‘I don’t know what Sybille’s going to eat,’ he said. ‘Sometimes she pulls a face and goes straight to the fridge.’
He raised a hand in a karate chop, and brought it down on the poppadoms. We fell on them.
‘You never get a good curry in this country,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘They don’t understand it. I had to teach myself how to cook it. It’s the only thing I can cook, to be honest.’
It was one of Sybille’s good days. She was eating everything. Her eyes went round the table. Her inspection of us was very thorough.
‘So what do you think?’ Pete said.
‘It’s all very good,’ Joaquin said. ‘I like everything.’
‘Actually, I meant – well, thank you – but I actually meant about the piece in the newspaper. About my brother. I mean all that about what he learnt growing up.’
‘I didn’t read it, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘That photograph was interesting.’
‘When I looked at it again today,’ Pete Frinton said, ‘I realized that you were in it too. I should have recognized you as soon as you came through the door.’
‘I’ve changed a lot,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago. What did the piece say?’
‘Did you hear my brother’s speech to Conference last year?’ Pete Frinton said. ‘It was the one that all the commentators said showed what he had in mind. I mean, they thought it was a fairly naked bid for the top job. Usually the Home Secretary gets to talk about prison and police and law and order – they love that stuff. But last year, in the middle, he started to talk about his journey, like a contestant on a talent show. It got my attention. He knew what it was like to grow up with a parent with mental-health issues. His father, the small-business owner. He knew what that was like, too. And then he had always had friends from different cultural backgrounds. Black friends and Muslim friends. That had been a help in knowing what it was like. There were friends who had been struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, too. He was happy that people in that situation had found life easier in the years since. When I heard that, I assumed he was talking about his friend Percy Ogden. But I don’t know. He might have been talking about you. Did you struggle?’
I didn’t think the Home Secretary had been speaking about me.
‘And he knew what loss was like,’ Pete Frinton went on. ‘When his friend Tracy died. It was quite moving. He really understood what thousands of people in this country had gone through, watching loved ones succumb to the horror of drug addiction and alcohol misuse. And for these reasons he could assure Conference that he was determined to—
‘Do you know what? I can’t remember what he was determined to do. Was it to carry on opposing the legalization of something? Or to stamp out this menace from our inner cities? Or to take firm new measures to show young people that drugs and alcohol don’t pay? It was something like that. I guess the Observer heard that speech and thought maybe they could write a profile about him that went into his whole story. The speech made me laugh, though, it really did. Only someone who had allowed love to die, long ago, could talk so fluently about his feelings in a hall in Wolverhampton. Reading it all out from an autocue, I mean, not talking. I don’t want to be vile about my brother. He was doing his job, long after …’
‘Long after what?’ Joaquin said.
‘I was going to say something poetic,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘I was going to say he was doing his job, long after he let love die in his heart. Sorry. That sounds over the top. But it’s what I think happened. When did you last see him?’
‘That’s an easy one,’ I said. ‘It was when Tracy Cartwright died. He got on a train for two hours. He came back just to tell me.’
‘He got praised by the judge,’ Pete said. ‘The boyfriend got prosecuted for supplying the stuff that killed her, didn’t he? Got six months. My brother did all the right things, apparently. He took her back to the flat. He saw how drunk she was. At least, he thought she was drunk. He made sure she got back all right. He found her keys in her bag. He put her to bed. She was totally incapable all this time, he told the court. He even left an answerphone message for someone or other who had a spare key, saying he’d appreciate it if they could look in on her in the morning. The judge said that showed a sense of responsibility. He wanted to draw a contrast between my brother and the boyfriend, who handed over a bag of heroin, watched her get drunk and high and then wandered off, leaving her alone and incapable.’
‘That’s pretty much what he told me when he came round,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what to think when I opened the door to him. I hadn’t seen him for years. I was back where we had grown up, living with Joaquin in the same flat. I asked him in. I gave him a cup of tea. He told me straight away that Tracy had died. He thought he should tell me before I read it in the papers. It was very good of him. He gave me the whole story.’ Or what I had taken to be the whole story at the time. He’d been at home, reading. There was some talk in the office about the situation in Afghanistan. He thought he might take the opportunity to amass some deep background. There was a banging on the door. It was Tracy. She was celebrating: she’d been sacked. He should come out with her! she said. Someone was having a party in – where was it? – Clapham. No, Chiswick. It would be divine. One drink, no more than that. He told her she should probably go home. The landlord appeared: this sort of thing couldn’t happen. He didn’t care. James Frinton should just ask his friend to leave, please. In the end James Frinton just thought that the best thing was for him to go with her to the party in Chiswick. Hand her over to someone he could trust.
James said frankly that there wasn’t anyone at the party he thought he could trust with her. She was drunk already. She carried on drinking. By nine she was passing out on a stranger’s sofa. There was no sign of Blaise, her boyfriend. James was the only sober person in the room. He took responsibility. And then it was as he told the court. He managed to bring her round. He took her back to her rooms. He took the keys from her bag and got her in. There was no one else at home. He laid her out on her bed and hoped for the best.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘The whole story was very shocking. I don’t think I thought there was anything else for your brother to tell. There was one curious thing about it, though. There was a bottle of gin only a third drunk on the table, and two glasses. She had probably had a drink with someone before she set out, but nobody could identify who that had been – it certainly wasn’t Blaise. I wondered afterwards whether your brother had sat down and had a drink on his own, once he had got her into bed. But that makes no sense – there were two glasses. Your brother behaved in a very responsible way. Everyone said so. He wouldn’t take someone as drunk as she was, and let her drink any more. It must have been obvious that she would pass into unconsciousness if she had any more.
‘I heard your brother through to the end. I thought I was under control until I started to say something. My voice just dried up. Before I knew it I was crying. James Frinton sat and watched for a few minutes. He patted me on the shoulder. But quite soon, I guess, it would be time for him to go. I wouldn’t be the only person he’d want to inform. “I know it’s upsetting,” he said. “This grief, though,” James Frinton said, “this display of grief, I mean, you shouldn’t bring it out in public. It’s not commensurate, to coin a phrase. I’ve got to go now. I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you.”’
‘I liked Tracy,’ Joaquin said simply. ‘She was a good girl.’
There was one thing I never understood. Why did James Frinton come up to tell me the news? We hadn’t spoken in years. Did he want to say goodbye to the person he could have become? I would never have expected him to come in person to break the news. I wouldn’t even have expected that the duty ought to fall on him. For years afterwards I could never understand why he had done it. I think I know now, however. In my opinion, James Frinton had thought about his future. He could suddenly see a profile writer, a biographer even, wond
ering about our little group at school, and speaking to us, one after another. He wanted to leave me with a heart-warming anecdote to share. He wanted even me to be able to say to his biographer that the last time I had seen him was a demonstration of his humanity, his care, his thought for others. Those biographers were emerging now. Although they had not found their way to me, at last I got the point. Of course he couldn’t tell that story himself. He wanted to perform an act of extraordinary goodness. His notion of extraordinary goodness was to waste an entire day travelling, and half an unnecessary hour with someone he despised.
We said goodbye the next morning. We were down in very good time for the bus. The weekend had not been the catastrophe we had at one point anticipated. The two big walks we had taken had been well worth it, apart from the extraordinary coincidence of finding a part of my youth in that silent corner of Germany. Pete Frinton took payment from my credit card. The dog Nala padded out of his private quarters and sniffed around me. Joaquin was pacing up and down outside, our rucksacks by the door. The bus back to Wernigerode was due in twenty minutes. It was with difficulty that I had resisted his suggestion that I phone the bus company to make quite sure of it.
‘It was good to meet you,’ I said. ‘I hope business picks up, anyway.’
‘You were the one who never changed his mind, weren’t you?’ Pete Frinton said, smiling. ‘Coming from an old Trotskyite, that really means a lot. You don’t mind being called an old Trotskyite? I thought the small-business owners like me were going to be the first up against the wall when the revolution came.’
‘I don’t know that we really think in those terms any more,’ I said. ‘But anyway. I hope you keep going. You’ve got a nice life here.’
‘Wo die Füchse und die Hasen sich gute Nacht sagen,’ Pete Frinton said. I knew the expression: where the foxes and hares say good night to each other. It is German for the back of beyond. It suited the village of Sorge as well as anywhere else. ‘Actually, we’re thinking of packing it in. It’s quite a lot of effort, to tell you the truth. Sybille’s got her eye on a big house that’s come up for sale in the middle of the forest, miles from anyone. She likes not being bothered.’
‘I’m not an expert,’ I said, ‘but it might be even harder to make a living from somewhere any more remote than this. What did you have in mind?’
‘I’m going to live on Sybille,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘Like an idle kept man. I might take to shooting and fishing. She wrote this – didn’t I say?’ He picked up the paperback novel that lay on the reception desk. The cover image was familiar, not just from German railway bookshops but from our local bookshop. I hadn’t read it. I could only vaguely say that it was about two rich American teenagers, one of whom dies of cancer. ‘It’s going to be a movie, too, apparently. I’m never going to laugh at another word Sybille writes. She’s just finishing the next one. She says it’s about a country girl who falls in love with a much older Englishman. Fancy that. I’m not allowed to read it yet, though.’
‘Crikey,’ I said. ‘I didn’t make the connection.’ I picked up the book. The author was announced as ‘S. T. Grobel’. Now I looked at it, I could see that it aimed at a mysterious anonymity in this regard.
‘She’s not up yet,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘She liked having you here, too. Take it – there’s boxes of copies out the back, in every language you can think of. You know, I was thinking about that photograph in the magazine of you and the others. They must have asked my brother if he could tell them who everyone was. I don’t know who gave them the photograph. Maybe that poet woman. He must have decided he didn’t want to bring you into it. I’m sure he could remember your name. You mustn’t be hurt.’
‘I’m not hurt,’ I said. ‘It really isn’t important.’
‘What I mean is, I’m sure he was thinking of your best interest,’ he said. ‘The others are in the public eye, more or less, but my brother knows that most people – most private people – don’t want to be bothered by journalists. I bet he thought that if he identified you, you’d always have investigative journalists phoning you up or turning up on the doorstep. Imagine what it’s like to be known publicly as a good friend from childhood of the Home Secretary. Or the Prime Minister, I expect. Do you have your number in the phone directory? Your surname’s quite unusual.’
It had never occurred to me not to have my phone number in the public directory.
‘I’m sure that’s it. It was a kindness, really. My brother thinks about other people more than you might imagine. He’s quite a thoughtful person. That’s your bus. You don’t want to miss it, I’m sure.’
We said goodbye. I went outside. I’m sure Pete Frinton was right. There was some residual consideration there. The magazine would have asked the Home Secretary’s office to ask him if he could identify the last person in the photograph of the teenagers clowning around. He would have said that he could not, untruthfully. That would spare me. But there was another reason there. The magazine article had said nothing about anything we had all done together. We were, apparently, to be regarded as a bunch of civic-minded kids who liked to hang around together. You might have thought we had met on a Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, orienteering. He was quite safe in this belief, or almost so. I had long ago come to the firm conclusion that on the last night of Tracy Cartwright’s life, he had taken her back to her room and, finding that the brisk walk was sobering her up, he had given her a final couple of glasses of gin to put her under once more. Then he had done what needed to be done. It wouldn’t have been hard to find the letters. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d bought the necessary bottle of gin himself. The letters he had written to Tracy, full of everything the Spartacists had got up to, were gone. Nobody afterwards knew they even existed.
Apart from me. In the photograph the magazine used, everyone else could be identified. Lord Milne QC, and the liberal poet, and the Blairite newspaper columnist – they would not be tempted to reveal that, when they were young, they had smashed windows, and painted ‘ARM THE POO’ on walls, and broken up the meetings of pacifists, and punched the wives of mayors in the face, even if it was in the course of explaining that they had the Rt Hon. James Frinton MP by their side at the time. I have done nothing much in life. My life has been devoted to a cause that has sometimes seemed impossibly remote and retreating from its realization. The political purity of my beliefs has been untainted by any deals with what may be achieved now, today, this minute. I would always leave a negotiation rather than accept something that inadequately contained my ideals. And so would Joaquin. And, as a result, we have lived lives of quiet satisfaction; lives of the utmost insignificance, you may think. It appeared to me that the Home Secretary had thought about this. He had realized that, in fact, his coming up to break the news in a blind panic would not be enough to demonstrate his extraordinary goodness. I had other things to tell. Apart from Mohammed, who had taken the photograph and was not in it, I was the only person there who had nothing to lose. I had been there at the time. I knew that James Frinton had written many letters to Tracy. I had seen some of them. I also knew that those letters were not to be found among her things after she died, and what romantic teenager does not keep letters? Of course, none of this is proof. I am a witness who had a partial glimpse of events, no more than that. Good lawyers could discredit me in a moment. And yet James Frinton had thought last year about whether it was a good idea to identify Spike, the friend of his youth, to journalists. When they had told him, perhaps, that Kate was unable to remember my name, he had said, untruthfully, that he could not remember it, either. I was the one who had said to him, in front of his mother, that he shouldn’t come back late ‘because you’ll wake Eartha Kitt’. Of course he could remember my name. I had hurt him, when he was sixteen years old, as badly as anyone could be hurt. He had thought about it last year. He had come to the conclusion that I had no reason not to hurt him again. The magazine had been obliged to write Unknown under my face.
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The lives we have lived have been devoted to the political principles we found when we were young. At sixteen, we were already wearing the comic hairstyles of people in late middle age. Our lives have been lived under the direction of those principles, or they have been lived in reaction to them. At the moment I am writing about, those processes of reaction and renunciation had taken many people into a debate about whether my country should leave the community of Europe or not. The principles that I and Joaquin had remained true to had left us in a place where this debate seemed of the utmost triviality. Either course could change nothing fundamental. We waited for the upheaval that would transform everything beyond the ordinary imagination. It had not come yet, but it would. Some of the friends of my youth would live to see it. Others would not. James Frinton would become Prime Minister, or he would not. Another man or woman would take his place, and sustain the crumbling structures of this society for a year or two longer. It hardly mattered.
‘Do you think we did the right thing?’ I said. We were sitting in the front seat of the empty bus to Wernigerode.
‘Oh, yes,’ Joaquin said. Then he understood that I was asking a bigger question from the emphases of my tone. ‘Of course. You have done the right thing and I have done the right thing. There was never any alternative.’
‘Do you think anyone else will understand that, ever?’
‘Oh, no,’ Joaquin said. He grinned. I think I can say he grinned – boyishly. ‘There is never any reward of understanding. This is not the Oscars. There is no prize to be had. What are you talking about? We should pretend we were wrong? You know how this story ends. They are kidding themselves.’
‘Pete Frinton and that girl. They’re saying they’re going to go and live on their own in a house in the forest, miles from anyone. He’s going to buy a shotgun. Take to shooting things.’
A Small Revolution in Germany Page 28
