Carnage on the Committee (22 page)

Mary Lou switched off the radio, it's some committee I've joined. Unless it was Muslims who did the earlier murders, it looks as if we'll have two lots of killers after us.'

The baroness emitted a cloud of smoke and smiled broadly. 'Don't pay any attention to that idiot,' she said. 'Our job is to sort out the idiots who would like to prevent me having my way. Let's get on with it.'

Amiss arrived at the little Italian restaurant early, and was sitting at the table reading the current
Wrangler
and drinking a Campari when Rachel touched his shoulder. He jumped up and kissed her on the right cheek. 'I don't do the kiss on both cheeks since some people started doing right, left, right,' he said. 'I'm too uncoordinated.'

She smiled wanly and sat down.

'You're looking good, Rachel.'

'Honestly, Robert?'

'Honestly, no. I was lying. You look tired and pale and too thin.'

'That's about how I feel, but I'm better than I was.' She looked up at the hovering waiter. 'I'll have a Campari too, please.'

In the awkward few moments that followed, they took refuge in exchanges about a menu which did not much interest either of them. Then, when food had been ordered and a bottle of Frascati had arrived, Rachel looked squarely at Amiss. 'I know roughly from Mary Lou what's been going on with you. Do you want to know what's been going on with me?'

'Very much.'

'Broadly, I left you for a creep.'

'What happened to the principled, high-minded Eric who was going to make the world a better place?'

'I suspect he never existed, but if he had, he didn't survive the corruption of power. And he certainly didn't survive the disappointment of losing it.'

'How long had you been together when you went off him?'

She gave a strained laugh. 'A couple of months. No, that's not true, but that's when the occasional nagging doubt surfaced. I was ready to leave and then he was fired so . . .'

'So you had to stand loyally by him?'

'Yes. How could I stop working for him and throw him out of my flat when he was down on his luck? And, in truth, I couldn't bear that anyone - including Eric -would think that I was chucking him for selfish reasons.

So a mixture of compassion and vanity kept me at his side until a couple of months ago.'

'I understand the dilemma. Tell me, what was the worst thing about him?'

'He was so self-important. And never any fun. You were right when you accused me of having succumbed to a prig-virus.'

'Maybe, but I was being so irritatingly uncertain at the time that someone with a sense of purpose must have seemed very attractive.'

'That's true. We hadn't learned how to live together, Robert. And I was amazingly naive about politicians. Now what about you?'

'We'll get to me in a minute. What are you working at now?'

'Nothing. I'm having a
crise
about what to do with myself. I don't want to go back to the Foreign Office -even if they'd have me after my bad behaviour in going off with a minister. And I definitely don't want to have anything to do with politics again. I've been looking in the appointments pages and so far haven't found anything I want. But I'm not going to rush into anything this time.'

'You sound like me.'

'Mary Lou said you were writing a book. What kind of book?'

i don't really want to talk about it until it's finished and it'll probably never get published, but I can assure you it's not the sort of thing that would appeal to the average Knapper-Warburton judge.'

'The average judge seems to be dead.'

'Come now, it's only a minority who're dead. Anyway, it's an old-fashioned detective story, I'm doing. Retro, that's what I'm going for. There's so much mystery fiction around these days that is harrowing or disgusting that I thought fashion was sure to change. It'll be the kind of book you'll be able to give your maiden aunt without any fear of being subsequently disinherited.'

'In my present state that sounds like my sort of book. Now, what's going on with that bloody committee? I was worried when I heard about Hermione Babcock. That's what had me ring Mary Lou. And 1 got really worried when I heard about Wysteria Wilcox. I thought you might be in danger and I couldn't bear not to talk to you. Even to offer you a refuge.'

Amiss smiled. 'Well now, that's the mystery solved. I murdered both of them so as to provoke you into getting in touch.'

She giggled. 'I'd forgotten how refreshing bad taste is. Let me tell you a bit about what it's like living with someone who doesn't approve of inappropriate language ...'

15

Fighting back a rising tide of panic but trying gamely to maintain a calm exterior, Rosa Karp was spending the evening in the House of Lords chairing a meeting of 'Reclaiming our past' - a group of academics, teachers and political activists who were planning a campaign to make women's and ethnic studies a core part of the school curriculum. Although she kept trying to tell herself that - after all she had suffered at the hands of the Troutbeck monster - Wysteria had been in a sufficiently disturbed state to have let the tide creep up on the eyot, Rosa was failing to convince herself. So troubled was she that half-an-hour in, Parminda Kumar, the militant director of the outreach unit of the liaison officers' union, accused her of marginalizing her by failing to respond to her concerns about the ideological necessity of stressing the secular rather than religious nature of the Indian community. 'Post-imperial capitalist, you mean,' snarled Angela Euston, the Afro-Caribbean sociologist, and as Parminda demanded that the chair rule such offensive remarks out of order, Rosa burst into tears and ran headlong out of the room, along the corridors and out of the Lords.

* * *

Pleading a virus, Felix Ferriter had cancelled his well-thumbed lecture on 'Literature through the pink prism' to a London students' gay, lesbian and bisexual society. He spent the evening at home compulsively watching news bulletins and wishing he could think of a face-saving excuse for going back to America. He flinched every time the clip was run of Geraint Griffiths insisting that Abu Mohammed was as good as instituting a jihad and demanding that the Home Secretary initiate his own Holy War against fascism. Having talked to him earlier, Ferriter was all too aware that Griffiths saw the Knapper-Warburton committee as the frontline troops in a glorious battle and was in maniacally high spirits about the possibility of martyrdom. Ferriter had tried to make contact with Rosa, Den Smith and Hugo Hurlingham in the hope that one of them might be weakening, but none of them could be reached. It was after ten before he disciplined himselff to turn off the television and read over the first draft of his paper for the forthcoming international Queer Theory confference which flew a challenging yet ironic kite about Oscar Wilde as a symbol for the proto-post-postmodern phallus. After a few pages, he threw it aside and reached for the vodka. He pulled out his phone before going to bed and was drunk enough to fall asleep quickly. When, at midnight, the doorbell began to ring, it was a few minutes before he realised what was happening. He lay under the duvet, terrified, trying to summon up the courage to get out of bed and ring the police.

Dervla's agent had hired four heavies to escort her to the fashion show she was being discreetly but generously paid to attend. She wished desperately that she'd taken Amiss's advice to cry off and go to Dublin for a few days. Sitting in the front row trying to look interested and vivacious.

she wondered how long she could keep up the faqade. At the end of the show, she managed a glass of champagne and some air-kissing, but as she left the Savoy and faced a battery of clicking cameras and screaming reporters, she felt sick and dizzy. As the words 'Dervla, are you frightened?' floated across the ether, she crumpled to the ground.

Hugo Hurlingham had attended the literary agents' dining club as a guest of the chairman and had drunk enough to suspend his fears and enjoy his favourite pursuits of boasting, gossiping and character-assassinating. 'You're very brave, Hugo,' said his host, in your shoes I'd have quit that committee PDQ.'

'Wouldn't dream of it, old man. Job has to be done. I think I can pride myself that I've managed to steady the nerves of my colleagues.'

His host shook his head in mingled surprise and admiration. Who would have thought that the pompous old git had balls? He escorted him from the restaurant at around eleven, shovelled him into a taxi and waved him off. When he reached his apartment block, Hurlingham got out slightly nervously, much more conscious than usual of the darkness of the street. He paid the driver and, while waiting for the receipt, fished his keys out of his pocket. He had just inserted a key in the lock when the noise of the taxi driving off was drowned out by the sound of a motorbike. As he opened the door he pressed the light switch and presented to the pillion passenger a much better target than he had anticipated.

Despite his underlying nervousness, Den Smith had had a most enjoyable day. First, there had been coffee with one of his regular contributors, a young man who regarded Smith as an inspirational guru and who was suitably awestruck at his courage in deffying whatever dark forces were threatening the Knapper-Warburton. The interview with Susie Briggs had given him a chance to savage the ghastly Troutbeck on the lunch-time news programme, then there had been lunch with a radical historian who wanted to consult him about the origins of American imperialism and who had given him extra ammunition with which to kick the stuffing out of the Foreign Office Minister of State during the debate that evening at the Cambridge Union.

It was three in the afternoon when he checked into the Trinity College guest room the Union had booked for him and had a nap, after which he read a bit and worked on his new poem, 'Stiff the Cunts', for which inspiration had come to him on the train. Within an hour or so he had a full draft:

There's only one way.

Stiff George W. Bush and his poodle Tony Blair, hired to sniff his ass.

Stiff the neo-con cunts who turn our world into a rodeo for their Texan whoremaster.

Stiff the racist Nazi Zionist serial killers.

Stiff the barbarians before they stiff you.

It was powerful and true, he felt, but perhaps still in need of some polishing. He tried replacing full stops with semicolons, but felt it took from the staccato effect. Then he tried capitalising the whole of the first line, but concluded reluctantly that the effect lacked subtlety. Reading it out loud to make sure the cadences were right. Smith heard a chime and realised with a start that it was six-thirty, and time to stroll up the street for a pre-dinner drink with the Union officers.

Having been asked to wear a black tie. Smith wore a red open-necked shirt, jeans and a bomber jacket. Seeing the students dressed up made him guffaw loudly, while deriding them for their slavish adherence to anachronistic styles and values kept him happy throughout most of dinner. He lost his temper, though, when the President - who had arrived late and flustered - told him that his main opponent had had to cancel and that his place would be taken by Geraint Griffiths, who was now speeding to Cambridge by car.

Not being able to admit that he feared Griffiths more than any minister, Smith took refuge in loud denunciations of the lack of courtesy involved in failing to consult him: the President's explanation that it all happened so late it was a miracle he had found a replacement was thunderously dismissed as a lie. 'I'm thinking of leaving now,' he growled but the volume of grovelling and begging that elicited persuaded him graciously to change his mind. By the time Griffiths arrived, Smith had sufficiently recovered his temper to ask him if he'd had a good journey and to agree to pose with him and the Union officers outside the building for the benefit of a freelance cameraman.

The debate would long be remembered by those present and not only because of what happened subsequently. Proposing the motion 'That this House would cage George Bush in Guantanamo Bay and throw away the key', Smith began with his now familiar account of how the mass murderers leading the fascist states of Britain and America and Israel had organised the air attacks on America in order to justify a war destined to seize the oil resources of the whole of the Middle East. Bush was not the moron he looked, explained Smith, but a brilliant, ruthless, ravening despot who had sought and found an excuse to begin enslaving the world: it was the duty of Muslims, Christians and every other moral person to defeat this evil axis by any means necessary. As he concluded his peroration.

Smith hesitated about whether to recite his new poem, but decided to go for it. Griffiths's roars of laughter so enraged him that he had to be pulled back from assaulting him by the President and a few other students, but Smith recovered himselff enough to shout 'Men and women, I beg to propose the motion', and sat down to thunderous applause mixed with boos and jeers.

Griffiths's onslaught on Smith was given considerable immediacy by his insistence that they were both potential victims of Smith's new best friends the Islamofascists. 'Only today,' he intoned, at only a quarter of his usual speed, 'on the BBC, that alleged bastion of freedom and democracy, the fascist cleric Abu Mohammed was allowed to threaten every member of our committee with death. Two of us have died already, but it seems we are all to be sacrificed because of the self-delusion and cowardice of those who don't realise that George Bush is our only hope of saving the world ...' Seeing Smith on his feet waving and shouting maniacally, Griffiths gave an elaborate bow and gave way.

'They were not murdered by Muslims,' screamed Smith. 'They were murdered by MI5 at the behest of people like you in order to justify a brutal clampdown on critics of this insane, blood-soaked government.' Griffiths responded with his standard defence of democratic imperialism, worked himselff into a gabbling frenzy against the tradition of British traitors and moral delinquents that included the Bloomsberries, who put their friends first, the Cambridge spies, who had put their ideologies first and these days people like Harold Pinter and Den Smith and all their cranky well-heeled Islington friends, who hated their country's allies and loved its enemies. He came to a sudden halt, formally opposed the motion and sat down to a chorus of cheers and boos.