The Meddlers (32 page)

“Master Briant,” he said softly. “Let me give you a little advice. You will get nowhere by going about things the way you are. To attempt to suborn a member of this House is to take a considerable risk, do you know that? And not even your youth would excuse you if I chose to make trouble because of your behavior here this afternoon. To attempt to sell information to me is an act of subornation, and I for one will have no part of it. Bought evidence may have some value somewhere, but not here. Good afternoon.”

“D’you mean you’re not interested?” Ian sat up straight and stared at the other man. “Oh, come on, you’ve got to be! You want this bill to get through, and I’ve been reading the papers like everyone else! You’ll have to do something pretty good to get it past this lot! Fancy themselves progressives, don’t they? Threw out hanging, brought in a queers’ charter, abortion, the lot—they aren’t going to put this through just because a few old stick-in-the-mud Conservatives don’t fancy it! You’ve got to be interested!”

“Oh, I’m interested all right!” Gurney was beginning to enjoy himself. “But not to the extent of paying you money! You stupid little boy, don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve
told
me what I need to know! Not in detail, perhaps, but enough to start me on my own inquiries. Now I know there’s more money coming into the project from somewhere, it will be a simple matter to find out precisely where somewhere is. You’ve
given
me what I want—free and gratis!”

Ian jumped up so sharply that his chair fell over, and he stood in front of the desk and thrust his face furiously at Gurney. “You lousy cheapskate! You dirty lousy—”

“Mr. Briant! Must I send for a sergeant-at-arms to remove you?”

“Ah, you make me sick! Too bloody mean to pay a decent rate for what you want! Well, don’t think you’ve scuttled me, chum, because you haven’t, not by a long shot! There’s more than you’d be glad to pay for what I’ve got to tell.”

“Oh? Precisely who? One of the cheaper tabloid papers, perhaps. But they won’t pay you a cent until they know you’ve got a story in you. And once you tell them, they’ll do precisely as I have and send you packing. Really,
Mr
. Briant, you’ll need a lot more experience and finesse—some subtlety—before you’ll make any success of this sort of thing. You’re too crude even to be amusing. Do me a favor, run away and play. You’re beginning to bore me—”

“Oh, am I! Well, there’s others won’t be so bloody bored! I’ll go to—to—”

“Yes, Mr. Briant? You’ll go to whom?”

“I … I’ll go to …” Ian floundered and then shouted triumphantly, “I’ll go to that religious lot, to what’s-his-name—Joel Wayne. That’s who. He’s really gunning for the Prof, he is. Calls him Christ-knows-what. And they’ve got some money coming in, I can tell you. Lashings of it. My sister went there, do you know that? She went to one of their rallies, and it put the fear of God into her and no mistake—for all she fancies herself so scientific— and they were raking in the cash hand over fist there. Oh,
they’ll
pay for what I’ve got to give ‘em. The more evidence they’ve got of the old man’s sinfulness, the better they’ll like it!”

He laughed suddenly, his original good humor apparently quite restored.

“My God, Gurney, I ought to be grateful to you. Your cheapskate ways’ll lead me slap bang into some real lolly! You’ll be kicking yourself for turning me down, that’s what you’ll be doing. And don’t you bother to come after me when you’ve changed your mind either, because
that’s
all you’ll get from me!” And he thrust two fingers up at him, accompanying it with a jerk of his chin, and then slammed out of the room, leaving Gurney to recover his equanimity.

At first he found himself infuriated by the boy’s behavior, feeling more ruffled than he would have cared to admit by the total lack of awe he had shown. God damn it, MPs were not people to be treated like that! How dare he be so incredibly insolent? But then he felt some genuine amusement at the juvenile way the whole thing had been handled. Even though Ian was only seventeen, he need not have behaved in so absurdly childish a fashion, assuming an ability to wheel and deal that he wouldn’t have as long as he had an arse to sit on. Gurney was somewhat given to thinking in juvenile obscenities himself when he was disturbed. When I was his age, he thought with malicious pleasure, I’d have been able to run rings around half the Establishment with a story like the one he’s obviously got at his fingers’ ends.

Undoubtedly it was a salable story. The question was, would that stupid yobbo be able to sell it? The religious thing—of course, he was right there. It might indeed be just the sort of fuel they needed to keep their flames burning. And from many accounts, they were extremely lucrative flames.

He moved to the window of the small office he had borrowed for the afternoon and stood staring out at the Gothic buttresses and their attendant pigeons, thinking hard.

This needed careful working out. He had embarked on the bill not because he really gave a damn one way or the other about Briant and his work. For his part, Briant could keep a thousand babies in test tubes or cages or whatever, and welcome. But the project had seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to make his mark, to
make himself felt. For his three years in the House he had no more to show than a measly consultancy to a second-rate public relations firm, and a badly paid monthly column in a local newspaper in the constituency. The whole point of letting Daphne put him up for the Selection Committee and steer him through the by-election to a seat (and his lips curved slightly as he remembered Daphne) had been the fringe benefits. But what fringe benefits were there for a virtually apolitical backbencher? The first real chance that had come his way had been his drawing of a place in the private member’s bill ballot, and then the Briant furor.

And it should have been the walkover it had looked like being; Davidson’s obstructive behavior had been a most unpleasant surprise. He hadn’t expected to have to face so many bloody complications. But they were there all right, and unless he found a way to overcome them, the success of the bill was far from being a fore-gone conclusion. And if it failed, where was the opportunity to get at the real honey he knew lay waiting to be scooped up by an MP with an intelligent eye to the main chance? Indeed, this latest development needed careful thinking out.

So, let’s think straight. These evangelists are pulling in huge audiences for their rallies, ever since that American arrived to take over the movement that had started with a few spontanous meetings in places like Trafalgar Square and Birmingham’s Bull Ring. They were making a lot of money, manipulating a hell of a lot of people. And if there is one thing the great British public is likely to rise to, it’s any suggestion that foreign pseudo-religious movements are making hay out of them. Remember all the flap there was about the Scientologists?

Now, if I can convince enough people here in the House that there are parallels, and that the Wayne lot are manipulating the public directly through fears engendered in simple minds by the Briant project, surely that should swing a lot of sympathy my way? And if I can show that the Wayne people are prepared to use any weapon they can get their hands on, even to the extent of allowing young Briant to sell them dirt about his father, that really would be ammunition.

I’ll have to move fast, he decided. Young Briant was already on
his way to Wayne, wherever Wayne might be. It might take him some time to track him down, but on the other hand, it might not. I’ve got to get to him too, as fast as possible.

Where do Americans stay in London? he asked himself and then grinned. The Regent Palace if they’re tourists, but Claridge’s or somewhere like it if they’ve got money to play with. I’ll start at the top end and work down. And he hurried out of the room for the members’ lobby and the telephone directories.

He bought some chrysanthemums, great shaggy-headed copper-colored ones, and felt slightly foolish when he was back in the car looking at them on the seat beside him. It had been the action of an impulse, and now he wondered whether it had been a bad one. She seemed so—what was the word?—crisp a personality, uninterested in the sort of approach that would appeal to most women. Her clothes neat and well fitting but with no suggestion that any real care about their effect had gone into their choosing, her face quite free of cosmetics, all had pointed to the sort of person who would scorn gifts of flowers. Yet, underneath he had had a dragging awareness of a different something about her, and it was perhaps that that had made him stop at the brightly colored stall in the dwindling light of a Camden Town afternoon to buy the exaggeratedly beautiful flowers.

He grimaced a little as the heavy smell of them hit him. A bit like formaldehyde, he thought as he waited for the traffic lights to
change. Quite suddenly he was back in the chemistry laboratory at the college, with Carrie standing beside him, impatiently directing him toward the results she had herself already achieved so effortlessly. Carrie. There were things about this girl that were very like her. Carrie too had been good-looking and seemed to scorn it. She too had been quick in reaction, had a much swifter mind than his own.

This is a hell of a time to remember Carrie, for Christ’s sake, he thought irritably, letting in the clutch. But he could not banish the memory. She had initiated him into so much, what with the way she had helped him plan his degree work and organized his living accommodations for him. And she had taught him how to make love too, directing his virginal fumblings with much the same ill-concealed impatience with which she had directed everything else. It had hurt him to realize how calmly and practically she had used him, while he in his stupid innocent fashion had let himself care for her a great deal. When she had been offered a plum job and accepted it without a moment’s hesitation or a backward glance at the year they had lived together, he had suffered agonies of outraged misery.

And though there had been other women since, none of them had ever quite matched that first experience. Some had had the urgent sexuality Carrie had offered without the accompanying intelligence that sharpened his pleasure in satisfying it. Some had had the quickness and wit he valued but lacked the sexual initiative she had conditioned him to expect in a woman. It was always the passive ones he abandoned most quickly.

But why now was he thinking about Carrie and her successors when he was on his way to get a story from this girl? The coffee they had shared had completed the breaking down of the barrier she had seemed to have against talking about the project, and she had agreed readily enough to this further meeting this evening. But it was a story he was after and not a girl as such.

Or was he in fact attracted to her? He parked the car at the end of Albert Street and sat staring ahead at the elegant patterns made by the façades of the old terraced houses with their cockleshell fanlights. Was he attracted to her as a woman? There was no other
woman around at this time apart from the green-eyed girl who lived in the flat above his own. She had made it clear she was interested if he was, and he had played with the idea of starting something there. But he dismissed her now. Anyway, there was never any sense in getting involved with people on one’s own doorstep; it created too many complications. And perhaps this handsome but somehow drab girl he was about to see was exerting some sort of a pull on him.

Maybe that’s why I thought of Carrie, he thought somberly. Science had been her thing too, albeit chemistry and not biology, and there were those other similarities. But why compare her with Carrie, who had caused him so much pain, and not with one of the others, who had been strictly for laughs? Was it because this one made him feel he could become emotionally involved with her? But that didn’t bear thinking of. He had managed very nicely without getting hung up on any one girl these past dozen years and more, and he was certainly unlikely to change so established a living pattern now, not at his age.

He left the flowers on the seat, filling the small car with their reek, and walked purposefully up the street, looking for the house. The hell with it. He’d play the bloody thing by ear. The main thing was he’d got her, and she was going to give him good copy.

  She had been standing waiting at the window for some time when she saw him walking up the street with his long loping strides. He’s a bit flatfooted, she thought suddenly and then looked at the shape of him. Shouldn’t I feel something about the way he looks? It’s supposed to be important, that, remembering the way Norma had used to waffle on about the appearance of the various boys who had occupied her thinking during their shared college days. But it doesn’t seem to mean a thing.

She felt curiously remote, and it comforted her. It was almost as she had been used to be, this detached considering attitude, and she let her mind stretch itself tentatively, exploring the feelings that had so bedeviled her these past weeks, much as one explored an aching tooth with one’s tongue, risking the exquisite stab of pain it might cause.

But there was no response, none of that sickening surge of feeling that had so distressed her so often, and she relaxed. Decision had been the treatment she needed, and to hell with George and his facile diagnosis and offer of tranquilizers! Her painful thinking ever since Norma’s hectoring had crystallized at last, and now she knew precisely what she had to do. The solution to her problem was within her reach.