John LeCarre - A New Collection of Three Novels Part 27

"Like you were in the German Army at Grimble's," Sefton Boyd suggested. "Like you were Himmler's aunt at Willow's. Like you f.u.c.ked Willow's wife and your father carried messages for Winston Churchill."

A day came, long spoken of and frequently postponed, when Michael took Pym home to meet his family. "Double First material," Michael warned him in an advance write-up of his spouse. "Mind like a dart. No mercy." Mrs. Michael turned out to be a ravenous, fast-fading woman in a slashed skirt and a low blouse over an unappetising chest. While her husband did things in his shed, where he appeared to live, Pym inexpertly mixed the Yorkshire pudding and fought off her embraces until he was obliged to take refuge with the children on the lawn. When it rained he marched them to the drawing-room and posted them round him in self-defence while he pushed their d.i.n.ky toys.

"Magnus, what are your father's initials?" Mrs. Michael said bossily from the doorway. I remember her voice, querulous and interrogative, as if I had just eaten her last chocolate instead of refusing to pop upstairs with her to bed.

"R.T.," said Pym.

She was trailing a copy of a Sunday newspaper in her hand and must have been reading it in the kitchen.

"Well, it says here that there's an R. T. Pym standing as Liberal Candidate for Gulworth North. He's described as a philanthropist and property broker. There can't be two, can there?"

Pym took the paper from her. "No," he agreed, staring at Rick's Portrait of Self with Red Setter. "There can't."

"Only you could have told us. I mean you're terribly rich and superior, I know, but a thing like that is jolly exciting if you're people like us."

Sick with apprehension Pym returned to Oxford and forced himself to read, if only glancingly, the last four letters from Rick that he had tossed unopened in his desk drawer, next to Axel's copy of Grimmelshausen and other unpaid bills.

Inside his camel-hair dressing-gown Pym at fifty-three was shivering. It had come over him suddenly, as it sometimes did, a fever without a temperature. He had been writing for as long as he had been awake, which to judge by his beard was a long time. The shiver turned to a shake, which was how it went. It twisted his neck muscles and gnawed at the backs of his thighs. He started to sneeze. The first sneeze was long and speculative. The second followed it like an answering shot. They're fighting over me, he thought: the good guys and the bad guys are shooting it out inside me. Whoops: O G.o.d receive my soul. Whoops: O Lord forgive him, for he knew not what he did. Rising, he held one hand over his mouth and with the other turned up the gas fire. Clutching himself, he began a prisoner's tour of the room's perimeter, dipping into his knees with each stride. From a corner of Miss Dubber's carpet he paced ten feet, made a right angle and paced eight more. He stopped and surveyed the rectangle he had measured. How did Rick endure it? he asked himsel How did Axel? He raised his arms, comparing the cell's breadth with his own wingspan. "Christ," he whispered aloud. "I'll hardly fit."

Picking up the reinforced briefcase which he had still not opened, he carried it to the fire and sat there, brows drawn, eyes glowering at the flames while the shaking grew more violent. Rick should have died when I killed him. Pym whispered the words out loud, daring himself to hear it. "You should have died when I killed you." He returned to his desk and took up his pen. Every line written is a line behind me. You do it once, then die. He wrote fast. And as he wrote, he began to smile again. Love is whatever you can still betray, he thought. Betrayal can only happen if you love.Mary too was praying. She was kneeling on her school ha.s.sock with her eyes plunged into the night-time of her palms and she was praying that she was not at school any more but at their little Saxon church in Plush that went with the estate, with her father and brother kneeling protectively to either side of her and their Colonel the Reverend High Anglican vicar barking out his fire orders and rattling the incense like a mess-gong. Or that she was kneeling at her own bedside in her own room in her nightdress with her hair brushed and her bottom pushed out, praying that n.o.body would make her go to boarding-school again. Yet however much Mary prayed and begged, she knew that she wasn't going anywhere but where she was: in the English church in Vienna where I come every Wednesday for early service, in common with the usual band of upwardly mobile Christians led by the British Amba.s.sadress and the American Minister's wife and supported by Caroline Lumsden, Bee Lederer and a heavy contingent of Dutch, Norwegians and also-rans from the German Emba.s.sy next door. Fergus and Georgie are roosting in the pew behind me without a pious thought between them, it's Tom not me who is at boarding-school and it is Magnus not G.o.d who is all-pervasive, all-knowing yet invisible and who holds the keys to all our destinies. So Magnus you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, if there is any truth left in you at all, do me a favour will you and lean out of your firmament and advise me, of your infinite goodness and wisdom---just for once with no lies, evasion or decoration--what the h.e.l.l I am supposed to do about your dear old friend from Corfu cricket ground who is sitting not praying in the same pew as myself just across the aisle on the bride's side--is slender and drooping with a pepper-and-salt moustache and bottleneck shoulders, exactly as Tom described him right down to the cobwebby lines of laughter round his eyes and the grey raincoat wrapped around his shoulders like a cape. For this is neither the first appearance of your grey angel nor the second. It is the third and the most imaginative in two days, and each time that I do nothing about it I feel him draw a step nearer to me, and if you don't come back soon and tell me what to do, you may very well find us in bed together, because after all, as you used to a.s.sure me in Berlin, you can't beat a little s.e.x for breaking the tension and removing social barriers.

Giles Marriott the English chaplain was inviting all those of a pure heart and humble mind to draw near with faith. Mary stood up, straightened her skirt and stepped into the aisle. Caroline Lumsden and her husband were ahead of her but the ethics of piety required that they greet one another after and not before the Sacrament. Georgie and Fergus stayed firmly in their pew, too high-minded to sacrifice their agnosticism for cover. More likely they just don't know what to do, thought Mary. Clasping her hands to her chin, she quickly ducked her head again in prayer. Oh G.o.d, oh Magnus, oh Jack, tell me what to do now! He is standing a foot behind me, I can smell his stale cigar smoke. Tom had mentioned that too. At the airport, as an afterthought: "He smoked little cigars, Mum, like Dad used to when he was giving up cigarettes!" And he has limped along his pew. He has limped into the aisle. A dozen people or more had fallen in behind Mary, including the Amba.s.sadress, her spotty daughter and a flock of Americans. Yet a limp is a limp and good Christians stop for it and smile and let it go ahead, and there he was behind her, the privileged recipient of everybody's charity. And still each time the queue takes a pace nearer to the altar he limps as intimately as if he were patting me on the b.u.m. Mary had never known such an insinuating, impudent, flagrant limp in all her life. His merry eyes were burning her back, she could feel them. She could feel her neck burning and her face heating as the moment of divine consummation approached. At the altar rail Jenny Forbes, the Administration Officer's wife, was genuflecting before retiring to her seat. As well she might, the way she's carrying on with the new young Chancery guard. Mary stepped forward gratefully and kneeled in her place. Get off my back you creep, stay your own side. The creep did, but by then his softly murmured words were bellowing inside her head like a bullhorn. "I can help you find him. I will send a message to the house."

In choral unison the questions were shrieking inside Mary's head. Send how? A message saying what? To instruct her in the causes of her disloyalty? To explain to her why, as she was leaving yesterday's International Ladies' bunfight, she had not flung out an accusing arm at him as he smiled at her from across the street? Why she had not screamed "Arrest that man!" to Georgie and Fergus who were parked not forty feet from the doorway he emerged from--jauntily, no hood was ever like that? Or again when he appeared not six yards from her at Swab's supermarket?

Giles Marriott was gazing down at her in puzzlement, offering her for the second time the body of Christ which was given for her. Hastily Mary placed her hands as she had been taught since childhood--right over left and make a cross with them. He laid the wafer on her palm. She raised it to her lips and felt it stick, then lie like a log on her dry tongue. No, I am not worthy, she thought wretchedly as she waited for the chalice. It's true. I am not worthy to come to this Thy table or anybody else's table either. Every moment I fail to denounce him is another moment of disloyalty. He is tempting me and I am hearing him for all I am worth. He is drawing me to him and I am saying yes please. I am saying, "I will come to you for the sake of Magnus and my child." I am saying, "I will come to you if you are clarity, even if you are evil. Because I am searching for a light, any light at all, and going half off my head in the darkness. I will come to you because you are the other half of Magnus, and therefore the other half of me."

As she walked back to her seat she caught Bee Lederer's eye. They exchanged pious smiles.

11.

There was never a by-election like it, Tom, there was never an election like it. We are born, we get married, we divorce, we die. But somewhere along the way, if we get the chance, we should also stand as Liberal Candidate for the ancient fishing and weaving const.i.tuency of Gulworth North situated in the remoter fens of East Anglia in the unlit post-war years before television replaced the Temperance Hall, and communications were such that a man's character could be born again by removing it a hundred and fifty miles north-east of London. If we do not have the luck to stand ourselves, then the least we can do is drop everything from crypto-Communism to unconsummated s.e.xual exploration and, forgetting the later Minnesanger, hasten to our father's side in the Hour of his Greatest Test to shiver on icy doorsteps for him, and charm votes out of old ladies in the manner in which he has instructed us, and see them right if it kills us, and tell the world by loudspeaker what a crackerjack fellow he is, and that they will never want for anything again, and promise ourselves, and mean it, that as soon as polling day is over we will forsake all other lives and take our place among the working cla.s.ses where our hearts and origins have always been, as witness our clandestine espousal of the workers' cause during the formative years of our studentship.

It was deep winter when Pym arrived and it is winter still, for I have never been back, I never dared. The same snow lies over the fens and marshes and freezes Quixote's windmills to a standstill against the cindery Flemish sky. The same steepled towns dangle from the sea's horizon, the Brueghel faces of our electorate are as pink with zeal as they were those three decades ago. Our Candidate's convoy, led by the lifelong Liberal Mr. Cudlove and his precious cargo, still bears the message from chalky schoolroom to paraffin-heated hall, skidding and cursing over country lanes while Our Candidate broods and downs another wet, and Sylvia and Major Maxwell-Cavendish fight in undertones over the Ordnance Survey map. In my memory our campaign is a drama tour of the theatre of the politically absurd as we advance across snow and marshland upon Gulworth's majestic Town Hall itself--hired against all advice from those who said we'd never fill it, but we did--for Our Candidate's Positively Last Appearance. There suddenly the comedy stops dead. The masks and fools' bells come clattering to the stage as G.o.d in one simple question presents us with His bill for all our fun till here.

Evidence, Tom. Facts.

Here is Rick's rosette of yellow silk that he wore for his great night. It was run up for him by the same luckless tailor who made his racing colours. Here is the centre-page spread from the Gulworth Mercury next day. Read all about it for yourself. CANDIDATE DEFENDS HIS HONOUR. SAYS LET GULWORTH NORTH BE THE JUDGE. See the picture of the podium with its illuminated organ pipes and curving staircase? All we need is Makepeace Watermaster. See your grandfather, Tom, centre stage, hacking at the speckled beams of the spotlights, and your father peeking coyly from behind him, forelock at the slope? Hear the thunder of the great saint's piety rising into the wagon roof, do you? Pym knows every word of Rick's speech by heart, every hammy gesture and inflection. Rick is describing himself as an honest trader who will devote "my life for as long as I am spared, and as long as you deem in your wisdom that you require me," to the service of the const.i.tuency, and he's about five seconds from making a swipe with his left forearm to cut off the heads of the Unbelievers. Fingers closed and slightly curled as ever. He is telling us that he's a humble Christian and a father and a straight dealer, and he's going to rid Gulworth North of the twin heresies of High Toryism and Low Socialism, though sometimes in his teetotal fervour he gets them the wrong way round. He also hates excess. It really churns him up. Now comes the good news. You can hear it from the faith in his voice. With Rick as its Member of Parliament, Gulworth North will undergo a Renaissance beyond its dreams. Its moribund herring trade shall rise from its bed and walk. Its decaying textile industry shall bring forth milk and honey. Its farms shall be freed of Socialist bureaucracy and become the envy of the world. Its crumbling railways and ca.n.a.ls shall be miraculously cut loose from the toils of the Industrial Revolution. Its streets shall run with liquidity. Its aged shall have their savings protected against Confiscation by the State, its menfolk shall be spared the ignominies of conscription. Pay-As-You-Earn taxation shall go and so shall all the other iniquities that are featured in the Liberal Manifesto which Rick has partly read but believes in totally.

So far so good, but tonight is our final curtain and Rick has worked up something special. Daringly he turns his back to the punters and addresses his faithful supporters ranged behind him on the dais. He is about to thank us. Watch. "First my darling Sylvia, without whom nothing could have been accomplished--thank you, Sylvia, thank you! Let's have a big hand for Sylvia my Queen!" The punters oblige with enthusiasm. Sylvia pulls the gracious smile for which she is retained. Pym is expecting to be called next but he is not. Rick's blue gaze has steel in it tonight, the glow is on him. More voice and less breath to his bombast. Shorter sentences but the champ throws them harder. He thanks the Chairman of the Gulworth Liberal Party and his very lovely lady wife--Marjory, my dear, don't be shy, where are you?--He thanks our miserable Liberal agent, an unbeliever called Donald Somebody, see the caption, who since the court's arrival on his territory has retired into a fuming sulk from which he has only tonight emerged. He thanks our transport lady whom Mr. Muspole claims to have favoured in the snooker room, and a Miss Somebody Else who made sure Your Candidate was never once late for a meeting--laughter-- though Morrie Washington swears she isn't safe to be sat with in the back. He pa.s.ses "to these other gallant and faithful helpers of mine." Morrie and Syd leer like a pair of reprieved murderers from the back row, Mr. Muspole and Major Maxwell-Cavendish prefer to scowl. It is there in the photograph, Tom, look for yourself. Next to Morrie roosts an inebriated radio comedian whose failing reputation Rick has contrived to harness to our campaign, just as in the last weeks he has wheeled in witless cricketers and t.i.tled owners of hotel chains and other so-called Liberal personalities, marching them through town like prisoners and tossing them back to London when they have served their brief span of usefulness.

Now take another look at Magnus seated on the right hand of his maker. Rick arrives at him last and every word he shouts at him is replete with secret knowledge and reproach. "He won't tell you himself so I will. He's too modest. This boy of mine here is one of the finest students of law this country has yet seen and not only this country either. He could hold this speech in five different languages and do it better than I can in any one of them." Laughter. Cries of "Shame!" and "No, no." "But that never stopped him from working his feet off for his old man throughout this campaign. Magnus, you've been crackerjack, old son, and your old man's best pal. Here's to you!"

But the dinning ovation does nothing to alleviate Pym's anguish. In the lonely reality of being Pym and listening to Rick resume his speech, his heart is beating in terror while he counts off the cliches and waits for the explosion that will destroy the candidate and his bold tissue of deceptions forev-ermore. It will blow the wagon roof and its gilded bearings into the night sky. It will smash the very stars that provide the grand finale of Rick's speech.

"People will say to you," cries Rick, on a note of ever-mounting humility, "and they've said it to me--they've stopped me in the street--touched my arm--'Rick,' they say, 'what is Liberalism except a package of ideals? We can't eat ideals, Rick,' they say. 'Ideals don't buy us a cup of tea or a nice touch of English lamb chop, Rick, old boy. We can't put our ideals in the collection box. We can't pay for our son's education with ideals. We can't send him out into the world to take his place in the highest law courts of the land with nothing but a few ideals in his pocket. So what's the point, Rick?' they say to me, 'in this modern world of ours, of a party of ideals?'" The voice drops. The hand, till now so agitated, reaches out palm downward to cup the head of an invisible child. "And I say to them, good people of Gulworth, and I say to you too!" The same hand flies upward and points to Heaven as Pym in his sickly apprehension sees the ghost of Makepeace Watermaster leap from its pulpit and fill the Town Hall with a dismal glow. "I say this. Ideals are like the stars. We cannot reach them, but we profit by their presence!"

Rick has never been better, more pa.s.sionate, more sincere. The applause rises like an angry sea, the faithful rise with it. Pym rises with the faithful, pummelling his hands together loudest of us all. Rick weeps. Pym is on the brink. The good people have their Messiah, the Liberals of Gulworth North have too long been a flock without a shepherd; no Liberal candidate has stood here since the war. At Rick's side our local Liberal Party Chairman is smacking his yeoman's paws together and rhubarbing ecstatically into Rick's ear. At Rick's back, the whole court is following Pym's example, standing, clapping, rah-rahing "Rick for Gulworth!" Thus reminded, Rick turns to them yet again and, taking his cue from any number of the variety shows he loves, indicates the court to the people, saying: "You owe it to them, not to me." But once more his blue eyes are on Pym, saying, "Judas, patricide, murderer of your best pal."

Or so it seems to Pym.

For this is exactly the moment, this is exactly where everyone is standing and beaming and clapping, when the bomb that Pym has planted goes off: Rick with his back to the enemy, his face upon Pym and his beloved helpers, half ready, I think, to break into a rousing song. Not "Underneath the Arches," it is too secular, but "Onward, Christian Soldiers" will be first rate. When suddenly the din takes sick and dies on its feet in front of us, and a freezing silence slips in after it as if somebody has flung open the great doors of the Town Hall and let in the vengeful angels of the past.

Someone unreliable has spoken from under the minstrel gallery where the press sits. At first the acoustics are so lousy they do not allow us more than a few querulous notes, but already the notes are subversive. The speaker tries again but louder. She is not a person yet, merely a d.a.m.ned woman, with the kind of piping, strident Irish voice that menfolk instinctively detest, wheedling you with its impotence in the same breath as its cause. A man shouts "Silence^ woman," then "Be quiet," and then "Shut up, you b.i.t.c.h!" Pym recognises the port-fed voice of Major Blenkinsop. The major is a Free-Trader and a rural Fascist from the embarra.s.sing Right of our great movement. But the scratchy Irish voice prevails like a door squeak that will not go away, and no amount of slamming or oiling seems able to silence it. Some tiresome Home-Ruler probably. Ah good, somebody has got hold of her. It is the major again--see his bald head and yellow rosette of office. He is calling her "My good madame," of all things, and manhandling her towards the door. But the freedom of the press prevents him. The hacks are leaning over the balcony shouting "What's your name, miss?" and even "Yell it at him again!" Major Blenkinsop is suddenly neither a gentleman nor an officer but an upper-cla.s.s lout with a screaming Irishwoman on his hands. Other women are yelling "Leave her be!" and "Get your hands off her, you dirty swine." Somebody shouts "Black and Tan b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

Then we hear her, then we see her, both clearly. She is small and furious in black, a widowed shrew. She wears a pill-box hat. A bit of black veil hangs from it by a corner, ripped aside by herself or someone else. With the perversity of a crowd, everybody wants to hear her. She begins her question for perhaps the third time. Her brogue comes from the front of the mouth and appears to be spoken through a smile, but Pym knows it is no smile but die grimace of a hatred too powerful to be kept inside her. She speaks each word as she has learned it, in the order she has arranged them. The formulation is offensive in its clarity.

"I wish to know please--whether it is true---i! you would be so kind, sir--that the Liberal Parliamentary Candidate for the Const.i.tuency of Gulworth North--has served a prison sentence for swindle and embezzlement. Thank you very much for your consideration."

And Rick's face on Pym while her arrow shoots him in the back. Rick's blue eyes opening wide on impact, but still steady on Pym--exactly as they were five days ago, when he lay in his ice-bath with his feet crossed and his eyes open, saying, "Killing me is not enough, old son."

Come back ten days with me, Tom. The excited Pym has arrived from Oxford light of heart, determined as a protector of the nation to throw his changeful weight behind the democratic process and have some fun in the snow. The campaign is in full cry but the trains to Gulworth have a way of petering out at Norwich. It is weekend and G.o.d has ruled that English by-elections be held on Thursdays, even if He has long forgotten why. It is evening: the Candidate and his cohorts are on the stomp. But as Pym alights bag in hand at Norwich's imposing railway station, there stands faithful Syd Lemon at the barrier with a campaign car plastered with the Pym regalia waiting to whisk him to the main meeting of the evening, scheduled for nine o'clock in the village of Little Chedworth-on-the-Water, where according to Syd the last missionary was eaten for tea. The car's windows are darkened with posters saying "PYM THE PEOPLE'S MAN." Rick's great head--the one, as I now know, that he had quite likely sold--is pasted to the boot. A loudspeaker bigger than a ship's cannon is wired to the roof. A foil moon is up. Snow covers the fields and Paradise is all around.

"Let's drive to St. Moritz," Pym says as Syd hands him one of Meg's meat pies, and Syd laughs and musses Pym's hair. Syd is not an attentive driver but the lanes are empty and the snow is kind. He has brought a ginger ale bottle filled with whisky. As they meander between the laden hedges they swallow big mouthfuls. Thus fortified, Syd briefs Pym on the state of the battle.

"We favour free worship, t.i.tch, and we're mustard for Home Ownership for All with Less Red Tape."

"We always were," says Pym, and Syd gives him the hairy eyeball in case he's being cheeky.

"We take a poor view of ubiquitous High Toryism in all its forms--"

"Iniquitous," Pym corrects him, sipping again from the ginger ale bottle.

"Our Candidate is proud of his record as an English Patriot and Churchman. He's a Merchantman of England who has fought for his country, Liberalism being the only right road for Britain. He's been educated in the University of the World, he's never touched a drop of the hard stuff in his life, nor have you, and don't forget it." He grabbed back the ginger ale bottle and took a long, teetotal draught.

"But will he win?" said Pym.

"Listen. If you'd have come in here with ready money on the day your dad announced his intention, you could have had fifty to one. By the time me and Lord Muspole showed up he was down to twenty-fives and we took a ton each. Next morning after he done his adoption you couldn't get tens. He's nine to two now and shrinking and I'll have a small wager with you that come polling day he's evens. Now ask me whether he'll win."

"What's the compet.i.tion?"

"There isn't any. The Labour boy's a Scottish schoolmaster from Glasgow. Got a red beard. Small bloke. Looks like a mouse peering out of a red bear's backside. Old Muspole sent a couple of the lads round the other night to cheer up one of his meetings. Put them in kilts and gave them football rattles and had them roaring round the streets till morning. Gulworth doesn't hold with rowdiness, t.i.tch. They take a very poor view of the Labour Candidate's drunken friends singing 'Little Nellie of the Glen' at three in the morning on the church steps."

The car slides gracefully towards a windmill. Syd rights it and they proceed.

"And the Tory?"

"The Tory is everything a Tory candidate should be with k.n.o.bs on. He's a landed pukka sahib who toils one day a week in the City, rides to hounds, gives beads to the natives and wants to bring back the thumbscrew for first offenders. His wife opens garden fetes with her teeth."

"But who's our traditional mainstay?" asks Pym, remembering his social history.

"The G.o.d-thumpers are solid for him, so's the Masons, so's the Old Nellies. The teetotallers are a cakewalk, so's the anti-betting league so long as they don't read the form books and I'll thank you not to mention the neverwozzers, t.i.tch, they've been put out to gra.s.s for the duration. The rest are a pig in a poke. The sitting member was a Red but he's dead. The last election gave him five thousand majority on a straight race with the Tory, but look at the Tory. The total poll was thirty-five thousand but since then another five thousand juvenile delinquents have been enfranchised and two thousand geriatrics have pa.s.sed on to a better life. The farmers are nasty, the fishermen are broke and the hoi polloi don't know their w.i.l.l.i.e.s from their elbows."

Switching on the interior light Syd allows the car to steer itself while he reaches into the back and fishes out an imposing red-and-black pamphlet with a photograph of Rick on the front cover. Flanked by somebody's adoring spaniels, he is reading a book before an unfamiliar fireside, a thing he has never done in his life. "A Letter to the Electorate of Gulworth North," runs the caption. The paper, in defiance of the prevailing austerity, is high gloss.

"We are also supported by the ghost of Sir Codpiece Makewater, V.C.," Syd adds with particular relish. "Peruse our rear page."

Pym did so and discovered a ruled box resembling a Swiss obituary notice:A FINAL NOTE.Your Candidate derives his proudest political inspiration from his childhood Mentor and Friend, Sir Makepeace Watermaster, M.P., the World Famous Liberal and Christian Employer whose stern but Fair hand following his Father's untimely Death guided him past Youth's many Pitfalls to his present Highly consolidated position which brings him into daily Contact with the Highest in the Land.

Sir Makepeace was a man of G.o.d-fearing Family, an Abstainer, an orator who knew no Equal without whose Shining inspiration it is safe to say Your Candidate might never have presumed to put myself forward for the Historic Judgment of the people of Gulworth North which has already become a Home from home for me, and if elected I shall obtain a Major property here at the earliest convenience.

Your Candidate proposes to Dedicate himself to your interests with the same Humility as was ever displayed by Sir Makepeace, who went to his grave preaching Man's Moral right to Property, free Trading and a fair Crack of the Whip for Women.Your future Humble Servant, Richard T. Pym"You've got the learning, t.i.tch. What do you think of it?" asks Syd, with vulnerable earnestness. "It's beautiful," says Pym. "Of course it is," says Syd.

A village, then a church spire glide towards them. As they enter the main street a yellow banner proclaims that Our Liberal Candidate will be speaking here tonight. A few old Land Rovers and Austin Sevens, already s...o...b..und, stand dejectedly in the carpark. Taking a last pull from the ginger ale bottle, Syd carefully parts his hair before the mirror. Pym notices that he is dressed with unaccustomed sobriety. The frosted air smells of cow dung and the sea. Before them rises the archaic Temperance Hall of Little Chedworth-on-the-Water, Syd slips him a peppermint and in they go.

The ward chairman has been speaking for some time but only to the front row, and those of us at the back hear nothing. The rest of the congregation either stares into the rafters or at the display cards of the Common Man's Candidate: Rick at Napoleon's desk with his law books ranged behind him. Rick on the factory floor for the first and only time in his life, sharing a cup of tea with the Salt of the Earth. Rick as Sir Francis Drake gazing towards the misted armada of Gulworth's dying herring fleet. Rick the pipe-sucking agriculturalist intelligently appraising a cow. To one side of the ward chairman, under a festoon of yellow bunting, sits a lady officer of the ward committee. To the other runs a row of empty chairs waiting for the Candidate and his party. Periodically, while the chairman labours on, Pym catches a stray phrase like the Evils of Conscription or the Curse of Big Monopolies--or worse still an apologetic interjection such as "as I was saying to you only a moment ago." And twice, as nine o'clock becomes nine-thirty, then ten past ten, an elderly Shakespearean messenger hobbles painfully from a vestry, clutching his earlobe to tell us in a quavering voice that the Candidate is on his way, he has a busy schedule of meetings tonight, the snow is holding him up. Till just when we have given up hope, Mr. Muspole strides in accompanied by Major Maxwell-Cavendish, both prim as beadles in their greys. Together the two men march up the aisle and mount the dais, and while Muspole shakes hands with the chairman and his lady, the major draws a sheaf of notes from a briefcase and lays them on the table. And though Pym by the end of the campaign had heard Rick speak on no less than twenty-one occasions between that night and his Eve of Poll address in the Town Hall, he never once saw him refer to the major's notes or so much as recognise their presence. So that gradually he concluded they were not notes at all, but a piece of stage business to prepare us for the Coming.

"What's Maxie done with his moustache?" Pym whispers excitedly to Syd, who has sat up with a jolt after a bit of a nap. "Mortgaged it?" If Pym expects a witticism in return, he is disappointed.

"It's not deemed appropriate--that's what he's done with it," says Syd shortly. In the same moment Pym sees the light of pure love suffuse Syd's face as Rick sweeps in.

The order of appearance never changed, neither did the allocation of duties. After Muspole and the major come Perce Loft and poor Morrie Washington who is already getting bother with his liver. Perce holds open the door. Morrie steps through and sometimes, as tonight, gets a bit of a clap because the uninitiated mistake him for Rick, which is not surprising since Morrie, though a third Rick's size, spends most of his life and all his money in an effort to achieve Total a.s.sumption with his idol. If Rick buys a new camel-hair coat, Morrie rushes off and buys two like it. If Rick is in two-tone shoes, so is Morrie, and white socks as well. But tonight Morrie has dressed like the rest of the court in churchy grey. For love of Rick he has even managed to get some of the booze out of his complexion. He steps in, he takes up his place across the door from Perce and fiddles with his rosette to make sure it is working properly. Then Morrie and Perce together crane their heads back in the direction they have come from, straining, as the audience is, to catch a first sight of their champion. And look!--they are clapping! And look, so are we!--as enter Rick, at a spanking pace, for we statesmen have no time to lose, and even as he comes striding up the aisle he is earnestly conferring with the Highest in the Land. Is that Sir Laurence Olivier with him?--looks more like Bud Flanagan to me. It is neither, as we shall quickly learn. It is none other than the great Bertie Tregenza, the Radio Bird Man, a lifelong Liberal. On the dais Muspole and the major present the other notables to the chairman and guide them to their seats. At last the moment we have come for is upon us when the only man left standing is the man in the photographs around him. Syd leans forward, listening with his eyes. Our Candidate begins speaking. A deliberate, unimpressive opening. Good evening and thank you for coming here in such numbers on this cold winter's night. I am sorry to have had to keep you waiting. A joke for the Nellies: they tell me I kept my mother waiting a whole week. Laughter from the Nellies as the joke is turned to account. But I'll promise you this, people of Gulworth North: n.o.body here is going to be kept waiting by your next Member of Parliament! More laughter and some applause from the faithful as the Candidate's tone stiffens.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, you have ventured out on this inhospitable night for one reason only. Because you care about your country. Well that makes two of us, because I care about it too. I care about the way it's run and the way it's not run. I care because Politics are People. People with hearts to tell them what they want, for themselves and for one another. People with minds to tell them how to achieve it. People with the Faith and Guts to send Adolf Hitler back to where he came from. People like ourselves. Gathered here tonight. The Salt of the Earth and make no bones about it. English people, root and bough, worried about their country, and looking for the man to see them right."

Pym peers round the little hall. Not a face but is turned flowerlike towards Rick's light. Save one, a little woman in a veiled pill-box hat, sitting like her own shadow, all apart and the black veil hiding her face. She is in mourning, Pym decides, moved at once to sympathy. She has come here for a spot of company, poor soul. On the dais Rick is explaining the meaning of Liberalism for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the differences between the three great parties. Liberalism is not a dogma but a way of life, he says. It is faith in the essential goodness of man regardless of colour, race or creed in a spirit of all pulling together to one end. The fine points of policy thus dispatched, he can proceed to the solid centre of his speech, which is himself. He describes his humble origins and his mother's tears when she heard him vow to follow in the footsteps of the great Sir Makepeace. If only my father could be here tonight, seated among you good people. An arm lifts and points to the rafters, as if picking out an aeroplane, but it is G.o.d whom Rick is indicating.

"And let me say this to the voters of Little Chedworth tonight. Without a certain person up there acting night and day for me as my senior partner--laugh if you will, because I would rather be the object of your mockery than fall prey to the cynicism and G.o.dlessness that is sweeping through our country--without a certain person's helping hand and you all know who I mean, oh yes you do!--I wouldn't be where I am today, offering myself--be it never so humbly--to the people of Gulworth North." He speaks of his understanding of the export market and his pride at selling British products to those foreigners who will never know how much they owe us. His arm strikes out at us again and he issues a challenge. He is British to the core and he doesn't care who knows it. He can bring British common sense to every problem you throw at him. "Bar none," says Syd approvingly under his breath. But if we know a better man for the job than Rickie Pym, we had better speak up now. If we prefer the airy-fairy cla.s.s prejudices of the High Tories who think they own the people's birthright, whereas in reality they are sucking the people's blood, then we should stand up here and now and say so without fear or favour and let's have it out once and for all. n.o.body volunteers. On the other hand, if we would rather hand over the country to the Marxists and Communists and the bully-boy trade unions who are bent on dragging this country to its knees--and let's face it, that's what the Labour vote is all about--then better to come out with it in the full glare of the public gaze of the voters of Little Chedworth and not skulk in the dark like miserable conspirators.

Once again, n.o.body volunteers, though Rick and everyone on the dais glowers around the room in search of a miscreant hand or guilty face.

"Now press b.u.t.ton B for Beautiful," Syd whispers dreamily and closes his eyes for extra pleasure as Rick starts the long climb towards the stars, which like Liberal ideals we cannot reach but can only profit from their presence.

Again Pym looks round. Not a face but is wrapt in love for Rick, save the one bereaved woman in her veil. This is what I came for, Pym tells himself excitedly. Democracy is when you share your father with the world. The applause fades but Pym goes on clapping until he realises he is the only one. He seems to hear his name being called, and observes to his surprise that he is standing. Faces turn to him, too many. Some are smiling. He makes to sit but Syd shakes him back to his feet with a hand under his armpit. The ward chairman is speaking and this time he is recklessly audible.

"I understand our candidate's celebrated young son Maggus is among us here tonight, having interrupted his legal studies at Oggsford in order to a.s.sist his father in his great campaign," he says. "I'm sure we'd all appreciate a word from you, Maggus, if you'll favour us. Maggus? Where is he?"

"Over 'ere, governor!" Syd yells. "Not me. Him."

If Pym is resisting, he is not aware of it. I have fainted. I am an accident. Syd's ginger ale has knocked me out. The crowd separates, strong hands bear him towards the dais, floating voters gaze down on him. Pym ascends, Rick seizes him in a bear-hug; a yellow rosette is nailed to Pym's collarbone by the ward chairman. Pym is speaking, and a cast of thousands is staring up at him--well, sixty, at least--smiling at his first brave words.

"I expect you are all asking yourselves," Pym begins long before anything has occurred to him. "I expect that many of you here tonight, even after that fine speech, are asking yourselves, what manner of man my father is."

They are. He can see it in their faces. They want the confirmation of their faith, and Maggus the Oggsford lawyer supplies it without a blush. For Rick, for England, and for fun. As he speaks he believes as usual every word he says. He paints Rick as Rick has painted himself, but with the authority of a loving son and legal brain who picks his words but never splits them. He refers to Rick as the plain man's honest friend--"and I should know, he's been the best friend I've had these twenty years or more." He depicts him as the reachable star in his childlike firmament, shining before him as an example of chivalrous humility. The image of the singer Wolfram von Eschenbach wanders through his mind and he considers offering them Rick as Little Chedworth's soldier-poet, wooing and jousting his way to victory. Caution prevails. He describes the influence of our patron saint TP, "marching on long after the old soldier has fought his last fight." How whenever we had to move house--a nervous moment--TP's portrait was the first thing to be hung up. He speaks of a father blessed with a fair man's sense of justice. With Rick as my father, he asks, how could I have contemplated any other calling than the law? He turns to Sylvia, who roosts at Rick's side in her rabbitskin collar and stay-press smile.

With a choke he thanks her for taking up the burdens of motherhood where my own poor mother was obliged to lay them down. Then, as quickly as it all began, it is over, and Pym is hastening after Rick down the aisle towards the door, brushing away his tears and clasping hands in Rick's wake. He reaches the door and takes a misty look back. He sees again the woman in the veiled pill-box hat, seated by herself. He catches the glint of her eye inside the mask and it seems to him baleful and disapproving just when everyone else is being so admiring. A guilty fret replaces his elation. She is not a widow, she is the risen Lippsie. She is E. Weber. She is Dorothy, and I have wronged them all. She is an emissary of the Oggsford Communist Party here to observe my treacherous gonversion. The Michaels sent her.

"How was I, son?"

"Fantastic!"

"So were you, son. By G.o.d, if I'm spared to be a hundred, I'll never be a prouder man. Who cut your hair?"

n.o.body has cut it for a long time, but Pym lets this go. They are crossing the carpark with difficulty for Rick is holding Pym's arm in an ambulant bear-hug and they are advancing at an angle like a pair of crookedly hung overcoats. Mr. Cudlove has the Bentley door open and is weeping a teacher's tears of pride.

"Beautiful, Mr. Magnus," he says. "It was Karl Marx come alive, sir. We shall never forget it."

Pym thanks him distractedly. As so often when on the crest of a phoney triumph, he is gripped by an unfbcussed sense of G.o.d's approaching retribution. What have I done wrong to her? he keeps asking himself. I'm young and fluent and Rick's son. I'm wearing my new unpaid-for suit from Hall Brothers, the tailor. Why won't she love me like the rest of them? He is thinking, like every artist before or since him, of the only member of the audience who did not applaud.

It is the following Sat.u.r.day, it is approaching midnight. Campaign fever is mounting fast. In a few minutes, it will be Eve of Poll Day minus three. A new poster saying "He Needs YOU on Thursday" is stuck to Pym's window, yellow bunting with the same message is strung from the sash, across the street to the p.a.w.nbroker's opposite. Yet Pym is lying fully dressed and smiling on his bed, and not a thought of the campaign is going through his mind. He is in Paradise with a girl called Judy, the daughter of a Liberal farmer who has lent her to us to drive Old Nellies to the booths, and Paradise is the front of her parked van on the way to Little Kimble. The taste of Judy's skin is on his lips, the smell of her hair is in his nostrils. And when he cups his hands over his eyes they are the same hands that for the first time in human history enclosed a young girl's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The bedroom is on the first floor of a run-down corner house called Mrs. Searle's Temperance Rest, though rest and temperance are the last things it sells. The pubs have closed, the shouts and sighs have taken themselves to another part of town. A woman's voice shrieks from the alley, "Got a bed for us, Mattie? It's Jessie. Come on, you old b.u.g.g.e.r, we're freezing." An upper window bangs open and the blurred voice of Mr. Searle advises Jessie to take her client behind the bus shelter. "What do you think we are, Jess?" he complains. "A b.l.o.o.d.y doss house?" Of course we aren't. We are the Liberal Candidate's campaign headquarters and dear old Mattie Searle our landlord, though he didn't know it till a month ago, has been a Liberal all his life.

Careful not to wake himself from his erotic reverie, Pym tiptoes to the window and squints steeply downward into the hotel courtyard. To one side the kitchen. To the other the residents' dining room, now the campaign's committee rooms. In its lighted window Pym makes out the bowed grey heads of Mrs. Alc.o.c.k and Mrs. Catermole, our tireless helpers, as they determinedly seal the last envelopes of the day.

He returns to his bed. Wait, he thinks. They can't stay up all night. They never do. His conquest in one field is inspiring him to conquest in another. Tomorrow being the sabbath, Our Candidate rests his troops and contents himself with pious appearances at the best-attended Baptist churches where he is disposed to preach on simplicity and service. Tomorrow at eight o'clock Pym will stand at the bus stop for Nether Wheatley and Judy will meet him there in her father's van and in the boot she will have the toboggan the gamekeeper made for her when she was ten. She knows the hill, she knows the barn beside it, and it is agreed between them without fallbacks that somewhere around ten-thirty, depending on how much tobogganing they do, Judy Barker will take Magnus Pym to the barn and anoint him her full and consummated lover.

But in the meantime Pym has a different slope to scale or descend. Beyond the committee rooms lies a staircase to the cellar, and in the cellar--Pym has seen it--stands the chipped green filing cabinet that he has aspired to for three-quarters of his life and too often tried in vain to penetrate. In Pym's wallet beneath his pillow nestles the pair of blue steel dividers with which the Michaels have taught him to spring cheap locks. In Pym's mind, heated by voluptuous ambitions, is the calm conviction that a man who can gain access to Judy's b.r.e.a.s.t.s can burst open the fortress of Rick's secrets.

His hands over his face once more, he relives each delicious moment of the day. He was bounced from sleep as usual by Syd and Mr. Muspole, who have taken to shouting Crazy Gang obscenities through his bedroom door.

"Come on, Magnus, give it a rest. You'll go blind, you know."

"It'll drop off, Magnus, dear, if you don't let it grow. Doctor will have to strap it up with a matchstick. What will Judy say then?"

Over early breakfast, Major Maxwell-Cavendish bawls out Sat.u.r.day's orders to the court. Pamphlets are obsolete, he announces. The only thing we can hit them with now is loudspeakers and more loudspeakers, backed by frontal attacks on their own doorsteps. "They know we're here. They know we mean business. They know we've got the best candidate and the best policy for Gulworth. What we're after now is every single, individual vote. We're going to pick them off one by one and drag them to the polls by sheer force of will. Thank you."

Now the detail. Syd will take number one loudspeaker and two ladies--laughter--down to that bit of scrubland beside the race course where the gyppos hang out--gyppos have votes same as everyone else. Shouts of "Put a fiver on Prince Magnus for us while you're about it!" Mr. Muspole and another lady will take loudspeaker number two and pick up Major Blenkinsop and our miserable agent from the Town Hall at nine. Magnus will take Judy Barker again and cover Little Kimble and the five outlying villages.

"You can cover Judy too while you're about it," says Morrie Washington. The joke, though brilliant, receives only token laughter. The court is uneasy about Judy. It distrusts her composure and resents her claim on their mascot. Barker looks down her nose at you, they complain behind her back. Barker's not the good scout we thought she was. But Pym these days cares less than he used to about the court's opinion. He shrugs off their gibes and, while the committee rooms are unguarded, slips down the steps to the cellar where he inserts the Michaels' dividers in the lock of the chipped green filing cabinet. One p.r.o.ng to hold back the spring, one to turn the chamber. The lock pops open. I am in the presence of a miracle and the miracle is me. I will return. Quickly relocking the cabinet he hastens back upstairs and not one minute after establishing his ascendancy over life's secrets he is standing innocently on the hotel doorstep in time for Judy's van to pull up beside him, the loudspeaker fixed to its roof with harvest twine. She smiles but does not speak. This is their third morning together but on the first they were accompanied by another lady helper. Nevertheless Pym contrived several times to brush his hand against Judy's as she changed gear or pa.s.sed him the microphone, and when they parted at lunchtime and he made to kiss her cheek, she boldly redirected him to her lips by placing a long hand on the back of his neck. She is a tall, sunny girl with fair skin and an agricultural voice. She has a long mouth and playful eyes inside her serious spectacles.

"Vote for Pym, the People's Man," Pym booms into the loudspeaker as they head through Gulworth's suburbs towards open country. He is holding Judy's hand quite openly, first on her lap and now, at Judy's instigation, on his own. "Save Gulworth from the scourge of party politics." Then he recites a limerick about Mr. Lakin the Conservative Candidate, composed by Morrie Washington the great poet, which the major vows is winning votes everywhere."There's a bossy old buffer called Lakin, Whose manners are frightfully takin'.

But if he thinks Rickie Pym Can be beaten by him, It's a deuce of a bloomer he's makin'."Reaching across him, Judy switches off the instrument. "I think your dad's got a cheek," she says cheerfully when the city is safely behind them. "Who does he think we are? b.l.o.o.d.y idiots?"

Steering the car into an empty side lane, Judy turns off the engine, unb.u.t.tons her jacket and then her blouse. And where Pym had been expecting more impediments he discovers only her small and perfect b.r.e.a.s.t.s with nipples rigid from the cold. She watches him proudly as he puts his hands over them.

For the rest of the day, Pym walked on clouds of light. Judy had to return to the farm to help her father with the milking, so she dropped him at an inn on the road to Norwich, where he had agreed to meet up with Syd and Morrie and Mr. Muspole for a discreet wet on neutral territory clear of the const.i.tuency. With polling day so near, an end-of-term hilarity has infected the gathering and, having remained upright until closing time, the four of them piled into Syd's car and sang "Underneath the Arches" over the loudspeaker all the way to the border, where they once more put on their jackets and their pious faces. In the early evening Pym attended Rick's final Sat.u.r.day pep talk to his helpers. Henry V on the eve of Agincourt could have done no better. They should not flinch from the final push. Remember Hitler. They should carry a straight bat to victory, they should keep the left elbow up through life, praise G.o.d and give her the whip in the final straight. Their ears ringing with these exhortations, the team scrambled for the cars. By now Pym's speech is a fully incorporated feature of the programme. The punters love him and inside the court he has the status of a star. In the Bentley, the two champions can squeeze each other's hands and exchange notes over a gla.s.s of warm bubbly to keep them going between triumphs.

"That gloomy woman was there again," said Pym. "I think she's following us round."

"What woman's that, son?" said Rick.

"I don't know. She wears a veil."And somewhere, amid these pressures and activities, Pym contrived to undertake the most perilous foray of his s.e.xual career till now. Having located an all-night chemist in Ribsdale on the other side of town, he took a tram there and made a series of pa.s.ses to check his back before marching boldly to the counter and purchasing a packet of three contraceptive sheaths from an old reprobate who neither arrested him nor asked whether he was married. And there is his prize now, winking at him in its mauve-and-white wrapping from its hiding place at the centre of a stack of "Vote Pym" circulars as he tiptoes once more to his bedroom window and looks down.

The committee rooms are in darkness. Go.

The way is clear but Pym is too old a hand to make straight for his target. Time spent on reconnaissance is never time wasted, Jack Brotherhood used to say. I will fight my way to the heart of the enemy and earn her. He begins in the hall, affecting to read the day's notices. The ground floor is by now deserted. Mattie's filthy office is empty, the front door chained. He begins his slow ascent. Two doors past his own on the next floor lies the residential lounge. Pym opens the door and smiles in. Syd Lemon and Morrie Washington are playing a four of snooker against a couple of dear old friends of Mattie Searle who look like horse thieves but they could be sheep rustlers. Syd wears his hat. Two locally obtained Lovelies are chalking cues and dispensing comfort. The mood is fraught.

"What are you playing?" says Pym as if hoping for a game.

"Polo," says Syd. "p.i.s.s off, t.i.tch, and don't be funny."

"I meant how many frames."

"Best of nine," says Morrie Washington.