The Storytellers (19 page)

“Do you know where they've moved to?” he asked.

“No, I am afraid not,” she replied, hurrying away. “I think they had a factory on the trading estate.”

“Yes, I know it,” he called after her.

“Good luck!” she called back.

Only when the woman was gone and he had given up searching for signs of life did her ‘had' rather than ‘have' come back at him like indigestion. The stack of unopened mail outside the door concerned him. He was growing accustomed to the signs.

Round at the factory, everything seemed normal as he lifted up the telephone in reception and said to the voice on the other end that he was looking for Andrew Champion. He could hear sounds of busyness coming from inside and felt relieved. But his relief was short-lived.

“Can I help you?” The young man asking the question looked disoriented and nervous.

“Yes, I am looking for Andrew Champion,” Harvey said again.

“He's not with us anymore.”

“How do you mean? Has he died?”

“You could say that,” the man answered, passing the side of his hand across his throat in a slicing motion.

“But this is his company,” Harvey asserted.

“Not any more it isn't,” he said. “It's the liquidator's.”

“Oh hell,” gasped Harvey. “When did this happen?”

“Before Christmas. It really shook us. We thought he had this thing licked and then there he was telling us it was all over.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“No.”

“So what's happening to all of you?” Harvey asked.

“We're being wound down. There's just a handful of us left.”

“But the business, what's happened to the business?”

“I don't rightly know,” he said, “but the service side was bought for a song, I heard, and our designs too.”

“Do you know by who?”

“Some foreign outfit I believe,” the young man said with obvious disgust. “Now if you'll excuse me…”

“Of course,” acknowledged Harvey as he watched the young man disappear back through the door to the factory floor, leaving him alone in reception. So that was it.

On the way home, he couldn't get Queen's song ‘Another one bites the dust' out of his head. How many thousand was that now? Was anyone even counting?

And because he had got to know Andrew Champion, this one felt personal.

* * *

Back home, he ignored Aberdeen and punched out his piece about the trail of devastation he had encountered under the headline
There Has To Be a Better Way!

Change
, he wrote,
was a constant but to leave things entirely to Schumpeter's creative destruction was surely no better than allowing vested interests to resist change until the artificial dam they constructed to hold back the inevitable burst, as it now had, flooding innocent and guilty alike
.

He marvelled at the hubris of men who imagined that whole industries could be run by politicians, bureaucrats and union organizers, none of whom were accountable to the one party that
mattered – the customer.

He wrote, too, about the communities which had grown up around single activities left largely in the lurch like jilted husbands when the industries that created them bolted for pastures new. Were these transitions not inevitable? Could they not have been foreseen? Rather than attempting to prop up what was failing, should these industries not have been taxed in the good times to fund alternative activities when the bad times came round?

Within the government, only Michael Heseltine, the Environment Secretary, seemed to be attempting this with his enterprise zones, Harvey reported, but it was – as always – too little too late.
And in any event
, he wrote,
according to unnamed sources, the Secretary was regarded by the Prime Minister as a competitor and a
wet,
even though he had been a remarkably successful businessman before becoming a politician, so his efforts were tolerated rather than cheered
.

* * *

George Gilder let his piece stand without alteration. It was clear the great editor was starting to question his own judgment, so alarmed had he become at the state of the nation and plummeting support for the government. Opinion polls indicated that the new SDP-Liberal Alliance was now supported by 50% of the electorate. As a further indication of editorial discomfort, George Gilder even referred to him by his Christian name: ‘It's all a bloody mess, Harvey, it truly is!'

The Sentinel
's political editor supposed that when two men were walking together along the road to perdition, a little extra intimacy was appropriate. After the accounting was finally complete, a year or two later, it would reveal that around 2 million manufacturing jobs had been lost, most never to return.

C
HAPTER

H
ARVEY hurried into
The Sentinel
building as he was running late for one of George Gilder's power lunches, as the great editor liked to call his regular get-togethers with the good and not-so-good. He needn't have worried. The only other guest was just moments ahead of him. Peter Betsworth had come to check on the heartbeat of the Fourth Estate.

“Good article,” he said looking across at Harvey as they started on the soup. ‘There has to be a better way, although I'm damned if I know what it is.'

Momentarily pleased, Harvey then suspected the compliment might have come from the intelligence officer's left hand.

“Things really are pretty bad, Peter,” George insisted. “We'll soon be a nation of shopkeepers again.”

“Wasn't that how Napoleon saw us?” Harvey proffered.

“Yes, although I think it was more to contrast us with the land-based economies of Central Europe that he had so easily conquered than to cause offense,” George explained.

“Adam Smith certainly didn't think shopkeepers could build an empire,” Peter added, “but he did think an empire-building
government should be informed by their views. After all, what's the point of an empire but to provide a flow of raw materials in one direction and customers in the other?”

“Glasgow made a fortune importing tobacco from American planters and selling them manufactured luxuries, often on credit,” said Harvey: “a triple profit! And Liverpool grew rich shipping Africans to the Americas and textiles to Africa.”

“Those were the days,” mused Peter. “All I read in your paper now is about how much of our manufacturing capacity has been closed or sold off to foreigners.”

“You read it because that's what's happening,” countered George testily. “It's looking like the aftermath of a war out there; isn't that right, Harvey?”

“In most places away from the capital, that is exactly how it looks,” agreed Harvey, pleased that his surname seemed at last to have been abandoned. He missed ‘Mudd!' though, and suspected it was in hibernation until George Gilder had regained his confidence. “You can always go to Aberdeen for a burst of optimism,” he informed them. “It's all green lights up there. The place is humming.”

“Thank heavens for North Sea oil,” rhapsodized Peter. “Without it, sterling would be in the can, interest rates through the roof and the government would have had to go cap in hand to the IMF.”

“I'm not sure our exporters see it that way,” said Harvey, “at least about sterling. Its ludicrously high level crippled them. The government should have lowered interest rates, not lifted them.”

“But then we wouldn't have had such a deep recession,” declared Peter. “Inflation would still be rising and the unions would still be in the driving seat.”

“I see the miners have just accepted a 9.3% pay rise from the Coal Board,' interjected George. “That doesn't sound like union capitulation to me.”

“King Arthur's first victory as president of the NUM,” mused
Harvey.

“And his last,” snapped Peter. “Margaret, I mean the Prime Minister, just couldn't afford another battle at the moment.”

With the soup bowls cleared, plates of sliced venison were brought in, served with potatoes dauphinoise and Brussels sprouts, no doubt a hold-out from the festive season.

“Rather good this,” prompted George, holding up his glass of wine. “Gruaud Larose '59. If our nation is going to implode, I thought we should at least go out in style.”

“Yes, very good, George,” agreed Peter, savouring the dark red delight in his glass. “But don't give up on our lady yet. She is trying to unwind decades of poor governance.”

“But if unions, management, banks and government can work together in Germany to build up that country's manufacturing capability, why on earth can't we?” asked Harvey.

“Yes, that's a good question,” agreed George. “So what's the answer, Peter?”

The intelligence officer pursed his lips. To be bested by anyone, especially the Germans, was not where he liked to be.

“It's not the Anglo-Saxon way,” he said eventually.

“What on earth do you mean by that, Peter?” George asked.

“I mean we like our freedoms. We don't like being organized. We're just not corporatist and neither are the Americans.”

“But at least the Americans seem to get through these things quicker,” posited Harvey.

“Not in the 1930s they didn't,” said George.

“And that was because their central bank cut the money supply at just the wrong time,” asserted Peter. “Our problem is that since the war we have been neither fish nor fowl – part-socialist, part-market-driven, the absolute worst of all worlds.”

“Leave it to the market then, Adam Smith's invisible hand?” elicited George.

“Well,” answered Peter, “if you are going to be corporatist you had better know where you are going and how to get there, and you absolutely must have everyone on board. But if you think life is exploratory and creative then market mechanisms are a far more powerful tool than grey suits and cloth caps trying to decide the future.”

“Governments must still plan and think strategically, surely?” urged Harvey.

“Of course they should,” agreed Peter, “but they must recognize their limitations too. Are politicians scientists, or engineers, or business managers? Only if they couldn't make it in those fields. And can a civil service populated by intelligent men and women with liberal arts degrees run entire industries? I think not. The socialist impulse to make everything better – and let's give it the benefit of the doubt here – is laudable. But a great deal of complexity lies between a wish and its fulfilment. This government is attempting to roll back decades of muddled thinking and reinstate the disciplines of the marketplace. It took us thirty years to get into this hole. This government has a lot less time than that to get us out of it.”

“The opinion polls are looking awful,” George pointed out. “If there was an election today she'd be out on her ear.”

“That's where you boys come in,” stressed Peter. “You must talk things up, not down.”

“There's precious little to talk up at the moment,” complained George. “That's the trouble.”

“I think it was Joseph Goebbels who said that propaganda should be popular not intellectually pleasing,” Harvey remarked.

“Ah!” extolled George. “Another fine German example!”

Peter shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Well you know what I mean,” he said.

“No, I'm not sure that I do,” George challenged, much to Harvey's delight. “We are not an organ of the state. We are fallible searchers
for the truth.”

“With a very particular political bent,” countered the intelligence officer. “Don't tell me that you haven't shaded a story to flatter your point of view.”

“So we are back to that old question – what is truth?” George laughed. “What do you think truth is, Mudd?”

The editor was clearly feeling better. Whether induced by the wine or the conversation, who could know.

“Well all I can say, in answer to that,” said Harvey, “is that I have seen an awful lot of people around the country who are suffering. That is a simple truth. A more complex truth is how it came to this. But if we could agree on ends and not be ideologically fixated with particular means, we might do better. It's like watching a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister debating the value of last rites while a man lies dying at their feet.”

“Your man's becoming too sophisticated for this line of work, George,” Peter chortled. “It sounds to me as though he is also developing a conscience!”

“Which is why he is becoming a first-rate journalist,” responded George with the fierce protectiveness of a mother hen. “Now, Peter, can we offer you some coffee?”

The Sentinel
had closed ranks.

* * *

Harvey left the meeting buoyed up by the gastronomic ambience he had enjoyed and yet forlorn at the state of things. He felt like a man who had savoured one last banquet before an advancing army overwhelmed his city. He called Suzie. As luck would have it she had no pressing engagements that day either and felt the same need as he to blot out everything inside one wholly absorbing moment.

They arrived at her apartment simultaneously. She struggled with
her key as he pulled at the zip of her tight-fitting black skirt with one hand and pulled out the white silk blouse she was wearing under her black jacket with the other.

“Stop it!”

“No!”

They tumbled inside, just managing to close the door before a neighbour crossed the landing from an adjoining flat.

“Just a minute,” she said as the skirt and jacket fell to the floor.

He followed her, hopping out of his trousers with the grace of a one-legged kangaroo.

Suzie sat, her tights and pants around her ankles, and ran her tongue over his offering. Harvey listened to the hiss and shuddered at the sensation. He pulled her head back, freeing himself and pushed his hand between her thighs, catching the last drops while kissing the mouth that had just pleasured him like an eager wildcatter drilling for oil.

There was a certain violence between them. It was as if they wished to reduce their encounter to one that was utterly primal, without affection, without emotion of any kind save for the desire to express an overwhelming urge to conjoin and be done with it. They were like animals whose normal solitary nature has been interrupted by the need to procreate, except that procreation was the last thing on these human minds.

Her face, reflected in the mirror above the washstand, looked almost pained as he drove into her again and again, staring, with a ferocity indistinguishable from anger, searching for a sign of submission only his instincts would recognize while his hands bore down on her shoulders to prevent any escape. But she had no wish to. She was where she needed to be, lost in the moment.

Suddenly he pulled away and she fell limp across the counter, sobbing. Both knew their marriage of convenience was at an end.

Later, as he was about to leave, having dressed with what he
hoped had not been unseemly haste, she followed him to the door.

“That was a side of you I have not seen before,” she said, her tone hinting at something inside herself newly discovered which she would revisit. “We'll see each other again?”

“Why not?” he answered and left, knowing they would not.