The Tyrant's Novel (4 page)

Two afternoons before this party of the Kennedys, as the day shift of construction workers was going off duty, three vanloads of Overguard men in their red berets so feared by the populace, their camouflage kit which implied that some peril to the state was imminent, and their automatics carried in the particularly ominous way, the butt poking up over their shoulder blades, arrived outside Toby Garner's prefabricated on-site office. Eight of them crowded in, others milled in the dust outside.

They told him that an hour earlier, Great Uncle had passed the site on his way somewhere. Great Uncle's location was of course always secret, to the extent that the chefs of each of his twenty palaces, soon to become twenty-one with the completion of Northbourne, prepared three meals a day, just in case someone malicious were watching for a clue to Great Uncle's whereabouts.

Anyhow, an hour before, Great Uncle had passed the Northbourne site and remarked to those who were riding with him that there was a gap either side of the great bronze gates, and that this detracted somewhat from them, and made him angry on the lovely gates' behalf. He told the Overguard escorts that when he passed by again, sometime after nine
P
.
M
., certainly before ten, he wanted to see the gaps between the stonework walls and the dazzling gates closed.

When they declared that they, all of them, were there to help Toby get the job done, he began to see that they were under the same pressure as himself—not that that was much consolation. He told them straight out it couldn't be done. He appreciated their offer, but the day staff was gone and he needed a further delivery of the honeyed sandstone of which the fourteen-feet-high walls were built. Work on the swimming pools and fountains would continue through the night, and wiring in the main residence. But the stonemasons themselves had all gone home. They were in coffee bars, driving their cars, shopping in supermarkets (or selling cigarettes on the black market).

Give us the lists, said an Overguard officer. We'll find them.

The stonemasons? asked Toby.

Every bastard you've got on the payroll. We'll get those lazy damned Overalls working too.

(The Overalls were the lowly city police, who wore blue overalls.)

He opened his computer personnel files and printed them off page by page, as the officer distributed them to his three dozen men. Toby could well imagine the quantity of fear that would arrive at each hod carrier's or bricklayer's door in the person of an Overguard officer. Are you Ted Williams? Then please accompany me, sir. The red beret, the great splotches of martial camouflage, the hefty holster, and the submachine gun carried upside down on a belt between the shoulder blades. Timidly, Is there a problem, sir? And if the Overguard were a little genial: You're wanted at work. Tell your missus to keep the dinner hot.

By five o'clock the workers were largely back at the site. Overguard officers with experience of pneumatic drills were helping out the stonemasons. Everyone in this together. Waves of fear and light-headedness overtaking Toby. It can't be done, I tell you it can't be done. And the Overguard demonstrating that in a sense they
were
warriors, saying it could be done, the redoubt could be taken, the walls closed up to those gates whose dignity demanded it. To hell with Courtney Witt and his fancy gates! thought Toby.

You might remember it was a hot evening, he reminded us.

Fine dust of sandstone fragments democratically clogged the lips and nostrils of workers and Overguard. The stacked and abandoned weaponry was humanized with orange grit, which seemed to hold out a promise that when the impossible job was not done by nine o'clock, or five past, and all or some were put against the wall, the weaponry might benignly clog. Further cement trucks arrived, and winches pulled large friable blocks onto foundations of wet cement. It was impossible. Ten yards either side to be closed, and closed with the same quality as the rest of the palace walls, no sloppy cement, no leakage, no hasty trim on the sandstone itself, no faulty symmetry.

About six-thirty, Toby said, the job was quarter done, one side closed up but only to human height. Unqualified men were trying to erect scaffolding to take the wall higher. Then the officer of the Overguard suggested they bring in workers from other government sites. There was a Ministry of Oil building going up on Viaduct Bay. An army of riggers and scaffolders were working there. We'll get them! promised the Overguard. Toby did not bother saying, There's not time to get them here. The Overguard officer was sanguine. He said that half the delay had been logistics, the job would move faster now. Even if they could bring in workers who would be effective for an hour and a half, that would be a contribution. More riggers were in any case needed to assemble scaffolding in line on the far side of the gates, where the other stretch of space was to be walled.

Throughout their labors, the workers on-site were largely silent—no whistling, no pop songs. There were occasional sudden surges of rage. You stupid prick, pick it up! But ultimately each of them came to realize he needed every stupid prick who could be mustered. Some upper wall stones were miscut, were raised, broke the uniformity of the capstones, too narrow or too broad to dignify the gates they were reaching for. Fear took the craft out of some of the craftsmanship. They had to be all hauled down, recut or discarded. It was the Overguard who shouted at mistakes and grabbed their holstered side arms. And Toby amongst them, the only man who had the entire plan in his head, found he became suddenly excited, this challenge meaningful, transcending the mere building materials. Be calm, everyone! Get the measurements right! Nothing to fear! And he heard a stonemason say under his breath, Balls!

And so the cement was poured on the far stretch of wall, and suddenly the stone began to ascend to the correct height there. Hope was traveling to meet hope, along dug foundations. After the sun went down, lights were brought in from other parts of the site to illuminate the area. The electrically competent amongst the Overguard worked at this and got them shining. A new kind of constructive energy emerged amongst the workers. When a man's hand was crushed in its leather glove, others felt they had time to express commiseration. Whereas two hours before they might have punished him, the Overguard sent for an ambulance. A further work gang, including stonemasons, arrived from the Ministry of Oil site. It was astonishing how much work they got done in an hour, given that everything was already set up for them, the total scaffolding in place within the site, on the blind side of the wall from the street, where it would not offend the gates. The last stone was set at eight-fifty-five. A mason and a bricklayer watched it settle for five minutes to ensure it would not play false. On the street side of the wall, Toby and the Overguard officer watched for mortar seepage or crookedness of the capstones and found none.

I could, said Toby in telling us the story, have kissed the fellow. As it was, we embraced like brothers.

The officer told Toby to get out of the way before Great Uncle came by again. Out of obscure duty he remained within the walls, as the tired Overguard cleaned their weapons of fragments of stone and dusted their camouflage kit and stood before the closed walls and the splendid gates to give the salute as the President passed. From a point on the inner scaffolding, Toby watched. He was exhilarated, he said. At that word,
exhilarated,
his wife reached out and touched his arm, as if she both feared his exuberance and had benefited from it, yet hoped it would not last too much longer. Toby said, I thought at the time, Frank Lloyd Wright never went through this. This is real architecture.

And what's the moral of this for Mr. McBrien? asked Wilf Apple, his eyes narrowed.

That if you work for Great Uncle, declared Toby joyously, one day you'll get a
real
deadline.

What's your smile for then? asked Wilf. You've been tyrannized over, and just because you get some obscure kick out of it, you tell this kid to join the club.

Sonia McBrien said, My husband is not a kid.

Apple was unkind enough to assert, He sounds like one.

Andrew Kennedy, the doyen, intervened. Oh come! All Toby's saying is that anyone who works here should be ready for some exceptional deadlines. We know that to be the case.

He raised his glass to Toby. I congratulate you that you have survived yours, Toby. My life would be hard to sustain without you.

This gesture made us all kinder to other, although Wilf Apple said, Our friend Alan Sheriff doesn't have to worry about a deadline, not with his Yankee advance.

For a second I wanted to answer, but I saw Sarah's eyes dissuading me.

Don't worry, Wilf, I told him. The dollars will no doubt run out soon.

Yet it was true that I had a certain security. I had reached the end of the penultimate draft of ninety thousand words, and thus was close to the conclusion of my novel.

My Sarah. She had already been a classically trained actress and a television and film notable for some years before I talked to her in person and in passing at a Kennedy salon, the first I was invited to. I had recently returned from military service and considered myself lucky to be patronized by old hands like Wilf Apple on the edge of that circle of fraternity and hope the Kennedys provided. Sarah moved in her own sturdy orbit amongst us. Her astonishing eyes lay on me during a twenty-second introduction. She ascertained that my few stories published to that time had dealt chiefly with the war but, said Andrew, placed it in a full human context.

He manages to get a lot of women into them, said Andrew.

She said with what I thought of as an inevitably cold, fake earnestness, I'll have to read them.

Then I found we were members of Professor Duncan's same drama seminar at the university. She would say at the start of each session, Hello, Alan. At the second or third meeting of the group, she told me she had read one of my stories, had tracked it down in
Writers' Magazine,
which the National Broadcasting Network had published for a while under Andrew Kennedy's aegis, until lack of funds and some official disapproval closed it down.

I said, That's very kind of you.

She gave a rare laugh. I'm reading Chekhov's short stories too, she said. Should Chekhov feel it's very kind of me?

But he's dead, I said stupidly.

When called on to read the few times the group had met, she read from
Uncle Vanya,
so flatly and tentatively the rest of us were stunned. Professor Duncan asked her to stop after a while, and told us that she was doing honor to Chekhov's text, letting it dominate as a monotone which suggested meanings, contours, and points of departure to it. That's the way she rehearsed for television and film. Isn't it? Professor Duncan asked her. Yes, of course, she said, not making a fuss of it.

Only amateurs like the rest of us, said Duncan, had the luxury of imposing emphasis instinctively on the texts they read. We were right to do so, but we ran the risk of making too many misreadings. But she was right in her method.

Sarah kept her eyes lowered like a schoolgirl. She did not like being defined as distinct from the eleven other members of the seminar. She had begun to sit near me in the seminar because, some instinct told her, I was too poleaxed to be as annoying and importunate as I would have liked to have been.

I had a problem of honor. I had met at the university's primitive radio station, still then operating under sufferance (though its days were numbered), an enthusiastic girl named Louise James, who managed to combine her studies with broadcasting a two-hour interview show six days of the week. Her father was a famous broadcaster who had done the same sort of show on the National Network, and had then become a television interviewer. Louise was tall, full-faced, with wide, hopeful eyes. After the interview she took me to a coffee-and-cake soiree at a wealthy student's house. There had been other such events, a walk, and a visit to the cinema. I have to say that these outings were sedate. We students laughed at country people who seemed to consider that if a man courted a woman for an evening or two, he was bound to marry her, a proposition often enforced with
chardri
s and shotguns. But unlike the Western countries, there was, for all of our university bravado, a code of concern that one must not, for one's own safety, lead women on. Once you were introduced to the parents, you incurred the debt of marriage. I could see on the rational plane why I should ultimately marry Louise James, who had shown signs of thinking along the same lines. She was a brave young woman, temperamentally much maturer than I, and of a good, positive cast of mind. She was also a leader by nature. Her features were pleasant, particularly when lit up by intellectual curiosity. When she folded her arms polemically across her full breast, I was entranced and hoped to become more so. But that was it. I could not argue myself into being sufficiently entranced, and that fact made me feel both guilty and hapless.

At the university library one day I watched my fellow classmate Sarah Manners move across the vivid tiles of the reading room. There was a tension and a sort of unconscious cooperation of movement and static color between her and the expanse of eighteenth-century tiles. They added to her mystery, but then everything that had happened at our few meetings had done that. She really did have, as they say in America, the sort of bone structure the camera loves. Even I, as a fan of European and American film, could see that. And she had that look that I've noticed in other beautiful thespians—offstage, offscreen, they moved negligently but warily, and were less made up than many others, less beringed, with a fine paleness created partly by residual television or stage makeup, and by long hours in the studio. She created an impact in men, or at least in me, transcending sex. Really! The appetites she evoked were subtler by far. I wanted to be consumed and to consume, yet I did not think at first of this communion in sensual terms.

Besides, I was a speck of mustard and she, so obviously, a sea of nectar. So there was no use dreaming.