‘Is that what our French amigo was driving at?’
‘He was disappointing, I thought. I told Payroll to give him dollars instead of pounds, and cancel the cheque if he complained.’
‘Pounds being the real thing, and dollars the replica, but after a while the real thing becomes the replica?’
‘Very good, Mark. Very good. Worthy of Martha, to offer praise.’ He squeezed his Special Consultant’s shoulder. ‘But enough of this jolly cut-and-thrust. The question we have to address is where.’
A map of the British Isles had been laid out on the Battle Table, and Sir Jack’s Co-ordinating Committee stared at the jigsaw of counties, wondering if it were better to be completely wrong or completely right. Probably neither. Sir Jack, now perambulating behind their backs, gave them a hint.
‘England, as the mighty William and many others have observed, is an island. Therefore, if we are serious, if we are seeking to offer the thing itself, we in turn must go in search of a precious whatsit set in a silver doodah.’
They peered at the map as if cartography was a dubious new invention. There seemed either too much choice or too little. Perhaps some daredevil conceptual leap was called for. ‘You’re not, by any chance, thinking … Scotland, are you?’ A heavily bronchial sigh indicated that, No, dunderhead, Sir Jack was not thinking Scotland.
‘The Scillies?’
‘Too far.’
‘The Channel Islands?’
‘Too French.’
‘Lundy Island?’
‘Refresh my memory.’
‘Famous for its puffins.’
‘Oh, fuck the puffins, for God’s sake, Paul. And no boring mud-flats in the Thames estuary, either.’
What could he be thinking? Anglesey was out. The Isle of Man? Perhaps Sir Jack’s idea was to construct his own purpose-built offshore island. That would not be untypical. Mind you, the thing about Sir Jack was that nothing, in a way, was untypical except what he didn’t want to do.
‘There,’ he said, and his curled fist came down like a passport stamp. ‘There.’
‘The Isle of Wight,’ they answered in straggly unison.
‘Exactly. Look at her, snuggling into the soft underbelly of England. The little cutie. The little beauty. Look at the shape of her. Pure diamond, that’s what struck me straight away. A pure diamond. Little jewel. Little cutie.’
‘What’s it like, Sir Jack?’ asked Mark.
‘What’s it like? It’s perfect on the map, that’s what it’s like. You been there?’
‘No.’
‘Anyone?’
No; no; no; no and no. Sir Jack came round to the other side of the map, parked his palms on the Scottish Highlands and faced his inner circle. ‘And what do you know of it?’ They looked at one another. Sir Jack pressed on. ‘Let me help clarify such ignorance, in that case. Name five famous historical events connected with the Isle of Wight?’ Silence. ‘Name one. Dr Max?’ Silence. ‘Not your period, no doubt, ho, ho. Good. Name five famous listed buildings on the island whose renovation might cause ructions at Heritage.’ ‘Osborne House,’ replied Dr Max in quiz-show mode. ‘Very good. Dr Max wins the hair-drier. Name another four.’ Silence. ‘Good. Name five famous and endangered species of plant, bird or animal whose habitat might be disturbed by our saintly bulldozers?’ Silence. ‘Good.’
‘Cowes Regatta,’ a sudden voice suggested.
‘Ah, the phagocytes stir. Very good, Jeff. But not, I think, a bird, plant, listed building, or historical event. Any more offers?’ A longer silence. ‘Good. Indeed, perfect.’
‘But Sir Jack … isn’t it, well, presumably, full of inhabitants?’
‘No, Mark, it is not full of inhabitants. What it is full of is grateful future employees. But thank you for volunteering to put your curiosity to the test. Marco Polo, as I said. On your horse. Report back in two weeks. I understand there is some famously inexpensive bed-and-breakfast accommodation on the island.’
‘SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?’ asked Paul as they sat in a wine lodge half a mile from Pitman House. Martha had a tumbler of mineral water, Paul a goblet of preternaturally yellow white wine. Behind him, on the oak-veneer panelling, hung a print of two dogs behaving like humans; around them, men in dark suits yelped and barked.
What did she think? For a start, she thought it surprising that he was the one who had asked her for a drink. Martha had become skilled at anticipating moves in predominantly male offices. Moves and non-moves. The fat pads of Sir Jack’s fingers had been laid meaningfully upon her at moments of professional elucidation, but the touch registered to her as command rather than lust – though lust was not ruled out. Young Mark, the Project Manager, flashed his quick blue eyes at her in a manner she recognized as largely self-referring; he would be a flirt with no follow-through. Dr Max – well, they had shared sandwiches on the deck overlooking the artificial wetland more than once, but Dr Max was delightedly and transparently interested in Dr Max, and when he wasn’t Martha Cochrane doubted she would be his preferred species. She had therefore expected an approach from Jeff, hunky, solid, married Jeff, with baby-seats strapped into his Jeep; surely he would be the first with the sly, joined-up murmur of fancy-a-drink-after-work? In the zoo-cage of egos at Pitman House, she had overlooked Paul, or taken him for a patch of quiet straw which occasionally shuddered. Paul behind his laptop, the mute scribe, the Ideas Catcher, fielding Sir Jack’s nickel-plated banalities and hoarding them for posterity, or at least for some future Pitman Memorial Foundation.
‘What do I think?’ She also thought it felt like a set-up: Paul as office-boy sounding her out for Sir Jack, or possibly someone else. ‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter. I’m just the Appointed Cynic. I merely react to other people’s ideas. What do you think?’
‘I’m just the Ideas Catcher. I catch ideas. I don’t have any of my own.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘What do you think of Sir Jack?’
‘What do you think of Sir Jack?’
Pawn to king four, pawn to king four, black follows white until white varies. Paul’s variation came as a surprise.
‘I think of him as a family man.’
‘Funny, I’ve always considered that phrase an oxymoron.’
‘He’s a family man at heart,’ repeated Paul. ‘You know, he’s got an old auntie out in the sticks somewhere. Visits her as regular as clockwork.’
‘Proud father, devoted husband?’
Paul looked at her as if she were perversely sustaining her professional mode outside office hours. ‘Why not?’
‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘Why?’
Temporary stalemate; so Martha waited. The Ideas Catcher was an inch or two shorter than her five nine, and younger by a few years; a pale, round face, earnest blue-grey eyes behind glasses which made him look neither studious nor nerdy, just a sufferer from bad vision. He wore the uniform of business a little uneasily, as if someone else had chosen it for him, and twirled his goblet on a characters-from-Dickens coaster. Peripheral awareness told her that when she looked away he focused on her intently. Was this timidity or calculation – was she perhaps meant to notice? Martha sighed to herself: nowadays even simple things were rarely simple.
In any case, she waited. Martha had learned to be good at silence. Long ago she had been taught – more by social osmosis than by anyone in particular – that it was part of a woman’s function to bring men out, to put them at their ease; then they would entertain you, tell you about the world, let you know their inner thoughts, and finally marry you. By the time she had reached her thirties, Martha knew that this was seriously bad advice. In most cases it meant giving a man licence to bore you; while the idea that they would tell you their inner thoughts was naive. Many had only outer thoughts to begin with.
So instead of approving male conversation in advance, she held back, savouring the power of silence. This unnerved some men. They claimed such silence was intrinsically hostile. They told her s
he was passive-aggressive. They asked if she was a feminist, not a term uttered as neutral description, still less as praise. ‘But I haven’t said anything,’ she would reply. ‘No, but I can sense your disapproval,’ said one. Another, drunk after dinner, turned to her, cigar still in his mouth, rage in the eyes, and said, ‘You think there are only two kinds of men, don’t you, those who’ve said something crappy already and those who are going to say something crappy in the future. Well, fuck you.’
Martha, therefore, was not going to be out-silenced by a sideways-glancing boy with a glass of yellow wine in front of him.
‘My father played the oboe,’ he said eventually. ‘I mean, he wasn’t professional, but he was good enough, played in small amateur groups. I used to get dragged round to cold churches and village halls on Sunday afternoons. Mozart’s Wind Serenade, here we go again. That sort of thing.
‘Sorry, that’s not really relevant. He told me a story once. About a Soviet composer, I can’t remember which. It was in the war, what they called the Great Patriotic War. Against the Germans. Everyone had to put their shoulder to the wheel, so the Kremlin told Soviet composers they had to write music which would inspire the people and make them throw out the aggressor. None of your art music, says the Kremlin, we need music for the people which comes from the people.
‘So the top composers were all packed off to various regions and told to come back with cheerful suites of folk music. And this one was sent to the Caucasus – at least, I think it was the Caucasus, anyway it was one of those regions which Stalin had tried to wipe out a few years earlier, you know, collectivization, purges, ethnic cleansing, famine, I should have said that earlier. Anyway, he travels around looking for peasant songs, the old fiddler who plays at weddings, that sort of thing. And guess what he discovered? There wasn’t any authentic folk music left! You see, Stalin had wiped out the villages, and scattered all the peasants, so he’d wiped out the music in the process.’
Paul took a sip of his wine. Was he pausing or had he stopped? This was another social skill women were meant to learn: when a man’s story had come to an end. Mostly, it wasn’t a problem, as the end was thumpingly obvious; or else the narrator started snorting with laughter in advance, which was always a pretty good clue. Martha had long ago decided only to laugh at things she found funny. It seemed a normal sort of rule; but some men found it rebuking.
‘So he had a problem, the composer. He couldn’t very well go back to Moscow and say I’m afraid the Great Leader has unfortunately by mistake wiped out all the music down there. That wouldn’t have been wise. So this is what he did instead. He invented some new folk songs. Then he wrote a suite based on them and took it back to Moscow. Mission accomplished.’
Another sip, followed by a half-glance at Martha. She took it as a sign that the story was probably over. This was confirmed when he said, ‘I’m a bit shy of you, I’m afraid.’
Well, that, she supposed, was better than being leaned heavily against by a red-faced, chalk-striped bruiser with suspiciously perfect teeth who said in a jolly, bantering way, ‘Of course, what I really want to do is shag the tits off you.’ Yes, it was better than that. But she had heard this one before as well. Perhaps she had passed the age when there could be new beginnings; only familiar ones.
Martha’s tone was deliberately brisk. ‘So what you’re saying is that Sir Jack’s rather like Stalin?’
Paul stared at her in bewilderment, as if she had slapped him. ‘What?’ Then he peered suspiciously around the wine lodge, as if for some deft KGB skulker.
‘I thought that was the point of the story.’
‘Christ, no, whatever gave …’
‘I can’t imagine,’ said Martha, smiling.
‘It just came into my head.’
‘Forget it.’
‘Anyway, there’s no comparison …’
‘Forget it.’
‘I mean, just to take a simple point, present-day England is hardly Soviet Russia at that time …’
‘I never said a word.’
The progressive softening of her tone encouraged him to raise his eyes, though not to meet hers. He looked past her, in little swerves and dabs, first to one side, then to the other. Slowly, as warily as a butterfly, his glance settled on her right ear. Martha was confused. She had become so used to plots and ploys, to complicit directness and confident hands, that a simple shyness pierced her.
‘And what was the reaction?’ she found herself asking, in almost a panic of tenderness.
‘What reaction?’
‘When he took his suite of peasant songs back to Moscow and had it played. I mean, that’s the real point, isn’t it? They’d asked him for some patriotic music to inspire the workers and such peasants as were left after all the purges and famines and whatever, so did this music, this music he’d completely invented, was it as useful and uplifting as the music he would have found if there’d been any? I suppose that’s the real question.’
She was over-elaborating, she knew. No, she was burbling. This wasn’t how she normally talked. But she’d pulled him back from wherever he was going. He dropped his gaze from her ear and seemed to retreat behind the frames of his spectacles. He was frowning, though more at himself than at her, she felt.
‘History doesn’t relate,’ he finally replied.
Wouf. Well done, Martha. Just got out of that alive.
History doesn’t relate.
She liked the way he couldn’t remember the name of the composer. And whether or not it had been the Caucasus.
. . .
DR MAX WAS, of all the assembled theorists, consultants, and implementers, the slowest to grasp the principles and demands of the Project. This was initially ascribed to scholarly isolationism – and yet Dr Max had been appointed precisely because he seemed not to smell of the cloister. He had always moved easily between his professorial chair and the broadcasting studios; he was adept at the posher game-shows, and first-named half a dozen TV anchors as they serenely waited for him to lay out his dapper controversialism. While appearing quite urban, he contributed the Nature Notes column to The Times under the well-leaked pseudonym Country Mouse. His sartorial preference was for tweed suits with a range of toning suede waistcoats, topped off by a trademark bow-tie; he was an early choice for style columns such as ‘My Mufti.’ However far his trouser leg rode up as he ostentatiously relaxed amid the sneaky subversions of a TV studio’s furniture, bare calf was never glimpsed. He was the obvious choice.
Dr Max’s first expression of tactical naïveté had been to ask where the Project’s library could be found. His second was to circulate offprints of his article in Leather Trash entitled ‘Did Prince Albert Wear a Prince Albert? – A Hermeneutic Study in Penile Archaeology.’ More serious was his tendency to address Sir Jack at Executive Committee with a friskiness which even an Appointed Cynic would not have risked. Then there had been his – as some felt – rather over-personalized homoerotic reading of Nelson and Hardy’s kiss during the brain-storming session on Great British Heroes. Sir Jack had ringingly listed the family newspapers under his pastoral control, before inviting Dr Max to fuck off and stuff his bow-tie up his arse, advice that was not recorded in the minutes.
Jeff didn’t like his new role as minder to the Official Historian, mainly because he didn’t like the Official Historian. Why should Dr Max come under Concept Development, except that it amused Sir Jack? Jeff didn’t think his reluctance sprang from homophobic prejudice. It was more a prejudice against dandies, egotists, and gadflies, against people who looked at Jeff as if he where some great, slow, brain-damaged plodder and asked, in a manner they deemed witty, how many Concepts he’d Developed over the weekend. Jeff always answered such questions in a straightforward, literal manner, which reinforced Dr Max’s assumptions. But it was either that or throttling the fellow.
‘Max, if I may.’ They were in the Oasis, a ferny, palmy, waterfally zone of Pitman House, which probably had some architectural theorizing behind it. No doubt h
e lacked a grasp of metaphor, but the sound of running water always made Jeff want to pee. Now he stood looking down at the Official Historian, at his silly little moustache, his poncey fob-chain, his wanky TV waistcoat, his smug cuffs. The Official Historian looked up at Jeff, at his bullocky shoulders, his horsily long face, his donkey hair, his glistening sheepy eyes. They had placed themselves awkwardly, as if some choreographer had told Jeff to throw his arm round Dr Max’s shoulders in a spirit of camaraderie, but neither could bring himself to effect, or accept, the gesture.
‘Max. Look.’ Jeff had a feeling of weariness. He never knew where to start. Or rather, he found that each time he needed to start at an even more basic level of assumption than previously. ‘It was bound to be a change of pace for you, coming here.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’ Dr Max was feeling generous. ‘There are one or two of you I m–ight accept into my classes as m–ature students.’
‘No, I didn’t mean it that way, Max. Change of pace up, not down.’
‘Ah. Yes. Boo-boo time again, I see. Instruct me then.’
The Concept Developer paused. Dr Max, as he liked to be called on television, since formality and informality were thus combined, was poised before him, ready to sparkle at a floor-manager’s thumbs-up. ‘Let me put it this way. You are our Official Historian. You are responsible, how can I put it, for our history. Do you follow?’
‘Clear as a b–ell, so far, my dear Jeff.’
‘Right. Well, the point of our history – and I stress the our – will be to make our guests, those buying what is for the moment referred to as Quality Leisure, feel better.’
‘Better. Ah, the old e–thical questions, what a snake-pit they are. Better. Meaning?’
‘Less ignorant.’
‘Precisely. That’s why I was a–ppointed, I assume.’
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