Implosion, p.12
Implosion, page 12
It was a fateful decision, in that it led to a seemingly trivial episode that was to have a lasting, if not profound, effect upon Bart’s attitude to several things.
He awoke late on Saturday morning. Earlier in the week he had told Mrs. H that he would be going down to Clacton, and had failed to tell her he had changed his mind. So Mrs. H did not arrive at her usual time and he overslept. It was nearly nine o’clock, and the gray light of a winter’s day peered round the edges of the curtains. He tried to lie in bed, but he found himself wondering if he had done the right thing in not going, and when he tried to think of other matters, the matters were inevitably work.
He got up, tired and irritable, and made coffee. He decided he could not be bothered to boil an egg, although he had not had any supper the night before. Mrs. H, thinking he would be in Clacton, had not provided any.
Waiting for the coffee, he ate a piece of bread and butter, cursing softly at the hardness of the butter and blamed Mrs. H for leaving it in the fridge. The coffee ready, he poured it in a jug, splashed in some milk, added sugar from a packet and stirred the mixture with the breadknife. He found a cup—he could not bother with a saucer—lounged into the living room and slumped down in an armchair.
His eyes searched the room for something he might vent his ill-temper on. Anything.
Those damned shelves round the fireplace … what on earth had they been for? Far too weak for books. That City gent and his particular wife must have had a hell of a lot of ornaments … what was on those shelves … concentrate … not books … books … schools … National Schools …
Bart opened his eyes, frowning. Suddenly it seemed important to remember what had been on the shelves. It was a relief to remember. Plates. Chinese plates—Ming or Soo or Bang or something.
He got up and went to the window. Not, he thought, much of a view. About fifteen feet away a vast blank flank wall, the cracked cement rendering wet and streaked with soot. It was raining again. Was it raining in Clacton? Had to get straightened out before going there again. He remembered the coffee, and poured a cup. It tasted filthy.
This, he decided, would not do. Have a shower, dress and go for a walk; never mind the rain. Do some shopping. Go to Harrods and get a present for Julia. He felt better at once.
Half an hour later he was on his way down in the lift. The lofty entrance hall and the rather grand staircase which he never used—his was a top-floor flat—reminded him that once this had been a private house, occupied by one family and their servants. Four floors and a basement, all full of people in one family, an age unbelievably remote …
Sheltering under the white painted portico was a detective. Bart, anxious to preserve his out-of-routine frame of mind, spoke instead of giving his usual nod.
“Rotten morning, Officer.” He surveyed the streaming road, the line of cars parked down the middle of the broad road. Not many children, but cars—
“It is that, sir.”
“Well, you needn’t bother with me this morning. I’m only going to do a little shopping—” He stopped, noting the detective’s wooden expression.
“I’ve got my orders, sir.”
“Yes,” replied Bart pensively, “haven’t we all?” His fragile good humor collapsed, he turned and set off down the slight slope to the Cromwell Road. Few people were walking, and all were far too intent on getting out of the rain to notice him. It made the shock all the greater when he entered Harrods.
Almost immediately he was recognized. Not that anyone spoke, but he had enough experience to recognize the casually turned head, the stare, not quite at him, the sudden whisper. Sharply Bart turned into the perfume and cosmetics department, now much less exotic, featuring lavender water and eau de cologne. He studied one counter, but thoughts of buying anything were driven from his mind as he saw the assistant’s haughty stare quicken with interest. He turned abruptly and strode farther into the store and found himself in the butchery department.
Bart stopped momentarily to get his bearings. A woman shopper bumped into him. She looked up to apologize; she stared at him, her lips slightly parted.
He headed for the man’s shop.
The assistant, an exquisite young man who tried, with some success, to give the impression that he was filling in time between Eton and Oxford, eyed him without visible emotions.
“May I help you, sir?”
The relief was immense. At last someone who did not spend all his spare time watching TV. “I want a hat.”
“Yes, sir—what sort had you in mind?”
“Sort? Oh, that will do.” Bart pointed to a display of near-Tyrolean creations.
“Of course, sir. What size?”
It was years since Bart had bought a hat. He had no idea. He grabbed one. Too small. Another. Not too bad, a little large, no bad fault.
“This one.”
Bart paid for the hat. Putting it on before a mirror he saw the reflection of his assistant urgently poking a colleague in the ribs. Bart could have killed him.
He turned out of the man’s shop and up the escalator. With the hat well drawn down, and his collar turned up he could relax; might look rather odd, but certainly less easy to identify.
For ten minutes he was moderately at ease in the book department. He selected a book and held it out to an elderly female assistant, but he saw her expression … he dropped the book on the counter and practically ran down the escalator and out into the friendly rain.
For perhaps half an hour he trudged aimlessly, head well down, with no clear idea of where he was going. He must have gone round in circles, for when he did look up, he was outside a Lyons tea shop near the top of Sloane Street. The sight reminded him that he was hungry. He turned and beckoned to his patient shadow, and pressed a wet ten-shilling note in the man’s hand.
“I’m hungry. Let’s go in here. You get the food.”
The detective gave him a commiserating look. “OK, sir. What would you like?”
Bart had not been at Lyons since his student days. “Oh, egg on toast and some tea. You have whatever you want.”
As they went in, the detective said, hesitantly, “Begging your pardon sir, but you wouldn’t be trying to give me the slip?”
“Christ, no!” Bart’s uncertain temper flamed momentarily. “No, Officer. I didn’t eat last night, and I had a piece of bread for breakfast. I feel tired, I want to sit down, and I want something to eat. Satisfied?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, but you understand—”
“I understand all right,” said Bart with great feeling. He pointed to a vacant table. “I’ll be over there. I won’t run away.”
So the second most powerful man in the United Kingdom, furtively and in some haste, ate his egg on toast amid the clatter and bustle of a Lyons teashop, under the sympathetic eye of his escort—or keeper.
By the time Bart got out into the street again he was so hypersensitive he imagined all eyes were on him. He got the detective to hail a cab, and returned with relief to his flat.
He flung his dripping hat in one corner and flopped down in a chair and tried to analyze his state of mind. He had been near panic in Harrods. After all, he had been well known for over a year, and while he had never liked it, he was used to being recognized, but now … There was one big difference, he concluded. To begin with, he was now alone. That was a very big difference. Also his life for months had steadily contracted into an almost monastic seclusion. He worked in his familiar office a lot of the time—ate a good many of his meals there too—a car took him home, or anywhere else. Even addressing a meeting he was, in a sense, isolated from his audience. Anyway, that was work. He expected to be known. Now he realized that since Farmer’s illness he was universally known, that he could not hope to do the most ordinary things—buy a paper, have a drink in a pub—without being recognized. Always he would be conscious of the people around him, the knowing nudge …
“Don’t let him see you looking, but that’s Bart over there. Looks miserable (or happy). No wonder, with his wife in a Home …” There would be silly, predictable jokes. The half-hidden grins, the odd outright laugh. At that moment Bart conceived a deep and enduring dislike for people en masse.
Bart grabbed the phone and called Julia. There was no reply. He rang the Home.
“Sorry, sir. Mrs. Bart is on duty at the moment in the labor ward. Shall I—”
Bart slammed the phone down. He called the Flavells. They had gone away for the weekend.
Half-past twelve on a cold, wet Saturday afternoon in winter. Sitting huddled in his coat, he felt utterly wretched, mentally exhausted, hating humanity. Above all, hating himself. Moving a leg, he knocked over the jug of cold coffee. He fought down a strong impulse to smash the jug against the wall. Instead he got up, fetched a bottle of whiskey and a glass. He kicked the jug to one side and sat down again, staring at the black stain on the red carpet.
He was still staring at the patch when the short winter’s day ended, the room was dark, shadowy. And the bottle half empty.
For the next fortnight Bart plunged desperately into his work. With Farmer back in office, he should have relaxed a little. Instead, he was deep in the child conscription scheme.
Miss Parkins, closer to him than most, detected a faint suspicion of keenness—pleasure was too strong a word—in his approach to this problem. About half the nation’s children were still outside the Schools. Given a free hand by the Premier, Bart made it clear he intended getting the rest in by the end of the Christmas holidays.
He approved a poster campaign designed to drive in the waverers. Arrangements were made with the police that when a child was killed in a road accident, the body was not to be moved until it was photographed. Ghastly, full-color posters appeared all over the country. All bore the caption, “Another child who died because he (or she) was not in a National School.”
M.P.’s and the newspapers were inundated with protesting letters. Even Farmer, who firmly supported his Minister of Regeneration in public, was unhappy, less certain, in private. He said so.
“Good!” Bart was cold, defensive. “They’re not supposed to add to the nation’s gaiety.”
Farmer let that pass. “Are you getting results?”
“Yes. It’s hitting the difficult group, the parents with children under ten.”
“Still, some of them are rough. That one of a child’s head crushed under a wheel—”
“It was a damned sight rougher on the child!” flared Bart. “For the sake of some half-baked woman’s filthy, selfish self-love—love, they call it!” He could not go on.
His bitter rage shocked Farmer. Its suddenness, and the near-fanatical look in Bart’s eyes disturbed him.
“All right, John.” Farmer spoke quietly. “Don’t try to pick a fight with me.”
“Sorry, George.” Bart shook his head. “I know I’m less tolerant, but they must see … and if they’re wilfully blind, it’s up to me to open their eyes. I know; you think that as we are starting conscription so soon the campaign has no point. I don’t agree. We’re getting more of the younger ones in, we’re building up in the parents a sense of guilt, and when compulsion starts, they will have some small consolation.”
Farmer changed the subject. “Not saying you need a rest, so don’t fly off at me, but you’d better remember my recent experience. Sure, you’re a lot younger. All the same, try to ease down. No! Shut up!” He held up an admonitory hand. “These repatriation talks with New Zealand. You could represent me. Have a few days in the sun—”
“No!” Bart snapped. Then he sighed. “No thank you, George. I’m hoping to go down to Clacton for a few days over Christmas. That’s all the change I need.” His tone belied his words.
Bart did his very best to lay aside all his cares and anxieties when he went down to the Home on Christmas Eve. His Christmas shopping, such as it was, had been done by Mrs. H. There was a compact sewing machine of Swiss make for Julia—Bart knew that no more would be imported—and a twin-set for Matron. The latter was a present from Julia, who had given her own rigid instructions about size and color. For the rest, there were a few bottles of wine and an assortment of skin foods and other cosmetics which Bart knew were dear to Julia’s heart—and also fast vanishing from the open market.
She was on duty when he arrived, and for a time her husband poked around the living room, feeling like an interloper. The room was bright and fresh, full of reminders of Julia. A roll of knitting in a chair, beside yet another novel about Mary, Queen of Scots. Bart frowned at the sight of himself, silver-framed on the writing desk, a votive offering of anemones before him.
There were sprigs of holly behind the pictures, a sprig of mistletoe over the door leading to the bedroom. A tray of glasses and bottles on top of the TV gave the final touch of restrained festivity. But something was missing. It was only when he glanced in the desk that he knew what it was. There were a dozen or so Christmas cards stuffed carelessly in a pigeonhole.
“Darling, darling, John! I’ve waited so long for this, and then I have to be on duty!” Julia practically threw herself in his arms.
“Hello, my dear,” said Bart lamely. He kissed her—she smelled of antiseptic and faint perfume. They stood back and looked at each other.
“You look thinner, John, are you eating properly?”
John nodded, and replied in as light a tone as he could muster, “I can’t say the same for your figure, my dear.”
Ruefully Julie smoothed her skirt over her swelling stomach.
“Pig! Be fair. After all, I’m five months gone with my first gift to the nation.” She spoke in a cheerful and unresentful voice, but her husband jumped as if he had been stung. Fortunately Julia was, at that moment, regarding herself in a looking glass.
“What’s the matter, darling? You look quite pale!”
Bart forced a laugh. “It’s the reflected light off all that white uniform!”
Julia brightened, and her face under the perky nurse’s cap looked as it had when first they met.
“Like it?”
“Suits you marvelously!” Still so damned young …
“Well, make the most of it. I’m off duty until Boxing Day, and I’m going to change now.” She kissed him impulsively and went off singing into the bedroom.
Bart sank down into a chair, his smile gone. Julia had said “gift to the nation,” her tone easy and natural, and in no way ironical or sarcastic … Bart knew that phrase; Section 2(a) had written it.
It was not quite the Christmas Bart had visualized. He had not, for example, expected to be taken to a Christmas Eve party, but with the evidence of Julia’s indoctrination mounting, it at least afforded him some respite from the disordered whirl in his mind.
Clearly Julia loved it, and that was the main compensation. Yet the very fact that she should be so keen … Bart suffered—and knew it—from the severe defect of frequently seeing both sides of a question. It was a defect he consciously fought in his Ministry. Most of his staff had no idea that the Minister, so calm and deliberate in action, was inwardly at war with himself, sternly suppressing what he inevitably thought of as his more liberal, more humane, instincts. Here, he could allow himself to view matters through Julia’s eyes, to see her side.
It was a medical staff party. Home doctors and nurses, including a few Mums, who, like Julia, were trained nurses. For Bart it was a familiar ambience, and once the constraint at his presence had worn off, he could imagine he was back in his early hospital days as a house surgeon. The same horrific medical jokes, the same jargon …
“Evening, Minister!” Matron, miraculously transformed in a silk dress, boomed in his ear. “Glad you could come; hope you’re enjoying it? Good. I’m very glad Mrs. Bart has settled down so well. She’s a very keen type—Doctor Bates is very pleased with her.”
It crossed Bart’s mind that Doctor Bates would be a brave man to say anything else. Matron read his thoughts.
“No, really! She’s an absolute model,” she added thoughtfully. “Wish I could say the same about all of them.”
Her change of tone interested Bart. “Trouble?”
Matron did not look up. She shook her head, and continued to gaze with, Bart felt, excessive interest into her glass of South African sherry. “Let’s not talk shop now, Minister. We can all do with a break, and speaking as a doctor, I would venture to say that includes you.”
Without the two or three drinks he had had, Bart might well have flared up. “Speaking as a doctor, I’d agree with you. But this trouble—”
Matron guided him to what passed as a quiet corner. “Just because a woman is fertile, it does not automatically make her a plaster saint. Home harmony is not too easy to preserve. We have our quota of thieves, cheats—” She gestured impatiently, the sherry swilling dangerously in her glass. “Come on, Minister, we must circulate.” She half turned, paused, her tone was more businesslike than inviting. “Would you care to take a glass at my place on Boxing Day morning? Just a few of the senior staff, y’know—that is if your wife can spare you.”
Bart got the message, Julia was not invited. “That would be very nice,” he said with polite formality. “What time?”
“Oh, eleven thirty-ish would be fine.”
He tried to sound enthusiastic, “I’ll look forward to that.”
“Jolly good, Minister.” Again she read his thoughts, going on with a touch of embarrassment, “Be a bit dull for Mrs. Bart—as a matter of fact, I believe some of the younger set are throwing a party at the same time.”
One thing was clear, Matron was a born organizer.
Christmas Day, raw, cold and foggy. Seagulls wheeled and pounced on scraps, their discordant screams, a high untuneful descant to a distant lowing foghorn.
The Barts lay long in bed, cramped but happy in her three-foot divan. He was incapable of making love, barred by a pregnancy which was not his. Instinctively Julia realized this, and accepted the situation with her newfound philosophical, easy grace. It amazed Bart, and as they dressed he tried to bring the matter into the open, to apologize.
