night was not something that should be overlooked.
Lomax picked up his pen and ran through the profile. And what, Todd wondered in conclusion, would Cope make of success? He was the kind who needed a challenge. Would he find it here in Scotney, helping to consolidate Moray’s victory, a victory which owed not a little to the discrediting of Ormerod? Political opponents could not always be expected to be so helpful. From now on, people were going to look to Moray for results. A long, hot summer awaited Cope. ‘Oh, no, it does not!’ Lomax ejaculated. ‘Not in this newspaper!’
‘The words “long hot summer” should be banned for the next hundred years, at least,’ he told Todd the next day. ‘The rest of it is all right.’
He handed the copy to Todd who stared at it in dismay. It wasn’t the long, hot summer that was bothering him, it was the whole damn thing. He had not for one moment imagined that Lomax would use it.
‘Now, there are one or two things I should like to make clear,’ he muttered, trying to summon to mind all the objections which ought to have occurred to Lomax but had so singularly escaped him. ‘This presents Cope as something more than a whizz kid on the local political scene; there’s a reference here to . . . where is it? Ah, yes. This bit about “a versatile man in a cosmopolitan town . . .” and it goes on to mention other versatile characters such as Mario Vicente. Now, you could read it that I’m saying Cope isn’t so far removed from Mario. . . .’
‘That, in fact, was how I did read it,’ Lomax admitted mildly.
‘But the whole emphasis of Moray’s campaign was that he was as far removed from Mario as is heaven from hell!’
‘Oh well, the purer the politician, the more devious must his campaign manager be.’
This piece of quiet cynicism so shocked Todd, who in spite of his constant denunciations was rather easily shocked, that he went out of the room.
As he walked back to his own desk his mind was going over some of the other things he had said about Cope – ‘that air of rather dangerously aimless enterprise which Eton gives to those of its pupils not destined for high office’. What had he meant by that? It was something he had felt genuinely at the time of writing; he had seen Cope’s face before him, the brilliance of the eyes which never seemed to be focused on anything in particular, like the eyes of a very intelligent child that is not fully occupied and may, therefore, look for trouble just for the hell of it. But that was incredibly fanciful! One could not possibly put it forward to substantiate that comment about Eton. Todd sat down at his desk, gnawing his lip. He had come to the office that morning prepared to work up a grievance about the rejection of the profile, he had even thought of handing in his notice; but now he was worried. He had always been afraid to hit hard in case someone hit him harder. Cope laughed a lot. But how good was his sense of humour?
Todd got up and went back to Lomax’s room.
‘I don’t want this to run us into any trouble,’ he said.
‘Why should it? It’s not actionable.’
‘Well, the Gazette has attacked corruption in this town often enough, and now we get a member of parliament who promises to do something about it and we turn sour on him before he’s had a chance to get going.’ Todd was good at working up resentment, already he felt the familiar swell and surge of bitterness within him.
‘But you always maintain that the people concerned are flattered by these profiles. And, in any case, it’s not about Moray. I’ll see him and get him to give details of some of the reforms he means to carry out. He’s done enough attacking, goodness only knows, he should be glad to offer some of his more constructive thoughts. Don’t you think?’
Todd went out. There were times when he thought Lomax was not fit to run a newspaper.
Chapter Three
Hannah walked along the seafront. It was Sunday and a grey one, mist was coming in from the sea, overcoats and long-sleeved pullovers were the rig of the day. Few people had been caught out. The English know their weather; even their faces had been adapted to it today.
There were a few people down on the beach, walking dogs, or watching children throw pebbles at the incoming waves. Up on the promenade, the windows of the shelters were blurred with sea-mist.
Hannah looked from side to side as she walked. She never tired of Scotney. Each building facing the sea had been conceived and decorated according to its owner’s predilection, with no care for its neighbour. A planner’s nightmare. It should be allowed to happen occasionally, otherwise one would be left with the dreary monotony of nearby Hinton, mile upon mile of annihilating good taste. The commercial buildings along the front were interspersed with terraces of Victorian houses, and squares, some small and homely, others vastly pretentious. The squares that had tried and failed were inexplicably sandwiched between those that were coolly triumphant. ‘It just happens,’ people said. But William Lomax, who also strolled along the front every Sunday and occasionally chatted with Hannah, had a more interesting explanation. He said that Mario Vicente bought property here and there, and that a whole square could suddenly become fashionable because Mario owned one house or had a restaurant on the corner. Where Mario bought, money followed.
Hannah came to the pier. Children were gazing through the palings which fenced it off from the promenade, wistful as though locked out of paradise; those on the pier, already disillusioned, whined and snivelled in the drizzle. The flags above the pier hung limp. The clock said a quarter past twelve.
To the east of the pier there were no more graceful squares and terraces. The boarding houses were small and sullen, and the amusement arcades looked dingy as though the owners could not afford to buy new equipment or repair the old. Then, as one came to the harbour, the atmosphere changed abruptly. Immediately opposite the harbour the ground rose steeply and narrow streets were lofted crazily one above the other. This was the oldest part of the town, and some of the buildings were sixteenth-century; they clung together in crooked tiers and one or two seemed to lurch precariously over the tier below. This was the area known as ‘Mario’s half mile’. The properties were well-maintained, whitewashed, with doors and window frames picked out in bright colours. There were narrow restaurants which contrived to cater for more customers than one would have thought physically possible; they had names like The Cod and Lobster, Smugglers’ Rest, The Crossed Keys. Most of the restaurants were good; they were also relatively inexpensive. Hannah came to this area every Sunday for lunch.
Guiseppe’s was opposite the jetty. There were a few tables outside, sheltered by two large sunshades advertising Cinzano. The drizzle was persistent now, so Hannah went into the dining-room. This was a small room which had not been tricked out with any fancy decor; the walls were whitewashed and the wooden tables were covered with check cloths. The waiter, who knew Hannah, came over to her at once and asked, ‘And what is it to be today?’ He had once presumed to bring her a Dubonnet because she had asked for it three weeks running, but had learnt his lesson. Today she opted for a dry sherry.
It was half-past twelve and the restaurant was empty apart from a party of six sitting at the table near the serving hatch. From the way they sat at the table, chairs anyhow, tilted back, or pulled in close if the sitter was hunched over the table, it was apparent that they were frequent visitors. The three women and the girl were at one end of the table, dressed in black; the women smiled and talked, not in the bright social way in which English women behave in a restaurant, but in an intimate, relaxed way as though in their own home. The girl looked as though she would rather be doing something else, but she was dispirited rather than sullen; rebellion was obviously out of the question. The two men did not talk much; they leant back against the wall, smoking cigars, and staring with sad, dark eyes towards the harbour. Every now and again, one of them would make a comment without removing the cigar from his mouth or turning to his companion; the other would nod wisely or sigh expansively. The women were not drinking, but the men each had a dark green aperitif. The waiter, now leaning with
arms folded against the serving hatch, watched them. One sensed that he was ready to accommodate them in any way. At the moment, they did not want him. They came here each week and sat and talked and sipped their drinks. When they ate, Hannah had no idea; sometimes the men went away and when she left she would see them drinking in another bar, at other times they were joined by other men and then there was a lot of hand-clasping and exchange of greetings with the women. It was all very foreign, but the fascinating thing about it was that they made you feel you were in their country. At this moment, Hannah caught the eye of the bulkier of the two men and he gave her a little bow; she came often enough for Mario Vicente to recognise her as a regular customer.
Hannah turned her attention to the menu, annoyed with herself for having betrayed an interest in the party. But perhaps today she could be forgiven her curiosity. Mario had, after all, suffered a serious setback recently. The development of the West Front was something in which he was reputed to be interested, so interested that he had lent a considerable sum of money to Geoffrey Ormerod, who was the director of an expanding property development company. Whatever favours Mario might have expected in return would not now be forthcoming since Ormerod was no longer a local councillor and had lost to Moray in the parliamentary election. Hannah knew that Moray was interested in a scheme for the West Front which had the backing of no less a person than Arthur Heffernan. Mario Vicente, Rodney Cope had assured Hannah, was small-time in comparison with Heffernan, who was making a national reputation for himself on the way to an international one. In fact, it was really something of a charitable enterprise for Heffernan to bother with Scotney at all.
