The Body Politic (2 page)

The Member had been told more than once by David Chadwick, his Party Agent, that the Major's main anxiety as Chairman of the Mellamby Branch of the Association was that the official speaker would be late in arriving at a Branch meeting and he, Derrick Puiver, would have to extemporise on his carefully prepared Chairman's remarks to fill the gap.

Not that Peter Corbishley minded about this. What he really disliked were branch chairmen who
did
enjoy his delayed arrival and who then embarked on their own State of the Nation speech while the audience was waiting for the Member to arrive—and who didn't stop and sit down when he did. Corbishley had known the schedule of more whistle-stop tours of the constituency at election time to founder on this than on awkward questions from those in the audience.

The voice at the back became more strident. “I said, ‘Why don't you drop dead?'”

The Member of Parliament might have deemed it prudent not to look in the heckler's direction. No such thought appeared to have occurred to Bertram Rauly. He was considering the man with the undisguised interest of a sportsman contemplating a new species of game. Of one thing Peter Corbishley was quite sure, and that was that nothing really worried Rauly, who had collected a DSO and an MC as a tank commander in the Western Desert for actions so flamboyant that it was rumoured that even Field-Marshal Rommel had been surprised. Peter Corbishley just hoped that the owner of Mellamby Place didn't happen to have a loaded gun too readily at hand.

The original owners of Mellamby Motte, the de Caquevilles, who were said to have come over with William the Conqueror, would never have been without a weapon of one sort or another within reach either. Corbishley spared a glance in the direction of the ruins of the great Norman keep beyond the house. Sited on a natural mound on the land, and given a licence to crenellate in 1272, the tower of the old castle still caught the eye. The occupants of Mellamby Motte would always have had oil on the boil, in a manner of speaking, against the arrival of unwelcome visitors.

And crossbows at the ready for enemies.

He brought his gaze back to the home of the Raulys. Mellamby Place was a fine Jacobean house set on a little plateau not far from the castle ruins. Its site, the historians said, was probably the jousting ground of the old castle: this view was lent further weight by the fact that the south lawn was still known as the tiltyard.

The only tournament that seemed to be engaged today was between one middle-aged and overworked Member of Parliament and an unknown heckler. Tomorrow, Peter Corbishley reminded himself, would be different. Tomorrow contemporary politics were to give way to the memory of an old battle. The Camulos Society were going to re-enact the celebrated clash between King Henry III and Simon de Montfort at the town of Lewes in Sussex in 1264.

Peter Corbishley would be there, of course, and would say a few words—had not Parliament itself come about because of Simon de Montfort?—but it was today's proceedings that were his real concern just at this moment.

He corrected himself even as he turned over his written speech at an oblique and decidedly ambiguous reference to the Common Market's unfortunate “butter mountain.” Mention of this and of the “wine lake” and similar economic embarrassments reminded him irresistibly of Hans Christian Andersen's Witch's Gingerbread House and other nursery stories of his childhood, and he skated quickly over the knotty problem of production surpluses in a sudden welter of words.

“Furthermore …” Even as the Member of Parliament spoke to an audience comprised mainly of farming families who had a keen interest in an agricultural policy of their own and who were therefore giving him their close attention, his own mind was elsewhere. The only part of today's proceedings which was really worrying him was a meeting he had lined up after tea with an anxious constituent.

“Why don't you drop dead?”

This time the Member scarcely heard the interruption to his speech. The person in the audience who was causing Peter Corbishley genuine concern was certainly not the heckler. Unless, that is, the heckler was called Alan John Ottershaw. Which he very much doubted.

Corbishley didn't even know Ottershaw by sight and so could not attempt to pick him out from among those sitting or standing in front of him. All that the Member of Parliament knew about Alan Ottershaw was that he was relatively young and—since he had just flown home from the Middle East, where he worked—probably the possessor of a good tan. He wasn't likely to recognise him anyway, since Ottershaw had always worked abroad and, as far as the Member knew, he had not met him before.

The man had married a girl from Mellamby and she had stayed on with their children in their house there: which was how it was that Alan Ottershaw came to be one of Peter Corbishley's constituents. At this particular moment the Member of Parliament could have wished Alan Ottershaw's English base had been anywhere else but the Parliamentary division of East Berebury in the County of Calleshire.

Or that he hadn't had the misfortune to have been involved in a road traffic accident in the Sheikhdom of Lasserta last week.

Peter Corbishley continued with the delivery of his speech, his mind dwelling on what he knew about Alan Ottershaw and his problems. A pedestrian had stepped out into the road in front of Alan Ottershaw's car in Lasserta, had been run over by the vehicle, and had died of his consequent injuries. An angry crowd of Lassertans, no lovers of expatriate mining engineers from the West at the best of times, had gathered round the luckless driver and made loud allegations of dangerous driving.

A charge of culpable manslaughter had been laid against Ottershaw with alarming speed. Well before any summons could be served, however, his employers, the giant Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company, had spirited him swiftly out of the country and back to England. In Lasserta the penalty for killing either a man or a camel was death. (In certain highly specific circumstances the killing of a woman did not even rate as crime.)

So far, as the record went, so good.

Unfortunately the success of this manoeuvre had been very, very limited.

The real trouble had begun when the Lassertans had requested the immediate return of Alan Ottershaw to stand trial in Gatt-el-Abbas, the capital of Lasserta.

The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company's predictable stance on this had been that the presence of their employee was urgently required in their London office for consultations.

In that case, the Sheikh of Lasserta had decreed to Malcolm Forfar, the head of the firm in Wadeem, where the minehead was, the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company could remove itself from the Sheikhdom of Lasserta within forty-eight hours.

Before Malcolm Forfar could even draw breath the Sheikh had added a rider with a wolfish grin. “Or else …”

Forfar had waited, now quite unable to breathe.

“Or else,” said the Sheikh, “its assets will be forfeit.”

Reeling, the head of the firm had telexed London.

That had been on the Thursday afternoon, London time.

Ever since then the Board of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company had been locked in deadly conclave in its prestige offices in Mayfair. The fact that it was now forty-eight hours later and no balloon had yet gone up had been due solely to the good offices of Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador in Lasserta.

Apprised of the situation by a distraught Malcolm Forfar, Mr. Anthony Mainwaring Heber Hibbs had demonstrated that he wasn't quite the old fuddy-duddy that the man from the mining company had always thought him. And that social and diplomatic skills, while not, naturally, in the same class of importance as mechanical expertise and experience, did have their place in the rich tapestry of international affairs.

Granted audience by the Sheikh of Lasserta without difficulty (happily he shared the Sheikh's interest in hawking), Mr. Heber Hibbs was far too wily a diplomat to attempt to discuss Alan Ottershaw and the road accident with Sheikh Ben Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra. Instead, the Ambassador, who had learned a thing or two besides games on the playing fields of Eton, concentrated his efforts entirely on persuading the Sheikh to extend the time period of the ultimatum. Shotgun decisions did not as a rule leave room for manoeuvre, and room for manoeuvre was undoubtedly what the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company needed at this moment.

Anthony Heber Hibbs achieved this in a somewhat oblique way. While not going quite so far as actually to equate the traditional English “le weekend” with the Festival of Ramadan, the Ambassador did somehow manage to imply that Saturdays and Sundays were days in which it would be difficult to get reasoned responses out of a board of directors in London.

And the Sheikh, he skilfully inferred, was far too sensible a ruler to want a hasty or ill-considered response from men whom it might be difficult to call together if they were already dispersing to the country to prepare to read the lesson in their parish churches the next day. With real artistry he elevated the carving of roast beef at Sunday luncheon to an important ritual, while Yorkshire pudding and gravy found their way into his discourse as vague sorts of libation.

Sheikh Ben Mirza Ibrahim Hajal Kisra, who knew and liked Heber Hibbs, graciously allowed himself to be charmed into extending his deadline to seven days without loss of face. With the studied politeness customarily extended by members of his tribe to infidels he said, as he summoned his falconer with a flick of an imperious finger, “Is that not what you call a stay of execution?”

Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador bowed.

TWO

After This Life's Whim

Alan Ottershaw was a mining engineer who knew a great deal about the rare mineral known as queremitte but very little about the ways of international politics. He had, however, a touching faith, carefully nurtured among all employees, in the greatness and goodness of the company for which he worked. This faith lasted until exactly twenty minutes past four on the Friday afternoon after the road accident in Lasserta.

That was the moment when the Chairman of the Board, Hamer Morenci, asked the company's Director of Finance to give him a figure for the real value of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company's assets in the Sheikhdom.

It was while the accountant was replying to this question that Alan Ottershaw had begun to feel uneasy. It had taken the money man a little while to explain that the company's holdings were practically incalculable except, naturally, for the purpose of writing down in the balance sheet and claiming depreciation allowances in the profit and loss account.

“Naturally,” said Hamer Morenci, nodding.

As he listened to the Director of Finance it was gradually borne in upon Alan Ottershaw that, excellent servant of the company that he might be, he himself now figured on the debit side of the balance sheet. Like it or not, he had become a definite liability in the firm's eyes. And as the Director of Finance warmed to his theme and became even more eloquent on the subject of mine shafts and their role as written-down fixed assets in the company's accounts so Ottershaw's disquiet deepened.

“And then,” put in Darren Greene, Vice-Chairman of the Board, in what Alan Ottershaw thought was an unnecessarily cold-blooded way, “there is the whole question of our monopoly rights in queremitte.”

From the quality of the silence in the boardroom Ottershaw knew that nobody round the table had forgotten for one single moment that the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company leased the sole rights to mine under the Lassertan desert at Wadeem the only known seam of queremitte ore on the sunny side of the Iron Curtain.

The Chairman of the Board was not a diffident man—chairmen of international companies seldom are—but even he had the grace to look slightly embarrassed as he said, “I've got an appointment at the Ministry of Defence Procurement at six o'clock this afternoon.” He coughed. “They have particularly requested that none of this reaches the press or, indeed, anyone else at all.” He looked up. “No one knows that you're in the United Kingdom, do they, Ottershaw?”

“Nobody,” said Alan Ottershaw evenly, shifting his stare from Darren Greene back to Hamer Morenci. “Not even my wife.”

His initial disquiet was beginning to turn to real alarm now. A man didn't have to be a Kremlin-watcher to appreciate the significance of that remark of Morenci's about the Ministry of Defence Procurement. Normal businessmen would have been making their urgent appointments with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. After-office-hours meetings at the Ministry of Defence Procurement late on a Friday afternoon in peacetime betokened very real alarm on both sides. The Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company was certainly looking after its own interests with a vengeance. Alan Ottershaw, by then, had begun to feel it was high time someone looked after his.

“We have to consider the national interest, too, you see,” added Morenci, whose own ethnic origins were a matter of perennial speculation both within and outside the firm.

That had been the point at which Ottershaw had felt truly frightened. As countless others before him had found to their cost, actions taken on those grounds could lead anywhere. Anywhere at all.

Which was how it came about that Peter Corbishley, the Member of Parliament for Alan Ottershaw's constituency, found himself studying his audience so carefully at the meeting at Mellamby the following afternoon. Sensing that the Board of the Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company had reached the point of finding it difficult to discuss the realities of the situation with him underfoot, Alan Ottershaw had seized his moment and asked leave to depart to see his wife and children at his home in Calleshire.

Given his congé, the mining engineer had high-tailed it to Mellamby and made an urgent request to see his Member of Parliament as soon as possible. News could be embargoed from family and the press, but the sacred right of a citizen of the United Kingdom to communicate with his Member of Parliament was enshrined in custom and, in the case of mental hospitals and prisons, in the Rules and Regulations too.