Dr Berlin (5 page)

‘He didn’t put it like that, Julius.’

‘Tell me I heard it wrong.’ Bomberg’s mockery was tangible.

‘What he said was, “If the Soviet Union denies the Allies their legal access to West Berlin, the West will have to find some way to convince them that on this issue we mean business.”’

‘Game, set and match,’ Bomberg said furiously. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. The Allies are preparing to go to war over Berlin. Doesn’t that terrify you? Doesn’t it make you think that maybe you should do something to try to stop it, like draw our audience’s attention to what’s going on?’

‘The man’s a soldier, Julius. That’s how soldiers think. It’s
not policy. It’s his opinion, which isn’t unreasonable given the aggressive behaviour of the Soviets.’

‘The way he’s talking, Gerry, we could all wake up dead tomorrow and no one would know why. You’ve got to include that quote.’

‘If the situation deteriorates, there’ll be plenty of other opportunities to get the military view. We can use this clip then.’ His knowledge of Bomberg told him that if you let him bully you once, he’d never leave you alone after that. If you wanted to work with him successfully, you had to defend your corner or be swept away in the storm.

Bomberg was silent. The storm wasn’t over, it had temporarily blown itself out.

‘Look, hurry up and finish, will you, Gerry?’ Bomberg took a cheroot out of his pocket and tore off the cellophane wrapping. He put it in his mouth unlit. ‘I want to smoke this thing. We’ll carry on upstairs.’

Bomberg was calling time on lunch. Pountney hated eating with him. He’d take a couple of mouthfuls of what was on his plate, and that was that. When he was done, you were done. Pountney pushed his tray aside unfinished. The cod may have seen better days, but the sponge pudding with hot treacle sauce looked enticing. Oh well, too bad.

*

Over the previous decade, Julius Bomberg had made his reputation pushing forward the boundaries of current affairs on television. He was responsible for a number of innovations that were now setting the agenda. If there was a theme to the choice of subjects on his programmes, it was the need to expose the devious strategies the powerful used to conceal the truth from those they governed.

This national obsession with secrecy, Bomberg argued, eyes blazing behind tinted spectacles, suggested that there was something rotten in the vital organs of the government, and his job,
their
job – here fingers stab at Pountney and his
colleagues – the
raison
d’être
of a current affairs programme like theirs – was to prevent this sickness spreading by telling their audiences what was going on.

‘Ignore what sociologists tell you about class distinction in our society, OK? There are only two classes that matter,’ he maintained, ‘the few who are in the know and the many who aren’t. In this country, secrecy divides us even more than wealth or birth. It is the great enemy of democracy, the means by which governments of all colours exploit the governed. Secrecy is an unrecognised crime perpetrated every day against the men and women of this country by those they vote into office. Our task is to oppose by all means within our power the bureaucratic machinery of government that tries to conceal its activities from public scrutiny. Our watchwords must be scepticism, vigilance and persistence. We believe in a transparent society. We’re here to show the buggers up for the liars they are. OK?’

Pountney and Julius Bomberg had met on their first day at Cambridge. Their names were painted in white, one above the other, on a black square at the bottom of C staircase in Milton Court. Bomberg J. T. (Julius Timothy, as Pountney discovered) and Pountney G. R. (Gerard Raymond). They had rooms opposite each other, 3a and 3b, on the second landing, though Pountney saw little of his neighbour. Bomberg’s life was lived outside the college. If he slept at all – and Pountney had little evidence to suggest that he did – then it was only occasionally and during the hours that others were awake. By the end of their first term, pieces were appearing in
Varsity
under Bomberg’s byline.

By the end of his first year he was widely recognised as the thinly disguised author of a regular social column in the undergraduate newspaper in which he reported mockingly on the antics of what he described to Pountney at a rare meeting on their staircase as ‘Pitt Club monsters with more money than is good for them’. Those he sought to ridicule saw the appearance of their names in his column as reinforcing their
status. They bayed for more. Bomberg’s success brought him the notoriety he sought. His ability to put a name in a column gave him a power over his fellow undergraduates that he relished. The scholarship boy from Hackney Downs had successfully created a persona that gave him credentials his background denied him.

‘Look, at Cambridge, you can do anything you set your mind to,’ he told Pountney as he returned late one evening from the
Varsity
office. ‘That’s what makes it so intoxicating. I wasn’t anybody before I came here. I wasn’t breathing. I wasn’t alive. Now I can reach for a world I never knew existed and make it mine. It’s better than dreaming.’

Pountney watched enviously from the sidelines as Bomberg slipped the moorings of his origins and reinvented himself. If he was to make the same journey (he too had dreamed of Cambridge as the stepping-stone to a new life), he would have to do it in his own way and his own time. It would take much longer, he knew, because he lacked Bomberg’s nerve and self-confidence. But with patience and care, he’d get there. He never doubted that. Patience had always been his strength.

Bomberg’s ambition tripped up only once. In his third year he ran for President of the Union. It was a step too far. He suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a Tory with, he claimed, ‘not an original thought in his head but the right connections’. Despite this baggage, or perhaps because of it, his victor ten years later had a safe seat in the Commons. The rejection hurt Bomberg because it told him the place he had engineered in Cambridge society was less secure than he had imagined. For once his dreams had been too heavy for the foundations he had tried so carefully to lay, and without warning they had collapsed.

He took his rejection hard. For a week he hardly left his room. Then, one night, unshaven, his eyes deeply ringed, his hair unkempt and wearing a dressing gown over a pair of old corduroys, he burst into Pountney’s room and declared what he would do with the rest of his life.

‘Look, Gerry, you go and fly the flag in foreign parts,’ he said, knowing that Pountney was trying for the Foreign Office. ‘For me, the future’s in television. That’s the land I’m going to conquer, OK? Then I’ll get my own back on the bastards who did for me here.’

Pountney got a first, passed well into the Foreign Office and his own quiet adventure began. Bomberg scraped a third and disappeared from sight. He was last heard of working in television in Manchester or Glasgow – no one knew for sure – producing a children’s programme, something to do with glove puppets. He was written off by his enemies as overambitious. ‘Shot his bolt at Cambridge. The rest of his life will probably be an anticlimax. All that energy, to end up with puppets. Too bad, isn’t it? No wonder he’s gone to ground.’ Pountney said nothing. He knew better than to underestimate Bomberg. He’d surprise them all yet.

*

By the mid-fifties, Bomberg had graduated from children’s puppets to current affairs. The year after Suez – he had now risen to the role of editor of a weekly current affairs programme – he revealed that a group of councillors in a northern city had been lining their pockets for years by taking their cut on local building projects. The accused were put on trial on charges of corruption, convicted and sent to prison. A police investigation prompted by a television programme was the instrument by which justice was finally done. The verdict created headlines. Bomberg had triumphed. The apprentice years of painful obscurity and other humiliations were quickly forgotten. He was back in control, his reputation assured. This time the dream had been built on such solid foundations that it was soaring into the sky. The lesson of his humiliation at Cambridge had been well learned.

Three years later, out of the blue, he contacted Pountney, who by this time had resigned from the Foreign Office over
Suez and was working for a newspaper, having in the interval written a book about the crises of 1956.

‘Look, Gerry, I read your book,’ he said on the telephone, not bothering to announce himself. It was as if they had spoken to each other only ten days before, not ten years. ‘Come and have lunch. I’ve got a proposition you’ll find irresistible, OK?’

They met in a restaurant in Audley Street. Nothing had changed over the years. Julius Bomberg was recognisably the same man he’d known at Cambridge, only more confident, harder, more ambitious.

He handed the menu to Pountney. ‘I can’t be bothered to read all this. You choose, OK? I’ll have whatever you’re having, so long as it’s not offal.’

They talked briefly of the years since they’d last met. Bomberg questioned Pountney on his resignation from the Foreign Office: ‘Getting out was the best thing you ever did, Gerry. You were wasted in that organisation. God knows why they don’t abolish it’, on his book on the Suez Crisis: ‘Not enough anger, Gerry. The writer is still trapped inside the civil servant. You must learn not to be afraid of your feelings so we can know where you stand on issues. Still, I enjoyed it. Who’d imagine Gerry Pountney fighting the establishment?’ and on his divorce from Harriet and his new life with Margaret. Bomberg had already been through two wives and was now on to his third: ‘I pay more in alimony in a month than most people earn in a year.’ Finally Bomberg came round to Pountney’s reinvention as a journalist.

‘Are you happy in Fleet Street?’ Bomberg asked. There was an aggression in his question that unnerved Pountney.

‘The newspaper’s been good to me, Julius,’ he replied, the defiance in his voice a response to Bomberg’s unstated challenge. ‘I like the people and the job. It’s something I do well.’

‘I thought the anti-establishment Gerry Pountney was braver than that.’

‘Braver than what?’ Pountney was bemused.

‘Look, you resigned from the Foreign Office because you thought their policy towards Nasser and his henchmen was wrong at a time when we should have been helping the Hungarians. You wrote a book to give more permanent form to your arguments. Does it end there? Has Gerry Pountney, harrier of those more powerful than himself, shot his bolt? Is he a one-hit wonder? Does he retreat under the skirts of a newspaper whose leaders read like a government press release? Come on, Gerry. You’re worth more than that, aren’t you?’

Had Bomberg suggested lunch so he could attack him for accepting a job that had nothing to do with him? The mystery about the invitation deepened.

‘Look at it another way, Gerry,’ Bomberg continued. ‘Print’s finished, OK? Hot metal, thundering presses, restrictive practices and out-of-control unions – they’ve had their day, thank God, and not before time. The newspaper industry has begun its fatal slide to a watery grave and it’s not worth saving. Ten years from now there won’t be a newspaper business to speak of. When the ship is sinking, my advice is take to the lifeboats fast.’

‘The ship seemed pretty buoyant when I left it an hour ago.’

‘Remember what I told you all those years ago, Gerry? I was right then and I’m right now, OK? The future’s in television. Come and join the future. Come and work with me.’

Mystery solved. Lunch was a job offer. Julius was handling the subject with all the sensitivity of a charging bull.

‘I don’t need a lifebelt, Julius. I’m quite happy where I am.’

‘Look, I’m talking to you from the future. I’m offering you the chance to sail in a ship which is not only seaworthy in every department but is now beginning to get up speed and make waves.’ He paused for a moment to draw breath. ‘I want a new kind of presenter, Gerry. I want a journalist with
experience of foreign affairs who can work in front of a camera, OK? You’ve been overseas, haven’t you?’

‘Moscow. For a few months. That’s all.’

‘Good enough. You’d fit the bill as well as anyone.’ Bomberg lit a cheroot and contemplated Pountney from behind a cloud of blue smoke. ‘But I get the impression you despise our brave new world. I’m right about that too, aren’t I?’

‘How can I despise what I don’t know?’

‘Show me a more self-satisfied organisation than a national newspaper.’ Bomberg laughed. ‘Most journalists I know would bite my hand off to come and work in television. They ring up every day begging for jobs. What’s holding you back?’

‘You think I bought the wrong ticket. I’m not convinced I did.’

‘The cosy confidence of Fleet Street. How I hate it. All right, I can take that argument head-on. Is television a serious medium? Can it deal with news, facts, current affairs? You may think the jury’s still out on that one. I maintain there’s no case to be answered. Television can do the job a damn sight better than most newspapers, and a damn sight quicker too. That’s the point, OK? The speed of news-gathering and broadcasting will change the world and put newspapers out of business. The power of television as a popular medium is awe-inspiring. Gerry, come and make your name with the rest of us as we pioneer this extraordinary revolution.’

*

‘Coffee?’ Bomberg was already at the machine, pouring himself a cup of what was known at the Centre as Bomberg’s ‘black poison’.

‘No thanks.’ Last time he’d drunk Bomberg’s coffee, he’d felt ill for days.

The office was a cramped and chaotic affair. Bomberg himself, a small, unprepossessing man with a sallow pock-marked face and a shock of stiff black hair beginning to grey,
sat in the only armchair, an ancient cane-backed affair, out of keeping in scale and style with the rest of the office, but to which he was devoted because, he said, it was all he had inherited from his much-loved great-aunt Bella. Pountney sat in a chrome and canvas contraption, a design that was as out of date as it was uncomfortable. He had to press his outstretched feet against the table leg to prevent himself pitching onto the floor. He wondered if designers ever sat in the chairs they created.