Gull (8 page)

On one of these walks, early in the new year, after a working lunch with his senior managers in the Conway (left as usual largely untouched: Randall noted that his was not the only appetite to shrivel in the presence of such fastidiousness), DeLorean was delivering his customary apology for having to leave when he suddenly stopped.

‘We need a house,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘Cristina and I, a permanent base here. Somewhere we can put visitors too when we are not around, let them relax a bit more than they can in a hotel.’

‘Right.’

‘It would need to be...’

‘Private,’ Randall was about to say.
‘Pretty secure.’

‘Of course.’

‘Some of these people might not have been here before, they might be a little nervous.’

‘There is one place I can think of straight off,’ Randall said. ‘It’s not far. I can go with you in the car and point it out.’

DeLorean thought a moment, looked at his watch. ‘Tell you what, wire me some pictures. You have experience in this field, right? I trust your judgement.’

And with that he was in the car and away again.

Warren House was not far at all, standing as it did at the northern tip of a more or less equilateral triangle whose other vertices were the factory site and the Conway itself. Randall had caught glimpses of it through the trees – multi-paned sash windows, ivy in profusion – long before he noticed the For Sale sign at the end of the lane that led up to it off the main Belfast road. Only after he had mentioned it to DeLorean and had phoned the real estate company to request a brochure did he realise that it was the same house he had looked at, albeit with a little less ivy, who knows how many times in a book on the hotel’s reception desk. Turns out it too used to belong to the family that owned Conway House – all the large houses in the district seemed to have belonged to them once upon a time although few of them had had such a curious and colourful afterlife.

The most recent occupants had been a chapter of the Plymouth Brethren – a sect Randall had hitherto mistakenly imagined was a uniquely American phenomenon. ‘They are like hermit crabs, that crowd,’ the real estate agent said when he took Randall to see the house. Lee Bell, he had told Randall his name was: ‘Three ls, three es and a B and that’s me, nine Scrabble points.’ He wore large-framed glasses that, when you looked at him head on, had the disconcerting effect (even more disconcerting after his mention of crabs) of making his eyes appear to bulge out at either side. ‘They will move in practically anywhere, even somebody else’s church building, although they tell me they don’t believe in churches. Make sense of that if you can.’

There were still chairs arranged non-hierarchically in a circle in the drawing room, it being another guiding principle of the Brethren, Lee Bell explained (‘the things you learn in this job’), that no man had a right to be raised above, or seated at the head of another.

‘You’re welcome to keep anything here you think is of use.’

Randall was still staring at the non-hierarchical circle. Whatever it was Lee Bell read in his expression – clearly not suppressed amusement (non-hierarchical circles? DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd?) – he started stacking the chairs. ‘Not these, obviously, but anything else – fixtures, fittings...’ He gave Randall the benefit of his full, distended regard. ‘Or you can have the whole place gutted.’

‘Are you kidding me?
Gutted?
’

Lee Bell shrugged. ‘Well, you never know with people,’ he said, as though referring to a species distinct from real estate agents.

Randall roamed the house with his camera while in the drawing room Lee Bell caught up with paperwork, or tried to think of names with a lower Scrabble value. Several of the six bedrooms showed signs of damp; the plug sockets throughout were mounted directly on to the wooden baseboard and would have to be replaced; the kitchen looked to have been equipped by people who did not believe in food any more than churches or priests, and as for the bathroom, OK, so it was an old house, but Randall had been in more sophisticated outhouses. Nevertheless, those first few photographs were all that was needed to convince DeLorean, although Randall still returned repeatedly over the weeks that followed to take more pictures – of the plaster mouldings and cornices as well as the baseboards, of the door- and window-frames, the mantels and the fire surrounds – which he sent back along with detailed reports of sunrise and sunset (the dining room got the benefit of the latter) and even cuttings from the shrubs growing nearest to the house.

The instructions that he received in return had, he suspected, more than a little of the hand of Maur Dubin in them; Maur at his most whimsical and Margaret-Mitchell-inspired. The bathroom faucets were shipped from Harrods in London, only Harrods in London apparently stocking the style of faucet that fit with his vision, or the DeLoreans’, for the house. The label on the box said gold. Randall very much doubted it. They would not have been to his taste, that was for sure, but then Randall did not have to live with them. Or did not imagine he would have to.

It was DeLorean himself on his next but one trip across – he had flown into London from Salt Lake City, whatever had him in Utah – who suggested that Randall move in, temporarily of course, while the renovations were still being carried out. ‘There is nothing brings a house to life like human beings in it.’

‘It’s a really kind offer, but...’

DeLorean stopped him. ‘Really kind offers never require a but. Besides, you would be doing me a big, big favour.’

And big, big favours, Randall knew, did not admit of refusals, however polite.

*

Friday night in the Conway Hotel was supper dance night. Saturday was wedding day. The former varied little, only the name on the pegboards outside the function room doors distinguished this week’s brown suits and fur stoles (Friends School Old Girls Association) from last’s (Derriaghy & District Indoor Bowling League); the latter, between the white tuxedos and the blue velvet, the peach organza and the turquoise tulle, to say nothing of the hats, the hats, the
hats
, were an advertisement for the inexhaustible variety of the human imagination.

Randall was sitting in a secluded corner of the lounge bar late on the rainy Saturday afternoon before he moved across to Warren House, reading a magazine he had picked up in the lobby, when a man in a grey morning suit, an arrangement of a white rose and something purple in his buttonhole, rested his whiskey tumbler on the edge of the table.

‘Do you mind?’ he said, his hand on the back of the seat facing Randall. He could have had his pick of two dozen others.

‘Not at all.’

‘I was worried I might be disturbing you.’

He gestured towards the magazine. Randall showed him the cover.
Homes and Gardens
. He laughed. ‘Actually, you’re saving me. You’re with the wedding party, I take it.’

The man looked down the length of himself, as though surprised all over again by his get-up and the reason for it. ‘It’s my daughter’s getting married.’

‘Well that’s great.’

‘Better now the speech is out of the way,’ said the man, shaking the hand that Randall had offered in congratulation.

‘I should buy you a drink.’

‘Thanks, but I’m OK with this. I have a long night of it ahead of me.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘To tell you the truth, it was the wife’s sister asked me to come over.’

Randall looked past him, half expecting to see a face he recognised (though whose that would be he couldn’t think), half dreading the one he did not. All he saw, though, was the archway through to the rest of the bar, the doors to the function room beyond.

‘She’s’ – picking his words with care – ‘on her own.’

‘Oh, listen, that’s really thoughtful,’ Randall said, then worried that even that could be construed as an acceptance. This guy was – what? Fifty? Fifty-five? And he was trying to set him up with his spinster sister-in-law? ‘I mean, it’s just, I have a couple of calls I have to make back home, to the US.’

The man held up his hands. ‘You don’t have to say anything more. Totally understand. I told her I would come over and I did. No harm done, I hope.’

‘None at all.’

The man pushed back his chair, but only, it seemed, to inspect his shoes. Shiny like he clearly didn’t believe.

‘Have you children yourself?’

‘One,’ said Randall, ‘but...’

‘Wee boy, wee girl?’

‘Girl, but...’

‘That’s lovely.’ It was worse than trying to deflect DeLorean in full flow. Randall gave up trying. ‘You know though you’ll get your eye wiped, don’t you? You tell yourself you won’t, but you will, guaranteed.’ He leaned forward and clicked the rim of his glass against Randall’s. ‘Girls. They’re too well able for us.’

The man returned to the wedding, Randall to his magazine, although he was barely even looking at the pictures. A little later, passing the doors of the function room, he saw the man dancing with his daughter (ivory taffeta with lace neck) and, truly, a prouder man never trod a dance floor. Randall lingered a while in the doorway trying to imagine. Tamsin had still been at the clomping stage the last time he had led her round a floor – round and round and round and round – to... what? ‘Our House’? Surely not. Too neat, though she had loved it then: ‘Now everything is easy ’cause of you and our la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la...’

He actually shook his head to wipe the picture.

At a table at the top of the room a woman was sitting alone, wearing the same corsage as the bride’s father, but younger than him by a good twenty years, and beautiful. She caught Randall’s eye, held it a moment. His hand started up in a wave but before it had arrived she had set her mouth and looked away. Sorry, buster, no second chances.

The warren from which the name derived faced his new home across a steep-sided valley, the shallow Derriaghy River making its unhurried way across the bottom. Randall quickly realised that this was the hill where he had seen the teenage boys passing the bottles between them on the day he arrived in Belfast. Most weekend mornings and a fair few mornings in between he awoke to the sight of their debris – theirs or their fellow enthusiasts – the green glass, the empty tins, bent in the middle – and once saw a rabbit, as though remotely conjured, appear out of a striped plastic bag into which it had apparently crawled in hopes of grass greener than that which lay all around it.

On another side of the house work had already begun to clear the ground for a new private road giving direct access to the factory site, in contravention, no doubt, of all Brethren strictures about raising any one man above another, though not – Randall had sought reassurance from Jennings on the point – of the terms of the British government’s grants. ‘I suppose if it improves efficiency...’

‘And security,’ said Randall, who could not help but see the lane up from the main road through DeLorean’s eyes, although he had once or twice on his own account wished as he turned on to it that he had about him the lump hammer from the Conway’s security hut.

He had been in the house little more than a fortnight when the Labour Prime Minister, Callaghan, lost a vote of confidence in the British Houses of Parliament and was forced to call an election for the start of May.

Several times during the campaign Randall, remembering Jennings’s warning, voiced his concerns to DeLorean as poll after poll suggested the Conservatives were winning over voters with their ad campaign, a long serpentine line of the unemployed dwarfed by the slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working.’

‘It is in Belfast,’ DeLorean said.

Randall pointed out that, from what he had seen of it, Belfast, Northern Ireland generally, was incidental to the election campaign, aside from promises – stock-sounding even to a newcomer and varying little from party to party – to get tougher with the IRA. Neither Labour, nor the Tories, nor the smaller Liberal Party were fielding candidates in the Northern Irish constituencies.

‘Which kind of makes you wonder what they wanted with it in the first place,’ said DeLorean.

Randall listened to the radio long into the election night as the results came in, first a trickle then a torrent, entranced by both the place names – the Wrekin, Sutton Coldfield, Epping Forest, Thanet East, Thanet West, Angus South, Clitheroe, Cirencester and Tewkesbury – and by the repetition of the commentary: Conservatives gain, Conservatives hold, Conservatives hold on an increased majority, swing of 9.9 per cent from Labour red to Tory blue. The outcome was beyond doubt long before sun-up. Jennings and the opinion polls were right. Callaghan – Mason – and Labour were out, the Conservatives, Thatcher and whoever she decided on as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland were in.

*

Robert did not much like Margaret Thatcher, but he liked that buffoon Jim Callaghan even less. To his mind
anybody
would have been an improvement.

‘Even a woman, you mean?’

‘Oh, come on, Liz, Margaret Thatcher’s never a woman, she’s a man in a dress.’

Liz was not sure what to make of it all. She had long ago given up on politicians in this part of the world – take your pick from old men, angry men, or angry old men – and the ones across the water always seemed, and not just by virtue of the water, remote. Part of her responded to the sound of a woman (whatever Robert called her) commanding attention, shouting down the hecklers – encouraging them in order to shout them down was how it sometimes came across – but another, larger part feared Thatcher’s certainty. Liz’s granny had a saying (her granny had a store of sayings; it was, besides her children, the principal achievement of her life): the higher you build your tower the harder it is to climb down.

Margaret Thatcher by the sound of her was still building and had no intention of stopping any time soon.

*

Turned out what had DeLorean in Utah earlier in the year was Imps and Sprytes – Thokiol Imps and Sprytes, to be precise: specialist snow vehicles built in Logan by a company that had got a lucky break in the Space Shuttle programme and were looking to offload their terrestrial holdings at a price that was too good to pass up, even for a man with a new high-concept sports car on his hands.