Ambition (10 page)

‘Mother, if you mean in your typically bourgeois way am I engaged in orgiastic delights with smooth-skinned China boys, sweat-oiled Negroes and hirsute Greeks, the answer is –
only in the imagination. Now shut the door on your way out, there’s a duck.’

One evening his father knocked on the door.

‘Entre.’

His father entered, looking serious. ‘Father, this is a rare treat! Why, if I’d known you were coming I’d have laid on some very tall blond Nazis for you to kill. Pray,
take a pew.’ Rupert gestured at a pile of silken cushions beneath a huge sepia poster of Rudolf Valentino.

‘I’ll stand, if you don’t mind. Son, I think it’s time we had a jaw. I know that you think I’m an old fuddy-duddy – I am, and proud of it. But I’ve
had a lifetime in the army, and I’ve seen all sorts of men. You don’t shock me. I’ve seen queers that would make your hair curl—’

‘Please,’ murmured Rupert.

‘I know that you hate your mother and me but, you may laugh, we’ve only ever wanted the best for you. I’ve feared the worst about you for a while now. But your
mother’s a woman—’

‘Lucky bitch,’ the boy whispered under his breath, examining his fingernails. His nails, bare of varnish, looked positively, obscenely
naked.

‘—and you’re breaking her heart. Mine went years ago. All I want to say is, try to understand. Your mother and I grew up in a different world. We didn’t have the
advantages youth have today, but it was a simple life, and a happy one. I sometimes feel sorry for young people nowadays, there are so many temptations—’

‘Father, have you ever considered abandoning the army in order to set up a small petit-point sampler retail outlet? You’ve just managed to pack more cliches and homilies into
that speech than an entire week’s output of
The Archers.’

‘Listen, son. What I’m trying to say is, you’re like an alien to us. We don’t seem to be able to speak the same language. But maybe, just perhaps – well,
together we can work this thing out. You’re our son, queer or not, and we love you.’ The major stood there, looking at his Hush Puppies.

Rupert flung himself backwards on to his satin quilt, hugged his knees and burst into peals of laughter. ‘Cue the violins, bring out the onions – father and son embrace, mother
weeps with happiness, celestial choirs sing and Douglas Sirk yells “PRINT!” – oh, Father, you’re positively
camp!’

The snooping of his parents, the sniggering at school – Rupert had adopted what he called the Law of Queens: ‘Never complain, never explain’ – and the desire for
‘something grand and glamorous’ all conspired to put Rupert on the last train to London one Monday night. Having forged his father’s signature on a cheque and withdrawn five
hundred pounds from the bank, his plan was to check into a West End hotel and ‘pursue a stage career’. A gay London friend had promised to introduce him to the iconoclastic ballet
dancer Sebastiane Boxer, who was widely believed to be more than a little interested in ‘Young men with Talent’.

He spent his first week in London drunk on pink champagne. In the evenings, when his dreams of glory were not good enough company, he wandered along to Piccadilly to get ‘a tasty
takeaway’. On the eighth day one of them stole his cash and he was forced to do a runner from the hotel, leaving his precious clothes behind to avoid detection. He went to a bar called
Bette’s to drown his sorrows at someone else’s expense account and ended up in a transvestite squat in Spitalfields.

After another two weeks, Sebastiane Boxer pronounced himself ready to see the boy. They met at his huge studio at St Katharine’s Wharf, Boxer all charm as he promised the boy an
audition. That night they slept together, though Rupert reflected that sleep was the last thing on Boxer’s mind. He felt stiff in all the wrong places as he limbered up the morning after,
watched silently and sullenly by the rest of the troupe.

‘OK, Rupert, let’s see if you’re as good vertically as you are horizontally,’ Boxer called from the stalls.

Rupert gave the cassette boy the nod, and the strains of
Sheherazade
filled the stage. But not for long. He was mid-jeté when there was a frantic signal from the stalls and
the music was clicked off. Rupert fell to earth with a bump. He felt like Icarus.

‘My, you dance just like Isadora Duncan!’ said Boxer, striding on to the stage. ‘Right after she broke her neck, that is.’ He looked at the boy and shook his head
kindly. ‘You’re a pretty child, Rupert, but you have about as much talent as my charlady. I suggest you go home and continue with your two times table.’

When he got back to the squat, the place was wrecked, the occupants evicted and the sad remains of his finery dumped in the street. Weeping, he cadged a coin from a passer-by and called his
mother. She told him tearfully that his father had gone to the police over the forged cheque. Hanging up, he realized there was no going home.

Wandering through the rainy West End streets, he thought of death and, as he had done so many times in the past, pictured his funeral. Whereas in the past he had relished the idea –
oh! The weeping parents and stunned schoolmates and extravagant sorrow of creative companions, not to mention the big black mammy singing heart-wrenching spirituals just like in
Imitation Of
Life –
now it depressed him. Because now there was no one to weep for him. He had nothing but a badge saying ‘THE FLEET’S IN’ in his pocket when he entered Bette’s
that night. Not so long ago he’d been walking these streets full of hope and pink champagne with money in his pocket and a song in his heart – ‘I Am What I Am’ from
La
Cage Aux Folles,
to be precise – on the lookout for a tasty takeaway boy. Now, as he walked into the bar, he realized that he would have to become one of these boys. Not forever, just
until his career got off the ground and ascended the heavens, up where he belonged.

Joe Moorsom was something of a loner. His strict adherence to his socialist principles excluded him from the perks and privileges that others in his party indulged in
without a care, such as pairing with Tory MPs to avoid attending votes, membership of all-party social clubs and the cheap and excellent alcohol provided the copious Commons bars.

His solitary nature extended even to his relationship with his wife and children. On weekends he returned to his northern constituency and his family, but invariably these days it ended in
tears. She wanted more of his time, more of his attention.

‘We hardly know you any more. You don’t seem interested in the kids and you certainly aren’t interested in me. What’s happening to us, Joe? We seem like strangers to
each other. I can’t go on like this much longer.’ These exchanges always fizzled out with a vague mutual agreement to talk about it ‘next time’.

Like all solitary people Joe Moorsom had a secret. Publicly, there was the success story: the coalminer’s son who became the youngest-ever official of the National Union of Miners; the
education at Ruskin College, Oxford; the pretty daughter of the NUM; baron he married; the two highly photogenic children. He was only twenty-six when he won his seat in Parliament.

Now thirty-five, he was respected by those who didn’t agree with him and loved by those who did for his blunt talk, his quick wit and his refusal to compromise his ideals. Much was
made of his council flat in a hard-to-let highrise in the Elephant and Castle, a far cry from the regulation Labour grandee
pied à terre
in Pimlico. But in recent months his
popularity had grown with the rise of public concern over child abuse; he was the chairman of the Child Protection Group and as the organization achieved a higher profile people stopped thinking of
Joe Moorsom as just a plain-speaking breath of fresh air on
Any Questions?
More and more, it seemed very likely that he might be given a post in the next Labour government.

Privately, he considered his life an unqualified failure. All his life he had been haunted by the fact that, left to his own devices, he was profoundly homosexual.

Much as he loved the mining village he came from and despite the scores of speeches he had made on the inhumanity of smashing whole communities with pit closures, he knew that the kind,
narrow-minded mining families, his own included, could never have accepted him as a practising homosexual in a month of May Days. It was only at Ruskin college that he dared be himself.

He was a Brasenose boy up from Harrow: privileged, right-wing and frivolous, everything Moorsom loathed. But the physical attraction made mincemeat of his ethics. After six idyllic months,
though, the Brasenose boy transferred his lavish affections to the Old Etonian son of a West African chieftain.

At the age of twenty-one, at a TUC conference in Blackpool, he met Jill. She was working class, a socialist and very serious; everything Moorsom loved.

And every single time they made love, he had to do it from behind so that he could successfully convince himself that she was the Boy.

The night was wet and cold and the bar seemed warmer and more welcoming than usual. Recently Moorsom had taken to stopping in at Bette’s most evenings just to nurse a
beer and watch the boys. He never felt the need to approach any of them; just being there was enough.

As
his reputation grew, pictures and pieces about Jill and the children were beginning to appear in more papers and magazines every month. He was camera-shy, at his best live at rallies, his
second best on radio. But Jill had the homely glamour of the TV commercial’s ideal wife, and the children were going from cuteness to beauty with no sign of an awkward adolescence. Not since
the early days of the Kinnocks had there been such an attractive political family.

Of course he was pleased with the way things were going. But the attention his family was getting, and the good free publicity that resulted from it, made him feel even more of a hypocrite.
What would these bedazzled journalists say if they knew that the dashing Joe Moorsom hadn’t slept with his lovely wife more than ten times in the last two years?

He sighed into his beer and, looking up, saw the boy. He was sitting on a barstool wearing jeans and a leather jacket, his fine brown hair curling in a silky pageboy around his hollowed
cheeks and his long fringe tickling his eyelids. He kept blowing it to keep it out of his eyes. Every time he did so, his raspberry-pink lips puckered and pouted alarmingly. He knew this, which is
why he did not take the more convenient course of cutting an inch off his fringe. He was not pouting now, though, as he searched through his pockets.

‘I know it’s here somewhere,’ he insisted to the barman, who was built like an Irish stevedore and dressed like an Italian starlet. The barman rested his chin on his hands
and smiled sleepily. ‘Can’t you touch one of these gents for it? Losing our knack, are we?’

‘It’s just cheap plonk, for God’s sake! You’d think it was Krug the way you’re carrying on!’

The boy, as Moorsom had known he would, had the loud, proud, spoiled voice of a Southern Counties only son. He was looking around the bar now, and his eyes alighted on Joe’s. He
smiled.

Joe looked away.

The boy slipped off his stool and came over. ‘I thought I’d better say
aloha’ –
he smiled – ‘because you look like the strong and silent type.
Look, I’m dreadfully sorry to bother you but I stupidly came out without my credit cards and that terrible old cow behind the bar won’t let me have it on tick. Could I borrow the money
from you? Cross my heart you’ll get it back.’ He could have been the Brasenose boy’s younger brother.

‘What are you drinking?’ Moorsom muttered.

‘Pink champagne, please,’ said the boy quickly. He called across the room, ‘A bottle of your best pink, my good man,’ and accompanied the request with a triumphant
middle finger sticking up out of his right fist.

‘I can’t stay,’ Moorsom blurted. He took out two ten pound notes and put them on the table. ‘Enjoy your drink.’

‘Are you for real?’ Rupert’s eyes widened. What a find – a shy one. He seemed a little common and Northern, but he thought nothing of giving twenty quid to a complete
stranger, so he must be a live one. Probably one of those screamingly repressed self-made Northern businessmen with a wife and two veg. A sugar daddy! – how incredibly camp.
And
fortuitous. ‘Look, don’t go for a minute.’ He put his hand on Moorsom’s arm and smiled up at him the way he had seen Lana Turner do so many times on rainy BBC2 Hollywood
matinee afternoons. ‘They say drinking alone is the first step towards alcoholism. You wouldn’t like my liver on your conscience, would you? Just think of the little thing, all pink and
pristine. Just say the word and you can save it.’ He blew his fringe out of his eyes, with all the puckering and pouting that entailed. ‘Please.’

Moorsom stared helplessly at the boy. All these years of working for other people, marrying for other people, living for other people. Didn’t he have a right to have something for
himself? As he sat down his voice was weary. ‘OK.’ But he felt as though a huge weight had been lifted from the back of his neck. At first Rupert refused to believe that Moorsom lived
in the Elephant and Castle. He thought it was a rich man’s little joke. By the time they were crossingBlackfriars Bridge, he believed him. He pouted in the cab, he sulked in the lift and when
he saw the size and spartan interior design of the flat he broke into a loud wail of anguish and fled into the bathroom.

But when he came out he was smiling, and holding an open copy of the
Sunday Best.
‘What an amazing coincidence! I’m in showbiz, too!’

Moorsom looked resignedly at the centrespread. There, in glorious Technicolor hypocrisy, stood himself, Jill, Debbie and Michael, lined up and smiling proudly in their modest Northern semi.
‘JOE MOORSOM – MARXIST WITH A MORTGAGE, REBEL WITH A CAUSE’ blared the headline.