The Rotters' Club (39 page)

a painful but necessary process of de-manning

Painful for whom?

something in the region of twelve and a half thousand jobs

Bill tensed in his chair, expecting uproar. He heard one or two rapid intakes of breath, but that was all. His Brothers were silent. Two rows behind him, Colin Trotter was nodding in melancholy agreement. He could see the logic behind all this. Bill could see the logic too, but he hated it, hated it with a passionate vengeance that had driven him onwards in the past but today just seemed to flatten and exhaust him. He caught Derek Robinson’s eye and they exchanged a long, dispirited glance.

*

‘Yes?’ said the voice on the telephone.

So this was it, then; the long-awaited moment of confrontation.

agapistic libertine
nefarious subterfuge
abominable philanderer
invidious entanglement
nyctalopic cuckold

‘Is that Mr Plumb?’

‘It is.’

‘This is Sam Chase here. Barbara’s husband.’

sanctimonious
attitudinizer
deviationist
tergiversator
prophylactic
febrifugal
incandescence
cruciation
legerdemain
apoplexy
shenanigans

There was a long silence. Neither man seemed to have anything to say to the other. Sam tried to form the words, but they wouldn’t come. More than a year’s worth of frustration and resentment boiled up inside him, but he had no means of expressing it. It was more than he could bear.

‘Do you have something to say to me?’ Mr Plumb asked. ‘Is it your intention that we should be the participants in some sort of colloquy?’

Furious at his opponent but even more at himself, Sam crumpled up the sheets of paper, screwed his eyes tight shut, and instinctively, without thinking about it, blew the longest and loudest raspberry he had ever blown in his life.

He had to admit, on later, more sober reflection, that it had not been his finest hour. It was hardly the action of a mature and articulate man. But it seemed to have done the trick. There had been a shocked pause, the line had gone suddenly dead and neither he nor Barbara ever heard from Sugar Plum Fairy again.

*

The delegates spilled out of the conference hall, into the hotel’s grounds and the February sunshine. A crowd of journalists was standing by and they surrounded Michael Edwardes eagerly. He was exhausted, but beaming. His speech had been a triumph. His words had won the day. The meeting had voted by 715 to five in favour of his proposals. A few ‘extreme militants’ had tried to oppose them, but nobody had listened. The restructuring of British Leyland was under way.

Bill sat on a warm patch of low wall and gazed out over the ornamental garden. He heard footsteps approaching across the loose gravel and looked up to see his friend and fellow-steward Derek Robinson standing over him.

‘We fight this, Bill,’ said the man soon – very soon – to be demonized in the newspapers as ‘Red Robbo’, and to be sacked by Michael Edwardes for trying to orchestrate protests against his programme of redundancies. ‘We fight this every inch of the way.’

‘Of course we do,’ said Bill.

Derek looked at him with searching, worried eyes, and said, ‘Don’t lose the faith, Bill,’ before walking away.

A coach was waiting to take the men back to Longbridge. Bill checked to see whether Sam Chase was the driver. He would have liked to chat with Sam. But it was somebody else.

‘You might as well head off,’ he said to the driver. ‘I think I’m going to stay here for a while.’

The crowd was breaking up. Michael Edwardes had been whisked away in a chauffeured car, and the journalists had followed. Bill wandered back into the hotel’s gloomy interior and stared around, not knowing what to do next. Colin Trotter and a group of other junior managers were drinking pints of bitter and gin and tonics at a table in a corner of the bar. Once again, the dark wood panelling and the air of conspiratorial good humour between these men made Bill think of a club, a gentleman’s club. The sort of club to which you had to be elected but nobody ever told you the rules, nobody ever explained why some people were in and others were out. So what would this one be called? The Bosses’ Club? The Scoundrels’ Club? The Liars’ Club?

Twelve and a half thousand redundancies. A painful but necessary process. He pitied the management their twinges of conscience, those long, distressing meetings, the salaried anguish of executive decision-making, and thought too about the weeks and months and maybe lifetimes of hardship and hopelessness that so many thousands of his men were going to face in the bitter, market-driven era to come. Was there anything he could do about it, now that everyone had swallowed the pill like trusting children and voted themselves out of a. livelihood? Oh, yes, there had been plenty of days, good days, and not so long ago, when he truly believed that the struggle could be won; but the decade was old now and he was growing old with it, and he knew that those days would never come back, any more than those days of hot, secret pleasure with Miriam Newman would ever come back, any more than Miriam herself would ever come back from the dead.

24

14 October, 1981
Exeter

Dear Chiara (as I must learn to call you now),

A grey and miserable day here. Howling wind coming in off the sea. Amazing how it can reach even as far as campus and make the air wet and salty. I am sitting in the library – the only person here, as far as I can make out – watching fat drops of moisture race, or rather stagger, down the window-panes. An anthology of worthy critical writings on eighteenth-century poetry open on my desk, along with a few volumes of Pope and Gray, all of them unread. Where
is
everybody? Is there a vital lecture I’m missing, or something? Anyway, I’d much rather be writing to you than thinking about boring old rhyming couplets.

And how is autumn in Mantova? Exquisite, I’m sure. I have a vivid image of you in your new life. You are sitting at a café in some piazza, sitting beneath a colonnade, drinking cappuccino. The autumn leaves are flapping across the flagstones. An old woman dressed in black is pushing her bicycle across the square, her basket full of bread and tomatoes and cheese and milk. And there’s a crowd of darkly handsome Italian boys clustered around their motorbikes in the corner, and they’re looking at this beautiful enigmatic student who’s just arrived from England and they’re talking about her and they’re arguing about who’s going to ask her out first. And there’s a bell sounding from the
campanile,
and… OK, so it’s nothing like that at all, I’m just piling cliché on to cliché, but I can be allowed my little fantasies, can’t I, on this dismal Devon morning?

Incidentally, are you planning to revert to being plain Claire when you come back to England? But no, you could never be plain.

Well, so
Philip
is going to come and see you in a few weeks’ time. It seems we have both managed to surprise each other with news of impending visitors. You and
Philip,
though? Wonders will never cease. Yes, of course, I know there is nothing in it, he’s a friend, he’s coming to stay with you in Italy for a few days: what’s the big deal? There was just something about the way you mentioned it in your letter. Anyway, you will have a very good time, I’m sure. He’s very sweet, good company, etc. I’ve always thought that. Of all of us who worked on the magazine in those days he was probably the nicest and least complicated – wouldn’t you agree?

Which is more than can be said for Benjamin.

Yes,
I’m
surprised that he’s coming to see me, as well, even for a long weekend. I think I just wore him down with two years’ worth of endless, persistent invitations. Now that it’s finally happening I find I’m terribly nervous about it. I mean –
Benjamin?
For two and a half days? What are we going to talk about? What would you talk about to Benjamin for two and a half hours or even minutes? Can I stand a whole weekend of those long mysterious silences, those aeons of depressive staring out of the window while he slowly ransacks his brain for the
mot juste
with which to answer your latest question, which was probably something along the lines of ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

Oh, I know, I’m being unfair, dreadfully unfair. We were all fond of Benjamin. I know you were, especially. And perhaps Oxford has opened him up no end. (Ha! OK, so that rates low on the scale of probability.) And, to stop being facetious for a moment, there were reasons why he always looked so sad and thoughtful, I think. In fact I know there were. Benjamin had hidden depths, if you must know. I glimpsed them once.

Actually I have never told anybody this story, but hey, it’s ten-thirty in the morning, all my friends have disappeared somewhere without me, the library is deserted and I’ve got a whole pad of blank A4 just waiting to be filled up. If I’m ever going to tell it to anybody, I might as well tell it to you, now.

It’s rather horrible, to be honest. And it’s more about his sister, Lois, than about Benjamin himself. That’s the part I’ll come to at the end, though.

It happened… goodness, three and a half years ago. How time has started to slip away from us, already! February, 1978, if my memory is correct. Just after he had started that appallingly unsuitable affair with Jennifer Hawkins. The less said about that the better.

Do you remember Mr Tillotson, and the Walking Option? I don’t think you were ever a member. It started as a Boys’ School thing, a sort of remedial home for the terminally unathletic, but then some girls were allowed to join too and it became much more popular, as you can imagine. All sorts of naughtiness used to go on but that’s another story altogether. The standing joke about it was that we all used to get lost every week and like all good jokes this one was completely true: Mr Tillotson was a sweetie but he couldn’t read a map to save his life. After a while we all became quite curious about how soon we would get lost and how long for, and some people would even be taking bets on it. It all added to the fun.

I think there are lots of nice bits of countryside around Birmingham, whatever people say, but after a few months we managed to exhaust even those and then one week Mr T had a brainwave and decided he was going to take us on a walk around all the disused canals. Most of us didn’t even know that there
was
a canal system in the city, but we were wrong – there are miles and miles of canals in fact, none of them in use any more, all superseded by the motorways now, of course. It was very atmospheric, I must say: a view of the city you don’t normally get, just the backs of dozens of empty factories and warehouses, all cracked window-panes and creepy abandoned spaces. Apart from anything else, it was an ideal place to get lost.

Benjamin and I managed to become separated from the others and after a while it began to grow dark and frankly we were starting to get a little scared. We hadn’t a clue where everyone had got to but we reckoned the safest thing would be to stay exactly where we were, at least for a while, and wait for someone to come by rather than running around in a different direction and getting hopelessly confused.

So then we sat down and we started talking.

Benjamin made some remark about the canals and I can remember that was what got us going. He said that apparently – or at least this was what Mr T had told him – Birmingham had more miles of canal than Venice. Sounds incredibly unlikely, doesn’t it: perhaps you could nip across there one day and do some measuring and tell me what you think. And I said something like, That’s all very well, but at least when you go round the canals in Venice you’ve got all those palazzos to look at, and those beautiful churches. And then Benjamin said a funny thing: he said it annoyed him when people made comparisons like that, and the important thing about a church wasn’t what it looked like, it was the kind of worship that went on in it, the
sincerity
(or something) of the religious feeling, and he said that in that respect the churches in Birmingham were just as impressive as the churches in Venice or anywhere else.

He said it with amazing passion, I thought, and it came quite out of the blue, so I said to him, ‘Benjamin, you’re not religious, are you?’, and he said, ‘Yes I am, actually,’ and when I asked him why he’d never mentioned it before he said that he’d been wanting to talk to me about it for some time but the right moment had never come up, and he’d never joined the Christian Society because he thought that belief was a very private thing and not something he felt comfortable sharing with other people.

Now, I bet
that’s
surprised you, hasn’t it? And I dare say you’re none too pleased to hear it. I know you’ve always hated any kind of religion and I’ve never said anything about it before, but I can say it to you now, in a letter: I can say that you’re
wronz,
Claire, and I know why you feel the way that you do, but the kind of religion your parents go in for has got nothing to do with real Christianity, it’s just a perversion of the Faith as far as I’m concerned. Real Christianity is about love and forgiveness and understanding people and being tolerant and not condemning people when they make mistakes and there is nothing
sinister
about it, nothing to be suspicious about. But no, I’m not going to get evangelical on you now, I just wanted you to see why it is that there’s some kind of sympathy, some kind of connection between Benjamin and me, however different we might be on the surface.