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 breasts 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 Saturday’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 prong 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 passed 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? Bloody idiots?”
Steering the car into an empty side lane, Judy turns off the engine, unbuttons her jacket and then her blouse. And where Pym had been expecting more impediments he discovers only her small and perfect breasts 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 constituency. 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 Saturday 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 God 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 glass 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 sexual 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 passes 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. “Piss off, Titch, and don’t be funny.”
“I meant how many frames.”
“Best of nine,” says Morrie Washington.
Syd misses his shot and swears. Pym closes the door. They are settled. No danger there for at least an hour. He continues his patrol. Another flight upwards the atmosphere tightens, as it will in any secret building. Here is the quiet room where invited guests may kick off their shoes and take part in a relaxing hand of poker with Our Candidate and his circle. Pym enters without knocking. At a table strewn
with cash and brandy glasses, Rick and Perce Loft are locked in a sharp piece of betting with Mattie Searle. The pot is a stack of petrol coupons, which in the court are preferred as hard currency. Mattie raises Rick and Rick sees him. Rick looks on with forbearance while Mattie scoops the pool.
“They tell me you and Colonel Barker had a crack at Little Kimble this morning, old son.”
I forget exactly why Rick called Judy Colonel. I have an idea it was a reference to a celebrated lesbian who had been involved in a court case. Whatever the reason, Pym did not care for it.
“The boy had them kissing the ground, Rickie,” Perce Loft confirms.
“Not the only thing he’s been kissing, if you ask me,” says Rick and everybody laughs because it is Rick’s joke.
Pym leans in for the good-night bear-hug and hears Rick sniff his cheek, which has Judy’s smell on it.
“Just you keep that old mind of yours on the election, son,” he says, patting the same cheek in warning.
Down the corridor lies Morrie Washington’s publicity department which doubles as disinformation section. Cases of whisky and nylons are stacked against the wall waiting to pave the way to the last electoral favours. It was from Morrie’s desk that the baseless rumours went out regarding the Tory Candidate’s support of Sir Oswald Mosley, and the Labour Candidate’s overaddiction to his pupils. Springing the locks with his dividers, Pym flicks quickly through the drawers. One bank statement, one set of indecent playing cards. The statement is in the name of Mr. Morris Wurzheimer and is overdrawn by a hundred and twenty pounds. The playing cards would be impressive if Judy’s reality did not eclipse them. Relocking everything neatly after him Pym climbs halfway up the last flight, then hovers listening to Mr. Muspole murmuring on the telephone. The top floor is the sanctum. It is safe room, cypher room and operations centre combined. At the end of the corridor lie Our Candidate’s State Apartments which not even Pym has penetrated so far, for Sylvia now spends erratic hours in bed having headaches or trying to grill herself brown with a mysterious hand lamp she has bought from Mr. Muspole. He can therefore never be sure of a safe run. Next door resides the so-called Action Committee, where big money and support are mustered and promises traded. What promises is still half a mystery to me, though Syd once spoke of a plan to fill the ancient harbour with cement and make a carpark of it, to the pleasure of many influential contractors.
Abruptly Mr. Muspole rings off. Without a sound, Pym swivels on his heel and prepares to beat an orderly retreat down the stairs. He is saved by the whirr of Mr. Muspole dialling again. He is talking to a lady, asking tender questions and purring at the answers. Muspole can carry on like this for hours. It is his little pleasure.
Having waited till his voice has settled to a reassuring flow Pym returns to the ground floor. The darkness of the committee rooms smells of tea and deodorant. The door to the courtyard is locked from the inside. Pym softly turns the key and pockets it. The cellar staircase stinks of cat. Boxes are stored on the steps. Groping his way down, unwilling to put on the light lest it be visible from the courtyard, Pym has an unmistakable mental reprise of a day in Bern when he carried his damp washing down the stone steps to another cellar and was scared of tripping over Herr Bastl. And as he reaches the bottom step he does indeed miss his footing. Lurching forward he falls heavily on to the cellar door and pushes it open with both hands as he tries to steady himself. The door screeches in the grime. The impetus of his body is enough to carry him into the cellar which to his surprise is lit by a pale light. By its glow Pym makes out the green filing cabinet and standing before it a woman holding what appears to be a chisel, examining its locks by the ailing beam of a bicycle lamp. Her eyes, which are turned to him, are dark and pugnacious. There is not a flicker of guilt about her. And it is a thing I wonder at still that it never seriously occurred to him to doubt that she was the same woman, with the same gaze, and the same intense and disapproving quietness, whose veiled face had fixed on him after his triumph on the hustings of Little Chedworth, and stalked him through a dozen meetings since. Even asking her name Pym realises that he knows it already though he is blessed with no faculty of premonition. She wears a long skirt that could have been her mother’s. She has a hard, pebble face and young hair turned to grey. Her eyes are disconcertingly straight and bright, even in the gloom.
“My name is Peggy Wentworth,” she replies defiantly in a tough Irish brogue. “Shall I spell it for you, Magnus? Peggy short for Margaret, have you heard that? Your father, Mr. Richard Thomas Pym, killed my husband John, and as good as killed me too. And if it takes me the rest of my living death till they put me in the grave beside him, I’ll find the proof of it, and bring the brute to justice.”
Seeing a flicker of moving light Pym glances sharply behind him. Mattie Searle is standing in the doorway with a blanket over his shoulders. His head is hung sideways to favour his good ear while he squints first at Pym then at Peggy over the top of his spectacles. How much has he heard? Pym has no idea. But his mind is made fertile by alarm.
“This is Emma from Oxford, Mattie,” he says boldly. “Emma, this is Mr. Searle who owns the hotel.”
“Pleased to meet you,” says Peggy calmly.
“Emma and I are in a college play next month, Mattie. She came up to Gulworth so that we could rehearse together. We thought we’d be out of your way down here.”
“Oh yes,” says Mattie. His eyes slip from Peggy to Pym and back again, with a knowledge that makes nonsense of Pym’s lies. They hear his lazy shuffle going up the stairs.
I can’t tell you very accurately any more, Tom, which bits she told Pym where. His first thought on escaping the hotel was to keep going, so they hopped a bus and went as far as it took them, which turned out to be the oldest, most broken-down bit of waste dockland you could imagine: gutted warehouses with windows you could see the moon through, idle cranes that rose like gallows straight out of the sea. A bunch of roving knife-bladers had pitched camp there, they must have worked at night and slept by day, because I remember their Romany faces rocking over their wheels as they trod their treadles, and the sparks gushing over the watching children. I remember girls with men’s muscles flinging fish baskets while they yelled ribaldries at each other, and fishermen strutting among them in their oilskins, too grand to be bothered with anyone but themselves. I remember with a leap of gratitude every flash of face or voice outside the windows of the prison she had locked me in with her relentless monologue.
At a tea-stall on the waterfront while they stood shivering with a crowd of down-and-outs, Peggy told Pym the story of how Rick had stolen her farm. She had begun it the moment they got on the bus, for the benefit of anyone who’d care to hear it, and had continued it without a comma or a full stop since, and Pym knew that it was all true, all terrible, even if quite often the sheer venom in her drove him secretly to Rick’s protection. They walked to get warm but she didn’t stop talking for one second. When he bought her beans and egg at a Seamen’s Mission hut called the Rover, still she went on talking as she spread her elbows and sawed the toast and used her teaspoon to get up the sauce. It was at the Rover that she told Pym about Rick’s great trust fund that took possession of the nine thousand pounds of insurance money paid to her husband John after he fell into the thresher and lost both legs below the knee and all the fingers of one hand. As she told this part she drew the lines of amputation on her own scant limbs without looking at them, and Pym sensed her obsession again and was scared of it. The one voice I never did for you, Tom, is Peggy’s Irish brogue dropping into Rick’s chapel cadences as she repeated his silver-tongued promises: twelve and a half percent plus profits, my dear, year in and year out, enough to see dear old John right for as long as he’s spared, and enough for yourself when he’s gone, and enough left over after that, my dear, to put some by for that first-rate boy of yours for when he goes to college and reads his law just the way my own son will—they’re birds of a feather. It was a Thomas Hardy story that she told, full of c
asual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry God to obtain the maximum of misfortune. And she was Hardy’s woman to go with it: lured forward by her obsession, and only her own destiny left to deal with.
John Wentworth, as well as being a victim, was an ass, she explained, and was ready to be swayed by the first charmer who walked into the room. He went to his grave convinced that Rick was a saviour and a pal. His farm was a Cornish manor called Tamar Rose where every grain of wheat had to be wrestled from the sea wind. He had inherited it from a wiser father, and Alastair their son was his only heir. When John died there was not a penny for anybody. Everything signed away, every bloody thing mortgaged to the neck, Magnus—on which word Peggy passed her bean-stained knife across her throat. She told about Rick visiting John in hospital soon after his accident and the flowers and the chocolates and the bubbly—and Pym in his mind’s eye saw the basket of black-market fruit beside his own hospital bed when he woke up after his operation. He remembered Rick’s noble caring for the aged and decrepit that he had helped him with during the war years of the great crusade. He remembered Lippsie’s sobbing voice calling Rick a teef, and Rick’s letters to her promising to see her right.
“And a free train ticket for myself,” Peggy is saying, “to come up to Truro Hospital to visit him. And your father driving me home after, Magnus, nothing too much trouble for him until he has our man’s money.” The documents he made John sign, Magnus, always witnessed by the prettiest nurses. How your father always had the patience for John, always explaining to him whatever he couldn’t understand, over and again if necessary, but John won’t listen, the deluded man is too trusting and lazy in his mind.
A fit of fury seizes her: “Me up at four in the morning for the milking and falling asleep over my accounts at midnight!” she shouts as sleepy heads turn to her from other tables. “And that stupid husband of mine lying warm in his bed in Truro signing it all away behind my back while your father sits by his bedside playing the saint to him, Magnus. And my Alastair needing a pair of shoes to walk to school in, while you’re living on the hog there with your fine schools and your fine clothes, Magnus, God save you!” For it turns out, of course, on John’s death, that for reasons outside everyone’s control the great trust fund has suffered a purely temporary problem of liquidity and can’t pay the twelve and a half percent plus profits after all. It can’t refund the capital either. And that to tide everyone over this sticky patch, John Wentworth took the wise precaution, just before his death, of mortgaging the farm and land and livestock, and bloody nearly his wife and child as well, so that nobody will ever want for anything again. And had given the proceeds to his dear old pal Rick. And that Rick has brought down a distinguished lawyer, name of Loft, all the way from London with him, just to explain the implications of this smart move to John on his deathbed. And John, to please everyone as usual, has written out a special long letter all in his own hand, assuring whom it may concern that his decision has been taken while he was of sound mind and in full possession of his mental faculties and was not in any manner subjected to undue influence by a saint and his lawyer while he was lying gasping out his last. All this in case Peggy, or for that matter Alastair, should later have the bad manners to dispute the document in court or try to get John’s nine thousand pounds back, or should otherwise show a lack of faith in Rick’s selfless stewardship of John’s ruin.