The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  “A record,” said Benjamin.

  “She’ll hate it,” said Doug, moving on. “Don’t tell me what it is, I don’t need to know. I just know that she’ll hate it.”

  “Mmn, lovely,” said Jennifer, pulling off the wrapping paper. “What an unusual present.”

  Benjamin had bought her Voices and Instruments, one of the new releases on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label. One side consisted of some e. e. cummings poems set to music by John Cage, sung by Robert Wyatt and Carla Bley. On the other, a Birmingham musician, Jan Steele, had composed some minimalist settings of texts by James Joyce.

  “I know you said you wanted the Evita record,” said Benjamin, “but you weren’t serious, were you?”

  “This is much nicer,” said Jennifer.

  For her birthday treat, they went to see Star Wars, which had just opened at the Odeon New Street. It was Jennifer’s choice. They sat in the back row but one and waited patiently through the first ten minutes of trailers and local adverts, then gave up and started French kissing instead.

  “King William’s Prefect In Public Snogging Scandal,” said a voice behind them.

  Benjamin turned and saw that he was sitting in front of Ives, the annoying little curly-haired second-former he had met with Harding in the Gerald Hill Studio last year.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. “Haven’t you got homework to do?”

  “Keep quiet, or I’ll tell Chiefy,” said Ives.

  Afterwards, they went to the fish and chip shop in Hill Street and talked about the film. Benjamin thought it was all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Jennifer said it was the best film she had ever seen. They agreed to differ.

  They said goodbye at the Navigation Street bus stops with an ambiguous kiss: too long to be formal, too brief to be passionate. Jennifer was a good kisser but Doug’s words had already taken on a haunting quality, and Benjamin found himself wondering, on the journey home, whether he would ever get another glimpse of the breasts he had clasped unknowingly for those dark sleepy hours three weeks ago.

  She didn’t call him “Tiger” any more, either. That wasn’t a good sign.

  23

  you are the very personification of narcissistic obliquity

  your effrontery and culpability are beyond the terminus of

  legitimate forbearance

  I abhor and depreciate your supercilious carnality

  your contrivance was simply to mesmerize her with your

  meticulosity and dilettantism

  you are a syphilitic, leucodermatous, febrile, pyretic and fistular

  marasmus

  Bill clutched tightly at his coffee cup and looked around him. The décor was austere, imposing, designed to intimidate. The hotel’s oak-panelled walls reminded him of a club room; they might even have called to mind the Carlton Club room at King William’s School, had he ever seen it. The message they sent out to visitors was the same: don’t mess with us; we have been here for a long time; decisions have been made here; the conversations of the influential and the elect have echoed around these walls. You may stand here awhile, but soon you will go. You do not belong.

  peccable

  scrofulous

  obscurantist

  charlatanism

  unctuosity

  pinguescence

  persiflage

  spavined

  suppurate

  improbity

  fustigate

  compurgation

  scorbutic

  malignancy

  There were about twenty-five people drinking coffee in the back room. Outside, in the conference hall, there were another seven hundred waiting to be addressed by British Leyland’s new Chairman, Michael Edwardes. The audience contained many national union officials as well as Leyland shop stewards. The twenty-five in the back room were considered among the most influential. Michael Edwardes himself was there, looking nervous but resolute.

  Bill should have been talking to his colleagues, gearing himself up for the speech ahead, which was sure to be important. Edwardes would be talking to the workforce about the state of the company as he saw it, explaining the decisions which he and his advisory board had been making, in private, over the last few weeks. There were bound to be redundancies. Bill should have been focusing on these issues but instead a weariness was lying over him this morning. He was already seeing his own defeat, and Edwardes’s victory, as inevitable. And he was thinking about a conversation he had had the day before. A Pakistani worker, Zulfiqar Rashid, had come to ask him about the television interview Margaret Thatcher had given two nights previously (the night of Benjamin’s first, abortive litter duty). What had she meant, Zulfiqar wanted to know, when she said that the British people were beginning to feel “rather swamped” by different cultures? Was immigration really going to be halted under a Tory government? His wife and three children were still in Lahore. They were planning to come and join him in Birmingham in two or three years’ time. Was this no longer going to be possible if Mrs. Thatcher became Prime Minister? Were his wife and children—were his skills, for that matter—wanted in Britain or not?

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Bill had said. “The Labour Party will be re-elected anyway.” But he had known that he was lying.

  Sam picked up the telephone. Barbara was out shopping, and he was alone in the house. It was ten to eleven. He knew that this was the time for morning break at King William’s. He knew that for the next twenty minutes, the teachers would be relaxing and drinking coffee in their common room.

  He looked down at the list of phrases he had been composing for the last three nights.

  your contemptibly inelastic fealty to the twin malpractices of

  sensualism and dissipation stimulates only my profoundest, most

  hypogeal and bathyphilous inculpation

  He dialled the number of the school and listened to the ringing tone. The Chief Master’s secretary answered the telephone and he asked to be put straight through to Mr. Miles Plumb.

  market share

  contingency

  lack of production output

  over-manning

  efficient management

  product strategy

  corporate plan

  executive meetings

  over-capacity

  reduced scale of operations

  dinosaur

  de-manning

  Sam could hear the hum of conversation in the Common Room, the clinking of cups, the creaking of chairs. The voice had said “I’ll just go and find him,” without giving any indication of how long it was likely to take. The seconds were ticking by. He had been waiting a minute and a half at least.

  your insouciant ruttishness is tantamount to nymphomania

  you are a temerarious poltroon, a rebarbative mooncalf, a

  pixilated dunderhead and a milksop of unmitigated flagitiousness

  The words were beginning to lurch and blur in front of his eyes. The phrases which had sounded so impressive when he had mouthed them to himself in the half-light of the living room at two o’clock in the morning now seemed forced and inadequate. He had no idea what some of them meant. And yet he had to meet this man on his own terms. He had to employ the same tools that Miles himself had used to draw Barbara away from him.

  He could hear footsteps approaching at the other end of the line.

  the time has come when we simply have to face up

  to the situation

  The atmosphere in the hall was sombre, attentive; almost funereal.

  difficult, and no doubt unpopular choices will have to be made

  Bill was one of the few people in the audience who knew how

  much was at stake this morning. What they were listening to

  was not a simple statement of beliefs. Just a few minutes before

  taking the floor, Michael Edwardes had announced to the dele-

  gates in the back room that he would be calling for a vote of

  confide
nce at the end of his speech. He was going to present his

  case, cloaked in these terms of agonized reasonableness, and

  then call for it to be endorsed after allowing only a few minutes

  for the shop stewards, unrehearsed and unprepared, to present

  their counter-arguments. They were being shrewdly out-

  manoeuvred.

  a painful but necessary process of de-manning

  Painful for whom?

  something in the region of twelve and a half thousand jobs

  Bill tensed in his chair, expecting uproar. He heard one or two rapid intakes of breath, but that was all. His Brothers were silent. Two rows behind him, Colin Trotter was nodding in melancholy agreement. He could see the logic behind all this. Bill could see the logic too, but he hated it, hated it with a passionate vengeance that had driven him onwards in the past but today just seemed to flatten and exhaust him. He caught Derek Robinson’s eye and they exchanged a long, dispirited glance.

  “Yes?” said the voice on the telephone.

  So this was it, then; the long-awaited moment of confrontation.

  agapistic libertine

  nefarious subterfuge

  abominable philanderer

  invidious entanglement

  nyctalopic cuckold

  “Is that Mr. Plumb?”

  “It is.”

  “This is Sam Chase here. Barbara’s husband.”

  sanctimonious

  attitudinizer

  deviationist

  tergiversator

  prophylactic

  febrifugal

  incandescence

  cruciation

  legerdemain

  apoplexy

  shenanigans

  There was a long silence. Neither man seemed to have anything to say to the other. Sam tried to form the words, but they wouldn’t come. More than a year’s worth of frustration and resentment boiled up inside him, but he had no means of expressing it. It was more than he could bear.

  “Do you have something to say to me?” Mr. Plumb asked. “Is it your intention that we should be the participants in some sort of colloquy?”

  Furious at his opponent but even more at himself, Sam crumpled up the sheets of paper, screwed his eyes tight shut, and instinctively, without thinking about it, blew the longest and loudest raspberry he had ever blown in his life.

  He had to admit, on later, more sober reflection, that it had not been his finest hour. It was hardly the action of a mature and articulate man. But it seemed to have done the trick. There had been a shocked pause, the line had gone suddenly dead and neither he nor Barbara ever heard from Sugar Plum Fairy again.

  The delegates spilled out of the conference hall, into the hotel’s grounds and the February sunshine. A crowd of journalists was standing by and they surrounded Michael Edwardes eagerly. He was exhausted, but beaming. His speech had been a triumph. His words had won the day. The meeting had voted by 715 to five in favour of his proposals. A few “extreme militants” had tried to oppose them, but nobody had listened. The restructuring of British Leyland was under way.

  Bill sat on a warm patch of low wall and gazed out over the ornamental garden. He heard footsteps approaching across the loose gravel and looked up to see his friend and fellow-steward Derek Robinson standing over him.

  “We fight this, Bill,” said the man soon—very soon—to be demonized in the newspapers as “Red Robbo,” and to be sacked by Michael Edwardes for trying to orchestrate protests against his programme of redundancies. “We fight this every inch of the way.”

  “Of course we do,” said Bill.

  Derek looked at him with searching, worried eyes, and said, “Don’t lose the faith, Bill,” before walking away.

  A coach was waiting to take the men back to Longbridge. Bill checked to see whether Sam Chase was the driver. He would have liked to chat with Sam. But it was somebody else.

  “You might as well head off,” he said to the driver. “I think I’m going to stay here for a while.”

  The crowd was breaking up. Michael Edwardes had been whisked away in a chauffeured car, and the journalists had followed. Bill wandered back into the hotel’s gloomy interior and stared around, not knowing what to do next. Colin Trotter and a group of other junior managers were drinking pints of bitter and gin and tonics at a table in a corner of the bar. Once again, the dark wood panelling and the air of conspiratorial good humour between these men made Bill think of a club, a gentleman’s club. The sort of club to which you had to be elected but nobody ever told you the rules, nobody ever explained why some people were in and others were out. So what would this one be called? The Bosses’ Club? The Scoundrels’ Club? The Liars’ Club?

  Twelve and a half thousand redundancies. A painful but necessary process. He pitied the management their twinges of conscience, those long, distressing meetings, the salaried anguish of executive decision-making, and thought too about the weeks and months and maybe lifetimes of hardship and hopelessness that so many thousands of his men were going to face in the bitter, market-driven era to come. Was there anything he could do about it, now that everyone had swallowed the pill like trusting children and voted themselves out of a livelihood? Oh, yes, there had been plenty of days, good days, and not so long ago, when he truly believed that the struggle could be won; but the decade was old now and he was growing old with it, and he knew that those days would never come back, any more than those days of hot, secret pleasure with Miriam Newman would ever come back, any more than Miriam herself would ever come back from the dead.

  24

  14 October, 1981

  Exeter

  Dear Chiara (as I must learn to call you now),

  A grey and miserable day here. Howling wind coming in o f the sea. Amazing how it can reach even as far as campus and make the air wet and salty. I am sitting in the library—the only person here, as far as I can make out— watching fat drops of moisture race, or rather stagger, down the window-panes. An anthology of worthy critical writings on eighteenth-century poetry open on my desk, along with a few volumes of Pope and Gray, all of them unread. Where is everybody? Is there a vital lecture I’m missing, or something? Anyway, I’d much rather be writing to you than thinking about boring old rhyming couplets.

  And how is autumn in Mantova? Exquisite, I’m sure. I have a vivid image of you in your new life. You are sitting at a café in some piazza, sitting beneath a colonnade, drinking cappuccino. The autumn leaves are flapping across the flagstones. An old woman dressed in black is pushing her bicycle across the square, her basket full of bread and tomatoes and cheese and milk. And there’s a crowd of darkly handsome Italian boys clustered around their motorbikes in the corner, and they’re looking at this beautiful enigmatic student who’s just arrived from England and they’re talking about her and they’re arguing about who’s going to ask her out first. And there’s a bell sounding from the campanile, and . . . OK, so it’s nothing like that at all, I’m just piling cliché on to cliché, but I can be allowed my little fantasies, can’t I, on this dismal Devon morning?

  Incidentally, are you planning to revert to being plain Claire when you come back to England? But no, you could never be plain.

  Well, so Philip is going to come and see you in a few weeks’ time. It seems we have both managed to surprise each other with news of impending visitors. You and Philip, though? Wonders will never cease. Yes, of course, I know there is nothing in it, he’s a friend, he’s coming to stay with you in Italy for a few days: what’s the big deal? There was just something about the way you mentioned it in your letter. Anyway, you will have a very good time, I’m sure. He’s very sweet, good company, etc. I’ve always thought that. Of all of us who worked on the magazine in those days he was probably the nicest and least complicated—wouldn’t you agree?

  Which is more than can be said for Benjamin.

  Yes, I’m surprised that he’s coming to see me, as well, even for a long weekend. I think I just wore him down with two ye
ars’ worth of endless, persistent invitations. Now that it’s finally happening I find I’m terribly nervous about it. I mean—Benjamin? For two and a half days? What are we going to talk about? What would you talk about to Benjamin for two and a half hours or even minutes? Can I stand a whole weekend of those long mysterious silences, those aeons of depressive staring out of the window while he slowly ransacks his brain for the mot juste with which to answer your latest question, which was probably something along the lines of “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Oh, I know, I’m being unfair, dreadfully unfair. We were all fond of Benjamin. I know you were, especially. And perhaps Oxford has opened him up no end. (Ha! OK, so that rates low on the scale of probability.) And, to stop being facetious for a moment, there were reasons why he always looked so sad and thoughtful, I think. In fact I know there were. Benjamin had hidden depths, if you must know. I glimpsed them once.

  Actually I have never told anybody this story, but hey, it’s ten-thirty in the morning, all my friends have disappeared somewhere without me, the library is deserted and I’ve got a whole pad of blank A4 just waiting to be filled up. If I’m ever going to tell it to anybody, I might as well tell it to you, now.

  It’s rather horrible, to be honest. And it’s more about his sister, Lois, than about Benjamin himself. That’s the part I’ll come to at the end, though.

  It happened . . . goodness, three and a half years ago. How time has started to slip away from us, already! February, 1978, if my memory is correct. Just after he had started that appallingly unsuitable a fair with Jennifer Hawkins. The less said about that the better.

  Do you remember Mr. Tillotson, and the Walking Option? I don’t think you were ever a member. It started as a Boys’ School thing, a sort of remedial home for the terminally unathletic, but then some girls were allowed to join too and it became much more popular, as you can imagine. All sorts of naughtiness used to go on but that’s another story altogether. The standing joke about it was that we all used to get lost every week and like all good jokes this one was completely true: Mr. Tillotson was a sweetie but he couldn’t read a map to save his life. After a while we all became quite curious about how soon we would get lost and how long for, and some people would even be taking bets on it. It all added to the fun.