Goodfellowe could feel the rain creeping like slugs down into his socks and his shoes. His suit had about as much chance of surviving its next encounter with the trouser press as Battersby had of winning Mastermind. It had been a mistake to use the bike. In weather like this it made him look a prat. Hell, perhaps it made him look a prat in any weather. But that still didn't give the bastard the right to block the cycle lane!
There was some part of Goodfellowe that was Irish, on his father's side, from old Queen's County before they renamed it Laois. In spite of the English overlay, which was supposed to consign all of life's furies to safe storage in some form of spiritual Tupperware, he took immense pride in these roots, if for no better reason than that it provided an ideal excuse for the occasional outburst. He was also on a diet, nothing but salads and crackers and no second glass of wine, which would make any Celt feel irritable. So, as another bus thundered past, Goodfellowe began to feel mightily and irresistibly pissed off. The whistle fell from his lips. He stood to his full height on the pedals, and let forth a stream of foulness.
The driver looked up once more, dull eyes staring, casting around to make sure no one else was observing him. Then slowly, almost reverently, he offered Goodfellowe his middle finger.
In his capacity as the Honourable Member of Parliament for Marshwood, Goodfellowe had sworn a solemn oath by Almighty God to uphold the Crown and its laws, but here it was dark, another world, and now he was drawing alongside this bloody car. Perhaps God wasn't watching. He shifted his weight in the saddle, took a deep breath, summoned a curse to his lips. Then he was upon it!
He lashed out at the panel of the driver's door with his heel. The panel gave a low cry of abused metal, giving great satisfaction to Goodfellowe, who wobbled onwards, taking a yard or two to recover his balance. He turned in his saddle to claim his triumph.
The driver simply shrugged and returned to his cheroot. He didn't give a stuff. Wasn't his wretched car.
– =OO=OOO=OO-= Goodfellowe pushes on into a night that is rapidly coming to resemble the rinse cycle of his local launderette, an awareness growing inside him of two things. The first is that he's made a bloody fool of himself – but that feeling will pass. It always has before. The other feeling he knows will be more difficult to handle. As a politician he is accustomed to finding self-justification for almost anything he does – hell, hadn't he just spent all afternoon voting for an Access To Welfare (Disability) Reform Bill he knew in his heart was rubbish and deeply inequitable? – but the upswell of rage about the cycle lane is more, far more, than a bruised sense of justice. What has really got him going is that the bastard driver hasn't recognized him. That's what really hurts and has got so far up his nose that it's pinching his brain. Suddenly he's become aware that he loathes his feebleness, scuttling around Westminster like a spider crab, getting soaked with every incoming tide, his only function to act as target practice for the likes of Battersby and every passing bus driver.
He wants to change the world, but before he can do that he will have to change himself.
A hot flush passes through him that is very masculine and slightly menopausal but which seems to dry his collar and warm his wet toes. He is directly opposite the Old Shades pub in Whitehall, on a night of storms and sticking Sturmey Archers, when suddenly the clouds part and everything becomes clear to him.
He knows. He hates his impotence and he hates the crumpled clothes, even more than he hates that insolent bloody driver.
It is a moment of personal conversion. Goodfellowe wants out of the laundry basket that his life has become. Before it's all too late.
TWO
Dawn had arrived gently, like a baby at its mother's breast, but already the farmhouse was alive with the noise of a new day. Magpies squabbled on the reed roof while its ancient beams, salvaged from a shipwreck on the nearby coast some three hundred years earlier, stretched in the warmth of the slow yellow sun. Somewhere near at hand a loose shutter began a quarrel with the morning breeze.
In a room at the top of the house, directly beneath the thatch, Captain Mary Wetherell (retd), formerly of the Royal Corps of Signals, lay in her bed, tracing the path of a rivulet of condensation as it trickled uncertainly down the windowpane, and identifying each and every noise, just as she had lain awake through long hours marking the noises of the night. Those noises of the dark hours had been less comforting. The screeches of hunters and the hunted. The insistent ticking of the long-case clock in the hall. The snoring of her husband.
Mary was one day into her thirty-first year. Her birthday had been celebrated – if 'celebration' were the appropriate term – the night before with a small dinner for herself and a few friends. Her husband's friends, to be precise. She had almost none of her own in this distant corner of Exmoor where the gorse and heather did battle with the sou'westerlies and on a damp day the slurry trickled in the general direction of Withypool. This was her husband's house, his world and his life, as it had been his father's before him. Something she had accepted when they had married seven months before and something that, in the loneliness of night, she knew had all been a wretched mistake.
It wasn't as if she had been a naive spinster. There was little to be naive about growing up in the cobbled backstreets of Burton-upon-Trent, in the shadow of the breweries and the Marmite factory with their rich, overpowering smell of yeast. Mary had been one of four sisters with a father who had a serious problem with both alcohol and employment. Too much of one, none of the other.
To say her family was dysfunctional would satisfy only the most unimaginative of sociologists. It wasn't dysfunctional, it was a disaster. When her father was drunk but still capable, which was often, he would inflict on Mary and her younger sisters, but particularly Mary, the most appalling suffering and indignities. Fuck anything at hand today, for tomorrow would bring oblivion. By contrast, her mother lived not for today but for the afterlife, being utterly devout. She was also stubbornly blind and deaf, a woman who never saw, and never heard, who refused to believe in the presence of evil even when it was sitting at her breakfast table. Life for Mary, even as a nine-year-old, was already a bitch.
When she was eighteen, shortly before she was about to go to university, her father had come home with a drinking mate, someone to whom he had lost a substantial and ridiculous bet. Mary was supposed to be the payment. As the two men had stumbled through the front door, she had fled through the back in her bare feet. She never returned. University was out and within six months, in desperation, she had ended up at the only warm place on the High Street that would welcome her, a recruiting office, so she had joined the Army. It didn't take them long to recognize the raw but irresistible talent of their new recruit. Soon it had been Sandhurst where sheer persistence had made her runner-up for the Sword of Honour, and simple excellence had put her at the top of the academic order of merit. Then it had been Blandford (top of the troop commander course). 30 Signal Regiment at Nuneaton. Germany. Angola. Bosnia. Northern Ireland. Namibia, where she had helped plug an election structure into the creaking southern African country even as she was being shot at by rebels. No postcards home, not from here, even if there had been anyone to send them to. Then Ethiopia, coordinating food drops. Training for life, and for death. She'd discovered the stench of death in abundance on the flood plains of Bangladesh, a country which, in her view, should never have existed, and probably wouldn't for much longer if the sea levels continued to rise. Signals were 'teeth-arms', at the cutting edge of every major military encounter, and she had been there, anywhere there was a challenge, at the edge. Sometimes too near the edge. Yet in the armed forces a woman is inevitably a target. A target of fun, and occasional abuse, of discrimination and desires. Mary Wetherell was more of a target than most, because she was not only cropped-blonde with a figure that was athletically feminine, even in mud-washed fatigues, but she was also remarkably determined – hell, in order to survive a father like hers, you had to be. She asked for no favours, nothing more than the chance to stand and compete upon that most elusive of hallowed plots, the level playing field, and the Army was an equal opportunities employer, or so the recruiting officer had told her.