by J M Gregson
He shook his head again, but less vehemently, perhaps even a little reluctantly. ‘I’d be too argumentative.’
‘You need the odd argument in a book club. You certainly need vigorous discussion. How much of that have you had, in the three years since you were divorced?’
‘Not much. Are you offering me this as therapy?’
She grinned at the thought. ‘Emphatically not. I’ll want your opinions on whatever we’ve read, and I’ll want you to listen to the opinions expressed by me and the other members of the group.’
This time he pursed his lips as he shook his head. ‘How many?’
‘Five or six to start with, if you come in with us. We might recruit one or two more, if we’re successful. That would be up to the group.’
‘Women don’t like arguments. They prefer it when people agree with each other.’
‘Not all women. And there’ll be men there as well as women. Two or three, I hope. That would be including you.’
‘I’ve lived in Brunton for a long time now. Would I know many of the people there? It might be embarrassing on both sides if I did.’
She got the impression that he was ticking off his objections one by one. ‘I don’t know all of them myself yet. There are a couple of people who teach literature professionally. One of them’s a man who’s a little older than you. The other’s a young woman who teaches me about the nineteenth-century novel, and you’ll like her. She’s blonde and curvy and quite a dish. Fit, they call it now, don’t they?’
‘They might. I don’t. And I’m more likely to be frightened of your bluestocking than attracted to her.’
‘Jane’s no bluestocking. And the other woman is almost as old as me. She used to be my husband’s PA, a long time ago. Before Frank retired, of course: remember he was fourteen years older than me. Her name’s Enid Frott.’
She thought that he knew that name, that he was going to comment on it. His lips tightened for a moment, then relaxed into a smile. ‘I’ll give it a go. On condition that I don’t have to stay if I decide it’s not for me. When do we start?’
Jamie Norris was trying to combine iambic pentameters with stocking shelves at Tesco. He wondered if he was the first person to attempt this. Possibly not: poets were a strange crew and they popped up everywhere.
Not successful poets, of course. Byron had made a fortune from poetry. ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Byron had been. Jamie had always rather fancied those epithets for himself, but he knew now that he wasn’t going to make it. Tennyson had made himself into a lord and been revered by the Victorians. But no poet made big money nowadays. And no modern poet was adulated like Tennyson, not even Betjeman. Good old Philip Larkin had needed a librarian’s wage to support his muse. At the moment, Tesco was supporting Jamie’s muse, such as it was.
Tesco and Alfred Norbury: another unlikely combination. It was Alfred who’d set him going on the iambic pentameters. Jamie knew what they were all about, of course. Shakespeare had used them, after all. But Alfred Norbury had pointed out that even Shakespeare had needed to learn his craft, that the early plays creaked in a way you could scarcely credit when you saw the mastery of the famous later passages.
So Jamie had been set to work on iambic pentameters. Back to basics, Alfred said. It would be easy enough, but it would give him the foundation for lots of other verse. Jamie wasn’t finding it easy enough. He conjured up lines of ten syllables easily enough, but getting the stresses to drop naturally on alternate syllables was rather more tricky. And you needed to do that to secure the poetic effects you wanted.
Jamie had always thought of himself as a free verse man, but Alfred said that was lazy thinking. You could only kick over the rules effectively when you knew exactly what the rules were and when you could write effectively within them. Otherwise, breaking rules was a kind of cheating.
Jamie Norris had understood all of this and accepted it. But he wasn’t finding it easy to implement. Yet he knew that what Norbury said was true: he’d be a better poet when he’d studied and mastered different forms of verse. He’d managed sixteen lines in iambic pentameters, on the theme of the supermarket in snow and the effects snow had upon the people who used it.
He wanted four more lines to finish off what he thought might be a neat and balanced little poem, with one or two quite vivid images within it. He mustn’t be self-indulgent, though, and he must be ruthless in pruning his verse. That was another thing upon which Alfred insisted: you must cut out anything which was even faintly second-hand or second-rate.
Norbury was right and Jamie could see that the little he did produce was of better quality. But standards didn’t make things easy, and when your thoughts were constantly interrupted by calls for more tinned peaches or more lasagne, it didn’t help your muse. John Keats had never had to contend with a frantic yelling for bags of frozen peas. But then Jamie Norris wouldn’t have to contend with consumption, so it seemed a fair exchange. And physical labour was a kind of release, when you couldn’t for the life of you form a bloody iambic pentameter.
It was towards the end of his shift that Jamie Norris was called into the manager’s office. Mr Jordan looked worried: even if he’d reached his exalted position whilst only three years older than Jamie, management wasn’t all milk and honey, the younger man realized. Jordan’s face cleared and he smiled when he saw Norris. Everyone enjoys the luxury of having good news to deliver.
He said, ‘You’ve been here for a little over three weeks now. Your work has been generally satisfactory and you’ve happily accepted whatever shifts we have asked you to undertake.’
‘Yes. I’ve been glad of the work, sir. And especially glad of the overtime.’
‘Are you happy with the way you’ve been treated?’
Jamie knew the proper answers to the standard questions; you couldn’t reach the age of twenty-six without learning some at least of the standard ways of survival. ‘Very happy, sir. I get on well with my colleagues and I have been well treated by my superiors.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. The work is repetitive at times, I know. That’s inevitable, I’m afraid. But it’s what you choose to make of it, in the main.’
Jamie wondered what that meant – wondered whether even the man who had stated it had any real idea what it meant. What the hell were you expected to make of it? But he said dutifully, ‘I appreciate that, sir.’
‘That’s good. That’s good for us as well as for you, Mr Norris. Because I like to think that we’re a team here. And I have some good news for you.’
He paused and Jamie accepted his cue. ‘Good news, sir?’
‘I am happy to tell you that we are now able to offer you permanent employment.’
‘Thank you, sir. I shall try to give satisfaction.’
‘And we like to think that there are no dead-end jobs here, Mr Norris. You don’t need to be a mere shelf-stacker for ever. If you continue to give satisfaction, you will be afforded more responsibility. We shall expect you to spot where shortages are likely to appear and take anticipatory action. That will take you into the realm of planning. In due course, if all goes well, you may be put in charge of other workers. You may even eventually take charge of a particular shift. I’m speaking long-term now, of course.’
‘Of course, sir.’
Jamie Norris went back to the shelves and the tins of fruit in a golden glow of satisfaction. After twenty minutes or so he felt quite guilty. It was absurd to be so pleased about securing permanent employment at Tesco. He was almost more pleased than he was with his iambic pentameters.
Half a mile away from Tesco, in the large modern red-brick police station, Detective Chief Inspector Percy Peach was having a trying day.
At three o’clock on this January afternoon, the lights had already been on for an hour in the station. Percy glanced out at the dying grey of the day and thought it replicated the amount of light he had been able to cast upon this particular incident. It was a serious affray and he wanted to charge someone, but he k
new now that he wasn’t going to be able to do that.
That realization didn’t improve his temper. This had been ruined for the rest of the day by a pep talk from Chief Superintendent Tucker. Even though it was only the middle of January, Tucker was already Percy’s candidate for Prat of the Year. A hotly contested award in the police service, but one for which T.B. Tucker was invariably a short-priced favourite in Percy’s book.
Peach glared at the young Asian man who sat four feet away from him in the interview room. ‘You were bent on aggression, the whole gang of you. And you were the ring-leader, Mr Maqsood.’
‘That is not true. We were not a gang. We were innocent people going about our business when we were attacked without provocation.’
‘You came to Lord Street last night intending aggression. You spread yourselves across the thoroughfare to prevent any escape for the youths you had already planned to ambush there.’
‘No. Your English trash carried out a planned attack upon us. We did no more than defend ourselves.’
‘You were carrying knives. You came to the scene prepared for violence. Possibly murderous violence. You are lucky that you are not today being charged with murder.’
The brief who had not spoken until now cleared his throat theatrically. ‘There is no case here for any sort of serious charge, DCI Peach.’ He made an elaborate show of consulting his watch. ‘You will have to release my clients in a few hours, and all of us know that. I suggest that you save valuable time for all of us and conclude this farce now by setting these men free. Whether they choose to sue you and your colleagues for wrongful arrest will of course be up to them.’
It was a prepared speech he’d been waiting to deliver, thought Peach sourly. It didn’t help his temper that the local white lawyer with the white youths incarcerated elsewhere in the building was more hesitant and less articulate than this smooth operator. He ignored the brief and said to Maqsood, ‘The only reason you didn’t use the knives was that you were prevented from doing so. Both of them were removed from you by your intended victims as soon as you produced them. They were more prepared for your assault than you had expected.’
‘You can prove this, can you, DCI Peach? It sounds like yet another instance of institutional police racism, to me.’
They’d have been charged and in court by now, if he could have proved it. The Asians knew that as clearly as Percy did, and they had grown more confident as the day had dragged past without charges. No need for the racism card really, their brief thought; that was a tactical error. Reserve the racism suggestions for when you were driven into a corner. There was no corner here, unless it was the one which DCI Peach and his colleagues had built for themselves. He contented himself with a bland smile when Peach glanced at him.
Percy said, ‘Your colleagues are being interviewed elsewhere. They will contradict you, and your whole case will collapse about your ears like a house of cards.’
But he knew in his heart that it wasn’t so. The others would be mouthing the same safe, rehearsed phrases that Maqsood was producing here. This was an experienced group, bent upon serious mischief. They’d been through all of this before. They were used to police questioning and to the restraints which were imposed upon it. They knew precisely what the CID could do and, much more importantly, what they couldn’t do.
Sooner rather than later, there would be serious bloodshed on one side or the other between these rival gangs. Perhaps deaths, and perhaps on both sides. And then the press and the television would weigh in with pieces about the police failure to maintain order. And police officers wouldn’t be able to cite all the hours they’d given to this today, because they’d been unsuccessful and they’d look stupid.
He said to the detective constable who stood behind his adversaries, ‘Take Mr Maqsood back to his cell. We’ll see what nonsense his companions come up with, and what the eye witnesses have to say about their actions.’
But he knew that he’d no eye witnesses to the key happenings, that Maqsood’s fellow-fighters were too well-versed to contradict themselves, that he’d end this by releasing both sides with no more than a police caution. For a man who thrived on success, it was a depressing prospect.
There hadn’t been a decent crime for months now. Not one you could get your teeth into and get some satisfaction from. They’d had a couple of manslaughters, but they’d both been domestics and solved within an hour. A proper murder would make life more interesting in these darkest months of the year.
Fat chance of that.
SEVEN
Enid Frott’s flat was an interesting combination of the old and the new. A substantial Georgian house (‘mansion’ in estate agent’s terms) had been converted just over twenty years ago into four spacious flats.
The amenities were modern – the kitchen, for instance, was spacious and had modern built-in appliances, most of which Enid had recently renewed. The bathroom had power-shower, bidet and mirrors which could be distressingly revealing to those sensitive about the effects of the passing years on human flesh. The central heating was both economical and efficient.
But the long Georgian windows had been carefully preserved and the rooms were spacious and surprisingly light. The four residences here were impressive from within and without. Enid had secured perhaps the best of them, the south-facing ground-floor flat which was adjacent to the communal front door of the converted mansion. She had no intention of leaving here until age or infirmity compelled it. For a spinster without children, extreme old age can be a desperately lonely business, but Ms Frott was a vigorous sixty-three year-old with much life to live before confronting such possibilities.
Like most people of her age, she consoled herself with the thought that dangerous frailty might never happen. She might be carried off by a heart attack in the throes of some illicit and highly vigorous passion, she told those whom she wished to shock. Who knows, she might even marry, she said: all possibilities were still open nowadays to the emancipated female. Her more private thoughts on such adventures she kept strictly to herself.
She had agreed in a phone call with Sharon Burgess that her hospitality on this occasion would be modest. Although everything was subject to discussion at this first meeting, the plan was that the book club would meet in the home of each of its members in turn. In view of this, you didn’t wish to set standards which other people might find it difficult to maintain, and still less to introduce the sort of competition which dictates that each participant feels he or she has to outdo whatever has been provided before. The books must be the things, the two women agreed, and everything else must be merely incidental.
Enid Frott nevertheless thought it sensible to have a bottle of wine at the ready for her visitors, with a couple of others hidden in the fridge against emergencies. You had to be prepared to grease the wheels if you wished them to run smoothly in a vehicle like this, in which everyone was travelling for the first time. She wondered as she set out three dishes of nibbles how far this particular vehicle would run and how closely she would be able to control the route it followed. She had accepted now that control was important to her. She had been able to exercise a considerable degree of it in her working life and she had relished that. With no husband of her own and no children, she had needed to make few of the compromises which others had accepted as part of working life.
Now she acknowledged to herself that she might need to make a few revisions in the way she lived. She told herself firmly that retirement needed different attitudes from those she had exercised as office manager in her final period at Burgess Electronics. Being flexible in your approach would prove to yourself as well as to others that retired women could still be lively and adaptable.
She didn’t need the wine, as it turned out. Sharon arrived first, as she’d expected. Then another woman and three men arrived in quick succession and her sitting room rang with a welter of introductions and nervous small talk. Four other bottles had arrived with these guests, who were obviously as anxious as she was
that the occasion should not founder on the social rocks. Her only problem was persuading people to sit down in the rough circle of chairs she had prepared for them. No one seemed to be prepared to be the first one to descend into a chair; it was as if sitting would be a confession of some form of social weakness.
There was unease at first, which was not unexpected. Part of this was the natural uncertainty of people meeting each other for the first time. They were sizing up human beings with whom they planned to spend a considerable amount of time over an indefinite period, whilst simultaneously trying to give the impression that they were not doing that. It is a strange contradiction and one which besets the British more than most, and the English most of all. You wish to be relaxed and to encourage others to be relaxed, yet you wish at the same time to gain as much knowledge as you can about the personalities of these people. You might be meeting them for years, if this club works as it is supposed to do. You stand, or eventually sit, with a glass of wine in your hand and make small talk, hoping desperately that it will tell you far more than small talk usually does.
There was one person here whose presence no one had anticipated, apart from Alfred Norbury, the man who had insisted on bringing him here. The lean, dark-haired figure led the rather gauche young man in behind him and said, ‘This is Jamie Norris. He is a young man with an interest in words, a writer who plans to shape words to his own purposes. Jamie is a poet and a wordsmith who shows considerable promise: I am sure he will be of great benefit to our group dynamic. He reads books like the rest of us, but writes as well, and he will bring a different perspective to our discussions.’
‘We’re all different, I’m sure,’ said Enid Frott. ‘I’m delighted to see Jamie here and to welcome him on your recommendation, Alfred.’ She gave Jamie Norris a wide, automatic smile, as if to assure him that no personal insult was intended in what she was about to say. ‘But the idea that our views will not be diverse without him is surely wrong.’
