The Man Who Knew Everything

by Tom Stacey

  Eager, open-hearted, gregarious Liz – he could attach adjectives to her, but for years now there was no precision to her except when she recurred, in half-sleep or even dreaming, always in the context of those pent homecomings and their blighted hopefulness.

  Encumbered by suitcase and typewriter, he pauses to buy a Star or Standard as they cross to where she has parked the car. MOLOTOV STILL SAYS ‘NYET’ says the Star in big black letters under a strap which reads ‘As Big 4 conference breaks up . . .’ Only just as they reach the car does she gently tug his typewriter from his hand and his arm is free to slip round her waist.

  And then? When she hands him the Hillman keys he can’t for a moment remember where the ignition keyhole is.

  ‘Well, how was it, darling?’ she asks.

  ‘Moscow always unnerves me.’

  Stalin’s Moscow, of course.

  ‘Glad to be home again, then?’ And she adds, bitter-sweet – ‘For a few minutes.’

  ‘They didn’t budge one inch on their zone of Germany. They’ve got half of Europe for keeps. It’s not what we thought we were fighting the war for.’

  ‘Is that the last of the Big Four conferences, then?’ she ventures.

  ‘I can’t see another.’

  ‘The end of your war at last?’

  He knows exactly what she means.

  ‘They want me to do China, my love. Before Mao Tse Tung wipes Chiang off the map.’

  After a little moment she tells him, ‘The boys hardly know you, Gran.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve persuaded them, my love?’

  ‘They don’t need persuading.’ He feels he knows the boys well, but she rubs it in. ‘I heard Gavin telling a friend he wouldn’t recognise you in the street if you weren’t wearing your hat.’

  ‘What a dreadfully grown-up thing to say.’

  ‘He was only boasting how important your job was.’ She swallows. ‘I can’t tell you how hurting it was.’ Already she is nearly crying.

  ‘Who to?’

  He shouldn’t have said that, because it’s a cue.

  ‘For a writer you can be terribly obtuse.’

  ‘I’m not a writer. I’m a reporter.’ And mocks himself in a heavy Russian accent, ‘I’m a lackey of the imperialist press barons.’

  This extracts a smile. She tilts her head against his squared overcoat shoulder. It’s a two-hour drive to Essex.

  In the boys’ bedroom she has decorated the Morning Post wall-map of the world with coloured pins showing where he has been on assignment. She has made a flag out of a tiny photograph of his head in his felt hat at the famous angle, cut from the Post in its double-ruled black oval typical of the paper in those days. The flag is still stuck in at Moscow, and one of the boys stands on the bed in his pyjamas and moves it to London. That would be Gavin.

  ‘Why didn’t you talk to Mr Stalin, Daddy?’

  ‘He was too busy sending people to Siberia.’

  ‘Didn’t you even see him?’

  ‘Not this time, Gavin. Though most of the time it felt as if Stalin was with us.’

  ‘Like a ghost, you mean.’

  Gavin isn’t satisfied, Jones can tell. It’s always hard to satisfy Gavin.

  ‘You know when you saw Hitler?’

  ‘That was before the war.’

  ‘Why didn’t you shoot him?’

  ‘You can’t just go around shooting people.’

  ‘If you shot him there wouldn’t have been a war.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t have had a daddy.’

  ‘You mean, I wouldn’t have even existed.’

  Gavin is precocious and likes grown-up words. It was no different then from now.

  ‘Would I have existed?’ Paul asks. Paul is on Jones’s knee, in his pyjamas too.

  ‘If I wouldn’t, you wouldn’t either,’ Gavin states the obvious.

  ‘Why not?’ Paul objects, burdening his older brother with his silly questions. But Liz explains.

  ‘They would have shot Daddy before I started you.’

  Paul says, ‘You started me when Daddy rang up from the airport, didn’t you Mummy?’

  It was an old Fleet Street joke, among the roving correspondents.

  Liz says it was enough talk, it was time the boys were out for the count. And she threatens, Ten, nine, eight . . . Paul snuggles against his father and Jones fishes from his pocket two red hammer-and-sickle badges which he begins to safety-pin to the boys’ pyjamas, explaining that Mr Molotov gave them to him with best love from Comrade Uncle Joe Stalin.

  Gavin is grave again. ‘What’s Siberia?’

  ‘It’s a very cold place, Gavin, full of salt mines and prisoners.’

  So Gavin unpins his badge, refusing to take any emblem of evil to bed with him.

  And in bed himself that night, much later, after they have made love, Jones half-wakes beside Liz and can just see that she is awake too, with inexplicable tears on her cheeks.

  Liz was dead now and the boys forty and thirty-eight. They never visited the island, yet just in case they should turn up unexpectedly Jones displayed no portrait of Romy. Though the boys knew well enough it was she that brought him here (everyone knew), no offspring could feel at home with a parent’s alternative mate. Even so, he sometimes wondered whether he might not put a picture up without offending the boys. But then, he couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t because of himself, because he himself couldn’t quite bear it, that he had no pictures of Romy up . . . He had enough of them, heaven knows – Romy on the Residency yacht; Romy playing hostess for her father at the Residency; Romy with her father and the Emir and his entourage; Romy, trowel in hand, at her island ‘dig’; Romy in a Beirut nightclub on a stolen weekend; Romy asleep on the patio of this very house; Romy looking formally beautiful in a portrait taken by a Bond Street photographer.

  The pictures were in drawers and manila envelopes: they had never got around to making an album.

  Yet for quite a while after Romy, her things still filled the house – books, prehistoric artefacts, bottles in the bathroom, clothes in wardrobes or drawers. A single hairpin would halt him, make him sit heavily in his chair. The detritus of love is indisposable. He often thought of moving out, in those days; just walking out the door and not coming back, and if it wasn’t for the parrot he might have done so.

  In the end he had to stay. What else was there for him to do? Who would employ him? By then he had already lived on the island five years; this house seemed to contain all that was left of him; it was Romy who found it for him, she who had pinned up the red and white chequered head-cloth across the window screens when they glassed them over for the newfangled air conditioners. In the end he tidied up, packed her things away, and kept only her excavated relics on view around him, that was all. During that period of desolation the Emir sent a car for him without warning to fetch him to the palace, but Jones declined to go: he was unshaven at the time and had no serviceable razorblade. After that the Emir actually called on him and sat with him awhile, bringing a vulgar gift – a consoling tag from the Koran buried in Perspex. He was accompanied by his spoiled young son Hatim.

  The Emir asked him what he occupied himself with, and in answer he gestured vaguely towards the pile of typescript pages on his writing-table. This was the book he intended to dedicate to Romy. A London publisher had been enthusiastic about the proposal, talking to him conspiratorially and with too much flattery over lunch at the Savile Club and even paying a small advance. The work was to be a study of mid-century history keyed upon the principal personalities. But he hadn’t touched it since Romy.

  When at last he turned back to the book, he found the publisher had gone cold. His fame was fading. Television men had become the stars. Nonetheless he did take up the manuscript again and waded on. All these years later it was a massive thing, three hundred thousand words. He could no longer afford a typist to clean-copy his repeated revisions. He alone knew his way through the morass of typescript sheets and freehand notes. There could still be w
orth in it. He didn’t want to die without explaining it to someone.

  He thought often about dying, even when his heart was giving no trouble. He seldom missed a siesta unless he was out on an assignment or had a dispatch to file, and thinking about death was like a comforter on the approach to sleep in the afternoon, if no memories happened to flow. He wondered how word of his death might get out. His servant Aziz would report it, of course, and the Emir would hear within a few hours. He hoped he might be granted a little warning and get a call through to McCulloch at the local paper, who perhaps might call London. If the Post didn’t have an obit ready, it would be best if they didn’t get the news late in the day. So McCulloch shouldn’t tell them at once if he went later than, say, 3 p.m. London time, simply because whoever they put on to writing the obit wouldn’t have time to go through all his cuttings and appreciate the extent of what he’d done: they’d skimp the job. Better for McCulloch to send a ‘flash’ for the last edition, after the obituary page had been screwed down for the night. The flash might make a couple of inches on page one that night. Then someone could give the whole of the next day to preparing a full-length obit in plenty of time for the first and all subsequent editions . . .

  The Post was loyal to its former staffers. It was still capable of remembering. It measured its obituaries against genuine professional achievement – irrespective of when. Loyalty to former staffers could still be called a characteristic of Fleet Street, even the trendy, unionised Docklands Fleet Street of lately.

  2

  This particular Friday lunchtime Jones found himself unable to recognise the people with young McCulloch at the Darwish bar. They weren’t the self-assured young bankers whose company McCulloch favoured.

  The mail clerk had handed Jones a cable with his airmailed newspapers and the rest of his correspondence. He settled at one of the window tables and as Abdullah brought him his cold Tuborg and a chilled glass he was opening the cable. It was from the Post’s foreign editor and read: ‘Suggest 300 maximum on school issue tomorrow for Saturday. Regards Foster.’ It must have been sent shortly before Foster left for home the previous evening since it carried a 20.46 GMT slug.

  Jones asked, ‘Has something been going on at the Asnan school, Abdullah?’

  Abdullah’s eyes twinkled. ‘The Emir has ordered the school to be closed for the present time, Mr Jonas.’

  ‘Oh, has he? Why?’

  ‘He expects the mischief.’

  The little fat waiter’s eyes always twinkled. Nothing in a bar was serious: alcohol, the infidels’ opiate, put everything just out of reach of gravity. Some of the habitués had nicknamed him Sunshine.

  As Jones was breaking open his third or fourth copy of the Post, Sandy McCulloch came across with his little group.

  The old man looked up at them with a pained expression.

  McCulloch did the introductions. ‘This is Lou Rivers of “The World This Week”, and Phil and Mick, his camera chappies. All wizards from the telly business.’

  They settled round him with the dubious cordiality of people about to touch an acquaintance for a tenner. Rivers said ‘Howdy,’ and ordered another round of drinks and a second Tuborg for Jones. A shark’s tooth bobbed on the fur of his chest among two or three other charms.

  Jones enquired indifferently what brought them here, and McCulloch answered for them, ‘“The World This Week”, Gran,’ as if that was enough. But Jones stubbornly repeated,

  ‘What brings you here?’

  Rivers said, ‘You tell me. We’ve done a couple of bits coming down the Gulf. The Museum of Islamic Art in Kuwait – they gave us a freebie. Yacht club at Dhahran. We’ve quite a little film in the can on the playgrounds of the Gulf – sheikhs fiddling while Islam burns, the oil price craps out.’

  ‘Playgrounds?’

  ‘Yes. Beach clubs. Gold-plated motors. Crazy palaces. All the decadence.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jones said. ‘The decadence.’ He lit a Kensitas and they saw his hands shake.

  ‘Yes, old son. The decadence, while they slug it out in Mesopotamia. Lousy rich sheikhs. We’ve some really quite beautiful material, haven’t we Phil, really booful? If it makes me sick, with any luck it’ll make the viewers sick too.’

  ‘With envy, anyway,’ Phil said.

  ‘Not envy at all, Phil. Just sick. I doubt if they’ll let us back here in a hurry, that’s all.’

  ‘I doubt it, Lou,’ Phil agreed.

  ‘Tough stuff,’ Jones said, and Rivers followed at once.

  ‘So what’s this trouble we hear?’

  ‘Is there trouble?’ Jones asked, as vague as could be.

  ‘You should know, Gran,’ McCulloch answered. ‘You always know.’

  ‘I know nothing. I’ve only just been told the Emir’s shut the school. London tells me.’ He flapped his cable.

  ‘You said this bloke knew everything, Sandy,’ Rivers commented across him.

  Jones regarded Rivers sadly. ‘I get all my information from people like you.’

  Rivers said, ‘That’s what we journalists are for, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ Jones told him.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The Morning Post. Granville Jones, Morning Post,’ he repeated with a courtly distance and watched the blank puzzlement in Rivers’ eyes. He picked up a copy of the airmailed Post.

  ‘Right. Great,’ Rivers said. ‘What the hell are we doing? London can’t have wanted us to come down here for a closed school.’

  ‘Shit-awful television,’ Phil the cameraman confirmed. ‘A closed school.’

  ‘Reuters are sending,’ McCulloch assured him. ‘Shaun Carew’s coming down from Kuwait this afternoon. They smell trouble at the oilfield.’

  ‘A strike?’ Rivers asked.

  ‘There isn’t a union. Not officially,’ McCulloch said.

  ‘Who’s this bloke Al Baker, Gran?’ Rivers asked. ‘Let’s have some detail: who’s this bloke Al Baker?’

  Jones looked up slowly from the Post.

  ‘Who’s Al Baker?’ Rivers persisted.

  ‘Who?’ Jones blinked rheumily.

  ‘Al Baker, the labour leader. Where does he come from?’

  Jones addressed himself to McCulloch. ‘What does he mean, “Where does he come from?”’

  Rivers interrupted, ‘I mean, Where does he come from?’

  ‘Fuad Al-Bakr comes from here. Where else?’

  ‘My people say I ought to get an interview with him.’

  ‘You can’t. If he’s on the island at all, he’s in hiding.’

  ‘Well, where does he hide? That’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘Oh are you?’

  ‘We’d pay,’ Rivers said. ‘Have another, old son. Tuborg? Waiter! I say, what is it? Four Heinekens, one Tuborg. More nuts . . . Beg pardon if I was a bit sharp, old son. I’ve been on the hop too long. All these late nights in the playgrounds earning my living.’ He patted Jones on the knee, rattling a bracelet with his name on it, which was perhaps meant to imply to women in cocktail bars or alongside swimming-pools that his job exposed him to real battles in a real war and only by the bracelet would his news-martyred body be identified.

  What kind of boys were these, Jones thought, playing at danger? And simultaneously Rivers was saying, ‘What kind of a bloke is he, then? This Al Baker, wotsit. I mean, you must have known him man and boy.’

  ‘What you would expect,’ Jones replied indistinctly, raising his newspaper, cutting them off. He hadn’t the least intention of telling this Rivers or even McCulloch that he had never actually met Al-Bakr. He’d as good as done so twenty-five years ago; and the fact that a meeting hadn’t actually taken place didn’t make a scrap of difference to his understanding of Al-Bakr . . . To be precise, it was the third day after his arrival on the island on his first visit. The previous day he had met Romy.

  ‘What might that mean,’ Rivers said, ‘– “What you would expect?” ’

  Jones kept his paper up. His sight had blurred, and he was
in the old fish market, twenty-five years before, climbing out of Romy’s Land-rover.

  ‘What Gran means is,’ McCulloch was saying, ‘Al-Bakr’s the typical old guard republican leftist who’s longing for real power after – what, Gran? – twenty-five years in exile? He sees the Gulf Liberation Movement like the PLO. Years ago the Emir persuaded us to put him on St Helena for a couple of years. Right, Gran?’

  ‘So I recall,’ Jones said from behind his newspaper, but he was with Romy in the fish market. She is in her bush shirt and trousers and floppy porridge-bowl hat. All the Arab marketmen know her. She is expounding to him: they were the oldest race of traders in the world. Six thousand years ago the ancestors of these stall-holders were in business right here – or just down the coast at her site. ‘Copper, tin, salt, limes, juniper,’ she reels off. ‘Frankincense, sesame oil, flax, pearls.’ ‘Girls?’ Jones queries, and she shoots him a glance of quizzical reprimand, for nothing is admitted between them yet.

  ‘Slaves, anyway,’ she says. ‘Now, look and learn. This is a binte nakhoda.’ Blue and yellow. ‘These crayfish they call rubiyan.’

  She has spotted him sneaking a look at his watch and clouds instantly. And he is protesting it was his job, his profession. ‘Your profession is excavating sunken prehistoric ports. My job is interviewing popular firebrands.’

  ‘You want to betray my father’s trust,’ she retorts icily.

  ‘If I see Al-Bakr,’ he begins, and her head gives a tiny tight shake at him for mentioning the forbidden firebrand’s name in the hearing of the marketmen. He proceeds more quietly, ‘If I see ahem, I wouldn’t file anything without talking to the Emir too. Your father says he’s perfectly articulate.’