Authors: Charles Cumming
“But these are bright guys, Milius. And maybe after working in the City they go into the law or politics, or they start their own small business and create jobs for other people.”
“Bullshit. Excuse me, Fort, but that’s bullshit. They’ll just make sure they have enough money to send their son to Winchester, and then the whole cycle will begin all over again. Another generation of inbred fuckwits who are spoon-fed just enough of the right information by gifted teachers that they can scrape through their A levels, go to university, and waste some more of the taxpayer’s money. You know what? We should have to pay to go to university like you do in the States. At least then we’d appreciate it more.”
Fortner smirks and mutters, “Yeah,” under his breath. A vapor of sweat has appeared on his forehead and he has a thin line of Guinness threaded across his upper lip.
I try a different tack: “Reminds me of a story my father told once.”
“Your late father?”
“Yes.”
Why did he need to stress that?
Late
father. Does it make him feel somehow closer to me?
“He said that whenever a Cadillac goes by in America, the man on the street will say, ‘When I make my fortune, I’m gonna buy one of those.’ But when a Rolls-Royce drives past in England, people look at it and say, ‘Check out the wanker driving the Rolls. How come
he’s
got one and I haven’t?’”
This is actually a story Hawkes told me, which I thought would go down well with Fortner.
“That’s what we’re faced with here,” I tell him. “A profound suspicion of anything that smacks of success. It’s got so bad now in public life that I wouldn’t be surprised if no one in my generation wants to go into politics. Who needs the grief?”
“There’ll always be folks lookin’ for power, Milius, whatever the cost to their personal lives. Those guys know how high the stakes are: that’s why they get involved in the first place. Anyway, a minute ago you were attacking politicians. Now you feel sorry for them?”
I have to be careful not to build in too many contradictions, not to sound too rash. The trick, Hawkes told me, is not to play your hand too early. Sound them out, try to discover what it is that they want to hear, and then deliver it. You must become practiced at the art of the second guess. I cannot afford to overemphasize like this. Rest assured, he said, that everything you tell them will be infinitely examined for flaws.
Fortner leans toward me.
“I’ll tell you, I think some of the worst offenders in this are CNN. That station has done more to decimate the art of television news than any other organization on the planet. For a start, it’s just a mouthpiece for whoever happens to be in the White House. It’s an instrument of American imperialism. And secondly, because of the pressure to do reports on the hour, every hour, the reporters never actually
go
anywhere. They sit in their hotels in Sarajevo or Mogadishu doing their hair and makeup, waiting for a live satellite linkup with the Atlanta studio based on information they gleaned from the guy who brought them room service.”
It’s surprising to hear these kinds of arguments from Fortner. They are the first anti-American sentiments he has ever revealed.
“Yes,” I tell him. “But at least you
have
CNN. At least you had the vision and the balls to set the thing up. Why couldn’t the BBC do that? They have the resources, the staff, the years of experience. And they would have done it a lot better than Ted Turner. Why did it take an American company to create a global news network? I’ll tell you. Because you have the vision and we don’t. It’s just too daunting for us.”
“You got a point,” he says, tapping his glass. “You got a point.”
My round again.
It’s past nine thirty and this is as crowded as the pub usually gets. Every so often, Fortner and I are jostled by customers hollering orders from behind our stools. Standing between us, a twig-thin trust-fund hippy waits for the barman to finish pouring the last of the half-dozen pints he paid for with a Coutts & Co. check. His jacket smells, and he has no qualms about pushing his thigh up tight against mine. I move to the right to make more room, but he just keeps coming at me, getting closer to the bar, squeezing me up.
“This is intolerable,” Fortner says. “Let’s get outta here.”
A small group of people are vacating one of the small tables up a short flight of steps to our right.
“I’ll grab that table,” I tell him. “Bring your stuff.”
I step down off the stool and make my way over, loitering nearby as the students drain their drinks and make for the exit. When enough of them have gone, and before any of the other customers has had time to react, I slide onto one of the vacant chairs, its wood still warm. One girl remains, an expensive-looking brunette with sharp features and highlights in her hair. She is checking her makeup in the mirror of a powder compact. Her black-lined eyes flick up at me momentarily, a fan of lash registering distaste.
Fortner comes up behind me as the girl moves off.
“I never bought that round,” I tell him.
“What?”
“Of drinks.”
“Oh sure, yeah,” he says, looking down at the table. “Get me a bloody Mary this time, will ya, Milius? I can feel my insides turnin’ black with all this Guinness.”
I stand up to go back to the bar as one of the members of the staff comes past me with a tall column of pint glasses stacked high in his arms. He collects the empties from our table and goes on his way, leaving the ashtray full of butts and gum.
“Pint of lager and a bloody Mary,” I tell the Kiwi barman. The boy-to-girl ratio around me is Alaskan: for every reasonably attractive woman, there are now six or seven men crowding up the pub.
“Tabasco, Worcester sauce in the bloody Mary?”
“Yeah.”
The Kiwi pours the pint and sets it down on a cloth mat in front of me, turning to fill a tumbler with ice. He places that alongside the lager and lifts a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff from a rack below his waist. Rather than simply pour the vodka into the glass, he gives the bottle a 360-degree spin in the flat of his hand and upends it so that a good splash of liquid bounces out of the glass and onto the mat. Then, when he has finished pouring a contemptible measure of spirits, he whips the neck of the bottle out of the glass in a fast twist, and the same thing happens again: large drops of vodka land on the mat outside the tumbler, leaving no more than an inch in the glass itself.
“I would have preferred that in the drink,” I tell him.
“Sorry, mate,” he says, a fake smile frozen on his face like a game-show host’s. He drop-slides the bottle back into its rack, fills the glass with bloody Mary mix, and says, “Four twenny.”
I don’t make a scene. How can you argue with a guy who, ten years after
Cocktail,
still thinks it’s cool to act like Tom Cruise? He gives me my change and I head back to the table.
“So I’ve been thinking about what you were sayin’ earlier,” Fortner announces, as if I hadn’t been away. I am still squeezing into my seat when he says, “About the difference between here and back home. You may have a point.”
“I definitely have a point. And I haven’t even started yet. You know the thing that frustrates me?” The music is turned up on a speaker above our heads, so I lean in a little closer. “It goes back to what we were saying about CNN. How come the world is crawling with mediocre American hamburger and ice cream outlets? Why does no one here get a piece of that?”
“Same reason you were sayin’. You guys just don’t have the vision. You don’t think globally. You tellin’ me the ice cream in Penzance isn’t better than Ben ’n’ fuckin’ Jerry’s? No way. But those guys were smart for two hippies. They saw the opportunity and they weren’t afraid to hang their balls out a little bit. But your man in Cornwall with his two scoops and his chocolate flake, he doesn’t think like that. That’s why he doesn’t have any outlets in Wisconsin and Ben and Jerry have a store on every street corner in western Europe. And Häagen-Dazs, for that matter.”
Fortner leans back in his chair. His eyes sweep briefly, suspiciously, around the room, and his mouth stretches out.
“You know Häagen-Dazs is a made-up name?”
“No kidding?” he says.
“I’m telling you. The guy wanted something that sounded aristocratic, something classy, so he played around with a few Scandinavian-sounding words and came up with that. Then he had his family change their surname by deed poll to Häagen-Dazs and now they have their picture taken for
Hello!
magazine.”
“Shit,” says Fortner. “I always thought they were descended from the Hapsburgs.”
“No. They’re descended from a thesaurus.”
Fortner is an intriguing drunk. In the early stages, say after two or three beers or a half bottle of wine, all the better elements of his personality—the quick, sly humor, the anecdotes, the cynicism—fuse together and he operates with a sharpness that I have seen captivate Katharine. But this doesn’t last. If he keeps knocking back the drinks, his questions become more blunt, his answers long-winded and tinged with a regret that can morph into self-pity. Right now, we are in the limbo between these two points. It could go either way.
Largely as a way of tapping me for industry rumor before his condition gets out of hand, Fortner starts talking shop for the next fifteen minutes. He tells me what he and Katharine have been up to and about Andromeda’s plans for the short-term future. In return, Fortner expects information, much of which he knows I should not tell him. What is Abnex planning to do about X? What’s the company line on Y? Is there any truth in the rumors about a merger with Z? My answers are carefully evasive.
“That was damn good,” he says, tipping his head back and letting the last half mouthful of his bloody Mary seep through a mess of ice and lemon. “I like ’em spicy. You like ’em like that, Milius?”
“Kate did.”
This just comes out. I hadn’t planned to say it.
“You never talk about her much,” he says, after a brief silence in which sincerity has suddenly swamped his mood.
“No. I don’t.”
“You feel like talkin’ about her now?”
And the curious thing is that I do. To talk about Kate to this weathered Yank in a pub swirling with noise and bluster.
“How long has it been now since you broke up?”
“Over a year. More.”
“D’you think you’re over her?”
“There’s always this pilot light of grief.”
“Nice way of putting it,” Fortner says. He is doing a good job of suppressing any instinct for flippancy.
“You were together what, six or seven years?”
“From school, yes.”
“Long time. You ever see her?”
“Now and again,” I tell him, just to see what happens. “You know how it is with couples who’ve been together a long time. They can’t ever really break up. So we meet once in a while and spend these incredible nights together. But we can never seem to get it going again.”
I like the idea of Fortner’s thinking she still can’t get over me.
“How often?”
“Every five or six weeks. I still confide in her. She’s still the best friend I have.”
“Really?” Fortner looks suitably intrigued, admiring, even. “She got another boyfriend?”
“Don’t know. She’s never said anything to me.”
“So how come you broke up? What happened?”
“Same thing that happens to a lot of couples after university. Suddenly they find they have to go out and work for a living, and things aren’t as much fun anymore. Priorities change, you have more responsibilities. You have to grow up so fast, and unless you can find a way of doing that together, the cracks are bound to show.”
“And that’s what happened with you and Kate?”
“That’s what happened with me and Kate. We were living together, but for some reason that made things worse. We were trying to be our parents before our time.”
This last remark doesn’t appear to have made any sense to Fortner.
He says, “What d’you mean?”
“Playing host and hostess to our friends. Dinner parties. Going to the Prado during the Easter holidays, renting villas in Tuscany. All of a sudden we were dressing smarter, choosing furniture, buying cookbooks. And we were barely twenty-one, twenty-two. We took everything so seriously.”
“That’s not like you,” he says, arching his eyebrows and grinning.
“Funny,” I reply.
“And Kate was getting a lot of work? She was finding success as an actress?”
“Partly. I was fucked up after college. I didn’t want to commit myself to any one thing in case something better came along. I was afraid of hard work, afraid that my youth was prematurely over. And I was jealous of her success, yes. It was pretty pathetic.”
“And she didn’t help?”
“No, Christ, she was wonderful. She was sympathetic and understanding, but I pushed her away. She got tired of me. Simple as that.”
“You think she was in love with you?”
I feel as though everyone sitting around us in the pub is listening in to our conversation, waiting for my response to this question. I falter, looking down at the worn brown carpet, then say, “I’ll tell you a story.”
“Okay,” he says. “But first let me buy us a drink.”
When Fortner returns he is clutching two whiskeys, mine a scotch and dry, his a double on the rocks. The bell sounds for last orders.
“Lucky I got there on time,” he says. “Now, you were gonna tell me somethin’.”
“You asked if Kate was ever in love with me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“This is what I know. During one of the summer breaks from college I went on holiday with Mum to Costa Rica. Without Kate.”
“How come?”
“I didn’t invite her.”
“Why?”
“Because I saw it as a good opportunity to have some time away from her. We lived in each other’s pockets and round about then Kate was very unsettled. And Mum wanted it to be just the two of us. She never really got on with Kate.”
Fortner just nods, takes a sip of his drink.
“My mother and I had rooms quite far apart in the hotel, so that if I came back late at night I wouldn’t disturb her. One night I went clubbing with some people who were also staying in the hotel. We drank a lot, danced, the usual stuff. There was a girl with us that I liked a lot. A Canadian. Don’t remember her name. She’d been hanging around the pool and we’d talked every now and again. She was beautiful, really sexy, and I fancied my chances, y’know? But I’d been with Kate so long that I’d forgotten how to seduce someone.”