Engleby (26 page)

Check pigeonhole for possible letter from Simon (nothing: sob) and pedal furiously to Sidgwick. Arrive just in time for Dr Meadowes on the economic consequences of the Great War. I make notes dutifully, though do sometimes think it would be easier to read one of his numerous articles on the subject.

Fevered talk in the tea room about student politics. Find it hard to be that excited as all involved have identical ‘broad left’ views. Nice Jill Lewis likely to be elected to follow podgy garden gnome Charles Clarke as president. Jill v pretty.
Stop Press
has found brilliant non-sexist way of referring to this (and it would be bizarre not to) by referring to her always as ‘Personable Jill Lewis’. Offence-proof word, but we all know what it means. Now known as PJL for short. (Tho’ she not acidic like near-eponymous lemon juice. I like that word ‘eponymous’. Must have caught it from Charlie in Emma. Now can’t imagine how lived without . . .)

These men (i.e. not including PJL) do take themselves very seriously, even though the Broad Left is elected almost unopposed every time, like rotten borough Whigs and Tories. The national leader (called, unbelievably, Jack Straw, inev therefore known as Wat Tyler) clearly thinks he will automatically become (inherit!) PM or Foreign Sec one day. But why would anyone elect people with no exp. outside committee rooms? Though, come to think of it, T. Heath, H. Wilson . . .

Back to coll for ‘salad option’ lunch. Reminds me that when it first started, teething problems meant that one day it was just the old rissole and boiled carrots. Malini Coomaraswamy at her bespectacled sternest asked chief steward why no option available, pointing to single dish of sweaty dumpling and gravy. ‘Of course there’s an option, miss. You can either’ave it, or not’ave it.’ (Mal does brilliant E. Anglia accent. You had to be there . . .)

Worked in my room till four, then to volleyball. Was wearing purple Hendrix tee shirt and nice shorts I’d borrowed from Emma Mitchell and conveniently forgotten to return. Good practice for Friday match v Newnham. Still don’t like way Ursula stands so close in shower. Anne convinced Ursula ‘not as other women’. Hid self modestly as far as possible, but she solicitous with soap and shampoo loan. Had to
have
shower as meeting Rob in Whim for late tea.

Starving after ‘healthy option’ lunch and v’ball so had banana cake as well as toast and lovely fresh Darjeeling tea – much to Rob’s delight. ‘Mmm, you tuck in, Jen . . . What about a poached egg on that?’ etc. He looking annoyingly gaunt and handsome as ever.

We went to see a friend of his, Tim, in Queens’ and sat by the river, talking about Donne’s poetry. I found this a bit awkward, as have barely read D, except the famous ones. R and T took very opposite views on D’s concept of romantic love, whether based on sex, fear of dying, and general early 17th C darkness (R), or something more spiritual and ‘corollary of the divine’(T).

It was a beautiful evening and the talk moved on, via Newton’s obsession with alchemy and fear of God. This fear, according to Tim, held Newton back from outlining an ungodly theory of relativity 200+ yrs before Einstein. Then on to Watergate – Haldeman and Ehrlichmann (?sp) resignation – then to who had or had not been invited to some big party in Trinity on Sat. Not me. (Incidentally, didn’t my O level German tell me Ehrlichmann means ‘honest man’?)

Rob persuaded me to go and see a film at the Arts about sex psychologist Wilhelm Reich, called
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
. Funny because so earnest and so dull. Came alive only when Nancy Someone made plaster cast of a young man’s
membrum virile
, as Miss Goff of the 5th Form might have called it. Prodigious size. R somewhat crestfallen afterwards. Told him man chosen for that reason only. After all, what other quals needed in castee? R somewhat reassured – don’t know if he has anything to worry about in that dept!

We had kebab in Rose Crescent then I took him to the Baron of Beef for a drink to cheer him up. Worked wonders. Met Hannah (who had just done a performance of
The Three Sisters
), Amit, Nick and one or two others. I made an excuse to go and do some work, but they wouldn’t hear of it, and eleven o’clock found us in Amit’s room in King’s, listening to Neil Young
After the Gold Rush
, drinking wine and smoking mild grass.

Can do essay over the weekend as have nothing else on.

Got back OK through night gate just before lock-up at one. Felt a bit wobbly on the way, but bike steered itself, as Dad would say. Crept up to room. Teeth. Bed. Fell asleep at once.

Wonderful day.

I’ve always had what Jen might call a ‘prodigious’ memory, and it’s not that difficult to recall her diary because the story provides a continual prompt. I know what happened next, so it’s easy to be reminded. Also, she’s a rather mannerly narrator, alternating splurge about her feelings with description of outside events and other people. Thus after some stuff about lack of self-esteem, bad haircut: ‘In the forenoon, we did call upon Mrs Thrale . . .’

I suppose it would be easy to parody, but I try not to be too hard on her. Although diarists’ motives are unclear, I really don’t think she meant anyone else to read it.

I retrieved the book from its usual place, in the bottom drawer of my desk in study/bedroom two, actually a sort of alcove off the living room, though I suppose a double amputee might make a bed in it.

I held the diary in my hands for one last time. It was a Letts day-per-page, A4 size, broken-spined, bulging with glued-in ticket stubs and snapshots among the packed blue handwriting. The burgundy cover was mostly obscured by a collage of small pictures: from mags she had cut round the heads of Martin Luther King, Grace Kelly, James Taylor and Steve Howe of Yes; there were snipped art postcards of a Leonardo madonna and a Vermeer milkmaid; and cropped photos of Mr and Mrs A, a boxer dog and a line of three passport snaps of Jen with Anne. There was also, bizarrely, a torn mag picture of a candlelit table with a Chianti bottle. What was that one about?

I wrapped it carefully in newspaper, then slid it into one of the padded book bags in which a scientific publisher had sent me a treatise on world food programmes that I had sold on to a book dealer in Fetter Lane. I thought of taking the parcel to the general post office on Praed Street, but something made me hesitate. I thought I’d wait till I was next out of town and post it there. I typed Mrs A’s address onto a label, stuck it to the package and put the whole thing back in the desk drawer.

I get out of town a fair bit these days because I’ve got a new job. My report of the Brixton riot appeared under a three-way joint byline, but they pulled out a description of some of the worst fighting and ran it under my name alone. The new editor, who is obsessed by what he calls ‘staff visibility’, entered it (without asking me) for some tacky press awards, along with the toxic-shock story and a background piece to the trial of Peter Sutcliffe at the Old Bailey in May last year. Our crime guy, Bob Nixon, did the trial itself, but I spent six days in Yorkshire, going over the territory. To cut a long (4,500 word) story short, I was commended in the mag features section and received a cheque for £100 at the award ceremony in a stuffy room in the Grosvenor House hotel where everyone was drunk.

This ended the career of Michèle Watts. She went up to collect the prize from David Owen, a big cheese in the new SDP, but it was Michael Watson who returned, cheque in hand, to the table. Since most of the staff is now female – from Jan (promoted to deputy ed), via Lyn Westmoreland, the ungrammatical fine-arts critic, to Shireen Nazawi, the EFL-speaking chief interviewer – Michèle had in any case outlived her usefulness.

A couple of weeks later I got a call from a Sunday newspaper, asking if I’d go to a meeting in the Howard hotel on the Thames. Here, the editor, a man in an expensive flannel suit with large blue-rimmed glasses, bought me gin and tonic and wondered if I would like to join the staff of his paper as a feature writer for a salary of £18,000 a year, plus traditional Fleet Street (i.e. bent) expenses.

The paper is ‘upper-middle market’. It does have book reviews and two pages called ‘scrutiny’ which purport to give the inside dope on the week’s big event; but it also has a lot of stories that begin with what is known as a ‘dropped intro’, like this: ‘When she clocked in to work on Friday at the Rusk-o-Slurry sausage works in Newark, Lincs., little could Mrs Betty Wigwam, 56, have known what a remarkable day lay in store for her . . .’ Presumably not, unless she was psychic. The paper also carries pictures of domestic pets.

My first response was to tell him to go whistle. I liked my life as it was because I didn’t have to be in an office. Since Jan had been promoted, her replacement, a pathetic Trot called Keith Dale, wasn’t able to compel my presence at ‘conference’ and I used to ring in later to ask if he had any ideas for me.

Why would I want to swap my life of solitary fulfilment to sit around an office with a lot of hacks with only one paper a week to fill? I told him I was happy where I was, but he persuaded me to meet someone called Tony Ball, the news editor, for further drinks.

This Ball I met in an underground room in Whitefriars Street where he drank three pints of cloudy Friary Meux bitter. I had gin and tonic again. (I don’t drink vermouth so much these days.) I sensed he’d been told to clinch the deal, so I thought I’d see how far I could push him. I beat him up to £22,500, four days a week (Tue to Fri) and office attendance only on Tuesday (conference) and Friday (writing).

This left me no alternative but to take the job; and so Toilet Engleby became Michael Watson, newspaperman.

Newspapers tell you what happened yesterday. Sunday papers have one big problem: nothing happens on Saturday.

Therefore you have to invent stuff to fill them up.

I soon found out that the most valued people in the office were those who could ‘come up with ideas’. Most of these came from other papers. If on Tuesday the
Telegraph
, say, did a short piece on something, then on Sunday we could do a longer one. My new colleagues spent the day with their noses in other publications, looking for things they could copy or expand. Others pored over the news agency wire services, whose bare reports could sometimes be fattened up with the addition of a few ‘quotes’ and passed off as one’s own.

The sports people were happy because they were the exception; for them Saturday was the big action day. They knew exactly what time everything would happen and could make up the pages in advance; all they had to do was fill in the details. It was like painting by numbers, and their only problem was how to occupy the time from Monday to Friday without developing cirrhosis. On the foreign side, our six correspondents could do a digest of what their daily colleagues had written over five days and throw in a shorter ‘funny’ piece they’d pinched from the local press, safe in the knowledge that none of our readers would have seen it in the
Washington Post
or
Le Monde
. Their task was also straightforward.

For the rest of us, life was demandingly, agonisingly, ‘creative’.

I had a desk with a phone in the newsroom, though I was seldom there. The sight of grown men, and some women, filling in expenses forms, going to the pub, reading newspapers and pretending they were working was absurd. The qualities needed to succeed at the job were patience, a flair for lateral thinking and the ability to write clearly – though none of these, slightly feminine, attributes was valued at all. What was admired in the newsroom was, in this order: belligerence, the knowing use of macho jargon and the ability to drink alcohol. The atmosphere that Tony Ball tried to create was that of a Royal Marines training school. And this, amazingly, was how it had always been.

Idle for four days out of five, the reporters hung out in the fiendish little pubs off Fleet Street, where they drank gassed-up Ind Coope or halitotic dry white and circulated rumours of imminent sackings and cutbacks. They spoke with envy of anyone who left for another paper, particularly the
Mail
, whose expenses arrangements were regarded with awe. The crime correspondent was better informed about the thinking of ‘management’ than on the briefings of Scotland Yard; twice a week, he drank with friends from the
Mirror
, keeping them warm for when the big chill would surely come our way.

They were vociferously loyal to Tony Ball when, periodically, word got round that management had finally rumbled him; yet they lived in fear. Their hands shook, not just from nicotine and alcohol, but from the ‘Bollockings’ they took on Saturdays and from anxiety that the ambitious mortgages they’d taken out would become unpayable. Disaster was approaching, but for some capricious reason they didn’t understand: a story wouldn’t ‘stand up’; it would get mangled by a casual Saturday sub-editor with previous convictions for butchery; it would get ‘spiked’ on the whim of a drunken night editor. Or maybe they’d been insufficiently pissed and collegiate at the Christmas party. Or they hadn’t ‘come up’ with enough ideas. It was so unfair, this never-ending strain imposed by a fat four-section paper that gobbled up every half-thought they had, leaving them permanently empty-headed and hungover.