LITMIR.BIZ

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my bicycle pump? Or cover my saddle with superglue?’

      Battersby remained silent for a moment. Goodfellowe was a notoriously awkward sod, a man who had a mind of his own and absolutely nothing of relevance to the Whips. No position, no ambition, nothing to lose. So no weak points, no leverage. An archetypal FU-2. And Battersby was beginning to feel uncertain of his ground. Had they really put garlic in the steak-and-kidney?

      ‘Anyway, something you ought to know.’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘The waitress,’ Goodfellowe continued. ‘She owns the restaurant.’

      With that, Goodfellowe was gone, democratic duty done and on his way home, leaving behind him the over-ripe odour of the milking shed and savouring the fresh air – although in London everything was relative, particularly the concept of fresh air. Whitehall was still crowded with traffic grinding its way towards Trafalgar Square and even the rain hadn’t managed to wash the taste of burnt diesel from the night. He spat, then spat again when he found a glistening maroon Ministerial Rover parked ostentatiously across the new green cycle lane, blocking his route. The vehicle’s driver was leaning against the wall of the nearby Cabinet Office, smoking a cheap Dutch cheroot.

      Goodfellowe felt his fuse beginning to burn. It was barely a month since they had painted this cycle lane, and then only after years of lobbying. It represented a small stream of green hope washing through Whitehall. Now Ministers were using it as a car park.

      Yet like all London cyclists who lived in hope of survival, Goodfellowe was prepared. Whistle to his lips, as was his custom when fighting heavy traffic, he blew to attract the driver’s attention. The driver turned, stared impassively from the shadows of his wall, dark eyes unblinking, his face lit like a Halloween mask, then returned to his cheroot.

      Goodfellowe blew again, impatiently, a shriller blast, but Ministerial drivers were a law unto themselves – why, they even had little silver badges issued by the Metropolitan Police to prove it. This bastard wasn’t for moving. And the rain was back.

      Exasperated, Goodfellowe engaged a lower gear and began to manoeuvre his small collapsible bicycle out into the roadway. But the gears were stiff, unoiled, reluctant, and the distraction caused him to be careless. He bent to his task, head down, and twitched at the handlebars, but no sooner had he moved out from the kerb than his world was all but turned on its end as he found himself hurled back towards the gutter by the bow wave of an advancing double-decker. The bus screamed past, almost brushing his shoulder. A collapsible bike pitted against fume-belching spray-spewing red-metal monster. No contest. Goodfellowe ended up drenched.

      The front wheel wobbled in despair. The Ministerial driver smirked.

      Suddenly Goodfellowe realized he knew the fellow. From years ago, but reasonably well. The smirk belonged to a driver from the Whitehall motor pool who on frequent occasions had driven Goodfellowe during those heady days of fame and good fortune when he’d been a Minister at the Home Office. At that time their relationship had been all smiles and shared Polo mints, larded with gossip about the fumblers and fallers in the great parliamentary steeplechase, but now the driver stared at him, oblivious and unrecognizing.

      Goodfellowe could feel the rain creeping like slugs down into his socks and his shoes. His suit had about as much chance of surviving its next encounter with the trouser press as Battersby had of winning Mastermind. It had been a mistake to use the bike. In weather like this it made him look a prat. Hell, perhaps it made him look a prat in any weather. But that still didn’t give the bastard the right to block the cycle lane!

      There was some part of Goodfellowe that was Irish, on his father’s side, from old Queen’s County before they renamed it Laois. In spite of the English overlay, which was supposed to consign all of life’s furies to safe storage in some form of spiritual Tupperware, he took immense pride in these roots, if for no better reason than that it provided an ideal excuse for the occasional outburst. He was also on a diet, nothing but salads and crackers and no second glass of wine, which would make any Celt feel irritable. So, as another bus thundered past, Goodfellowe began to feel mightily and irresistibly pissed off. The whistle fell from his lips. He stood to his full height on the pedals, and let forth a stream of foulness.

      The driver looked up once more, dull eyes staring, casting around to make sure no one else was observing him. Then slowly, almost reverently, he offered Goodfellowe his middle finger.

      In his capacity as the Honourable Member of Parliament for Marshwood, Goodfellowe had sworn a solemn oath by Almighty God to uphold the Crown and its laws, but here it was dark, another world, and now he was drawing alongside this bloody car. Perhaps God wasn’t watching. He shifted his weight in the saddle, took a deep breath, summoned a curse to his lips. Then he was upon it!

      He lashed out at the panel of the driver’s door with his heel. The panel gave a low cry of abused metal, giving great satisfaction to Goodfellowe, who wobbled onwards, taking a yard or two to recover his balance. He turned in his saddle to claim his triumph.

      The driver simply shrugged and returned to his cheroot. He didn’t give a stuff. Wasn’t his wretched car.

      Goodfellowe pushes on into a night that is rapidly coming to resemble the rinse cycle of his local launderette, an awareness growing inside him of two things. The first is that he’s made a bloody fool of himself – but that feeling will pass. It always has before.

      The other feeling he knows will be more difficult to handle. As a politician he is accustomed to finding self-justification for almost anything he does – hell, hadn’t he just spent all afternoon voting for an Access To Welfare (Disability) Reform Bill he knew in his heart was rubbish and deeply inequitable? – but the upswell of rage about the cycle lane is more, far more, than a bruised sense of justice. What has really got him going is that the bastard driver hasn’t recognized him. That’s what really hurts and has got so far up his nose that it’s pinching his brain. Suddenly he’s become aware that he loathes his feebleness, scuttling around Westminster like a spider crab, getting soaked with every incoming tide, his only function to act as target practice for the likes of Battersby and every passing bus driver.

      He wants to change the world, but before he can do that he will have to change himself.

      A hot flush passes through him that is very masculine and slightly menopausal but which seems to dry his collar and warm his wet toes. He is directly opposite the Old Shades pub in Whitehall, on a night of storms and sticking Sturmey Archers, when suddenly the clouds part and everything becomes clear to him.

      He knows. He hates his impotence and he hates the crumpled clothes, even more than he hates that insolent bloody driver.

      It is a moment of personal conversion. Goodfellowe wants out of the laundry basket that his life has become. Before it’s all too late.

       TWO

      Dawn had arrived gently, like a baby at its mother’s breast, but already the farmhouse was alive with the noise of a new day. Magpies squabbled on the reed roof while its ancient beams, salvaged from a shipwreck on the nearby coast some three hundred years earlier, stretched in the warmth of the slow yellow sun. Somewhere near at hand a loose shutter began a quarrel with the morning breeze.

      In a room at the top of the house, directly beneath the thatch, Captain Mary Wetherell (retd), formerly of the Royal Corps of Signals, lay in her bed, tracing the path of a rivulet of condensation as it trickled uncertainly down the windowpane, and identifying each and every noise, just as she had lain awake through long hours marking the noises of the night. Those noises of the dark hours had been less comforting. The screeches of hunters and the hunted. The insistent ticking of the long-case clock in the hall. The snoring of her husband.

      Mary was one day into her thirty-first year. Her birthday had been celebrated – if ‘celebration’ were the appropriate term – the night before with a small dinner for herself and a few friends. Her husband’s friends, to be precise. She had almost none of her own

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