Barry shook his head. “No, no. I’m persuaded. But I’m no computer whizz, Maurice. Quite what skills I could offer, I…”
“You would leave all that to me, Prof. As I said, I have the equipment and I know how to use it. But a second pair of eyes to look over the final product would be invaluable. The way you once corrected my essays with those little pencilled comments in the margins?”
Barry nodded and smiled. “And such essays they were, a pleasure to read. Much like the argument you have just prosecuted.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, and by the by, improbable though it may sound, I used rather to like John Lennon. My favourite of his songs was ‘Imagine.’”
Maurice laughed. “Just like the old guy in St Petersburg. And who knows what the fallout might be once we dress Jeremy up as John returned from the dead and send the image virally with a suitable text? Russia would be the primary target, of course, but who knows what other spin-off effects there might be? We might even be able to resurrect in the US and the UK echoes of bygone better days and whip up a backlash against the unreason of these times. So you are with me?”
“Every step of the way,” said Barry. “But there remains the problem of persuading Jeremy into his role in all of this.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him,” said Maurice. “But judging by the radical moves he’s recently made to change his life around, I have the feeling he’s the sort of chap ready for another adventure, albeit only a virtual one.”
Nineteen
Following the “triumph” of her grovelling last ditch offer of billions of pounds to Bastien Duchamps in exchange for his moving on Brexit negotiations from the tortuous issues surrounding the initial divorce to “serious discussions on trade,” PM Clarissa was pooped. Talking all the previous night on the phone to the Northern Irish and squabbling members of her own cabinet to “establish her authority” and then taking a pre-dawn flight back to Brussels to “lay her cards on the table” before Bastien were enough to poop anybody. But pooped though she was, she went on grinning gormlessly from the announcement podium the following morning even when, in front of the world’s media, Bastien reminded her from his lectern that in all divorces the first part was always the easiest. What came afterwards was harder to thrash out, much more complicated, and would certainly take longer to achieve than Clarissa apparently had in mind. If anything were achieved at all.
“Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” said Bastien in summary.
But on Clarissa went nonetheless, waving the flag for Britain. Not the whole of Britain, you understand. The 48% of EU Remainers from the 2016 referendum, for example, ridiculed her performance. As, paradoxically, did a large proportion of the 52% Leavers, who reckoned she was being conned by the very unelected European morons they wanted no more to do with, which was why they’d voted leave in the first place. A similar division was replicated within her cabinet back at 10 Downing Street, although to the media hacks with their cameras waiting outside, every minister struggling through the door produced toothy smirks and thumbs ups while muttering undying allegiance to their leader. The only one to produce any joined-up language was “Fat Slob,” the foreign secretary who, over his shoulder, said, “Finally we’ve got HMS Britain off the rocks and set her sailing again,” before waving perfunctorily at the cameras and hurrying off “On urgent business in Bongo Bongo Land.” No wonder, on her return to the sceptred isle, pooped Clarissa had scuttled through the doors of No 10 and headed straight upstairs to her bedroom, upon whose door she plastered the warning DO NOT DISTURB UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER.
Not that Clarissa slept easy. Normally she went out like a light once her head hit the pillow and, being a person devoid of imagination, never dreamed. But not so on this occasion. Toss and turn, turn and toss she went in her prime ministerial four poster, alongside which, on a bedside table, sat her hotline phone to the madman in the White House, which never rang because the madman in the White House was too busy tweeting and re-tweeting he was a “stable genius” against the charge he was an unbalanced baby too much in need of perpetual instant gratification to be bothered with the “special relationship.” And, during this tossing and turning, in semi-sleep, Clarissa uncharacteristically experienced what she assumed to be a vision. Terrible it was too: Clarissa being stabbed in the back while breast-stroking across the ladies’ swimming pond on Hampstead Heath by Fat Slob who was abetted by Lurch, aka the chancellor of the exchequer, Jiggle Jaws the home secretary, the rest of the cabinet, and a significant number of the Nazi/Tory members in the Houses of Commons and Lords, all of them in black wetsuits and goggles treading water beneath her. And then came the coup de grâce administered by the Bowie knife thrust up her thorax by Bastien Duchamps. His wetsuit was blue with twelve gold stars on it.
Unsurprisingly, Clarissa emerged from this novel experience gagging and clutching at her throat, but, as she’d been taught on the playing fields of Roedean and Cambridge after being hit in the face by a hockey stick, one did not cry. Unlike her Roedean and Cambridge days, however, now she kept two bottles of spirits—vodka and gin—in the cupboard beneath her bedside table, and from them she took hefty swigs before calling Sir Hubert Humphreys and Dame Muriel Eggleshaw on her hotline phone to demand progress on the search for Jeremy Crawford, the guy she now realised she needed more radically than ever to re-focus the narrative on the UK’s—and her—fate.
The man in question was currently back in the bluebell woods abutting Barry’s Shepherd’s Hut, but this time accompanied by only Maurice Moffat, who had invited him out for “a little chat.” The dying sun cast oblique shadows on the pair as they ambled along through the trees before deciding to take a rest on the trunk of a fallen oak, which offered convenient indentations for both their bottoms.
“You cannot be serious,” said Jeremy in the manner of John McEnroe querying an umpire’s line call decision.
“Such was more or less the view of your new friend Barry,” Maurice said, taking from his coat pocket a well-chewed rosewood briar and a pouch of St Bruno. “I think in the end, however, even he was persuaded,” he added, tamping the tobacco into the pipe.
“That I should dress up as John Lennon, and…”
“Only a lookalike, old chap,” said Maurice, using one hand to fire up the briar with a Zippo Pipe Master and the other to ensure no lit embers fell to the forest floor.
“And then have it fed all around Russia to upset Ripurpantzov? C’mon…”
“Stranger things have happened in the USA, Jeremy. But, before we go any further, may I be sure as to the root of your disquiet? Personal or political, which is it?”
Jeremy took a deep breath of the forest air and stared off at the setting sun, its shadows now longer.
“It’s just…” he eventually said.
“That?” Maurice said, puffing at his briar.
“Many things have happened to me in recent times, things I could never have foreseen, and…”
“Things you chose, Jeremy, however. As I understand it, at least. Rather in the manner in which Barry chose to be a gardener instead of continuing to be an Oxford professor.”
“True.” Jeremy smiled. “Choosing for once, rather than being chosen.”
“Exactly. And, let us be clear that with choice comes responsibility. It’s not just a question of freeloading like the hippies all those years ago. We cannot merely opt out of systems. Which was the great thing about Lennon. The way he laid bare his weaknesses then tried to encourage others to do the same, even though everybody in those days thought he was crazy. ‘Come together over me,’ right?”