Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘You arsehole, Bent,’ Culpepper hissed, as they changed back into their uniforms. ‘You fucking useless pathetic little arsehole weakling tosser. You let us all down. Every one of us. We would have won if it wasn’t for you. You wimpy sherring tosspot arsehole.’
But Benjamin simply smiled back, and that seemed to infuriate him even more. He wasn’t even doing it to antagonize him, either. He was smiling because he loved everybody and everything, including Culpepper, and from now on nothing could shake his faith in humanity or the essential rightness of things. And the same smile – beatific, serene – was his only response when Chase grabbed him by the arm on their way to Big School and demanded, ‘What happened? Where did you get them?’ Later on he would tell him, ‘They were a gift,’ but that was the closest he would ever come to explaining the mystery of those knee-length, ill-fitting, navy-blue swimming trunks. They entered, for a while, the arcane and changeful mythology of King William’s School, and then were quietly forgotten. Other wonders took their place.
Benjamin listened with great attention to Francis Piper’s reading. Not to his words, exactly, but to the pleasing tremolo of his seventy-year-old voice, a fragile woodwind playing melodies which sounded, to Benjamin’s newly devotional ears, like the distant echoes of some psalm or hymnal. He gazed intently, too, at the old man’s kindly, placable face, scored deeply with laughter-lines, and felt that he was seeing not – as Mr Fletcher might have hoped – a little piece of twentieth-century literary history, but an emanation, a vision of perfect clarity that was for his eyes alone; something not unlike the face of God.
Dustclouds swirled in the beams of gold around Francis Piper’s dove-white, angel-white hair, and it was all Benjamin could do to stop from laughing out loud. It was everywhere. Divine Grace was everywhere.
WINTER
8
The track had been stopped for about an hour and a half. Nobody seemed to know why. Bill Anderton stood out in the yard beneath the loading bay, surrounded by workers from the underseal section and the machine shop; surrounded by them, but not joining in any of their laconic banter, or the game of football a dozen of the men had begun to improvise. He was smoking his fifth or sixth cigarette, tipping the ash into the sludge of cold tea at the bottom of his plastic cup. Every so often he would exhale deeply, blowing out rigid columns of smoke which mingled in the freezing air with the breath steaming from the chapped lips of his colleagues. It looked as though everybody was smoking, that raw November afternoon.
A familiar scrawny figure walked by, wearing a dark grey suit and also sucking fiercely on a cigarette. It was Victor Gibbs, looking more than usually sallow and cadaverous. He nodded at Bill, who nodded back, relieved that they weren’t going to attempt a proper conversation. But this relief was short-lived. After a few more steps Gibbs stopped and turned in his tracks. He approached Bill with a sly, insinuating smile on his face.
‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ he said, ‘Brother Anderton. Some months ago I wrote you a letter. Do you remember?’
Bill remembered perfectly well, but answered: ‘I get a lot of letters.’
‘It was about Miss Newman.
Miriam,
to you and me.’
Bill didn’t want to talk about this. Not here. Three feet away, on the other side of the machine-shop wall, was the shower block where he and Miriam had made love the day before. The usual feverish, clumsy business. The more entangled they became, emotionally, the more joyless and inadequate these fumbled occasions started to feel. He couldn’t discuss her with someone else. Not in this place. Not anywhere, with Gibbs.
‘Your complaint was investigated thoroughly,’ he said, ‘by a third party. They concluded there was nothing in it.’
‘I never had a reply.’
‘That was remiss of me. Sometimes the system breaks down.’
Gibbs looked away, sensing an impasse.
‘Lovely girl, that Miriam,’ he said, after a while. ‘Very… fetching. A lot of blokes round here got their eye on her. But I bet they’ll never get anywhere.’ He frowned, as if the thought had just occurred to him, although Bill could tell that this was all part of some rehearsed strategy. ‘D’you know what I think the chicks find attractive? D’you know what turns them on?’
‘Chicks?’ said Bill, contemptuously.
‘It’s power, Brother Anderton. That’s what it is. They go wild for it. It drives them crazy.’
Bill forced a glance at him. He didn’t even want to meet his eye, if he could help it. ‘Can we just drop this subject, Gibbs? I’m not interested in your opinions, to be honest.’
‘Fair enough.’ He held up his hands, acquiescent. ‘I just thought it would be good news to a man like you. After all, power oozes out of your every pore. These men’ – he gestured at the football players – ‘they do pretty much everything you want them to, don’t they? What’s going on this afternoon, anyway? Have you called them out again?’
There were several ways Bill could have responded to this goading. He could simply have walked away, or he could have played his trump card and dropped some sort of hint about the Charity Committee theft, which he had still not mentioned to anybody. For the time being, though, he decided to keep his cool.
‘Sledgehammer fell on the track a while ago. We’re waiting for someone to come and sort it out.’
‘You know, it’s funny,’ said Gibbs, ‘I’ve noticed, every time something like this happens – and it seems to happen a lot, every couple of weeks – it always happens just before lunch, so they can’t get an engineer out before two, and half the day’s gone before the thing’s up and running again. Meanwhile, the company’s lost how many cars? Sixty? Seventy?’
‘I don’t know what you’re implying,’ said Bill, turning on him as fine droplets of rain began to splatter the tarmac, ‘but I do know that your knowledge of working practices is exactly nil. Nobody who spends all day sitting on his arse pushing figures around is going to criticize
my
men for the way they do their job.’ He stubbed out his cigarette, screwing it angrily into the ground. ‘Come and spend a day or two on that track, Gibbs, and then tell me you begrudge these blokes a few minutes kicking a ball around. There’s a mate of mine called Ian, Ian Bateman, was laid off last week aged
forty-eight,
with a back that’s killing him and six months in hospital to look forward to. That’s what ten years as an undersealer does for you.’
He began to walk off, but Gibbs stopped him with the words: ‘No chance of your son ending up like that, then, is there?’
‘My son?’ repeated Bill, turning.
‘Not after that fancy school he goes to. That toffs’ academy. Too good for the local comprehensive, was he?’
Advancing towards him, Bill seemed suddenly to grow in stature. The hostility between the two men was immediately charged, physical.
‘What
is
your problem, Gibbs? Eh? What is it?’
‘I know about you and Miriam Newman,’ he answered, calmly.
At which point, Bill couldn’t help smiling. He was glad, finally, that the thing had been mentioned at last. It made everything very straightforward.
‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ he said. ‘And you shouldn’t have forged those cheques, either.’ He didn’t even wait to watch Gibbs’s expression change. ‘I’ve a terrible feeling that one of us,’ he said over his shoulder, ambling away, ‘is going to be out of a job on Monday morning.’
And for the rest of the afternoon, whenever he thought about that moment, Bill found himself glowing with pride. The sort of pride that comes before a fall.
*
That evening, he met Miriam at The Black Horse in Northfield, and they drove out to Stourbridge in his brown Marina. They checked into The Talbot Hotel as Mr and Mrs Stokes (a little tribute Bill had decided to pay to the current chairman of British Leyland). Irene was under the impression that he was in Northampton, staying overnight for a TGWU dinner. And indeed, that’s where he should have been. But he had phoned the regional office that afternoon, and called off sick. It had all been arranged more than a month ago. It was to be their first whole night together.
They sat in the hotel’s cavernous lounge bar, Bill drinking pints of Brew, Miriam drinking Dubonnet and bitter lemon. He rested his hand on her knee beneath the table. It was proving surprisingly hard to sustain a conversation.
‘Wouldn’t it be lovely,’ Miriam said, ‘if we could spend every evening together like this?’
Bill wasn’t sure that it would be lovely at all. It was beginning to dawn on him that he and Miriam didn’t know each other very well. Yes, they knew each other’s bodies – knew every inch of each other’s bodies, knew them inside out – but they had never done much talking; had never had the time. The affair had been going on for eleven months but tonight, quite unexpectedly, Bill felt that he was sitting with a stranger. He thought about Irene and found himself aching for her company: not for anything in particular she might say or do; just for her wordless, kindly presence. He thought about his son, about how he would feel if he could see his father in this ridiculous situation. And then he watched Miriam as she went to the bar for more drinks, and his body was galvanized, yet again, with the knowledge that he had somehow won the affection of this beautiful woman – this beautiful
young
woman, more to the point – and that tonight she was going to give herself to him, willingly. To him: not to any of the young designers she worked for, or the fitters who were always trying to chat her up in the social club, but to him, Bill Anderton, pushing forty, losing his hair. Other girls had fallen for him in the past, often enough, so clearly there was something about him, something they must have liked: but the thrill never quite went away, the thrill of knowing that he could still inspire those feelings, even with Miriam, even after eleven whole months…
If only she would stop looking at him that way.
‘Cheers,’ he said, raising his glass.
‘To us,’ she said, raising hers.
They smiled at each other, and drank, and then just a few seconds later she put her glass down and let out a convulsive sob and said: ‘I can’t go on like this, Bill, I just can’t.’
Soon afterwards she composed herself and they went in to dinner.
The dining room was vast, and empty. A waitress led them through the gloom to a far corner, lighting their way with a candle which she carried before her as if it were a torch, and which was then set down to flicker bravely on their table, partly no doubt as a romantic gesture but also, perhaps, in a futile attempt to ward off the swathes of funereal darkness that surrounded them. Buried somewhere in the walls was a speaker system through which John Denver’s ‘Annie’s Song’ dribbled out like primeval musical ooze. The base of the candlestick was encrusted with lumps of molten wax which Bill initially mistook for ice, so Arctic was the room temperature. They took it in turns to warm their hands at the flame of the candle, thereby finding a third use for it. Neither spoke much as they perused their menus, which were printed on enormous sheets of card, some two feet by eighteen inches, but seemed to offer only three choices, one of which was off.
Bill went for the mixed grill. Miriam chose the chicken-in-a-basket.
‘Do you want chips with that?’ the waitress asked.
‘What’s the alternative?’ asked Miriam.
‘Just chips,’ said the waitress.
‘Chips is fine,’ said Miriam, fighting back tears.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ said the waitress, concerned. ‘Do you not like chips?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Miriam, reaching for a tissue. ‘Really.’
‘She loves chips,’ said Bill. ‘Adores them, in fact. We both do. This is a purely personal matter. Please go away.’ Just as she was about to disappear into the encroaching shadows, he added: ‘And bring us a bottle of Blue Nun while you’re at it.’
He took out his own handkerchief and dabbed tenderly beneath Miriam’s eyes. She pushed him away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s this place. I know how you feel. It’s so depressing.’
‘It’s not that,’ said Miriam, sniffing. ‘It’s Irene. I want you to leave her. I want you to leave her and move in with me.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ said Bill. ‘I don’t believe this is happening.’
This was not a response to Miriam’s declaration – which he had been anticipating anyway, with growing dread – but to the arrival of a party of twelve men and a ferocious, tweedy woman at a nearby table. The men were a sullen-looking bunch: middle-aged for the most part, too poorly dressed to be businessmen, too weedy and unathletic to be rugby players. They were noisy but there was no boisterousness, no high spirits about them; and they all seemed to be terrified of the woman, who, after sitting down at the table, took out a monocle and clamped it over her right eye. It would have been an unprepossessing assembly, at the best of times. But this was the worst of times: for among their number, quite unmissably, was someone Bill recognized only too well. Someone he saw every day of the working week, and usually went out of his way to avoid. His brother-in-arms in the labour relations war, and personal
bête noire:
Roy Slater.
‘Don’t move,’ said Bill. ‘Don’t look around, and don’t say anything. We’re going to have to leave.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Miriam. ‘Did you hear what I just said to you?’
‘Of course I heard,’ said Bill. ‘And we’ll discuss it. I promise we’ll discuss it. But right now’ – he glanced over his shoulder, taking note, with some relief, of a velvet-wallpapered door in the wall behind them – ‘it’s time for a quick getaway. You know who Roy Slater is, don’t you?’
Miriam nodded, confused.
‘Well, he’s right behind you. And if we don’t get out of here in the next ten seconds, he’s going to see us.’
The dimness of the lighting was on their side, this time, and it was easy enough to leave their table and slip out through the door. They found themselves walking down a deserted corridor, past a number of dark, unused public rooms, until a fire exit gave them access to the hotel car park. The cold night air assaulted them brutally, without warning. Miriam actually cried out: a brief, uncontainable wail of distress. It was the shock, mainly, but also a hint of her despair at the way this longed-for evening was turning out.