‘If you care to proceed to the kitchen sir, I’ve laid out our election night spread.’
I duly obeyed. ‘Goodness! Party food. But surely, all of this, well, it’s not food at all by your usual strict criteria.’
‘I know, but look closer. It’s the health food store’s artificial version of artificial food, if you see what I mean. All made with sugar substitute stuff, but using some kind of dodgy veg oil I think, otherwise it would all fall apart.’
‘So, not only will it taste of less than nothing, we have no idea whether it’s even more dangerous to health than the original.’
‘I know.’
‘This is my reward for not distancing myself enough from politics I suppose. Nice of you to go to all the trouble.’
‘Actually, it wasn’t any trouble, because of the time of year, the store has a kind of kid’s bran tub thingy at the cash desk. So, I used up all the points on my store card.’
‘Oh right, the card you failed to get passed Brinkley.’
‘That’s the one! So anyway, before you switch on the tv, what’s the result going to be?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Yes, but that’s what your head says, what’s your gut feeling?’
‘Buffy’s going to get away with it, a majority of say, between forty and fifty?’
‘What! No way! Surely not? They must be wrong.’ So exclaimed Charlie a few moments after 10,00pm.
‘Trouble is, unlike opinion polls, these exit polls that have been introduced in the last couple of decades have been getting more and more accurate.’
‘Then why aren’t you punching the air? Rory will romp it with a majority of, what?’
‘Er, just about five thousand, if it is a swing of around ten per cent. It’s too much, not for Rory I mean - Buffy will be insufferable.’
‘Shouldn’t have got into bed with him then.’
‘Time to make a hasty withdrawal, via the back staircase. From now on I’m turning on, tuning in and dropping out - as Uncle used to be fond of saying.’
‘Eat your treats.’
There are two kinds of people, those who require one screen on their desks and those who require two. I’m a one screen person but I’ve met plenty of the other sort. Market traders, bankers, bookies, people with security responsibilities etc. The second screen sits there in their peripheral vision, often their whole working lives. Their brains unconsciously absorb and learn the patterns, then notice difference. Those of us with one screen like one task at a time, but we have our regular habits - and sometimes the irregular just shouts something’s wrong. It was just before Christmas that I found myself reading online another of those Chinese health stories that occur every few years, a rush of pneumonia cases, suggestive of a virus - is it another strain of flu? Video of the authorities taking even more elaborate tech precautions than usual. I found I was still staring at the screen some minutes after finishing the story. Markets will fall, I thought to myself. China is the most important economy even if no one admits it yet. Why should I be feeling concern? A little of the Trust’s assets had been invested with listed companies, but only the safest - banks, insurance companies and the like. The Trust acts a bit like a pension fund really… Then I had it, this is personal, a personal health scare.
‘Brinkley. Good morning to you. The Trust money you persuaded us to invest in the markets a year or so ago, how’s it doing? ..Jumped since the election, well that’s good then. Be so kind as to contact matey, now - and tell him to sell it all, today. ..Yes, it may well rise further, but I have a bad feeling about China. ..Yes. ..No. You’ll find written instructions are already in your inbox.’
After hectic post-election Christmas celebrations at the Park, Charlie finally got a proper sit-down tea at Aunt Elisabeth’s on Boxing Day. In fact, she made quite a hit with the members of the Book Club. Firstly, on account of having braved the elements in a rather spectacular floral peasant dress, secondly, she knew the book they had all been digesting - Only A Factory Girl by Rosie M Banks. It was a reissue by the Nonsuch Press in their Modern Romantic Classics series. It turned out she’d read a first edition when she was fourteen, the volume in question being owned by her mother, but with an inscription on the flyleaf written in her grandmother’s childhood fist!
Once literary criticism had been exhausted, conversation turned inevitably to gossip. I was shocked to discover that several of the assembled company were already aware of a surprise announcement made at the club lunch barely forty-eight hours previously. Tuffy had taken it upon himself to make a speech, uninvited. He’d rambled for a while about how throughout his life he’d been unlucky in love. There had been definite murmurings of discontent from the crowd. I’d begun to feel anxious myself, but then he’d suddenly announced that Lady Victoria Herring had graciously consented to be his wife. This was followed by a moment of stunned silence before myself and others realised, we’d better start clapping like crazy.
‘So, what do we know of the gal?’ Aunt Elisabeth appeared to be addressing me with her comment.
‘Hardly a girl, aunt. Tuffy and I first met her when we were at school and had signed-up for formal dance classes, she was one of the girls bused in from St. Hilda’s to help out. We took to her right away because she obviously knew what she was doing, even then all her leisure hours were dominated by the ballet. She and Tuffy went out together a few years later, he even got as far as introducing her to his mother, but nothing much transpired.’
‘Of a suitable age, well that at least is reassuring.’
‘Oh, Vic’s alright, what I don’t comprehend is why a woman, having gone to all the trouble of getting rid of one husband, barely six months previously, should want to take on another?’
‘Moneyed is he, this Tufnell fella?’ So spoke the only other male at the tea party. It was Murchison, who had been Aunt’s jobbing gardener throughout the years of her widowhood, but also shared her taste in literature.
‘Really Kenneth! A little tact please.’
‘Well, Tuffy’s father did rather well, but how much remains I haven’t a clue. Tuffy and his mother live very simply in a rather lovely Victorian terraced house - two storeys below street level, three above, plus attic quarters, the whole works! It was there that Tuffy’s father introduced me to Sherlock Holmes, in the perfect Baker Street house.’
‘I hear all Lady Victoria’s divorce settlement went into opening her art gallery.’ This from the lady who used to work at the library.
‘Well, that I can neither confirm nor deny I’m afraid. I assume she has some money of her own, the Herring fortune was a large one in bygone days.’ At that point Charlie nudged me hard enough to rattle my china tea cup, I took it as a cue to stop rambling and shut up.
The conversation drifted to other local characters with whom I have little interest. Finally, as the Aunt made efforts to draw the encounter to a close, she apologised to the assembled company, saying she would be unable to attend their next get together due to a prior engagement at a local hospital. It appeared her medical advisors had persuaded her to seek a surgical solution to some of her joint problems. But she assured everyone, she would get stuck into the prescribed reading.
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