Downriver (39 page)

‘We are required,' she continued, with all the confidence of one who has received absolution from the highest court in the land, ‘to offer our suggestions for the erection of a National Shrine; a place of quiet and meditation, a place fondly to recall those who have gone before, an inspiration to those who will follow.'

‘What
did
the old boy do in the last show?' enquired the Chair, ‘apart from blasting out a few craters on the golf courses of the Cinque ports?'

‘Not known,' the Architect, subdued, whispered into his hand, ‘stricken from the record. “Mentioned in despatches”, certainly. Something biological. And intelligent. Very hush-hush.'

Flash frames of shredded files. Laser-enhanced index cards. Chemically-inspired memory transfusions. They swept over the gob-struck assembly like a hazchem plague. Take your pick: droplets of blood beading the windows, dead fish pelting from the clouds, black and gungy smoke belching in spasms from the fluted stacks of the Silvertown Sugar Mills. And now, operatically, as if orchestrated by Leni Riefenstahl, at this moment when all the secret nightfears of the heart lay exposed on the linen table, a silver chopper skimmed in over the dock, ruffling the hide-thick surface, to land within sight of the petrified diners, on the uncropped grass of the man-made isthmus. Goons, too highly strung to wait for ladders, leapt to the deck, wheeling as they fell, scanning dim horizons, shrugging and twitching inside their Burberrys; patting themselves for the reassurance that they weren't toting an empty holster. A child, scrubbed and pink, backlit, emerged from the open door of the Sikorski, as if for his first day at prep school, clutching an executive-size briefcase
(from which the price ticket was clearly visible) to his bosom. He was dressed in unbruised cricket flannels. A wet bob faking it for the parents' match.

‘The Minister,' announced the Chair, ‘early as usual. Come to take our soundings back upstairs.' Surreptitiously, he slid a magnum Havana back into its pigskin case.

Before the guilty reflex was complete, the praetorian guard were hustling their juvenile lead into the open-plan dining area, were taking up crouched positions among the rubber plants, and gibbering killspeak into faulty handsets.

The Chair was not alone in his guilt. The Lady from the Fens had a distinct ‘thing' about men in cricket gear. It began when she'd been dragged along to Lord's, because her husband, after some characteristic reverse, needed to maintain a high profile, show himself, rub shoulders with the nabobs, share the banter and the chocolate cake of the radio box. She had been bored out of her skull, until she had taken up the fieldglasses to watch this beautiful black fellow (Michael Holding?) walk back to bowl, rubbing the ball in the most intimate way on the side of his thigh. There was an awful, addictive languor about the whole performance. The slow build-up. The springy stride into the wicket. The ball fired like a bullet. The cringing batsman. Ahh!

This sense of innocent eroticism was not shared with her husband (nor indeed with the Minister – who had not enjoyed his compulsory charity match: either under siege, and in danger of voiding his bowels, or banished to the mindboggling inertia of the outfield). Did nobody share her dream? A wide bed, her lover helping her to change the sheets. Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the radio. Describing, let us say, Imran Khan's flight to the wicket. The leap. The delivery. Her lover in white. She is in lacy black underwear. Neither one touching the other, separated by the bed. And he is dressing to leave. As she undresses, a warm afternoon, to lie back, listening to the cricket. The curtains flap. He hesitates. He cannot bear to turn away. Apple blossom in the orchard.

‘Did you score, Minister?' She blushed, as the Chair put his toadying question. ‘Pick up any wickets?'

The flustered youth ignored him. (He hadn't; but that was nobody's business.) ‘Your deliberations are complete, Mr Chair.' It was not a question. The youth lisped in a still small voice; implying that if he did not get his way he was quite capable of ‘screaming and screaming and screaming until he was thick'. He was under visible pressure. One of those who feel they should be somewhere much more important; and who keep glancing down to check the zip of their flies. He squeaked, like a cheeky cartoon mouse being dubbed by a seventy-year-old actor who has not yet been told that the polyps in his sinuses are malignant.

Closer inspection, in the hush that followed this incursion, revealed no youth, but a shrink-wrapped young man – who had forgotten to climb out of his lightweight suit before sending it to the cleaners. Or some kind of quantum leap in the field of headshrinking. The Minister looked like a ventriloquist's dummy – which, in a sense, he was: the latex exception that proves the rule. The rest of the Widow's gang split neatly into the Uglies (shifty, weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven-week embryos) and the Bunters: smooth, fleshy, near-identical, bum-faced nonentities in Savile Row suits and bulletproof spectacles. Apocalypse-resistant unflappables. The Uglies had lost ground recently, the time for cracking skulls was past. They were ennobled, sent to the city like feral cats. No longer the nights of broken glass, lycanthropes and zoo-rejects with burning brands: it was the mid-term era of soft sell, Brylcreem condomed, safe-handed boys, and public men of conscience (and private fortune). We gloried in the exploits of the agitated one (nicknamed ‘The Albatross'), the Sumerian fish-totem, whose role it was to be seen wandering, gape-mouthed in pin-stripes and hard hat, from one disaster to the next, blinking like a nocturnal animal caught in the harsh lights of the rescue services; lips trembling, ready to blub out his patent sincerity. A scapegoat begging for slaughter.

This boy, the Minister, had been picked because he smelt like a political virgin: he was fresh, oven-ready, blatant with coal tar and Old Spice; bubbling, enthusiastic, popping up everywhere with endorsements that kept him spinning dizzily around the outer circle; never quite ‘one of us', but very useful as a fag and disposable messenger. He had been rewarded, as Minister of Sport and Recreation, by being given in addition the very minor Arts portfolio. (In his spare moments he was supposed to sort out the weather.) But he remained, basically, a whipping boy: buoyant enough, and stupid enough, to deflect heat-seeking missiles from such entrenched citadels of the left as the Church of England, the Royal Opera House, and the
Sunday Telegraph
.

‘Your decision, gentlemen – and, excuse me, Madame,' (he smacked his lips in a dingy-inflating pout) ‘
if you please
,' the Minister trilled, grinning bravely about the placard-sized identity card pinned to his lapel, as if he was still an evacuee. (Without it, civil servants kept ‘losing' him. And he wasn't allowed in to the premières of grown-up films.) ‘I'm obliged to show my face at the First Round Losers' Cup Second Replay at Plough Lane. Now we've got rid of those beastly beer-swilling spectators they expect a few celebs to make the broadcast a bit sexier.'

A show of hands was called for: all reached dutifully in high salute – except Professor Catling who was fully occupied with the cheese cutter and a brace of ripe walnuts.

‘Of course, Minister, we give our unqualified support to the scheme as outlined.' The Chair ritualized the verdict.

‘But no scheme has, actually, ever been outlined, has it?' said the Laureate's Wife, to subdued titters.

The Minister, superbly, without a trace of self-consciousness, performed his smiling-at-the-ladies smile. He snapped open the steel skin of his attaché case and produced packs of hi-tech brochures. They had the heavy paper and the gloss finish of the best international art magazines. There were photographs, half-tones, tints, bleeds, elevations, concertinaed maps, detachable numbered etchings: all the tricks that disguise the thinnest
dribble of text. The margins were so generous that modernists might have imagined themselves holding a set of one-word columns from Tom Raworth.

‘We're going to take off from the defunct Crosby/Sandle “Battle of Britain Monument” projection. That's been our inspiration. It's a definite mover. It's got all the elements – in fossil form, naturally. But the bottom line is that we, as a Government, have the guts to sink our dosh in an uninhabited swamp. We must summon up the courage of the Dutch, when they built their polders against chaos, or helped us design the great fortress at Tilbury, repulsing the Spaniards and extinguishing for ever the fires of the Inquisition.'

He bowed, held his breath for the statutory forty seconds, waiting for applause – while the committee members scrambled frantically through the brochures, attempting to convey, by coughs and significant nods, the impression that they had heard of (and wholeheartedly approved) this cracker-barrel pitch.

‘Crosby has grasped the salient point: the first duty of any decent monument is to pay its own way, and not to simply stand around for a few hundred years waiting for history to kiss its ass.' He had the grace to blush, most becomingly. ‘You art wallahs can sort out all the retrospective justifications. I can promise you prime-time television and the best crews available (none of that hand-held stuff, straight from the ad agencies). Make this clear: Crosby's underlying theme is absolutely spot on –
celebration
! It can't be shameful to rejoice in our God-given victories; and our joy will take the specific form of a stepped pyramid, bathed in banks of coloured light. The very beams that once swept our London skies, seeking out pirates and invaders, will now illuminate a transfixed block of time; in which a Heinkel bomber plunges to its doom beneath a brave little Spitfire. Gentlemen, we're going to top the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Colossus of Rhodes in one hit.'

‘And where would this monument be sited, sir – exactly?' enquired the Architect, with lapping khaki tongue.

‘Here! Where else?' The Minister allowed his impatience to show by tapping his black brochure on the tabletop. Someone had not done his homework.

‘I'm sure,' he continued, uncreasing a disfiguring scowl, ‘our friend from the cinematograph can help us to stress the value of a professional presentation. Wall-to-wall sound systems, the right choice of themes…
Chariots of Fire
,
Dam Busters
,
Kwai
, Elgar, Paul McCartney. Nothing too sophisticated, nothing rabble-rousing. No German melancholy.'

The Producer nervously groomed his beard, searching for his mouth, which had dried and contracted to a useless ring of gristle. ‘Yankee names above the titles, home-grown technical facilities, plus Jap finance (with maybe a Colombian top-up). Am I close? Logos from brand-leaders tactfully showcased in positions of maximum visibility – right?'

‘
Right
? You're in Disneyland, baby. We're not pitching for a Cola franchise, or a sweetener from Virgin Atlantic. Think Armada, Festival of Britain, Churchill's funeral. We're talking heavy ritual here. Leo Von Klenze, the Egyptians, the Mayans. What does Crosby call it? “A place of pilgrimage… a viable commercial investment… with side-effects which are unpredictable.”' He rapped imperiously at the window, causing three of his goons to flash for their shoulder holsters. ‘The monument will be sunk in that dock. Work to commence immediately, contracts tendered and awarded.'

A modest smile crossed the Chairman's face: as a director of both the firms involved he could not lose. He had ruthlessly undercut himself, juggling the tax concessions and the Enterprise Zone allowances.

The Minister was inspired: a vision appeared to him on the face of the waters. He saw things as they ought to be, he
believed
. ‘Visitors will enter through a maze of submarine pens, based on Sandle's preliminary drawings. They will be “mood-graded” by a discreet soundtrack, quoting from those wonderful films of our boyhood,
Above Us the Waves, Sink the Bismarck
… Johnny Mills,
Jack Hawkins, John Gregson, Ordinary Seaman Bryan Forbes… all that bleep-bleep, glug-glug, Up Periscope stuff. On through glass-walled tunnels, from which the humbled punters glimpse phantom U-boats, white sharks, limpet mines – maybe a hologram
Belgrano
.
Gotcha
!'

He whacked his hands together. The lady screamed. And the chief goon shot himself in the foot. And was carried, bleeding, to the chopper.

‘Then it's into the pyramid itself, a Cave of Remembrance. Sober. Solemn music. On the walls could be carved elevating sentiments from the great philosophers and leaders. We considered using that Scotsman who is, apparently, something of a whiz with a chisel (to show we don't harbour grudges and also to do our bit for unemployment north of the border). But now we're informed the chappy is an over-sensitive, litigious blighter. The frogs are quite convinced he's a card-carrying Nazi.'

‘That's a cross we all have to bear,' murmured the Chairman.

The Minister was not to be diverted. ‘A continuous frieze of speeches by Winston and Margaret will remind us of our duties as citizens, prepare us for the tapes of ack-ack guns over Dagenham, cones of concentrated fire, tracer shells. White parachute discs over the Isle of Grain. A distant thunder from the Thames Estuary. Stamping jackboots. Criss-crossing searchlights wind-milling above the dome of St Paul's. Vast processions. Boy scouts, landgirls, aviators. Cheering. Travelling camera. Flashing bulbs. Cheering and clapping to the rhythm of a beating heart; clapping and stamping; cheering building to a soul-purging climax.
Yes!
All the razzamatazz of Nuremberg, without any of the chthonic excesses. The showbiz side, if you like. They certainly knew how to throw a party!'

‘Right!' enthused the Producer, his eyes moist with the possibilities. ‘Those production values! Technically speaking,
Triumph of the Will
stands up; it's a hell of a movie. Give me extras from the old school who'll really go for it, give me a monster-monster budget – and anything is possible.'