Political Suicide (10 page)

A
NTONY
C
RAYBOURNE
-F
ISK
was born in Norfolk, and educated at Stowe, where he captained the second eleven at cricket, and was an enthusiastic squash player. After graduation from Trinity College, Oxford, he studied law and later went into the City. He still has extensive interests in the Stock Exchange, and in Public Relations, but he has worked since 1980 for Conservative Central Office. He plays a keen
game of squash, and is “unmarried but hopeful,” as he puts it.

The details given seemed almost designed to show Craybourne-Fisk as the archetype of the “young shit” type in right-wing politics. But if that was what the young man was, and what he had done, it would have been difficult to avoid saying it. He turned to the handout of his main rival:

J
ERRY
S
NAITHE
was born in London, but went to school in Yorkshire. After university, where he graduated in Forestry, he became Labour member for Fordham on the GLC in 1978, becoming Opposition spokesman on housing the next year. When Labour took control in 1980, he became chairman of the important Arts and Leisure Activities Committee. In this position he has tried to rob the Arts of their elitist image, and has financed a variety of popular and community activities. He is thirty-six, and married to a social worker in the borough of Hackney.

“You know what that about robbing the Arts of their elitist image means, don't you?” asked the pot-bellied reporter.

“I can guess,” said Sutcliffe.

“It means subsidizing steel bands and pigeon fanciers and working men's clubs and the Tottenham Hotspur fan club.”

“Generally giving the ordinary citizen the idea that his tastes are as good as anyone else's? Making the world safe for the reader of the
Daily Grub?”

“Watch it, mate. I represent the
Daily Grub
.”

Sutcliffe cooled it, and went on to the last handout.

O
LIVER
W
ORTHING
, your
local
candidate, was born in Rotherham in 1934, where he attended the Primary and High Schools during and after the war. He did National Service in Aden and Cyprus, and went to Hull University, where he studied History and Economics. He came to Bootham as Tutor in Community Studies at the College of Further Education in 1972, and has served on the Town Council since 1978. He stood for the Alliance at Bootham East in the last election, when he doubled the Liberal vote at the previous one. His motto is: double it again! He is divorced, and has three children.

“Nothing there, see,” said the pot-bellied
Daily Grub
reporter. “All old stuff.”

“I suppose so,” said Sutcliffe thoughtfully. “These things are always interesting for what they don't say.”

The reporter chuckled cynically, as if Sutcliffe was referring to the candidates' sex lives, but then he thought and said: “Mean anything by that?”

Sutcliffe shrugged.

“You notice Craybourne-Fisk ‘was educated,' whereas Snaithe ‘went to school.' But what school? If it was the Swardale Comprehensive or something, you'd think Snaithe would say, wouldn't you? And you'd think that would mean that he actually
lived
in Yorkshire as a child, which you'd also think he'd say. Could it be that
he's
a public schoolboy too, but doesn't want
it known? . . . And then there are the gaps in his career . . .”

“Gaps?”

“Apparently he went on the Greater London Council in 1978, eight years ago. He was then twenty-eight. What had he done between university and then? It says ‘after university,' but people don't leave university at twenty-eight, unless they've been doing one hell of a post-graduate course. That ‘after university' could cover a multitude of sins.”

“Worth looking into,” said
Grub
, taking out an appropriately grubby little notebook.

“Then, who are Craybourne-Fisk's parents? He thinks it worth while giving Stowe and Trinity a plug, but keeps quiet about his parentage. If he's going for some kind of snob vote, you'd think he'd mention them. And I wonder what
exactly
he does for a living, apart from slogging away at Conservative Central Office . . .”

“What about the Alliance man?”

Sutcliffe paused.

“Ah—there it's more difficult. It doesn't seem to be a life packed with incident, does it? Being a local man, he'd have a lot more difficulty hiding anything, wouldn't he? If there was anything about the divorce it would probably have surfaced at the last election—and, besides, there never
is
anything about divorce these days: it's so clean and easy.”

“Too right, mate. They've nearly been the death of muck-racking, have the new divorce laws. Hell for the profession.”

“Quite. No—I fear that Mr Worthing is this election's Mr Nice Guy, without any skeletons in his cupboard. Unless I'm being very naive.”

Sutcliffe drained his glass.

“Here—” said the other—“you're not a reporter, are you? I thought you were, but you're not.”

“How do you know?”

“Reporters don't give away their ideas, like you've been doing. Not unless they're green, and you're too old to be green. We don't
share
stories in this trade.”

“No. Reading the
Grub
I never feel the interplay of several brilliant minds.”

“What's your interest in this, then—?”

But Sutcliffe had gone. He slipped into the Public Bar, and got from the landlord the location of the Partridge cottage: down to the end of the main street, then the first turning on the left—a lane that had a couple of stone cottages at the end of it, a matter of fifty yards or so from the main street. Up for sale it was, the landlord believed. Was the gentleman interested?

“
In
terested,” said Sutcliffe gnomically—but it was truthful, so far as it went.

When he turned off the principal thoroughfare of Moreton-in-Kirkdale (which had a butcher's, a small supermarket and an all-purpose clothes shop), he slowed down his pace, so as to approach the cottage in a leisurely way, gazing at it with considering eyes. The first of the two stone buildings had the look of still being a countryman's home, but the second of them, the Partridges', had the distinct air of being a “cottage” rather than a cottage—something adapted to the townsman's needs, and the townsman's idea of necessary comforts, even in the country. Mrs Partridge, he felt sure, didn't come out into the country to
work
like a countrywoman. The house itself, he eventually realized, was in fact two two-up-two-downers, made into one reasonably
large house. It was built of good stone, and both it and the garden were kept in good order. Partridge would have wanted that, as long as he was the local MP, and his widow no doubt kept the gardener on, for the benefit of potential buyers.

His approach, he should have realized, had been observed. One's approach always was observed in the country. A woman's head popped up from behind the hedge of the first of the cottages.

“I saw you lookin' at the cottage. Was you the gentleman Mrs Partridge said ud be comin'?”

“Very possibly,” said Sutcliffe, which was also truthful as far as it went. He had mentioned to Mrs Partridge that he might be pursuing the case in Yorkshire.

“Ah—she said a gentleman ud be comin' to ‘ave a look, with a view to movin' in, just until it's sold. That'd be you, then. I'll just get you the key. I hope you like it, sir. Always nice to have someone near, that's what I say, and since my Albert died it's always felt that bit lonely here. Be glad when the house is sold, that's for sure, so long as it's not these weekenders, like before. Though
Mr
Partridge, he was a lovely man, God rest him. You'll find it's very nice in there, sir, beautiful furniture, and that . . . Here you are, then, that's for the front.”

She had fetched the key from a nail inside her front door, and Sutcliffe took it and made off from her garrulity, promising himself a chin-wag with her later if it seemed likely to repay the trouble. The cottage was set back somewhat from the lane, and surrounded by the inevitable privet. The front garden was lawn and roses, cut back but not yet pruned; round the back he could see pear and plum trees. The front door was
newly painted dark blue and the paintwork around the windows was spruce. Sutcliffe let himself into the cottage.

The downstairs of the two little houses had been entirely refashioned; the front door now led into a small hallway, with on one side a small dining-room, and on the other a very good-sized drawing-room. Both of them had been furnished on the good old principle of “See Maples and die,” but it was the rooms that had died. Large pink plush sofas and chairs declared their domination of the space, heavy oak tables and chairs rendered human beings an intrusion in the dining-room. Penelope Partridge's choice, Sutcliffe surmised: her tastes could not be adapted to a cottage setting. Behind the dining-room there was a kitchen and scullery, and here there were a washing- and a washing-up machine, and a dominating fridge and deep-freeze. There was a breast-high Husqvarna oven, as little cottage-like as it was possible to imagine. Oh, the simple life for me, thought Sutcliffe. In the deep-freeze there was a series of little foil dishes, labelled
Lepre in Agrodolce, Stufatino alla Romana
, and so on.

Like the index to an Elizabeth David book, Sutcliffe thought to himself. Was Penelope Partridge bequeathing all these as a rich gift to the gentleman who was coming, or to the cottage's purchaser? Or had she, in fact, not been here since her husband's death? The cottage was extremely tidy (and could never have had much of a lived-in feeling), but when he peered into the waste-paper basket, it was full of duplicated Parliamentary handouts, trivial letters dated late November or early December, and advertising circulars. Presumably someone had been in to clean—the next-door neighbour,
very probably—but she had not liked to throw away anything remotely personal. Why? Sutcliffe wondered. The open verdict at the inquest, perhaps. Intelligent woman! His eye honed in on a little cabinet that obviously folded out to make a writing desk. He went over and opened it up.

Inside were the remains of James Partridge's last weekend's work as MP for Bootham. Letters from constituents were paper-clipped together with carbon copies of Partridge's replies. Looking under the cabinet, Sutcliffe found stored away the machine on which they had been typed—an old portable Olivetti. To read through the letters was to get a vivid sense of an MP's job and the mental strain of it if he were conscientious and compassionate, as apparently James Partridge was. The letters alternated between the silly and the sad, and even many of the silly ones had an undertone of sadness—exposing the inadequacy, the panic, the frustration of small minds caught up in a web of misery in a town plagued by unemployment and the accumulation of years of industrial decay. There were small problems that had mounted up into big ones, there was bafflement at the ways and words of officialdom, there were personal difficulties compounded by the misery of poverty and idleness. James Partridge's replies were models of quiet helpfulness or regret at helplessness, but once or twice Sutcliffe sensed, coming through the flat prose, a wail of frustration at the wretchedness which lay at the heart of his constituency's problems.

But there was only one letter that seemed of relevance to Sutcliffe's investigation. It was headed, in embossed print, Manor Court Farm, Ltd, Cordingate, Bootham,
Yorkshire, and it was on a fine paper, neatly typed, doubtless by a secretary. But the signature at the bottom was a large, brutal scrawl, almost in itself a gesture of defiance. The letter read:

Dear Partridge,

What you say is absolute twaddle. The British public wants cheap food and it's firms like this one that make it possible. Conditions here are second to none, and I'm taking legal advice about what you've written about us. You'll soon get a bloody nose if you start sticking it into our affairs, I can tell you. I make a bad enemy. As a life-long Tory it makes me sick that one of your sort should be our MP, with your lily-livered pseudo-scruples. You should be getting business back on its feet again, not trying to bring it to its knees to satisfy your so-called conscience. I tell you, I not only won't be voting for you, but I'm organizing several of the Conservative Association members who have the business interests of the constituency at heart to see if we can't bring about a change of candidate before the next election. That's what your meddling is likely to bring about.

Sincerely,

Walter Abbot

The carbon of Partridge's reply read simply:

Dear Abbot,

I see no point in prolonging this correspondence.

Yours,

James Partridge

Sutcliffe slipped the letters into his inside pocket, had a swift last look around, and then left the cottage.

“You like it?” said the next-door neighbour cheerfully, still in the garden, when he handed over the key.

“Yes. Yes indeed. Very nice.”

“All nice stuff they got, though large for the place I always think. They're lucky it's still all there.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Nearly had a break-in t'other night. Half twelve or so it was. I don't sleep well, never ‘ave done since my man died, so I heard 'em. Got on the phone to the police, but the silly buggers come from Bootham with their sirens goin', and they was clean gone by the time they got here.”

“Did you see them?”

“No—no, I didn't. Just lights and shadows like. What I say is—”

But she was interrupted by the phone inside. She had taken the key, and as he was continuing on down the lane, Sutcliffe heard her say:

“Oh, Mrs Partridge. How are you, then? Getting over it? That's right. Well, your gentleman's been to see the house. Very nice gentleman, very nicely spoken . . . No, a middle-aged gentleman. Quite fifty, I'd say. But—”