The Storytellers (16 page)

C
HAPTER

P
ETER BETSWORTH had cut Stacy some slack. It was obvious she and Marx were growing close. That had been the point, after all. Expecting a woman to ingratiate herself with a man and not feel anything, especially if the target was personable, was not realistic. It could hardly be otherwise. And now that he had satisfied himself that Marx was committed, he felt he could let nature take its course. But he had cautioned her.

“Love and duplicity make uneasy companions, especially at the outset. I know.”

Whatever the MI5 man's wife suspected she now knew better than to pursue. Young love lacked the same maturity.

* * *

Marx confessed his double life to Stacy early on, which she had promptly reported to her employer. The intelligence officer had expressed no surprise, simply telling her to maintain the fiction for John Preston's safety.

“A shared secret,” he said, “will tie him closer to you. It will also
make it more bearable for him. But in any communication between you and me about him, he is Marx. That is essential.”

Part of her resented her puppeteer. But a far larger part enjoyed the work and took pleasure in the knowledge that she was helping protect a person she increasingly liked.

* * *

It was a Saturday in June. He'd met his handler the previous afternoon and decided to stay the night in London at the government's expense. To her surprise, he suggested they drive in her car almost two hours west to a country house. She knew events were getting to him. In May, he had ‘Marched for Jobs' to Trafalgar Square with over 100,000 others. More than eighty had just been arrested during clashes between white power skinheads and blacks in Coventry. A man had fired six blank shots at the Queen in Horse Guards Parade. The total of IRA protesters starving themselves to death in the Maze Prison had reached four. Over 2.6 million were unemployed and that number was rising. Manufacturing companies, unable to keep going for want of work, were closing their doors for the last time across the country. And the Liberals and Social Democrats had formed an alliance to defeat one of the most unpopular governments in living memory – a government he had helped to get elected. Enough was enough.

“Let's goo an' see summat beaotiful, fer Christ's sek,” he said, “an' forget all this rubbish, at leus fer a doy.”

A photograph in a local tourist office had caught his eye. It was of an Eden, so colourful and lovely and peaceful, and so utterly different from his day-to-day experience.
Visit Bowood's spectacular rhododendrons…
it urged, and that had been enough for him. He had not come across the word rhododendron before and was far from sure how to pronounce it, but that hardly seemed to matter. The
photograph offered a way into a different world, away from the single-minded bloody-mindedness that was destroying every fucking thing around him.

* * *

They sat on a bench, their picnic laid out between them. Late bluebells fell away in front, one after another, in rows, in lines, a stationary hoard of cobalt conquerors carpeting the forest floor with colour, an electric counterpoint to nature's green. High above, across a matching sky, white clouds scudded, capturing and releasing in playful dance the oak-tree-dappled light. And then there were the rhododendron blooms – reds, creams, yellows, mauves: how they shouted. We are here! We have endured! This is our moment! Enjoy!

John and Stacy just sat and stared. This was even better than he had expected, but it was also real and he didn't know what to make of it. How could it exist in the same world that he knew? Had the M4 west out of London become a wormhole to a different universe? A cuckoo sounded, its melodious notes belying the trumpeter's dirty little habit of laying eggs in another's nest. A robin tossed at fallen leaves in its search for grubs. Intercepting insects by the score, swifts screeched through the air like fighter jets. Nearby a badger slumbered. Come nightfall, it would set out to kill. All around nature was feeding on itself, but all they saw was its beauty.

* * *

“What's this?” he asked.

“Cheese,” she told him. “Don't you like cheese?”

“Yes, I loik cheese well enough.”

They picked at the meal Stacy had prepared. A bee flew past, startling her and she flapped ineffectively moments after the insect
had determined her red tank top held no nectar. The garment's tight-lined roundness, however, had not gone unnoticed by her companion.

“Muggin girl!” he mocked. “It's juss a tiny th'n.”

“I'd like to see you get stung,” she scowled.

“Charm'n!” he protested, extracting a sausage from the pack.

“I don't suppose we're allowed to drink here,” she speculated, pouring beer into a plastic cup and handing it him.

“Oo's ter stop us? The place seems 'alf empty.”

“Yes, I thought it would be teeming, a lovely place like this. Still, good for us, right?”

But John Preston couldn't keep his eyes from her tight shorts.

“Hoo d'ya get into those things?” he asked.

“The same way I get out of them,” she teased.

“I'd loik ter see that!”

“In your dreams!” she challenged. “Now do you want some fruit?”

“I'll yav 'un of those undersoized oranges.”

“Mandarins, you chump. They are supposed to be that size.”

“Hell, I knoo that. You fink I don't knoo that?” And then a small black object crashed into him. “What the fock!” He shot up from the bench sending the remains of his sandwich flying and spilling his beer. “What the fock was that?” he protested turning around himself like a dog chasing its tail. “It was a bloody zeppelin!”

“It was a tiny little flying beetle,” she taunted with undisguised pleasure. “Now sit down and stop saying ‘fuck' so much.”

“I'll say ‘fock' as often as oi want,' he retorted sulkily only just regaining his composure. “Now is there a Kit-Kat or summat?”

Stacy fished in her bag and found a Mars bar which seemed to be acceptable.

“Do you fink it just happened loik this, Stace?' he asked, taking in their surroundings once more.

“It says it was laid out in 1854, by the third Marquis of Lansdowne,”
she said, reading the brochure they had been given with their entry ticket, and enunciating the name with care. “That sounds like the right sort of name for a gardener.”

“Some gardener!” he exclaimed. “I don't suppose 'ee did much wi' a sped 'imself, moind.”

“No, I don't suppose he did,” she agreed. And they sat in silence looking, as they had when they first arrived.

Snatches of conversation reached them from time to time but the 60 acres crisscrossed with paths and shrubs, many 20-or-so-feet high, could have hidden a small army. No other soul had passed by all the time they'd been anchored to their bench. Admittedly they had walked to the top and perhaps others hadn't bothered. Slowly their ears became attuned to woodland sounds, so different from the grinding, screeching, thumping noise of the metropolis that city people had programmed themselves not to hear.

A flock of jackdaws squawked overhead, alighting in a large beech tree nearby for a noisy get-together before moving on. Sleek pigeons floated by from time to time with effortless purpose. Two grey squirrels chased each other through the trees, leaping from branch to branch like Evel Knievels. The sweet smell from a giant Loderi, 25-feet high and as many wide, brushed past in the breeze. Nature was hard at work reproducing itself.

“What a pretty butterfly!” Stacy exclaimed suddenly as a Holly Blue zigzagged down from the canopy and alighted briefly on her knee before fluttering away.

John stared at where the lepidoptera had been and reached across to touch the spot.

“Too late!” she taunted, “and just as well. All men want to do is squash things.”

But John did not remove his hand. Instead he moved it inward.

“Oh for goodness sake,” she protested lightly, looking around. “Come on.”

She led him towards a large rhododendron bush with dark red flowers and thick green leaves which touched the ground like an old-fashioned skirt. Beside himself with want, he blindly followed as she found an opening and squeezed inside. As she lay down on the fibrous earth and started to wriggle out of her shorts while he, hopping like a pogo stick, freed himself from his pants, they heard the sound of an engine. Staring through the foliage, they saw a miniature tractor, pulling a trailer, coming up the path. It stopped near their bench and its driver looked around. Seeing no one, he gathered up the remains of their picnic and threw it in the cart. They listened to the putter, putter of the engine retreating into the distance and burst out laughing.

“Bloody 'ell, Stace. That were close!”

“Just look at you now,” she smirked, staring at her beau. “You'd better bring it here.”

John's desire had folded like an ice lolly in the sun.

* * *

He was shrouded in gloom during the train ride back to Birmingham that night. Stacy had wanted him to stay on and he'd been greatly tempted, but on Sunday morning he and Jack Pugh were due to meet a group from the NUM who were working to have Arthur Scargill elected their next president. Besides, he'd already stung Peter Betsworth for an extra night in London as it was.

Bunched in a corner seat, he stared at himself reflected against the darkness. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack: the sound and the motion had a way of making one feel introspective and in the mood to take stock. Looking through his own disembodied face at the stationary lights rushing by, the reality of things foxed him. What was and wasn't real? Was anything real? Little did he know that such questions had occupied some of the greatest minds in human history and that none
of them had reached a satisfactory conclusion.

What he did know was that his time in that woodland garden with Stacy had been the most magical in his life. Next to his encounter with Joan of Arc in a school book, nothing had made a greater impression on him. But the world was topsy-turvy for sure, without rhyme or reason. That he, a union mole, still had a job at British Leyland and his father, who had given the company his life, did not was, he supposed, just one of those things. And when he wasn't moleing, he was preparing for the launch of the Triumph Acclaim in conjunction with the Japanese company Honda, once one of his country's fiercest competitors. Perhaps Britain had won the war, with a little help from its friends, and lost the peace but never realized it.

He didn't like Jack Pugh one bit. The man's Marxist passion reeked of self-interest. His own code name could hardly have been an accident, although he didn't place humour high on the list of Peter Betsworth's characteristics. And what did he make of his Prime Minister now? She seemed more like a vengeful Old Testament God laying waste to a sinful populace than a modern-day Joan of Arc defending her people's honour. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack; the image of Stacy seeped back into his head, lying there, warm, welcoming, soft, in that garden, on that earth, in that time.

C
HAPTER

A
NDREW CHAMPION now faced each day with the grim determination of a man walking across an ice field no longer caring that he mightn't reach the other side. The journey was to be endured, the circling wolves kept at bay, the numbing cold ignored, each step treated as an achievement in itself. The distant possibilities he could see on the horizon hardly seemed relevant. His team had been pushing everything it could into generating overseas orders but people were hesitating. Their agents said sterling was still too high. What they asked themselves privately was would the Champion Group survive Britain's collapse?

In the last fortnight alone, riots had broken out in twenty-five cities across the country. Violence had also erupted again in Brixton after police searched houses for petrol bombs that were never found. In the Maze Prison, six of the IRA hunger strikers had now starved themselves to death and the Prime Minister blamed the IRA, which Harvey thought must have been an unintended compliment as martyrs were not that easy to come by. Amid this gloom, the British people were trying to convince themselves that the imminent marriage between the heir to their throne and the lovely Diana
Spencer foretold a happy ending just around the corner.

* * *

Andrew parked his car. It was still only eight and there were not many people around. Monday often seemed to get off to a slow start. He had deliberately taken offices away from his three factories so as to give them autonomy and not be swayed by any one. They also had a sales and service unit near Charles de Gaulle Airport as France was one of their best markets. On pushing open the office door he noticed a white envelope that someone must have slid under it over the weekend. He put it with his things and went to make a cup of coffee.

Back at his desk he liked to skim the newspaper and gather his thoughts for the day ahead. His priority that morning was a hard drive from the French company, Honeywell Bull, which they were having difficulty integrating into their micro-computer. He didn't want his developers wasting time on it. If Bull couldn't sort out the problem, he suspected he'd have to try the American Seagate Technologies again, a highly innovative new company specializing in data storage which he'd already visited once. As he toyed with how best to fit in a trip to Les Clayes-sous-Bois and California sometime over the next few days, he casually opened the letter.

The Royal Bank's letterhead surprised him and then as he read the quite crudely typed note asking that the Champion Group's £1.2 million overdraft be repaid forthwith, he suspected a prank. Hell, the bank had increased the Group's facility by £300,000 three months earlier. This had to be a joke. He looked at his watch. It was still only 8.30 a.m. His bank manager would not be in his office until 9.30 at the earliest and more likely 10.00.

Clocks always seemed to move slowly when one wanted them to move fast and too fast when time was scarce. To fill the minutes
he pulled out his ‘survival strategy' folder whose contents he already knew inside out. The mathematics were simple. Without money the company had to stop trading and there were only two ways to get it: from customers and from lenders. They had tried raising fresh capital some months earlier but the atmosphere was already becoming poisonous and manufacturing a pariah. He'd negotiated a loan increase from the bank at the start of the crisis and still thought there was a reasonable chance that this would carry them through. But there was absolutely no way that they could pay off their bank overdraft ‘forthwith'.

Andrew's doomsday scenario was to cut overheads to the bone and hope that there was still enough of the company left when they finally poked their noses out of the long tunnel they were in. The most cost-effective overheads to cut were his top management. He had already stopped drawing a salary himself and although it had taken him ten years to build up his team, his senior appointments had always been ahead of growth. With no growth he knew he could run his operations through middle management alone – for a while. He'd done it when Harold Loxley had been snatched from them, after all. But he also knew, from what he had observed and read, that more companies failed at the tail end of a recession than when the demon was at its peak. Utterly exhausted by the struggle, they simply had nothing left to give. This, presumably, was what the Prime Minister meant by survival of the fittest, although he doubted she understood that the survivors of her ‘cure' for what she considered the ‘British disease' would be based in America, Germany and Japan.

As he played with the numbers, he heard his secretary coming in. The sound was a comfort until he remembered that unless he found a way to keep his ship afloat she would be out on her ear.

“A refill, Andrew?” she asked, poking her head round his door.

“Yes, June, thank you. And could you get Nobby Bruce on the phone just as soon as he gets in. I found a damn silly letter that claims
to come from the bank stuffed under our door. I'm hoping it's a joke – a thoroughly bad joke.”

June knew better than to ask what the letter said, but she was well aware from the dismal reports that graced every newspaper and broadcast what was going on across the country. Three of their own suppliers had already called it a day. The signs of economic and social disintegration were everywhere.

He heard the phone ring and June answer, but it was still only 9.15 and he didn't think it could be the bank. His light came on and he lifted the receiver.

“That's Harvey Mudd, Andrew,” June announced. “Shall I say you'll call him back?”

Andrew thought for a moment and said, “No, June, put him through. I could do with a distraction. But if you get Nobby, interrupt.”

“Andrew, is it a bad time?”

“Yes, Harvey, these days it is always a bad time! Are you after something from the frontlines?”

“As a matter of fact, Andrew, I am. George Gilder, my editor, wants me to work up a piece on how this recession is impacting Britain's manufacturing capacity.”

“In three words Harvey, its buggering it!”

“Another perfect summation! Have you ever thought of writing copy for a living?”

“No, but I might have to!”

“It's that bad?”

“Yes, Harvey, it's that bad. Companies are falling like autumn leaves and it's not even August.”

“What about the Champion Group?”

“Well, we're still on the branch, Harvey, still on the branch.”

They talked for a while and agreed to meet, but neither was able to pin down a time or a place. It was now 9.30 and June rang through
to say that no one at the bank could say when Nobby Bruce would be in.

Andrew left it for fifteen minutes and then called the bank himself.

“Mr Bruce, please.”

“Who's speaking?”

“Andrew Champion.”

There was a pause and an unfamiliar voice came on the line.

“Mr Champion, I have a number for you to call. It's our head office. You are to ask for Mr Murray.”

“Can I speak to Mr Bruce, please?”

“I am sorry Mr Champion, but that is what I have been instructed to tell you. Your account is no longer with this branch. It has been taken over by our head office.”

“Fucking hell it has!” Andrew exploded and the line went dead.

So now he knew. The letter was no hoax. This was war. It was time to reach for the lawyer.

“June, get me Donald Fraser at Brightman and Meadows will you. Say it's urgent.”

He only had to wait a minute before June called back.

“I have Mr Fraser on the line.”

“Thank you, June.”

“Andrew, I'm in a meeting. What's up?”

“The bank's called in our entire overdraft.”

There was a pause.

“Can you get to my office by midday?”

“You bet.”

“Well, I'll see you then and bring every scrap of paper you have relating to the bank's facility. Remind me, Andrew, which bank is it?”

“The Royal Bank.”

“Oh yes,” he drawled. “Not known for their rigour, which may be a blessing. Until midday then.”

Thank God for the law and lawyers, he thought to himself, a
civilized alternative to the Colt 45. No sooner was he through with Donald than June came back on the line.

“Andrew, I've got Mr Bruce. He's been holding. I think he's in a payphone.”

“Nobby, it's Andrew. What the hell's going on? That noise; are you calling from a box?”

“Andrew, I'm most awfully sorry. We're under lockdown.” Nobby Bruce sounded as distraught as he.

“What's lockdown?”

“Head office has taken over our loan book. They're calling in loans wherever they can. It's a major panic.”

“Christ, Nobby, that's like telling the boys on the frontline that their ammunition is being withdrawn!”

“I know, Andrew, I know. But the bank's just looking after itself right now.”

“A bloody funny way of doing it, if you ask me. And you; are you all right? Have you still got a job?”

“I don't know, Andrew, I honestly don't know.”

“Well thank you for everything you've done for us up to now Nobby and good luck. You'd better get back to your desk before it's carried off to head office as well.”

There was a weak laugh.

“And good luck to you, too,” Nobby just got in, before the pips cut him off.

* * *

Andrew sat in Donald Fraser's office with its view of St Paul's, only a stone's throw from
The Sentinel
building, while his lawyer sifted through the bank's papers. An owlish man with a sharp mind, Donald liked batting for the small against the large, although it was from the large that he earned most of his money. He punctuated
his progression through the Royal Bank's pages with an occasional ‘uh-huh' as his client sat on the edge of his seat like an accused man waiting for a judge to overturn or confirm his death sentence.

Peering over his spectacles he asked, “I take it you are over the facility at this point?”

“No,” Andrew told him. “We are still under by about a hundred thousand.”

He nodded and went back over the papers again.

“Not very professional this,” he said after what felt to Andrew like a spell in purgatory. “Do you want the good news or the bad?”

“Some good news would be nice for a change,” Andrew answered, clearing his throat, alert to the sudden weakness of his voice. “We've had nothing but the other kind lately.”

“Well the bank can't call in its loan to you. Their people have completely screwed up.”

“Are you sure?” Andrew asked incredulously. He'd already had a session with his finance director before coming up to meet Donald in London and neither of them had seen any way out.

“Yes, I'm quite sure, but here's the bad news. The fact that they have put you on notice means that if your group goes one penny over the agreed facility they
will
be entitled to call in the loan.”

Andrew felt like kissing Donald Fraser on all four cheeks, but Donald wasn't really the kissable kind.

“So what do I do about their damn letter?”

“Let me make a call. I have already had some dealings with their legal department. They don't know whether they are coming or going, frankly.”

“Please. Go right ahead.”

Donald had his secretary make the call and they talked for a short while about trout fishing on the River Test which was Donald's passion. It was not Andrew's, but at that point the head of the Champion Group would have happily scrubbed his lawyer's office
carpet if asked.

“Anthony, how are you?” Donald oozed when the call came through. “Busy are you…? Yes, I expect so. You'll have to come and work with Brightman and Meadows.” His look at Andrew conveyed the certainty that whoever this Anthony was, he would never be allowed within a million miles of Brightman and Meadows. “Quite so. Now, Anthony, about your bank's letter to the Champion Group … The Champion Group … Yes I expect you have sent out a great many letters recently … Yes, these are very difficult times, but it's good to know that the banking industry is doing its bit for the economy … Yes, that's right. The Champion Group, with your Mayfair branch, I believe.” Donald looked across and Andrew nodded. He had never changed banks from his time in the airless basement on South Audley Street. “Right, well I've been going over the papers and I think you boys have jumped the gun a bit … A clerical error? … Easily done … So shall I tell them to shred it? … Very good, Anthony. I'll tell them … No, Anthony, I don't think we have grounds for a suit at the moment … Nice talking to you. Let's have a drink sometime.”

Andrew moved from a feeling of complete elation to one of extreme anger in the space of a moment.

“Do you want to sue?” Donald asked. “You'd have to prove damage.”

“Wouldn't I just,” Andrew fumed. “But unfortunately we couldn't afford to and I have a company to run.”