And if the Spitalfields weaver’s loft, or the country house, wistfully rendered in a mouthwash of Piper twilight, staggered on as icons of a vanquished civilization, then the fire-blackened cityscape of the Blitz was the setting increasingly invoked by the barbarians of the free market. Exquisitely made-up young ladies tottered out on Saturday mornings to hawk the Socialist Worker, for an hour, outside Sainsbury’s. Duty done, they nipped inside to stock up on pâté, gruyère, olives, French bread, and Frascati for an alfresco committee meeting. The worse things got, the more we rubbed our hands. We were safely removed from any possibility of power: blind rhetoric without responsibility. Essays, spiked with venom, were the talk of the common rooms. Meddlesome clerics fought for the pulpit. The most savage (and the wittiest) practitioners were never free from the telephone. Review copies clattered on to the mat, obsequiously eager to face the treatment. TV lunches were grim as public floggings. Government narks listened at every door. Nobody wanted it to end. Jerome Bosch art-directed the steaming imagery. It was positively Spanish: Index, Inquisition, Auto-da-Fé. Nobody wanted to be the one to hammer the first stake through this absence of a heart. We’d have nothing to write about, except ley lines and unexplained circles among the crops.
The ‘Standing Member’, Meic Triscombe — a stoop-shouldered, flat-footed, arm-flailing shambler, whose delicate porcine features were lost in the barren disk of his face — haunted his electoral boundaries like the Witchfinder-General. His nose, a detumescent erection, twitched after conspiracies, winks in the council chamber, wobbly handshakes. He favoured quarrelsome lime-striped shirts; always untucked, fanning out behind him; quite loud enough to set the dogs barking, and causing women to miscarry in the streets. Asthmatic — and allergic to almost all life-forms — he gasped and sneezed, turning his frailty to advantage, by pretending to be overcome by emotion: a Shakespearean soliloquy of pity for the human condition. Choking and spluttering, he drenched his audience in a spray of peppermint-tasting mucus; desperately running the sleeve of his blazer across his watery eyes. There was no other calling in which he could parade his disabilities in such a favourable light. On the telephone he could be genuinely alarming. And had been reported several times as a pervert.
His constituents — or unemployment statistics, as he thought of them — were bow-legged, small-skulled, foul-mouthed, impertinent; fff-ing rapid-fire dirges of complaint, out of the corners of mouths tilted into half-zipped wounds. Triscombe could not bend low enough — an old rugby injury — to make out what they said. His slight hearing difficulty, mostly a build-up of cerumen rammed into the external auditory meatus with the tip of his black Biro, was an aristocratic trait, and no hindrance in the chamber: he thought of Harold Macmillan. As did so many others, now that the old confidence-man was safely removed from the scene. Triscombe did not need to sift the words of the fellaheen; he was their voice. He could articulate their primitive and amorphic wails for attention. On their behalf, he dined on rumours, played squash at a City health club; denounced scandals he was too late to get in on. He thought of himself as the ‘people’s tribune’ and he lived among them. Or, at least, reasonably adjacent to them. While he waited for his personal Belgrano to cruise down the Hertford Union Canal.
His wife, estranged, and with a cast-iron investment portfolio behind her, refused to set foot in the grime of East London. The property Triscombe acquired in a partly-renovated Early Victorian Square (okayed by John Betjeman), within safe hailing distance of the Islington borders, lease signed three weeks before the election, had proved a decent enough speculation when he ‘let it go’six months later — well before ‘Black Monday’. These large crumbling mansions, built for sober city magnates, had given refuge, in the era of Wilsonian Social Democracy, to some of the more acceptable — and only distantly related — members of that premature Free Market combo, the notorious ‘Firm’: before the towerblocks marched in like triffids. The square, a quadrangle of submerged aspirations and cringing modesty, now preened itself on an actively ‘ruralist’ identity. It was a village under siege from marauding misfits, razor-gangs, crack dealers, and fast-breeding aliens. The gentle bohemian newcomers of the 1960s uprooted the comfrey and the cannabis, persuaded someone to take on the cleaning lady, and took flight into the silicon-chip countryside; draining, in the process, the last dregs of their inherited capital. Sadly, this was the ultimate shuffle of the brewery shares. Their homes, now seen as a solid ‘first step on the ladder’, passed into the hands of food-photographers, marine insurance trouble-shooters, rising tele actors going into their second Stoppard, and Bengalis shifting from supermarket chains to oil percentages.
Triscombe took his profit and went east, to the summit of the Ant Hill. When in doubt, climb. The nude temptations of worldly power: he loved to look down on the beaten spread of the Borough and say, ‘All this is mine!’ There was a reborn credibility in stashing himself among the photogenic ruins of Homerton: it added considerable colour to his CV. A satellite development had been jobbed onto the shabby grandeur that clung to the coat-tails of Sutton House. The estate’s title was worked in flourishes of wrought iron into the entrance gates, like something out of Citizen Kane. Security guards, a nice blend of ex-para and ex-Parkhurst, patrolled the walkways, Moorish arches, and plashing fountains of this Neo-Alhambra. The tower of St John of Hackney rose proud above the camera-scanned walls, with intimations of vanished Templar glory. The panoramic view towards Leytonstone was not so hot: a set of low-rise blocks, let in by the planners on the dubious grounds that, at least, they were not high-rise blocks. These were the ultimate barrios of despair, and behind them lifted a futuristic silver tube: the burning chimney of the Hackney Hospital, belching forth mistakes, ex-humans, and assorted bandaged filth.
Meic Triscombe was a shire-horse among whippets. Red ears pricked for multinational conspiracies, tongue like a dagger, equine teeth set to savage the ‘Secret State’ Whitehall plotters: a stallion of wrath! He stamped and snorted; he reared up. He also tended, rather too frequently for comfort, to fall down; so that one, or more, of his limbs was perpetually cased in plaster. An ardent all-night debate on the abolition of the ILEA caused him to tumble the length of a spiral staircase in the terrace house of a female member of his steering committee: cradling in his arms a not-quite-empty bottle of Southern Comfort. A barstool shattered under the sudden imposition of his weight, leaving its shrapnel in his left buttock, while he was denouncing the iniquity of a system that permitted whispering nocturnal trainloads of uranium waste to pass unchallenged through ‘Nuclear Free’ Hackney. He suffered an attack of acute food-poisoning, with attendant sweats, cramps, and trumpeting flatulence, on a ‘fact-finding’ tour of ethnic restaurants between Lower Clapton and Green Lanes. Meic Triscombe was not unknown to the Hackney Hospital. A procession of mini cabs heaved him out at the gates; where ‘security’ told him, firmly, to try elsewhere. They had no facilities for dealing with accidents, emergencies, amputations, inebriations, childbirth, chewed-off ears, grievous bodily harms, or spontaneous combustions: or, indeed, anyone at all who was not actually frothing at the mouth, bug-eyed, and belted into restraint like an ‘Old Kingdom’ mummy.