Ten Lords A-Leaping (13 page)

‘Very well. Snorted a lot and talked about tosses he had taken in his time and other fox-hunting witterings. What was more disturbing was the letter Tommy showed me.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Threatening vengeance if he didn’t support abolition.’

‘How do you know?’

‘They seem to have gone out to everyone in the Lords, including me. I did a spot check when mine arrived. The only reason Reggie won’t have had it is because he wasn’t at home.’ She went over to her desk, took a piece of paper out of her drawer and tossed it over to Amiss. Printed in red ink on cheap paper, it was headed, ‘beware’.

‘That’s a good opening,’ said Amiss. ‘They’ve obviously been reading about the necessity to grab your audience at the very first word.’

He read on.

‘Member of the House of Lords – You are trying to defeat a just bill which outlaws evil. Everyone who speaks against any part of the Wild Mammals Bill will be responsible for putting the lives of their families and property at risk. Wrongdoing must be punished.

T
HE
A
NIMAL
A
VENGERS

‘I never heard of them, but they sound quite serious. Have you told the police?’

‘I rang your pal Pooley and then faxed it to him. Presumably Scotland Yard will be doing something, but it is worrying.’

‘You mean you’re afraid someone might take a pot shot at you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. What’s worrying is the effect it will have on the noble lords without backbone, of whom I fear there may be a few. I’m concerned lest they find themselves on Tuesday with urgent business elsewhere, just when we need a show of strength.

‘So with Jock’s help I got Reggie to send this out to everyone this afternoon.’ She handed him a fax from the House of Lords. The letter read:

Dear

I believe you may have received from a scoundrelly group calling itself T
HE
A
NIMAL
A
VENGERS
a threatening communication. Since I have reason to believe that it was they who recently damaged my saddle and caused me to take a toss in the hunting field, I thought I should let you know that I am standing firm. I have no intention of letting terrorists move me from the path of duty to Britain and her way of life. Therefore I still intend to be speaking against the anti-hunting clauses of the Wild Mammals Bill on Tuesday.

I have every confidence that you are as zealous as am I when it comes to upholding free speech and that you will not allow yourself to be persuaded by wicked and un-British threats into abandoning the path of duty.

I remain,

Yours sincerely,

Poulteney

‘But I only left him at two o’clock.’

‘Yes, but Bertie nobbled him a few minutes later and between his secretary, a word processor and three clerks brought in from a nearby agency, the whole twelve hundred will have been sent out by five o’clock, topped and tailed by Reggie. It’s exhausted him more than an all-day hunt. If you work it out, he must have written more than two thousand four hundred words, which is probably as much as he would normally write in the course of a year. Martini?’

‘Martini
?’

‘Yes, martini. What’s so difficult about that concept?’

‘Nothing. It just seems a bit unexpected. I hadn’t expected you to indulge in anything as effete as cocktails.’

‘There’s nothing effete about a good martini, young Robert. Not the way I make them.’ She strolled over to the fridge, removed a bottle of gin, poured it into two glasses, added a couple of drops of vermouth and dropped in an already prepared twist of lemon rind. She presented a glass to Amiss, who examined it doubtfully.

‘You believe in sixteen parts gin to one of vermouth, I see.’

‘I’m not quite as heavy on the vermouth as that.’

He tried it timidly and after a certain amount of choking began to enjoy it. The baroness looked pleased.

‘Good. Now you’ve got some nourishment, I wouldn’t mind a chat about my own speech. I’m relying on you to stop me from getting too carried away. I am, after all, a maiden speaker and it behoves me to affect a certain modesty.’

‘Aren’t you a bit old to change the habits of a lifetime?’

‘Stop being smart and take a look at this draft.’

‘Have you never felt nervous about anything?’ She raised her head from her newspaper. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Tuesday, for instance. Are you at all nervous about making this speech?’

‘No, why should I be?’ She was clearly baffled.

‘In case you make a hash of it.’

‘You mean compared to Tommy and Reggie?’

‘No, no, no. I’m talking within the bounds of possibility. I mean just do it badly.’

‘If I do it badly, I do it badly. Just have to do it better next time.’ She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘What are you going on about? Is it wrong not to worry?’

‘No, no, Jack.’ Amiss felt weary. ‘It’s not wrong. It’s just unusual.’

The telephone rang early on Tuesday morning. Bleary from too late a night working on last-minute additions to Stormerod’s speech, Amiss climbed miserably out of bed, picked up the receiver and croaked, ‘Hello.’

‘Are you OK?’

He was baffled at such an enquiry from the baroness. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘It’s just that I’ve had a letter bomb and I was afraid you might have had one too.’

‘Are you all right?’ he shouted.

‘Of course. I spotted it just in time and chucked it into an armchair. It gave Plutarch a nasty shock when it went off, but she’s recovered now. The chair isn’t looking too good, but otherwise all is well. Right, you warn Bertie, Sid, Reggie and Tommy and when I’ve tipped off the fuzz I’ll get in touch with anyone else who occurs to me. Tell everyone we proceed regardless. Bye.’

‘Jack!’

‘What?’

‘I… I’m glad you’re all right.’

‘I’m glad you are too,’ she said gruffly, and put the phone down.

‘I won’t put up with it.’ Beesley was shaking with rage. ‘I tell you I won’t put up with it. First threatening letters and now this. You and Sid could have been killed.’

‘Well, we weren’t. So we go on as normal. We’re all here to make sure our speeches complement each other and that we know what we’re going to do. I trust no one’s got cold feet.’

Beesley, Deptford and Poulteney snorted with indignation at the suggestion. Stormerod merely smiled and Amiss raised his eyes to heaven.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Poulteney, ‘is why you two were the only ones to be sent bombs.’

‘I expect because apart from Robert – who doesn’t count – we’re the only ones likely to have been at home this morning. The senders would appear to have been considerate enough to wish to avoid unnecessarily injuring noncombatants.’

‘They weren’t so considerate with all those bombs a, few weeks ago. Remember one took the hand off an MP’s secretary.’

‘Maybe they learned from that,’ said the baroness. ‘Anyway, speculation’s a waste of time and we haven’t any time to waste. Let’s get on with it. Robert, take us through the running order of the arguments again. Then we can have a decent lunch.’

Chapter 14

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There was no doubt that numbers were down. Where Stormerod had originally expected the Conservative benches to be full, there were now several gaps. But although the word was that a few names had been withdrawn from the speakers’ list, there were enough for Amiss, sitting in the front row of spectators just to the right of the baroness, to be resigned to a long session.

Lady Parsons kicked off very much in the style of the Islington public meeting. She spent little time on the uncontentious clauses, but when she got to hunting, the detailed facts and figures tumbled out followed by the moral denunciation: there was no place for the anachronistic pursuits of the idle rich in a modern society facing the challenge of the European Union. It was disgraceful that country people should still carry such traditional baggage from the shameful days of Empire.

She sat down to obedient but unenthusiastic ‘hear, hears’. Stormerod came next. His unassuming, urbane tone was ideally suited to the Lords. ‘I should like to congratulate the noble and learned baroness on her mastery of the evidence for the prosecution. Such is her skill that I wished she might have turned her redoubtable talents to the defence – where I am sure she would have made an even better case. She, whose concern for the underprivileged is so well known, could not have failed to be moving on the subject of the damage that would be done to ordinary people in so many professions if this bill went through.’

He dwelt movingly and in sequence on the plight of the huntsmen and the houndsmen whose lives had been dedicated to the ancient trades in which they took such pride.

‘I am not myself a huntsman, so it might surprise you that I am opening for the defence of that sport, but then the noble and learned baroness is not a fox.’ This piece of wit elicited polite laughter from all over the house, fortunately drowning out to all but those in the Baroness Troutbeck’s immediate vicinity the mutter, ‘But she is a bloody vixen.’ Gently and in the pragmatic manner that befitted an elder statesman, Stormerod talked of those parts of the bill with which he was entirely happy and then about what made hunting different. Why was it, he asked, that as with capital punishment, every time the House of Commons had given proper consideration to the hunting issue reason had triumphed over prejudice and the visceral popular demand to abolish the one and reinstate the other had been rejected? Now it was for the Lords to make sure that irrationality did not prevail.

Brother Francis, aka the Lord Purseglove, could not compete with this. Where Stormerod fitted in with the ambience of the Lords like a top hat at Ascot, Brother Francis looked as out of place as an anorak. Amiss knew enough of the Lords by now to appreciate that while eccentricity was part and parcel of the place, it had to be within clearly defined parameters. You could be shabby, boring, dotty, absent-minded, repetitive and a bit of a drunk, but anything that smacked of the spiv, the cad, or the crank made you, by definition, an outsider. Brother Francis’s dress, from his plastic sandals to his clerical collar, did not put his audience at their ease. Apart from anything else, as Sid had explained to Amiss, there was deep disapproval that he was sitting on the cross benches in clerical gear. To the Lords, clergy were bishops: they sat on the benches of the Lords Spiritual in a properly hierarchical manner, archbishops to the fore on the benches with the arm rests. It was muddling to have a member of the clerical lower orders turning up and suggested that the chap was obviously unsound.

Like Lady Parsons, Brother Francis had made few concessions to a change of audience, though he had the wit to begin with a waffly wringing of hands about how dreadful violence was and how he hated it as much when it was applied to man as to beast. He had also left out his verses and his hymn; clearly he was not such an innocent as to be unaware that the Lords were likely to be a bit conservative about their hymn sheet. But he did produce an apposite verse from Cowper.

…
Detested sport
,

That owes its pleasure to another’s pain;

That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks

of harmless nature…

Yet though his sincerity earned him a sympathetic hearing, he kept annoying their lordships. It was, for instance, clear to Amiss from the shocked expressions within his vision that it did not go down well to address peers as: ‘My noble brothers and sisters.’ Nor did his syrupy sentimentality appeal either to those of rural background – the majority of the hereditary mob – or to those who had fought their way up the greasy poles of politics, academia, law or business. In choosing him as her seconder, Lady Parsons had shown how little she understood the institution.

Deptford came next and – as an old Lords hand – got the tone completely right. Simply and directly, he told the autobiographical story of how hunting had brought joy, excitement and an understanding of the cycle of nature to a boy from the most underprivileged of backgrounds. And he raised a laugh by telling of his delighted amazement in finding the sport egalitarian. ‘As the great hunting journalist, Nimrod, explained: “A butcher’s boy upon a pony may throw dirt in the face of the first duke in the kingdom.”’

It should not be thought that only the right defended hunting, as the Labour Minister for Agriculture had shown when he opposed the anti-hunting bill of 1949 on the grounds that it was not for townsmen to attack the life of the countryside. Yet here we were now contemplating allowing an ‘urban dictatorship’ to prevail. The murmurs and ‘hear, hears’ throughout the speech were frequent and genuine.

The antis had pulled off a coup with the next speaker, for Lord Pangbourne was a convert from field sports, who waxed eloquent about the cruelty he had seen and indeed participated in before he saw the light. He produced gruesome descriptions of foxes being dug out before being thrown to the hounds, and other revolting examples which Amiss recognized as standard in anti-hunting literature – always countered by the pros as exceptions and always cited by the antis as typical. But Pangbourne was lucid and at times shocking and – Amiss calculated – probably cancelled out Deptford.

It was with apprehension that he saw Poulteney rise, though with relief that he saw he was clinging on hard to the typescript Amiss had given him. Without stumbling too much, he talked as instructed about tradition, about how all classes united in this great test of vigour and courage. He talked of how restrictive was the social life of the country with little to do but go to the pub or watch television. What hunting offered was an opportunity for vigorous physical exercise that brought the community together, got people out in the open air, gave them a day’s excitement and enjoyment and pride in their own achievement and brought to newcomers from the towns some appreciation of how nature worked.