Engleby (31 page)

I forced my fallen jaw back up. ‘And the rest? The other thirty per cent?’

‘Politics. Do you know the work of the early Jewish philosopher Hillel? He was a contemporary of Christ, only
much
more popular.’

His eyelids flickered with shy pride as he dangled this name for me.

(I hadn’t heard of Hillel, unfortunately, so the next day I looked him up in the British Library catalogue. There was a book
about
him by Glatzer, Nahum Norbet, called
Hillel the Elder: the Emergence of Classical Judaism
(1957) and a lot of books about soil mechanics by someone with a similar name; but the man himself seemed, like Jesus, to have written nothing, so it was hard to see how Ken had ‘read’ him.)

Anyway: back in Ken’s office, I returned to my prepared list of questions.

‘Where do you take your holidays?’ I asked.

‘I can’t afford to take holidays.’

‘How much money have you got?’

‘None. I haven’t had a job since 1970, when I stopped working at the Royal Marsden hospital.’

‘Were you a nurse?’

‘I was an auxiliary.’

‘So what do you live off?’

‘Off the councillor’s attendance allowances that were introduced by Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker when they were the Tory environment secretaries.’ He crossed his legs. ‘I suppose I’ve got a lot to thank Michael and Peter for.’

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

‘I can’t discuss that.’

‘Are you gay?’

‘Private life. I never talk about that to the Press.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘No.’

I looked back down to my list of questions, and as I did so I noticed something odd about Ken’s ankles. He was wearing flared trousers. I didn’t know you could still buy them.

I asked if he liked cooking, but he quickly turned his answer, via kitchen work, into a lecture about sex and oppression. ‘I don’t believe in traditional gender roles in any case. The best men exploit women. Even the best whites exploit blacks.’

I guessed he wasn’t much of a cook.

‘Are you patriotic?’

‘It’s impossible not to feel some sort of crude stirring when you hear “Land of Hope and Glory”, but you have to set that against the systematic slaughter of the Tasmanian Aborigines.’

I looked down at my reporter’s notebook. I’d covered about five sides of it, but that was nothing like enough for a 1,500-word article.

In the end, I had to resort to talking politics; he’d left me no alternative.

His round Chinese laundryman’s face at last became animated. ‘Oh yeah, I’m the most powerful left-winger ever to hold office in this country. Michael Foot and Tony Benn never had ministries in which they could really influence people’s lives like I’ve done.’

Scribble, scribble. When I’d covered ten more pages, I called a halt. I’d been outflanked by someone determined not to let me let him be interesting. I felt doomed to write about the received ideas after all. Loony this . . . Newt that . . . I’d have to wear out the inverted-comma key on my typewriter.

As I left and walked back down that dingy corridor with its numbered doors, Ken called after me to point out that the very last thing he’d done as GLC leader – even after the Brent handout – was to twin London with Managua.

‘Thank you,’ I called back.

I left with a smile. I felt that Jen Soc, at least, would have liked that twinning. They’d have voted for it, eight to five with two abstentions. Then a glass of Hirondelle to celebrate.

The Chatfield Old Boys’ Society contains some dogged sleuths. I’m flabbergasted by their persistence. Each year since I left I’ve dropped their pathetic entreaties for information into the bin; every time I changed address, I failed to tell them. Yet in the morning yesterday I found a copy of the
Chatfield Year Book
on the doormat. How on earth do they
do
that? It was addressed to me as M. Engleby, though in the Old Boys’ News section, I was appalled to read: ‘M. Engleby (Collingham, 1966–70) is reportedly working as a journalist in London under the nom de plume Michael Watson. Further sightings, please!’

The only thing that cheered me up was an entry in the
Valete
column. ‘J.T. Baynes (Collingham 1963–68) died from a stroke in Stoke Mandeville hospital. He had suffered gradual paralysis over many years. Our sympathies to his widow Jane and their two children.’

‘Gradual paralysis’. Was that a bona fide medical term? It was good enough for Lt Commander S.R. Sidway, RN, retd, editor of the
Year Book
. And good enough to have finished old Baynes.

As I climbed out of the underground at Chancery Lane and looked in the clothes shop with the Tudor half-timbering, I puzzled over one thing: how ‘Jane’ allowed that faceful of pus to rub on her skin while he impregnated her. I also felt slightly disappointed that he’d managed to find a wife at all – though Christ knows what sort of swamp-dweller he’d bagged.

For the rest, of course, the news was unalloyed delight, and at lunchtime I took Margaret to Langan’s Brasserie to celebrate. We both had the spinach soufflé with anchovy sauce to start, and a bottle of the house champagne to wash it down. Then another bottle with the main course. Afterwards we walked over to the Ritz, took a room and had it off.

There was a message on my desk last Friday. The handwriting was that of Felicity Maddox, the sarcastic newsroom secretary. ‘James Stellings’s office rang. Would you go to dinner Thursday the 11th. 8.30, 152 Elgin Crescent, W11.’

I found the word ‘dinner’ a bit intimidating. Would it be just me and Stellings and his wife and child or was it a ‘dinner party’? I’d never been to one of those, though I’d seen them in plays and films. (In
Accident
, by Joseph Losey, for instance.) Christ. I pictured this Clarissa in some sort of ball gown saying to the other guests, ‘James has asked his funny little friend Toilet Engleby. He’s known him since college, apparently. What a scream! Do be kind to him, won’t you?’

Shit. I was actually out of London on the day in question, in Birmingham, and didn’t get back till about seven. I had a bath and put Steely Dan on the record player. I ought to explain that I don’t like new pop music any more. I’d always liked the latest thing, sequentially: rock’n’ roll, pop, soul, psychedelia, hard rock, progressive, glamour, punk, then: whooaaah! I remember the day I suddenly stopped. A deejay played a song that started ‘I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar,/That much is true . . .’ When it finished, he banged on about how brilliant it was, how it was the future and everything. And I thought
that
pathetic sound, those gutless hairdressers with a toy kazoo –
that
is the inheritor of Hendrix and Dylan and Stevie Wonder and the Beatles and Cream and . . . Dear God. I lowered the top half of the sash window, took careful aim and hurled the small radio out as hard as I could: over the street and into the grassless ‘garden square’, where it landed noiselessly. I liked to think of them warbling on till the batteries died, face down in the dog mess.

So for five years or more I’ve just listened to old stuff. I always liked Steely Dan. They must be two of the strangest men ever to imagine they were pop stars. You’d have had them down for maths professors or computer programmers. ‘Dr Donald Fagen at nine on Statistical Analysis; Professor Walter Becker at ten on Boolean Algebra.’ Except they were rockers, and so were the others in the picture: Jeff ‘skunk’ Baxter, responsible, I gathered, for the fret-shattering guitar solo on ‘Bodhisattva’, Jeff Porcaro and the others.

That night, before Stellings’s do, I was listening to the melodious, early
Can’t Buy a Thrill
. I thought its sweetness of nature would put me in the mood. I must have heard it a thousand times, but there’s always something new there. I was humming along to ‘Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)’ when I noticed with a jolt that I must always have misheard the lyrics. For a decade or more I’d had it as ‘A race of angels/Bound with one another,/A dish of dollars/Laid out for all to see,/A tower room at Eden Roc/His golf at noon for three:/Brooklyn owes the charmer under me.’

Now this had always bothered me because in my limited experience of golf, a three-ball is frowned on. Some clubs you even have to get the secretary’s written permission. But here was Donald Fagen, and maybe some girl he’s singing to, or possibly Walter Becker – anyway, that makes two: but who was the third, and how were they going to swing it with the caddymaster? Maybe Don had the secretary’s ear, and with a back catalogue like that, who’s complaining? But it bothered me. Christ knows what Jeff ‘skunk’ Baxter’s short game was like.

Then, as I lay in the steaming water, it struck me that the words in fact were ‘A tower room at Eden Roc/His golf at noon for
free
’ and it all made sense. I got out of the bath, laughing with relief.

Why was I having these peculiar thoughts and chuckling to myself? My mental processes, I believed, could sometimes include humour, but they weren’t normally facetious. What was going on?

I suppose I was nervous.

I’d bought a suit some time ago for going to Fleet Street, but it wasn’t very new or very fashionable or very clean. I didn’t have much else apart from jeans. It took me only a minute to glance through my ‘wardrobe’. I picked a tan seersucker jacket that Margaret had once said she liked, some fairly new straight-leg trousers and a clean shirt (there was only one: it was a sort of maroon colour. It didn’t quite go with the jacket, perhaps, but there was no time to wash and iron another one). I wasn’t sure about ties. Most of mine were a bit on the kipper side. Then I remembered I still had a cowboy bootlace thing that Julie had given me one Christmas (it was one up on the Donny Osmond tee shirt. Where the hell did that go, by the way?). I put the tie on and I thought it did a job. If they were all wearing ties, well, so was I; if not, mine was a joke. My newest shoes were a pair of rubber-soled caramel-brown lace-ups, so on they went.

At the weekend I’d bought a pricey bottle of Montrachet to amuse Stellings and I got some flowers (dahlias, I think; I’m not good on flowers – orange jobs anyway) at 8.22 from the garage on Westbourne Grove for ‘Clarissa’. I was keeping a tight watch on the time because I didn’t want to be late. I walked on briskly.

When I first came to London, Notting Hill was full of squatters, potters and banjoists; but the tide seems to be turning. Many rooms have gone to flats, the flats back into houses and the houses have been bought by people in American banks who wouldn’t know a Bacon from a xylophone.

At 8.29 I punched the front doorbell in Elgin Crescent. It was opened by a small oriental woman in a white apron. She showed me into a large, empty sitting room with an open fire and a couple of huge oil paintings. One was of an old bloke in Gainsborough style (a Stellings or Clarissa ancestor, perhaps) and the other a more or less random splosh-and-twirl in grey and tangerine that seemed designed to trigger a sequence of sophomore thoughts about ‘art’.

I was still shuddering at the banality of my own responses when Stellings breezed in.

‘Christ, Groucho, you’re punctual. Or Gaucho, we’ll have to call you with that tie. Have a drink. Champagne? Wine? Scotch?’

‘Yeah, Scotch.’ I thought it would sit better on the three Johnnie Walkers and the blue pill I’d already had in my flat.

‘Clarissa’s just saying goodnight to Alexander. How’s things? Any good scoops lately?’

I told Stellings a bit about the work I’d done. He was wearing jeans with an open-necked white shirt, espadrilles and no socks. He hadn’t made much of an effort, I thought.

My drink was brought to me by the Thai or Filipina in the white apron.

A woman appeared in the doorway: tall, fair-haired, dressed all in black, so I wondered if she’d been to a funeral, down to the thin black tights on her long legs. She had rather more mascara than you’d expect for a wake, though, and reddish-pink lipstick. Also, she didn’t look tear-stained or sad. I felt her eyes flicker over me, pausing for a moment at my feet.

‘Darling, this is Mike Engleby. Mike, this is Clarissa – the old trouble and strife.’

Clarissa’s soft hand entered mine and withdrew almost before it had made contact; it was more of a stroke than a shake. ‘James has told me so much about you. Come and sit down. James, you’re not looking after Mike properly. Have an olive.’

‘Is it all right if I smoke?’

‘Of course it is. Letitia, would you mind getting an ashtray?’

Clarissa’s large blue eyes fixed on my face as she perched next to me on the sofa, shifting away only a few inches when some of my smoke seemed go up her nose. I felt swaddled by the intensity of her interest.

‘And tell me more about your family,’ she was saying. ‘Are they still in . . . Reading? I had a friend who lived not far from there once. In Stratfield Saye. Do you know it?’

Her expression had the life-and-death curiosity of someone needing only one more score-draw for the pools jackpot.

‘No. My mother’s in the hotel business.’