Tully Toffener sits on the Government Front Bench of the House of Commons, but only when his superiors don’t think it prudent to sit there themselves, when they don’t want to have to answer difficult questions. Then he acts as the Department’s spokesman. He is the one who takes the blame, carries the can. He is the one who gets hated. Tully it is who recommends, if only by proxy, that little old ladies should pay more for their heating, that the lame should be obliged to limp to the dole office, that the poor should drink the rain from heaven, not water from the taps. Yet at the same time Tully must profess to love the old, the lame, the poor. Tully is politically ambitious: he would not want his hypocrisies made public: he would not want his desire to euthanase all unfortunates made known. I might blackmail him.
Tully is quite attractive. His fleshy face has a well-fed glow; his eyes are bright and intelligent; he knows he is powerful, and so do the girls he meets at parties, on tap for his benefit and entertainment. I think he mostly goes home to his wife Sara, whom he loves, though perhaps not always. They have no children.
Once I took the nastiness of people like Tully for granted. Part of me still does. Part of me might even have agreed, just a little, with his views; that the rich deserve to be rich and happy, and that the poor deserve to be miserable. But I am changing. I am more censorious of the Tullys of this world than I used to be. I have joined the ranks of the persecuted. I have grown kinder in one way, crueller in another. It’s not so much, as Lady Rice says, that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned: it is that a woman scorned is thrust into hell and must work her way up out of it, and her antennae as to what is good and what is bad, and where hypocrisy lies, and who most deserves her sympathy, become sensitive and acute. And she might as well turn that to her advantage, says Lady Rice.
The guardians of our society have lost their way, says Angelica. The law refuses to condemn, our politicians need to be liked.
‘Leaders of the people by their counsel
Wise and eloquent in their instruction –’
Oh yes, oh yes. Tully Toffener, leader of the people. Brian Moss, eloquent in his instruction. Villains! Bastards! cries Angelica.
I am led, I am instructed, and it does me no good at all, says Lady Rice. Edwin loves Anthea; he no longer loves his wife. And when she remembers it she is all to pieces and different personae again. Anthea has stolen my husband from me, and she is so much lesser a person than I am. How can he possibly prefer her to me? My head hurts as the alter egos kick and writhe within it.