“Beautiful, Mr. Magnus,” he says. “It was Karl Marx come alive, sir. We shall never forget it.”
Pym thanks him distractedly. As so often when on the crest of a phoney triumph, he is gripped by an unfocussed sense of God’s approaching retribution. What have I done wrong to her? he keeps asking himself. I’m young and fluent and Rick’s son. I’m wearing my new unpaid-for suit from Hall Brothers, the tailor. Why won’t she love me like the rest of them? He is thinking, like every artist before or since him, of the only member of the audience who did not applaud.
* * *
It is the following Saturday, it is approaching midnight. Campaign fever is mounting fast. In a few minutes, it will be Eve of Poll Day minus three. A new poster saying “He Needs YOU on Thursday” is stuck to Pym’s window, yellow bunting with the same message is strung from the sash, across the street to the pawnbroker’s opposite. Yet Pym is lying fully dressed and smiling on his bed, and not a thought of the campaign is going through his mind. He is in Paradise with a girl called Judy, the daughter of a Liberal farmer who has lent her to us to drive Old Nellies to the booths, and Paradise is the front of her parked van on the way to Little Kimble. The taste of Judy’s skin is on his lips, the smell of her hair is in his nostrils. And when he cups his hands over his eyes they are the same hands that for the first time in human history enclosed a young girl’s breasts. The bedroom is on the first floor of a rundown corner house called Mrs. Searle’s Temperance Rest, though rest and temperance are the last things it sells. The pubs have closed, the shouts and sighs have taken themselves to another part of town. A woman’s voice shrieks from the alley, “Got a bed for us, Mattie? It’s Jessie. Come on, you old bugger, we’re freezing.” An upper window bangs open and the blurred voice of Mr. Searle advises Jessie to take her client behind the bus shelter. “What do you think we are, Jess?” he complains. “A bloody doss house?” Of course we aren’t. We are the Liberal Candidate’s campaign headquarters and dear old Mattie Searle our landlord, though he didn’t know it till a month ago, has been a Liberal all his life.
Careful not to wake himself from his erotic reverie, Pym tiptoes to the window and squints steeply downward into the hotel courtyard. To one side the kitchen. To the other the residents’ dining room, now the campaign’s committee rooms. In its lighted window Pym makes out the bowed grey heads of Mrs. Alcock and Mrs. Catermole, our tireless helpers, as they determinedly seal the last envelopes of the day.
He returns to his bed. Wait, he thinks. They can’t stay up all night. They never do. His conquest in one field is inspiring him to conquest in another. Tomorrow being the sabbath, Our Candidate rests his troops and contents himself with pious appearances at the best-attended Baptist churches where he is disposed to preach on simplicity and service. Tomorrow at eight o’clock Pym will stand at the bus stop for Nether Wheatley and Judy will meet him there in her father’s van and in the boot she will have the toboggan the gamekeeper made for her when she was ten. She knows the hill, she knows the barn beside it, and it is agreed between them without fallbacks that somewhere around ten-thirty, depending on how much tobogganing they do, Judy Barker will take Magnus Pym to the barn and anoint him her full and consummated lover.
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?”