Body Politic

by J M Gregson

  Raymond Keane found himself applying the rules he had adopted for his public exchanges to his private life. ‘If you’re on a loser, cut your losses quickly,’ was one of the rules he applied to political exchanges. On this occasion, he could not call briskly for another question. He looked at his watch and said, ‘Well, we mustn’t trade on your hospitality for too long.’ He pushed his cup and saucer on to the small table beside his chair and pulled himself clumsily to his feet. ‘Busy weekend, I’m afraid!’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’ Moira had not taken her dark eyes from Zoe’s face. She now allowed her gaze to travel down the curves of the blonde woman’s slim figure. Her small, knowing smile degenerated momentarily into something very near a leer. Then she rose in turn and stood facing Raymond Keane. ‘I shall watch your career with interest. From afar, of course.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you. And when you are better, which I’m sure will be soon now, you must come and have lunch in the House one day.’

  He was more nervous than he could remember being in years, and his sentiments dropped into the abruptly silent room like the most hollow of political platitudes. Everyone was standing now, but no one helped him out, no one offered a crutch for his feeble stumblings. The two men saw no reason to rescue a man they disliked, and Zoe was aware that any intervention from her could only make matters worse.

  She knew now that Raymond and this woman had been very close, that he had treated her shabbily when Zoe came into his life. He had pretended to her that his affair with Moira was finished when he met her. He had come here today to dismiss her finally from his life—and found that she had turned the tables completely upon him. This was Moira Yates’s dismissal of Raymond Keane.

  And for the second time that day, Zoe found she had no wish to rescue Raymond from a situation he had brought upon himself.

  It was obvious that the other woman in the room was enjoying being the central, unpredictable figure in the scene of Keane’s discomfiture. As she ushered them into the hall, Moira addressed her words of dismissal to Keane alone. ‘It’s been good to see you again. And to find you so little changed. I wish I could say the same for myself.’

  It was a blatant invitation to frame a denial, and Keane was unwise enough to fall for it. ‘You look as beautiful as ever. I’m sure you’ll be back to normal by the time we meet again.’

  She neither nodded nor denied it, but threw him the last and most dazzling of her smiles, underlining with it the falseness of his compliment. None of the people there believed that he would ever visit her again.

  Zoe did not look back, but Raymond Keane could not resist the temptation to turn towards the house as he reached the gate. Moira, the woman who nowadays shied away from even an open window, was standing in the doorway of the house, an actress playing out the final effect of a scene she had dominated, that brilliant farewell smile still fixed firmly upon her features.

  Only the two men who stood behind her in the darkness of the hall saw the tears upon her cheeks as she shut the door and turned back towards them. ‘I did well, didn’t I?’ she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was Sunday afternoon when Raymond Keane took Zoe Renwick to see Moira Yates, the woman she had displaced in his affections. By the evening of the following Wednesday, the embarrassment of that meeting seemed already more than three days behind him.

  It is easy for an MP to keep busy, to remind himself that private concerns should be submerged beneath the swirling waters of national events. And these last three days of the parliamentary session had not been without their satisfactions. He had voted in a two-line whip motion on defence cuts. He had managed to ask a ‘planted’ question of his leader at Prime Minister’s Question Time on the Tuesday—in effect it had merely offered congratulations to the PM on his prompt actions to quell the latest urban riot.

  His question had meant that the nation—or at least that fraction of it that chose to listen to Yesterday in Parliament—had heard his clear articulation and confident tones amidst the bear garden of Question Time and the Speaker’s ritual calls for order. More important, the fact that he had been suggested by the Party hierarchy to be this conduit of admiration for the PM confirmed that he was a coming man, in other people’s minds as well as his own.

  That Wednesday, he even concluded some action on behalf of a troublesome constituent of his, Joseph Walsh. He had been taken aback by the man’s vehemence at his clinic in the constituency, but not for long. Politicians were perforce accustomed to dealing with the occasional harmless loony, who thought an MP could achieve far more for them than the system actually permitted. And the man had lost his daughter, after all. He deserved a certain amount of consideration, even if nothing could be achieved for him.

  Raymond had asked the appropriate written questions of the appropriate minister, and received the appropriate answers in writing from the civil servants in her department. Now he wrote to Joseph Walsh and told him nothing could be done, enclosing a copy of the minister’s reply to demonstrate how diligently he had pursued the matter.

  A busy week so far, then, but not without its modest achievements. Raymond allowed himself a bottle of the excellent parliamentary claret with his dinner. With parliament now suspended for the Christmas recess, there was time for a little relaxation. He began to plan out his movements for the next three weeks.

  *

  On the following morning, in the neat modern house in Gloucestershire, Dermot Yates watched his sister anxiously, assessing the effects of the visit of Moira’s former lover and his new mistress upon the invalid in his care.

  Moira had seemed exhausted after her brilliant performance—Dermot could only see it as that—in discomforting Raymond Keane. She had been all intensity, full of a sustained, almost unnatural concentration upon the part she had chosen for herself, whilst Keane and that strangely dignified blonde woman had been in the house. But the effort had told: she had been very quiet since Sunday, moving about the house like a convalescent who had pushed herself beyond what her resources will support.

  Thursday was one of those quiet December days when the sun shines softly through the leafless trees and the day is unnaturally mild. Dermot tried unsuccessfully to get his sister out into the garden, to breathe the air which had once been such a delight to her, so necessary a part of her life.

  She made the coffee for them in mid-morning, and he was pleased by this departure from the lethargy which had dropped its hand upon her like a malign presence over the last months. She opened the window to call in her elder brother from the garden and he was emboldened by this small concession the agoraphobic was making to the outside world to keep her there while he spoke. He said, ‘We could have our coffee on the terrace, I think, if you put your sheepskin coat on. It’s sheltered there, and the sun is right on it at present.’

  Moira regarded him for a moment with a simple, uncomplicated love, even looked with seeming longing at the spot he had indicated, where the honey-coloured sun poured softly into an alcove, around which the brown clematis stems intertwined with a climbing rose which still carried its last three obstinate blooms, as if refusing to believe the calendar. Then she shook her head firmly, and he saw her shutting him as well as the suggestion out with the movement. ‘I can’t, Dermot. Not yet.’ She shut the window carefully in his face, as if the security of her self-imposed prison was supremely important to her again.

  He had to go through the kitchen to the dining room to make contact with her again. He found her putting ginger biscuits upon a plate. She pushed them towards him, then grabbed one and dunked it suddenly into her own mug of coffee, dismissing further argument with that abrupt gesture. It was uncharacteristic of her, too, he thought. He could not remember seeing her dunk biscuits in tea or coffee since she was a child. She looked for a moment at her brother’s troubled face and said, ‘I’ll be all right soon, I think. I’m feeling better each day now.’

  He was not convinced; but how could he tell her tactfully that her actions did not support
that view? She turned away from him and went over to the shelves of books that ran from floor to ceiling on the other side of the dining room. She stood motionless whilst he studied the upright back, which had remained erect over many a mettlesome horse, marvelling at this stillness in a woman who had always been so active. He wondered what was going on in her mind, for he did not think she was looking at the books at all. He had left his rubber boots at the door when he came in from the garden. Now he set down his beaker and moved across the carpeted room on silent, stockinged feet to study the profile he knew so well.

  He had half expected the eyes to be filled with tears. Instead, he found that an odd half-smile sat upon her lips. And the dark eyes, though as unseeing as he had expected, were dry and brilliant.

  In the next hour, the doctor would be making his weekly call. Dermot was suddenly glad of that support. But this did not seem the moment to remind Moira of the visit.

  *

  Twenty miles away from Moira Yates, in a bungalow with a large, well-kept garden on the edge of Oldford, another woman was drinking coffee. But Christine Lambert sat alone, and she was scarcely conscious of whether she drank her coffee or not.

  Indeed, when she remembered it, after staring for a long time at the movements of a robin in the winter garden, she found it was almost cold. She leant towards the table beside her and picked up the letter again, with its official heading, its bland, impersonal wording, its unconvincing assurance that this second summons was not necessarily anything to be anxious about. ‘Not necessarily,’ she repeated aloud to herself, fastening with her teacher’s practised expertise on the key phrase in this welter of bureaucratic reassurance.

  She did what she had not done in years, not done since the bad old days of twenty years ago, when she had been left in the house for days on end with only toddlers, and had almost left her husband and his whole damned police force. She rang John at work.

  ‘Superintendent Lambert?’ said the efficient voice. ‘Yes, I think he’s in his office. I’ll put you through.’

  She realized then that she had been half hoping he wouldn’t be there. It was unusual for him to be available at the station. Unlike most people of his rank, John Lambert did not conduct cases from his office, where the head of the team usually stayed, but went out to the scene of the action. It made him an eccentric in the modern police force. For years, his colleagues had doubted how long such behaviour would be tolerated. But Lambert’s methods had survived the arrival of a new Chief Constable, as many had not expected they would. In the big cases, the murders and the other crimes of violence, Lambert got results. The hierarchy was wise enough to allow him a little licence, as long as he pulled the rabbits from the hat so regularly for them.

  He picked up the phone at the first ring. Christine was scarcely ready for it, wondering if he was going to bite her head off for this unexpected intrusion into that other, working world she had long since resigned to him. She said foolishly, ‘John?’ as if she had not recognized the voice she heard so often on the phone when he rang her.

  ‘Christine? What is it? Is it one of the children?’

  He was concerned, not abrupt. For that small kindness, she was absurdly grateful to him. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. Nothing serious really. There’s no need—’

  ‘I’ll be home in an hour. Or is it more urgent than that?’

  ‘No. There’s no reason for you to come home at all, really. I’m being—’

  ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

  ‘I’ll make you some lunch, then. And please don’t—’

  But the phone was down and he was gone. She was immensely relieved that he should have known immediately how anxious she was, that she had not needed to spell out her exaggerated fear to him on the phone.

  Endurance in marriage brought its rewards, in the end.

  *

  In a smaller house, with a garden much more neglected, on the outskirts of the city of Gloucester, another solitary figure turned another official letter within his hands.

  But Joe Walsh had no one to ring with his news, no figure to bring the reassurance of common sense and proportion into the dark world in which he increasingly lived. It seemed, indeed, so dark this morning that he could detect no chink of light within it. Until he determined upon the one fierce, explosive action he would himself achieve, which would dispel the darkness with a sudden, blinding flash, bringing a blaze of light so brilliant that it would make it impossible to see what lay beyond it.

  He looked again at the House of Commons crest upon the notepaper, at the three short paragraphs which were meant to dismiss his daughter for ever, at the confident, illegible scrawl of a signature which said, ‘I am a busy man and this is all that your daughter is worth to me.’

  Already he could have recited the letter by heart, but he looked again at those phrases which stung his eyeballs like acid: ‘... matter has now been thoroughly investigated ...’; ‘... facts of the incident have been established as clearly as they ever will be ...’; and last and worst of all, ‘ ... can only advise you to reconcile yourself to the fact that this was an unfortunate accident ...’

  The pain on his unblinking eyes was almost unbearable. Then, abruptly, it eased, and the phrases which had been so painful swam before him, as the salt tears sprang from nowhere, brimmed on the lower rims of his eye-sockets, and ran unchecked down his cheeks.

  Well, Mr High-and-Mighty, uncaring, sodding, bloody Keane, there was more than one type of ‘unfortunate accident’. You’ve had your chance and failed, Keane. Just as I knew you would, like all the rest. Now it’s time for your punishment, you smooth bastard, you false, uncaring, fucking friend. I’ve watched you for long enough: now it’s time to act.

  He did not normally use obscenities, and they brought a kind of relief. He went on shouting them for some time at the impassive walls of the silent house, which had ceased to be a home when his daughter had been carried from it in the narrow oak coffin.

  He would get Keane. And without being caught himself. He did not care for his own safety, now that Debbie was gone, but his revenge would only be complete if it went unpunished. The man who had killed Debbie had got away scot-free; when he killed the man who had so miserably failed to avenge her, he would get away scot-free too. The justice of it pleased him. Somewhere in the recesses of his memory, that phrase rang a Shakespearean bell.

  Unfortunately, it was not a warning bell.

  CHAPTER SIX

  John Lambert looked at the letter, his face made longer by the deepening lines of the last few years. To Christine’s great relief, he did not make light of it.

  He made the ritual comfortings, as they both knew he must. ‘Quite a high percentage of people have to go back for a second scan after these mass screenings, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Well, not all that high, actually. About four per cent, I believe.’ She had checked that already.

  And how many false alarms were there among those? And how many genuine cases of breast cancer? The questions started up in both their minds, but neither of them wanted them voiced aloud. Christine said, ‘I don’t know why I should feel so cast down by it. I’ve been expecting it somehow, ever since I went to the unit last week for the first screening.’

  She expected him to say, in his knowing, common-sense way, that she was probably imagining that, now that this had happened, that it was a kind of phoney, retrospective knowledge that she had had. Instead, he nodded and said, ‘You were very quiet, the night after you’d been.’

  ‘Was I? You’d never have noticed that, you know, at one time. It was the night I agreed to baby-sit for Eleanor, if you remember. I thought you were more excited by the thought of getting Bert Hook hitting a golf ball!’

  Suddenly, she was in his arms. Neither of them knew who had made the first move towards the other. They subsided clumsily on to the big settee, laughing their relief in the contact, seeking out each other’s lips, allowing their mouths to dwell long and tenderly upon each other.

 
‘This is a turn-up, cuddling at lunchtime,’ he said eventually, holding her so that they could look into each other’s eyes, smiling his wish that this might be nothing more than a trivial diversion from the steady tenor of their middle age.

  ‘Special occasion,’ she said. ‘You don’t have a neurotic wife demanding your attention every day of the week.’ It was true that they were not much given to casual physical contact. They never kissed each other ritual goodbyes in the morning, like some other couples they knew. But now she took his hands from behind her shoulders, and ran them softly over the breasts which were now suddenly so suspect.

  He smiled, an intimate, tender smile, wanting to offer assurance, helpless in the knowledge that he could not. ‘They feel all right to me, lass,’ he said, in a clumsy parody of her northern roots.

  ‘Maybe they are. Probably they are. We’ll know soon enough.’ It was she who comforted him now; she felt happier in that role, bred into her over the years, of soothing away childish ills and anxieties.

  ‘You haven’t felt any lumps or anything?’ he said, feeling awkward and heavy in his maleness, wanting to tell her he understood this female complaint. Yet how could he ever do that? He wished that one of his daughters could be here, cursed the nature of modern society which split families and took daughters away from their roots to be with their husbands. His concern was all for Christine; and yet he felt helpless, as he never felt in his work.

  She smiled at him. ‘No lumps. It’ll be a false alarm, you see. Just the silly apprehension of a menopausal idiot.’