The BRIGHT DAY

by MARY HOCKING

  Hannah filled the kettle. When she had made the coffee, he said, ‘Have you got the file on Heffernan? I forgot to take it with me.’

  ‘Good Heavens! You were meeting him, weren’t you?’

  ‘It didn’t matter.’ His voice was dry, without humour. ‘He did all the talking.’

  ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘I can’t say I took to him.’

  She put the file on the table, and he looked down at it, but did not touch it. Hannah sensed the desperate tiredness which comes from a reluctance to tackle something, and the thought crossed her mind that he would not be able to cope with public life. Afterwards, she told herself that this was fanciful, but no doubt it affected her reactions at the time.

  He said, handing her the empty cup, ‘That’s better! What would I do without you, Hannah?’

  Hannah said, ‘Fortunately, you don’t have to do without me; so the question doesn’t arise.’

  He did not do anything about the Heffernan file that morning.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Well now, I should like his help. You get me? I’d be very glad of his help. But if I don’t get it, well, that’s too bad. I’ll be able to get along, though I can see it may take just that little bit longer. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was upset about this.’ Arthur Heffernan broke off at this point to glare at Priscilla Fry. It was a hot day. The window (there was a lot of window) was open, something he rarely permitted, and already two flies had come in. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and hissed, ‘Get them out of here.’ While she made a brisk attack with a roll of paper, he returned to his telephone conversation with Rodney Cope.

  ‘I don’t take offence at this sort of thing, you know that. I’ve been in the business world too long to take offence at anything. But I like to know where I stand with someone, and I got the feeling I didn’t rate very high with this Neil Moray. What was he before he stood for parliament, by the way? A Sunday school teacher or something? I know his kind, they preach humility but they don’t practise it themselves, and I got the definite impression that in his quiet way, he thought rather a lot of himself.’ He patted his pink, freckled head with a rolled handkerchief. Wow, I just don’t have time for that kind of thing, it doesn’t impress me one bit. I like a man I can talk to fair and square; maybe we’ll call each other a lot of names, but that doesn’t matter, the tougher they come the more I like them. But it would take a month of Sundays to get to understand what goes on in that young man’s mind, and I don’t have that time to spare. . . .’ He wriggled on his seat, pulling himself up by the shoulders; even on the telephone, he was very conscious of his lack of height. ‘Yes, well, maybe, but I expected someone with more dynamism, and that wasn’t the way he presented to me. I just can’t see him in a fight. And we’re going to need to fight this all the way. . . . All right, if you say so. You know him better than I do. But I don’t often make mistakes. I understand about people; I’ve had a lot of dealings with people over the years and I don’t back many losers. . . . All right, I’ll leave it to you. But I don’t want this to hang fire, it’s important there shouldn’t be any suggestion that we’ve run into difficulties. . . . Oh, I don’t worry about that. Who reads a local paper, anyhow? Just the people who want to know if their football team won. But I wouldn’t want Moray to back down, it wouldn’t look good at this point in time. . . . Yes, do that, will you?’

  He put the receiver down, brisk, to the point, that was always his way. His secretary said, ‘I could buy some aerosol.’

  Heffernan studied his hands; he had small, rather puffy hands with stubby fingers in which were surprisingly embedded finely rounded nails with a delicate sheen of pearl above the clear half¬moons. His bulbous eyes looked angrily at the nails as though repelled by the sight of something so sensitive snared up in his flesh.

  ‘What did you think of him? I always respect your judgement, you know that.’ He looked at Priscilla Fry compellingly.

  He was desperately thin-skinned, obsessed with projecting an image of himself quite at variance with the real person. This quiet, sad-faced middle-aged woman, who looked as though she had wandered into the wrong half of the century, had been the guardian of that image for many years and did not fail him now.

  ‘Rather enigmatic?’ she suggested. It would not do to lie; their relationship would have foundered long ago if it had been based on lies. Her attitude to him was that of a nanny, anxious for the well-being of her charge, but not wanting to spoil his little pleasures. She was careful to present him with little bits of truth, never too much at any one time, and always carefully mixed with less indigestible stuff. ‘He doesn’t give much of himself away to anyone, I would guess. Charming, and aware of it, but not making use of it as yet, perhaps doesn’t know how to. I would say a little immature. These people who live so within their shell often are, don’t you think? And he hasn’t had a failure.’

  ‘Yes!’ Heffernan snapped finger and thumb. ‘That’s it! He hasn’t had a failure.’ It was the thing which had got under his skin when he talked to Moray. Now that he was presented with a reason unconnected with class for that slight aura of superiority he no longer felt any resentment. The man who has not had a failure is only to be pitied; either he has risked too little, or is fast using up his reserves of luck.

  ‘I hope he isn’t going to be a nuisance.’ He had Moray in perspective now.

  ‘It would be difficult for him to turn round and march the other way, wouldn’t it?’ she mused. ‘I don’t think he’s the kind who would find that very easy.’

  ‘No. You’re right there. He wouldn’t find it easy.’ Heffernan sounded satisfied.

  He hadn’t done his homework on Moray, Priscilla Fry reflected. It was unlike him. He usually went to so much trouble. He was not by nature a good judge of other people, his own personality got in the way, he was easily flattered and quick to take offence. He found social intercourse painful, he could never quite conquer the feeling that he was the one who must prove himself. It wasn’t that his origins were bad, but rather that he wasn’t conscious of originating anywhere. His parents had spent their life in an endeavour to move up the social scale so that he seemed to have rungs rather than roots. But what he lacked in intuition, he made up for by painstaking research. Even when he was dealing with relatively unimportant people, who would figure only briefly in one of his schemes, he would study all that he could find out about them, sometimes talking to people who had known them as children. The deepest clefts in personality are made in childhood. He had every reason to know that. His final decisions were never made over a good meal; those who suffered under the illusion that this was how business was done came in for a few shocks where he was concerned. He knew his weakness: he didn’t make decisions until the vibrations had died away – except in a few cases of which Priscilla Fry was one and Rodney Cope another.

  ‘The local paper,’ he said, putting Moray to one side. ‘What’s it called – The Scotney News, or Gazette, or Weekly. . . . or something.’

  ‘Gazette.’

  ‘Who owns it? We must have a record of that.’

  ‘It’s one of the Cannock papers.’

  ‘Oh, is it!’ Lord Cannock had a reputation for not interfering with his editors.

  ‘I don’t think you need worry. It’s a very respectable paper. In the past they’ve run into a bit of trouble with some of the local big-wigs, but it’s all been very low-keyed.’

  ‘And the editor is William Lomax. Right?’

  ‘Forty-three. Divorced. Wife wanted someone more enterprising, she’s married to a Zurich broker now. No children. He lives alone. Mildly eccentric. Devoted to the Gazette.’

  ‘No possibility that he might be on Vicente’s pay roll?’

  ‘He’s been to Vicente’s house once or twice, people talk, but there’s no evidence of Vicente exerting any influence on the Gazette.’

  ‘How would you sum up Lomax?’

  ‘Staunch. But not a crusader.’

  He nodded his
head. ‘Yes. I think that is probably right. I wouldn’t be quite sure there is nothing between him and Vicente, though.’ He found it hard to believe that anyone could come so close to money and not find some of it in his pocket. ‘We might have a look at that angle, anyway. Just in case it should come in useful.’

  Chapter Seven

  The long range weather forecast was good. There was no mention of storms. All seemed set for a long period of untroubled sunshine. Scotney was quick to get into the act; it had recorded temperatures in the top seventies yesterday. Not bad for the beginning of June.

  Rodney Cope left his basement room in Cadogan Crescent, which in spite of its distinguished-sounding name, was on the ‘wrong’ side of the London Road, and walked towards Scotney Square. It was the morning rush hour and petrol fumes were already polluting the brisk morning air. In the centre of the busy concourse, a harassed traffic warden waved traffic on with a motion as though stirring a pudding. While he waited. Cope decided that he would take a stroll through The Warren. Neil would have to wait for him.

  It didn’t worry Cope that Neil showed signs of being difficult, or that the Gazette appeared to be mounting a campaign against the proposed development of the West Front. These things would have to be dealt with, but they didn’t worry him. Neil was likely to be the most difficult problem. The Gazette would tire, newspapers seldom stayed with this kind of thing for long-even if the staff had the stamina, their readers didn’t. Neil’s resistance might be of a different order, and the fact that the part which he had to play was an active and not a passive one made his reactions crucial.

  But none of this was in Rodney Cope’s mind as he strolled through The Warren. He never planned moves in advance. If you plan, you start working out other people’s moves and before you know where you are, you are adapting yourself to them. He didn’t believe in adapting himself to other people. He preferred to be strong enough to enforce his will on them. Quite apart from these considerations, he hated planning. It meant imposing a measure of discipline on yourself, telling yourself that you couldn’t do this, or must do that, marking out a path for yourself which very soon had high brick walls on either side. You set limits for yourself and lived within them. He would rather be dead. And that wasn’t one of those idle phrases. He had flayed around with death. When he had been on military service in the Near East he had been involved in a number of unofficial exploits any one of which might have ended his life. It had been a good time. Some of the men he had been with wouldn’t admit that now. They suffered from a sense of shame, a need to explain away, now, in a civilised context, the savagery of warfare. When he listened to them he wondered what it was they were talking about, it had so changed in their minds that he was unable to recognise the incidents as the ones in which he had been involved. War and peace don’t inhabit the same world, they require a different vocabulary, more than that, a different person. How can a peace-time man, moralising comfortably in his armchair, ever understand the man who is lighting outside the stockade? The immediacy of the moment, the quickened pulse, the sharpened senses, the heightened awareness of life that comes from an acquaintance with death, what does he know of this? But now, back here, where all the wheels were running down, it was a different kind of death; death had grown older, he too had tired and staled, he took you by inches.

  It was the one thing which frightened Rodney Cope. Every so often he had to do something to demonstrate that he wasn’t going to be shepherded into the pen. He had seen a painting once at a local exhibition; it had been called Ten Level’. He could remember now the stakes looming up, blocking the view of the long, bare hills beyond. Not for him.

  All these thoughts were in his mind as he walked through The Warren. Sombre thoughts to be occasioned by an election victory. But Cope, looking back over the past few months, was uneasy. It had all started at a party. He had met Moray. A man called Ronald Singleton, who himself had unfulfilled political ambitions, had been trying to persuade Moray to stand as Independent candidate for Scotney. On an impulse, in the way that things happened to him. Cope had told himself that he could persuade Moray to stand. And when he succeeded, he had added, feeling that the gesture needed rounding off, ‘I’ll be your campaign manager. You’ll get in with a majority of over four thousand.’ He had been quite convinced of this and his assurance had infected Moray. Moray did not want to handle the messy part of the campaign. He saw in Cope a man capable of taking this off his shoulders, whereas Ronald Singleton would drag him down with him into the morass. One of the messiest parts of the campaign was money-raising activities. ‘I’ll have to leave all that to you,’ Moray had said to Cope. One thing led to another. The quest for money led Cope to Arthur Heffernan, and from then on more was at stake than winning an election. Cope had worked hard for both his masters. It had been exhilarating, and the fact that Moray was not aware of what was happening and would certainly not have approved of it, had given added interest to the manoeuvre. Yet, Cope was uneasy. When he was confronted with Heffernan’s plans for the development of the West Front, he had found himself thinking that this was a challenge of a different order to his other adventures, something he must see through. He had never before caught himself thinking in terms of seeing anything through. The corruption of civilisation was hard to withstand.

  He stooped in the doorway of a print shop, a dark little place which he seemed to fill like a giant in a fairy’s cave. The prints were good. He had no interest in them, he wasn’t going to put his head in culture’s noose. But he liked the little shops in The Warren which were mostly run by young people who had stepped out of line. In the end, of course, the shops would own them, but most of them were some way from that yet. He bought articles here and there, half-aware of the insidious nature of such philanthropic gestures. At the moment, he was supposed to be collecting costume prints. He could tell by the way the girl looked at him – not calculatingly, she hadn’t learnt to calculate a thing yet, but with a gentle perplexity – that she couldn’t fathom his motives. How long would it be before she was more interested in her sales than her customers’ motives for buying? He caught himself in the act of making a value judgement. These were dangers one had to risk. He paid for the print and wandered on, past a café where they were putting out elegant white-painted chairs at coffee tables, threading his way between wickerware outside the next shop. The sun was bright, and although the rays were still too much on the slant to penetrate the narrow alleys, the forecast had promised a long, fine day and the shopkeepers were trustingly placing their wares on the gleaming cobblestones. He could smell the first whiff of Ambre Solaire.

  Neil had been waiting for him for half an hour when he arrived at the office.

  ‘I’ve been prospecting,’ Cope told him. ‘There’s a new coffee place opened in The Warren. Shall we try it out?’

  ‘We can’t talk there.’

  ‘Much safer than here,’ Cope assured him. ‘Hannah has probably bugged all the packing cases, haven’t you, love?’

  ‘If you want to be on your own, wouldn’t it be better if I tried out the place in The Warren?’ she suggested.

  ‘Would you mind?’ Moray asked awkwardly.

  ‘I’ve got to go to the printers, anyway. That’ll take some time.’

  ‘What would we do without our Hannah?’ Cope said lightly when she had gone.

  ‘Perhaps we need to talk about that.’

  ‘Doing without Hannah?’

  ‘No. But about the future, for all of us.’

  ‘Why yes. By all means, let’s talk about the future.’ Cope stretched his long legs out in front of him and waited.

  Moray sat at Hannah’s table; the weight of his slightly bowed shoulders rested on his left forearm, the right arm was extended across the desk, the fingers resting lightly on the wood. He studied the scratches on the surface of the table as though they were lines of music and he was waiting for the bar where he came in. Cope had no intention of giving him a cue. They had used each other, Cope and Moray; now t
hey had to work out what use they still had for each other. After a moment, Moray raised his eyes and gave Cope a rueful, half-apologetic smile. It was charming, the kind of smile which can be a prelude to almost anything, including a kick in the teeth. Cope responded by raising his eyebrows.

  Moray said, ‘We’ve come quite a way together. I don’t think I have said how grateful I am.’ He looked rueful as a man who has recently gone through his accounts and found himself deeper in debt than he had imagined.

  Cope did not intend to back out tactfully, like one of those figures in a Western, riding off into the sunset when all the bad men have been shot, leaving the good guy to make a nice, law-abiding town for all the honest little people to live in. He said, ‘Let’s not waste time on gratitude. There’s quite a way to go yet.’

  ‘I don’t know how things are with you financially.’ Moray sounded awkward; he hated talking money as much as a miser hates spending it.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Cope answered. ‘It’s a useful training for me in responsible citizenship. You must try to see me in the capacity of an apprentice.’ As Moray still seemed uneasy, he said, ‘Unless, of course, you feel you want to manage the whole show on your own from now on.’