Ms Alicia Wintershine of the Mid-Yorkshire Sinfonietta, whose excellence was evidenced by the fact that the only session she had available (and that only because another budding virtuosa had discovered ponies) was nine o’clock on Saturday morning.
So goodbye to breakfast in bed, and all that.
But a man is still master in his own head if not his own house, and Pascoe buttered himself another piece of toast and settled down to the rest of Roote’s letter.
Sorry about the hiatus!
I was interrupted by the entrance of a train of porters carrying enough luggage to keep the Queen of Sheba going for a long state visit. Behind them was a small lean athletic man with a shock of blond hair which looked almost white against his deeply tanned skin, whom I recognized instantly from his dust-jacket photos as Professor Dwight S. Duerden of Santa Apollonia University, California (or St Poll Uni, CA, as he expressed it). He seemed a little put out to find himself sharing the Quaestor’s Lodging with me, even though I had modestly chosen the smaller bedroom.
(You will already, I’m sure, have worked out that I’m not the Quaestor – whatever that is – of God’s, but merely a temporary occupant of his rooms during the conference. The Quaestor himself is, I gather, conducting a party of Hellenophiles around the Aegean on a luxury cruise liner. This is a line of work that interests me strangely!)
Professor Duerden and most of his luggage have now finally disappeared into his bedroom. If he intends a complete unpacking, he may be some time, so I shall continue.
Where was I? Oh yes, in the midst of what looks dangerously like becoming a rather tedious philosophical digression, so let me get back to straight narrative.
The following day, I played Polchard to a draw. I think I could have beaten him, but I wouldn’t like to swear to it. Anyway, a draw seemed best for starters.
After that we played every day. At first he always had white but after our third draw he turned the board round and thereafter we alternated. The sixth game I won. There was a moment of cenotaph silence in the room, only more in anticipation of sacrifice than remembrance of it, and as I made my way back to my cell, men who’d become quite friendly over the past couple of weeks drew away from me. I paid no heed. They were thinking of Polchard as King Rat, I was thinking of him as Grand Master. There’s no fun playing someone not good enough to beat you, and less in playing someone who’s good enough but too scared. My long-term survival plan depended on establishing equality.
That was my thinking, but I knew I could be wrong. I dreamt that night I was in that scene in Bergman’s Seventh Seal where the Knight plays Death at chess. I woke up in a muck sweat, thinking I’d made a terrible mistake.
But next day he was sitting with the board set up and I knew I had been right.
Now all I had to do was find a way of letting him beat me without him spotting it.
But not straight off, I thought. That would be too obvious, and for him to catch me losing would be worse than constantly winning. So I played my normal game and planned ahead. Then Polchard made a move three times quicker than usual, and when I studied the board I realized I didn’t need to worry. All that solitary exercise had turned him into a fine defensive player. Well, it’s bound to when you’re resisting attacking gambits you’ve devised yourself. But the bastard had been soaking up the details of the way I played and suddenly he’d gone into full attacking mode and I was in trouble.
It would have been easy to fold up before his onslaught, but I didn’t. I twisted and turned and weaved and ducked, and when I finally knocked over my king, we both knew he’d beaten me fair and square.
He smiled as he re-set the pieces. Like a ripple on a dark pool.
‘Chess, war, job,’ he said. ‘All the same. Get them thinking one way, go the other.’
Not a bad game plan I suppose if you’re a career criminal.
After that I stopped worrying about results.
Now everyone was my friend again but I played it cool. I wanted to be accepted as an equal not envied as a favourite. I knew as long as I played my cards, and my pieces, right, I’d got a fully paid-up ticket to ride my stretch as comfortably as I could hope.
But make yourself as comfortable as you like in a noisy stinking overcrowded iron-barred nineteenth-century prison and it’s still a fucking jail.
Time to turn my energies to my next project, which was to get myself an exeat.
You can see why I didn’t have any time for the luxury of plotting revenge! I had a delicate balancing act to perform, staying Polchard’s friend and at the same time getting myself a sufficient reputation as a reformed character to get a transfer to a nice open prison. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Powers That Be still have a touching belief in a correlation between education and virtue, so I did an Open University degree, opting for a strong sociological element on the grounds that this would give me the best opportunity to impress the PTB with my revitalized sense of civic responsibility. Also it’s the easiest stuff imaginable. Anyone with half a mind can suss out in ten minutes flat which buttons to press to get your tutors cooing over your essays. Whisk up a froth of soft left sentiments with a stiffening of social deprivation statistics and you’re home and dry, or home and wet as the old unreconstructed Thatcherites would see it. With that out of the way, I started on an MA course on the same lines. My dissertation was on the theme of Crime and Punishment, which gave me the chance to really strut my born-again-citizen stuff. But it was so deadly dull!
It would have been all right if I could have told them the truth about my fellow cons, which was that to most of them crime was a job like any other, except there was no unemployment problem. Treating prison as a retraining opportunity is pointless when you’re dealing with people who think of themselves as out of circulation rather than out of work. Better to spend all that public money sending them on holidays abroad in the hope they’d get food poisoning or Legionnaire’s. But I knew that advancing such a theory wasn’t going to get me letters after my name, so I dripped out the usual gunge about socialization and rehabilitation and in the fullness of time became Francis Roote, MA.
But I was still in the Syke, though by now I’d hoped to have smoothed my way out to Butlin’s, which is what my ingenious fellow felons called Butler’s Low, Yorkshire’s newest and most luxuriously appointed open prison on the fringe of the Peak District.
I couldn’t understand why I didn’t seem to be making any progress in that direction. OK, I played chess with Polchard, but I wasn’t one of his mob in the heavy sense. I put this to one of the screws I’d sweet-talked into semi-confidential mode.
‘You lot can’t keep giving me black marks for playing chess,’ I protested.
He hesitated then said, ‘Maybe it’s not us who’re giving you the black marks.’
And that was it. But it was enough.
It was Polchard who was making sure I didn’t get a transfer.
He didn’t want to lose the only guy on the wing, probably in the whole of the Syke, who could give him a run for his money on the chessboard and all he had to do to keep me was let the screws know that losing me would make him, and therefore everyone else, very unhappy.
I could see no way of changing this, so I had to find a way of countering it.
I needed some big hitters in my corner. But where to look?
The Governor was too busy watching his back against political do-gooders to have any time for individual cases, while the Chaplain was an old-fashioned whisky priest whose alcoholic amiability was so inclusive he even spoke up for Dendo Bright, who, thank God, had been transferred to some distant high-security unit.
As for my obvious choice, the Prison Psychiatrist, this was a jolly little man with the unreassuring nickname of Bonkers, whom it was generally agreed you’d have to be mad to consult. But then came a Home Office inspection, which led to a temporary improvement in menu and the permanent removal, under some kind of cloud, of a still-smiling Bonkers.