‘You’re a sensible girl,’ he said. ‘Will you pass me my undershorts? And my cigar?’
She carried over his drooping white undershorts with as much grace as she could manage; and his cigar, pinched between finger and thumb like some kind of unpleasant dropping. He lit it again, and puffed up some figured clouds of pungent blue smoke.
‘This isn’t an easy world, Della,’ he said, as if he was trying to excuse himself for what he had just forced her to do. ‘We all have to go out and get what we want, as rough and as tough as we have to. It’s the only way.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’ll excuse me if I go to the bathroom.’ Shearson sat on the ottoman for a minute or two after she’d gone, and then heaved himself up and laboriously stepped into his undershorts. He was mopping the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief when, in complete silence, his Puerto Rican manservant Billy appeared at the door. Billy was a small man, slender and nervous and narrow-chested, with a face as oval and white as a blanched almond.
‘Peter Kaiser on the telephone for you, sir.’
Peter Kaiser was his personal assistant. Shearson waved his hand dismissively. ‘Tell him to call back in the morning. What time is it, Billy?’
‘Eleven, sir. He says it’s very urgent, sir.’
Shearson took his cigar out of his mouth and frowned at the smouldering tip. For some reason, this one wasn’t burning right. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But this is the last call tonight. You understand that? Mrs McIntosh and I have a great deal of important business to discuss.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Billy, without a single hint of insolence. Shearson waddled over to his armchair, sat down, and picked up the telephone.
‘Peter?’ he said. ‘What the hell’s so damned urgent you have to call me at this hour? I have guests.’
‘I know. Senator. Billy told me.’
‘All right,’ said Shearson, in a patronising tone. ‘You can cut out the little-league superiority. All I want to know is why you’re calling.’
‘It’s to do with this blight. Senator. You know the wheat problems they’ve been having in Kansas?’
‘I do have a passing acquaintance with the problem,’ said Shearson. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve just been discussing a Blight Crisis Appeal with Alan Hedges. I was going to fill you in tomorrow.’
‘Well, the fact is. Senator, it’s worse,’ said Peter. Shearson sniffed. ‘Worse? What do you mean by worse? Worse than what?’
‘Worse than it was before. Much worse. I’ve had two urgent and confidentials from Dick Turnbull in the past three hours. The wheat blight is spreading like crazy. Dick estimates five hundred thousand acres already. And now we’ve got nine major farmers in Iowa reporting a similar kind of blight on their com and soybean crops.’
‘Are you serious?’ asked Shearson. ‘Com and soybean too?’
‘All the reports have been authenticated,’ said Peter. ‘There are six or seven more which haven’t been checked back yet, including two reports of fruit and vegetable blight in California.’
Shearson rubbed his jowls thoughtfully. ‘What about the media?’ he asked. ‘Any trouble from them yet?’
‘Not too much, although the Wall Street Journal’s been pestering me for most of the evening. That may give us a little time – maybe until the morning – but we won’t be able to hold it back for very much longer. It seems like every darned crop in the whole darned country’s going rotten.’
Shearson said, ‘Listen, Peter – I want you to keep a tight rein on what the media get to hear about. Right at the moment, I don’t want a panic. I’m trying to set up this appeal fund to help farmers whose crops have been destroyed by the blight, and if everybody starts running about like blue-assed baboons, then it’s going to spoil the whole presentation. The minute the public themselves start to feel threatened by what’s happening, they’ll lose all interest in giving aid to the farmers.’
‘Well, all right,’ said Peter, dubiously. ‘But what am I going to tell the press if they put it to me point-blank?’
‘Tell them there’s a crop blight crisis. Tell them it’s serious. But tell them we have whole teams of experts working on a solution, and we expect to be dusting with proven antidotes within the week. If they want figures, tell them we don’t anticipate anything worse than an eight per cent cereal crop shortfall.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Peter. ‘Supposing they go take a look for themselves?’
‘Use your head,’ retorted Shearson. ‘All press and television people are up against deadlines. You think they’re going to be able to take a look at the whole of Kansas before tomorrow morning’s editions? They’ll take one or two stock shots and leave it at that.’
‘All right, Senator, if you say so,’ said Peter. ‘Do you want me to keep you in touch throughout the night?’
‘Tonight, I’m busy,’ Shearson growled. ‘Call me at seven tomorrow morning. Oh – and there’s one thing you can do. Get in touch with the agricultural research laboratories and see how they’re progressing with their analysis.’
‘Okay, Senator. I’ll call you tomorrow.’
Della appeared at the living-room door, with her hair brushed and her make-up restored. There was a faint stiffness about her smile, but Shearson was too pleased to notice it. ‘You wait till you hear what’s happened,’ he grinned. ‘It seems like every damned farmer in the whole middle West is getting hit by this blight. So if we play our cards right, if we can keep the public’s personal anxiety way down low and their sympathy way up high, we might be in for more than we originally bargained for.’
Della said, ‘Good,’ in an abstracted voice, and then walked over to the cocktail cabinet, where she poured herself three fingers of scotch, straight-up, and drank it back without blinking.
Six
It was a dry, hot, windy morning. The sky over southern Kansas was already the odd mauvish colour of burned notepaper. Ed drove Season and Sally along Highway 54 into Wichita with the air-conditioning in his Caprice stationwagon right down to freeze. Every time he glanced in his rear-view mirror he could see the three Gucci suitcases packed in the back, with the tags that read LAX.
Season was wearing a smart camel-coloured suit, and her hair was tied back with a scarf. Sally had brought along her favourite dolly, a floppy and unsavoury rag creature with bright pink hair. Its name was Merry, for reasons that Ed and Season had never quite managed to understand.
They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t very much to say. He had tried this morning to ask her not to go, as they lay – side by side in their soft curtained bed; but she had kissed him, and said that it was necessary for her own survival. He had made love to her, more doggedly than passionately, and afterwards she had lain there amongst the rose-patterned sheets and smiled at him gently, but still without changing her mind. He knew she had to go, too. She needed to remind herself that Kingman County wasn’t the whole world, and that South Burlington wasn’t the sum of her life and her intelligence.
All he had said to her over breakfast was, ‘You’ll come back, won’t you, when you’ve made up your mind?’
Sally had looked up from her bowl of Grape Nuts, puzzled. Season had touched her lips with her fingertip to tell Ed that he shouldn’t say any more. But a few minutes later, she had said, gently, ‘You know I will.’
The early sun had shone through the window across the breakfast table, and with Dilys bustling at the stove in her gingham apron, the kitchen had taken on all the appearance of one of those happy 1950s television series, the ones where hearty neighbours kept popping in through a swing door, and everybody ate heaps of bacon and sausage-links and wheatcakes, and never suffered anything worse than an occasional misunderstanding.