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.
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.
It hadn’t worked quite like that. She never seemed able to shrug off the fact that most of her colleagues were men with unfair advantages like university degrees, while in turn they never seemed able to accept that she was as good as or often better than them, or to forget that she had breasts. No one ever stopped noticing that she was a woman, whether under instruction on the Staff Course at Camberley, in the officers’ mess at Rheindahlen or stuck in the middle of the fratricide of Bosnia. If she eased up and was too friendly with the men, they regarded her as a regimental recreation centre, yet when she refused the first offer of a drunken fondle on a Friday mess night they called her a frigid little feminist. Bike or dike.
Never just plain Captain Mary Wetherell.
Her Commanding Officer was a particular problem. Lieutenant Colonel Abel Gittings was a very modern warrior with an OBE and MBE to show for it. That’s what you get when you fight all your campaigns at what they call the ‘politico-military interface’ inside the Ministry of Defence rather than on a battlefield. A filthy job, he’d been known to say, surrounded by cigar smoke and politicians, but somebody had to do it. He’d fought with such skill in the Directorate of Military Operations that they’d promoted him to be Military Aide to the Chief of General Staff. You weren’t going to get much farther away from the bullets than that. Chances were he’d probably survive to become a general, once he’d finished his tour as CO of Mary’s regiment. Yes, a very successful soldier, was Abel Gittings.
Didn’t stop him being a prick, of course, and it took a totally unambiguous prick to wander over to Mary’s Troop Sergeant during an exercise on Salisbury Plain to enquire whether the troop was ‘taking care of their little lady, making sure she’s tucked up at night, got her bed socks
