QUILPS IS ACCUSED

Bad publicity, if there is such a thing

QUILPS TO THE TOP (4)

Once the furore started by the shock news that Mrs Quilps might well be involved in a seedy domestic arrangement with a third party, and all sorts of sleazy possibilities formed in minds everywhere, together with all manner of questions allied to it, had all gradually died down, somehow Quilps looked as calm as a very calm cucumber painted white and wearing a top hat. He seemed unmoved by the possibility that his wonderful and acclaimed by the press as being truly beautiful wife was having shenanigans with a third party, and being paid for it in a way that breached the usual rules of decency.

“What are you going to say to your wife when you get home?” asked the Labour candidate, Eva Curry, possibly mischievously but certainly curiously.

He didn’t know. So his reply was typical of the man he so badly wanted to be.

“I think I’ll offer her cheese on toast,” he said, grinning.

“Welsh Rarebit?” she asked.

“Whatever. Probably French, and offside,” he managed, squeezing nonsense into a handful of syllables, then remembering advice from Head Office, advice that suggested the best way in interviews is answering any question bar the one you’ve been asked, he added, “the grass, they say, is always greener on the other side of any particular hill, and I can promise those who vote for me that I’ll work unstintingly to ensure that they get their share of any chlorophyll going.”

The Interviewer, Cedric Blowchamber and a fine political hack back in the day, frowned. He couldn’t make head nor tail of what the top-hatted buffoon (that’s how he saw Indigo) was saying, and he also recalled an instruction from the chief moron at National Treasure Television, the company that paid his bills, that however the interview turned out, the labour woman must look foolish and her ideas dangerous whilst the tory bloke should seem like a breath of fresh air. After all, this was a news broadcast for National Treasure Television and he knew which side his metaphorical bread was buttered.

“Would you care to elaborate, with special reference to your domestic circumstances?” he asked.

Indigo Quilps decided that he wouldn’t care to do any such thing, and he’d learned a trick or two from the party’s manual for prospective candidates and how to dodge issues.

“I agree with you,” he told the confused interviewer, “last time I observed a field full of happy cows munching on good old fashioned British grass which was considerably greener than any grass across the channel I thought of cheese, and who, I ask, wouldn’t?”

“I didn’t actually make a statement so you can’t agree with it,” Cedric Blowchamber ploughed on.

“But you must know that the average household is zillions of pounds better off under the policies of my government,” continued the conservative candidate who seemed to think he’d become Prime inister, beginning to enjoy the process of confusing the public as per instructions from Number Ten, and, incidentally, not yet elected to any government let alone leading one.

“Even though you support the immoral trade enjoyed by Mrs Quilps?” asked Eva Curry.

“Enjoyed, yes, but immoral, no,” shot back Indigo Quilps, “it’s only immoral if it’s not quite right, and everything my wife does is right, down to dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. It’s why I married her in the first place, that and the baby.”

“Shall we try to leave Mrs Quilps out of this, for legal reasons?” suggested Cedric Blowchamber.

“That’s all right by me,” smiled Indigo, “just let your audience decide whether they’re better off. I mean, anyone with a handful of shares in British Industry must be better off than ever, and that must be quite a lot of people out there!”

“I didn’t mention shares…” complained the Interviewer, “because the vast majority donlt have any...”.

“Ah, but I did,” laughed Indigo, just in time for the programme’s editor to decide there was nothing to be gained by continuing the debate and switching the cameras off.

“That’s it,” sighed Cedric, “I’ll probably never get a political debate again, damn you, you top-hatted loon!”

Eva Curry smiled at Indigo. “That went well,” she said, hitching her skirt up so that he could see the colour of her underwear, “how about a drink in the green room, just you and me, to settle our differences? I know they’ve got a nice red wine on tap. And then you can tell me how your wife gets away with it?”

He might have replied to the invitation because, truth to tell, he was getting to be thirsty, but there was a sudden cacophony from the doorway, and he almost recognised the loudest voice, from his childhood.

“Let me at him!” shrieked that voice, “he’s cost me my job and everything! I want his guts for garters, that’s what I want! Telling the world that he was abused at my home when he was treated a sweet as anything, and I even read him stories!”

He recognised the speaker as a woman somewhat angrily emerged from the audience and planted herself in front of Indigo Quilps. Eva Curry smiled quietly to herself as she saw what was going on. And Indigo knew who the woman was, her face familiar to him now as it had been back in his childhood. It was Mollie Daybright of Brumpton Orphans Sunshine Home where he’d spent his orphaned years.

“Why, Matron,” he grinned, pleased to see her.

“Don’t you go around, patronizing me!” she shouted, “telling the world that we abused you when we were nothing but sweetness and light to you, and you sitting on my knee and reading Mr Dickens with me..!”

“I never…” he began, but he remembered what had happened and how a simple misunderstanding hadbeen blown out of proportion. He’d been abused, yes, but by thye death of his parents in that rotten car crash. He had been quizzed by the police after his silly statement, but that had been too late for the newspapers to be interested.

“Were you abused?” an officer had asked, “how had it happened, what did they do to you, were you frightened?”

“No,” he had replied, “it was all a mistake.”

And Marie had been there, his lovely, beautiful unfaithful Marie.

“Everyone was kind,” she had said, and the officer had turned on her,

“Did they tell you to say that?” he barked, “were you made to cover up all sorts of badness and evil…”

“Of course not,” he had insisted, and Marie had fluttered her eyelashes, which might have meant anything.

But the enquiry had been so thorough that it had got everything wrong and poor Mollie had become what he called in his mind a fall-gal.

Not that it mattered. It was all in the past and that can’t be altered, he knew that.

Now it was the present and Eva Curry was grinning at him.

Somewhere in a complicated electronic van outside someone switched the cameras back on just in case they were missing something important and red lights flickered here and there in the hall.

“You ruined my life!” slashed Mollie, and the tears running down her face were so genuine the only way he could ignore them was to pretend they didn’t matter, like nothing except his crazy top-hat world of make-believe really mattered.

There will have been some television audience still tuned in, and of course there was the selected live audience for the debate, and they all must have watched as he went over to her, the mother he ought to have had, and put one arm round her shoulder and loudly whispered plain as plain in one of her raging ears and close to a television microphone,

“I love you, Mollie, like gold…”

© Peter Rogerson 26.07.22

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