Read A Very British Coup for Free Online

a nail file. Inside was a single sheet of notepaper which at the top bore the legend “From the Secretary of State”. The message inside written in red ink simply said: “Lunch Sunday? Ring me at midnight.” And then a telephone number.
    There was nothing else. The envelope did not even bear her name. Afterwards it occurred to Molly that this was because Perkins did not know her name. Trembling slightly she stuffed the letter into her handbag and went to catch up with her boss who was waiting in the main reception. That evening, at midnight precisely, she telephoned to say “Yes.”
    Where women were concerned, Harry Perkins was a late developer. He passed through Parkside Secondary School without ever giving the girls in his class a second glance. It was not that he didn’t have friends. There was Nobby Jones whose father was a signalman on the railway. Bill Spriggs, who lived in Jubilee Street, which backed on to the same alley as the Perkins house. And Danny Parker, whose father also worked at Firth Brown. They were all in the same class and went around together. At weekends and during school holidays Nobby’s father would sometimes smuggle them into his signal box, where they would sit for hours, with notepads and pencils, jotting down engine numbers. Sometimes when it rained they would go back to Perkins’ house and play cards, gin rummy usually. They used to sit round the dining-room table, each with a heap of used threepenny stamps as the stake. Harry never had much luck with cards and very often his supply of used stamps was cleaned out by the end of an afternoon. “Never mind, Harry,” Mrs Perkins used to say, “unlucky in cards, lucky in love.”
    As it turned out Perkins didn’t have much luck with love either. By the time they reached the fourth form the other lads had lost interest in train-spotting and gin rummy. Instead they took up girls and pop music.
    It was in a rather downmarket coffee bar called Brady’s that romance first blossomed. Bill Spriggs and Nobby Jones both did paper rounds and so they could afford to spend the after-school hours sitting round Brady’s formica-topped tables tapping their toes to music from the juke box and making a single cup of Brady’s awful coffee stretch out over two hours. Occasionally Perkins went with them, but his shilling-a-week pocket money did not run to many cups of coffee, let alone allow for feeding the juke box. Besides, he was not much interested. By the time he was fourteen he preferred to spend an hour browsing through the newspapers in the reading room of the city library. It was the time of the Korean war. Day by day in the
Daily Worker
young Perkins would follow the progress of MacArthur’s army as it inched its way up the Korean peninsula towards the border with China.One evening in Brady’s he tried to interest Danny Parker in Korea, but all Danny could talk about was a third-form girl called Lucy Marston whom he had just taken up with. “Last night she let me feel her tits,” exulted Danny.
    Perkins was disgusted. “Here we are with the world about to blow up and all you’re interested in is Lucy Marston’s tits.” That was the last time he went to Brady’s. Most weekends he stayed at home reading. Now and then he would go with his schoolmates to see United play; sometimes a crowd of them would go to the cinema. Danny and Nobby would bring their girl-friends along, but Perkins always played gooseberry. Once they passed themselves off as sixteen year olds and got into an X film called
Flood of Tears
. It was set in America, about a dam that burst and in the floods that followed prisoners escaped from the local jail. Two of the convicts, a murderer and a rapist, end up trapped by the rising waters and seeking refuge in a house with a beautiful girl. What followed was Perkins’ introduction to sex. It was pretty tame stuff by today’s standards, but