Читать книгу: «Below the Clock»

CHAPTER I

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

THE House of Commons has its moments.

Ascot bends a fashionable knee to hail Gold Cup Day with an elegant genuflection, Henley hesitates between pride and sophistication to welcome the Regatta, Epsom bustles with democratic fervour as Derby day approaches, Cowes bows with dignified grace as curving yachts carve another niche in her temple of fame, Aintree wakens and waves to saints and sinners on Grand National day, and Wimbledon wallows for a week in a racket of rackets.

The House of Commons has its Budget Day …

The afternoon sun broke into a smile after an April shower, and beamed through the leaded glass in the western wall, throwing lustre on the dark-panelled woodwork, turning brass into a blaze of gold, brightening the faces of Members of Parliament, revealing dancing specks of dust so that they scintillated with the brilliance of diamonds. One widely elliptical ray wandered from the stream of the beams, and bathed the spot where Edgar Reardon, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was to stand. The ray glistened on the brassbound despatch box at the corner of the table and shimmered beyond to waste its beauty on the floor. Nature, in a generous moment, had provided a theatrical spectacle.

The flood of golden light brought no solace to the men who stared at it from above. For the leaders of finance and industry shuffled their feet on the floor of the gallery, and waited for the worst while hoping for the best. They were not thinking of happy omens, portents, and auguries as they eyed the sun beaming on the despatch box. With the passage of years their hopes had faded until budgets meant burdens. Ladies in the grille abandoned their furtive whispers to advance with muffled tread and peer over the brass-work in front of them, looking first of all for relatives, and later, for celebrities.

Members blinked as the sun winked in their eyes. The lambent glow was even noticed by the Cabinet Ministers, who sat out of the beams, arrayed on the Treasury Bench, endeavouring to look as wise as Pythian oracles. The wandering radiance actually distracted attention from Mr Speaker, resplendent in his robes, although an errant ray stabbed a glimmer on the silver buckle of the shoe which he elevated so carefully in the general direction of Heaven. The sun had fascinated the spectators so effectively that few spared a thought for the lesser glories of the Sergeant-at-Arms, although he wore archaic dress, and exercised his privilege of being the only person in the House to bear a sword.

In the minds of the onlookers the sunbeams had one competitor. They were thinking of the man for whom the vacant place on the Treasury Bench had been reserved—and of his deficit!

A stranger casting a casual glance round the House might well have imagined the Members as wholesale breakers of minor laws. For each one apparently held a police summons in his hand. But they were not summonses—only blue papers giving details of how the deficit was made up, but not a single hint of how it was to be met. The filling of the gap between revenue and expenditure was reserved for a white paper, perhaps so coloured to signify the cleansing power of gold, maybe so blanched to prepare the nervous for the shock, but never issued until industry trembles and the City is at rest.

Joe Manning, the Opposition leader, flung down his blue paper as though the sheet were wasp-ridden and turned to Fred Otwood—a small, beetle-browed man who had been Chancellor in the previous Government, and hoped to repeat the performance in the next.

‘Fred,’ said Manning aggressively, ‘if Reardon runs his household as he does national finance the bailiffs would have called on him long ago. As a Chancellor of the Exchequer he’d make a good confidence man.’

‘I said that last year,’ remarked Otwood wearily, ‘and the tale’s getting a bit worn at the corners. No sense in attacking Reardon whatever he says. After all, Joe, somebody has always to pay.’

Manning pulled his whiskers into a new shape and looked at his lieutenant somewhat critically. There were times when Otwood seemed to lack all the requisites for instructing and moulding public opinion. The former Prime Minister glanced away from the sunlight and looked along the line of faces on the Treasury Bench.

‘I can’t understand it,’ he remarked. ‘They’re all smiling as if they were disposing of a surplus. Anyone would think that Willie Ingram had arrived to give a present to the nation.’

Ingram, the Prime Minister, had a flabby face, a fleshy nose, an outsize in eyebrows, and a polished skull. The eyes redeemed other features. They were brightly keen and puckishly humorous.

‘He must think he’s backing a winner,’ said Otwood.

Joe Manning continued to stare at them until he suddenly gripped Otwood’s arm and whispered another pointer for his forthcoming speech:

‘Callous indifference, Fred. That’s the note to strike.’

‘Perhaps it’s still a good line, Joe, but doesn’t it begin to sound a bit like a cracked gramophone record?’

The conversation was halted by a new arrival. Tranter, a doctor from the north, made his way with difficulty to a place behind them, and sat perched upon the knees of two unwilling supporters. Tranter had one fixed panacea for political ailments, but each time he produced it with the earnestness of an original performer.

‘Couldn’t we make a stand for inflation?’ he whispered. Currency inflation was Tranter’s method by which money could be raised without anyone paying for it. As he received no reply he moved away, satisfied that he had struck another blow for national welfare. Fortunately, he did not hear Otwood’s comment:

‘If that man, Joe, had studied medicine as he’s studied economics he wouldn’t know enough to bandage a cut finger.’

Manning tugged more viciously at his moustache and peered anxiously at the clock. During all this time the ritual of question time was proceeding, carried on by a scratch crew under the guidance of Mr Speaker. People grew restless, whispers increased, feet shuffled.

There was a crowd at the Bar. Eric Watson, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Mr Chancellor Reardon, sat with his face bathed in the sunlight. He ought not to have been there. On such a day there must have been many other things for him to do. But the occasion was great, and Watson took his share of the limelight, basking with the self-importance of a cock pheasant flaunting before a hen at mating time.

Watson had made a name for himself by a couple of striking speeches. Now he was consolidating his position, pushing steadily towards minor office in the recognised way—by bottle-washing for someone who had already arrived. He was tall and too handsome. The fine features suggested—to those who were unkind—that strength might have been sacrificed in the process of modelling. He looked round the House, and spoke with unnecessary emphasis:

‘Wait until Edgar comes. He’ll tickle them up more than a bit.’

A Member sitting behind him chuckled softly. It was Dick Curtis, yet another who had joined the long procession and added politics to a legal profession. Curtis imagined that the ranks were full in the present Government. Perhaps that explained why he belonged to the Opposition.

‘He may find that he’s tickling a pike instead of a trout,’ he said. ‘Deficits are not like air bubbles. They won’t be burst and they refuse to blow away.’

Watson smiled tolerantly. He had faced Curtis in many a wordy war in the Law Courts, knew his gift for banter, his flair for argument. Curtis had a full, round voice, and a tonal range that embraced most varieties of expression. Some air of prosperity was conveyed by the figure which indicated the commencement of a senatorial roundness. His next words showed that his banter covered a judicial brain:

‘Reardon’s got one great thing in his favour, Watson. The City isn’t frightened of him. I know the Account that’s closed resembled business in a deserted village, but there was some brisk buying on the Stock Exchange before that. From your pestilential point of view that’s not a bad sign.’

‘Reardon is pleased about that,’ whispered Watson. ‘I know he wants to carry the City with him.’ He spoke as though he had rendered more than a little assistance to his chief in the bearing of the burden.

‘He doesn’t seem in any hurry to arrive,’ said Curtis. ‘Wife with him?’

Watson nodded a wordless affirmative.

‘I thought so,’ remarked Curtis dryly. ‘She’ll be keeping him.’

The Parliamentary Private Secretary seemed disinclined to discuss women in general, or his chief’s wife in particular. He changed the subject with surprising abruptness:

‘Tranter is jumping your seat, Curtis. Turf him out of it.’

Curtis looked lazily. A silk hat threw the light back from his seat like a reflecting glass. His eyes gleamed with humorous brightness.

‘Tranter will soon learn wisdom after I’ve—’

A rising cheer drowned the remainder of the sentence. Mr Chancellor Reardon had arrived in the House.

‘I’ll have to go,’ whispered Watson, hurrying away to return a couple of minutes later with a long glass, filled with claret and seltzer water for Reardon’s use during his speech. The Chancellor interrupted his talk with the Prime Minister to place the glass on the table. As he turned Curtis sat on the hat Tranter had left on his seat. There was a muffled sound of constrained mirth, followed by a peal of loud laughter. The noise increased when Curtis withdrew the hat from beneath him, appeared astonished to find it in his hand, and then held it aloft for all to see. He seemed to have some difficulty in recognising it as a hat.

Tranter snatched the ruin from Curtis’ hand and ran with it up the steps of the gangway. The overhanging gallery offered shelter from derision. The Speaker had to delay his departure from the Chair to restore a sense of responsibility to the House. Even the removal of the mace was attended with the backwash of earlier laughter.

The speech for which the stage had been set, for which the nation waited with apprehension, started in an atmosphere of levity.

As Edgar Reardon stood in the beam of the sun’s spotlight he was revealed to the observant and discerning as a mass of contradictions. The forehead, by its width, depth and sweep, showed intellect, almost patrician nobility; the eyes were vague, flickering and wavering with uncertain darts; his nose was finely chiselled; the mouth was set too low, and the sagging lips might well have fitted a voluptuary; his jaw had the firm, sweeping outline of a determined man; the pale, thin hands moved unceasingly, long fingers wriggling like worms.

The Chancellor had a gift of persuasive speech, and during the customary review of national finance, with which he prefaced the important business, he used the gift to advantage. He reached the end of his preamble at quarter to five. Operators had grown tired of waiting to see the new taxes flashed over the tape machines. But so far Reardon had given no hint of which milch cow he would grasp, of where his money was to come from.

Members leaned forward and there was a perceptible flutter among the financiers and industrialists in the gallery. Relaxed figures became taut.

Mr Chancellor Reardon prolonged the moment of suspense until it became irritating. The way in which the man wasted time was more than exasperating; it was astonishing. He fingered his notes as though he had never seen them before, damping a thin finger on his lips as he turned page after page. He drank from his glass of claret and seltzer, and flicked through his notes again. Perplexity and disquiet increased. Everyone knew that Reardon had worked on the notes for a full week, preparing and arranging them. It seemed that his delay was deliberately insulting, that the Chancellor was verifying unnecessarily that which he must have memorised.

A low murmur rose round the House. The Chancellor was carrying his taunt too far, was playing like a cat with a mouse, refusing to open Pandora’s box until nerves were on edge.

The murmurs grew until individual voices were clear. The impatient were begging him to proceed, Opposition members sneeringly suggested that he had every cause to hesitate, and the members of the Cabinet urged him to hurry, admonished him against delay.

At last Edgar Reardon turned away from his notes and resumed his position in the spotlight, leaning his elbow on the Despatch Box. His gaze wandered round the House before settling upon the face of Joe Manning. The leader of the Opposition moved a little uneasily. The Chancellor stared at him as though the first announcement was to be a direct, personal challenge.

But Reardon hesitated unaccountably on the brink of that announcement. Joe Manning’s face flushed and he started to rise to his feet. Even as he moved he spoke, his voice burdened with temper:

‘Why this farce, Mr Chancellor? Are you so ashamed of the Budget you have to produce that your nerves have failed you?’

The questions provoked cheers from the Opposition members. Ingram, the Prime Minister, rose with a retort, hoping that the Chancellor would save the situation by speaking first.

Reardon frowned. Then his mouth twitched. His left hand groped until it found a corner of the Despatch Box.

For the first time Members began to suspect that something had gone wrong, that all was not well. Within a few seconds suspicion grew to a certainty. Reardon’s eyes were strange. They ceased to wander, were fixed in a persistent stare. The pupils shone strangely, and the man’s body stiffened until it seemed unnaturally tense.

His appearance changed with each fleeting second. He seemed numbed, almost paralysed. Even the golden light from the sun could not disguise the pallidity of his face. Reardon looked distressingly like a man who stands in a daze after concussion.

A colleague decided that it was time to act. He rose and caught the Chancellor by the tails of his coat from behind.

It seemed that the action was the only thing wanting to upset the Chancellor’s balance. He fell headlong to the floor with a crash!

The moment that followed was one of those in which the whole being is concentrated in the eye. The hush that fell over the House was poignantly dramatic. It was an uncomfortable silence.

Tranter broke the spell by claiming right of passage, and dashing forward to the side of the Chancellor. Members who had sat with the muteness and stiffness of statues found their tongues. Ingram cast the secrets of the Budget all over the table in a frenzied search for water. Abruptly he seized the remains of the claret and seltzer, flung it into the face of the Chancellor. Reardon did not move.

Watson, the P.P.S., recovered sufficiently to run for water. As he hurried the Hon. John Ferguson, President of the Board of Trade, worked with trembling fingers and whipped off the man’s collar. Sam Morgan, anxious to help, but uncertain of the procedure, stood wishing that he were a doctor instead of a Home Secretary.

In the general confusion everyone succeeded in getting in everyone else’s way.

At last Tranter produced some sort of order out of the chaos. As he knelt down by Reardon’s side he gave short, sharp directions to those around him. He was definitely a better doctor than he was an economist. The whispering ceased. There was a silence ladened pause. Then Tranter raised his voice again:

‘Carry him outside at once.’

The prostrate form was seized by half a dozen willing, but clumsy, hands. Reardon’s flaccid muscles writhed under the pull and thrust of the shuffling figures, the trunk bowing as they lifted him. The helpers bustled him into a position they fondly hoped was comfortable. It was a grotesque parody of a chairing. The Chancellor’s head wobbled hideously, the body sank into itself telescopically, looking invertebrate and horribly unhuman, swaying and jolting to each step of the bearers as they staggered with their burden out of the House.

The Members watched the procession with bewilderment. This was something that the Chancellor had not budgeted for! They need have felt no sympathy for the sagging figure.

Edgar Reardon was dead!