Expo 58: A Novel (3 page)

‘What does Sylvia say?’ she asked him.

‘I haven’t mentioned it to her. I’m waiting for the right moment.’

‘Could you take them with you?’

‘It’s been suggested. I don’t think it sounds ideal. We’re not sure what the accommodation’s going to be like yet. It could be pretty basic.’

His mother looked very doubtful. ‘You shouldn’t have told me first. You should have discussed it with your wife.’

‘I’m going to.’

She held up a warning finger. ‘Don’t neglect her, Thomas. Be a good husband to her. This –’ (she gestured into the near distance, beyond the unfinished goldfish pond, beyond the air-raid shelter in which Thomas kept his few garden tools, beyond the railway embankment, and towards the dreary flatlands of Tooting itself) ‘– is not her home, you know. Not really. It’s not what she’s used to. And it’s no fun being a long way from home with a man who doesn’t care for you.’

Thomas knew that she was talking about her own experience, about her marriage to his father. He didn’t want to hear it.

‘Your father had affairs, you know.’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘I put up with it. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t mind.’ Mrs Foley shivered, and wrapped her shawl more closely around her shoulders. ‘Come on. I think we’d better get inside. It’s getting chilly.’

She was about to get up, but Thomas laid a restraining hand on her arm, and said earnestly: ‘I’ll be in Brussels, Mother. Close to Leuven, close to where the farmhouse was. Only about half an hour away. I can go there and – I know the house isn’t there any more – but I can see where it used to be, and . . . talk to people, and . . . take pictures . . .’

Mrs Foley rose stiffly to her feet. ‘Please don’t do that. Not on my account. I don’t think about any of those things any more. What’s gone is gone.’

These are modern times

Four-thirty on Tuesday afternoon found Thomas walking through St James’s Park, on his way to a meeting in Whitehall. Despite the steady downpour of rain, there was an unaccustomed jauntiness to his step, and under his breath he was singing to himself a cheerful tune he had caught on the Light Programme the night before: ‘The Boulevardier’ by Frederic Curzon.

Things had progressed pretty smoothly since the weekend. Over last night’s dinner, he had finally told Sylvia about the Brussels assignment. She had been shocked, at first: the thought of coming with him did not seem to cross her mind (nor did he suggest it), and the prospect of being left alone for six months certainly alarmed her. But Thomas’s reassurances were convincing: there would be letters, there would be telephone calls, there would be weekends when he flew home to see her. And the more he told her about the fair itself, the more she came to see that this was an opportunity he could not afford to turn down. ‘So, really,’ she had said – at last beginning to see the thing clearly, as pudding was dished up and she poured condensed milk over her slender portion of apple pie – ‘it’s a great honour that Mr Cooke has singled you out in this way. He didn’t ask any of the others. And you’ll be rubbing shoulders with people from all sorts of places: Belgians, French – even Americans . . .’ And Thomas had realized, when she said this, that from one point of view Sylvia was actually willing him to go, already: that in her eyes, painful though the separation would be for both of them, he would grow in stature from this experience. No longer a mere government pen-pusher, he would become, for six short months, something much more interesting, and indeed glamorous: a player (however small) on the international stage. The idea appealed to her – even titillated her. And perhaps it was this knowledge, more than anything else, that lightened his step that Tuesday afternoon, and added a few imaginary inches to his height as he strode across the footbridge towards Birdcage Walk. He felt a sudden, unexpected kinship with London’s seagulls as they swooped low over the water beneath him, revelling in the freedom of flight.

Half an hour later, Thomas was seated in Conference Room 191 of the Foreign Office, as close as he had ever come in his life to a centre of power.

The conference table was huge, and every seat was taken. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Some of those present Thomas had already met in the waiting room downstairs. Others were public figures whom he recognized: Sir Philip Hendy, director of the National Gallery; Sir Bronson Albery, the famous theatrical manager; Sir Lawrence Bragg, the physicist and director of the Royal Institution. Several times in the last few months, back at the COI’s Baker Street offices, Thomas had caught glimpses of James Gardner, designer of the British pavilion; but he had not, until today, met the man with whom Gardner spent most of the meeting locked in combat – Sir John Balfour, GCMG, Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom’s participation at Expo 58.

The trouble began early on. Thomas could tell that there was a general sense of panic in the air. The fair was due to open in three months’ time, and there was obviously a good deal of work still to be done. Sir John had a thick pile of paperwork on the table in front of him, the very sight of which seemed to fill him with a palpable disgust.

‘Now I have to say,’ he began, crisply but with an edge of weariness to his voice, ‘that our Belgian friends have been most prolific with their communications over the last few weeks. This mountain of paper represents but a small proportion of their output. And we have been more selective still in making copies for everyone. So perhaps it would be in order for me to summarize. Let’s start with the musical side of things, shall we? Is Sir Malcolm here?’

Sir Malcolm Sargent, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and musical advisor on the British contribution, had not been able to come to the meeting, it transpired.

‘He’s in rehearsals, I’m told,’ said a young man in a pin-striped suit, whom Thomas took to be a junior clerk. ‘Sends his apologies and all that. But the concert programmes are well in hand, he says.’

‘Did he give you any details?’

‘A few names were mentioned. Elgar, obviously. A bit of Purcell. The usual suspects, by the sound of it.’

Sir John nodded. ‘Ideal. I must say there are some pretty . . . peculiar ideas coming out of the Belgian side.’ He glanced at the uppermost of his sheets of paper. ‘A week-long festival –
week
-long, it says here – of electronic music and
musique concrète
, featuring world premieres by Stockhausen and – how the devil do you pronounce this – Xenakis?’ He looked around the room, frowning incredulously. ‘Has anyone heard of these chaps? And what is
“concrete music” when it’s at home, I’d like to know? Can anyone enlighten me?’

There was a general shaking of heads around the table; in the midst of which Thomas became distracted, on suddenly becoming aware of two curious figures seated at the far end. What was it about them, in particular, that caught his attention? They were following the discussion as closely as anybody – perhaps more closely – and yet they seemed somehow detached from it. Although they never spoke to each other, or appeared to acknowledge each other’s presence, they were sitting rather closer to each other than was strictly necessary, and gave the impression of being in some sort of conspiracy. They were both (he would have guessed) in early middle age. One of them had slicked-back dark hair, and a moon-shaped face whose expression managed to be both vacant and intelligent at the same time. The other looked more benign, and less watchful; he had a noticeable scar down his left cheek, but the look of it was not at all sinister, and it did not detract in the least from his general air of dreamy good nature. They were the only two people who, throughout the entirety of the proceedings, were never named or introduced, and once he had noticed them, Thomas found their presence strangely distracting.

‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s an excellent proposal,’ Sir John was saying.

Thomas realized that he had not been following the discussion. It appeared that Britain was being asked to make its own contribution to the contemporary music week, and the general feeling around the table was that a military tattoo would fit the bill perfectly.

‘The Grenadier Guards, perhaps?’ someone suggested.

‘Perfect,’ said Sir John, nodding to the secretary at his side, who duly made a note of the decision.

At which point, from one corner of the table, came what could only be described as a derisive snort. ‘Ha!’

Sir John looked up, in wounded surprise.

‘Mr Gardner – would you like to register an objection?’

The lean, ascetic figure in question, who peered through conservatively horn-rimmed glasses but wore his hair rakishly long, waved his hand dismissively and said: ‘Really, Sir John, it has nothing to do with me. No, I don’t want to register an objection. But your secretary can register my amusement if she likes.’

‘And what, might we ask, is so amusing about a military tattoo?’

‘In this context? Well, if you can’t see that, Sir John, all I can say is . . . you are probably the ideal person to be chairing this committee.’

Thomas was expecting a ripple of laughter, but there was only shocked silence.

‘Mr Gardner,’ said Sir John, leaning his elbows on the table and putting his fingertips together to form a pyramid, ‘I was going to defer discussion of your latest suggestions for the British pavilion, but perhaps after all this would be a good moment to consider them.’

‘They’re just ideas,’ said Gardner, of
f
hand.

‘The Brussels World’s Fair,’ Sir John reminded him, ‘opens in three months’ time. Work on the construction of the pavilion is running weeks behind schedule. Isn’t it a bit late to be pitching in with new ideas? Particularly ideas like . . .’ (he glanced down at his paperwork) “ ‘A history of the British water closet.’ ”

‘Oh,’ said Gardner, ‘didn’t you like that?’

‘It seems a trifle . . . well, “whimsical” would be a polite way of putting it.’

‘Don’t feel that you have to be polite if you don’t want to, Sir John. After all, we’re all friends here.’

‘Very well. I shall rephrase that, and say that this suggestion appears to me . . . downright stupid and offensive.’

Several of the men (there were no women, apart from Sir John’s secretary) seated around the table looked up at this point, their interest keenly aroused.

‘I respectfully disagree, Sir John,’ said Gardner. ‘Britain’s contribution to the disposal of human waste has never been properly recognized. That’s not just my opinion, it is a historical fact.’

‘Gardner, you’re talking rot.’

‘Well –’ (there was an embarrassed cough from a pallid, undernourished young man sitting to the left of Mr Gardner, who seemed to be part of his team) ‘– not exactly, Sir John.’

The Commissioner raised an eyebrow.

‘Not exactly?’

The man who had spoken up seemed more embarrassed than ever. ‘What I mean is, Jim – I mean Mr Gardner – does have a point. Toilets are crucial to everyday life. I mean, we all use them, don’t we? We all . . .’ (he swallowed hard) ‘. . . do them, after all.’

‘
Do them
, Mr Sykes? Do
what
?’

‘There’s no point in pretending otherwise, really, is there?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Well, you know. We all do . . . number twos.’

‘
Number twos?
’

‘Precisely!’ Gardner jumped to his feet and began pacing the perimeter of the table. ‘Sykes has put his finger on it. We all do them, Sir John. Even you! We all do number twos. We may not like to talk about them, we may not even like to think about them, but years ago, somebody
did
think about them, he thought about them long and hard – if you’ll pardon the expression – and the result was that we can now all do our number twos cleanly, and without embarrassment, and the whole nation – the whole world! – is a better place as a consequence. So why shouldn’t we celebrate that fact? Why shouldn’t we celebrate the fact that, besides conquering half of the globe, Britons have also fought a historic battle against their number twos, and emerged victorious?’

He sat down again. Sir John stared across the table at him coolly.

‘Have you quite finished, Gardner?’ Taking his silence as consent, he added: ‘Might I remind you that at the entrance to this pavilion, which you propose to deface with this obscene display, visitors will find a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen?’

Gardner leaned forward. ‘And might I remind you, Sir John, that even her Majesty –
even her Majesty
. . .’

Sir John stood up, his brow furrowed with rage. ‘If you finish that sentence, Gardner,’ he said, ‘I shall have to ask you to leave this room.’ There was a tense, extended silence, as both men locked eyes across the table. When it became apparent that Mr Gardner was not going to add anything, Sir John slowly sat down again. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘I expect you to forget all about this ludicrous idea, and concentrate on devising a display which does something to reflect not just the glory but the dignity of the people of these islands. Is that understood?’ Distinctly flustered, not pausing for an answer, he turned over his next sheet of paper and read the first few lines out quickly and automatically, without thinking about them: ‘Next – the ZETA project. “Proposal for transporting and exhibiting a replica of Britain’s . . .’ ”

‘
AHEM!
’

Sir John glanced across the table again. The warning cough had come from one of the two mysterious men who had earlier caught Thomas’s attention: the one with the moon-shaped face and the slicked-back hair. He held a minatory finger up to his lips, and shook his head, almost unnoticeably. Whatever had prompted the gesture, Sir John took immediate notice of it, and turned the sheet of paper over in a casual movement, laying it face down on the table.

‘Quite right, of course. Not a priority at all. We can leave that until later. We have a far more important matter to consider, which is . . . Ah, yes! The pub. The famous pub.’ His features relaxed, and he looked enquiringly among the assembled faces. ‘Now, we should have a new recruit to our team, is that correct? Mr Foley, are you amongst us?’

Thomas half-rose to his feet, then realized that this probably looked ridiculous, and sat down again. His voice, when he managed to find it, seemed impossibly thin and tentative.

‘Yes, that would be me, Sir . . . Sir John.’

‘Good. Splendid.’ A long, expectant silence ensued. When it became clear that Thomas had no intention of breaking it, Sir John said: ‘We’re ready to hear your thoughts, I believe.’

‘Ah. Yes.’ Thomas looked around the circle of distinguished faces currently trained on him, and swallowed hard. ‘Well, the Britannia, as you probably know, will be – in some ways – the focal point of the British exhibit. The original idea, as you probably know –’ (why was he repeating himself?) ‘– was to build a replica of – and here I quote – “an olde English inne” – to show visitors the finest in traditional British hospitality. One or two factors, however, brought about a change from the initial plan. One is that the Belgians themselves are, apparently, in the process of constructing a village on the festival site, which they are calling “La Belgique Joyeuse” – which translates, roughly speaking, as “Gay Belgium” – and this will include replica buildings from the eighteenth century and earlier, including an authentic inn. Another, erm, factor, is that the COI – and, I think, Mr Gardner himself, though I wouldn’t like to put words into his mouth – have always been concerned that the British contribution, while doing justice, obviously, to our great traditions, should not be too – well, too backward-looking. And so it was decided that the designers of the Britannia
should be briefed to take a slightly more modern approach. Britain, after all, is a modern country. We are at the very forefront of innovation in the sciences and technology.’ (He was getting into his stride now, and, to his own amazement, rather beginning to enjoy himself.) ‘But our great strength is our ability to move forward, without ever breaking our links with the past. This is the paradox that the designers have worked so hard to express with the interior of the Britannia.’