Amsterdam (14 page)

On Tuesday morning he was woken by the orchestra manager, who actually shouted at him down the phone. Rehearsals on Friday, and still they had no complete score. Later the same morning Clive heard on
the phone from a friend the extraordinary news. Vernon had been forced to resign! Clive hurried out to buy the papers. He had read or heard nothing since Friday’s
Judge
, otherwise he would have been aware of how opinion had been turning against its editor. He took a cup of coffee into the dining room and read the press there. It was grimly satisfying to have his own views of Vernon’s conduct confirmed. He had done his duty by Vernon, he had tried to warn him, but Vernon wouldn’t listen. Having read three scathing indictments, Clive went to the window and stared at the clumps of daffodils growing by the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. He had to admit it, he was feeling better. Early spring. Soon the clocks would go forward. In April, with the symphony’s premiere behind him, he’d go to New York to visit Susie Marcellan. Then to California, where he had a piece in the Palo Alto Music Festival. He was aware that his finger was tapping the radiator to the beat of some new rhythm, and he imagined a shift of mood, of key, and a note sustained over changing harmonies and a savage kettledrum pulse. He turned and hurried from the room. He had an idea, a quarter of an idea, and before it went he had to get to the piano.

In the studio he shoved books and old scores to the floor to make himself a clear surface, took up a sheet of lined paper and a sharpened pencil, and had just formed a treble clef when the doorbell downstairs rang.
His hand froze, and he waited. It rang again. He was not going down, not now, when he was about to crack the variation. It would be someone pretending to be an ex—coal miner in order to sell ironing board covers. The bell again, then silence. They’d gone. For a moment, the slender idea he had was lost. Then he had it, or part of it, and was just drawing the stem of a chord when the phone rang. He should have turned it off. In his irritation, he snatched it up.

“Mr. Linley?”

“Yes.”

“Police. C. I. D. Standing outside your front door. Appreciate a word.”

“Oh. Look, can you come back in half an hour?”

“’Fraid not. Got a few questions for you. Might have to ask you to attend a couple of identity parades in Manchester. Help us nail a suspect. Shouldn’t take up more than a couple of days of your time. So if you wouldn’t mind opening up, Mr. Linley …”

In her hurry to get off to work, Mandy had left a wardrobe door open at an angle that allowed a mirror to accuse Vernon with a narrow vertical slice of himself: propped against the pillows, resting the mug of tea she had brought him against his belly, his unshaved face bluish white in the bedroom gloom, letters, junk mail, and newspapers spread beside him—truly, a tableau of unemployment.
Idle
. Suddenly he understood that business-page word. He had many idle hours ahead of him this Tuesday morning in which to brood on all the indignities and ironies that had accumulated about his dismissal yesterday. The curious way, for example, the letter was dropped off in his office by an innocent sub, that very same sobbing dyslexic sub he had saved from the push. Then the letter itself, politely soliciting his resignation and offering in return a year’s salary. There was a muted reference to the terms of his contract, by which, he assumed, the directors wished to remind him, without spelling it out, that if he refused and forced them to sack him, there would be no remuneration at all. The letter concluded by observing kindly that in any event, his employment would cease that day and the board wished to congratulate him on his period of brilliant editorship and to wish him well
in his future plans. So there it was. He had to clear out now, and he could leave with or without a sum in the low six figures.

In his resignation letter, Vernon had noted that circulation was up by more than a hundred thousand. Just writing out the number, the zeros, pained him. When he went to the outer office and handed the envelope to Jean, she seemed to have difficulty looking him in the eye. And the building was curiously silent as he returned to collect his things from his desk. His office instincts told him that everybody knew. He left his door open in case anyone felt like coming by in the way of fellow feeling, down the beaten track of friendship. What there was to pack easily fitted into his briefcase—a framed photograph of Mandy and the kids, a couple of pornographic letters from Dana written on House of Commons paper. And it looked like no one was popping in to express their outraged sympathy. No raucous crowd of shirtsleeved colleagues to bang him out in the old style. Very well, then, he was leaving. He buzzed Jean and asked her to let the chauffeur know he was coming down. She buzzed back to tell him he no longer had a chauffeur.

He put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, and went into the outer office. Jean had found herself an urgent errand, and he met no one, not a soul, on his way to the lift. The only person to say cheerio to the editor was the porter downstairs on the desk, and he
was also the one to inform Vernon of his successor. Mr. Dibben, sir. By minimally inclining his head, Vernon managed to convey the pretense that he already knew. When he stepped outside Judge House, it was raining. He raised an arm for a taxi, then remembered that he had very little cash with him. He took the tube and walked the last half-mile to his home in a downpour. He went straight for the whisky, and when Mandy came in he had a terrible row with her, when all she was trying to do was comfort him.

Vernon slumped with his tea while his mental odometer tallied the insults and humiliations. Not enough that Frank Dibben was treacherous, that all his colleagues deserted him, that every newspaper was cheering his dismissal; not enough that the whole country celebrated the crushing of the flea and that Garmony was still at large. Lying on the bed beside him was a venomous little card gloating over his downfall, written by his oldest friend, written by a man so morally eminent he would rather see a woman raped in front of him than have his work disrupted. Perfectly hateful, and mad. Vindictive. So it was war. Right, then. Here we go, don’t hesitate. He drained his cup, picked up the phone, and dialed a friend at New Scotland Yard, a contact from his old crime desk days. Fifteen minutes later all the details had been imparted, the deed was done, but Vernon was still back with his thoughts, still not satisfied. It turned out that Clive had
not broken the law. He would be inconvenienced into doing his duty, nothing more than that. But there had to be more. There had to be consequences. Vernon brooded another hour in bed on this theme, then at last got dressed, though he did not shave, and passed the morning moping about the house, refusing to answer the phone. For consolation he took out the Friday edition. The fact was, it was a brilliant front page. Everyone was wrong. The rest of the paper was strong too, and Lettice O’Hara had done him proud with the Dutch story. One day, especially if Garmony ever got to be prime minister and the country was lying in ruins, people would regret they had hounded Vernon Halliday from his job.

But the consolation was brief, because that was the future and this was the present, the one in which he had been sacked. He was at home when he should have been in an office. He knew only one profession, and no one would employ him in it now. He was in disgrace, and he was too old to retrain. His consolation was also brief because his thoughts kept returning to that hateful postcard, the twisting knife, the salt in his lacerations, and as the day passed it came to stand for all the major and minor insults of the past twenty-four hours. That little message to him from Clive embodied and condensed all the poison of this affair—the blindness of his accusers, their hypocrisy, their vengefulness, and above
all the element that Vernon considered to be the worst of human vices—personal betrayal.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage. As with words, so with sentences. What Clive had intended on Thursday and posted on Friday was, You deserve to be
sacked
. What Vernon was bound to understand on Tuesday in the aftermath of his dismissal was, You
deserve
to be sacked. Had the card arrived on Monday, he might have read it differently. This was the comic nature of their fate; a first-class stamp would have served both men well. On the other hand, perhaps no other outcomes were available to them, and this was the nature of their tragedy. If so, Vernon was bound to consolidate his bitterness as the day wore on and to reflect, rather opportunistically, on the pact the two men had made not so long ago and the awesome responsibilities it laid upon him. For clearly Clive had lost his reason and something had to be done. This resolve was bolstered by Vernon’s sense that at a time when the world was treating him badly, when his life was in ruins, no one was treating him worse than his old friend, and that this was unforgivable. And insane.

It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation. The hours passed, and Vernon picked up his copy of the
Judge
several times to read again about that medical scandal in Holland. Later on in the day he made a few phone inquiries of his own. More idle hours passed while he sat about in the kitchen drinking coffee, contemplating the wreck of his prospects, and wondering whether he should ring Clive and pretend to make peace, in order to invite himself to Amsterdam.

Was everything in place? Had he remembered everything? Was it really legal? Clive considered these questions from the confines of a Boeing 757 parked in freezing fog at the northern end of Manchester airport. The weather was supposed to clear and the pilot wanted to keep his place in the takeoff queue, so the passengers sat in muffled silence, taking
comfort
in the drinks trolley. It was midday, and Clive had ordered coffee, brandy, and a bar of chocolate. He had a window seat in an empty row, and through gaps in the
fog he could see other airliners waiting competitively in ragged, converging lines, something brooding and loutish in their forms: slit eyes beneath small brains, stunted, encumbered arms, upraised and blackened arseholes. Creatures like this could never care about each other.

The answer was yes, his research and planning had been meticulous. It was going to happen, and he experienced a thrill. He raised his hand to the smiling girl in a cocky blue hat who seemed personally delighted by his decision to go for the second miniature and privileged to bring it to him. All in all, given what he’d been through and the ordeals that lay ahead, and the certainty that events now were sure to accelerate giddily, he didn’t feel so bad. He would miss the first hours of rehearsal, but an orchestra finding its way through a new piece—always a dog’s dinner. It might be sensible to miss the whole of the first day. He had been reassured by his bank that to have ten thousand U.S. dollars in his briefcase was within the law and he was not required to explain himself at Schiphol airport. As for the Manchester police station, he had handled it capably, he thought, and had been treated with respect, and he could almost feel a touch of nostalgia for the bracing ambience and those hard-pressed men with whom he had worked so well.

•  •  •

When Clive arrived from the railway station in the blackest of moods, having cursed Vernon every mile of the way from Euston, the chief inspector himself came out to the front desk to welcome the great composer. He seemed awfully grateful that Clive should have come all the way up from London to help with the case. In fact, no one seemed at all annoyed that he hadn’t come forward earlier. They were only too happy, various policemen said, to have his assistance with this particular crime. In interview, when he made his statement, the two detectives realized, so they assured him, just how hard it must have been to write a symphony to order with a looming deadline, and what a dilemma he had been in when he was crouching behind that rock. They seemed rather keen to understand all the difficulties associated with composing the crucial melody. Could he hum it for them? He certainly could. Every now and then one of them would say something like, Now just take us back to what you saw of this man. It turned out that the chief inspector was working for an English degree at the Open University and had a special interest in Blake. In the canteen, over bacon sandwiches, the inspector proved he knew by heart the whole of “A Poison Tree,” and Clive was able to tell him of his 1978 setting of that very same poem, performed at the Aldeburgh Festival the next year with Peter Pears and never once since. Also in the canteen, lying asleep on two chairs pushed together, was a six
month-old baby. The young mother was locked up in a cell on the ground floor while she recovered from a drinking binge. Throughout the first day Clive sometimes heard her plaintive shrieks and moans drifting up the peeling stairwell.

He was allowed to go through to the heart of the station, where people were charged. In the early evening, while he was waiting to go over his statement again, he witnessed a scuffle in front of the duty sergeant; a big, sweating teenager with a shaved head had been picked up hiding in a back garden with bolt cutters, master keys, a pad saw, and a sledgehammer concealed beneath his coat. He was not a burglar, he insisted, and no way was he going in the cells. When the sergeant told him he was, the boy hit a constable in the face and was wrestled to the floor by two other constables, who put handcuffs on him and led him away. No one seemed much bothered, not even the policeman with the split lip, but Clive put a restraining hand over his leaping heart and was obliged to sit down. Later a patrolman carried in a white-faced, silent four-year-old boy who had been found wandering about the car park of a derelict pub. Later still, a tearful Irish family came to claim him. Two hair-chewing girls, twin daughters of a violent father, came in for their own protection and were treated with joky familiarity. A woman with a bleeding face lodged a complaint against her husband. A very ancient black lady whom osteoporosis had
folded double had been thrown out of her room by her daughter-in-law and had nowhere to go. Social workers came and went, and most of them looked as criminally inclined, or as unfortunate, as their clients. Everybody smoked. In the fluorescent light everybody looked ill. There was a lot of scorching tea in plastic cups, and there was a lot of shouting, and routine, uncolorful swearing, and clenched-fist threats that no one took seriously. It was one huge unhappy family with domestic problems that were of their nature insoluble. This was the family living room. Clive shrank behind his brick-red tea. In his world it was rare for someone to raise his voice, and he found himself all evening in a state of exhausted excitement. Practically every member of the public who came in, voluntarily or not, was down-at-heel, and it seemed to Clive that the main business of the police was to deal with the numerous and unpredictable consequences of poverty, which they did with far more patience and less squeamishness than he ever could.