‘Are you trying to say that your father killed his own son?’
‘Mother, don’t talk nonsense. Michael died because of a terrible and tragic accident.’
‘But that’s what you’re saying isn’t it?’ his mother insisted. ‘If the farm had been financially stable, Michael wouldn’t have had to drive into Wichita. If your father hadn’t over-spent and mis-managed the farm, Michael could still be alive.’
‘Mother, for God’s sake, you can’t talk like that.’
The old woman stood up straight. ‘This is my house. I can talk how I like.’
There was a pause, and then a quiet, firm voice said, ‘No, Ursula. This isn’t your house. Not any more. And if you want to be welcome in it, you’re going to have to keep a check on those irrational outbursts of yours.’
Season was standing at the far end of the corridor, by the door of the master bedroom, in a long lacey negligee. Mrs Hardesty touched her forehead with her fingertips as if she felt a sudden twinge of headache, and then abruptly turned and walked back to her bedroom, without a word. Season stayed where she was, waiting for Ed to say something.
‘I’m going into Wichita tomorrow to see Dr Benson,’ Ed said. ‘If I’m going to press for extra compensation, I think I’m going to have to get myself all the technical information I can lay my hands on.’
‘Of course,’ said Season. There was an odd, slightly challenging note in the way she said it.
‘Do you want to come with me?’ he asked her. ‘You could do some shopping at the civic centre.’
‘It depends what time you go,’ she said. ‘I’m catching an eleven o’clock flight to Los Angeles from Wichita Mid-Continent Airport’
‘Season?’ he said, quite urgently; but she had already gone back into the bedroom, and closed the door.
‘Season?’ he repeated, knowing that she couldn’t hear him.
Five
Senator Jones walked back into his lavish Moroccan-style living-room, with its multi-coloured mosaic tiles and its North African draperies and its elaborate brass-topped tables and stood silent for a moment, lighting up a cigar.
‘Well?’ asked the red-headed girl in the silky emerald-green wrap, stretching herself out on the ottoman sofa.
‘Well what?’ said Senator Jones, as he pup-pup-pupped his Havana into life.
‘Well, who is it who’s so burningly fascinating that you’re prepared to break off right in the middle of courting your favourite newspaper lady? Usually, my darling, you’re not even prepared to answer the phone for the President.’
‘The President’s a Democrat,’ growled Senator Jones. ‘Apart from being an uninteresting asshole.’
‘And was this a Republican? An interesting asshole?’
‘If I told you who it was, and why he’d called me, you’d rush back to the office and print it,’ said Senator Jones.
‘It’s as scandalous as all that?’
‘It’s no more scandalous than anything else that happens in American politics. Tell me one worthwhile political achievement since seventeen seventy-six that hasn’t been scandalous. It was scandal that made this nation great.’
Senator Jones lowered his bulky body into a large carved-oak armchair, upholstered in a zig-zag fabric that resembled camel blankets. He crossed his legs by tugging at his left ankle with his right hand and he puffed at his cigar for a while reflectively. He had always been a big man. There were photographs upstairs in his study which showed him as a linebacker for the Washburn University football team. A serious, solid young man with thick lips and eyebrows that looked as if they had been drawn across his face with a black felt-tip pen. He had remained reasonably athletic while he worked in his father’s law firm in Topeka; but when he entered politics, in the Eisenhower landslide of 1956, as one of the state’s youngest-ever representatives, he quickly learned to enjoy the fruits of political success, as well as the steaks and the lobsters and the truffles and the fine vintage wines. By the time Ike’s term was over, Shearson Jones weighed over 250 pounds, and Washington wags were calling him ‘Shearson Jones, Incorporated.’ Time magazine printed a famous picture of him sitting in a committee meeting with his belly protruding so much that they captioned it ‘Kansas Representative and Friend.’
He may have been overweight, but he stayed light on his feet, both physically and politically. The hours he spent over dinner weren’t wasted, because he chose his dinner-partners carefully, and by the time Kennedy was elected he was known as one of the toughest and most knowledgeable negotiators in Congress. His main power base was the Department of Agriculture, where he formed intricate and lasting alliances with the most influential members of the bureaucracy, the faceless officials who really decided what went on. He ran for senator in 1964, and during the Johnson years he built up several enduring friendships with the heavyweight Southern Democrats who controlled the Agriculture Committee. In 1971, he was the prime mover behind a small but forceful group of senators who blocked attempts to abolish or adjust the parity ratio – the ratio between income and expenditure which was supposed to show how well America’s farmers were faring. The parity ratio usually showed the farmers were doing badly, and that they urgently needed federal support, so that by 1973 the government was handing them more than 2.5 billion dollars a year.
What the parity ratio didn’t show was that most larger farmers were actually doing very well, and that many of those larger farmers were paying Shearson Jones hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain their subsidies. By 1973 – when the federal farm programme was eventually changed under the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act – the senator from Kansas was worth well over seven million dollars.
He was said to have made another million out of illegal sales of rice to the North Vietnamese, but an exhaustive investigation in the Washington Post failed to come up with any concrete evidence. Shearson Jones had raised his fist in the Senate and asked God to strike him dead instantly if he had ever been guilty of illegal trafficking in grain or rice.
Today, Shearson Jones was big, balding and buoyant – a huge and ebullient man at the peak of his career. He had occasionally been mentioned as vice-presidential material, although The New York Times had ruled out the possibility of his ever making the White House. ‘Too fat in an age of austerity,’ they had remarked, dismissively.
The red-haired girl said, ‘What are you going to do now? Kiss me? Kick me out? Or are you going to sit there and seek oral gratification from that cigar for the rest of the night?’
‘I’m thinking,’ said Shearson.
‘Oh, you’re thinking. In the middle of our romantic courtship, you have to think?’
He ignored her. ‘Make me another drink,’ he said. ‘I want to make one more phone call.’
She got up from the ottoman, walked over, and kissed him on his bald forehead. There were pinpricks of sweat on his brow, and he still smelled of garlic from lunchtime. He glanced up at her and gave an appreciative ‘hmmph,’ but then he was used to the attentions of pretty young women. He was very rich, and very powerful, and apart from that the sheer bodily size of him exerted some sort of grotesque attraction over the unlikeliest girls. One of his mistresses had ecstatically described his love-making as ‘something between riding on Moby Dick in a rough sea, and bouncing on a huge feather bed.’