by Jonathan Coe
“Hmm . . .” Doug didn’t seem very persuaded by any of this. “Well, I don’t know him as well as you do, of course: but I would have said he was unhappily married, hated being childless, and was completely unfulfilled in his professional and creative life. What about Lois?”
Paul reeled off some details quickly—that Lois was still living in York, still a university librarian, still married to Christopher—making it more and more clear as he did so that his brother’s and sister’s lives bored him almost to the point of disgust. When he noticed that Doug himself was doing his best to suppress a yawn, he said: “I know. They haven’t exactly set the world alight, have they, my siblings? Sends you to sleep just thinking about them.”
“It’s not that,” said Doug, rubbing his eyes. “We’ve got a new son. Ranulph. Five months old. I was up half the night with him.”
“Congratulations,” said Paul, dutifully.
“Well, you know, Frankie wanted another. That’s my—”
“Your wife. I know. The Honourable Francesca Gifford. Daughter of Lord and Lady Gifford of Shoscombe. Cheltenham and Brasenose College, Oxford. I looked her up in Debrett’s this afternoon.” He glanced at Doug, with an indefinable slyness in his eyes. “Married before, wasn’t she?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Amicable break-up?”
“What is this, an interview?” Doug had been pretending to study the wine list. Now he laid it down, seeming to conclude that if he had landed himself with the task of spending two or three hours in Paul’s company, he might as well make a go of it. “Basically, she only left him because he didn’t want any more kids. He’d had enough of the whole child-rearing thing: whereas she loves it, for some unknown reason. Loves the whole business. Loves being pregnant. Doesn’t even seem to mind the labour too much. Loves everything that comes afterwards. The visits from the midwife. The bathing, the nappy changing. All the paraphernalia—the slings, the pushchairs, the cots, the Moses baskets, the bottles, the sterilizers. She loves all that. Spends half her waking hours expressing, these days—hooked up to this milking machine that makes her look like a prize Jersey.” He blinked, apparently having some difficulty getting the image out of his head. “Gives me a completely different attitude to her breasts, I must say.”
“How many does she have now, then?”
“Just the two—same as everybody else.”
“Children, I mean.”
“Oh. Four, altogether. Two boys, two girls. All living at our place. Plus the nanny, of course.” Reflecting upon his current ménage like this never failed to depress Doug, or at least to make him feel obscurely guilty. Perhaps it was the thought of his mother, now widowed and still living alone in Rednal, and how small and lost she appeared whenever he managed to persuade Francesca to allow her to stay with them for a few days. He shook the thought away impatiently. “And Antonia must be—what? She must be three by now.”
“Yes, absolutely. What a retentive memory you have.”
“Hard to forget a baby who was named after the party leader, and managed to play such a big role in an election campaign when she was only a few months old. She must have visited more doorsteps than the postman that month.”
Paul sighed tiredly. “She was not named after Tony. That’s another stupid myth you journalists have dreamed up.” He added: “Listen, Douglas, if you’re just going to be cynical and hostile to me all evening, I don’t know that there’s much point in continuing with this.”
“I’m not entirely sure that I could see the point in the first place,” said Doug. “Why did you invite me here, exactly?”
And so Paul attempted to explain. Malvina had made him realize, he said, that in order to raise his media profile, he would have to start cultivating friendships with well-disposed journalists. What could be more natural, then, than a desire to renew his acquaintance with someone who had made a name for himself as one of the most highly regarded political commentators in the country, and who had been such an important figure to him throughout their schooldays together, back in the far-off, touchingly innocent days of the late 1970s?
“But we hated each other at school,” said Doug, smartly putting his finger on the only flaw in the proposal.
“I don’t think so,” said Paul, frowning and looking shocked. “Did we?”
“Of course we did. Well, for a start, everybody hated you—you must remember that.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because we all thought you were a creepy little right-wing shit.”
“OK, then—but it was nothing personal. So that means we can still be friends, doesn’t it, twenty years on?”
Doug scratched his head, genuinely baffled by the direction the conversation was taking. “Paul, the years haven’t made you any less weird, you know. What do you mean, ‘friends’? How could we ever be friends? What would this friendship consist of?”
“Well . . .” Paul had already worked out the answer to this. “Malvina thought, for instance, that since you and I had children of about the same age, we could maybe introduce them and see if they wanted to play together.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Doug: “your media adviser is suggesting that your children and my children should play together? I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous at all,” Paul insisted. “You and I have far more in common than we used to.”
“Such as?”
“Well, politically, for instance. We’re both on the same side now, aren’t we? We both agree, by and large, that the best hope for the prosperity of Britain and its people lies with the Labour party.”
“What on earth makes you think I believe that? Don’t you even read my stuff in the paper?”
“Oh, I know you have a few criticisms to make, here and there—”
“A few—?” Doug sputtered, brokenly, scattering the remnants of a pickle-laden poppadom over the tablecloth.
“—but on the whole it’s true, isn’t it? You subscribe, as I do, to the core beliefs and ideals of the New Labour revolution. Don’t you?”
“Well, I suppose I might,” said Doug, “if I could work out what the fuck they were.”
“Now you’re just being silly,” Paul muttered, sulkily.
“No I’m not.” Warming to his theme, Doug dismissed the waiter who was hovering at their table and continued: “What are your ‘core beliefs,’ Paul? Tell me. I’m curious. Genuinely.”
“Do you mean mine, personally? Or the party’s?”
“Either. Anyway, I’m assuming they’re the same.”
“Well . . .” For the first time that evening, Paul seemed to be lost for words. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “What did you send that guy away for? I was just ready to order.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
Paul wriggled in his seat. “Well, look here, Doug, you’re asking me to reduce a very broad, very complex set of beliefs to some easy formula, and it just can’t—”
“The ‘third way,’ for instance,” Doug prompted.
“What?”
“The ‘third way.’ You’re always banging on about it. What is it?”
“What is it?”
“Yes.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, ‘What is it?’ It’s a simple enough question.”
“Really, Douglas,” said Paul, dabbing at his lips with a napkin, even though he hadn’t eaten anything yet, “I can’t help thinking you’re being very naive about this.”
“What is it? That’s all I want to know.”
“Well, OK.” He wriggled a little more, then sat up straight, then drummed his fingers on the table. “Well, it’s an alternative. An alternative to the sterile, worn-out dichotomy between left and right.” He looked to Doug for some sort of reaction, but saw nothing. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“It sounds like a very good thing. It sounds like something we’ve all been trying to find for years. And you guys managed to come up wi
th it in a weekend, as far as I can see. What are you going to turn up next? The philosopher’s stone? The Ark of the Covenant? What else has Tony got hidden down the back of a sofa at Chequers?”
For a second or two it looked as though Paul was finally going to lose his temper. But all he said was: “Are our children going to play together or not?”
Doug laughed. “OK, if you want.” He caught the waiter’s eye and called him back again. “Do you want to know why? Because I reckon that one of these days, there’s going to be some story about you, and it’s going to be so huge, so fucking scandalous . . . And I want to be around when it breaks.” He smiled combatively. “That’s it. That’s the only reason.”
“Good enough for me,” said Paul. “And it proves my point, after all.” When Doug looked at him in surprise, he explained: “We do have something in common—ambition. You don’t want to stay in the same job all your life, do you?”
“No,” said Doug, “I suppose I don’t. But a little birdy tells me I’ve got a promotion coming up anyway.”
And then, having at last reached an understanding of sorts, they moved on to the more pressing business of ordering food.
Paul returned to his flat in Kennington shortly after eleven. During the week, he lived on the third floor of a converted terrace a few streets away from the Oval cricket ground. This meant that Susan and Antonia were left alone, four nights out of seven, at their country home—a barn conversion on the semi-rural outskirts of his Midlands constituency. This arrangement caused him some pangs of guilt, occasionally (the house was fairly isolated, and he knew that Susan had not yet managed to make many friends in the area), but otherwise it suited him very well. Essentially, he lived like a bachelor, but with the added safety net of a welcoming family life, in which he could take refuge whenever he started to feel stressed out or lonely. The best of all possible worlds.
Susan did not have a key to his London flat. A few days ago, however, he had arranged to have one cut for Malvina. She had seemed nonplussed when he presented it to her, and had asked, “What’s this for?” “You might need it,” Paul had answered, meaninglessly, and had then kissed her on the cheek, for the third time in their friendship. As before, she had not recoiled from the kiss; nor had she returned it, exactly. He could not imagine what she made of these gestures—either the kiss, or the gift of the key—and he was not sure, for that matter, whether he really understood them himself. He had not yet admitted to himself how attracted he was to Malvina, or what a large part that attraction had had to play in the decision to employ her. None the less, this attraction was real, and it determined much of his recent behaviour, however incapable he was of owning up to it. In truth Paul would have liked nothing more, now, than to feel the responsibility for his actions being taken out of his own hands, to allow himself to be swept away on a wave of passion that someone else had set in motion. In short, he was waiting for Malvina to do something that she would never do: to throw herself at him.
As he opened the door to his flat that night, therefore, Paul felt a tingle of anticipation: for, ever since he had given Malvina the key, he had been half-expecting to encounter what he liked to call a “James Bond moment.” By this he meant something approximating the scene in countless James Bond films where the hero returns to his hotel room late at night in an exotic foreign location, and turns on the light only to find that his bed is already occupied by a naked femme fatale, who stirs languidly between the sheets and invites him to join her by purring some sleepily seductive line. Being blessed, in his more alcohol-fuelled flights of fancy, with something of the suave sexual magnetism of Ian Fleming’s legendary creation, Paul continued to hope that it was only a matter of time before something similar happened to him.
Tonight, however, he was again disappointed. His bedroom remained inexplicably Malvina-less, and when he texted her to ask where she was and what she was doing, he received no answer. There was nothing for it but to phone Susan, listen impatiently to her long narrative of the minutiae of her day, and ask her to kiss Antonia for him. Then, after reflecting that his dinner with Doug had been much more successful than he had expected, he fell into a deep and self-satisfied sleep.
25
A little over two weeks later, on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 15th, 2000, the first edition of the Evening Mail hit Birmingham’s streets bearing the stark headline, “STABBED IN THE BACK.”
The accompanying story made for grim reading. It appeared that the car manufacturer Rover was to be sold off by its German owner, BMW, resulting in huge job losses at the Longbridge factory just outside Birmingham. This in spite of the fact that its future had recently been assured—so everybody thought—by a grant of £152 million from the government the previous year, and in spite of repeated promises from the BMW management that they had every intention of keeping the ailing company afloat. The Labor MP for Northfield, Richard Burden, was promptly quoted as saying: “It would be a gross breach of faith if BMW deviates from its stated plans for Longbridge. This has been a bolt out of the blue. This is playing with the lives of the 50,000 people whose jobs depend on Longbridge. BMW has made a commitment to the British people and the British people have made a commitment to them. It is up to both sides to keep those commitments.”
Next day, towards the end of the afternoon, Philip Chase logged off his computer at the Birmingham Post early and drove out to Longbridge, wishing to gauge for himself the mood of the workforce and the local residents. His colleagues on the Business Desk had flown over to Munich that morning, to be present at a press conference with the BMW management team. The news being sent back simply got worse and worse. It seemed that even Land Rover, the most prestigious part of the Rover empire, was to be disposed of, while the Longbridge plant itself was being offered for sale to a small venture capitalist firm called Alchemy Partners, who had already announced their intention to lay off the vast majority of workers, retaining just enough to keep the company going as a small-volume producer of specialist sports cars. The rest of the factory site was to be completely redeveloped, probably as residential property: but who was going to want to live in that community any longer, if there was no industry to sustain it?
There was not much activity at the gates to the South Works that afternoon. A keen March wind was blowing, the sky was grey and puffy with clouds, and the few departing workers Philip managed to detain all had more or less the same thing to say: they were “gutted,” or “devastated”; the decision was a “slap in the face” from those “German bastards.” Within a few minutes, Philip’s job was done: these quotes would serve his purpose, even if he could just as easily have made them up at his desk. He didn’t want to leave, though. It felt as though history was unfolding here: dismal, melancholy history, to be sure, but still something that demanded to be witnessed, and recorded. Pulling his raincoat tightly around him against the encroaching cold, he began to walk uphill along the Bristol Road. Shortly before reaching the 62 bus terminus, he turned right and made for The Old Hare and Hounds pub, pushing open its doors and, at first, not recognizing the interior: for the place had been redesigned, since he had last been there, to attract a middle-class clientele, and instead of ancient oak tables and an almost impenetrable half-light, he found a number of smaller, more welcoming seating areas, with books on the walls and fake log fires in every corner.
Squeezed into one of these corners was a group of at least twenty men, all discussing the latest developments from Munich in tones of subdued but palpable fury. Philip wandered over and introduced himself. Many of them knew his name and, as he had expected, they were more than happy to talk to a local journalist. Before long they were discussing the initial responses of the media and the Labour party to the evolving crisis, and a good deal of approval was voiced for the comments already made by Richard Burden. At which point somebody asked: “What about Trotter?”
“Who?” said at least four or five voices around the table.
“Paul Trotter. What’s he got to say about
it?”
“His constituency’s miles from here.”
“Yeah, but he’s a local lad, isn’t he? Grew up round here. I can remember when his dad worked at the factory. What’s he got to say about it?”
“Well, we can find that out easily enough,” said Philip, taking out his mobile. “I’ll give him a call.”
He retrieved Paul’s number from the SIM card memory and hit the dial button. On the fourth or fifth ring, a female voice answered. Philip introduced himself as a journalist from the Post who had once been at school with the MP, and after a certain amount of confusion he was put through.
“I was just wondering,” he said to Paul, “what your reaction was to the news from Birmingham yesterday.”
There was a short silence in the pub, while the men round the table leaned forward, attempting vainly to hear Paul’s words. Philip’s expression was neutral at first, then puzzled.
“Can I just get things clear, Paul?” he asked, before hanging up. “You’re saying that you’re happy about this announcement, are you?” There were just a few more loud, decisive words from the other end of the line; after which, there was a decidedly quizzical note in Philip’s voice as he said: “OK, Paul, thanks for your comments. Good luck for tonight. ’Bye now.”
He clipped the phone shut and laid it on the table in front of him, frowning deeply.
“Well?” someone asked.
Philip looked around him at the circle of attentive faces, and told his listeners, in a tone of wonderment. “He said it was good news for the industry, good news for Birmingham and good news for the whole country.”
When Philip phoned, Paul was sitting in the dressing room of a television studio on the South Bank in central London, his cheeks pink with newly applied blusher. Longbridge was the last thing on his mind, as it happened. He was actually practising the delivery of a joke about chocolate.
