"And we couldn"t let The Rooster know. It would have unsettled him. But we couldn"t leave the body there in the bushes because it might have caused trouble for you and your dad. So when I saw the other one driving into your yard, bold as bra.s.s, it came to me that if we put it in his trunk it would serve both of them right. And you played up to me. Without a word. Just trusted me."
"Yes."
As they walked, the back of his hand brushed lightly against hers.
"Only it went wrong, you see? He must have noticed the trunk strap flapping just after he drove out of your yard. So when he looked in there and saw what he saw, all he could do was dump it in the phone kiosk. Only it happened to be you that found him. I"m sorry about that."
Their hands met palm to palm and stayed together.
"It"s all right," she said.
Later, when they"d been married for some time and Sonny was doing well in London as a boxing promoter, she had a telephone in her own home and talked to her friends on it nearly every day. Sonny was driving a Daimler by then with plenty of room at the back for the children and they sometimes used it to pop down to Tadley Gate, where her father had put up a proper garage sign and often filled up as many as half a dozen cars a day on summer weekends. Sometime between one visit and the next the Post Office took away Kiosk One and replaced it with a more imposing model, all bright red paint and gla.s.s panels. They gave it a glance as they drove past.
The Hope of the World MAT COWARD.
It"s not easy to pigeon-hole Mat Coward, and that"s all to the good. There"s escape in versatility. He"s written science fiction, hard-boiled mysteries, humorous crime (check out his Edgar-nominated story "Twelve of the Little b.u.g.g.e.rs" in his collection Do the World a Favour), and reference books on humour, such as The Pocket Essentia] Cla.s.sic Radio Comedy (2003). Occasionally he delves back into the past, and here takes us to the days before the planned communist revolution. It"s a country-house murder with a difference.
Beneath a monkey-puzzle tree on the west lawn of his seat in Suss.e.x, Lord Bognor and his guests were trying to settle on a date for the revolution. Capital, they all agreed, had clearly had its day; it was just choosing the day itself which was proving problematical.
"Wednesday, September the tenth," suggested Norbert Whistler.
Lord Bognor flicked the pages of his appointments diary. "Wednesday the . . . ah, no, sorry. No good for me, I"m afraid playing for the Old Boys against the Lord Chancellor"s XI."
Diana Lawrence clicked her teeth together in irritation. "Well, couldn"t you miss it, just this once?"
Bognor sucked hot July air through a gap in his bottom teeth and compressed his face so that his eyebrows almost met his cheekbones. "Not really, old thing. You see, I"m opening bat they rather rely on me. If it was any other game, perhaps, but the Lord Chancellor"s is a top team. I suppose if it rains . . ."
"Oh look," said Willie Browning, "I spy refreshments."
A butler and two kitchen maids, indeed, were making their unhurried way from the house, carrying between them a variety of large trays. The Special Arrangements Group of the Executive Committee of The Bolshevist League of Urgency adjourned for tea. This was on the afternoon prior to the violent unpleasantness, and it was such a lovely day.
"What exactly is a f.l.a.n.g.e-mounter?" asked Diana Lawrence, spraying flecks of seed cake towards Norbert Whistler, who sat on a lawn chair beside her.
Norbert swallowed a gulp of tea. It should have been a sip, of course, in such company and in such a setting, but his throat was dry. "It"s rather complicated. Difficult to explain to the layman. It"s to do with f.l.a.n.g.es, you know, and the mounting thereof."
"Of course, silly of me. But we are so happy to have you here, Comrade Whistler representing, as it were, the vanguard of the cla.s.s-conscious proletariat! If one may put it that way."
"Quite so," said Norbert, trying not to look up her skirt. She wasn"t a young woman, and it wasn"t a long skirt. At thirty-two, Norbert was the youngest man in the group by at least ten years, and he thought he sensed something hungry in Diana"s earnest, avian gaze.
"I know Boggy, in particular, is delighted. You"re quite a catch, you know! Being, that is, the I"m sorry, the a.s.sistant Secretary . . . ?"
"a.s.sistant North-East Regional Secretary of the Consolidated Federation of f.l.a.n.g.e-Mounters and Correlated Crafts," said Norbert, all on one breath because he feared that if he paused during the sentence he might be unable to complete it.
"Rather! Good show. And tell me, Comrade Whistler or, if I might, Comrade Norbert? Formality is an outmoded bourgeois mechanism, one feels. Doesn"t one? There"ll be no surnames after the revolution."
"By all means," said Norbert, wondering how that would work, exactly: no surnames. It"d make telephone directories a bit tricky, surely?
"There! Now, do you feel that the f.l.a.n.g.e-mounters of the north-east are ready for revolution? As a cla.s.s, one means."
Norbert chewed slowly on his scone, and made ruminative noises. When he felt that this device had carried him as far as it might, he cleared his throat. "Aye, well. Happen they are, and happen they aren"t. It all depends, I would say, on the objective nature of the circ.u.mstances prevailing and, naturally and, if I may say so, subjectively on the direction of the leadership."
Diana was clearly more than satisfied with this response, and hurried off to share it with the others. Once he was alone, Norbert produced a small, leather notebook from his jacket pocket.
"Diana Lawrence," he wrote. "Lady of refined type. In her seventh decade, but with the vigour of one in her fifth (and the costume, it might be noted, of one in her third). Introduced to me as "the celebrated travel writer". Politically: enthusiastic, but not noticeably well-informed."
Diana"s place at his side was soon taken by Willie Browning, an extravagantly thin and modestly bearded man of considerable age. "I wonder," he said, indicating their delightful surroundings, "what old Charlie would have made of all this."
"Charlie?"
The old man chuckled. "That"s what we always called him in the old days. Karl Marx, I mean." He looked away, towards the rolling green horizon, as if what he had said was nothing, merely a casual remark.
Norbert did not have to counterfeit an impressed expression; over the years, he had shaken hands with many people who had shaken hands with many idols of working-cla.s.s history but, by any measure, this was a bit special. "You knew Karl Marx?"
"Oh, my people knew him a bit they moved in some of the same circles, you understand."
"What was he like?" Norbert knew it was a meaningless, cliched and unanswerable question, but felt it would have been almost rude not to ask it.
"Old, by the time I met him. That"s my main memory of the great man how very old he was. The beard and everything, you know?" He sighed. "Mind you, he wasn"t as old when he died as I am now, but in my youth he seemed very old to me."
Norbert smiled. He was trying to place the elderly Marxist"s accent; place it by region and hierarchy. Willie spoke with a little too much precision to be truly posh, and his vowels contained the faintest leftover of East Anglia. A collar-and-tie man, no doubt, schooled but never moneyed.
"Very fond of the public house, Charlie was." Norbert couldn"t be sure whether Willie"s tone was nostalgic or censorious. "A sociable fellow, if he took a liking to you. But he fell out with everyone sooner or later. Didn"t have a friend left in the world by the time he died, not counting poor old Engels."
"He perhaps wouldn"t have been terribly surprised by what we see here, then," said Norbert, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that his own accent would tell more about him than he might wish told, to the right listener.
"I"m sorry?"
"I mean to say," said Norbert, "it does appear to be something of a characteristic of working men"s movements the setting up of new parties every few years."
"Ah." The old man nodded. "Like prophet, like followers, you think? Yes, you could be onto something there, my young friend. And it can be quite painful, breaking from good comrades. But sometimes it has to be done."
"You speak from experience?"
"I was with the Communist Party for a short while, but I"m afraid it was impossible for me to stay. Impossible."
"Oh, dear."
"Yes, you see the local branch secretary well, really, he didn"t have even the faintest grasp of revolutionary theory. Do you know, he put it to a branch meeting, in all seriousness, that the revolution might break out on a Sunday? A Sunday!"
"A Sunday," said Norbert. "I say."
"Well, quite! Revolutions do not happen at weekends. How can they? The men are not at work at weekends. If they are not at work, they do not const.i.tute a proletariat, and only a proletariat can inst.i.tute a proletarian revolution. By definition! Revolutions occur during the week." He took out a small handkerchief and mopped his face. "Well obviously, I couldn"t stay after that."
"Obviously," Norbert agreed. Despite a long a.s.sociation with the revolutionary movement, he was still astonished by the tininess of Willie"s ideological dispute with orthodoxy. Days of the week: that was pretty impressive, by anyone"s standards.
"A plump man, the branch secretary," said Willie. "Dreadful manners, very informal with the female comrades."
Ah, thought Norbert; yes, that sounded more like it.
Comrade Diana Lawrence had a headache, Comrade Lord Bognor reported to the committee after tea, and had gone for a lie down. "Occurs to me that the date-claiming business might, in any case, be better done once everyone"s here, so I propose we adjourn until tomorrow."
Norbert didn"t entirely follow Bognor"s logic, but was in favour of anything which got him out of listening to further extracts from his n.o.ble host"s crowded social and sporting schedule, so he raised his hand as part of a unanimous "Yes" vote.
Freed to wander, Norbert wandered. Walking quietly and with purpose was a skill he"d long possessed, and it was in that manner that he made his way along the upstairs corridors of the main house, looking into this and listening to that. He was in a room of un.o.bvious purpose when a voice from the doorway very nearly made him jump.
"I see we share a vice, Comrade Whistler."
The young woman who had been taking the minutes during the meeting on the lawn; he searched for the name. "A vice, Comrade Chaplin?" She had rather delightful hair, somewhat longer than was fashionable. Perhaps, he thought, she was one of those who believed that short hair could lead to baldness in women.
She smiled. "Nosiness!"
He raised his hands. "Guilty! I just couldn"t resist. It"s not every day you get to look round a place like this, is it?"
"Quite. And then, of course, places like this won"t exist for much longer. As private homes, that is."
Her voice trailed off, and her brow wrinkled. Norbert didn"t need to look behind him to see what had caused her attention to stray. "Yes, I"ve been wondering what that thing was, too. In fact, this entire room"s a bit odd."
She leaned forward to read the label on the peculiar contraption. ""The Vibro-Vitaliser." I suppose it"s some sort of health and fitness machine. I must say, it looks more like something the Okhrana might have used to extract information from reluctant witnesses."
He laughed. "It does, rather. I"m Norbert, by the way I don"t think I caught . . . ?"
"Susan." They shook hands.
"And what do you make of the proceedings so far, Susan?"
Her face and posture signalled her disappointment. "Well, I have to say, I"m not entirely . . . that is, Lord I mean Comrade or rather "
"Comrade Boggy?"
She smiled. "Him, yes. He does rather seem to view my role on the committee as being largely secretarial in nature."
That was what she did for a living, Norbert remembered; and lived with her parents in one of the newer London suburbs. "One of those Tube-station places," he"d heard someone say. Diana Lawrence, probably. "Yes," he said. "I suppose he does, rather."
Her face reddened. "Which seems a little unfair, I have to say. I mean, if a woman can be chairman of the General Council of the TUC "
"You might hope that self-proclaimed socialists would be a little more post-war in their att.i.tudes, certainly."
Susan nodded. "If not socialists, then whom? You know that the first thing the Bolsheviks did when they came to power in Russia was to declare universal suffrage for everyone over the age of eighteen both s.e.xes. It"s not even as if Comrade Boggy is some reactionary old stick. He can"t be more than forty-five, wouldn"t you say? And quite youthful with it."
They both jumped, guiltily, when the door creaked open. ""Ullo, me old ducks! "Ere I am again with me old string bag." Seeing their expressions which were not so much blank as startled Lord Bognor added: "Ah, perhaps you two don"t listen-in? It"s just something one of those comedians says. On the wireless, you know."
"I see," said Susan.
"Awfully funny when she does it." He coughed, smiled, and coughed again. "Well, I was just pa.s.sing and I heard chatter coming from in here, and wondered if anyone was lost."
"No," said Norbert, "we were just admiring the equipment here. Do you use it yourself?"
There was more throat-clearing; more on-off smiles. "Not, ah well, no. No, not personally. It belongs to my wife, she"s awfully keen on . . . She stays in London mostly, these days. For the theatre and so on."
The only decent response to that seemed to be an awkward silence; Susan and Norbert supplied one.
"I don"t know how half of it works, to be honest," Bognor continued, his voice a little hoa.r.s.e from all the coughing. "My wife calls it her Vitality Room."
"This one, I suppose, is some sort of slimming machine?" said Norbert, lifting a long, thick leather belt which protruded from a metal plate on the wall. "I presume it works by vibration."
"Of course," Bognor replied, "this would all be right up your street, wouldn"t it? Engineering, and all that. Tell me, are there many f.l.a.n.g.es involved in a device such as this?"
"Oh, you know pretty much the usual number." Norbert was coming to loathe b.l.o.o.d.y f.l.a.n.g.es, and was very glad when Susan stepped onto the platform of another of the Vitality Room"s exhibits.
"But what on earth is this thing?" she said, running her hands over the extraordinary loops and lengths of rubber tubing, metal canisters, valves and electrical wires which made up whatever it was. She read from the manufacturer"s plaque in front of her. "What is Galvatronic Therapy?"
"What it is, my dear," Bognor explained, with another less than ecstatic smile, "so far as I can tell, is something designed to maximize the profits of the electricity company." His guests laughed dutifully.
"I imagine," said Norbert, stepping up beside Susan, "you"re supposed to put this metal skullcap on your head, and depress that switch in front of you. Though to what purpose, I couldn"t guess."
"Ah!" said Bognor. "Anything involving electricity, the ladies lap it up."
"Actually," said Susan, "I think I read about something like this in a magazine. It"s believed that the application of galvanism to certain regions of the head can increase mental capacity, and provide aid to those deficient in nervous energy."
"I also read something in a magazine," said Bognor. "About a chap who"s invented a Death Ray." He paused, and barked a laugh. "Let"s hope it wasn"t the same chap."
Not to be left out, Norbert recalled something he"d read in a magazine; a report by a panel of doctors, warning that young women today were leading such hectic social and working lives that they were becoming dangerously thin and exhausted, relying on alcohol, tobacco and other drugs to keep them going. The unavoidable result, the doctors were sure, would be an unprecedented epidemic of consumption.
He kept the fruits of his reading to himself, however, suspecting that Comrade Susan Chaplin would not take kindly to a gang of male doctors trying to convince her sisters that they"d been happier before the Great War.
"If this is where you switch it on no, don"t worry, I"m not going to," said Susan, "then what are those controls over on the wall?"
"They regulate the dosage, I think," Norbert said, having investigated. "I suppose you set that before you mount up."
To Bognor"s visible relief, the sound of the electric doorbell reached them from the main hall. "Ah, excellent that"ll be our penultimate guest. Shall we greet him, Comrades?"
If the newcomer had turned out to be the late Lenin himself, Norbert could not have been much more surprised. Sir Reginald Lloyd was a cotton man, and even by the standards of that none-too-gentle trade was reputedly a ruthless compet.i.tor, and notoriously anti-union, loathed by his peers and his underlings equally.
"What on earth is that dreadful man doing here?" Willie Browning stood at Norbert"s elbow, his face displaying astonishment and what appeared to be real distress.
"I cannot imagine," said Norbert. "Perhaps he has seen the error of his ways."
Having been introduced to the beef-faced tyc.o.o.n, Norbert made his excuses and retired to his room. He spent twenty minutes writing in his notebook and then sat back in the enormous wing chair and closed his eyes, just for a moment. He wondered whether Sir Reginald used f.l.a.n.g.es in his business, and if so whether he was personally acquainted with the mounting thereof. And then he stopped wondering; in the modern world, there were few silences so deep as that found in the guest wing of a country house, late on a summer"s afternoon.
He awoke to the sound of a thousand daddy-longlegs. He reached his bedroom window just in time to see an aeroplane land in a meadow a few hundred yards from the house.
Well, thought Norbert: this really is a different world. He"d be willing to bet that very few f.l.a.n.g.e-mounters, north-eastern or otherwise, had ever seen a sight such as that. Why aye bonny lad, look you, isn"t it?
He was admiring the plane slightly bigger, he thought, than the few he"d seen during the war when its pilot emerged. It couldn"t be! It b.l.o.o.d.y was. The young man was wearing motorcycle goggles and a leather cap, and had a scarf wrapped around his throat and lower face, but never mind Norbert would know that walk anywhere. It wasn"t a swaggering walk or a loping one, let alone a strut. It wasn"t anything as vulgar as that. It was effortless; unthreatening, devoid of arrogance, open and confident and friendly. Supercilious b.a.s.t.a.r.d. It took centuries of careful breeding to condense such an intensity of superiority into so simple an action. Norbert washed his face, changed his shirt and hurried downstairs.
"Ah, here he is," said Lord Bognor, standing in the hall with Susan Chaplin and the pilot. "Giles, I"d like you to meet a most valuable member of our group. This is Norbert Whistler, Secretary-General of the Eastern Mounted . . . Consolidated Secretary of the Mange-Flouters of . . ."
Norbert took a deep breath. "a.s.sistant North-East Regional Secretary of the Consolidated Federation of f.l.a.n.g.e-Mounters and Correlated Crafts, Comrade," he said, smiling at the pilot and holding out his hand. He hoped handshakes weren"t irredeemably bourgeois; it would be so galling to make a faux pas. "Pleased to meet you."