by MARY HOCKING
Her car was being serviced, so she set out on foot. She had forgotten to take her handbag with her. This was becoming a habit; she had run up bills all over the town. In her present mood, however, it suited her to walk in the rain and she set off across The Green towards the even more expensive area on the fringe of Gloucester Park where Mr. Slater lived. She arrived at his house at seven as he was relaxing with a drink before dinner.
‘It’s Pauline Ormerod, Mr. Slater,’ she reminded him, and smiled graciously, just as though she was giving her name at a ball.
A gust of wind blew rain into Mr. Slater’s face which was round and pink as a sugar plum. He had pale protruding eyes and an invariable smile. Even now, when he was far from pleased, the lips still smiled.
‘You had better come in,’ he said.
‘I want to talk to you about Geoffrey.’ She showed willingness to start a discussion there in the hall, which was as well from her point of view as he had no intention of allowing her a further foothold. The wind dislodged petals from the tulips in the window recess. Mr. Slater closed the front door.
‘I cannot possibly talk to you about your husband, Mrs. Ormerod.’ It was hard to tell whether the impropriety of her visit, or her slovenly attire, displeased him the most. Her boots made muddy welts on the highly polished parquet floor.
‘But I can’t contact him. He doesn’t answer the telephone and he doesn’t reply to my letters. So I must talk to you.’
‘If your husband does not wish to communicate with you, that is nothing to do with me, Mrs. Ormerod.’
At this point, Mrs. Slater closed the drawing-room door and another tulip petal fell.
‘But you are his solicitor. You must know what has happened to him.’
‘Nothing has happened to him.’ Mr. Slater smiled reprovingly. ‘He is staying in London for the time being, that is all.’
‘He hasn’t been arrested?’
‘There is no reason why he should be arrested, Mrs. Ormerod. He has committed no crime.’
‘But he lost the election.’
‘He lost the election because he did not get as many votes as Neil Moray,’ Mr. Slater said tartly. ‘He is unlikely to be arrested for that.’
‘But people didn’t vote for him because of the disclosures about his dealings with Mario Vicente. I’m not a fool, Mr. Slater.’
‘If that is your reading of the situation. . . .’ Mr. Slater shrugged his shoulders.
‘What is your reading of it, then?’
‘I have no idea why people vote for one candidate as opposed to another,’ Mr. Slater smiled disdainfully. ‘Nor am I concerned with it. Now, Mrs. Ormerod, if you don’t mind. . . .’
‘But I haven’t nearly finished. It’s no use trying to edge me out like that. I have information which is important. As my husband’s legal representative. . . .’
‘Really, this is quite intolerable!’ Mr. Slater’s face became a more hectic pink. ‘I must ask you to leave.’
‘But I am trying to tell you something that concerns my husband. You are paid to represent him, after all!’ She spoke as though he were a tradesman.
Mr. Slater left the tulips to their fate and opened the front door again.
‘It’s about the burglary,’ she said.
‘Burglary!’ He was very angry. His smile agitated his features terribly. ‘Was there really a burglary, Mrs. Ormerod?’
She stared at him. ‘Of course there was.’ The wind which surged into the hall seemed to have taken all her vehemence away. ‘Those documents. . . .’
‘The envelope in which those documents were posted was typed on the typewriter in your husband’s study, Mrs. Ormerod, the one which you used to type his correspondence.’
She rested her hand on the little table where the telephone stood and drops of water from her sweater smeared the delicate cherry wood. ‘You’re not suggesting . . . you can’t possibly mean. . . .’
‘I am making no suggestions, Mrs. Ormerod.’ He knew that he had already said too much and was anxious to get rid of her.
‘Does Geoffrey believe that I . . . ?’
‘Mrs. Ormerod, I have merely given you one or two facts. . . .’
‘But I must speak to Geoffrey, I must!’
Mr. Slater panicked as her voice shrilled into the garden and beyond. ‘You must leave. Madam! Otherwise I shall call the police.’
She said, ‘Oh God, what a bloody mess!’
Mr. Slater put out one hand to urge her forward and then bethought himself of what might happen if she resisted. The smell of damp earth drifted in and mingled with the odour of her wet pullover. For a moment which seemed to him interminable, they stood in silence in the doorway, then she walked past him, her head bowed in thought as though she had already forgotten he was there. He closed the door after her and then hurried to peer in undignified fashion through the dining-room curtains to make sure that she left his premises. He was relieved to see her open the garden gate; she left it swinging on its hinges and he did not venture out to close it until he was sure she would be some distance away. The rain was coming down harder than ever.
Pauline walked on the fringe of darkness beyond which lay Gloucester Park. She understood Geoffrey’s behaviour now. When he became so bitter and spiteful, she thought he had guessed she was having an affair, while all the time he was thinking that it was she who had sent those documents to Neil Moray.
‘You have never wanted me to go into politics, have you?’ How often he had said that. ‘You think it would make too many demands on you if I were to go into politics. You resented my business activities, but you couldn’t do anything about that. . . .’
A bus swished by, splashing her with muddy water.
‘Oh God!’ she thought. ‘What a bloody awful mess!’
It was still raining heavily when Hannah left her evening class at half-past nine. There were a few people sheltering in shop doorways near the bus stop, a girl and a boy running, laughing, coats drawn over their heads. Hannah looked down the road; it was a wide road in one of the busiest parts of the town, but there was little traffic about and no sign of a bus. She decided not to wait, it would only put her in a worse temper. She attended an astronomy class which for the first two years she had greatly enjoyed; she had bought a star map and, together with other members of the class, had gone onto the Downs at night, and had visited nearby observatories; she had saluted the seasons with such comments as ‘Winter is upon us, Orion is coming up. . . .’ Now, however, they were discussing galaxies that were so many million light years away that man would never see them from this planet, even with the aid of the largest telescope. Hannah liked her stars visible to man.
Tonight, toiling up the hill towards the church of St. Stephen the Martyr, she felt very depressed. Everything came to an end. Even the stars, it seemed. It was no use young Mr. Ross lecturing about a limitless universe, as far as she was concerned she had come to the end of the stars on the night of 31st May, 1973.
She turned into Saddlers Row. She could hear water running in the gutters; the street lights were furred as though it was a November evening. In the car park opposite her flat, there were five cars, a lorry, and a caravan which had been abandoned for some six weeks. A dark, oily pool of water had collected at the entrance. She opened the door to one side of the garage and went up the narrow shaft that led to the flat. There was a smell of damp plaster and the handrail felt slippery. The light bulb flickered; she hoped it wasn’t going out, it was difficult to reach the fitting. She felt she could not bear the extinguishing of another light.
It was a relief to get into the flat. Most of it was on view from where she stood just inside the front door; bedroom to her left, kitchen, which also contained the bath (an idiosyncrasy of design much deplored by her sister-in-law), the sitting-room, the long stroke of the L, to her right. There were no doors, but curtains could be drawn if she had visitors who fussed about such things. The lavatory was at the bottom of the stairs, which was a nuisance, indeed a hazard
, when guests had had rather too much to drink; someone had once broken an ankle.
Hannah looked thankfully around her as she took off her wet cape and shoes. The stars might be lost to her, but she still had number 12a Saddlers Row. She went into the sitting-room and stretched out on the Victorian couch which she had bought in a country-house sale and had re-upholstered herself. The room was perhaps rather sparsely furnished for some tastes, Hannah hated to live in a clutter; but a lot of work and love had gone into it and each piece of furniture was a reward for determined forays into antique markets and auction rooms.
The open-plan living had its disadvantages, however; from where she was lying, the far corner of the bedroom was visible, showing a portion of unmade bed. Hannah did not live sluttishly, and it was rare for her to go out without making her bed. The bed had remained unmade because she had spent more time than usual reading The Scotney Gazette. Her reading had given her little pleasure.
The last three editions of the Gazette were on the top of the bookcase. She picked them up and began to read through the passages which had most offended her, in much the same way as one probes a bad tooth to make sure it can still be made to ache. She turned first to the profile on Rodney Cope. Cope had dismissed it with a shrug of the shoulders – ‘I told you Lomax encouraged his bright boys. This is Basil Todd flexing what he uses for muscle.’ Perhaps there was some sense in this. The interview with Neil was on another page. His words had been faithfully and unambiguously recorded, but it was all a little dull, rather tired-sounding. Neil had been tired at the time, so perhaps one shouldn’t complain about that. But things had not improved in subsequent weeks. The Gazette had become decidedly tetchy, looking back over the last few months and asking questions. Had the campaign against Ormerod been so strong that people had overreacted? Did no one intend to examine Ormerod’s objections to Heffernan’s proposals objectively? Exactly what was proposed, and who would benefit? And so and so forth.
The previous Sunday, before she had begun to feel quite so uneasy, Hannah had met Lomax walking along the front. She had decided not to go to Guiseppe’s, but to see whether there was a reasonably priced restaurant on the West Front.
‘It’s quite pleasant along here,’ she acknowledged, albeit a little grudgingly because the harbour area was older and she preferred old buildings. The promenade here was wide, however, the property set well back, there were more trees, and farther away the great cliffs rose with dramatic suddenness.
‘Make the most of it,’ Lomax advised. ‘There are changes on the way.’
‘Perhaps we need change,’ Hannah said. ‘Neil thinks this new enterprise will offer big opportunities, bring new blood to the town, a lot of business. . . .
‘It will bring the really big-time gamblers, the highly organised rackets.’ He swung his rolled umbrella and held it, shouldering arms. ‘Would you like that?’ He looked at her intently, as though the whole scheme depended on her answer and if Hannah Mason were not pleased that would be an end to it.
‘Surely that may not happen?’ she protested, evading the necessity of making so momentous a decision.
‘It will, it will!’ he assured her with passion, and then stopped to poke some litter out of the way with the handle of the umbrella, following this up with a practice shot which left her undecided as to whether his game was golf or hockey. ‘What Mario Vicente has done hasn’t greatly altered the character of the town; in some ways, he has added a flavour to it, but . . .’
Hannah recalled that he was reputed to be friendly with Mario Vicente, some people said too friendly. Whatever the truth of the matter, it seemed likely that his judgement had been somewhat at fault in his association with Mario. It wasn’t what one expected of him. Hannah, while regretting this flaw in the much-respected editor of the Gazette, found the man more interesting for being fallible. She took him up on his remarks about Mario. ‘Neil says that Mario works undercover, that where he doesn’t own, he controls. He thinks it is bad that Mario’s influence isn’t apparent, that it means people can’t express a point of view about his dealings.’
‘I would have thought that over the last few weeks people had heard much of Mario’s dealings, and absolutely nothing of Heffernan’s.’ The editor of the Gazette dismissed Neil’s views crisply; Will Lomax addressed himself to Hannah with some urgency. ‘I think that under Heffernan’s scheme you might be very aware of change. Scotney would seem less like your home, it would belong to the “international set” – ghastly phrase.’ He looked at her keenly. ‘Don’t you think it’s ghastly?’ Before she could answer, he stopped abruptly, disconcerting a couple who were ambling close behind. ‘Look!’ He took Hannah’s arm and swung her round. They stood together, gazing back at the long line of the promenade, at the buildings, the pretentious and the restrained, the sober and the garish, which, in spite of their diversity, gave Scotney its identity. ‘Do you want that to become “The California of the South Coast”?’ His eyes told her that if she wanted it, she must have it, but he would be desperately disappointed in her.
Hannah made a joke of it and told him he had spoilt her Sunday morning stroll. But he had done rather more than that. He had disturbed her peace of mind. She found she was beginning to ask her own questions.
During the last few weeks, Neil had spent much of his time in London. He had made his maiden speech: on immigration. It was not a topic of much concern to his constituency which, apart from occasional cases of illegal entry into the country, was scarcely aware of the problem. ‘I wish he didn’t have these sudden rushes of idealism to the head,’ Cope had said. Hannah wished she could see it as idealism. It seemed to her that Neil was putting off the time when he must come to terms with his election promises. She did not think that he was a coward, but she began to question whether he had sufficient grasp of the realities of the world in which he was now moving. The problems were considerable and had defeated many a good man before him. But it was scarcely conceivable that Neil Moray was but one of many good men.
Hannah had come under Neil’s spell, and she was not alone in this. Politicians, in spite of their much-vaunted contempt for the media, tended more and more to court its favours, adapting their personalities to its demands, striving to create the right image. Unfortunately, what came across was as blandly unconvincing as the patter of the public relations officer. Neil Moray was different: thoughtful, tentative, apt to speak hesitantly, he gave the impression that he was bringing a fresh mind to bear on each problem put before him. He was a good listener, and his answers were never glib; yet he contrived to convince his audience that he would find the answer. But there was more to his appeal than this. When he reflected silently on a question, he seemed to be holding in the balance one’s own hope and despair. He was the kind of person who arouses that almost unbearable hope that here at last is someone who carries within him the secret power which turns this world’s dross into gold. As soon as he stepped onto a platform, he projected to the audience that mysterious sense of secret power; even if he was only looking down at his notes while the speaker introduced him, he held the attention of the audience and aroused an exciting sense of expectancy. The fact that he never seemed quite to fulfil this promise at any one engagement did not detract from the success of his performance, but seemed only to whet the appetite. One day, his listeners felt, sometime, somewhere, he would do something really spectacular and they were resolved to be present on that occasion. Towards the end of his campaign his meetings were packed. ‘He would have been a superb actor,’ Cope had once said. ‘Give him the part of the Officer and he’d steal the death scene from King Lear.’
But what would he have done with the part of Lear? Hannah was beginning to wonder.
She threw the copies of the Gazette on the floor. Was it possible that Neil was going to end up like all the other well-meaning but ineffectual people in parliament? That would be unutterably sad. So much bright hope, such high endeavour, all waning, the light and the dark running together to form a smudgy, all-
pervading drabness. She couldn’t bear to watch that happening slowly, week by week.
She went into the kitchen and made herself a cheese omelette. Before she went to bed, she opened all the windows, ventilation was a problem in the open-plan design. The noises of the town came to her ears, men shouting outside pubs at closing time, the screech of tyres on slippery roads, an occasional siren. The rain had stopped, and she saw a solitary star between the roof of the International Stores and the spire of St. Stephen the Martyr.
The time had come for a change, she thought. If she gave in her notice immediately, she could say that once the excitement of the election was over, the work no longer interested her. That would sound perfectly plausible; Neil had commented once or twice during the campaign on her lack of political conviction. She did not think he would mind if she left now; he would get a lot of his secretarial work done at Westminster. She felt better for having made the decision and slept well.
She got up early and set out for the office in the bright light of a fine June day. The possibility of change excited her. She might try commuting to London. She opened the post, sorted it and set to work clearing the backlog of letters which Cope had dictated to her yesterday. Cope telephoned to say he would not be in until the afternoon.
Neil came in at half-past nine.
‘I came down with the newspapers,’ he said. ‘Have you ever done that?’
‘Whatever for?’
‘I was late at the House. I missed the last train.’
‘Couldn’t you have come down this morning?’
He shook his head. ‘I had a lot to do. There’s so much I have to catch up on, read about. . . .’ He sat on the one upright chair. His voice was husky, but staccato, not his usual way of talking. ‘The station is very odd at that hour. No drunks, even. And the cloakrooms and all-night coffee places were all closed because of the bomb scares. Some trains had been cancelled. Most of the people waiting had missed trains, too. I remember once when I was working with discharged prisoners, I had to meet a man at a railway booking office. I was sure I would recognise him, but when I got there all the people who were waiting looked so utterly destitute of hope I couldn’t pick my fellow out. People always look like that when they’re waiting and they’ve nothing to do, have you noticed? As though they are staring through a rent in life.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’m so desperately tired. Would there be any coffee?’ Hannah was shocked by his appearance. The colour had ebbed from his face and the slight tan merely made his skin look unhealthy, blotched with shadow.
