Hemingway’s Chair

that Marshall now looked, having consulted his watch, for
first signs of the arrival of the Ministerial party. A sizeable crowd lined the
route. Foremost amongst them was Elaine, standing with her mother and Mary
Perrick and Shirley Barker from the post office. Seeing them provoked in him a
sharp and profound sense of irritation at the whole charade of the last year.
If only the Government had had the courage of its convictions the Privatisation
Bill would have been in place a year ago and he would not have had to waste
nine months of his life pretending to work in a post office. The calibre of
those he had been dealing with had not given him great hope for the future. The
Elaine Rudges and the Shirley Barkers. Either they wanted to be screwed or they
wanted help with the crossword. They were completely uninterested in the wider
issues. Ask them how you might change their lives for the better and they would
suggest getting engaged or buying a new lawnmower. Small town Britain had been
a great disappointment to Nick Marshall. Still, soon he would be out of here,
rightly acknowledged as a man of universal vision. Christ had spent time in the
wilderness. He had spent time in Theston.
    He
looked out to sea. The mist had cleared, and the sun was now taking on the
higher cloud. The company yacht rode splendidly out in the deeper water
alongside the pier. It was a fine ship, a symbol of what could be achieved by
those blessed with vision and foresight and daring. Glenson was right. The
businessmen it had brought over were far more important to the future of
telecommunications than the Minister of Technology or the Mayor of Theston. He
smiled quietly to himself. He’d already held informal talks, as they say, with
the Dutch boys. They liked him. Liked his style. Liked the fact that he’d
bothered to learn the language. Once this link was up and running Devereux and
Vickers wouldn’t see him for dust.
    There
was a stirring in the crowd now and he looked back towards the hill. A police
car came into view and at a discreet distance behind it a black Ford Granada.
TV crews shouldered their equipment in readiness.
    Dennis
Donnelly, the Minister, was the new name on the political scene. The coming
man. He had only recently been plucked from the bowels of the Heritage
Department and some said his promotion to Technology was only the first step in
a rapid upward progress through the ranks of government. Donnelly was a man of
principle. His principle was to support the Prime Minister in whatever he did
and whoever he was, until such time as he himself had acquired enough power to
withdraw that support and become Prime Minister himself. Donnelly had many
advantages. He was still young, only thirty-eight, he was not particularly
intelligent and he had never once slept with anyone but his wife. The only
cloud on the horizon was that she had slept with lots of people and, despite
his stern words, had shown no sign of desisting. She was probably at it now.
Whilst he was in Suffolk heralding the dawn of a telecommunications revolution,
she was probably being pinioned to the floor by some huge black telephone
engineer. Dennis Donnelly put these unsavoury thoughts from his mind as he
stepped out of his limousine and started to smile. He was greeted by Ken
Stopping in one of his last mayoral duties, and taken down the line to shake
hands. They all liked the Minister. He seemed a straight-talking type, greeting
everyone like a long-lost friend.
    Stopping’s
speech of welcome was short and unmemorable, severely hampered by his inability
to say the word ‘telecommunications’.
    Then
Maurice Vickers stepped forward. His lazy eye ghamed somewhere off to the left
as he spoke of opportunities grasped and horizons widened and new dawns risen
for a Post Office soon to be free of commercial restraints.
    He
skilfully avoided any controversial issues such as the total destruction of the
traditional post office, and Nick, whose legs were aching now with the waiting,
was greatly relieved when Vickers climaxed in suitably apocalyptic style and
the great moment came for the eager Minister to be placed in front of a video
camera and his likeness transmitted by telephone line to a voice-activated
computer in Zandvoort. This would, all being well, send live pictures
simultaneously to a dozen major financial centres on the continent of Europe
and beyond.
    Nick
felt a curious and unexpected frisson of pride as the Minister stepped
forward. He heard the