The Summer Isles (26 page)

“That doesn’t seem so very harsh,” I say. “Not when you think what’s happened to some of your people, Father. Assuming you
are
Irish, a Roman Catholic.”

“Doesn’t, does it?” he mutters, ignoring my jibe. “But how about you, Professor? Where does that leave you with that fucking look in your eyes and your nice wee tablets, tottering on your silly stick? You bloody well actually knew him.”

“Perhaps,” I say, “the truth had to slip though somewhere. Perhaps even John Arthur understands that.”

“But where! Where! You tell me the
truth
, Professor…!”

I walk along the corridor through splinters of flashing light, away from the clamour of Father Phelan’s voice.

Captain Anderson stands waiting for me that evening in the New Dorchester’s foyer. He’s still in his uniform, and he smiles when he sees me emerging from the crowds, and shakes my hand again, his belts creaking slightly, smelling of starch and Brylcreem. Specks of weariness float before my eyes. Already, I’m wishing I hadn’t agreed to come.

“It’s good to see you, Mr. Brook.”

“Just call me Geoffrey.”

“I had the car brought around to the front…”

It’s hard to tell as we stand outside the New Dorchester’s colonnades that there’s anything special about the neat black Ladybird that awaits us on the circled drive. Just the odd lettering of the numberplates and the absence of a tax disc.

“It’s just a pool car,” he says as he holds open the passenger door. “Being in the KSG, I don’t get the chance to own many things…”

“You make it sound like a religious order.”

Captain Anderson chuckles. The Ladybird’s interior smells of wood and leather. My seat, as I run my hands across it, is soft as a spaniel’s ears.

“Do you have any idea where you’d like to go?” he asks, pumping up the choke, jingling the keys.

“I thought I’d leave that up to you.”

He isn’t wearing a gun. Not obviously, anyway. “To be honest, I did take the precaution of booking somewhere. It’s a bit out, but we should be against the traffic…”

We drive across the Thames, through Westminster and Chelsea and then out beyond Hammersmith and along the Great West Road past the bright new factories where Smiths make their crisps, and Macleans their toothpaste. The Hudson Car, complete with dummy passengers, floats floodlit a full hundred feet up. But beyond there, beyond the glare of the sodium street lights, the factories give way to building sites, and the buildings sites give way to ruined warehouses, strips of wasteground. Greater Britain is like a film set. Push hard enough, I keep telling myself, and it will collapse entirely.

Captain Anderson turns north at a roundabout beside a new neon-and-concrete Underground station. Soon, we are amid the suburbs. Here, much like the streets where my acquaintance lived in Oxford, although teeming in a far greater multitude, are the bay windows, the neat gardens, the half-jokily named pubs, the new rows of shops. Captain Anderson lights a Capstan and winds down his window. I lean out of my own before I start to cough, breathing in gardenfuls of air.

We arrive at a place called the New Galleon. It crouches on concrete beams at the edge of a reservoir as if preparing to stride across the black waters that the recent rains have provided. I’m surprised at the expanse of new metal in the car park. Bentleys and Rovers. The kind of Jags and Bristols, glinting blood-red or blue in this water-scented darkness, that are owned privately but take so much money, so much influence and simple
position
to get hold of that they might as well be official.

Inside, up the curved concrete ramp, it’s all horse brasses, Constable prints—or possibly originals—flock wallpaper, Mantovani strings. Although he tells me he’s never been here before, Captain Anderson seems at ease, peeling off the paper coaster from the base of his double whisky as we sit on tartan chairs around a low copper table and study the copper-plate menu. There’s a sense that everyone knows everybody else here. Wealth and success in Modernist Britain have become a kind of club.

“Quite the popular place to be,” he observes as a dinner-jacketed waiter leads us to our reservation beside a wide plate glass window overlooking the reservoir and the flowing lights of the arterial road beyond. He nods discreetly. “I think that’s Tommy Lawton over there. That man we passed on the way in—he’s Charles Hill the Radio Doctor.”

I have no idea who Captain Anderson means, but I follow his gaze in the window’s reflection. He is far from being the only member of the KSG here either, although as a captain he’s the most junior.

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, ah, Tony, but I’d like the meal to be my treat. I can easily afford the bill.”

“Don’t worry. I have a standing imprest. No one will query it.”

He clicks his fingers and orders another whisky, then lights a fresh cigarette from his last. After this long day and my experiences of mixing too many tablets with too much alcohol, I settle for iced water, which smells, as I raise it to my lips, like that swimming pool from which Tony Anderson emerged. I study him now, still hardly able to take in how ordinary these KSG people are when you get close to them. He’s still young enough to have a small whitehead showing at the corner of his mouth.

“Did you really enjoy my articles?” I ask as we wait for the food.

In reply, he gives me a passable run-through of the subjects I covered in those Saturday pages. He’s obviously been well-briefed, but it’s like listening to a student regurgitating his studies for an oral exam in the certain knowledge that it’ll all be forgotten a day later. I notice that his second or possibly third whisky’s already down to the ice.

The food, when it finally comes, is a disappointment. I’d imagined that the plain names and descriptions on the New Galleon’s menu were a double-bluff; surely boiled potatoes, beef and swede really couldn’t mean
just
that? But it does. Tony’s meal is a steaming heap of mashed potato, a sprinkling of parsley over cod from which he has to carefully extract the bones. So this is what the fabulously rich and famous eat at dinner. Of course, John Arthur likes only plain food himself. Francis, I remember, was exactly the same.

We plod through the pudding.

“I’m sorry,” Tony Anderson sighs, standing his spoon up in the custard. “This place was recommended to me. I nearly went instead for this Italian place down in Bayswater.” He smiles. His face has relaxed somewhat with the whisky. “It’s all garlic, those big pepper grinders, candle smoke on the ceiling…”

“Perhaps some other time.”

“Yes…” He gazes at me. Those blue eyes. I can warm to him more easily now that he’s given up the pretence of being interested in
Figures Of History.

“Still, Tony, I’ve enjoyed our meal.”

“There’s no hurry to go back to the New Dorchester, though, is there?” He sounds almost hopeful. “We could drive into central London first. Take a stroll. See the sights. This of all nights, there must be plenty going on…”

He signs for the bill after downing his last whisky, and I follow him back outside, collecting my coat, my stick, chewing on a little mint that looks and tastes like one of my fat tablets. The little man who sweeps in past us through the swing doors is clearly Lupino Lane, and the car park is fuller than ever. A seagull is mewing. The London air whispers and rustles around us, pulling me this and that way with fingers of weariness, hope, expectancy.

“Why did you join the Knights of Saint George?” I ask Tony as he starts the Ladybird up and backs it out from beside a Bentley Convertible.

“I just wanted something better for the future,” he says.

“Isn’t that what everyone says?”

“I know…” He pulls a face as we wait at the junction on the main road. “…It’s a cliché.” The traffic lights shine red, orange, then green. He pulls off. These simple commands—from machines, even—which everyone now obeys.

“Does that mean it’s true?” I ask.

Slipping into the traffic’s flow, talking more easily now that we’re no longer face to face and half his mind is on the driving, Tony Anderson tells me how he was brought up in the Wirral just over the Mersey from Liverpool, the same kind of nothing-place where most of us start our lives. His father had been a shopkeeper—hardware; one of those emporiums filled with tin baths, stick-on soles, replacement broom handles, lino, shoe polish, patent floor cleaners and just about everything else imaginable.

Tony Anderson, who’s twenty-five now, was born at a hard time, something that’s so easy to forget about his generation when you see them now, so at ease in the world they have created. His first memories are about the end of the War: defeat, depression, unemployment, hyper-inflation, limbless ex-soldiers sleeping and dying on the streets. Tony and his father, mother and two elder sisters lived above the shop in three small rooms. They should have been alright, providing basic domestic supplies to the large urban population of Birkenhead. But the business just went down and down. The customers couldn’t pay. The supplier’s prices went haywire. They ended up accepting credit just to create the impression that they were busy, but at the end of the day there was no way out. No food. No money.

Tony’s father was beaten up on the orders of the moneylenders he’d gone to in an effort to keep going. The moneylenders were Jewish; it wasn’t unusual for minor financiers to be Jewish in those days. His father tried turning to other trades; offering cheap groceries which he went down to collect from the market ten miles away by handcart. That didn’t work either.

“The shop’s still there,” Tony says, pulling past a slow-moving Colman’s Mustard van as we bowl along the Fulham Road. “Or at least the building is. It’s a barbers now, although you can still see our name on the gable bricks if you look carefully. My father was a good businessman, not afraid to do new things and stock new products, to change with the times. He did his best, his absolute best. By everything that was right and fair, he should have succeeded. But you’re a historian, Mr. Brook—you probably understand this better than me. There are some things you can’t fight against. They just steam-roller over you no matter what you do about it. It’s just—what?—the force of history?”

“That’s as good a name for it as any.”

“My father struggled on for a while. He went up to look for work in Bolton. Then Sheffield. He was much too old to be a labourer by then, but that was what mostly he did, and sent us what money he’d saved. Then we just stopped getting the letters. My mother had to go down to collect his belongings. She would never talk about it—I still don’t know quite how my father died…”

“So you joined the EA?”

“I just wanted to belong to something that made sense. I was sixteen when John Arthur came into power, and by then we were all living in a single room. One of the first things John Arthur did was introduce new scholarships and City Colleges—did you know that? And he made the benefits system work for the people who really needed it. He gave me and millions of others a chance. I found I could go back to school. And I found that I was good at learning. Good at sports. Good at dealing with people. It was as if it had been a secret that people had kept from me until then. So I was happy to become a party member. I felt I owed it to John Arthur personally. He virtually saved my life.”

“To get into the KSG, though… There must have been a lot of competition?”

“Of course,” Tony grins, still proud of the memory of all that he’s achieved.

Leicester Square is brighter than daylight as we crawl around it with the rest of the traffic. Long gone are the days of my own furtive wanderings here; a quick exchange of looks and words, then back to a room around Russell Square, the smell of the stairs, tramlines flashing like lightening beyond the curtainless windows, the sag of the bed and the trickle of soapy water as we size each other up and privately regret our decision.

It would be hard to find a place to park this Ladybird in central London tonight if Tony wasn’t able to ignore the signs. We step out into the crowds and are carried with them towards the fairground that’s been set up in Regents Park. There’s the sickly smell of candy floss and soaring, sparkling lights. Sleepy, excited children, their sticky faces shining with sugar and grease, nag their parents for a last ride on one or another of the vast machines of fear and joy, then scream as the wheels rise and turn and clanging trains swoop down from the sky. The older lads nudge each other excitedly at the sight of Tony Anderson in his KSG uniform. When they grow up, they all want to be him. Tony finds a drinks tent and has the barman—who notices his uniform easily and comes over straight away, despite the press of the crowds—refill the steel whisky flask he produces. I shake my head when he offers it to me, and watch as he slugs it back.

He seems absorbed in his own life and his own history as he walks beside me, his arm brushing my own; but I still find it hard to squeeze the real person into this uniform, the fact of what he is. Further out beyond the stalls and the tents and the rides lies an open space and a vast bonfire, throwing sparks into a grey-glowing sky. I buy us both hot potatoes from a crooked-chimneyed oven. After the New Galleon’s dire food, they taste like hot new bread, salt and honey. Tony and I stand at the long ropes and watch the bonfire’s spiralling antics as butter melts down our chins.

Two Spitfires swoop out of the night, low over the bonfire, agitating the sparks, trailing ribbons of smoke whilst lads stripped to the gleaming waist climb over each other to make trembling pyramids, marshalled by absurd middle-aged men in khaki shorts and broad-brimmed hats. Just as I’m wondering what else goes on in the ridged canvas tents that have been set up behind the zoo, I sense that I’m being stared at from across the ring. It’s Christlow, his face slippery with firelight as he marshals the next shining cluster of Modernist youth preparing for some gymnastic feat or other. His eyes flick away from mine when I attempt to smile at him. He looks around as if in panic, then stumbles back into the trembling heat.

“Perhaps we should go,” I say to Tony, and we push into quieter areas of the fair just as the London Police Alsatian Display Team begins to leap through flaming hoops. Everything seems tired now. Lads are yelling fuck-this and fuck-that at each other. Couples lie coiled like heaps of rope in the shadows between the tents. The toilet tents have turned nasty. Back at the Ladybird, the streets are almost quiet.