A Conspiracy of Friends (7 page)

“Don’t!” whispered Rufus. “Just don’t!”

“Why not? If she’s not going to do anything herself about meeting the right sort of boy, then I don’t see what’s wrong in giving her a bit of a push.”

“She won’t listen to you,” said Rufus.

I won’t ask her to listen to me, thought Frances. I shall do this myself.

She left the room and went up to their bedroom, where there was a phone beside the bed. She paged through her address book and identified the Warden number.

Peggy listened with interest to her proposal.

“It’s a complete coincidence,” Frances began. “Caroline has a room—maybe even two—coming up in her flat in Pimlico. You said that Ronald—”

“Oh, that would be marvellous,” said Peggy. “If Ronald could—”

Frances interrupted her. “I haven’t spoken to Caroline herself. You know how touchy they can be about this sort of thing.”

“Don’t I know it. They’re worried that we’re trying to lead their lives for them.”

“And all we’re doing is trying to provide a bit of help.”

“Exactly.”

“You tell him you’ve heard that Caroline’s looking for a flatmate. Don’t tell him I told you. Make something up. Then get him to phone her—they do know one another vaguely, after all. They were at that dance a couple of years ago in the same party, weren’t they?”

“They were. That was when the Ellis girl got pregnant, wasn’t it?”

“So they say. Anyway, Caroline could hardly refuse to let him at least look at the place.”

Peggy raised the possibility that she might be looking for a female flatmate. “I could understand it if she were …”

“Not at all,” said Frances. “These days they all live together, as friends.”

There was a pause. Both women were thinking the same thing but neither could admit it to the other. And Frances, in addition, was wondering whose lawn would be more suitable for the marquee: theirs or the Wardens’? Theirs was on a bit of a slope, and although the marquee-hire people claimed that they could erect their tents on sloping ground and compensate for it in the setting up of the floor, she was not convinced that this always worked. She had been at a wedding once where the marquee had been so placed and there had been several collisions on the dance floor as dancers, unaware of the subtle slope in the floor, failed to adjust their steps. Bumping into people on the dance floor—metaphorically—was one thing; bumping into them in the physical sense was quite another.

The two mothers finished their conversation and rang off, Frances uttering these parting words to her friend: “Tell him I just happened to mention that Caroline’s flat has a vacant room. Happened to mention. I would prefer for Caroline not to think that I was interfering.”

“Perish the thought,” Peggy said.

Which was reassuring, thought Frances. Peggy might not be unduly bright, but she was not dim; if that was possible. Not bright but not dim—somewhere in between, like one of those lights controlled by a rheostat.

B
ARBARA
R
AGG BEGAN
her day, as most people do, with a routine. Hers was to change into her jogging outfit—black Lycra leggings and loose-fitting sports sweater—and run the five blocks that separated her flat in Notting Hill from the corner newsagency where she purchased her morning paper and a pint of semi-skimmed milk. These would be placed in an environmentally sound hemp shopping bag and she would run home, or rather run three blocks and walk the final two. The point at which she changed from running to walking was always the same, and although she realised that it was a superstition—of much the same order as the superstition that keeps children from stepping on the pavement cracks lest they be eaten by bears—she nonetheless observed it scrupulously. She knew it was irrational, but she believed that were she to run for a block more or a block less, then she would be seized by some vaguely imagined impending doom. Such beliefs, she had been told, spring from our inherent understanding that our lives hang by a thread. Things may be going well and we may be successfully negotiating the perilous shoals that beset any human life, but we are acutely aware that at any time, quite without warning, our run of luck can stop. And did stop for many people, suddenly and without warning, as the perusal of any daily newspaper would reveal. That which separates us from the unfortunates who perish in accidents is only the merest of chances. One may cross a busy road without incident; the next person may coincide with a carelessly driven car, or a car driven by someone who at the crucial moment closes his eyes in a sneeze and brings to an end, in that second, a whole cherished life. Or a swimmer enjoying the surf on an Australian beach may emerge from the tumble of waves exhilarated and refreshed,
while another, only a short distance down the beach, may find that he shares his wave with a great white shark that just happened to be cruising past that particular place at that particular time. Neither deserves his fate; sharks and other agents of Nemesis pay no attention to the claims of moral desert. A selfless campaigner for social justice tastes much the same to a shark as a ruthless exploiter of others; not especially delicious—in shark terms, we are told—but good enough to eat in the absence of a seal or sea lion pup.

That morning, the feeling that the hand of fate should not in any way be tempted was strong and nothing would have persuaded Barbara to run even half a block more than habit and superstition dictated. This was because she was happy—blissfully so—and did not wish in any way to imperil her happiness. The happiness came from the fact that she would that evening be seeing her fiancé, Hugh, who was travelling down from Scotland to spend several days with her in London. This, then, was double good fortune: to be engaged and to be facing the prospect of dinner with the man who had asked her to marry him. Me! she thought. Me! It was a simple thought, but one that the blessed must often think: that this should happen to me, of all people.

When they had first become engaged, they had planned to live together immediately in a cottage on the farm. In the clear light of day this had seemed to be a rather impetuous decision, and they had opted to take their time. Barbara would return to London and, rather than packing up there and then, would wait a year or so. She knew, of course, that this would cause problems as she had already told her business partner Rupert that she would sell her flat to him more or less straight away. Telling him of the change of plan was going to be awkward.

Hugh had stayed behind in Ardnamurchan. There were two decrepit cottages on the farm that they were doing up, and much of the work was being done by Hugh, who was in the process
mastering skills ranging from pointing and plastering to replacing broken Ballachulish slate on the roofs. There was no alternative, he explained: contractors in that part of Scotland were few and far between, and anyway, the budget did not run to their exorbitant charges. So Hugh, who as a farmer’s son had always been good with his hands, was obliged to become even better.

He sent her photographs of his handiwork, and she emailed back for more. She looked at these photographs with wonder, not because the building work was in itself especially interesting but because it was
his
work. The slates were grey and uninteresting but had been put there by him. The plaster looked as any plaster looks but was special to her because it was Hugh—her Hugh—who had smoothed it into position. And then, very occasionally, there was a photograph in which, at the edge, she saw his hand, or perhaps the toe-cap of his work-boot. She would look at this with a still deeper sense of wonderment, savouring the thought that this was him, and he was hers. And these photographs in her eyes became almost sacramental in their significance.

Tonight they would eat in. Hugh enjoyed going out for meals, but preferred to have dinner with her in the flat. She was touched by his appreciation of her culinary skills, which had never been exceptional but which she now set out to improve for his sake. She had purchased several volumes of Delia and studied them conscientiously. “If there is one person who will help you keep your man, it’s Delia.” That had been said by a friend of hers, and Barbara had initially thought it was a joke. But then she had reflected on it and realised that it expressed a folksy but nonetheless profound truth.

She reached her flat and went to run her bath. As she did so, she glanced at the front page of the newspaper and saw an item that made her stop in her tracks.
Snark Accepts Ministerial Post
, the copy line read.

She read the news report, which was fairly lengthy, impervious
to the fact that the water was approaching the top of the bath. Oedipus Snark had been Barbara Ragg’s lover. He had not cared for her, and she had eventually freed herself of him. And now here he was, a government minister.

She closed her eyes. The bath continued to run.

T
HE NEWSPAPER ITEM
on Oedipus Snark put Barbara in a thoroughly bad mood. It was not the tone that had this effect; the newspaper did not welcome the appointment, it simply reported it. She was galled because she knew what Oedipus was like: she knew the contempt he had for the electorate; she knew that it was personal gain rather than public service that motivated him. If she had no difficulty is seeing this clearly, why did others who had dealings with him miss it? Were they completely ignorant of his character? Was the Prime Minister, who presumably had made the appointment, such a poor judge of men that he should think Snark worthy of ministerial office?

But it was not only these questions that caused Barbara to despair; what made her truly despondent was the fact that unworthy people could succeed—and often, as in this case, did so spectacularly. Like most of us, she believed in the existence of Justice. She believed that, by and large, the wicked and unworthy could not prevail for long and that Justice, although overburdened with an impossible case-load, would eventually get round to invoking Nemesis. Barbara really believed it, and could, if pressed, call to mind numerous cases where precisely this had happened. Sometimes
these were major instances—as when a florid dictator was overthrown or put on trial; sometimes they were more modest—as when an outsider won against impossible odds, the victory of a little man against a bully and so on. And yet, if Justice were to accomplish her goals, she needed support, and specifically she needed somebody to whisper into her ear what she needed to know.

As she stepped into the bath that morning, it occurred to Barbara that it was she who should be the invoker of Nemesis. She had been making a deliberate effort to put the issue out of her mind, but she had knowledge of something that could end Oedipus Snark’s political career within days. It had never really occurred to her to use this information but now she thought the time had come. She would have to use what she knew; it was her duty to do so.

A few lines of Yeats came to her, something about the best lacking all conviction and the worst being filled with passionate intensity; she would not be so immodest as to list herself among the best, but those lines, she thought, had some bearing on the situation. Oedipus got away with it because nobody
did
anything. And that was always how evil triumphed; it counted on the inaction of those who, although they might have no taste for it and its works, did nothing to thwart it.

She lay down in the bath and closed her eyes. She had added a few drops of Penhaligon’s Lily of the Valley to the water and now she luxuriated in the rich embrace of the bath oil. The warmth of the water and the delicious scent calmed her, and her mind began to drift back to a weekend three years earlier when Oedipus Snark had come to stay. He often did that then, arriving at her flat in time for a late dinner on Friday and staying until Sunday afternoon.

She was pleased by the company. On Saturday mornings they did some shopping, sometimes traipsing across town to a food market before returning to laze about the flat for the afternoon. Oedipus liked crosswords and would spend several hours with one of
the more difficult newspaper puzzles, all the while congratulating himself on defeating a compiler’s wiles.

“Infantile,” he would say, tossing aside a completed crossword. “Predictable. Tedious. Infantile. Composed for ten-year-olds.” It did not occur to him that this might be a tactless remark to make in the full hearing of Barbara, who, although not unintelligent, found it difficult to get more than a few clues.

“They don’t want to make them too hard,” she said. “We can’t all be …”

“Geniuses?” said Oedipus scornfully. “Clearly not. You don’t need to tell me that, Barbara. I have constituents!”

She wanted to retort:
Who voted for you
;
who pay your salary
. But she did not.

Barbara would read, or spend time in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. Or she would sometimes wash the car, carrying hot water out in her old red bucket with the uncomfortable handle … It was bliss, even if she felt that this shared domestic existence could never last. She did not trust Oedipus even then, but tried as hard as she could to put this distrust out of her mind. Oedipus was an attentive lover; he could be amusing—in a waspish sort of way; he made her feel less alone. In short, Oedipus fascinated her, just as a cobra might fascinate its prey.

Then, one Sunday after Oedipus had said goodbye and returned to his flat, she found that his briefcase, which he had placed under a coffee table in the living room, had disgorged a small pile of documents. When he came to leave, he had picked up the briefcase without noticing the spillage, and these were the papers that Barbara now discovered.

She had not intended to read them, but her eye was caught by the name at the top of one of the papers—a very well-known name; a public figure, although not a politician.

She could not help herself. Picking up the letter, she began to
read. “Dear Mr. Snark,” the letter began, “I am writing to thank you for all that you have done to assist the passage of my company’s planning application. We have now been informed that we have been given approval, even if there were one or two members of the council who made shocking allegations in the course of the debate. The usual stuff—the revenge of failure, I call it. Socialists to a man, of course.