Political Suicide (9 page)

“Yes darling . . . Wakefield, can you believe it? And she was in rep there for positive
ages
—Sheffield, or Rotherham, or Darlington, or somewhere like that.”

“Better and better. Is she all right?”

“Of course, dear. As far as I know.”

“Not senile or an alcoholic or anything?”

“Of course not, dear.”

“How long is it since you saw her?”

“
Saw
her? Oh, positive ages. But I spoke to her on her last birthday—or was it the one before?”

“And she sounded all right?”

“
Per
fectly all right. Positively spry. We had a good slanging match, so I know.”

“Splendid. Right. And she's still in that home?”

“Oh yes. Arthritis, but otherwise perfectly splendid. An old trouper. I've got the number here somewhere . . . Torquay 48751. Give her my love if you ring.”

“Right. Well, 'bye, Mother.”

“ ‘Bye, darling. You don't want me to come up?”

“No, Mother. Love to Peter.”

“Takki, darling.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Takki. Best to get the little details right. I'm married to Takki Mavrocordatos. I sent you a card.”

“I believe you did.”

“Be nice to him, if you should run into him, darling. He's a sweetie, and at my time of life one has to be grateful . . .”

“Meaning he's about my age?”

“I didn't say
that
, darling. But if you
should
run across him—”

“I'll be nice,” said Antony, vowing to undertake the longest journey rather than run across Takki Mavrocordatos. “I will, Mother. See you some time. Be good, darling.”

“Oh Antony—too late!”

• • •

“Sue?”

“Oh, Jerry. How's it going?”

“Terrific. Absolutely terrific. Tremendous enthusiasm. You can tell people here aren't going to take any notice of that ‘Red Jerry' stuff the media are putting out. The media are here in droves, by the way.”

“That'll please you.”

“I was just ringing, Sue, about this business of your coming up here.”

“Oh, yes.”

“When we talked last you were a bit vague about when you would come.”

“No, I wasn't. I was vague about if I would come.”

“Come off it, Sue. You know I'm as anti as could be this idea of turning the by-election into a beauty parade or a Happy Families game, but—”

“But?”

“But you know what the Tory press is like: they're going to seize on the least little thing. And your not appearing wouldn't be a little thing in their eyes.”

“I've no objection to helping you, Jerry. I think you'd make a very good MP of a certain type. But—”

“Fine. Then shall we say a spot of canvassing the weekend after next, and then a little speech at a meeting, say a week or so before polling day?”

“You ignored my ‘but,' Jerry. You always ignore other people's ‘buts.' ”

“People have too many ‘buts.' Nothing but wholehearted commitment is good enough for me.”

“Well, you should try and hide that for the next three weeks. Ordinary people don't commit themselves wholeheartedly. My ‘but' is that I'm snowed under with work here, the dining-room table is laden down with five separate piles of case files. With these government cuts I'm being handed cases that—”

“Fine. Who better to make that point to people than you? I've got to raise your sights, Sue. You could make a really powerful plea for the sort of people a social worker comes in contact with.”

“Meanwhile Jenny Waddel half-starves from Saturday to Monday because her mum's on her own and she's a hopeless manager; Jimmy Cross gets burned with cigarette ends because his dad's a sadist; old Mrs Farraday dies of hypothermia because—”

“Sue—do you think I don't know about all this? Good God, haven't I spent my political life fighting for people like them?”

“I don't know, Jerry. Really, I don't know.”

“I want you here, Sue. Do you get me? I'm the only
major candidate who's married, and it could be a big plus in my favour. I don't want any questions. This is a thing that's tremendously important—to us. Do you understand?”

There was a pause.

“Yes, Jerry. I understand.”

• • •

Antony Craybourne-Fisk had had a hard day. He had shaken innumerable hands, patted the heads of babies (it was very
vieux jeu
to kiss them), had bellowed out uplifting slogans and poured out standard answers to predictable questions. This was his first encounter with broad Yorkshire, and sometimes his answers had been to questions quite different from the ones actually asked. Then in the evening he and Harold had mulled over the arrangements for the press conferences that began on Monday. Central Office had volunteered a whole array of cabinet ministers, to mark their sense of the importance of this by-election. The trouble was, the cabinet was composed almost exclusively of the dullest members of the parliamentary party. They had to get a leavening of bright sparks, but most of those were out of favour with Central Office. It was grinding work, and taxed Antony's powers of diplomacy to their limits. By nature Antony was a scrapper, and a dirty one, not a diplomatist.

When he arrived back at the Unicorn it was quarter to eleven. Thank God, just in time for a drink. Behind the bar, he was disgusted to find, was that same Gianni who had served him breakfast.

“A double Scotch.”

Gianni had only two or three words of English, and
had no intention of learning more. He stood there, eyelashes pointed with deadly precision.

“Whisky! Whisky, for God's sake!”

Ah yes. Whisky was one of the words Gianni knew. He uttered some Sicilian apparently signifying that as a favour to the gentleman he would fetch it.

“Double,” said Antony. And then, rather daringly,
“Ancora.”
He slapped down a fiver, and waited for Gianni to improvise some change.

He took a gulp at his whisky, then looked around the bar. Nobody. Utterly empty. He downed the glass, and then shoved it across the bar. Once more Gianni uttered in Sicilian, and once more as a favour he got the whisky. Antony gave him this time what he thought was a reasonable price, and with a shrug Gianni accepted.

When he had drained his glass a second time it was eleven o'clock. He got off his bar stool, and made for the door. By the door stood Gianni waiting to lock up. As Antony brushed past him, he took him by the arm and—Antony could have sworn—suggested that there was a further favour that he could do the gentleman, if the gentleman was so inclined. Antony gazed with horror at the eyelashes, now delicately fluttering.

“No,” he almost shouted. “No!”

When he got to his room he locked the door and lay on his bed. A momentary thought had struck him that
“No”
in Italian might mean “yes,” just as
“caldo”
meant “hot.” My God—that
would
be a way to begin a by-election campaign! He'd have to get out. He'd have to move to Penny's cottage. He'd ring her tomorrow and arrange it.

When Sutcliffe arrived in Bootham, he was three days short of the two weeks' grace his boss had given him.

“Expecting to find anything?” the Assistant Deputy Commissioner had asked him.

“Not in three days,” Sutcliffe had said.

“After that you've got leave, haven't you?”

“That's right.”

“Got any particular plans?”

“Yorkshire in February is said to be lovely,” said Sutcliffe, and they had both smiled a smile of complicity.

When he drove his car towards Bootham centre it was only half past ten, but already the electoral frenzy that according to the media was gripping the town seemed to have moved to the residential outskirts. The odd cameraman he saw, the odd mangy reporter waiting for the pubs to open, but otherwise people seemed to be going about their everyday business with scarcely a thought for the momentous decision they were to make
on February 27th. Sutcliffe parked his car, looked around the town unenthusiastically, and then chose a modest but not too grimy-looking hotel, and went in to Reception.

They looked at him as if he were mad.

The expression was reproduced on the faces of all the other reception clerks he approached, except for those who gazed at him with frank contempt.

“Don't you realize,” said one, “that all the world is looking to Bootham at the moment? You won't get a room here, not for love nor money. Far as the hotels are concerned, this is the best three weeks of our lives. The pubs are coining it hand over fist too. The focus of all eyes, that's what we are.”

“The cynosure,” said his assistant complacently, spreading the word out as if it were caviare.

“You'd best get in your car and try Rotherham or Sheffield,” advised the first.

But Sutcliffe didn't do that. He got out his map of Yorkshire and hunched over it to read the small print. He had got a fair idea of the area covered by Partridge's constituency from
The Times Guide to the House of Commons
, and he was looking for a place called Moreton within its boundaries. Finally he found a Moreton-in-Kirkdale which he decided must be the village where the Partridges had their cottage. He went back to his car and set off.

That wasn't altogether easy. It was rumoured in Bootham that the town's traffic system, designed by the anti-car sadist in the Town Hall, had already cost the sanity of ten journalists. Certainly one had been found slumped over the wheel of his car in a horrible
suburb, sobbing in a highly emotional manner. When Sutcliffe eventually discovered a way out, he also found he was not going in the direction of Moreton-in-Kirkdale, but with a bit of intelligent map-reading he finally made it on to the right road.

Moreton-in-Kirkdale was three or four streets, probably about five or six miles as the crow flies (if it was allowed to fly) from the outer suburbs of Bootham. Somewhere in these three or four streets, or in the straggle of cottages beyond, was presumably the Partridges' cottage. There were two pubs, and outside one of them there were a couple of cars with London registration plates. The late-comers among the journalistic contingent, Sutcliffe thought to himself. A board outside advertised
PUB FOOD
, with underneath:
ROOMS, HOMELY ATMOSPHERE, FAMILY HOLIDAYS
. That, presumably, was the role the Happy Dalesman had seen for itself before the Bootham area became the cynosure of the world's eyes. Sutcliffe pushed his way into the Saloon Bar, and asked the landlord if he had a spare room.

“Well, we do—just the one single. It is a single, is it?” The landlord looked at him cunningly. “It'll cost you £28 a night, but for that you get a full English breakfast.”

Things had come to a pretty pass, Sutcliffe thought, when something that one would only recently have taken for granted was offered as an extra of unimaginable luxury. The price was clearly ludicrous—upped sky-high and higher by the by-election. He took it, and accepted a key on a rusty twist of wire from the landlord.

The room was a box, with a bed and a washstand and a Gideon Bible. The lavatory was down the end of a creaking corridor, so that all and sundry could chart the state of one's bowels and bladder. All the walls had been distempered in pale green shortly after the Second World War, it seemed, and the Breakfast Room was another little box into which eight or nine tables had been fitted by some kind of conjuring trick. It was as bleak and comfortless as could be imagined. “Family” and “homely” here could only have the sort of connotations they have in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. If journalists were often posted off to dumps like this, perhaps they had good reason for going on the booze. Really there was nothing for it but to go back to the bar, which probably was the whole point.

The lunch-time rush had not started, but there were already two or three men whom Sutcliffe couldn't see as locals, crouched over beer or whisky. Sutcliffe ordered beer and a ham sandwich. (“You won't wait for our steak and veg pie? It's on at twelve. Very tasty.” Sutcliffe shook his head.) When they came he took them over to a table under the window.

“Give the canvassing a miss today, did you?” said the man in the corner—shabby, pot-bellied, with a pink complexion and hands perpetually grimed from reading too much newsprint. Sutcliffe nodded noncommittally. “Very wise. You see the bastards doing one morning's canvass, you've seen the lot. It writes itself after that. Woman slams door in Labour candidate's face. Pensioner shouts obscenities at Conservative candidate. You don't need to follow the smarmy bastards round to get stuff like that.”

“Home Secretary's coming tonight,” said another man at the next table. “Might liven things up a bit.”

“You can't have heard him speak, mate. The school prig addressing the school debating society, that's his style. Things won't liven up till we get Tony Benn here. Then we can lay on all the ‘red menace' stuff.”

The bar, which did not seem to have been properly cleaned for days, was full of broadsheets and handouts scattered in profusion on tables, chairs and floor: the daily Conservative newssheet, the Labour equivalent, notices of meetings, polemics on specific issues, rushed duplicated sheets trumpeting or discounting the latest opinion poll results. Sutcliffe's eye was taken by a collection of the election addresses of each of the main candidates, on the back of which were their potted campaign biographies, printed in the appropriate colours. He made a collection of the three main parties' efforts, and began to read them.

“Old stuff that, mate,” said his pot-bellied reporter friend. “Been out all of three days.”

“Interesting, though,” said Sutcliffe, and so in their way they were.