The Storytellers (26 page)

C
HAPTER

T
HEY ARRIVED at 71 Buttesland Street by taxi, emotionally at sea. Puccini's
Turandot
could do that to people. Not only had the great composer died of a heart attack before completing it, but his sympathies seemed to lie more with Liù, a faithful slave girl willing to die for the man she loved, than with Turandot, a self-centred heroine happy to have unsuccessful suitors put to death. Harvey and Frances were also nervous, but that was not Puccini's fault. Neither had entered the other's home before.

“I hope you're up for something simple?” Harvey asked when they had got inside. “I thought penne run through with ricotta, diced smoked ham and a little spinach in a cream sauce might do it.”

“That sounds lovely. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“How about a starter of sliced mozzarella, fresh tomatoes and basil drizzled with olive oil? The mozzarella's in the fridge, basil and tomatoes are there and the olive oil over here. Put on this apron,” he instructed, handing her one with Pisa's leaning tower and the words
Viva Italia
printed on it.

“Very classy!” she joked.

“Oh yes, it's all class in here – East-End Italian class!” And he
slipped the apron over her head and tied its bow at the back.

Frances rearranged it slightly. She wasn't used to being dressed by a man.

“Now I think I've got a reasonable Sicilian wine somewhere,” he said disappearing down a set of steep steps into what had once been the coal hole.

The displaced chatelaine of Graham castle started to busy herself with the first course, while looking around Harvey's kitchen with that sense-making curiosity particular to the female character. She wasn't sure what was going to be hardest: competing with Harvey's dead mother or with Harvey, a man so clearly set in his ways. The kitchen was immaculate.

“I think we'll enjoy this,” he said, emerging triumphant from the coal hole. “It's a red from the Bondi vineyards on Mount Etna. A blend of two local grapes, apparently.”

“Mount Etna?” she said, sounding surprised. “That can't be very safe?”

“It's not, but the Sicilians have a love-hate relationship with their mountain. She is angry one minute, sublime the next, like a petulant mistress.”

“Have you had a girlfriend?” she blurted out. The question came from deep inside her. She had read about the unbreakable bond between some men and their mothers.

Harvey laughed as he poured them both a glass of the wine.

“You are worried I might be a mother's boy – even a dead mother's!”

She shrugged and looked embarrassed.

“Sylvia, my mother,” he began, by way of explanation, “and I think of her as Sylvia as often as I do my mother, said I would never get a woman as long as I lived here with her. And in a way, she was right. From the age of twelve she looked after me and never once did I imagine that I wouldn't do the same for her. So I suppose you could
say we were as good as married. But did I have a girlfriend? Well, let's say that my mother and I had an understanding. There was someone I saw pretty regularly, but never here and we never talked about it. If she was lonely when I was out, she would have our gay neighbour, Trevelyan, round and they'd watch television together.”

Suddenly Frances found herself worrying about the girlfriend rather than the mother. “Are you still seeing that someone?” she asked cagily, “if that isn't too nosey?”

“Yes, it's very nosey, but no, I'm not still seeing her. It was becoming too mechanical, if you know what I mean.”

“I'm not sure I want to,” Frances answered, sounding more relieved than she intended.

Harvey seemed to be everywhere: finishing off the penne, laying the table, refilling their glasses and looking over her shoulder, rather attentively she felt, which was not altogether unwelcome, to see how she was progressing.

“What did you make of the production?” he asked.

“Turandot?”

“Yes.”

“It left me a little dissatisfied, I have to admit,” she confessed.

“Yes, it's hard to feel much sympathy for Turandot when she spares her last suitor, especially as one's sympathies still lie with the slave girl, Liù. Apparently Puccini was very fond of his own maid, Doria, and some think he invested his creative energy into her as Liù rather than into the heroine.”

“Do we know what happened to Doria?”

“The poor girl committed suicide after the maestro's wife accused her of having sexual relations with her husband. At the autopsy she was found to be a virgin.”

“How terribly sad.”

“Yes. And it would probably have made a better opera, too,” Harvey speculated. “But Madame Puccini would soon have put a
stop to that I fear!”

The candlelight flickered and they talked the talk of two people happy to be in each other's company, taking pleasure in the fact that it had come to this, regardless of the path each had taken to be there. Like two creatures who had stumbled out of a forest into the same clearing, they found themselves wrapped in nature's momentary communion, oblivious of past and future, aware only of a seemingly eternal present that reached back and reached forward without any need for justification.

Harvey and Frances could have been in the eye of a storm, or paradise, or one and the same because the intensity of a moment is a function of its transience. But neither cared nor thought about such things. Romeo's love for Juliet and hers for him was enriched by its impossibility. The wine and food elevated pleasure above all other concerns. The voices of Buttesland Street were coming alive and slipping their moorings: from hawkers to harlots, mothers and their children, men and their work, from music hall darlings skirting the edge of respectability to Salvationists decrying the evils of drink and loose living, the conflicted nature of human experience had been corralled within a rainbow and they were inside its bag of gold.

As they gathered up the dishes and fed them distractedly into the sink's open mouth, their proximity – a brush here, a touch there, her smell, his – could no longer be ignored. Harvey placed his hands on her shoulders with the firmness of a writer placing a full stop to end a sentence and turned her towards him. They looked at each other with a mixture of fear and hunger. Tomorrow's words had not yet been written, but the piggybank of hope was about to be broken and its contents spent.

“Perhaps we should go upstairs,” Frances whispered, wondering what her body would look like to another man. “I haven't done this in a while.”

“Oh God,” cried Harvey. “There's only mother's double bed!”

But Sylvia's ghost was no impediment. The joy of physical concert and exploration came readily to them both and the bed bore witness to acts of tender inventiveness that might have surprised its prior occupants. Strange thoughts did float around, though. For a moment Frances came face-to-face with David although he didn't seem angry, just amused. And Harvey could not quite escape the thought of his mother shouting encouragement from the sidelines.

‘Go, Harve – now didn't I say!'

C
HAPTER

N
ORMALLY George Gilder liked to attend the Conservative Party conference, but this year he could not. He would be over 11,000 miles away visiting his sister in New Zealand. She was fighting a losing battle against cancer and this would likely be his last chance to see her. Harvey would have to go instead. His deputy editor could enjoy the special status accorded to
The Sentinel
for the paper's steadfast support of the Prime Minister and listen to the interminable speeches from party members which passed for consultation with the rank and file.

* * *

It was approaching 1.00 a.m. when Harvey dropped Frances back. Her sister had given a dinner party for her at which he had been the object of interest and he now had to haul himself off to Brighton. He always had a second wind around midnight and whenever he could reach it, enjoyed the night-time. It was a different world, one in which human beings ceased to be mere functionaries governed by clocks and schedules, hierarchies and etiquette, but creatures driven
by instinct, the veneer of civilization rubbed off.

The cold lights along the Chelsea Embankment looked much as they had in Victorian times, although now electric, not gas, and the brown water of the River Thames slipped by like a stealthy vagabond carrying away everything in its path as it had been doing for centuries, long before the city was conceived. But top hats, silver-topped sticks, street ladies and dirty urchins out to make a penny, the imagery of Dickens and Conan Doyle, still attached themselves to London as if the age of its greatest greatness was reluctant to leave the feast. And as the emperor Nero had for ancient Rome, so Jack the Ripper still did for London: terrify and excite in equal measure, imagery no cosmopolitan city could seemingly do without.

The King's Road was winding down, its restaurants closing and its last revellers heading home to waiting beds or on to some human cave of physicality where everything but the sensations of the moment could be cast aside. A few black cabs still searched for fares like jackdaws after scraps; others were aiming for the suburbs, their day's work done.

Not until Putney Bridge did Harvey feel his journey south had begun, even though the suburbs would surround him for many miles yet. And it was only after he had skirted the leafy darkness of Richmond's Royal Park that the miscellany of small shops with flats above, which lined his route like flag-waving celebrants to trade, began to fade and England's army of semi-detached homes take root, each one a little haven of repose, its red bricks a panegyric to conformity.

New Malden, Long Ditton, Chessington with its famous zoo, the names passed by dimly in the night, each hamlet the work of time and individual ambition, now princelings in Greater London's mighty court. It was true, he thought, that the kingdom's pulsing heart sucked in everything it could reach, draining centres such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham of their power. Like ancient
Rome, England's capital fed on its empire, sending back its template in return: its military and economic order, its justice, its priorities, its culture, a compact most seemed willing to accept until one day they did not, prompting a future Gibbon to ponder London's decline and fall.

For a while, after Leatherhead, he joined the M25, the capital's 117 mile orbital motorway, second only to the Berliner Ring. Continental competition had not died, only mutated, but at least one could now die in the comfort of one's automobile instead of a mud-filled trench in Flanders fields. The numbers were also better. He'd read that these days only 5,000 people were being killed on the roads each year, compared to the 8,000 Britons killed during the first battle of Ypres alone.

Near Mersham, he branched south onto the M23. He passed signs to Redhill, where Polish pilots had been trained to fight the Luftwaffe, followed by Gatwick, London's second airport and then Crawley, a coffee-stop for contestants during the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. In 1896, the journey had taken Léon Bollée, the fastest contender, three and three quarter hours to complete. Harvey looked at the illuminated clock on his car's dashboard. With luck, he would cover the same distance in ninety minutes.

Night-time, solitude and travel were a cocktail designed for thought. These last years had been the most exciting of his life, even more so than the time he had spent at university. Then, a feeling of being liberated from one's background and offered seemingly limitless possibilities had been intoxicating. Now, nurtured by experience, the growing sinews of his mind no longer moved freely in the wind but were resisting it and assuming a concrete shape. Having drawn freely on the lives of others, Harvey realized that he had become himself and it was a good and powerful feeling.

Crossing the western end of the High Weald, over 500 square miles of what had been designated an area of outstanding natural
beauty, running from Kent to Surrey, he begrudged the darkness. He had seen it in daylight certainly – rolling land crisscrossed with hedgerows. This was quintessentially England. The Battle of Britain had been fought in its skies. Somewhere out in the darkness, to the north, was Runnymede, now a prosperous part of the London commuter belt, where a group of nobles in 1215 had forced the king to sign a Magna Carta restricting his power: one milestone in the eternal struggle between individual and State. How, he wondered, would the battle now raging around him be thought of in 700 years?

The road dropped down from the Weald crossing the River Adur, before rising again over the South Downs, the chalk escarpment which buttresses England from the sea and guided fighter pilots back across the Channel. He wondered what the Prime Minister would have to say at her conference. The economy was slowly picking itself off the floor and her poll ratings were improving, but outside Nottinghamshire the miners were fighting on and she was loathed by large swathes of the population. Around 3 million people who wanted to work were still unemployed – 20% of all men under twenty-five and 9% of those over – and there were many in the country who felt that her government had simply taken a sledgehammer to their lives.

* * *

It was approaching 3.00 a.m. and the Prime Minister was still working on her speech. She, too, was enjoying the quiet solitude of the night. In the bedroom next door, her beloved husband was sleeping soundly. She rose and in the bathroom mirror saw herself staring back: a lady in a nightgown two days short of her sixtieth year. It had to be a good speech. She knew that. The party needed reassurance that things were on the mend. Often she felt that only her will kept Britain from sliding back into a collectivist nightmare in which every soft option taken led not just to further decline, but to a
belief that more of the same, not less, was needed to reverse it.

How could so many intelligent people have thought that a country's economy could be left to organizations like an elected government, the civil service, the nationalized industries and the trades unions, all of whose leaders were more anxious to maintain their political control than meet the needs of individual consumers? She rubbed some cream into her cheeks and forehead. In a war, a nation could be run like a giant corporation because there was one overriding objective – to beat the enemy. But not in peacetime, when individuals had many objectives and a free market, under law, was the best medium through which to express and reconcile them. She gently wiped off the surplus lotion. In a few hours, her beauticians would be in attendance. She had to look her best.

In the ante-room, she sat again at the desk to look over her speech one last time. She should turn in. She knew it. The day ahead was going to be long but she was determined not to let people down. In moments of doubt, she reminded herself that Moses, often in the face of fierce protest, had led the Israelites away from Egyptian slavery.

“So buck up, Margaret,” she whispered. She
would
lead her people away from the slavery of socialism.

And had Sylvia been listening from her resting place in the afterlife, she would surely have called out, ‘And don't you give up, dear.'

* * *

Harvey entered the outskirts of Brighton on Preston Road. The town had a genteel, if somewhat worn-out appearance, like an elderly widow still living off what remained from an ancestor's fortune. He passed Patcham, Cliveden Close and Lansdowne Road, all solid names appropriated by the middle class. It was a privilege to have a room at
The Grand, even if his would be a small one, up in the rafters. Most of the British Cabinet would be housed there along with the movers and shakers of the Conservative Party. Although a representative of the fourth estate, George Gilder was considered a ‘trusty', in prison parlance, and his deputy was to be accorded the same respect. At the Kingsway, he turned left. The famous pier lay ahead. It still had some lights shining on it and appeared to hover above the water.

From nowhere, Graham Green's novel
Brighton Rock
came into his head. Perhaps Ida Arnold was the Prime Minister, determined to bring down the sociopath Pinkie Brown, a sort of small-scale Joseph Stalin with a Catholic rather than Communist background, after a chance encounter with Hale, one of Pinkie's victims, on the Palace Pier. As he turned left again, out of the Kingsway, to confront The Grand, he glanced at the dashboard clock. It was 2.54 a.m. He had made excellent time.

The car must have been about a hundred yards short when Harvey slammed on the brakes. At first he could not make sense of it. The entire centre section of the Hotel simply fell in on itself. Then came a bang, followed by complete and utter silence. He just sat there, staring, as dust, under-lit by street lights, rose ethereally into the night sky. For a split second he could see only the destructive beauty of it all. And then his violently-contracting stomach muscles alerted him to the true horror. They – whoever ‘they' were – had just blown up the British Government.

* * *

“What the devil was that?”

The Prime Minister's husband sat bolt upright in bed. There was a smell that wasn't scented polish in the air and the room looked ghostly in the pale glow of an emergency light.

“I think it was a bomb, dear,” his wife answered. “You'd better get
dressed quickly. We should investigate. There may be people hurt.”

“We should get out, more like,” he cautioned. “Oldest trick in the book: one bomb followed by another when everyone's in disarray.”

He moved quickly to the bathroom.

“Heavens, Margaret! Take a look at this!”

They both stared through the half-open door. The darkened room looked as though it had been torn apart.

“I was in there moments ago,” she said, aghast.

“Margaret, I'm getting you out of here, now.”

* * *

Harvey stood next to his car, unsure what to do. At first the only sound came from the building as some loosened sections of masonry fell to the ground and others settled. The Grand appeared to be adjusting to its new situation like a sleeper turning over in bed. A dog began barking. Lights were coming on in buildings nearby. He heard voices and then shouts. With about as much forethought as one of the zombies in
Night of the Living Dead
, he approached the hotel. A call box on the pavement seemed intact so he went inside. He heard the familiar purr of a dialling tone and dialled 999.

“Fire service, ambulance or police?” a female voice asked.

“All of them,” he answered. “There's been an explosion at The Grand Hotel.”

Harvey then felt in his pockets for change, but there was none and so he made a reverse-charge call to the night desk at
The Sentinel
.

“Henry, it's Harvey … No, I'm not in bed. Look, this is big. I need you to get a photographer down here now … Brighton. I'm in Brighton. This is going to be front page so stand by … There's been an explosion at The Grand Hotel. Most of the cabinet must be staying here … I don't know. But there will be casualties … No, I don't know if the Prime Minister is amongst them, Henry, it's just
happened. Get that photographer down here and start working on a headline … No, I don't know who or what was responsible…”

“Fair enough…,” Harvey conceded at Henry's not-unreasonable plea that he would need something more to go on and glancing at his watch said, “Look, it's just gone three. I'll call you in a couple of hours. There's bound to be an agency photographer down here who'll get something up to London in time for the early editions … I know that'll cost us. Oh, and Henry, call George in New Zealand. Tell him I'll contact him when I can.”

As he emerged from the kiosk, an armada of police cars approached, their blue lights flashing and sirens blaring, followed by a line of more deeply-throated fire trucks. Normality, then the event, then silence, then the ululation of the response teams announcing their arrival like the US cavalry in a spaghetti western after the wagon train has been decimated by Indians. Within seconds, as the only living being visible, he had been bundled into the back of a police car. Who was he? What was he doing outside The Grand Hotel at 3.00 a.m.? And if that was his car in the middle of the approach road, would he get it out of the way as it was impeding the emergency services. Harvey was freed from detention, mildly punch drunk, relieved he had been neither black nor Irish.