QUILPS AND A COSY CHAT

The value of money.

QUILPS TO THE TOP (5)

The green room wasn’t green at all. It was little more than a cubby hole with three or four chairs squeezed in, looking as if they might have been rescued from the corporation tip after dark. In fact, the only reference to green was a post-it note stuck crookedly on the door that read “Grene Room”

“Cosy” grinned Eva Curry, settling down in what looked to be the most comfortable of the chairs.

“Where’s the plonk?” asked Indigo Quilps because, in all honesty it wasn’t a chance to swap ideas with this woman, nor the colour of her underwear that she had flashed at him at the end of the meeting, that motivated him, but the suggestion there might be some red wine on tap that had drawn his attention. He was feeling thirsty and so far the meeting, as he saw it, hadn’t gone his way at all. He had been accused of lying about abuse! That was a cardinal sin, if ever there was one, and the television people had been there making sure the whole world knew about it.

Newspapers were one thing, but a major television company like the nation’s beloved National Treasure Network! That was something else, and all the more dangerous because of it.

“Here,” almost mewed Eva Curry, and she handed him a glass with its bottom almost moistened by what might have been a reddish wine. “There’s a box over there,” she added, pointing.

“No barman then,” grunted Indigo, and he tipped a generous amount of wine from the box into his glass.

“Tell me,” enquired Eva, “why do you wear that daft top hat all the time?”

He’d been asked the question before, and knew the answer. In fact, he knew a hand full when multiple answers were called for, so he raised the hat in question and lowered it back onto his head, revealing as he did so tht he had a mass of hair swirling uncontrollably under it.

“It’s being part of history,” he told her, “my ancestors wore hats like this, and it did them no harm.”

“Except that they’re all dead,” she quipped.

“What?” he jerked out, surprised by her easy riposte.

“Ancestors. Those who went before you. Which makes them dead,” she replied easily.

“I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of it like that. But yes. The good old days when men were men…” he mumbled.

“And women?” she asked.

“Were women, I suppose. Not much is said about women from back then. It was men who ruled the world.”

He didn’t know it, but he had started treading on very dangeroius ground. Besides being an up and coming leftie in the other party Eva Curry was a feminist with at least two published books to her name. But he didn’t know that. He was still reading Charles Dickens when he had time to read at all and socialist feminism didn’t appeal to him to the extent that he’d never heard of it.

“And that was all right?” she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and drained his glass. The wine might have been from a box but as far as he was concerned it did everything he wanted it to bar taste good.

“I mean, aren’t women half the human race?” she asked.

“So they say,” he murmured with what he hoped was a disarming smile big enough to change the subject for him.

“From what I’ve read they either wore top hats back then, just like that one on your head right now, or died in squalor,” she said.

“All those that mattered knew a decent hat when they saw it,” he told her.

“And women? Did they like big hats?” she asked.

“Not toppers. Never on a woman. They’ve got the wrong shape head,” he grinned, shaking his own head and almost dislodging his hat.

“Back then,” she said, pointedly, “wasn’t it considered bad manners to wear a hat in the presence of a lady?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he conceded, “but not all women are ladies!”

“What do you mean?”

“There are washer women. They’re not ladies. And w****s. They’re not ladies either. In fact, every b***h who isn’t suitably refined is a woman rather than a lady. You must know that!”

“And you’re a misogynist!”

For all of his albeit limited experience of life Indigo had no idea what a misogynist might be, so he shrugged his shoulders and “maybe,” he admitted.

“That women out there, what was her name, Mollie something or other,” she indicated the main hall, “she said you ruined her life!”

“It wasn’t me. It was the papers who got the wrong end of the stick, and printed it.”

“And I heard her. You told her you loved her, and made her cry!”

“I suppose I had to say something, and the truth is she was like a mother to me. She read books to me, some I suppose when I was too young to understand what they were all about.

“Mothers do that.”

“Mine was dead.”

“I’m sorry. It can’t have been nice.” Eva looked genuinely sympathetic.

“It was … good,” he told her, “I learned all about workhouses and Oliver Twist, and wanting more on a plate from Miss Daybright. That’s Mollie’s name.

“And did you want more?

He shook his head. “No,” he almost whispered, remembering the way he’d shaken his head when the other boys wanted to raid the pantry at night.

“And is your wife on the game?”

He didn’t want to work that one out. “You said she was,” he said stubbornly, “and if she is best of luck to her! She’ll be earning more than me, then, and of all the things on Earth the most important is money. Lots of money. I’d like millions in the bank, to fall back on.”

“Isn’t that greedy?”

He looked at her, surprised. “If everyone had millions in the bank the world would be a happier place,” he said.

“But who’d earn it?”

“What a daft question! We all would, silly woman, hard work and millions waiting to be spent on luxuries would see to that.”

Eva laughed a pretty little laugh. “But it’s not the people who work hard who earn the money,” she told him, “it’s the masses on a minimum wage who actually do the work. They work hard and they struggle while you posh boys take it and stash it into overseas banks!”

He sneered, probably because her laugh had made him wonder uncomfortably if she was mocking him.

“I work hard,” he said, “doing nothing. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

She giggled again. “You’re the best advertisement for corruption I’ve met in my life so far,” she told him, “a w***e for a wife, but you don’t have to work. Why do you want to win this election?”

“Because I can,” he told her quietly, “because I jolly well can.”

© Peter Rogerson 27.07.22

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