Whispers of Betrayal

Within five months she had quit in despair, her career destroyed, her confidence shattered as completely as a discarded bottle.

That’s why she had married Oscar. In a moment of weakness. He was a stooping gentle giant of a hill farmer, a widower with two grown sons, and a good companion. OK, so he was old enough to be her father, but he was unlike her own father in so many ways. Oscar, for instance, had worked diligently, drank in moderation on every day except Friday and showed only fleeting interest in her sexuality. She hoped that at last she had found a partner who would share her needs rather than treat her body as an excuse for violence or as a prize in some Friday-night rutting festival, but Oscar showed almost no interest at all. He had a family, had already done his duty. At last she had found that elusive level playing field for which she had been searching, only to discover that it was as empty as it was flat.

Beside her, Oscar was beginning to stir, the smell of last night’s stale cigar smoke still on him. She didn’t feel like waiting for the usual exchange of greetings which were no longer meant, on her part at least – did he realize? A pang of confusion and guilt burst upon her, driving her from her bed. He wasn’t a bad man, not like the others. It wasn’t his fault they couldn’t get newspapers delivered to such an isolated spot and had no conversation to share other than the tumbling price of milk quotas and the closure of the local post office. But it was his fault that they lived there, and her fault, too.

She stood in her bathroom shivering, and not just from the cold, failing to recognize the face in the mirror that was melting in tears at the thought of another day in their half-forgotten world on the middle of this moor, with its empty hearths and closed hearts.

She knew she would do anything for a change.

Goodfellowe was enjoying the prerogative of a Member of Parliament, exercised on days when the Government wasn’t about to fall, of loitering in bed.

Not that he was idling, of course. He was preparing himself for the tribulations that lay ahead by devouring the Daily Telegraph. Back to front, as was his custom in matters of the mind. First the sports section, where he discovered that something called Charlton Athletic was sitting on top of the Premiership. Mystified, he rubbed the shadows from his eyes and turned to the obituaries. The Lord Drago had died, leaving no family. Goodfellowe knew him – had known him – but then he seemed to know more and more of those featured in this column with every passing year. He read about a progress through the ranks of Party and Parliament that was written like the eulogy for a modern-day Alexander and was, of course, complete bollocks. Forty years ago, before they had changed the law and lowered the age of consent, Drago had avoided imprisonment only because he had once served in MI5 and had friends in necessary places – although fourteen-year-olds were still beyond the pale, even today. He should have ended up in Wormwood Scrubs, instead he’d ended up in the House of Lords, and now he had ended up dead. Goodfellowe sighed and wondered what sort of obituary he would get, indeed whether he would get one at all. He decided not to dwell and hurried on through business and fashion, discovering what he might do with his money. If he had any. Then, finally, a splendid front-page story reporting a bravura speech by Brenda, the Environment Secretary, in which she claimed to have ‘honoured this Government’s covenant, not just for today but with future generations,’ by announcing an increase in spending on the environment. No mean achievement during these turbulent and tight-fisted times.

Sadly, as the newspaper reported with considerable malice, Brenda’s rhetorical sophistication hadn’t markedly improved since the days of last year’s drought when she had advised the nation to ‘dig deep and do whatever it takes’ to conserve water, and her husband had been discovered showering with their next-door neighbour. A finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth, had our Brenda. Several pounds short of a pension.

Oh, but what would the Telegraph do without her? On a bad news day – no divorces, no disasters, almost a day of despair for the newsroom – they were able to reveal that Brenda’s citadel had been built with bricks of straw – and not even her own straw. In fact, she had done little more than rhetorically to raid the contingency budget that had been set aside by the Ministry of Agriculture to prevent hard-pressed farmers from starving, then in a gesture too far had classified it all as environmental expenditure on the grounds that most of the money was keeping the countryside green. Or, more accurately, being poured down a hole in the ground. Too bloody blatant, even for this Government. One day it would spin itself entirely out of control.

The letters page made for scarcely more comfortable reading. Clerics featured prominently this morning, with epistles deploring everything from the inaccuracy of church clocks to the most recent outbreak of pew power in which a congregation in Durham had mounted a picket line outside the cathedral. Their objective had been to insist on a return to King James and a few snatches of traditional organ music in place of all the clapping and community kissing. As Goodfellowe was frequently moved to note, God moves in a mysterious way; perhaps it would be better if God stopped dashing around and simply rested for a while to enable all these confused souls to catch up with Him. Or Her.

Another letter caught his eye. A broadside against the Government, damning it for its broken promises and fractured budgets, much like many other correspondents over the months, but this letter was of particular interest to Goodfellowe. Full of anger, yet written with simplicity and considerable dignity. It described the Defence Secretary as doing ‘what no tyrant has been able to do since the days of the Norman Conquest, namely, single-handedly to threaten the security of the entire country.’

That description was inaccurate, Goodfellowe reflected. The Defence Secretary was no tyrant, rather an inferior form of ministerial life who had proven himself wholly incapable of standing up to the grasping demands of the Treasury, which was precisely why he had been allowed to linger in office so long beyond the point where any signs of usefulness had expired.

‘Self-sacrifice is part of the military tradition,’ the letter continued, ‘particularly in order to save the lives of others, but to be sacrificed in order to save the life of an ebbing administration is an extraordinary breach of faith. There is nothing in this but shame for the Government, and growing danger for the country as a whole.’

Goodfellowe wriggled his toes in discomfort beneath the duvet. He agreed. The cutbacks had been appalling, even dangerous. He had thought so even as he’d marched through the lobby to vote for them. But what was he to do? Unlike the military, a backbencher is not immersed in thoughts about the nobility of self-sacrifice.

The letter fired its final salvo. ‘For most soldiers, to be cast aside by their country is a greater humiliation than surrender. Most soldiers would prefer the simple dignity of being shot.’

The letter was written by Colonel Peter Amadeus, MC. The Parachute Regiment. Retired. Obviously forcibly.

Goodfellowe gave a quiet squeak of surprise. ‘I know this old bastard.’

‘Which old bastard?’

He looked up.

It was Elizabeth.

‘Nothing better to do in bed than read the newspaper?’

She was smiling. Bearing a breakfast tray. And completely naked. For a moment all his senses were filled with her, the soft curves of her body that caught the light from the window, those places of shadow and mystery, the almond-and-marzipan lips and eyes of … Eyes of what? He always had difficulty describing the colour of her eyes. Marmalade was about as close as he ever got. Full of sunshine and Seville. Not that he’d ever been to Seville, or had any idea what it was like. Except it produced lots of marmalade.

There were some questions he would never be able to answer about Elizabeth. Theirs was a relationship that had covered the spectrum between hell and the hurricane, and visited most of the storm centres in between. They had never fully trusted each other, since they were two people who found considerable difficulty in trusting themselves, particularly Goodfellowe, who had battled for what seemed half a lifetime to come to terms with his guilt and anger. His guilt arose because he was married to Elinor, his anger, even greater than his guilt, because Elinor was no longer, and could never again be, his true wife. Poor, tormented Elinor, locked away within the darkness of her starved mind and confined to a nursing home since the death of their son, Stevie. Not her fault. Perhaps not his fault either, but enough torment to have laid a trail of confusion upon his love for Elizabeth.

‘It’s Amadeus,’ he announced, placing the newspaper to one side as he accepted the proffered tray. ‘I know him. Or knew him, to be precise. At school. Didn’t know him well, but pleasant enough. Very intense for a fourteen-year-old. Not a name you forget in a hurry.’

‘You didn’t enjoy school much, did you?’

‘Not that school,’ Goodfellowe agreed. Not any school, in truth. ‘Got expelled.’

‘You? Expelled?’ she burbled in surprise. She perched on the edge of the bed, intent on discovering more.

‘The headmaster and I suffered from fundamentally differing viewpoints.’ He rallied, tore his eyes away from her body, knowing he would have to finish the story first. ‘Hoare – unfortunate name for a headmaster, don’t you think? Left him rather distracted, I suspect. Christened his daughter Amanda. Can you imagine her school register? Anyway, during a dull interlude in one of his lessons when perhaps my attentions were drifting, Old Hoary thought it was in order to throw his stick of chalk at me. Which is where our fundamental disagreement came into play. Because he didn’t think it was appropriate for me to pick it up and throw the bloody stuff back. Caught him smack on the bridge of his spectacles. Knocked ’em clean off. Smashed. You could hear the noise all over the school.’

‘So he expelled you? For throwing chalk?’

‘No, not for the chalk. It was for my artwork. As he was shaking the hell out of me for breaking his glasses, one of my illustrations fell out of a textbook.’

‘Illustrations?’

Goodfellowe looked reflective, painting in the air with a piece of toast as he refreshed the picture in his mind. ‘An amateurish but highly annotated illustration of a woman. Entitled “Martha”.’

‘Naked?’

‘Of course. Vividly so. Accompanied by a brief but entertaining sexual history. One which was highly accurate too, according to fourth-form rumour. To which the headmaster, even without his glasses, took great exception on the quite narrow-minded grounds that Martha was also the name of his wife. Copped merry hell for that. Not to return after the end of the term, my parents were told. Copped a packet from the old man, too.’ Goodfellowe bit into a corner of the toast, trying to avoid the thick smear of butter that clung to its surface. ‘Amadeus was in the year below me. Came to say goodbye when he heard I was being thrown out. Asked for a copy of the drawing. Offered me a shilling for it. Damned decent gesture, I thought.’

Goodfellowe pulled a face.

‘Unpleasant memory?’ she enquired, concerned.

‘No, unpleasant toast. How can you ruin toast, for pity’s sake?’ He dribbled crumbs onto his bare chest, which she brushed tantalizingly with the tips of her fingers, tracing the fragments of scorched bread down towards his navel.

‘Why do you think I own a restaurant? It’s the only way a girl like me can get a decent meal. Either that or joining an escort agency. Come to think of it, an escort agency would offer much better hours. The overheads would be lower, too.’

‘In my opinion, which is anything but humble, the chaotic hours of running a restaurant are ideal for you.’

‘Why?’

He beamed wickedly, pulling her back towards him. ‘Because they precisely match my own.’

‘You selfish bastard, Goodfellowe,’ she cried, picking up his newspaper and beginning to hit him around the head.

‘Don’t do that! I want to keep Amadeus’s letter. Invite him for a drink, perhaps. When you’ve put your clothes on.’

She began to laugh, like wind chimes disturbed by a summer’s breeze. She was remarkably unselfconscious about her naked body, and with good reason. Even in her thirty-somethings it was still finely crafted with, as Goodfellowe had once put it, ‘excellent long-term potential’. She had thought it a clumsy phrase, while he thought it summed her up exactly. So they fought a lot, misunderstood each other, had to compromise. But, as they fought, he learnt, about himself, and about that other half of humanity they called Woman. He liked learning as he neared his fiftieth, almost as much as he’d done in the fourth form. As for compromise, he found it easy when he was in her bed. Elizabeth de Vries. Excellent long-term potential. A body. Brains. A superb Russian restaurant thrown in, too. What more could a man want?

Except for an uncreased copy of the Telegraph. He grabbed it back.

‘Anyway, what does he say in his letter, your friend Amadeus?’ Elizabeth asked, conceding.

‘That the Government is crap. He’s probably right.’

‘But it’s your Government, poppet.’

She sounded the words slowly, with a smile of saccharine, as though she were lecturing a small child, but he wasn’t in the mood. Nowadays he was rarely in the mood. He had developed a fundamental humour loss when it came to this Government. His Government. A Government that was deep into its menopause and now so bereft of ideas that it had all but run out of things to leak.

‘That’s naïve,’ he responded, he hoped softly enough to smother the sounds of his own imploding frustration.

‘You vote for it every day of the week.’

‘Like all women, you don’t understand …’

‘What’s the matter, Goodfellowe, the only place you discover your balls is in bed?’ She laughed, claiming victory.

‘Ridiculous female logic.’

‘Typical male inadequacy might be closer to the mark.’

‘Elizabeth, you’re being emotional,’ he protested, knowing already that his banners were in tatters and the field was hers.

‘I know I’m nothing more than a weak and wanton woman, but you aren’t. So why don’t you do something about it?’

The coup de grâce. A single blow. Delivered with unerring accuracy.

‘Do something? Do something?’ he repeated, as though the question was struggling to penetrate the wits of a drowning man. ‘I can’t! I wish I could but I can’t. I’m a miserable backbencher with no power and a bike that’s going rusty while these bloody Ministers …’ He clenched the rescued newspaper in his fist as he spoke, unaware that he was crumpling it beyond redemption.

‘Most of them are cock-ups scuttling around Whitehall in search of an occasion,’ he continued. ‘They sweep past in their Ministerial limousines, their spin doctors strewing rose petals and whisky in their way, while we are expected to stand idly by in the pouring rain and wave them onward. And, to hell with it, look what you’ve done to my newspaper!’ he howled in the manner of some Dickensian villain.

‘No, Goodfellowe, you did it. And it’s my newspaper. My toast.’ She picked up the tray. ‘And my bed. Time to get out of it. The second shift arrives in half an hour.’

He looked at the disappearing tray with a sharp edge of hunger. Damn the diet. The toast didn’t look that bleak after all. ‘You know what I really want, Elizabeth?’ he called after her, his imagination full of the sight and succulence of a full English from the Connaught.

She turned at the door. ‘I know exactly what you want, poppet,’ she said with a certainty that for a moment completely overwhelmed him. ‘You want to be a Minister once again.’

For a moment he was stunned. Was it so bloody obvious?

‘It would cause problems for me, of course,’ she continued, her lips puckering. ‘The Minister’s mistress. I’d become a cliché.’

‘Would that be a very great problem?’

She stared at him directly, glints of orange fire in the marmalade. ‘I’d manage. If that’s what you wanted. In fact, old darling, I think I’d manage rather well.’

The words hung between them, persisting. It was the first time they had admitted to each other, perhaps even to themselves, that they saw their futures together, as a team. This was not easy for either of them to admit. There was something often a little theatrical about Elizabeth, like Vivien Leigh, all extravagance and dramatic passion as though she had stepped out of ‘Gone With The Wind’ with high cheekbones and expressive lips that could squeeze submission from almost any man. But if so much of her life was an act, it was only because, in those secret places inside, she had spent much of her life feeling inadequate. She had first learnt the mechanics of satisfying a boy at the age of fourteen. She had also learnt of the potential consequences when, once satisfied, he had simply walked away. Abandoned her to the sniggers of his friends. Made her feel like a slut. She had decided there and then that if anyone was going to do the walking away after that, it would be her. She had been walking away ever since, from her ill-prepared university exams, from her ill-starred marriage, from any sort of personal commitment she felt she could not control – until Goodfellowe had come along on his bloody bike. He was different, confusing, didn’t run by the normal rules. He was both infuriating and fun. So maybe it would be different this time. Maybe.

Goodfellowe understood some of this, although he had never been allowed to penetrate behind all the layers of tinsel. It meant that his love for her could never be a comfortable matter but, hell, he’d had years of respectable marriage, done the comfort thing and collected the T-shirts, all of which were starched and ironed and filled the locked matrimonial closet. He needed something different, not order and contentment but a challenge that would strip away the restraints and leave the T-shirts crumpled and torn, something that would allow the man beneath to show through.

As he listened to her words about Ministerial office and advancement, an uneasy sensation scoured his stomach. At first he hoped it might be nothing more than the echo of an unfinished breakfast, but quickly it overwhelmed him. A sensation he hadn’t felt in so very long.

Excitement.

Twisting inside him once more.

He had Elizabeth. And now, with her encouragement, once again he had that other inspiration missing from his life.

He had ambition.

The hour is late, well beyond evening. A solitary shaft of light cuts across the prep school lawn. The turf is immaculate, which is much more than can be said for Boris, the caretaker’s cat, a ginger-walnut tom with missing ear and the look of battles past, many of which he appears to have lost. He pauses, cautious, sniffing the air in suspicion before padding across the river of light.

The old clock above the quad takes its time about striking ten, disturbing the screech owl that had found a perch on the weather vane. There is no disguising the fact that the bell is badly cracked, and getting worse. The entire clock tower is a disgrace, so dilapidated it will soon need replacing if Amadeus can find the money, or silencing if not. Another tedious battle which as bursar he will have to fight with the governors, hand to hand, a tussle that will soak up as much of his energy as did the recapture of ‘Full Back’ on Mount Longdon, and maybe leave as many scars.

He turns up the volume of his CD player until the voices make his office vibrate. Not a problem, since there is no one left to disturb, apart from the cat and the owls. Mozart’s Requiem. The work of a dying man that was destined to be left behind, uncompleted. Amadeus has revisited this music many times recently, feeling its power, beginning to understand how wrathful the composer must have felt in his frustration, and sensing his fear. So much unfinished business.

‘… fac benigne ne perenni cremer igne,’ the chorus sang. ‘Grant that I burn not in everlasting fire.’

How Amadeus loathes his job. A travesty of his talents. Surrounded by children who have no respect and teaching staff who show no interest, parading in their crumpled jackets and tatty liberalism. When he was interviewed for the post, the headmaster suggested he had no management experience. Sure, he didn’t know how many paper clips he had in his desk drawer. But he had planned a Para battle group assault with eight hundred men and heavy drop kit, all loaded onto twenty Hercules that were then flown five hundred miles and dropped on precisely the right bloody spot at exactly the right bloody time so that no one drowned or broke his fucking back. That wasn’t management, of course, not in Civvy Street. He’d just have to get used to such subtle distinctions. ‘Look, it’s an income,’ the Officers Association had encouraged when they pushed the bursar’s position at him. Yeah, but so was mugging grandmothers.

He took the job because there was nothing else on offer at the time, apart from the still greater humiliation of his wife’s incessant nagging. And when he sat down and considered all the options, beneath all the doubts there was the bedrock of his pride. Amazing what a man’s pride could make him do.

Amadeus turns from his post at the window and wanders back to his desk, a route he has crossed and recrossed at least a dozen times during the evening, restless, like a refugee. From beneath the puddle of light thrown by the solitary lamp upon his desk he retrieves the copy of the Telegraph, tightly folded to the letter page, which contains the reply that has been printed to his own. It comes from the Minister for Defence, Gerald Earwick. He reads it again, and still his soul burns.

‘… distortion of the truth … time for the country to decide, arms or Accident & Emergency wards … our duty to defend our hospitals and schools, our old and infirm … an end to feather-bedding in the armed forces.’

On that night in the black snow on Mount Longdon, he had watched the youthful Argentinian conscript die, Scully’s bayonet stuck in an inch below his twelfth rib, the young man scrabbling uncomprehending at his emptying stomach while hope drained away between his fingers. Somehow it hadn’t seemed like a feather bed.

‘We should not allow the argument to be distorted,’ Earwick’s riposte continues, ‘by the self-interested pleading of a small number of disgruntled former officers. The truth of the matter is simple. The nation’s security remains safe in this Government’s hands.’

He reads it yet again, even though every word has already dripped like acid across his heart. The music of the Day of Judgement echoes in his head.

‘Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla … Nil inultum remanebit,’ they chant. ‘O, day of wrath, that day will dissolve the earth in ashes … Nothing will remain unavenged!’

Nothing will remain unavenged. Eternal words that reach out across the ages. At last Amadeus stops his pacing. He pours himself a large whisky, a Talisker, neat, the colour of amber, sits at his desk and lights a cigarette. He drinks and inhales, both deeply. His mind reaches out to places far away but not so long ago. The slopes of Longdon with its stench of rotting fish. The drive through Sniper’s Alley in Mostar, and the ridge above Konjic where death jumped out of the virgin snow. Kigali, with its piles of bodies strewn like yesterday’s newspapers along the fetid roads, bloating in the sun. Places, and times, when he had been needed.

The music has stopped. The only sound in the room is that of his breathing, which is deep, as though he has been running, or is about to start. Perhaps he should put it all behind him, bury his anger and wait for salvation in the life hereafter. But he can’t. Forgiving the enemy is for saints, or politicians, or oil companies. Not for him. For Amadeus, every dark corner hides an injustice, every breath grows into a sigh of protest.