The Malcontents (12 page)

As a matter of record, they had moved from step to step with something like the logic or escalation of action. Neil’s initial find about the rack-renting was both innocent and genuine: so was their indignation: so was their realization that they could use it in their cause. The chain of tenants, culminating in the ground landlord, the Shadow Minister, was quite authentic.

What was not so innocent was the connection they had made between these finds. Simply – and for different reasons with no qualms – Neil and Lance Forrester had persuaded, using a straightforward bribe in the process, the man Finlayson to implicate both agents and the landlord. Stephen and Mark had known of this soon afterwards. They didn’t like it, but Stephen hadn’t stopped it, or tried to. It stiffened the case, it enriched the cause. There was a price to pay in scruple: which had allowed Lance to make his jeers about prime specimens of honesty, that last Sunday night in Neil’s room.

But it had escalated further. Through their contacts, similar groups in other universities, they knew they were on to a big thing and, in a phrase they kept hearing, ‘something real’. Journalists, press and TV were drawn in: ‘we’ll blow this up,’ they said. So were one or two politicians. This was a chance to bring down the Shadow Minister for good. With a bit more trimming, his character could be killed off. This was not directly political, in the English party sense. Most of those involved would have been just as happy, or more so, if they could have done the same character-killing of a Labour front bencher. The most ardent adviser was, in fact, a journalist of the irregular right. To him, it would be a stroke against what he called ‘the system’.

To Stephen, that kind of thinking was crassly simple. But the machinations weren’t. They led into what became a conspiracy of defamation. It was that which Thomas Freer had heard of, as a ground for legal action, though his informants couldn’t at that time have learned the full story.

One interesting thing was, none of them knew, or gave a thought to, the man whom they were aiming at. To themselves, among themselves, they could be sensitive: but they didn’t, not even the most imaginative of them, even when they were coming frank about the ethics of situations (or what the Bishop would have recognized as the theology of cases), speak of him as though he were a man.

In that, they made a practical mistake. For the Shadow Minister was an unusual man for a politician: not because of his dangerous or attacking qualities, but the reverse. He was a gentle soul, with a touch of defenceless paranoia. Like others with that kind of temperament – so rare in politics that people in Whitehall couldn’t understand how he had got so far – he inspired protectiveness in others. That was why, so inexplicably to outsiders, security officers had been devoting what seemed a disproportionate amount of attention to the activities of the core. Neil’s picture of security resources was exaggerated, a conspirator’s image in reverse. Stephen had been correct in observing, at the Monday meeting, that they would be flattering themselves to think that they were worth much in the way of professional security surveillance. The security service wasn’t without its intelligence in universities. There was a shortish file on Neil in a London office, since he had for a time carried a party card. Lance’s drug purchases hadn’t passed unsuspected by the police. Normally, that would have been all.

But, owing to the Shadow Minister’s personality, things hadn’t proceeded normally. In his previous term of office, he had been on close terms with a couple of security chiefs. They liked him: they saw he was in trouble: they discovered why: they set their apparatus going. As a matter of duty, they would have done something for other politicians in trouble. But here they went rather beyond the line of duty. As it happened, they had some help from inside.

Nearly twenty minutes early, it was not yet a quarter to five, Stephen and Tess stood outside the New Walk apartment block. After Stephen rang the bell, they heard the buzz and Lance’s jaunty voice down the intercom.

In his sitting-room he looked to Stephen as though he hadn’t stirred out since the morning. He had, it was true, taken off his dressing-gown and changed from pyjama trousers into jeans: otherwise he might just have got up, not precisely sleepy but not ready to recognize that the day had begun.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I thought you two would come.’

Just as in the morning, Stephen couldn’t match that tone, and Tess set herself not to be provoked.

‘Plenty of time to wait,’ Lance went on. ‘It will be interesting to see who comes, won’t it?’

Neither of them replied. Stephen, who didn’t often smoke, lit a cigarette.

‘Oh, hell,’ said Lance, ‘you can’t say it won’t be interesting, can you?’

‘I want to get this over.’ Stephen spoke impatiently and sternly, and for a moment Lance stopped gibing. Then he began again: ‘Did you ever play last across?’

‘No.’

‘Nor did I. Too carefully brought up, that was the trouble. Very precious we were, weren’t we?’ He looked at Tess. ‘Were you precious too, duckie?’

She couldn’t tell whether he was lit up. He sounded quite coherent, maddeningly and indifferently so. Suddenly her unassertive manner fell away, and she said, with firm flat authority: ‘Drop it. We’re not playing.’

Lance gazed, eyes hooded, at the two taut faces. He wasn’t put down. He said: ‘It isn’t going to be a bit like last across, you know it isn’t.’ He drew no response at all, and the room fell quiet. Then the bell rang, and even Lance, quick on his feet, appeared glad to hear it.

It was Neil.

‘Welcome,’ said Lance. ‘I’d have liked a bet on the next arrival.’

Neil nodded to the others. He didn’t pay special attention to Lance, as though unsurprised that he was present and the meeting going according to plan. Dislike, even suspicion, much nearer the nerve of living than dislike and so much more ineradicable, seemed to have become neutralized by now: or at least there were neutral intervals, curiously lacking in personal exchanges, as they sat there while their watches ticked on towards five o’clock.

Another ring of the bell. It took between twenty and thirty seconds for someone to push on the outside door and climb upstairs. Twenty seconds is a long time. When Emma entered, all their eyes were already watching: and immediately she looked round, counting who was there.

‘Well,’ she said trailingly.

The next to come was Bernard. Some of the greetings were louder by now, and it would have been difficult to tell whether they were heartier or more strained. He said good afternoon and went over to a chair. Everyone else was sitting unoccupied, but he took out a small writing pad and began to make some notes.

Five o’clock had just passed. No one said it, but Mark had not come. Several of them, Emma first, without a word spoken, had begun to walk about the room. Although it was a January evening, there was light enough to see from the windows people in the road below.

All of a sudden, Emma, standing by the side window close to which Lance had drunk his coffee that morning, cried out: ‘There he is!’

It was a strong cry, but the excitement had died out of it. Stephen gazed down to the pavement, five storeys beneath, and saw, in the last of the sunset, Mark’s hair shining like an oriflamme.

As soon as he entered the room, he said: ‘I’m so sorry I’m late. I had a bit of trouble with the car.’ He apologized with an embracing smile, with the manners that were both first and second nature.

Neil said: ‘We’re all here, then.’

There was a pause, until Lance gave a creaking yell of a laugh.

‘What else in Christs’ name did anyone expect?’

Others were laughing, as though the let-down was a relief, as though they had forgotten the moment in which they stood – or perhaps as though they wanted it to linger. Tess watched Stephen, unable to restrain, for an instant, a sardonic smile, which she had seen when he was happy. Emma said: ‘Have we got it all wrong? Is there a chance we’ve got it wrong?’

She meant, could they all have been loyal after all. She asked like one grasping at a new hope and wanting to believe. Not quite at once, but after an instant’s silence, Mark said: ‘I’m sorry.’

He said it gently but with certainty.

‘What are you getting at?’ Emma asked harshly, but she knew.

‘We’ve not got it wrong.’

‘How can you tell–’

‘No. I know.’

‘We don’t believe in bleeding clairvoyance,’ said Neil. ‘You’d better explain how.’

‘I can’t. But I know.’

Stephen was certain who was Mark’s source, and Lance could make a guess. In fact, though, the others were convinced. The moment of hope – and it had been a moment of hope – had vanished. They were back with the harsh clarities of the night before. Even though Neil had started to argue, his tone had been tired and resigned. Now he said: ‘Oh, have it your own way. Then where do we go from here?’

In the high room, all lights switched on, faces had become guarded once more. Again each was hesitating before he spoke. Until Lance shouted: ‘I’ll tell you where we go. We’re going to have the hell of a good party. If it’s the last thing we do.’

He added with a sidelong grin: ‘Of course it may be.’

Astonishing as it seemed afterwards, their mood had swung, wildly swung, and they were to remember afterwards that none of them said no. More than that, Lance, that odd-man-out, had touched a trigger releasing unknown forces.

There was one level voice. Unobtrusive, matter-of-fact, Bernard said: ‘Isn’t there work to do?’

As they looked at him, quietened, he went on: ‘We ought to settle the contingency plan. Plan B2.’

That was the plan which they had argued about, which Neil had pressed, on the two preceding nights. If the exposure was coming within days – still none of them knew their enemies’ timing, nor whether it was fixed – then they should get their own attack in first. Some of it would be ragged: their political contacts weren’t ready, though most of their press was. It could be mounted within seventy-two hours, by Thursday afternoon. It wouldn’t be the operation they had planned for. Nevertheless they wouldn’t have been silenced.

Although Neil, with his ally Emma, had demanded a decision the night before, they hadn’t made one. For a reason which didn’t need saying, and had, with the curious delicacy of distrust, not been said. They could name a date – but then security would be broken again. All they were arranging, there was someone to listen to. The realization had the crystal sharpness of paranoia, except that it was true. They assumed – certainly Stephen assumed – that this talk of the contingency plan had already been reported.

That would be so with what they decided that night. Yet did it matter? Either/or. Either wait, and the other side got in and stopped you. Or mount the plan, knowing it will have been leaked by next morning: in which case you might still be stopped. But there was a finite chance that way, against a certainty.

‘That may be right,’ said Stephen, in answer to Bernard. But though Stephen’s intellect gave a clear answer, he had to control himself to sound positive and give a lead.

‘Of course it’s right,’ said Neil.

At once they began to take part in a committee meeting. In the future some of them recalled it as the strangest committee meeting they had had: on the spot there was nothing outwardly strange about it. The sense of a spy among them flickered in and out of minds but it may have been more omnipresent in retrospect than there, in the prosaic well-lit room, discussing in the business like fashion they had used so many times before.

By this time they were all trained to business. When the others applied themselves, so did Lance. They were as competent as a meeting of officials – probably more so, certainly less long-winded, than a meeting of executives at Mark’s father’s firm. The standard of relevance was high. The proceedings were quite short, all over in less than half an hour. At any meeting of decision, as opposed to theorizing, they had always taken secret minutes, kept by Bernard, and deposited in a safe at Stephen’s bank. The minute of that meeting had its own terse eloquence.

Moved:
   To put plan B2 in operation by 6.00 p.m. Friday, 16 January, 1970.

In favour: St John, Forrester, Knott, Kelshall.

Against: Boltwood, Robinson.

Carried

There hadn’t been a vote on paper. Stephen had asked each of them where he stood, for or against, and had then, with what seemed to others like uncharacteristic indifference, not cast a vote himself.

‘That’s all,’ said Lance, after Bernard had read out the minute.

‘Perhaps that’s all for tonight,’ said Stephen.

‘We can’t do anything tonight,’ Lance looked round. ‘Right?’

‘Right,’ said Neil.

‘Now it’s a party,’ Lance proclaimed. ‘Anything you like.’

Again the mood swung. A good many people, including some of those in the room that night, elected to face a disaster, and even more an issue hanging undecided, stone cold, without any softening to the nerves. As a rule, that was so with Stephen. But not this time. He too, before he began to drink, had already been taken into the collective mood. When he did drink, the mood – it was something like well-being – ran through his bloodstream and his senses. A first whisky wouldn’t usually affect him like this: in the fashion of his kind of family, he had been used to alcohol since he was a child. Yet, after another whisky, he was gazing round at his companions with euphoria, with yearning, with hope. There was Bernard, across the room, near the side window, sipping at a glass of beer: he had never seen Bernard with a drink before. Closer at hand, Lance was standing by the sofa, and Stephen listened to him exhorting Emma: ‘Come on, girl. Take a trip.’

Any other night, Stephen would have told her not to. Now he watched, the sight was sharp, the sounds were pleasant, as Emma answered: ‘Oh, I don’t mind if I do,’ and Lance picked up a bottle and poured a few drops into her gin.

Stephen wasn’t drunk, or even getting drunk, nor was anyone there. Yet excitement, strain, perhaps even lack of sleep, blended with alcohol, had brought him – and this was true of others – into a state of synaesthesia, in which the senses were confused, bright lights clanging like noise, cries, laughter approaching and receding like light and dark. So that the room was a riot of confusion, sights and sounds clashing and bringing pleasure, resonating with each other as from the interior of a telescoping cave. Together with that synaesthesia, there was another confusion, as though feelings had become blended too, so that, more soothing than at any time since last Saturday night, it seemed simultaneously that nothing would happen and that all that would happen would dissolve into ease.