The Partridge Kite Read Online Free

Berg had been the prime mover of the most drastic takeover of British industry and investment ever presented to Parliament. Yes, he had had many enemies.
    ‘Run the tape again, Kellick,’ he said aloud. ‘Let me hear how this man became involved. . . why he ran away. . . why he. . . defected.’
    The acidness had left his voice and he cupped his hands over his eyes, elbows resting on his desk, the light from the table picking out the thick purple veins on the back of his hands. The freckles were fading into khaki blotches, the fingers spread white, purple fingernails - the hand of an old man.
    Kellick ran the tape on to the point where Sanderson’s voice began again.
    ‘When I joined CORDON just over six and a half years ago, I was totally committed. A great deal of the work in organising the cell structure of our membership then was done by me, supervising and vetting. At that time, starting almost from scratch, we had to be sensitive in who we approached and how we dealt with people who made the initiative to us. We relied much on our intuition and a probationary period for suspect newcomers. We protected ourselves then by merely promoting an image of ourselves as some kind of crank offshoot of the Empire Loyalists, dead and gone.
    The present success of CORDON is a direct result of the care we took in those days in admitting the right people and rejecting the suspect. We were guided then not by any new ideology: there were no pep talks or conditioning programmes. We were not trying to change people.
    ‘When people came to us it was because they shared our convictions, people who were witness to and sickened by Britain’s steady slide into ruin: sickened by the total bankruptcy of political talent in government at all levels; angry at the awful power of the Trade Unions and of particular men in that Movement with whom certain Government Ministers were beginning to share the responsibility of government in a practical daily way.
    The “collapse of democracy” was the subject in those days. The unify of CORDON, its raison d’être, was how to
    reverse the slide. Patriotism was not a word that had disappeared from the vocabulary of the people who joined us, a love of one’s country! But what we were really talking about was already history. It took a little time for us to appreciate how archaic we were.
    ‘We found we were talking about a countryside that existed only in back copies of Country Life. The good looks and civilities of the British way of life were more obsolete than we’d imagined. We’d lost our currency, our weights and measures, our pint, our mile. And when we realised we had become caricatures of ourselves, our attitudes hardened.
    ‘I suppose I represented what you might call the centre- cut of British society - those who had so little but felt they had so much to lose. Like so many of those around me at that time I felt the need to belong to something because I felt I was no longer part of anything. CORDON put fire into me and into those around me who joined then. It hit me in the way National Socialism must have hit those millions of Germans in the twenties and thirties. It was a force: something hard, something new, something actual in a lazy, careless, nondescript society. It was the only definite thing I’d ever known. Maybe if I had been born fifty years earlier I should have followed Keir Hardie with the same enthusiasm.’
    Across the darkened room lit only by the single brass lamp with the green shade, across from the disembodied taped voice, there was only the slightest stir in the Prime Minister’s chair. Kellick took it as a cue to stop the machine.
    ‘Sanderson goes on for some time like this, Prime Minister,’ he said.
    There was no answer from the chair, only a new breeze of sickeningly sweet pipe smoke unfolding through the lampshade.
    ‘I’ll move another ten minutes into the tape. Prime Minister, to where he begins to explain the structure of CORDON.’
    ‘CORDON. . .’