Engleby (36 page)

‘Howe? Christ, no. I’d let him tie up the codicil to my auntie’s will in Swansea, that’s about all.’

So it went on (‘Wykehamist arse-licker’, ‘poor man’s Enoch’, ‘tub of kosher lard’ and so on), but by allowing him to choose the wine, I managed to stretch out our meeting to the respectable time of two-fifteen before he rose abruptly from the table and strode off down Bow Street.

I waited for my first sight of Mrs Thatcher in the flesh with several other journalists on a Midlands factory floor. I honestly forget what it produced. Pins and needles, pottery, brake linings. Something that entailed a fair amount of clanking, anyway.

I’ve always liked factories. The paper mill held no fears for me.

Factories are good for friendship. One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

Take Alan Clark. His face was deeply lined, but his hair, while greying, was thick, like a young man’s. And his suit, though presumably expensive (I can’t judge these things; I’m not a clothes man) was . . . Well, there was too much flannel and pinstripe, just too much
suiting
. And I didn’t want to see his teeth and his uvula. And his hand with the hairs on the back of the fingers wrapping round the glass . . . He was physically over-present. His molecules extended too far.

In factories, all being well, you don’t hear that much. To be heard, people have to call out. You’re alone, but it’s companionable. I like the floors of factories, the pocked cement slab with pools of oil and small puddles of water; I like the stained tea mugs and the low grade paper towels. I like the way it’s all stripped back, undecorated and it doesn’t matter if you make a mess.

I don’t suppose many of the journalists there that day had ever worked in a factory. They didn’t know, like me, the secrets of the brew-room and the toilet break and stores where Fat Teddy used to have a twice-weekly knee-trembler with Mrs Beasley from the back office. Through a side window on the factory floor, you could see her emerge from the stores, all flushed, smoothing down her skirt, checking things off on her clipboard in a pathetic dumbshow of normality.

Mrs Thatcher’s entourage consisted of about a dozen men in dark suits with carnations, blue rosettes or both. They talked to one another behind their hands as they waited; perhaps they were checking for halitosis or remarking on each other’s ties. Should they all have gone for yes-man’s Tory blue, or did a splash of daffodil show greater self-confidence? They stifled laughter. Each time one of them gave way, he immediately coughed and straightened up: his tie, his face, his spine. Even the older ones made repeated attempts at looking more dignified as they waited; then a whisper would start, and a giggle passed through them, making them look like ushers at a gay wedding.

From the machine room, the procession entered. There was a factory foreman in a brown coat, a couple of pinstriped youths and the sixty-year-old local MP – the undersecretary for postal orders or similar, who looked grey, shattered, as though he hadn’t slept for weeks, padding in on rubber-soled shoes, gesturing and talking to his leader.

She herself wore a check woollen suit and moved with a purposeful bustle from the hips, head slightly to one side – the combination of forward momentum and strained patience that had struck fear into the chancelleries of Europe and the barracks of Buenos Aires.

Standing well apart from the others, she addressed the gathered press about the qualities of the local candidate, the postal-order chap. Then she moved on to Europe and the economy and her desire for low taxes. When she spoke of the Labour Party, her voice hit a different frequency. It stopped modulating like normal speech and seemed to lock on to some short wavelength, perhaps favourable to dogs but hard on the human otic nerve. It was bad luck that she stood beneath a sign that said ‘Ear defenders must be worn’.

When she’d finished her address, the supporters applauded showily, and it seemed surly of the press to keep their hands in their pockets, as their tradition of impartiality required.

Some of the local hacks then asked her trick questions about the town’s hospital and schools and so on, but she swatted them in the direction of the MP, whom she once more endorsed. She said he was sure to win. Or else, you felt.

I managed a few moments alone with her later on.

‘And this is Michael Watson,’ said the grinning young minder, pointing me towards the Prime Minister, who was sitting on a sofa with her knees together in the office of the factory manager.

I sat down on a hard chair opposite.

‘Do you read a lot of books?’ I said.

Her eyes shot up to the minder. Her hair was like fine wire wool at the front, lacquered, though thin. There was a trace of orange in the colouring that I hadn’t expected.

She smiled slightly and inhaled, tilting her head again fractionally, like a cardinal who had decided, on balance, to grant an indulgence to a pilgrim. In private, her voice was gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.

‘I like to read biographies. I recently read one of Disraeli. One doesn’t have as much time to read as one would like.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘We are a Christian family. We go to church.’

‘Can you forgive the IRA men who tried to kill you in Brighton?’

‘It’s our job as the Government to help the police to bring the terrorists to justice.’

‘Would you like to see them hanged?’

‘There is no capital punishment in this country, as you know.’

‘But for terrorists?’

She didn’t answer, she merely looked at me, her blue eyes filled with pity and menace. I saw what Mr Clark had meant.

‘When you closed the pits in South Yorkshire, might you not have helped the miners to find new work?’

‘“Helped”? “Helped”? What do you mean?’

‘By putting money into starting new projects or—’

‘Whose money?’

‘Money from the relevant department. The Department of Trade and—’

‘That money would have come from the taxpayer. From you and me. It’s not the role of government to start up businesses. It’s our job to create a climate in which people can do that for themselves.’

‘Talking of money, are you personally well off? How much money do you have?’

‘Do you have any more questions about politics?’ said the minder.

I thought for a moment. ‘Not really. Yes. All right. Who do you think will win the election?’

‘We shall of course!’ The sun came out on Mrs Thatcher’s face again. ‘The Conservative Party. People trust us and know that we have done a marvellous job for Britain.’ She had a slight wobble in the middle of the ‘r’: Brwritain. ‘Though there is work still to do. In those inner cities, for instance, where we—’

‘Sure, but . . .’

‘What?’ The face was plump and powdered, like a rich aunt’s, but the nose was sharp. I could see the tiny blood vessels inside her nostrils.

‘Sorry.’ I’d lost my place for a moment. ‘Yes. I know what I wanted to ask. When you look back at the riots in Brixton and Liverpool and places, the miners’ strike and the Falklands War, the rate of unemployment and so on, I wonder if you had any regrets, if you would—’

‘Of course not. Britain is a far stronger country, far better equipped to face the future than when we came to power in 1979. Inflation is at a quarter of what it was, our competitiveness has—’

‘But surely you must have some regrets. It’s only human to—’

‘Let me tell you something . . . Michael,’ said Mrs Thatcher, leaning forward so that her face was closer to mine. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice. “Too much looking back is a weariness to the soul.”’ She wagged her finger. ‘It was St Francis who said that. If you want to make something of your life, you must keep your eyes on the horizon. Never be deflected. Don’t look down, or you may stumble. Above all, don’t look back.’

‘Like Orpheus, you mean.’

She didn’t answer, but she smiled in my direction and nodded graciously as the minder showed me to the door.

When I read through my notebook later, there wasn’t much I could use. My article was thus made up chiefly of a description of the factory visit and of her entourage; for quotation I used some of the answers she’d given in public.

But in private, over the weeks and months, I did occasionally think about what Mrs Thatcher’d said to me.

I thought about it particularly when I was at an old church in Muswell Hill watching an amateur production of
The Birthday Party
by Harold Pinter. Margaret (Hudson, not Thatcher) was keen to go because a friend of hers had helped design the sets. I’m not interested in the theatre because I can’t deal with the level of non-reality it offers, but with Pinter it’s all right because he’s not pretending to be realistic. It couldn’t matter less whether you ‘believe’ in it or not.

I’d seen the play before, of course, in an undergraduate production. For students, it’s right up there with
The Good Person
and
The Crucible
; it’s nasty, brutish and not overlong. Posturing potential: limitless.

The other good thing about an old church is that it’s not, like a West End theatre, heated to sauna point. You don’t have to clap when the star comes on. You don’t have to gasp if someone uses the word ‘bloody’. You can stretch your legs and have a drink beside your seat; you can enjoy it.

And so I did. To begin with, at least. I’d forgotten how funny it was, the low-rent exchanges in the boarding house – like Steptoe or Hancock. And the way they can’t get over the fact that two strangers actually want to come and
board
in their dingy house. I’d also forgotten how early the landlord flags up the fact that he’s met these two men.

When Goldberg and McCann appeared, I presumed that whatever Stanley was meant to have done wrong had been invented by them. They were thugs, bad guys, so Stanley had to be OK. Anyway, how wicked could a failed pianist have been? Then there came a moment when I felt, with a lurch, that even if Goldberg and McCann are genuine villains, which they are, Stanley might still be guilty of something forgotten. That was not good.

It’s impossible to deal with a world in which the polarities aren’t mutually opposite.

When they turned the lights off to play blind man’s buff, I had to leave the church hall. I stumbled down the row of chairs, kicking over drinks and ran to the back of the hall.

Outside, I kept running, across to the main road, where the lorries were thundering down towards Archway. I thought of throwing myself beneath one.

It was like the attack I’d had in Basingstoke. I didn’t know what the hell was happening. But I crunched two blue pills in my dry mouth and got into a pub where I poured vodka down me.

It occurred to me as I stood there, waiting for the effect, that at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear.

In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely,
want
time to appear to run forwards because the ‘future’ is the only place you can see an escape from this intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn’t move. And if time isn’t running, then all events that we think of as past or future are actually happening simultaneously. That is the really terrifying thing. And you are subsumed. You’re buried, as beneath an avalanche, by the weight of simultaneous events.

I have no memory of what happened then. The next thing I can recall with any clarity is the following day, being in Margaret’s flat.

I was in bed and the alarm clock showed a time of ten past twelve. I was wearing only my underclothes. I put on a dressing gown and went to the bathroom, then through to the living room, where Margaret was reading the paper.

She looked up and smiled. ‘Are you all right, love?’

I rubbed my head. ‘Yes, I’m fine. What happened?’

‘What happened? You tell me! One minute we’re watching the play, the next thing I know you’ve run out and disappeared.’

‘Yeah, I know, I remember that, but I don’t know what happened next. I think I went to a pub. What did you do when I ran out?’

‘Well, nothing. I thought maybe you’d just gone to the toilet or something. The speed you went, I thought maybe you were going to be sick.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I left you to it. I thought if you were being sick you didn’t want me fussing over you. Plus I didn’t want to disturb the other people, or the actors. It was quite a small place and you’d already made an almighty racket going out.’

‘I see.’

‘Anyway, after about ten minutes, there was a short break and I crept out to see if you were all right. I expected to find you sitting in the churchyard, but you weren’t there. I decided to have a look in the street, but you weren’t there either.’

‘Were you worried?’

‘A bit, but not really. You’re a big boy, Mike. I knew you could find your own way home. To be honest I was just a bit cross that you hadn’t let me know.’

‘Know what?’

‘What you were doing. I mean, you might have said something, or left a note for me – to say you were going straight home, or whatever it was you were doing.’