by Lodge, David
“The students will have prepared reports,” said Robyn.
“Well, of course, I don’t mind just chairing a discussion, if that would…”
“That would be fine,” said Robyn. “Thank you very much.”
Swallow escorted her to the door. “Frankfurt,” he said wistfully. “I attended a very lively conference there once.”
PART V
“Some persons hold,” he pursued, still hesitating, “that there is a wisdom of the Head, and that there is a wisdom of the Heart. I have not supposed it so; but, as I have said, I mistrust myself now. I have supposed the head to be all-sufficient. It may not be all-sufficient; how can I venture this morning to say it is!”
CHARLES DICKENS: Hard Times
1
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Victor Wilcox and Robyn Penrose would end up in bed together in Frankfurt, though neither of them set off from Rummidge with that intention. Vic was conscious only of wanting to have Robyn’s company, and to give her a treat. Robyn was conscious only of wanting to be treated, and to be whisked away from her routine existence for an interval, however brief. But subconsciously other motives were in play. Vic’s growing interest in Robyn was on the point of ripening into infatuation. Robyn’s cool handling of Charles’s relationship with Debbie concealed wounded pride, and she was ready to assert her own erotic independence. The trip to a foreign city, safe from the observation of friends and family, provided the perfect alibi, and a luxury hotel the perfect setting, for an affaire whose time had come. It hardly needed the extra incitements of the drama of the Altenhofer negotiations, Robyn’s susceptibility to champagne, or the hotel disc-jockey’s penchant for Jennifer Rush. As Robyn herself might have said, the event was over-determined.
…
Vic picked up Robyn from her house at 6:30 and drove swiftly through slumbering suburbs to the airport, with her silent and still half-asleep beside him. While he parked the car, she had a cup of coffee and started to come to life. It was her first time in Rummidge Airport. The new-looking terminal impressed her with its stainless-steel and fibreglass surfaces, its vaulted roof, its electronic databoard announcing departures to half the capitals of Europe. Built (so Vic informed her) with the help of a grant from the EEC, it seemed like an interface between the scruffy, depressed English Midlands and a more confident, expansive world. Burly Rummidge businessmen toting overnight bags and burgundy leather briefcases with digital locks checked in nonchalantly for their flights to Zürich, Brussels, Paris, Milan, as if they did so every day of the week.
“Smoking or non-smoking?” the British Airways checker asked Vic, who hesitated and glanced at Robyn.
“I don’t mind,” she said accommodatingly.
“Non-smoking,” he decided. “I can do without fags for an hour and a half.”
Only an hour and a half! If one had the money, then, one could rise at six and be in Germany in time for breakfast. Quite a lot of money, though—she sneaked a look at her ticket and was appalled to see that the fare was £280000. Breakfast was included, however. They were travelling Club Class, and attentive stewardesses served them with a compote of apricots and pears, scrambled eggs and ham, rolls, croissants and coffee, and Dundee marmalade in miniature stoneware jars. Robyn, whose rare flights were undertaken on the cheapest tickets available, and usually spent sitting next to the lavatories in the bucking tail of the plane, trying to eat a trayful of tasteless pap with her knees under her chin, relished the standard of service. “You businessmen do yourselves proud,” she said.
“Well, we deserve it,” said Vic with a grin. “The country depends on us.”
“My brother Basil thinks the country depends on merchant bankers.”
“Don’t talk to me about the City,” said Vic. “They’re only interested in short-term profits. They’d rather make a fast buck in foreign markets than invest in British companies. That’s why our interest rates are so high. This machine I want will take three years to pay for itself.”
“I never did understand stocks and shares,” said Robyn. “And after listening to Basil, I’m not sure I want to.”
“It’s all paper,” said Vic. “Moving bits of paper about. Whereas we make things, things that weren’t there till we made ’em.”
Sunlight flooded the cabin as the plane changed course. It was a bright, clear morning. Robyn looked out of the window as England slid slowly by beneath them: cities and towns, their street plans like printed circuits, scattered over a mosaic of tiny fields, connected by the thin wires of railways and motorways. Hard to imagine at this height all the noise and commotion going on down there. Factories, shops, offices, schools, beginning the working day. People crammed into rush-hour buses and trains, or sitting at the wheels of their cars in traffic jams, or washing up breakfast things in the kitchens of pebble-dashed semis. All inhabiting their own little worlds, oblivious of how they fitted into the total picture. The housewife, switching on her electric kettle to make another cup of tea, gave no thought to the immense complex of operations that made that simple action possible: the building and maintenance of the power station that produced the electricity, the mining of coal or pumping of oil to fuel the generators, the laying of miles of cable to carry the current to her house, the digging and smelting and milling of ore or bauxite into sheets of steel or aluminium, the cutting and pressing and welding of the metal into the kettle’s shell, spout and handle, the assembling of these parts with scores of other components—coils, screws, nuts, bolts, washers, rivets, wires, springs, rubber insulation, plastic trimmings; then the packaging of the kettle, the advertising of the kettle, the marketing of the kettle to wholesale and retail outlets, the transportation of the kettle to warehouses and shops, the calculation of its price, and the distribution of its added value between all the myriad people and agencies concerned in its production and circulation. The housewife gave no thought to all this as she switched on her kettle. Neither had Robyn until this moment, and it would never have occurred to her to do so before she met Vic Wilcox. What to do with the thought was another question. It was difficult to decide whether the system that produced the kettle was a miracle of human ingenuity and co-operation or a colossal waste of resources, human and natural. Would we all be better off boiling our water in a pot hung over an open fire? Or was it the facility to do such things at the touch of a button that freed men, and more particularly women, from servile labour and made it possible for them to become literary critics? A phrase from Hard Times she was apt to quote with a certain derision in her lectures, but of which she had thought more charitably lately, came into her mind: “’Tis aw a muddle.” She gave up the conundrum, and accepted another cup of coffee from the stewardess.
…
Vic, meanwhile, was reflecting that he was sitting next to the best-looking woman on the plane, including the hostesses. Robyn had surprised him by appearing at the door of her little house dressed as he had never seen her dressed before, in a tailored two-piece costume, with matching cape, made out of a soft olive-green cloth that set off her coppery curls and echoed her grey-green eyes. “You look terrific,” he said spontaneously. She smiled and stifled a yawn and said, “Thanks. I thought I’d try and dress the part.”
But what was the part? The other passengers on the plane had clearly made up their minds. They were businessmen like himself, many of them on their way to the same trade fair, and he had intercepted their knowing, appraising glances at Robyn as she strode into the departure lounge at his side. She was his girlfriend, his mistress, his dolly-bird, his bit of spare, his nookie-cookie, thinly disguised as his secretary or PA, going with him to Frankfurt on the firm’s expenses, nice work if you could fiddle it, lucky bastard. And the Germans would presumably think the same.
“How shall I explain you to the Germans?” he said. “I can’t go through all that rigmarole about the Shadow Scheme every time I introduce you. I don’t suppose they’d understand what I was on about anyway.”
“I’ll explain,” she said. “I speak German
.”
“Go on! You don’t!”
“Ja, bestimmt. Ich habe seit vier jahren in der Schule die Deutsche Sprache studiert.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Yes, I do. I studied German for four years at school.”
Vic stared in wonderment. “I wish I could do that,” he said. “Guten Tag and Auf Wiedersehen are about the limits of my German.”
“I’ll be your interpreter, then.”
“Oh, they all speak English… As a matter of fact,” he said, struck by a thought, “it might be useful if you don’t let on that you understand German when we meet the Altenhofer people.”
“Why?”
“I’ve done business with Krauts before. Sometimes they talk German to each other in the middle of a meeting. I’d like to know what they’re saying.”
“All right,” said Robyn. “But how will you explain what I’m doing there?”
“I’ll say you’re my Personal Assistant,” said Vic.
…
Altenhofer’s had sent a car to meet them at the airport. The driver was standing at the exit from Customs holding a cardboard sign with MR. WILCOX on it. “Hmm, giving us the treatment,” said Vic, when he saw this.
“How much would this sale be worth to them?” Robyn asked.
“I’m hoping to get the machine for £150,000. Guten Tag,” he said to the chauffeur. “Ich bin Herr Wilcox.”
“This way, please sir,” said the man, taking their bags.
“You see what I mean?” Vic murmured. “Even the bloody chauffeurs speak better English than I do.”
The driver nodded approvingly when Vic gave the name of their hotel. It was on the outskirts of the city because it hadn’t been possible to get an additional room for Robyn in the downtown hotel where he’d originally been booked. “But this one should be comfortable,” said Vic. “It’s pricey enough.”
It was in fact the most luxurious hotel Robyn had ever entered as a guest, though the ambience was more like that of an exclusive country club, with a great deal of natural wood and exposed brick in the decor, and all kinds of facilities for recreation and body-maintenance: a beauty salon, a gymnasium, a sauna, a games room, and a swimming pool. “Schwimmbad!” Robyn exclaimed, seeing the direction sign. “If I’d known I’d have brought my costume.”
“Buy one,” said Vic. “There’s a shop over there.”
“What, just for one swim?”
“Why not? You’ll use it again, won’t you?”
While Vic was registering, she strolled over to the sports boutique on the other side of the lobby and flicked through a rack of bikinis and swimsuits. The more exiguous they were, the dearer they seemed to be. “Much too expensive,” she said, coming back to the reception desk.
“Let me treat you,” he said.
“No thanks. I want to see my room. I bet it’s enormous.”
It was. It had a monolithic bed, an immense leather-topped desk, a glass-topped coffee table, a TV, a minibar and a vast wardrobe system in which the few items of her modest luggage looked lost. She plucked a grape from the complimentary bowl of fruit on the coffee table. She switched on the radio at the bedside console and the strains of Schubert filled the room. She pressed another button and the net curtains, electrically operated, whirred apart to reveal, like a cinemascope establishing shot, landscaped grounds and an artificial lake. The bathroom, gleaming with sophisticated plumbing, had two washbasins carved out of what looked convincingly like marble, and was provided with more towels of diverse sizes than she could think of uses for. Behind the door were two towelling bathrobes sealed in polythene covers. Schubert filtered into the bathroom from an extension speaker. It was the only sound in the suite: double glazing, deep-pile carpets, and the heavy wooden door, absorbed all sound of the outside world. Two weeks here, she thought, and I could finish off Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females.
The chauffeur had waited to take them into the centre of the city. Sitting in the back seat of the swift, silent Mercedes, Robyn was struck by the contrast between the streets of Frankfurt and their equivalents in poor old Rummidge. Everywhere here looked clean, neat, freshly painted and highly polished. There were no discarded chip cones, squashed fried-chicken cartons, dented lager cans, polystyrene hamburger containers or crumpled paper cups in the gutters. The pavements had a freshly rinsed look, and so had the pedestrians. The commercial architecture was sleek and stylish.
“Well, they had to rebuild from scratch after the war, didn’t they,” said Vic when she commented on this. “We pretty well flattened Frankfurt.”
“The centre of Rummidge has been pretty well flattened too,” said Robyn.
“Not by bombing.”
“No, by the developers. But they haven’t rebuilt it like this, have they?”
“Couldn’t afford to. We won the war and lost the peace, as they say.”
“Why did we?”
Vic pondered a moment. “We were too greedy and too lazy,” he said. “In the fifties and sixties, when you could sell anything, we went on using obsolete machines and paid the unions whatever they asked for, while the Krauts were investing in new technology and hammering out sensible labour agreements. When times got harder, it paid off. They think they’ve got a recession here, but it’s nothing like what we’ve got.”
This was an unusually critical assessment of British industry, coming from Vic. “I thought you said our problem was we bought too many imports?” she said.
“That too. Where was that outfit of yours made, as a matter of interest?”
“I’ve no idea.” She looked at the label inside the cape and laughed: “West Germany!”
“There you are.”
“But it’s nice, you said so yourself. Anyway, you can’t talk. This cost me all of eighty-five pounds. You’re just about to spend a hundred and fifty thousand on a German machine tool.”
“That’s different.”
“No, it isn’t. Why don’t you buy a British machine?”
“Because we don’t make one that will do the job,” Vic said. “And that’s another reason why we lost the peace.”
…
The exhibition centre housing the trade fair was rather like an airport without aeroplanes: a vast multi-levelled complex of large halls, connected by long walkways and moving staircases, with bars and cafeterias dotted about the landings. They registered inside the entrance hall. Robyn put down on the form, “J. Pringle & Sons” under Company and “Personal Assistant to Managing Director” under Position, and received an identity card recording these false particulars.
Vic frowned at a plan of the exhibition. “We have to go through CADCAM,” he said, adding for her benefit: “Computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacture.” Robyn stored away the information for future reference: she intended to compose her URFAIYS report as far as possible in acronyms.
They threaded their way though a hot and crowded space where computers hummed and printers chattered and screeched on stands packed as close together as fairground booths, and passed into a larger, airier hall where the big machine tools were displayed, some in simulated operation. Wheels turned, crankshafts cranked, oiled pistons slid up and down, in and out, conveyor belts rattled round, but nothing was actually produced. The machines were odourless, brightly painted and highly polished. It was all very different from the stench and dirt and heat and noise of a real factory. More like a moving toyshop for grown men; and men in large numbers were swarming round the massive machines, squatting and bending and craning to get a better view of their intricacies. Robyn saw very few women about, except for professional models handing out leaflets and brochures. They wore skintight Lycra jump-suits, heavy make-up and fixed smiles and looked as if they had been extruded from the Altenhofer automatic core-moulding machine.
The sales director of Altenhofer’s, Herr Winkler, and his technical assistant, Dr. Patsch, welcomed Vic and Robyn warmly at the company’s stand, and ushered them into a carpeted inner sanctum for refreshme
nt. Champagne was offered, as well as coffee and orange juice.
“Coffee for me,” said Vic. “I’ll leave the bubbly till later.”
Herr Winkler, a portly, smiling man, with small, perfectly shod feet and a springy step like a ballroom dancer, chuckled. “You wish to keep a clear head, of course. But your charming assistant… ?”
“Oh, she can drink as much as she likes,” said Vic offhandedly, presumably to encourage the supposition that her presence on this occasion was purely decorative. He had already stripped her of her doctorate, introducing her to the Germans as “Miss Penrose.” With her false identity card on her lapel, Robyn felt she had no option but to go along with the role assigned to her, and enjoy the fun of it. “I’m rather susceptible to champagne,” she simpered. “I think I’d better mix it with orange juice.”
“Ah, yes, the Buck Fizz, isn’t it?” said Herr Winkler.
“Buck’s Fizz, actually,” she said, ever the teacher, even in disguise. “As distinct from Buck House, where the Queen lives.”
“Buck’s Fizz, Buck House—I must remember,” said Herr Winkler, waltzing over to the drinks table. “Heinrich! a glass of Buck’s Fizz for the lady! And coffee for Mr. Wilcox, who wishes to buy one of our beautiful machines.”
“If the price is right,” said Vic.
“Ha ha! Of course,” Winkler chuckled. Dr. Patsch, tall, saturnine and dark-bearded, measured orange juice and sparkling wine into a champagne flute, holding it level with his eyes like a test-tube. Winkler snatched the drink from him and sashayed back to Robyn. He presented the glass to her with a slight bow and a perceptible click of his heels. “I am informed that your boss is a hard bargainer, Miss Penrose.”
“Who told you that?” Vic said.
“My spies,” said Dr. Winkler, beaming merrily. “We have all spies in business these days, do we not? Will you take cream in your coffee, Mr. Wilcox?”
“Black with sugar, please. Then I’d like to take a closer look at the machine you’ve got out there.”
