The Rotters' Club (11 page)

They hurried round to the front of the hotel, ducked inside, then paused uncertainly in reception.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ said Bill. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

‘Bed?
It’s only eight-thirty.’

‘We can’t stay down here. It’s too risky.’

‘What about my chicken and chips?’

Bill didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘What’s he doing here, anyway?’ he was saying to himself. ‘Who are those people?’

He went to the reception desk and asked for details of the large party which had just arrived for dinner. Were they guests at the hotel? The receptionist checked her register and told him that they were members of something called the Association of British People, and they were holding a training conference and would be there for the whole weekend. Bill listened to this information impassively. He was silent for a few moments, then remembered to say thank you to the woman behind the desk. When he returned to Miriam, his face was transformed, marked by some grim new knowledge.

‘What is it?’ Miriam asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

Bill took her arm and led her towards the stairs. ‘The bastard’s a fascist,’ he said.

Post-coitally, they lay side by side in the centre of the bed, their bodies pressed tightly together, Bill’s hairy, white, thirty-nine-year-old legs bristling against the smoothness of Miriam’s newly waxed calf and thigh. They lay like this not for the sake of intimacy, but because their double mattress sagged heavily in the middle, and gave them no choice in the matter. For preference, they would have been lying with a foot or two of space between them. They had made love effortfully, mechanically, neither of them feeling like it, but both knowing that this whole disastrous excursion would seem even more of a fiasco if they didn’t at least go through the motions. And now, while they remained physically conjoined, their thoughts had already begun to run along separate paths.

‘You don’t understand what these people are about,’ Bill was saying. ‘At least with Enoch Powell you’ve got some thought behind it, something you can argue with. Christ, even the National Front’s got an ideology. Of sorts. But these people… It’s just an instinct with them. It’s just hatred. Hatred and violence.’

‘D’you think he saw us?’ Miriam raised herself on one elbow, her thick brown hair falling across one shoulder. Bill couldn’t help but run his finger along her skin, the immaculate softness of it. ‘D’you think Mr Slater saw us?’

‘I don’t know, love. I just don’t know.’ He laughed, contemptuously. ‘Did you ever see such a bunch of wimps, eh? Such a bunch of bloody runts. No wonder they have to get other people to do their dirty work for them. And as for that… harridan! Did you ever see anything like her?’

‘What would you do, though?’ Miriam persisted. ‘I mean, if he saw us, if he spread it all over the factory, if Irene found out about it – what would you do?’

‘He didn’t see us,’ said Bill.
‘I
saw
him
– that’s more to the point. So now I know. Now I know who’s been spreading that stuff around. Those stupid bloody leaflets.’

‘It probably doesn’t matter, anyway,’ said Miriam, her voice far-off, dreamlike: until it suddenly acquired a sharper tone. ‘I think there’s someone who knows already.’

Bill looked up. ‘Eh?’

‘In fact I know there is. Mr Gibbs, from the Charity Committee.’ She watched him, hoping, apparently, to see some sign of panic, or surprise. When there was none, she said: ‘Doesn’t that worry you?’

‘Oh, I know all about Gibbs. In fact, we had words about it this afternoon.’

‘Words? What sort of words?’

Bill shook his head, skirting the question. ‘He’s a little sod, that one. An interfering little bastard. What’s it to him, anyway? Why can’t a bloke like that mind his own business?’

‘Because he’s got it in for me,’ said Miriam. She lay back against the pillow, her arms folded behind her head. The pose was languid, provocative. It was somehow as if she relished the subject, took an almost sensual pleasure in it. ‘He hates me, you know. He hates me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.’

‘What?’ said Bill, shaken this time. ‘When was this?’

‘Oh, months and months ago. He came up to me in the committee room one evening, after you’d all gone home, and he asked me out for a drink. I said, No thank you – politely, you know, in a pleasant sort of way – and he said why didn’t we skip the drink then and just go for a nice screw back at his place.’ She glanced at Bill, checking to see that he was suitably agitated. ‘So naturally I was… horrified, and I told him so in no uncertain terms, and he said that I needn’t act all innocent, he knew just the kind of girl I was, he knew all about me and you, he could see it in the way we looked at each other, and then he started calling me all kinds of names like slut and whore and dirty piece of stuff, and then I told him that even if I was a whore I’d have to be paid more than a million pounds to do it with a creep like him, and then he just stared at me, stared at me for ages and ages, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so angry, I was sure he was going to belt me in the face or something –’

‘I would have belted him back, if he had, I can tell you that.’

‘– but instead he just walked out of the room, without saying another word, and in a way that was the most scary thing of all, that silence, that not saying anything, and ever since then, every time he sees me, I can see it in his face, the same thing, this… hatred. This total hatred he has for me.’

Bill raised himself, leaned over her, brought his face close to hers. He willed himself to smile, wanting to reassure her, but even as he did so, some cloud was gathering at the corner of his memory. How strange it was, how very strange, that he should have encountered both Gibbs and Slater on the same day. And going back all those months to the day before Valentine’s Day, the time Miriam had phoned him at home… Yes, that was the afternoon he read Gibbs’s letter, and saw Slater on the television, and read the foul leaflet that Slater, it now seemed, must have been putting around the factory. They always seemed to crop up together, those two; as if there was some sort of connection between them. And there was something else, something else weird, something that Gibbs had said to him this afternoon. He hadn’t really taken it in at the time. ‘Toffs’ academy’… that’s right. That was how he had described King William’s. But that was the phrase Slater had used, as well, exactly a year ago, when they shared that minicab home from the restaurant. Why should they have used the same expression? And come to think of it, how did Gibbs know which school Doug went to in the first place? They must have been talking about him: that was the only explanation. And so they must know each other. They must be friends.

‘Don’t worry about it, Bill,’ Miriam was saying, running a hand across his stubbly cheek. ‘I don’t care if he’s got it in for me.’

But no, he thought, there was more to it than that. Something worse, some kind of dread came over him, when he thought about those two: something in relation to Miriam. Like a premonition…

He did his best to shake this feeling off, to think of his responsibilities. He’d got Miriam into this mess in the first place. It was his job to protect her.

‘I’m not worried,’ he said, almost managing a smile. ‘Not about Gibbs, at any rate. He’s history.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m going to have him sacked.’

Miriam’s eyes widened, and then she was smiling too; not just with pleasure but also with some amusement, it seemed, at this unexpected display of macho resolve.

‘You can’t sack someone just like that,’ she said. ‘Can you?’

‘He’s a crook. He’s been filtering money from the charity account.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘Yes. I’ve got the cheques back from the bank. All with forged signatures.’

‘Whose signature has he been forging?’

‘Tony Castle’s. Mine.’ He paused for emphasis, before admitting: ‘Yours.’

Miriam said: ‘Why haven’t you done something about this before?’

‘I’ve been waiting for when the time’s right,’ said Bill. ‘Which is now.’ He kissed her gently, and suddenly an irresistible wave of emotion washed over him. Words began pouring out, and he heard himself saying things, knowing even as he said them that he shouldn’t be saying them, that they were the worst things he could be saying. ‘I love you, Miriam. I’d do anything for you, you know. Anything to make you happy.’

And now he expected her to reach for him, to feel the kiss returned. But instead, she answered:

‘I’ve got someone else as well, Bill. You’re not the only one.’

He drew away.

‘What?’

‘Perhaps Mr Gibbs is right,’ said Miriam, her voice quite toneless now. ‘Perhaps I am a slut. A whore. I know that’s what my father would call me.’ She gave a desperate laugh. ‘Oh, if he could see me now! He’d pick up that bloody family bible and knock me out cold with it.’

‘Who is he?’ Bill wanted to know. ‘What’s his name?’

‘You don’t know him,’ said Miriam. ‘He’s not from the factory. He’s not from anywhere round here.’ She looked at him brightly. ‘You’re not jealous, are you? You have got Irene, after all.’

Bill said nothing at first. He was furiously jealous, there was no doubt of that, but at the same time relieved, and he couldn’t even begin to reconcile the two feelings.

‘Are you making this up?’ he asked, eventually. ‘Because if this is just a way of getting me to –’

‘He’s much younger than you,’ said Miriam. ‘About half your age. He’s not as good-looking as you, but he’s got more… stamina, if you know what I mean. And he’s not married.’

Bill rolled over on to his back, stared at the ceiling.

‘Is it serious?’ he asked. And: ‘Where did you meet him?’

Miriam sat up in the bed, climbed astride him, and reached between his legs. She teased him into readiness, and then lowered herself gradually, steadily, with infinite care, infinite attention, until he was deep inside her, his eyes screwed shut with expectation, with helpless pleasure.

‘You’re the one that I want, Bill. The only one,’ she said; and there was no more talk that evening.

The next morning, Miriam’s behaviour was even stranger, and his longing for Irene, for the security she represented, became even more acute.

Cutting their losses, they checked out of the hotel before breakfast, and drove out to the Clent Hills. In the tea-shop they ate wedges of fruitcake and drank strong, milky coffee. Then they walked for an hour or more, along the thinly wooded ridges, the bracken wearing the last traces of autumnal gold, the bridle pathways leading them seemingly at random through stretches of dry, bleached-out grassland and ragged clusters of evergreens, the treetops forming makeshift canopies against the keen morning sunlight. After yesterday’s rain, they had good weather before them, and the hills almost to themselves. Sometimes a horse might amble by, the rider tipping his hat, or a breathless dog criss-crossing its owner’s path, but otherwise, the world left them alone. Half-tamed farmland stretched out beneath them on every side. They could hear, as always, the motorway’s distant roar.

Bill asked Miriam to tell him more about her new lover. She dodged his questions nimbly; bounced them back with laughter, changes of subject, evasions. She held his hand, kissed him, walked arm-in-arm, then would turn back, choose a different pathway, stand gazing out over the fields while he walked on ahead. He couldn’t make her out.

When they got back into the car, the first thing he said was: ‘So, are you going to choose, then? Between him and me?’

‘What about you?’ she answered. ‘Are
you
going to choose, between me and her?’

But Bill had already chosen. The emergence of this potential rival had only made things easier for him. He no longer felt that he would be abandoning Miriam; he would be relinquishing her, rather, handing her over to someone younger and better qualified. There was something almost noble in the gesture. At the moment he could scarcely bear the thought that he must live without her, that he would never again be allowed to see, or touch, that body he had come to know far better than his wife’s. But he was sure it was the right thing to do. He even believed it was what Miriam herself wanted, at heart.

They were driving back towards Northfield, and were only five minutes from Miriam’s house, when she became hysterical. She began crying again, and screaming through her sobs that her life meant nothing when she was away from him, that she was going to turn up at his house and confront Irene, that she would kill herself if he didn’t leave his wife and come to live with her. Bill pulled over to the side of the road and tried, hopelessly, to calm her down. He began promising things, promises he knew that he could never keep. The noise of her crying and shouting seemed to go on for hours, like radio static at top volume. All he could do was to repeat again and again that he loved her, he loved her, he loved her. They had both lost control of what they were saying.

9

The next morning, Miriam knew she had to get out of the house. Sundays at home were always dreadful: Miriam and Claire lived in permanent fear of their father, Donald, whose forbidding, taciturn presence seemed to have cast a chill over their entire childhoods, and whose demeanour on Sundays was usually even more severe and unapproachable. Although he no longer insisted on the two hours’ Bible study that used to be such a dismal feature of their weekends, he still expected the whole family to go to church in the morning. Today, however – perhaps sensing that her sister was in no state to undergo this weekly ordeal – Claire put on a spectacular and unprecedented show of defiance, and refused point blank to accompany him. Donald trembled with rage when she spoke the words; there was a bitter, poisonous exchange, tearful on Claire’s side, quietly brutal on her father’s; but the result was that both sisters stood firm, and stormed out of the house together at about ten o’clock. They had nothing to do but go for a long walk.

It had been a turbulent year in the relationship between the two of them. Early in December, 1973, a series of Bovril stains on the pages of her private diary had alerted Miriam to the fact that Claire was reading it in her absence. Mayhem had ensued. After an argument of incredible length, violence and intensity, there had been no verbal communication between them for six weeks. Christmas, in these circumstances, had been intolerable; Claire’s birthday was not much better. And yet somehow, through one of those minor miracles that form part of the strange texture of family life, a reconciliation had taken place, and they had emerged better friends than ever before. Her knowledge of Miriam’s feelings for Bill Anderton turned Claire, slowly and painfully, from an object of hate into something like a confidante. Miriam had stopped keeping a diary, and she never told Claire the whole story, by any means; but the mere fact that her sister was aware of Bill’s existence, knew his name, understood his importance to her, made Miriam eager, not to share secrets with her exactly, but at least to seek out her company, intuitively, whenever the affair was causing her distress. In this way, despite their difference in age, a kind of closeness grew up between them.