by A. N. Wilson
Kurtmeyer had done damage-limitation with the Zinariyan Embassy. Spottiswood had been in touch with the Mararraba office. Assurances had been given that such articles would not appear again. Lennox himself wanted the young idiot who wrote the article to be hung out to dry; but Mary Much had pleaded.
‘Go on – make Aubrey’s day.’
The tall former army captain would be moved from Features to be an assistant to Aubrey Bird (‘Dr Arbuthnot’) on the gossip column. It was hardly the fucking Siberian salt mines, which was what Lennox thought he deserved.
There was a ripple as the retiring editor, Anthony Taylor, a tall, thin, cricket-loving man in specs, led the proprietor, six inches shorter, sun-tanned and silver-haired, into the newsroom. A virtue was being made of necessity. Lennox Mark had said he’d be fucked if he was going to hire a special party venue to say goodbye to Tony Taylor. Spottiswood decided that a good newspaperman would prefer to have his send-off in the newsroom itself. It was clear, from the smell, noise and atmosphere of murmurous disrespect among the two hundred and fifty or so who thronged the great open-plan office, that they’d been at the Asti Spumante for about an hour. Over the laminated grey surface of the desks stood a multitude of bottles. Some drank from glasses, others from plastic cups. Canapes had been ordered and arranged. An atmosphere of stale fish drifted from mouths and plates. On the back bench itself, chromium platters of smoked salmon on inch-square brown bread and butter congealed with tiger prawns and cigarette stubs. Some of the plastic cups containing fizzy white wine were clouded with floating filters and deposits of ash.
The proprietor stood on a chair and tapped his tin of Seven-Up. It was inaudible in such a throng, so Tony Taylor tapped a glass. Still the conversation and laughter rumbled on.
‘Quiet, please!’
This from Taylor.
‘General Bindiga!’ called Lennox.
The calling-out of this controversial name brought silence; the whole office had been buzzing for twenty-four hours about the article by Sinclo Manners, and its consequences.
‘General Bindiga – my friend General Bindiga!’
There were loud guffaws of mirth at this.
Lennox beamed. He had hit a right note. They were going to listen to him.
‘My friend General Bindiga is a much kindlier fellow than you’d believe if you read everything in the newspapers …’
A great roar of laughter. Peg Montgomery, interviewer extraordinaire, appeared to be choking on a Silk Cut cigarette.
‘But he has been known to dispense of the services of his Cabinet and other trusted colleagues in a way that some of us would find, shall we say, a trifle peremptory.’
Yet more laughter. The atmosphere was now such that if the speaker had begun reciting the alphabet or reading at random from the telephone directory, the audience would have rocked with mirth.
‘But, my dear Anthony’ – and Lennox placed a podgy hand on Tony Taylor’s shoulder – ‘… not dispensing so much as … sad leavetaking … worked on the paper, I believe now for thirty-five years …’
‘Twenty-nine years – I’m not that old!’ called back Tony spiritedly, which caused more laughter from the audience.
‘… much valued … through and through a newspaperman … though many would remember some of Taylor’s less than spectacular scoops.’
Lennox had consulted the Court about the wisdom of ribbing Taylor for the innumerable gaffes in his career. His speech was typed out in bold for him by Mary Much, on cards which could be slipped back into his pockets.
He reminded the crowd of the time when, on the say-so of some alcoholic stringer in a tapas bar, Taylor – then Foreign Editor – had been proud to track down Dr Goebbels in Buenos Aires. The man who had committed suicide in 1945 had been the double of the National Socialist Propaganda Minister; the ‘real’ Dr Goebbels, having escaped to Holland and boarded a merchant vessel, had reached the Argentine, where he had been living for a number of years with a belly dancer.
Helpless laughter. ‘Dr Arbuthnot’ bent double. Tears of mirth making Peg Montgomery’s mascara run.
Then Lennox recalled Taylor’s campaign to have Belisha beacons restored. ‘How many more kids have to die on the roads?’ Taylor’s anguished editorial had asked before the Department of Transport informed Tony that Belisha beacons could not be restored because they had never been abolished.
The grin on Taylor’s face became decidedly fixed as his proprietor got the staff to laugh at him for not having heard of Nicole Kidman.
‘But seriously …’ said Lennox Mark, ‘seriously, and we must be serious …’
‘Shame!’ cried out L. P. Watson as the oration limped on.
TWENTY-FOUR
While Lennox Mark stood on his chair and drew forth such predictable responses from his staff, there stood among them a thirty-one-year-old man whose spiritual agony was so palpable that many who found themselves near him in the throng edged away from him, unaware of why they did so. Some considered him haughty or stand-offish. Many of the women thought him extremely handsome. His face was not that of a naturally sad person, but of a happy man whose heart had become totally desolate.
Sinclo Manners was a tall man, with the ruddy complexion of a countryman, high cheekbones, blue eyes and aquiline nose. He had thick chestnut hair which, when not fiercely brushed back from his brow, flopped over it. The fact that, until five years ago, he had been a captain in the Royal Green Jackets was easy to imagine. (What was less easy to imagine was that he was on the staff of The Daily Legion.) Wherever his face had been seen in whatever part of the globe, it would have been quite impossible to suppose Sinclo to be any nationality other than English. This was not merely because of his colouring and physiognomy, but because of the cast of his face, which combined melancholy and comedy in equal proportion. (This accounted for an expression which some saw, quite mistakenly, as ‘stuck up’.)
There were two reasons for his unhappiness. First, he loathed The Daily Legion and was ashamed of himself for staying on as a member of staff; secondly – his reason for staying – he was profoundly and, as far as could be seen, hopelessly in love.
He was one of those who had decided to give journalism a try, but who had been sucked into a branch of it which, until he entered a newspaper office, he had never known existed. Emerging from the army after seven years, he had imagined himself as a foreign correspondent. On active service abroad he had more than once encountered journalists – in the Balkans, in Saudi Arabia, in Malaysia. He had envied them, and believed they were doing work which he could do well. When he had met these men and women, who were often in disaster areas or war zones, running risks as great as the military, it had not occurred to him to think that journalism was a shaming occupation. No doubt, if Sinclo had played his cards differently, he could have become just such a foreign correspondent. It was still very much his ambition to do so.
When he left the army, he had gone through a period of unemployment and depression, sharing a London flat with old school friends, all of them in well-paid jobs in City firms or lawyers’ chambers. Poverty and boredom oppressed him, and he began to lose any sense of self-worth as days, then weeks, passed without any offer of work. He wrote to several newspaper editors pointing out his army experience, and suggesting that he be sent to West Africa. General Bindiga had fought off an attempted coup, but there was in effect a renewal of civil war in Zinariya. Thousands had been killed, but no mention of this had appeared in any British newspaper. Sinclo believed that his first-hand experiences of this African country would make him well qualified to write about it. In the event, only one editor bothered to answer his letter, saying that he could not write articles about Zinariya without a ‘story’ or ‘peg’ to hang them on.
Some of Sinclo’s friends told him that there was no point in trying to secure a job in journalism unless you knew someone who was already working on a newspaper. Others told him to write some articles and hawk them around. He tried both, and neither experiment w
as successful.
At the far end of the newsroom now, Lennox Mark was still speechifying about Taylor, the decent but essentially unintelligent editor who was being fired. The ritual of the insulting speech, delivered to the victim before a baying drunken audience, had something of the feeling of a public execution. Sinclo hated bullying. In the army he had always moved in to stop it, actually getting one sadistic corporal court-martialled when he found out what he’d done to his men. Lennox Mark seemed much worse than that corporal. Sinclo had to go back in his memory to school (Radley) to summon up comparable examples of oikish thuggery. He wanted very much to go up to Mark now and punch his face, as he had once punched a Radley boy who was picking on a younger child.
‘Not that Tony could ever be accused of being a dedicated follower of fashion.’
Laughter from the sycophants.
The present occasion was making sharply clear in Sinclo’s mind impressions which had hitherto been only latent. The mist was clearing and the grotesque edifice was revealed, its gargoyles and resident monsters in all their Brothers Grimm monstrosity. The smoke coming from the nostrils of Peg Montgomery could have been from a dragon’s nose. Aubrey Bird (the diarist ‘Dr Arbuthnot’), one of the last men in London to affect royal-blue shirts with white collars, was certainly an evil old fairy. L. P. Watson, whose travel books had so impressed Sinclo, was perhaps one of those knights errant caught in the tangles of a briarwood for a hundred years – or was he simply in a snare of his own cynicism? And now, entering ostentatiously late, tiptoeing as through a minefield, with such exaggerated movements of her long, thin, pointed shoes (hand-made in Paris), was the Enchantress herself, Mary Much, her silver-blonde bob, and her long, cool, beautiful face gazing mischievously around, casting spells as she strode.
As Lennox spoke, The Daily Legion was exposed to Sinclo in all its brutality and power. And it was the power, expressed through money, of the tycoon which made sycophants of them all: including Sinclo himself. He was fully aware of that, having, on the strength of his Legion salary, taken out a mortgage on a flat which he could only just afford. There did not have to be any rules, telling you things which must or must not be done or said. There was a perpetual atmosphere of fear, generated by Lennox and his wife, by Mary Much and by the editors. That was why it had been so liberating when, a few days before, Taylor (everyone knew he’d been sacked in spite of his repeated claims to be taking early retirement) wandered over to the features desk where Sinclo worked and said, ‘Your Zinariya piece – would you like to tweak it? We’ll run it on Monday.’
Sinclo had written his article about Zinariya well over a year ago. It was after he had secured his desk job on Features, and he thought he might persuade Taylor to send him to Africa on an assignment. Taylor had barely acknowledged the article, and it had sat around in the Features ‘basket’ for months before being spiked. Sinclo’s boss at Features told him that Zinariya was a no-go area in the Legions.
‘Lennie doesn’t ban us from carrying stories about it. He doesn’t need to. Taylor and Blimby are so shit-scared of annoying him they’d rather not mention the subject.’
Zinariyan topics were therefore handled with kid gloves. Martina Fax and L. P. Watson in their columns praised Bindiga, and Lennox himself sometimes dictated leading articles to Taylor about the General being a latter-day Oliver Cromwell, supporting the liberties of his people by the paradoxical, though time-honoured, method of curtailing free speech, free elections and indeed freedom of any kind. The Daily Legion liked Bindiga’s ‘no-nonsense’ approach to homosexuality. (It was illegal in Zinariya – if we’re honest, don’t we all feel our kiddies would be safer if it were still illegal in Britain?) While not letting readers into the secret that Lennox Mark owned tobacco and cocoa farms where unpaid children worked, The Daily Legion opined that the best chocolate and the best cigarettes in the world came from Zinariya. The copper piping in your bathroom would cost five times as much if it were not for General Bindiga. African dictators, like the Almighty, moved in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. Mary Much, who had taken a shine to Sinclo, said, over one of their lunches, ‘I wouldn’t write Bongo stories if I were you.’
He’d been impressed by her spy network. He’d never mentioned his interest in Africa to her.
But then, as a last defiant gesture before he left, Taylor had published the article. The office was buzzing with excitement. Sinclo, considered by some a stuck-up bastard, was going to be sacked, or have his arse kicked – this idea caused pleasure to those who invented it, but they were equally impressed by his recklessness. It was seeing his article in print, with the photographs of Father Vivyan, Bindiga, the slave boys, the copper mines, which contributed to this sense of mist clearing, this feeling that he was seeing The Daily Legion in its true garish colours for the first time. He was afraid – because like everyone in that newsroom he had become addicted to being overpaid, and did not know how he would live if he were to be sacked. At the same time he tingled with adrenalin: the mingling of fear and joy was a little like going into battle. He looked across at his fellow-journalists: Mary Much was stooping her long, swanlike neck to kiss Aubrey Bird and trying not to dislodge his toupee; Seamus Ahearne (‘Creevey’ on The Sunday Legion) had a face creased with laughter as Lennox Mark recounted the story of Dr Goebbels in the Buenos Aires tapas bar – the face sweated whisky; Dot Saxby, the literary editor, with that alarming low dark fringe of hair and her weird taste in men’s double-breasted suits, was edging towards a bird-like girl who wrote medical stories. And through the smoke and the noise and the faces, he felt completely alien. Could it really be the case, he asked himself, that for nearly two years he had been a deputy features editor – not writing articles himself, but telephoning others to write them?
Until he was offered the job, it had never even occurred to him that there was a need in the world for a deputy features editor. The chance to become one arose when he met the features editor at a dinner party. She was married to a school friend of one of his flatmates. She was on the look-out for someone to help at the features desk. He could come along and try it out for a few weeks if he liked. At first he had worked as a dogsbody, fetching ‘cuts’ from the library. (Many if not most newspaper articles, he discovered, were scissors-and-paste jobs, repeating things which had already been printed somewhere else.) Then Jan, his boss, took her children away for half-term and Sinclo was asked to attend the daily editorial meeting (or features conference as it was pompously called) in her stead. His position as her deputy was thereafter official, and his days had a pattern.
At the beginning of each day, they prepared ‘ideas’ for the features conference. Then at 10.30 a.m. they trooped in to see the editor and put up these ideas for his approval. The themes could cover any subject ranging from the problem of world terrorism to whether kiddies should eat potato crisps. Taylor usually liked to commission two or three articles on such themes each day. They would be nine hundred words long, and because they were printed opposite the editorials they would be known as ‘op eds’ or ‘leader page articles’ (LPAs). Sinclo, who’d developed a fondness for initials and abbreviations in the army, relished this aspect of the job and loved all its private language – blacks (you didn’t see these very often now copy was almost always e-mailed), spikes, and so on. After the morning conference, Sinclo would ring up likely writers of the articles they had concocted in outline in committee. One quickly learnt why a newspaper valued a figure such as L. P. Watson, whose appalling facility enabled him to churn out nine hundred words at double-quick speed on any theme, and to adopt any opinion suggested to him by the commissioning editor.
There would then follow lunch – usually an alcoholic lunch – after which Sinclo would read the articles, which were known in the business as why-oh-whys. Then he would have to ring up the writers and sometimes suggest rewrites. This was not usually because of their infelicitous style. Much more likely it was because between the morning conference and lunch-time, the editor would have
changed his mind. In the morning, for example, The Daily Legion’s view might be that the flood of illegal migrants coming through the Channel Tunnel represented a danger to Great Britain every bit as grave as the threatened invasions of the Nazis in 1940. The researcher would be dispatched to the library for cuts – previous Legion articles would be found, which had warned, before the tunnel was built, that it would open the floodgates of immigration. The why-oh-why artist would be primed.
After lunch, however, when the article came in, comparing the refugees from Bosnia or Albania with the hordes of Attila the Hun, The Daily Legion’s great collective mind would be altered. What were these people coming into the country but the twenty-first-century equivalent of the poor huddled masses who created the enterprise culture of the United States? The Legion was not offering anyone a blank cheque. If these foreigners thought they could come to Britain and exploit its welfare system then the Legion had no pity – they deserved to be booted back on the train and booted back fast. But if they came in the spirit of the great entrepreneurs – why, had not all the most famous American philanthropists started life as poor refugees?
Naturally, the features desk came across the occasional difficult customer who would not adapt their copy in this way. Some pretentious so-and-sos even tried to parade knowledge, and would reel off the names of philanthropic Americans of patrician birth who had never been huddled or poor in their lives. But by six on a good evening the task would be done. The article on immigrants which it had taken all day to rewrite would be spiked and they’d use instead the heart-rending plea of a mum whose eleven-year-old weighed thirteen stone. ‘In an Open Letter to the Health Secretary, a Mother pleads – Stop this crisp-eating madness now.’ And so, their work would be done, and the wine bar and the London evening would beckon.
