Реджинальд Хилл - Matlock's System

She paused a second, but when he still didn’t speak, she went on.

“Listen, Matt, I don’t care what you do. Take Browning’s offer. Go for Op. Or just sit it out. But whether you live one year or forty, make a place in it for me, Matt. I’m not saying you owe me it. I’m not an old woman debt-collecting. I don’t need to, Matt, do I?”

She flung the sheet back and knelt upright so he could see her mature but beautifully firm nakedness.

“But I believe that there’s a place for me with you, Matt. I won’t try to persuade you what to do, but don’t shut me out. I’m in. I’ve been in for twenty years. I won’t go now.”

“I don’t ask you to, Lizzie.”

Matlock felt a happy calm spread through his being. He had made up his mind. He got out of bed, caressing her long flank as he did so. Then he moved purposefully and unselfconsciously across the room and opened a panel on the wall. Reaching in he pressed a button and looked closely at a couple of dials. This little toy was known as his bugswatter. Any electronic eavesdropping device within a range of fifteen yards was now jammed. He knew his flat was well bugged. Indeed he knew the location of several of the mini-mikes. But how many more there were he could never be sure, so it was pointless digging them out. Instead he jammed them.

He paused in front of the long mirror on his way back to the bed, drew his stomach in and puffed his chest out.

“I’m really not so very old, you know,” he said.

Lizzie watched him with delight and was obviously eager to start all over again when he got back to bed, but he held her at arm’s length.

“Later,” he said. “Listen to what I want to tell you.”

Then coolly, dispassionately, he proceeded to recount the events of the previous thirty-six hours.

She listened as a good secretary should, attentively, without interruption. Her silence stretched into his own when he was finished.

Finally she asked, “What made you make up your mind about me, Matt?”

He grinned widely and made a gesture which encompassed her breasts and belly.

“This, of course.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously I never doubted you for a moment. Oh, I know I didn’t fall over you when I got back yesterday, but do you blame me?”

“Yes.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her face.

“Lizzie, what I believe in is based on individual faith and trust and hope. If I lost that in you, then I lose my worth, my purpose. I’d have taken Browning’s offer if I had believed the Abbot.”

“I still don’t understand why he told you those lies.”

“Simple. According to his logic, it negated the power of Browning’s threat against you and Ernst through the forged documents. He didn’t realize what dangerous ground he was treading on.”

“What happens next, Matt?”

In Matlock’s mind things were beginning to sort themselves out with crystal clarity. He recognized that the doubts and selfsearching of the past day had been much graver than he had told Lizzie. He knew that deep down inside him, in the caverns of his mind, was an area where his surface certainties were shifting, shadowy. But he knew himself well enough to recognize how unfitted he was to deal with any change of personal loyalties. He had done it once. Old friends had felt themselves betrayed and turned from him with disgust which he himself had felt like treachery. His wife had moved out of their bedroom, then out of their house. A few months later a burst spleen had moved her out of his life. (It had been an irony of fate that an anti-Matlock protest strike by one of the big Unirad-controlled Unions had cut off the power supply to her flat and prevented her from summoning help.) Her father who outlived her by five years, when he was replaced by Browning, always said she died of a broken heart. Adding, “As I shall too.”

Matlock knew he could not take this again. Even if my beliefs change, I cannot change my friends, those I love.

“First,” he said, “call Ernst and Colin.”

Lizzie looked surprised.

“Matt, are you sure?”

He raised her gently from the bed and pushed her towards the door.

“As sure as I am of you, Lizzie. They do not give me the same pleasure, but I love them too.”

He dressed swiftly while Lizzie was on the ’phone and joined her in the living-room as she hung up.

“My, are we finished then?” she said. He smacked her behind vigorously.

“Get dressed. There’s work to do. First, breakfast.”

Thirty minutes later as he sipped a mugful of black coffee, Ernst arrived. Matlock waved aside his questions till Colin had appeared also. Then as swiftly and accurately as he had talked to Lizzie, he revealed the course of recent events to them. When he had finished he looked from one to the other.

“How surprised are you? Did either of you have any knowledge, suspicion even of the situation? I have to ask. There’ve been too many false assumptions, concealments, deceptions already.”

“What do you mean?” asked Ernst.

“Not a whisper of my own plots and schemes in the North has reached me in any of our lecture trips. But our contacts must have known. They must have been supremely well drilled not to show any awareness of what was going on.”

Colin shook his head. “Surely, the thing is, Matt, that even if they had done, you wouldn’t have recognized it as such.”

“My God!” Ernst again. “Matt, Percy. Percy said something when he was dying, something like ‘till the Day’. Then he smiled. It seemed a happy thought somehow.”

Matlock remembered his friend’s peaceful face on that dingy stage. The Day. Budget Day.

“But Percy would have spoken. Must have spoken to me about something like this. He was the closest of all our Northern Contacts.”

“And therefore likeliest to obey absolutely any injunction to silence he thought came from you,” said Ernst.

“Anyway, that’s immaterial now,” replied Lizzie. “The thing is, where do we go from here?”

“Look,” broke in Ernst, “what I don’t understand is the Scottish situation. I don’t see why they should need you, Matt, if they’re in as close contact with the Organization as McDonwald claims.”

“They are in contact, Ernst. Get that straight. The Abbot told me. He also told me a little more in what he termed our private chat. I haven’t mentioned this before because it was immaterial to the main drift of events, but central perhaps to our choice of action. With Browning controlling the papers, it’s as difficult to get a true picture of the state of affairs in Scotland as it is anywhere else. McDonwald tries to give the impression of a happy, stable, democratic, agricultural community. Arcadia, so to speak.”

“Couldn’t you have got more out of him?” asked Ernst.

Matlock grimly rubbed his ribs and winced. He hadn’t noticed the pain when with Lizzie but now it came back.

“No. He had a rather touching sensitivity about his country. The other side of the coin was shown me by the Abbot and it’s rather more in line with the kind of anti-Scottish propaganda Browning’s been pumping at us for years. Though it has slackened off, of late.”

“A deal?” asked Lizzie thoughtfully.

“Who knows? Anyway, Scotland according to the Revised Version is indeed almost a self-supporting agricultural economy. But it’s full of cracks. On a local level, the people have reverted to the old clan system with its tight-knit code of loyalties. On a national level, the old urban rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh has become a desperate political struggle between opposing clan-based factions for national domination, with a third smaller but very militant group up in Inverness waiting for its chance.”