The Best Laid Plans Part 11

"Do I always cart around that much nourishment in my chin spinach?" he asked me as he tucked in his s.h.i.+rt and brushed his canvas pants.

"Well ... well, yes ... yes, you do. It's part of your charm," I babbled.

"Actually, it's part of my lunch, and last night's dinner."

I honestly had no idea what was happening. I thought Angus must have been in some advanced state of denial; yet he appeared calm and compos mentis. He looked down the terminal to the clamour of reporters, took three deep breaths, and headed their way.

"Whoa, Angus, what do you think you're doing? Where are you going?"

My endless stream of questions fell on the deaf ears Angus had only recently revealed through his hand-to-hair combat. He just kept striding towards the scrum. I had no idea what to do. Eventually, I fell silent and trudged behind him, bearing his carry-on. As we exited the secure area and confronted the horde, he turned to me. "You set 'em up, and I'll knock 'em down," he whispered.

He stood tall for him, anyway with his hands behind his back. I seemed to understand Angus, though I didn't know how or why. I just knew what to do. I stepped into the scrum. The reporters clicked on their sun guns and hoisted their cameras to their shoulders. They thrust their microphones within inches of my face.

"Dr. McLintock will make a brief statement, but let's leave the questions until tomorrow, shall we. He's been flying for the past 19 hours, so please give him a break and let me take him home. It's Professor Angus McLintock, spelled M, little c, capital L-i-n-t-o-c-k. Angus?" I stood aside and felt my pulse pound. Not knowing what would happen in a tense situation always pushed my maximum-anxiety b.u.t.ton. I went to DefCon 1. I was breathing hard but, oddly, also felt a wafer-thin gauze of serenity enveloping me, for which I had no explanation. Angus moved into position, and the reporters closed ranks around him. He bowed his head and closed his eyes for a few seconds, not in prayer but in preparation. He looked up and squinted briefly, adjusting to the glare of the lights.

"I'm new to this, so please bear with me. One hour ago, I was on a plane from Papua New Guinea where I spent the last two weeks installin' a new water-filtration and purification system for a village that heretofore had only limited access to clean drinkin' water. That is where I was. That is where my mind was. Like everyone else in Canada, I expected to walk off that plane free of any political enc.u.mbrances, as Eric Cameron waltzed back to Ottawa as he always has.

"I freely admit that when I agreed to let my name stand as the Liberal candidate, I had no intention of servin', and no expectation of needin' to. I've heard my friend Daniel here say on more than one occasion that anything can happen in politics and occasionally does like tonight, for instance. Rest a.s.sured, I'll not be throwin' my name around so cavalierly in the future.

"I like to think I'm an honourable man whose word is his bond. I hope my friends and colleagues would concur. I let my name stand on the ballot. Events have conspired to grant me the most votes. Unless someone named 'Spoiled Ballots' steps forward, I appear to have been elected for better or worse. And I'm quite convinced it's 'worse' if you want my view on it.

"In a weak moment of folly, I made a commitment. I stand by it and will serve though I'd certainly rather continue my engineerin' work, toilin' in relative obscurity.

"Let me congratulate Jane Nankovich for the campaign she ran. She undoubtedly did her supporters proud. I extend my heartfelt sympathies to Eric Cameron for the calamity that has befallen him. Whatever his extracurricular interests may be, he undoubtedly has served Canada well and deserves our respect, our grat.i.tude, and in particular right now, our understandin'.

"For all my new const.i.tuents, I can only say I will do my best in a role for which I feel ill suited and unprepared. Whatever the situation, you may rely on me to be honest and direct. I shall never forget whose money the government is collectin' and spendin'. And I promise that I will always, always be guided by two immutable questions, posed, considered, and answered in this essential order of priority: Firstly, what is best for Canada? And secondly, if necessary, what is best for the people of c.u.mberland-Prescott?

"I guarantee that some, perhaps many of my own const.i.tuents will take issue with this approach and the positions and decisions it will sometimes yield. I can only suggest they will have a chance to vote for someone else in four years' time perhaps sooner, if we're all lucky.

"I want to recognize the long and distinguished service of Muriel Parkinson, who ran before me in the previous five campaigns. A lasting regret of mine will be that it is I and not she who stands before you now. While I am well aware of her famed organizational skills, part of me laments that she deployed them with such vigour and obvious success in poll 22, the Riverfront Seniors' Residence where she lives.

"Finally, I may need a few days to recover from my two weeks in a different hemisphere, not to mention from the surreal trip I've taken since landin' here in Ottawa. I seek yer patience and indulgence until I am feelin' myself again. In the interim, if you need anythin', you may contact my newly appointed executive a.s.sistant, or whatever his t.i.tle should be, Dr. Daniel Addison. He helped me get into this situation, and he will be with me every step of the way on Parliament Hill. Good night."

I had to stop for a minute or two to sort through the jaws on the ground until I could find my own. Stunning. The reporters were transfixed. As was I so much so that Angus's last sentence hadn't yet registered. Andre Fontaine just stood there blank-faced and dumbstruck. The scrum parted for us like the Red Sea for Moses. Come to think of it, Angus looked the part. I walked two steps behind as we made our way to the luggage carousel and then to the parking lot. I was trying to catch up, literally and figuratively. Seven cameras trailed us all the way to the car.

He spoke only once on the drive home and I, in a daze, not at all. "You'd best have left me plenty of Lagavulin."

CTV CAMERON WATCH (1:45 AM EST).

(All polls reporting).

Eric Cameron (PC) 2,992.

Angus McLintock (Lib)* 3,703.

Jane Nankovich (NDP) 3,639.

Spoiled Ballots 14,662.

DIARY.

Monday, October 14.

My Love.

I'm at 29,000 feet, closing in on Ottawa, and I can't wait to get back. I didn't notice my longing for home whilst in Papua New Guinea. I was so consumed with my work and the deep and immediate impact it had on the villagers that I simply didn't notice I was missing our home. I'm utterly knackered after such a long journey. But I'm feeling like a new man with a new lease on life. Upon my return, the normal order of the universe will be restored, and I can resume my life free of the fetters of this d.a.m.ned election. My focus will be Baddeck I and my research. I also look forward to renewing my chess rivalry with Dr. Addison. I've missed our spirited matches these last two weeks.

The seat-belt sign has just bonged, so I must close this rather flimsy tray table and brace myself for landing. I'll complete this when I'm home with you watching over me.

AM.

ADDENDUM (2:00 AM).

Oh s.h.i.+te.

*Declared winner at 10:55 PM.

Part Two.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

I leaned against the stone wall on the other side of the corridor, watching the sign painter.

D. ANGUS McLINTOCK.

Member of Parliament for/Depute de.

c.u.mBERLAND-PRESC.

Only the House of Commons would employ a commercial artist whose raison d'etre was hand-stenciling the names of MPs in gold-fleck paint on the front doors of their offices. I watched as he worked meticulously to finish the final O-T-T as if it somehow confirmed as real what I'd hoped might be some particularly cruel nightmare. The irony was painful. I felt like the sad-sack inmate who had tunneled out of his cell only to miscalculate and surface in the gas chamber. Just a few short months earlier, I'd very nearly made a clean escape. Yet here I was, back on Parliament Hill, atop my own personal pyre of politics.

While a weak and distant little whisper in my head argued for abandoning Angus and seeking political refugee status at the university, the whisper was quickly drowned out by a sanctimonious, annoying voice, delivering a will-sapping refrain of "do the right thing." s.h.i.+t. I knew what I had to do. I just wondered what it would be like to flirt with being a jerk for once. I would certainly have been in good company. But I had gotten us both into this mess. I really had no choice but to stand by Angus in his hour of need. And how I wish an hour was all that was required. The way my luck was going, the next election might well have been five years off despite the Government's minority status.

At least, the university had been reasonable, even generous. Both Angus and I had been granted open-ended leaves of absence with no loss in seniority and with our tenure status unaffected. Angus had his, and I was on a long road to get mine. My future seemed reasonably secure; it was my present that depressed me. On the brighter side of the ledger, neither one of us would be teaching English for Engineers. In a rather satisfying twist of fate, Dean Roland Rumplun had been forced to take over the cla.s.s the blind leading the blind. For Angus, the knowledge that Rumplun would be enduring the weekly torture of E for E almost made coming to Ottawa tolerable.

I was greeted by my former colleagues as the prodigal son, their smirking incredulity standing in for the fatted calf. Bradley Stanton, the weasel, offered muted congratulations, but the Leader seemed genuine in his praise for the "brilliant campaign" I'd run. My veteran status on the Hill conferred some privileges unavailable to the new kids on the block. I snagged us a choice office suite along the quiet corridor that ran the length of Centre Block behind the House of Commons and the Senate chamber. The suite was small but gave us a glorious view of the river. It was not unlike the vista offered up by Muriel's traditional vantage point in the lounge of the Riverfront Seniors' Residence some 30 kilometres east.

Not many MPs even wanted offices in Centre Block, opting, for more s.p.a.cious accommodations in the Confederation Building just to the west. But I wanted Centre Block. And in time, Angus would thank me. In the deep freeze of an Ottawa February, he merely had to saunter down the hall to the House for evening votes while many of his colleagues would be re-enacting Admiral Peary's North Pole trek to get there.

In the three weeks since the election, Angus had still not adjusted to his status as a Member of Parliament, not to mention his folk-hero notoriety. His extemporaneous, yet eloquent, airport soliloquy had endeared him not just to the press gallery but to millions of Canadians who watched, heard, and read it over and over through the media in the days that followed. The long-time parliamentary bureau chief for The Calgary Herald coined "Honest Angus," and the moniker stuck like a lamprey with nothing to lose. I must say it was a big improvement over "Absent Angus," with which we'd been tagged during the campaign.

True to his word, Angus slowly came to grips with the election's unlikely check that, shocking outcome. A few letters to the editor in the c.u.mberland newspaper decried the election of a Liberal on the strength of a piddling 3,700 votes, calling it an affront to democracy. These were easily overwhelmed by the dozens of letters from Canadians who considered Angus to be just the sort of politician we needed an honourable representative who spoke his mind and did what he said. His frank admission that he'd run with neither the intention nor the desire to serve, pa.s.sed through the country's consciousness and out the other side with nary a discouraging word. And the skies were not cloudy all day. His honeymoon had started.

Angus had sequestered himself in his workshop in the immediate aftermath of the election, using me as his s.h.i.+eld from the outside world. For an entire week, he spent his days painting his beloved hovercraft; I spent mine fending off reporters and getting high on the fumes rising through the vents in my floor. His contact with me in the first few days was perfunctory, even cool. It was clear he was wrestling with what had befallen him and was struggling to make peace with the hard-left turn his life had taken, with me at the wheel.

When his painting was done, he seemed to emerge from his funk, and our chess games resumed. In our initial contests, he crushed me with such relentless fury that I could only conclude it was his way of punis.h.i.+ng me for involving him in this fiasco. While I felt justified in noting that no one had forced him into our little arrangement, I figured shoving that particular red-hot poker up his nose was ill-advised at best and suicidal at worst. I took my sh.e.l.lacking, game after game, with stoic good humour as Angus slowly burned through his considerable reserves of anger and self-pity. Eventually, he pa.s.sed through the dark valley and emerged on the other side, showing at least traces of the personality I'd come to know, enjoy, and respect.

My agreement to return to Parliament Hill with him, as if he'd left me any choice in the matter, seemed to help put our relations.h.i.+p back on a tentative but promising footing. In the week following the election, Angus had studiously avoided newspapers, television, and radio. But I'd clipped and kept the stories chronicling his evolution from anonymous engineering professor to political giant killer. Most stories reprinted verbatim the remarks Angus made in front of the baggage carousel and conveniently overlooked that Cameron's demise had been wholly self-inflicted. Reading the coverage and how it developed over the days and weeks after the election was a case study in how heroes are manufactured out of media hyperbole, rose-tinted hindsight, and concerted lily-gilding.

We are all, to greater or lesser degrees, captives of our own egos. Angus, for all his hard-nosed honesty and honour, still lived with human frailties. During the second week following the election his election and after he'd soundly trounced me a dozen times or more on the 64 squares, I gave him the folder of clippings to read. Though he endeavoured to mask it, I could tell he was pleased and surprised that his predicament and response had been the subject of such positive, if exaggerated, comment. Though he scoffed and declared it all "drivel," I noticed that he'd read every article.

After carefully and sensitively managing Angus's moods and emotions for nearly three weeks, free from the prying eyes of the public and the media, I felt he was ready to venture into Ottawa and begin his new life. He was less certain, but allowed himself to be cajoled into acquiescence.

Angus was sitting behind his standard-issue MP's desk, his back to the leaded window panes high above the river. His head was in his hands. His office was pretty well organized with only a few pictures on loan from the Parliamentary art collection yet to be hung. He looked as if he were at a funeral. Pale and stiff, he might have been at his own funeral. When I lost him in the black depths, one of my many jobs as his executive a.s.sistant was to drag him back up, boost his spirits, and force him to confront and, I hoped, accept his new reality. I called it doing a "Lazarus." It required delicate management of mood (his, not mine) and a pa.s.sel of patience (mine, not his).

"Angus, we've got 20 minutes before you're due in the Clerk's office. Let me show you something I know you'll like," I proposed with the finesse of a neurosurgeon who knows his patient's head inside and out.

"Blow it out yer hindquarters! I cannae enjoy my wallowin' with you playin' cruise director."

I clearly had him right where I wanted him. "Come on, Angus. You're in Centre Block the very seat of our nation's history. I guarantee you'll love what I'm going to show you. I know you, and you will want to see this," I persisted, carefully gauging my tone and words to yield the desired effect. I sensed I was close to reaching him. Reading and managing his temper really was an important skill, which I like to think I possessed in some modest measure.

"Was there a particular part of 'blow it out yer hindquarters' that left you confused as to my disposition?" he replied through teeth clamped tighter than ca.n.a.l locks.

I was obviously on the right path. Just a little more. "Angus, you need to buck up, and you need to trust me. You're in my house now, and I just want to show you a very special place. It's on the way to the Clerk's office anyway." Nothing. "Come on, Angus, you're about to embark on a completely new and rare experience that comes to very few Canadians. Please let me help you get off on the right foot. Now, let's go." I moved towards the door, hoping my very motion might help push him over the edge of agreement.

"Buck up and trust you? Get off on the right foot?" he said, hissing. "I've got a better idea of what I can do with my right foot if you come a wee bit closer. I wish you'd just shut up."

Brilliantly played. From buck up to shut up in two seconds flat. I stayed silent and trained a sympathetic gaze on him. It was my last gambit. Mercifully, he softened.

"Awright, awright, awright, if you'll stop yer yammerin' and give me a wee bit of peace and quiet, I'll come. But don't push yer fortune and challenge my good nature or there'll be more blood on the board tonight," he said, sighing. He stood up and shuffled after me like Eeyore off his medication.

We headed out into the hall and down to the central north-south corridor, running from the Peace Tower at the south end to two k.n.o.bless, wooden doors at the north end. We turned left and approached the two doors, I walking with purpose, Angus slowing. Just as I was about to walk right into the beautifully carved wood (with the theme song from "Get Smart" echoing in my head), they silently parted, and we both entered my favourite place on Parliament Hill.

I stood aside and let Angus pa.s.s into the three-tiered wooden glory of the Library of Parliament. An alabaster statue of Queen Victoria towered over us in the centre of the circular library. A handful of staff laboured under her benevolent gaze. I fell silent and listened for Angus's reaction. I was rewarded by his sharp intake of breath at the sight of three levels of ornate, wooden shelves, which circled the perimeter of the room, and the arched windows in the domed, sky-lit ceiling. I'd entered that place dozens, even hundreds, of times and always felt a slight wobble in my knees as I pa.s.sed over the threshold. As I antic.i.p.ated, Angus was similarly moved.

"Consider yourself forgiven. It takes the breath clean away," he whispered, craning his neck and slowly rotating on the spot just in front of the beautifully carved counter sheltering the Dewey Decimal disciples who worked behind it. The head librarian gave me a wink, gathered Angus in her wake, and took him on a brief but engaging tour designed to entrance even the most seasoned bibliophile. Angus was duly enthralled. I could hear his endless stream of questions as I took my traditional place in the shadow of Laurier's bust as I waited for Angus. Ten minutes later, I cleared my throat to gain the eyes of the head librarian. She escorted Angus to the door where I met them.

"Thanks so much, Lucille. I knew Angus would enjoy this place as I always have. I'm sure he'll be back, but it's time for his swearing in, and we shouldn't keep the Clerk waiting," I noted.

Angus thanked her as politely as his gruff manner permitted, and we pa.s.sed back through the incongruous automatic sliding doors as if leaving the bridge of the stars.h.i.+p Enterprise and not a pristine library constructed in the late 1800s.

"I've always felt at peace in there," I remarked as we strode down the hall towards the Clerk's office.

"Aye, it's a fine room, it is," Angus replied. "And I can go in there whenever the spirit moves me?"

"Whenever you please," I confirmed.

Someone I didn't recognize emerged from the Clerk's office as we approached. The mace lapel pin indicated she was a newly elected MP. We said h.e.l.lo as she pa.s.sed and then slipped through the door she held open for us.

"Professor McLintock, I presume," said the Clerk of the House of Commons.

She was dressed in full regalia and with a sweep of her hand, waved us into a small ceremonial reception room from a bygone era, the centerpiece of which was a fireplace with logs blazing in its hearth.

"Aye, that is I," replied Angus as he extended his hand.

"Nice to meet you; congratulations on your election. You've caused quite a stir in the country," she commented with a gentle smile.

"As you may know, I had no intention of stirrin' anythin'. In fact, you might say I'm here under false pretences," Angus responded.

"Ah yes, but the people have spoken, and here you are."

"Well, a few of them have spoken, but I fear the vast majority in c.u.mberland-Prescott might rather I were somewhere else."

She looked my way for the first time. "h.e.l.lo, Daniel. How are you?"

We'd worked together over the years, particularly on the procedures in the House around the Throne Speech and budgets.

"I'm fine, Anne-Marie. A little taken aback by what has transpired, but that's politics," I answered.

"Well, it's nice to have you back. Now, why don't we proceed with the swearing in as we have eight more MPs to go before quitting time."

The House of Commons photographer positioned Angus in front of the fireplace, facing the Clerk.

"Did you bring your own Bible, Professor McLintock?" she asked.

"No, I tend towards agnostic," Angus commented.

"Well, you can use this one. It belonged to Wilfrid Laurier. We use John A. Macdonald's for Conservative members," she offered, handing Angus a well-worn, black, leather-bound edition.

"Fine. Thank you."

"The oath you're about to take is required under the Parliament of Canada Act. You may not enter the House of Commons before taking it. Please hold the Bible in your left hand, raise your right hand, and read the oath."

She held up a five-by-seven card, embossed with the official imprimatur of the House of Commons. Angus did as she directed while the trigger-happy photographer flashed away.