Diana didn’t take the Sketch, but she did take the Daily News and saw Josh’s article, headed, Principles or Politics? What would you choose?
The piece was generally sympathetic, posing the age-old question about heart and head; but the journalist did finish by saying, For most of us there would be no dilemma, and we would take any dangerously sick child to a private doctor if we could afford it and thought it was in the child’s interests. It is unfortunate for him that Tom Knelston has hitched his wagon to Nye Bevan’s star, and is known to be one of the most passionate disciples of the National Health Service.
Poor Tom: that was the end of his political career, certainly for the foreseeable future.
Alice, who had crept out early to buy the papers, before Kit woke up, was sitting in the room surrounded by them, in a state of panicky misery. A third paper, the Sunday Express, had got the story, heaven knew how, and was thundering self-righteously about hypocrisy, clearly delighted to have caught another Labour man out: Ironically, Tom Knelston was once described as the heir to Aneurin Bevan, the paper stated. The headline, ‘What Price Principles, Mr Knelston?, was only the beginning of a long tirade. This was illustrated with a picture of her – goodness knows how they’d got hold of it, she thought, taken years ago, looking very young and pretty in her St Thomas’ uniform, Nightingale cap and all. Alice Knelston, the caption said, trained at one of London’s top teaching hospitals, where many of the girls are ex-debutantes.
Somehow, in spite of all her angry, scornful words, Alice hadn’t expected it to happen; hadn’t thought Tom was important enough for his actions to merit such a lambasting, had seen it as all part of his arrogance. Now, staring at the headlines, she felt a pang of sympathy. Not remorse – to her the situation was still clear-cut, she had been acting for Kit, and had probably saved his life – but the whole business had probably seen off the political success that Tom had worked so hard for.
Josh had been right; Tom, looking cautiously out of the bedroom window at six o’clock, saw a gathering of about half a dozen men and one woman in front of his house. He pulled the curtains more closely together, and leaned against the wall. Now what did he do? It was all very well Josh telling him not to go out but he really must go down to Purbridge, do whatever troubleshooting he could. Besides, it looked cowardly and an admission of guilt.
He felt worried about Mrs Hartley, too, whether she would be nervous of the press: although it was hard to imagine Mrs Hartley being nervous of anyone. And he needed to ask her to have the children for the day if he was going to Purbridge. The Hartleys had no phone and the only way into the house, apart from the front door, was via the side passage to their back door. Charlie was now crying for a bottle. He would have to go down and the kitchen was in the front of the house; he could easily be seen.
Sure enough, one of the crowd saw him and there was a surge down the front path, and a steady press on the bell. Upstairs, Lucy woke up and started crying, and Charlie screamed more loudly still. Angry suddenly, Tom picked him up and opened the door. Several flashbulbs went off.
‘Mr Knelston, how’s your little boy this morning?’ ‘Mr Knelston, can I have a word?’ ‘Any idea what your constituents will have to say about this, Mr Knelston?’
‘Would you all just go away, PLEASE!’ shouted Tom, shaking with rage and, he had to admit, fear as well. ‘You’ve woken and frightened both my children. I would appreciate some peace and quiet while I settle them, and I have nothing to say to you, whatsoever.’
He slammed the front door shut, carried Charlie and his bottle upstairs to Lucy’s room, and, having comforted her as best he could, wondered what on earth he was going to do. It was exactly like being under siege; he was trapped, well and truly.
He looked down into the back garden; the fence dividing it from the Hartleys was only waist-high. He could shin over that. They must be awake by now, poor things: on a Sunday morning, too, when Mr Hartley, who worked long shifts at the local canning factory, had his only lie-in of the week.
The bell-ringing had recommenced; and going to the top of the stairs, he saw a note being pushed through the letterbox. He went down, picked it off the mat; it was scrawled on a page of a reporters’ notebook.
Dear Mr Knelston, it said. Sorry about this. Given that you’re going to have to talk to one of us, can I introduce myself? Fiona Jenkins, Dispatch, and may I suggest you talk to me exclusively? In return, the newspaper will make a generous donation to your favourite charity, and I’ll try to persuade the others to go away.
Tom, thinking things could hardly be worse, went down to open the door. More flashbulbs. God, it was relentless.
Fiona Jenkins – or so he presumed – was standing at the front nearest the door; she smiled at him, a rather irritating, self-satisfied smile.
‘Come in. Quickly,’ said Tom. He slammed the door shut again behind her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and her voice was surprisingly posh. She was quite attractive altogether, he noticed now, mid-thirties, nice figure, dark red hair, good legs, wearing a fairly short skirt and tight sweater. It was obviously a uniform carefully designed for getting into people’s homes; men’s homes, anyway.
‘Coffee?’ said Tom. He wouldn’t have offered it, but he was desperate for one himself.
‘Yes, thanks. Black, please, plenty of sugar.’
‘OK,’ said Tom shortly, ‘let’s get this over. What sort of money are we talking about for charity, by the way?’
‘Fifty pounds,’ said Fiona Jenkins coolly.
Tom had expected something far less. But, ‘Make it sixty,’ he said. ‘Pay it to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and I’ll answer your questions. Most of them, anyway.’
‘Done,’ she said, opening her notebook. ‘First of all, how is your little boy?’
‘Better. Thank you. At least, he was last night, I haven’t had a chance to ring this morning.’
‘And your wife’s with him? Staying at the hospital.’
‘Yes,’ said Tom, ignoring the implied criticism. ‘Now, just let me explain how he happens to be in a private hospital and then you can go.’
‘Fine. Only I think your constituents will most want to know why you said it was nothing to do with them. I’d have thought everything an MP does was his constituents’ business. I don’t suppose many of them could afford a private hospital.’
‘Listen,’ said Tom, ‘that was taken out of context. I was trying to explain to the reporter how it had happened. Kit was desperately ill. The GP was out on his rounds. He’d seen Kit before and diagnosed a grumbling appendix. My wife is a nurse and she wasn’t satisfied. His temperature was almost a hundred and two and he was in dreadful pain, screaming and writhing about on the floor. She spoke to a family friend, a paediatric surgeon, who agreed to see him at once, and then, having seen him he diagnosed a problem with the gut, very rare, called intussusception. He said immediate surgery was essential or Kit could die, and he could operate that afternoon. What would you have done?’
‘What you did, obviously,’ said Fiona Jenkins.
‘Exactly. My remark about the constituents was taken completely out of context. I was trying to make the point that this was a private, family matter. Although I admit it does sounds harsh. Lucy, not now, darling –’
The little girl was enthusiastically trying to show the reporter her treasured doll.
‘She’s all right. I like that doll’s dress, Lucy, very pretty. Now, look, let me make us another coffee, I’ve just a couple more questions and then I’ll be away.’
She sent the other reporters packing, got a message to the Hartleys, helped get Lucy dressed, and then left, having given Tom her card, with her direct line on it, so he could chase up the sixty pounds if necessary.
In another life, Tom thought, he would have married her.
Mr and Mrs Hartley had rather enjoyed the drama of the morning, particularly Fiona Jenkins’s visit.
‘Pretty girl,’ Mr Hartley said, ‘and well mannered too, you wouldn’t think that was her job.’
‘Well, and nor would we have thought Mr Knelston was a Labour politician,’ said Mrs Hartley. ‘Both so nicely spoken, specially Alice. I’d have put them down as Conservatives, both of them. Just goes to show.’
Mr Hartley agreed that it did, and drew her attention to the article in the Dispatch, delivered first thing by a now overexcited paper boy, telling anyone who cared to listen that the Hartleys had a great crowd of reporters on their doorstep.
Mr and Mrs Hartley read the article, which, as lifelong Tories themselves, they usually took as gospel.
‘Well, I think that’s most unpleasant of the paper, calling him a hypocrite,’ said Mrs Hartley. ‘I’d like to give them a piece of my mind. It seems to me the reporters didn’t bother to check their facts.’
Mr Hartley said they never did, far as he could make out, otherwise how come all the papers always had different versions of the same stories.
‘Yes, but if they had, they’d have known Kit was dangerously ill, poor little scrap. I blame that Dr Redmond, not knowing what he was doing. Remember when he said my friend Iris had bronchitis and it turned out to be pneumonia, and she ended up in hospital for weeks?’
Mr Hartley said he did.
‘Yes, well, Alice being a nurse clearly knows better than him. And seeing she knew this Mr Welles, who’s a specialist in kiddies’ illnesses, of course she’d take a child to him – wouldn’t you, if he was as ill as Kit – not mess about with any more GPs or even casualty, all that waiting, over two hours sometimes these days. I mean, little Kit could have died, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway, I’m going to pop next door, get Charlie and the little girl too, so poor Mr Knelston can do whatever he needs to do to put this rubbish straight. Fancy us living next door to a famous politician.’
Mr Hartley said Tom wasn’t a politician, not yet, and he wasn’t really famous either, but he always had a smile and a ‘Good evening’, which was good enough for him.
Colin Davidson, being Tom’s political agent, was in despair; he sat at the breakfast table in Purbridge, staring at the papers, his jaw slack with disbelief. How in the name of heaven could Tom have been so stupid, so blind? Of all the idiotic things that he might have done, why choose the very one that went against all that he stood for? Well, it was the end of any hope of success for Tom, and the end of him, too, as an agent. Who would want such incompetence working for the party?
He knew he must go down to the office, try to put some positive interpretation on the whole miserable business; but it was with very low expectations that he drove there.
The last thing he expected to find when he got to the Labour Party office, actually sitting at his desk, was Tom Knelston.
‘I’ve come to face the music,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’
The long-suffering Christine Herbert feared that Donald might actually have his much-anticipated heart attack as he worked his way through the papers like some huge, clumsy beast, roaring with rage as he came upon each new headline, burying his head in his hands at some particularly damning detail, hurling each publication onto the floor as he finished reading it, dialling and redialling Tom’s number, and cursing whatever malevolent fate had caused it to become unobtainable. Finally, through them all, he left the breakfast table and reappeared, a large glass of whisky in his hand.
‘And don’t tell me I shouldn’t be drinking it at this time of day,’ he said, glaring at her. ‘Nothing else is going to get me through this. Stupid fucking young idiot. Now, where are my glasses?’
Christine said she had no idea; in fact, Donald had pushed them up onto the top of his head. It was a small but sweet piece of revenge, watching him continue to hunt for them.
Ned, who had visited the hospital early and talked to Alice, bought the papers on the way home and read them with great sadness. Josh’s article, by far the most sympathetic, would only resonate with the Daily News readers, few of whom would be Tom’s putative constituents. They would most likely be shaking their heads over the Sketch and wondering if they should vote Liberal by way of protest; and any waverers, who might have come down on the Labour side of the scales, would be stabbing at the paper with their forefingers and saying there you are, politicians were all the same, liars and hypocrites who, when push came to shove, were only interested in themselves and what they could get out of any situation. None of it was very good publicity for the hospital either, presenting it somehow as a symbol of class injustice. It was sad, too, to see the NHS presented as a kind of very poor relation to which no one would go if they had a choice.
Jillie only saw the Daily News and felt very sad and fearful for Alice, for Tom, and for their joint future, wondering if she should have directed Alice to take Kit to casualty, rather than to Ned. But no, he had been a very sick little boy, suffering from something extremely rare which only a paediatric specialist would recognise, and such beings were not always available at short notice in a large general hospital.
She was sure, however, that Alice was going through all sorts of tortuous hoops. She would ring her at the hospital, go and see her if she liked. She had nothing else to do, Patrick being away for the weekend, visiting his parents. But first she had some important news for Ned.
‘So how are we going to handle this?’ said Tom.
‘What do you mean?’
In spite of hearing Tom’s version of the story, Colin was still hostile. ‘I can see there wasn’t a lot you could do,’ he said. ‘But you could have at least given out a proper statement, about how ill Kit was, and how the surgeon was a personal friend, taken the edge off it a bit.’
‘Colin,’ said Tom patiently. ‘You haven’t even got any children, let alone a sick one, but if one of them was in real danger of dying I doubt you’d have made what you said to the press top priority. We were off our heads with worry, my only concern was Kit and whether he’d pull through. What we’ve got to do now is get across to the voters how it was. How can we do that? I don’t mind addressing a few meetings, knocking on some doors.’
Colin smiled rather feebly. ‘We haven’t got any meetings until this afternoon, but we can go knocking on doors. You might get a few rotten eggs thrown at you, but it’ll be a good way of testing the water. You had any breakfast? Because you’re going to need it.’
The door knocking was as tedious and unproductive as usual, more people irritated at having their Sunday dinner disturbed than concerned about which sort of hospital their candidate had taken his small son to. Tom got a bit of a rough reception, mostly from men who’d spent an hour or two downing pints at the pub, telling him they’d read about him in the papers and thought he was a bloody hypocrite, although more often than not their wives would then appear and tell them off for swearing before assuring Tom that any parent would have done the same thing if they’d had the opportunity. The evening meeting, however, threatened to be more difficult, and Tom, most unusually, had a pint with a whisky chaser before going onto the platform.
His audience were mostly hostile; many of them were carrying one or more of the papers, and spoiling for a fight. There were also a couple of reporters.
Tom kept his speech short, then, his heart thumping, asked if there were any questions. A pugnacious-looking man, wearing a check shirt and denims slung under his large belly, stood up, waved the Dispatch at Tom, and said, ‘So what’s wrong with the Health Service then?’
‘Nothing,’ said Tom staunchly. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘So why not take your son there then, rather than some poncey place in the West End?’
‘My son was dangerously ill, with something very rare that the GP hadn’t recognised. It was literally a matter of life and death by Friday. The doctor at St Mary’s was a family friend, he said he could see Kit immediately and having seen him, was able to operate that afternoon.’
‘That’s all well and good,’ said the man, ‘but suppose you hadn’t had this convenient family friend? Then what?’
‘Then I’d have had to take Kit to casualty where the long wait might have been just too long. Look, I admit it doesn’t sound very fair but what would you have done? Can you honestly tell me you’d have risked your child’s life?’
‘Point is,’ said another man, standing up, ‘you happened to have the contacts and the means to save the kid. I’m happy for you, and I’m glad the little feller’s pulled through, but I wonder if you’re the sort of person to represent working people?’
There was a murmur of ‘hear hear’, growing louder,
‘I believe I am,’ said Tom, his voice steady. ‘If I am elected, I can fight for the waiting times to come down, for more highly trained doctors in every local hospital. I can’t do anything if I’m not elected. I believe passionately in the National Health Service, have done from the very beginning. I want it to work for everyone. But it’s not perfect – it’s short of funds. I want to see the money allotted to it doubled, and I shall fight for that if I get in, I promise you.’
‘I’d probably have done the same as you,’ said a rather earnest, well-spoken woman, standing up. ‘Although I’d have felt very guilty.’
‘I did,’ said Tom. ‘Believe me.’
‘I do believe you,’ said the woman. ‘But what I didn’t like was you saying that it was nothing to do with us. If you’re our MP, then it is to do with us; you seem to regard your responsibilities to us rather lightly.’
‘Which I most certainly don’t,’ said Tom. ‘I was horrified when I read that. It was a remark taken out of context –’
‘Oh, spare me,’ said the plaid-shirted man. ‘That old chestnut.’ The earnest woman ignored him.
‘Even out of context, it shows a certain lack of concern for us. We need one hundred per cent support here. Life isn’t easy, the schools are in need of investment, the housing lists are long …’
‘I’d like to say something about schools and Mr Knelston’s concern for them.’ The voice came from the very back of the hall. ‘Mr Knelston has been wonderfully supportive in that way. He’s been to two prize-givings at my boy’s school alone, and he’s a governor at the grammar school, gives up a lot of his time. I’d say his commitment overall is impressive.’
And so it went on until they’d finished. The room emptied slowly; plaid shirt was one of the first to go, muttering under his breath. One of the reporters had left, but the other came and asked Tom if he would have done anything differently, faced with the same dilemma again.
‘Yes, I would,’ Tom said. ‘With considerable misgivings, which I experienced anyway. But my son’s life was at stake. I ask you, as I’ve asked so many people, what would you have done?’
The reporter said nothing.
They walked back to Labour HQ. ‘That was very well done,’ said Colin. ‘Thank you. Sorry it was so tough.’
‘Do you know,’ said Tom, ‘I rather enjoyed it.’