I think we may well have a Labour government tomorrow morning.’
Gordon had gone with Vicky to vote before he dropped her at the clinic. They had walked past the playground railings and into the primary school that was their polling station. There had been the usual officials, local people all known to him but wearing expressions of absorbed self-importance for the day, and the representatives of the parties sitting behind their rosettes at rickety card tables, and voters with too little else to do lingering to gossip. Inside the big classroom he had taken his ballot paper into the usual flimsy half-screened cubicle and held the string-tied stub of pencil poised over the list of names.
He had been overcome by a feeling of ennui, by a suffocating recognition of his own predictability and the predictability of Grafton.
He read the candidates’ names and their parties, and he wondered if there would be a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder if he voted Labour, or Green, or Dog-Lovers Rights or Monster Raving Loony. There seemed little enough to choose between the neatly printed inscrutable English names even though he knew that the Labour man was considered sound, that the Conservative had an irritatingly patronizing manner and the Green woman was an energetic housewife married to a man in the county planning department. He thought of everyone else, of the seventy or so per cent of franchised adults in the country who would take the trouble to go to the polling stations that day, and wondered how many of them felt clogged as he did with repetition and banality and the unheard voice of mediocrity.
The voters in the cubicles on either side of him had come and gone. Gordon felt the scrutiny of one of them directed at his back as he passed. If only by making a different mark he could change the condition of England or even himself in the smallest detail, he thought.
Gordon’s pencil wavered.
Then he marked a firm cross in the space beside the Conservative’s name, folded his paper and dropped it through the slot in the black tin box before walking to the door where Vicky was waiting for him. She looked serene, with an air of pleasure in having done the right thing.
‘Trouble making up your mind?’ she joked as they left.
‘A brief meditation on the responsibility of the voter.’ He smiled at her.
At Andrew’s party Jimmy Rose answered him. ‘The night will tell, but I hope to God you’re wrong. Still, they can’t make me pay tax on what I’m not making, can they?’
Star had left his side as soon as they arrived. She was wearing a black-and-white striped jacket with a red rosebud in the buttonhole. It was a joke among the couples that Star was the only Labour voter who was allowed to cross Andrew Frost’s threshold, and Star had been known to retort that Andrew was as guilty of tokenism as the BBC.
The noise level was rising. There was a deliberate gaiety as they absorbed enough wine to fortify themselves for the results. Andrew plied his bottles and Janice ordered everyone to come and eat while there was nothing else going on. There was an elaborate cold buffet laid out in the dining room.
The Cleggs arrived late, complete with Barney and the twins. Barney was carrying a case of Bollinger which Darcy presented to Andrew.
‘Put the whole lot in the fridge. We’ll crack it as soon as we know we’ve won, and I’m not going home until it’s all drunk.’
There was a mottled flush across Darcy’s cheeks and a new looseness about his throat that made him look unkempt, although his hair was sleekly brushed and he was wearing one of his emphatic chalk-striped suits. He declined wine, and filled himself a tumbler of whisky.
The three younger Cleggs and Hannah melted into the thick of the party. Hannah was wearing a bright green dress made of some shimmery material.
‘I’m announcing what I voted,’ she proclaimed.
‘Save the Hedgerows, Hannah?’ someone teased her. ‘Andrew, did you know we’ve got a traitor to the cause here?’
‘It’s not quite obligatory to vote Conservative,’ Marcelle protested. ‘I voted Lib Dem, as it happens.’
‘The Pantsdown party? Adulterers unite?’
There was a small, shivery silence in the heart of the party before someone else’s boisterous laughter crashed over it and the waves of talk washed it away.
‘Please come and eat,’ Janice begged.
They crowded into the dining room and spooned her good food on to their plates, settling to eat and drink and talk before the television coverage began. Only Lucy Clegg ignored the food, but she filled and refilled her glass of wine. Marcelle found a corner of a sofa and picked at a salad until Jimmy came and sat beside her.
‘Sad face,’ he said gently. ‘Why’s that?’
Marcelle gazed at the animation round them. She could hear the ebb and flow of three different conversations but couldn’t think of anything to contribute to any of them. Tiredness dragged at her.
‘Do I look sad? I don’t mean to.’
Darcy was in the nearest group, talking loudly and stabbing with his fork to emphasize his words. Marcelle thought wearily that she must have been to a hundred Grafton evenings with the same or similar permutations of people.
‘Talk to Uncle Jimmy,’ he cajoled her. He did not look much like an uncle, with his bright eyes and demonic smile.
‘I talk too much as it is.’ Gordon and Vicky were across the room, in a group that included Barney Clegg and the Kellys. Jimmy followed the direction of her glance.
‘These things pass,’ he said smoothly. ‘See?’
*
At eleven o’clock the big television was turned on. Jon Snow’s face filled the screen.
‘Is that a positively impartial tie or has he just spilled something?’ Hannah called.
There were other cries for quiet. The experts’ view at the close of polling was that the result was too close to call. There were ironic cheers and whistles.
Andrew had photocopied the newspapers’ lists of marginal and key seats and he distributed them amongst the watchers. The political enthusiasts prepared themselves for the first results while the rest of the party congregated in noisy groups in the kitchen and elsewhere. Cathy Clegg indicated to Lucy that they might slip away soon, but Lucy mutely shook her head. She hovered at the margin of the gathering, holding firmly to her glass and keeping her face turned away from Jimmy. She was paler and less pretty than usual.
Star sat on a tall stool by one of the kitchen counters with a half-full bottle of wine beside her. She looked elegant in her striped jacket. The rosebud in her buttonhole was beginning to unfurl in the warmth. Gordon slid into the place next to her and filled his glass from her bottle.
‘How long until Darcy’s champagne, I wonder?’ he murmured.
‘For ever, I hope,’ Star said crisply.
He smiled at her. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot. And you’re wearing your party badge, as well.’
There was a shout from the television room as the first result was declared.
‘Don’t
