The Rotters' Club (38 page)

It took him a few minutes to locate Benjamin after school. Doug found him, eventually, with his bottom wedged into one of the litter bins, his legs akimbo and his hands tied behind his back with his prefect’s tie.

‘How did it go?’ he asked.

Once he had pulled Benjamin out, undone the elaborate series of reef-knots and dusted him down, he said: ‘So, what’s it like, then, being a member of the ruling classes?’

‘I can’t do this, Doug,’ said Benjamin. ‘I’m going to have to resign.’

‘You can’t resign, old son. It’s a job for life.’ He chuckled. ‘You really are a prize prannet, Ben. Anyone could see you weren’t cut out to be a member of the Special Branch.’

‘Yes, well I’m beginning to realize that, aren’t I?’

‘How’s Steve coping?’

‘Better than me,’ said Benjamin, as they began to walk together down towards the Bristol Road. They could see the buses rumbling past in the distance, crammed full of schoolkids. In the foreground, the rugby fields stretched vast and ghostly in the dying light. ‘They seem to respect him a bit more. We had a nice long chat the other night, actually. Some parents came to look round the school and the two of us had to make seventy cups of coffee for them and then wash them all up. Gave us a chance to talk for a couple of hours.’

‘So in between doing stints as a tea lady for the Chief Master, and having it off with Jennifer Hawkins, I don’t suppose you’re getting much work done, are you?’

‘I’m not having it off with her.’

Doug snorted in disbelief. ‘Come off it, Ben. We all know what happened at the party. I’ll never feel the same way about my parents’ wardrobe again. Every time Dad goes to get himself a new pair of socks I get these incredible mental images.’

‘Yes, well that was just a one-off. We haven’t done anything since.’

‘But you’ve been seeing her, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Irritated by Doug’s tone of continued puzzlement, Benjamin said: ‘What happened in that wardrobe – yes, I know, I know, so it’s funny – but what happened that night was important to me. To both of us. The circumstances may have been weird, but it wasn’t meaningless. It was the beginning of something very special.’

‘Oh, grow
up,
Ben, for fuck’s sake. Just because you get drunk at a party with a girl and she pulls you off, it doesn’t mean you’re… betrothed to her, or anything. This isn’t some Jane Austen novel we’re talking about here.’

Benjamin looked at him crossly. ‘You must have been reading some different Jane Austen novels to me. I don’t remember any scenes like that.’

‘You know what I mean. You and Jennifer don’t belong together.’ He stopped walking and turned to Benjamin, with a new urgency in his voice. ‘Listen. I’m going to tell you two things. You remember that time I went down to London to see the
NME
people? The time I wanted you to come with me, and you wouldn’t do it? I met this girl down there. She was a typist or something, worked for
Horse and Hound.
We went and saw The Clash playing in Fulham and afterwards we went back to her place, and for the rest of that night, I’m telling you, Ben…’ (he dropped to a whisper) ‘… We fucked each other’s brains out. We did it so many different ways, we did things you wouldn’t believe were possible. What we did makes your thirty seconds with Jennifer seem like
nothing.’

‘It was forty seconds, actually.’

‘Whatever it was – the point is that I never saw this girl again. We didn’t bother to swap phone numbers or anything. It was just one night of fantastic sex and then goodbye.’

Benjamin thought about this for a second or two, and then walked on. ‘Well, that’s a beautiful story, Doug, that’s a very touching little anecdote. Real Romeo and Juliet stuff. A Troilus and Cressida for the nineteen-seventies. But some of us just have a different approach to these things.’

‘All right, then,’ said Doug, running to catch up, ‘I’ll tell you something else. And this really
is
important. You’re seventeen years old and you’re going to meet hundreds more women in the next few years. If you’re going to go all soppy over someone from this craphole of a city you might as well choose the right person: and there are only two girls round here who are worth anything at all.’

‘Oh yes? And who might they be?’

‘Claire and Cicely, of course.’

Benjamin slowed down, then came to a halt. They were near the gates to the main road, now, outside the entrance to the sports hall. The upper-sixth common room was on the top floor (home to the fifty or so boys who had not been elected to the Carlton Club), and light from its windows spilled out on to the tarmac around them, throwing long distorted shadows. It suddenly seemed to Benjamin that this was another of those fateful moments he had recently learned to recognize: supernatural, charged. A moment when crucial choices were being offered to him.

‘Claire and Cicely?’

‘I know you’ve never had any time for Claire. I don’t know why, I think she’s fabulous. Always have done. But we tried going out and it didn’t work, so… there you are. It’s just not meant to happen. As for Cicely: she isn’t my type, to be honest, but…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well she’s
your
type, isn’t she? She’s perfect for you. You’re perfect for each other. God, Benjamin, you’re the only person who’s ever been able to talk any sense into that woman. She worships you, actually. She hangs on your every word. If there were ever two people who were made to be with each other it’s you and Cicely, and to see one of you being fucked over by a married man and the other one trying to pretend he’s in the middle of something deep and meaningful with Jennifer Hawkins… Well, it’s heartbreaking.’

Benjamin didn’t speak for a long time. He looked at the ground, tracing shadowy patterns with his foot, his Cyclops Records bag swinging gently in the air.

‘It’s Jennifer’s birthday tomorrow,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t break up with her on her birthday.’

‘You can break up with her any time,’ said Doug. But he knew, then, what he had always known: that Benjamin was a lost cause, and he had been wasting his breath. ‘What did you get her?’

‘A record,’ said Benjamin.

‘She’ll hate it,’ said Doug, moving on. ‘Don’t tell me what it is, I don’t need to know. I just know that she’ll hate it.’

*

‘Mmn, lovely,’ said Jennifer, pulling off the wrapping paper. ‘What an unusual present.’

Benjamin had bought her
Voices and Instruments,
one of the new releases on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label. One side consisted of some e. e. cummings poems set to music by John Cage, sung by Robert Wyatt and Carla Bley. On the other, a Birmingham musician, Jan Steele, had composed some minimalist settings of texts by James Joyce.

‘I know you said you wanted the
Evita
record,’ said Benjamin, ‘but you weren’t serious, were you?’

‘This is much nicer,’ said Jennifer.

For her birthday treat, they went to see
Star Wars,
which had just opened at the Odeon New Street. It was Jennifer’s choice. They sat in the back row but one and waited patiently through the first ten minutes of trailers and local adverts, then gave up and started French kissing instead.

‘King William’s Prefect In Public Snogging Scandal,’ said a voice behind them.

Benjamin turned and saw that he was sitting in front of Ives, the annoying little curly-haired second-former he had met with Harding in the Gerald Hill Studio last year.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘Haven’t you got homework to do?’

‘Keep quiet, or I’ll tell Chiefy,’ said Ives.

Afterwards, they went to the fish and chip shop in Hill Street and talked about the film. Benjamin thought it was all ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’. Jennifer said it was the best film she had ever seen. They agreed to differ.

They said goodbye at the Navigation Street bus stops with an ambiguous kiss: too long to be formal, too brief to be passionate. Jennifer was a good kisser but Doug’s words had already taken on a haunting quality, and Benjamin found himself wondering, on the journey home, whether he would ever get another glimpse of the breasts he had clasped unknowingly for those dark sleepy hours three weeks ago.

She didn’t call him ‘Tiger’ any more, either. That wasn’t a good sign.

23

you are the very personification of narcissistic obliquity

your effrontery and culpability are beyond the terminus of
legitimate forbearance

I abhor and depreciate your supercilious carnality

your contrivance was simply to mesmerize her with your
meticulosity and dilettantism

you are a syphilitic, leucodermatous, febrile, pyretic and fistular
marasmus

Bill clutched tightly at his coffee cup and looked around him. The décor was austere, imposing, designed to intimidate. The hotel’s oak-panelled walls reminded him of a club room; they might even have called to mind the Carlton Club room at King William’s School, had he ever seen it. The message they sent out to visitors was the same: don’t mess with us; we have been here for a long time; decisions have been made here; the conversations of the influential and the elect have echoed around these walls. You may stand here awhile, but soon you will go. You do not belong.

peccable
scrofulous
obscurantist
charlatanism
unctuosity
pinguescence
persiflage
spavined
suppurate
improbity
fustigate
compurgation
scorbutic
malignancy

There were about twenty-five people drinking coffee in the back room. Outside, in the conference hall, there were another seven hundred waiting to be addressed by British Leyland’s new Chairman, Michael Edwardes. The audience contained many national union officials as well as Leyland shop stewards. The twenty-five in the back room were considered among the most influential. Michael Edwardes himself was there, looking nervous but resolute.

Bill should have been talking to his colleagues, gearing himself up for the speech ahead, which was sure to be important. Edwardes would be talking to the workforce about the state of the company as he saw it, explaining the decisions which he and his advisory board had been making, in private, over the last few weeks. There were bound to be redundancies. Bill should have been focusing on these issues but instead a weariness was lying over him this morning. He was already seeing his own defeat, and Edwardes’s victory, as inevitable. And he was thinking about a conversation he had had the day before. A Pakistani worker, Zulfiqar Rashid, had come to ask him about the television interview Margaret Thatcher had given two nights previously (the night of Benjamin’s first, abortive litter duty). What had she meant, Zulfiqar wanted to know, when she said that the British people were beginning to feel ‘rather swamped’ by different cultures? Was immigration really going to be halted under a Tory government? His wife and three children were still in Lahore. They were planning to come and join him in Birmingham in two or three years’ time. Was this no longer going to be possible if Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister? Were his wife and children – were his skills, for that matter – wanted in Britain or not?

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Bill had said. ‘The Labour Party will be re-elected anyway.’ But he had known that he was lying.

*

Sam picked up the telephone. Barbara was out shopping, and he was alone in the house. It was ten to eleven. He knew that this was the time for morning break at King William’s. He knew that for the next twenty minutes, the teachers would be relaxing and drinking coffee in their common room.

He looked down at the list of phrases he had been composing for the last three nights.

your contemptibly inelastic fealty to the twin malpractices of sensualism and dissipation stimulates only my profoundest, most hypogeal and bathyphilous inculpation

He dialled the number of the school and listened to the ringing tone. The Chief Master’s secretary answered the telephone and he asked to be put straight through to Mr Miles Plumb.

*

market share
contingency
lack of production output
over-manning
efficient management
product strategy
corporate plan
executive meetings
over-capacity
reduced scale of operations
dinosaur
de-manning

*

Sam could hear the hum of conversation in the Common Room, the clinking of cups, the creaking of chairs. The voice had said ‘I’ll just go and find him,’ without giving any indication of how long it was likely to take. The seconds were ticking by. He had been waiting a minute and a half at least.

your insouciant ruttishness is tantamount to nymphomania

you are a temerarious poltroon, a rebarbative mooncalf, a pixilated dunderhead and a milksop of unmitigated flagitiousness

The words were beginning to lurch and blur in front of his eyes. The phrases which had sounded so impressive when he had mouthed them to himself in the half-light of the living room at two o’clock in the morning now seemed forced and inadequate. He had no idea what some of them meant. And yet he had to meet this man on his own terms. He had to employ the same tools that Miles himself had used to draw Barbara away from him.

He could hear footsteps approaching at the other end of the line.

*

the time has come when we simply have to face up to the situation

The atmosphere in the hall was sombre, attentive; almost funereal.

difficult, and no doubt unpopular choices will have to be made
Bill was one of the few people in the audience who knew how much was at stake this morning. What they were listening to was not a simple statement of beliefs. Just a few minutes before taking the floor, Michael Edwardes had announced to the delegates in the back room that he would be calling for a vote of confidence at the end of his speech. He was going to present his case, cloaked in these terms of agonized reasonableness, and then call for it to be endorsed after allowing only a few minutes for the shop stewards, unrehearsed and unprepared, to present their counter-arguments. They were being shrewdly out-manoeuvred.