England, England

by Julian Barnes

  ‘Actually, Sir Jack,’ said Paul, not looking at Martha but thinking of the immediate area behind and above her left knee, of the difference between finger and tongue, between silkily covered flesh and pure flesh, between leg and raised leg, ‘actually, I have a date.’

  ‘You do indeed. You have a date with me. You have a date to drive me to see my Auntie May. So get yourself a fucking cap, de-garage your fucking company Jaguar, and take me to Chorleywood.’

  Paul’s incipient erection scuttled back into its mousehole. He didn’t dare look at Martha. He didn’t care about being humiliated in front of the others – they all knew what Sir Jack could be like – but Martha … Martha. Three minutes later, he found himself bending to open the rear door of his own car. Sir Jack paused heavily, and waited until Paul produced an awkward salute, a stiff memory of some army film.

  ‘So kind of you,’ said the voice behind his ear as the gatekeeper raised his pole with a more practised salute. ‘A few points I’m sure you won’t mind my mentioning. Your car – which is my car, when we come down to it – looks as if it has just been driven backwards across a ploughed field after a fox. The unwashable in pursuit of the inedible, if I may turn a phrase. Always change the tie before driving me, something simpler – plain black, in fact. And the order of events is as follows: remove the cap, place it under the left arm, open the car door, stand erect, salute. Capito?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Except that Paul would rather counterfeit an epileptic fit than go through this again.

  ‘Good. And I’m sure Martha will be waiting up for you later, and will give you an even bigger kiss.’ Paul’s eyes went instinctively to the mirror, but Sir Jack’s were there already, contemptuously triumphant. ‘Keep your attention on the road, Paul, that’s most unchauffeurlike behaviour. Of course I know. I know everything I need to know. For instance – and this may be of some comfort to you – I know that there are very few things in the world that spoil by being kept waiting. Rice, of course, and soufflées, and fine old burgundy. But women, Paul? Women? In my experience, no. In fact, I would say, without any undue indelicacy, on the contrary.’

  Sir Jack chuckled like a stage lecher and unsnapped his briefcase. As they did slow spurts amid the damp blink of brake-lights, the Ideas Catcher ran through the rationalizations he knew so well. Sir Jack’s ego required so much oxygen that it seemed both logical and just to him that it should be extracted from the lungs of those nearby. Sir Jack was a normally demanding employer who paid well and expected perfection: when he didn’t get it, someone had to suffer. It just happened to be your turn that week, that day, that microsecond, it didn’t mean anything. Conclusion: the humiliation was quite unjustified, but the very injustice, the extremity of disapproval, demonstrated that Sir Jack didn’t really have it in for you. Alternatively: the fact that he did have it in for you, had singled you out for this treatment, made you special, in his eyes and your own. If he didn’t care he wouldn’t have bothered. It was almost his way of showing affection.

  Paul told himself all this as the stalled traffic began to loosen. Because otherwise he would be obliged to lightly swing the wheel, just like that, say, and take the Jaguar into an approaching lorry and kill them both. Except that any Pitco employee could have told him what would happen: Paul would end up as steak tartare, while Sir Jack would walk energized from the wreckage, eager to philosophize about Providence’s generosity to the first TV crew on the scene.

  After an hour’s silent drive, during which Paul felt his sense of self dwindle, they reached a suburb of dripping beech trees where carriage-lamps illuminated burglar alarms.

  ‘Just here. Two hours. And my drivers never drink.’

  ‘It’s raining, Sir Jack. Can’t I run you to the door?’

  ‘Umbrella. Package.’

  Paul managed the awkwardness of the cap, the door, and the salute, then watched Sir Jack walk off with a wrapped bottle of sherry beneath his arm. He climbed back into the car, threw his cap on to the passenger seat, and reached for the phone. I’m sorry, Martha, I’m sorry I couldn’t look at you. I hope you don’t hate and despise me. I love you, Martha. And you’re right about Sir Jack, you always have been, it’s just that I didn’t like to admit it. I may say something different tomorrow but you’re right today. Is everything still OK? Have I lost you? I haven’t, have I?

  In mid-dial, as blood and self returned, Paul stopped. Of course: his employer probably got a printout of numbers called from all company cars. It was just the sort of detail Sir Jack never overlooked. That could have been how he’d guessed about Martha. And if Paul phoned her now, Sir Jack would find out, and retain it in his elephantine, retaliative memory, waiting for some moment, some unwelcome public moment.

  So, a phone box. Rare things nowadays. Paul drove the empty streets, taking turns at random. An occasional dog-walker, a respectable alcoholic limping home with supplies, no sign of a box, and then, twenty yards ahead, in a curving avenue of detached houses quarter-lit by replica Victorian gas-lamps, his headlights spotted a stripey golf umbrella. Sod it. What now: drive past, or brake suddenly? Whatever he did would be wrong, or Sir Jack would find a reason for it being wrong.

  Driving past might seem a greater impertinence: best to stop. Paul braked as softly as possible, but the umbrella with legs did not break stride. It marched on and disappeared up a driveway. After a few minutes Paul released the handbrake and gentled the car down the avenue. Auntie May lived in a tile-hung Domestic Revival house with neat banks of shrubs and a carved wooden name-plate screwed to a fir tree. ‘Ardoch,’ the house was called. Paul imagined a frail maiden lady with a scrap of lace at the neck offering seed cake and a glass of madeira. Then she became large, perfumed, Jewish and Viennese, spooning extra whipped cream on the Sachertorte. Then – perhaps Sir Jack’s braces were a clue – an ironical, fine-boned Parisienne, the sleeve of her tweed jacket pulling elegantly up her forearm as she poured a delicate tisane through a silver spout. He might be a brute at times, but Sir Jack’s piety towards his Auntie May, his unmissable monthly visits, did him credit.

  Paul gazed balefully at the house and tried not to think of Martha. He wondered if ‘Ardoch’ was an official Pitco property. It would be just like Sir Jack to put his Auntie on the payroll, with a large house thrown in. Time passed. Rain fell. Paul looked across at his chauffeur’s cap on the passenger seat. Was Sir Jack jealous of Martha? Of him and Martha? Was that it? Then he did something in a moment of unthinking rebellion. He took the recorder out of his pocket, half-pretending to himself that it was a phone on which he could call Martha, and activated Sir Jack’s body-mike.

  The specified range of the instrument was fifty feet, a capacity needed on days when Sir Jack liked to perambulate musingly in halls as broad as his thoughts. The front door of ‘Ardoch’ was thirty feet away, and doubtless walls reduced the strength of the signal. But the three words Paul had on tape, and which later that night he replayed to Martha, making them both lose interest in immediate sex, came through as clearly as if Sir Jack had been sitting at his desk.

  The Jaguar was back at the original rendezvous; rain was still falling as the striped umbrella came into view. Paul’s salute was impeccable. In the rear-view mirror Sir Jack’s expression was one of benign repose. They reached his apartment at quarter to eleven, and Paul nodded gratefully as a hundred-euro note was stuffed with approximate fingers into his top pocket. But his gratitude was for another gift.

  ‘T … N … P!’ whispered Paul as he came out of a brief postcoital doze. The downward pressure of Martha’s laugh ejected his cock, and she rolled him aside to give her lungs room.

  ‘He might just have been telling a story.’ She was deliberately cautious.

  ‘To his auntie? With that punchline? No, it’s got to be true.’

  Martha wanted it to be true; more important, she wanted to keep Paul as he’d been when he returned three nights ago – quietly angry, quietly triumphant, ripping up a hundred-euro note. She didn’t want him slipping back
into respectful reasonableness, a piece of Pitco livestock with the company brand on his rump. She wanted him to lead for once.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the house isn’t on the manifest of properties, and you can be sure it would be if she was his Auntie May. And she’d be on the payroll. And I’ve told you, he never misses. First Thursday of every month. Wood’s driven him there direct from Heathrow on occasion. Never takes her out, either.’

  ‘She could be in a wheelchair or something.’

  ‘No-one ever visits aunties like that, even if they are in a wheelchair.’

  Martha nodded agreement. ‘Unless they’re other kinds of auntie.’

  ‘T … N … P!’

  ‘Don’t. You’re killing me.’ Laughing on her back felt almost unhealthy. She sat up in bed and looked down at Paul’s inverted face. She took his lobe between thumb and finger. ‘What do you think we should do?’

  ‘Find out. I mean, get someone else to find out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, why?’ Paul reacted as if his generalship were in question.

  ‘Just that we ought to know what we’re after.’

  ‘Insurance.’

  ‘Insurance?’

  ‘Even Sir Jack’s ardent admirers’ – he looked up at Martha as if dissociating himself from them – ‘would admit that his hire-and-fire policy isn’t always merit-based.’

  Martha nodded approval. ‘Am I in focus when you haven’t got your glasses on?’

  ‘You’re always in focus,’ he said.

  Gary Desmond was their chosen operative. Gary Desmond, until recently a key byline in Sir Jack’s own newspaper chain. Gary Desmond, who had outed three cabinet ministers, one of them female; who had named the England cricket captain’s love-child, lamented the coke habits of two weather-girls, and finally, after only a small amount of breaking-and-entering, brought his employer photographic evidence of Prince Rick’s three-in-a-bed sessions with high-price escort girls.

  Had he been over-confident, or just naive? Either way, he had assumed the wrong thing: that the moral parameters implicit in his stories, and enthusiastically endorsed by proprietor and readers, were somehow real; or if not real, at least immutable. But Gary Desmond, waiting, with a modest pun, to call the story his crowning achievement, discovered that it was possible to triumph too completely, in a way that challenged the supposed reality of his trade. There had been no doubting the general excitement when he’d revealed how a young man ‘six heartbeats from the throne,’ funded out of public money and paid to represent the Nation on foreign trips, had languidly cavorted with Cindy and Petronella in one of the ‘luxury palaces’ provided by the tax-payer. But as each day’s revelations had continued, prurient condemnation had somehow given way to embarrassment and then to a sort of patriotic self-reproach. At a more local level, this translated itself into Sir Jack Pitman picking at his House of Lords braces and fearing he might not get the ermine to match.

  Gary Desmond’s story stood up as solid as Pitman House; the pictorial evidence was unchallenged, and the girls didn’t have a parking ticket between them. Nonetheless, Gary Desmond found himself surplus to requirements. He was denounced in the very paper which had once published his exclusives as ‘the sleaze-hound who went too far.’ Reference was made – and this was quite out of order – to a research trip to the West Indies from which, strictly speaking, nothing publishable had resulted. He’d taken Caroline from Accounts and the bastards had printed a snap of her looking distinctly the worse for wear, with her bikini top at half-mast, which could only have been obtained by theft or severe bribery. All of which had rendered Gary Desmond a bit hard to employ for the foreseeable.

  Martha and Paul met him in the lounge of a tourist hotel.

  ‘The deal is this,’ said Martha. ‘We own the story. We decide whether it runs or not. It might be more useful not to publish. We’ll pay your fee, a bonus for a good result, and a second bonus for either publication or secrecy, whichever we decide. So either way you don’t lose. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ said the reporter. ‘Except, what if the trail gets over-populated?’

  ‘It can’t unless you blow it. We know, you know, that’s it. That remains it. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ Gary Desmond repeated.

  With hindsight, he could understand how Pitman House had behaved over the Prince Rick business. There had been ‘unusual pressure,’ he was assured, from both the Palace and the Home Office. The pay-off had been satisfactory, even fair; his pension rights were unaffected; the secrecy clause was normal in the circumstances. Gary Desmond was not without imagination; he knew these things happened. But what he could not forgive, and what made him shake hands on the present business, was the comment Sir Jack had made as he stepped into his limo beneath the shadow of the saluting Wood. ‘I always say,’ his former employer had told the waiting hack-pack, ‘I always say you can never trust a man with two Christian names.’ The quote made the front page of three newspapers, and it continued to rankle with Gary Desmond.

  THE ISLAND BREAKFAST EXPERIENCE began with the search for a logo. The design section produced scores of them, mostly unacknowledged revisions and quiet steals of familiar symbols. Lions in various numbers and various stages of rampancy; assorted crowns and coronets; castle keeps and battlements; a skewed Palace of Westminster portcullis; lighthouses, flaming torches, silhouettes of landmark buildings; profiles of Britannia, Boadicea, Victoria, and Saint George; roses of every kind, single and double, tea and floribunda, briar, cabbage, dog, and Christmas; oak leaves, apples, and trees; cricket stumps and double-decker buses, White Cliffs, Beefeaters, red squirrels, and a robin in the snow; phoenix and falcon, swan and talbot, eagle and popinjay, hippogriff and hippocampus.

  ‘All wrong, all wrong.’ Sir Jack hefted a sheaf of recent suggestions from Battle Table to shagpile. ‘It’s all too then. Give me now.’

  ‘We could just have your entwined initials.’ Careful, Martha: don’t confuse professional cynicism with amateurish contempt. But since discovering what she thought they had discovered, her attitude to Sir Jack had shifted; Paul’s too.

  ‘What we want,’ said Sir Jack, ignoring her and banging the table in emphasis, ‘is magic. We want here, we want now, we want the Island, but we also want magic. We want our Visitors to feel that they have passed through a mirror, that they have left their own worlds and entered a new one, different yet strangely familiar, where things are not done as in other parts of the inhabited planet, but as if in a rare dream.’

  The Committee waited, expecting that Sir Jack’s complicated demands were merely the preface to an applaudable answer. But the normal dramatic pause lengthened into an anxious silence.

  ‘Sir Jack.’

  ‘Max, my dear fellow. Not the first voice I would have expected.’

  Dr Max gave an uneasy smile. He was in shades of bark-brown that day. He gave a superstitious touch to his bow-tie and joined church-steeple fingers to indicate his TV-anecdote mode. ‘Sometime in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century,’ he began, ‘a woman was walking to Ventnor market with a basket of eggs. She came from one of the villages along the coast, so she naturally took the clifftop path. It came on to rain, but she had wisely brought her umbrella. This being the early days of umbrella technology, it was a large and sturdy contraption. She had proceeded some distance nearer to Ventnor when a sharp gust of wind from the landward side caught her by surprise and blew her off the edge of the cliff. She thought she would die – at least, I assume this to have been the case on the grounds that any normal person so swept would have assumed they were going to die, and there is no indication that she was an abnormal person in this respect – but her umbrella began to act like a parachute, slowing her fall. Her clothes also billowed out in a way which decreased her velocity. We do not know exactly what she was wearing, but we might plausibly picture to ourselves a crinoline with stretched muslin or the like, so that in effect she had two parachutes, one above and one below. Though even as I speak, a
doubt suggests itself: surely the crinoline was a garment of the fashionable and bourgeois classes, its encirclement all too obviously denoting the protectedness, the noli me tangere, of such women. Could the egg-seller have been middle-class, I wonder? Or might the existence of a thriving fishing industry on the Island mean that whalebone, that essential stiffener of the female undergarment, was more socially pervasive than on the mainland? It is not, as you see, exactly my province, and I would need to do some research into the undergarments worn by the egg-selling classes in the probable decade during which the recorded incident took place –’

  ‘Get on with the bloody story, man. Stop wittering,’ shouted Sir Jack. ‘You’ve left us hanging in mid-air.’

  ‘Quite.’ Dr Max took no more notice of Sir Jack than of a studio heckler. ‘And so, you see, she drifted down, her basket of eggs over one arm, her umbrella and her crinoline further sustained by the upcurrents from offshore. One pictures her looking out to sea, murmuring a prayer to God, and watching the soft sand rising to meet her. She landed safely on the beach, and was quite unharmed, according to my source, the only damage done being that a few of the eggs in her basket were said to be cracked.’

  Sir Jack’s expression was of exasperated pleasure. He sucked on his cigar and the exasperation waned. ‘I love it. I don’t believe a word of it, but I love it. It’s here and it’s magic and we can make it into now.’

  The logo was drawn and redrawn, in styles from pre-Raphaelite hyper-realism to a few expressionist wrist-flicks. Certain key elements persisted: the three echoing sweeps of umbrella, bonnet and spread skirts; the pinched waist and full breasts indicating a woman of an earlier period; and the hemispherical rustic basket whose circle was completed by the rounded pile of eggs. Outside Sir Jack’s hearing the motif was referred to as Queen Victoria Showing Her Knickers; within it she was given a series of attempted names – Beth, Maud, Delilah, Faith, Florence, Madge – before they settled on Betsy. Someone remembered, or discovered, that there had once been a phrase ‘Heavens to Betsy,’ which seemed to make her christening appropriate, even if no-one knew what the expression meant.