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'Darling, I have this feeling it is going to be an excellent day,' he proclaimed as he kissed his wife goodbye at their doorstep. A couple of photographers were outside on the pavement, and they asked him to repeat the kiss before he was allowed to get into his official car and drive off for a day's campaigning in the House.
His wife went through her daily routine of clearing the breakfast table before settling down to handle the correspondence. The volume had increased dramatically in the last few years, she noted with a sigh of resignation. Gone were the days when there was any hope of a personal answer to them all; it was now up to the word processor and its carefully programmed series of standard responses. She wondered whether anybody really noticed or cared that most of her husband's constituency letters were written by computer and signed by a little autograph machine he had brought back from the States on a recent trip. The majority of the letters were from lobby groups, professional critics or downright political opponents who weren't the least bit interested in the content of the replies. But they all needed answering nonetheless, she told herself as she began the monotonous daily task of opening the thick bundle of envelopes. She would never risk losing her husband a single vote by failing to offer some form of reply even to the most abusive of letters.
She left the padded brown envelope until last. It had clearly been hand-delivered and was firmly stapled down, and she had to struggle to extract the infuriating metal clips before getting at the contents. As she pulled out the last tenacious staple, a cassette tape fell out into her lap. There was nothing else in the envelope, no letter, no compliments slip, no label on the tape to indicate where it had come from or what it contained.
'Fools. How on earth do they expect me to reply to that!'
She put the tape to one side before switching on the word processor.
It took her three hours of solid work to go through the letters, persuade the word processor to chum out a reply which had some chance of persuading the recipient that they were receiving personalised attention, watch them being signed by machine, then fold and seal them. The tape she left on the desk. Her mouth was gummed up from licking too many envelopes, and she needed a cup of coffee. The silly tape could wait.
It was very much later that evening when she remembered the cassette. Woolton had come back from a hectic day canvassing at the House, and was feeling tired as the adrenalin of the first ballot began to wear off. He had heeded the advice of his close colleagues not to overdo the canvassing, and to get a couple of good nights7 rest. He was planning later in the week to make three major speeches, and he would need to conserve his energy.
He was sitting in his favourite armchair sketching out some preliminary speech notes when his wife remembered the tape on the desk.
'By the way, darling, a tape cassette was dropped off for you today without any form of identification. Do you know what it is? A recording of last weekend's speech or a tape of a recent interview, perhaps?'
Haven't a clue. Pour me another drink and let's listen to it.' He waved broadly in the direction of the stereo unit.
His wife, dutiful as ever, did as he bade. He was just savouring his freshened gin and tonic when the tape deck ate up the last segment of blank tape and with a burst of red light the playback meter on the equipment began to show that the tape heads were reading something. There was a series of low hisses and crackles, it was clearly not a professional recording, and she turned the volume up.
The sound of a girl's laughter filled the room, followed by her low, deep gasp. The noise hypnotised the Wooltons, rooting them to the spot. For several minutes, the speakers gave out the sound of a series of shorter, higher breaths as the unmistakable sounds of sex were accompanied by the rhythmic banging of a bedhead against a wall. The tape left little to the imagination. The woman's sighs became shorter and more shrill, as the two bodies climbed ever higher, pausing occasionally for breath before pressing on remorselessly until with a shrieking crescendo they had burst through to reach the summit of their mountain. They shared gasps of pleasure and satisfaction before descending gently together, accompanied once more by the sound of the woman's laughter mixed with the deep bass chuckling of her companion.
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