Gull (27 page)

‘Jennings!’ DeLorean said. It sounded a lot like delight. Jennings merely nodded. Behind him the secretary of state emerged, broad face, hair swept back.

‘I believe you have already spoken,’ said Jennings.

‘A pleasure to meet you at last.’

Prior took the hand that DeLorean offered. ‘I was about to say the same thing.’

‘You know Edmund?’

Prior smiled blandly in Randall’s direction. ‘You are most welcome.’

They entered a room with tall windows at one end looking across a lawn to a rather fine-looking glasshouse and, at the room’s very centre, a table on which sat a telephone twice as large as any Randall had ever seen and around which they took their seats and waited. Five minutes. Ten.

Prior made a show of consulting his watch. ‘The cabinet meeting must have overrun.’

DeLorean held up both hands in a gesture of magnanimity. ‘Who are we to curtail the exercise of democracy?’

Jennings pursed his lips and went to the door, opening it and almost immediately closing it again. ‘I thought I heard the tea trolley,’ he said, a second before a light began to flash orange below the telephone’s dial and a voice –
that
voice – seemed to fill the entire room.

‘Gentlemen, I do apologise for keeping you waiting. I trust I haven’t missed anything.’

The gentlemen, one and all, jumped to, sitting up in their seats, squaring their shoulders in their suit jackets. (Randall could still not quite believe how quickly he had been admitted into this:
the prime minister of the United Kingdom was virtually in the same room
.)

DeLorean spoke before any of them. ‘I was just telling Jim, Prime Minister, that we have an order coming in from the United Arab Emirates.’

It was the first that anyone seated around the table had heard it, but it was said with such conviction that Prior actually looked to Jennings as though to make sure he had not suffered an actual bout of amnesia.

‘So’ – Mrs Thatcher’s voice did not waver – ‘we can expect to see you start to pay back...
how
much is it exactly we have advanced you?’

Prior – trying to get back on the front foot, or at least return the discomfiture – leaned in towards the phone. ‘Sixty-five million pounds, not counting the ten million compensation claim.’ (Which was never paid in full, Randall wanted to remind him, but missed his moment.) ‘About eleven thousand pounds for every car that has been built to date.’

He sat back, folding his arms. DeLorean carried on as though he had not spoken at all.

‘The thing is, Prime Minister, we are on the point here of a major – and I mean
major
– breakthrough. The market is primed.’

‘The market, I’ve heard, is stagnant,’ Prior said and could not have sounded more the sulky English public schoolboy.

‘Well if you don’t mind me saying, you maybe need to get your hearing checked. We are on course to post a profit for the first five quarters of operation.’ Randall had seen the projections just the day before: it was true. ‘If your own Member – is that the word you use? – had not put about those rumours in the fall we would have floated the company weeks ago and taken things on to the next stage.’ All this was directed at the suddenly not-so-very-Old Carthusian to his right. The next line, however, was delivered straight to the phone in a tone so intimate that Prior – and Jennings, and Randall come to that – might as well not have been in the room. ‘You have my word, Prime Minister, every penny owing will have been repaid by this time next year.’

‘Your word?’ Thatcher, from
her
tone, was somewhat disarmed.

‘Absolutely.’ His hand as he said this was pressed, hard, against his heart. ‘In the short term, though’ – the hand that had been on his heart was now flat on the table – ‘we are going to need one final cash injection.’

Prior’s eyebrows rose, his jaw dropped. Next to him Jennings’s face was a frozen mask of horror. Randall had angled himself towards DeLorean, poised to speak, but he was not about to be interrupted or deflected. It was him and the prime minister, to use the old telephone operator’s phrase, person to person.

‘
Another
one?’

‘A final one.’

‘And you were thinking of...?’

‘What the flotation would have raised: forty-seven million pounds.’

Jennings’s eyes closed, Prior’s eyebrows practically disappeared into his high hairline. The phone on the table, despite its bulk, actually vibrated.

Randall, meanwhile, had pulled a notebook towards him and scribbled down what he had been trying a moment before to say. He tore off the page and pushed it in front of DeLorean who read what was written there verbatim and as though he had all along intended to say it.

‘If you could show the same flexibility that you showed to Lear Fan here last December
thirty-second
.’

Up went Jennings’s eyelids. Down came Prior’s brows. The phone’s vibrating (if Randall had not seen it with his own eyes he would not have believed it) stopped.

‘I’ll leave it with you then,’ DeLorean said, and stood. ‘Prime Minister... Secretary of State... Jennings.’

He and Randall were on the steps down to the car before he spoke again. ‘Are you going to explain that one to me?’

Only partly was the answer. ‘A friend of a friend who I fell into conversation with last week,’ Randall said. It was, June assured him, a momentary premarital lapse, occasioned by the cassette tape inlay and the couple of drinks they had had when he called at her place to talk it over. She sat up at one point in bed (hers and her fiancé’s, he supposed). ‘I never told you Aaron’s story,’ she said. ‘That last time he was back and went for the interview.’

‘This friend’s friend knows someone pretty senior in the engineering side of things,’ Randall told DeLorean. ‘According to him it was an open secret among all the managers. The deadline for the first test flight was the end of December, their funding was supposed to be dependent on it, then someone in the Northern Ireland Office came up with the helpful idea of adding a day on to the year, and hey presto, they got a plane up on the thirty-second, they got the money.’

DeLorean was shaking his head as they got into the car. The driver started the engine, which automatically started the cassette player. Drums, drums, clarinet. Randall had forgotten he had given him it. He leaned forward to tell the driver to shut it off after all. ‘No,’ DeLorean said. ‘Leave it.’ He listened appreciatively. ‘Well, what do you know?’

*

Liz did have some sympathy for Robert. The last time she had gone to a works Christmas party she had performed oral sex in a stationery cupboard – on Robert, mind you, although the fact that knowing that
he
had submitted to a stationery-cupboard blowjob (to take the passive view of his role in the escapade)
she
had allowed him to go on his own to eighteen more dos since – all those silly wee clerk-typists tipsy on QC-wine punch – was evidently lost on him.

She could sense, throughout the week leading up to it, him struggling not to object. She would nearly rather he had got it out and over with. (She actually wondered for the first time whether she ought to have been more suspicious in the past of those clerk-typists, whether it was not just inconsistency he was battling but hypocrisy.) Instead it was left to her to take a bit of heat out of the situation. (She never pretended to be above a bit of hypocrisy of her own.)

‘I doubt I’ll stay that long... the place will be so noisy and packed, it’ll be worse than the factory when it’s going full pelt...’ And so on.

Of course she was hoping to see Randall. Not with any stationery-cupboard thoughts in mind, God, no, but they had not left things in a good way. She had to be able to work with him long term without tension or without worrying that he felt she had led him on or let him down.

And there was a bit of her too that hoped maybe, down the line, they could sit somewhere every now and again and... no more than that, really. Just sit.

She bought a blouse from Marks and Spencer and tried it on at home for Robert’s approval.

‘Is it cut a bit too low at the front, do you think?’ she asked.

‘Maybe. A fraction. I don’t know.’

‘No’ – she plucked at the neckline – ‘definitely, it is. I’ll have to return it.’

‘But what will you wear?’

‘I have that black one.’

‘The black one?’

‘I got last year. Remember?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

So she took the new blouse back and wore the black one, as she had all along intended, not cut so low, but neater fitting in all the places that neater mattered.

‘Look at you!’ one of the boys said when she walked into the living room. She had been experimenting a bit with her hair, back-combing it to give it volume. A touch too much volume maybe. ‘Siouxsie Sioux!’

Robert’s brow furrowed. ‘Who’s Siouxsie Sioux?’

Both boys laughed.

‘Who? You mean
what...
’

‘She’s a dog’s dinner.’

‘Thank you, and thank you.’ Liz nodded to them each in turn. ‘Lovely to be appreciated.’

Robert patted her shoulder. ‘Never mind them. I think you look all right.’

He dropped her at the security gate in front of the hotel. ‘Pick you up again here at ten?’

‘Are you sure now? I could always call a taxi, there’s bound to be somebody else going the same way.’

‘You never know the taxis round here,’ he said. ‘It’s no trouble anyway.’

‘I kind of didn’t think it would be,’ she said under her breath as he drove away. Still: ten – she had more than three hours.

The place was, as she had predicted in her heat-reduction offensive, chock-a-block. The first of her section she found – a full quarter of an hour after arriving – was Amanda, braced in a corner of the bar, holding off all-comers with her elbows.

‘Explain white to me,’ she said beneath the general clamour.

‘As in...?’

‘Vodka and white.’

‘Oh, you mean lemonade?’

‘And a body wouldn’t just think to say that?’

‘No, because you might get brown.’

‘And how would that be different?’

‘Well, it would just be, I don’t know,
brown
.’

Amanda screwed her face up. ‘Right enough. But, here, while I’m getting, what you having yourself?’

‘Are you sure? Pernod and...’

‘White? Black?’

‘Water.’

Amanda smiled. ‘I like the hair, by the way. Do I know you well enough yet to tell you it takes years off you?’

‘As of this minute, yes.’

They found Anto standing, nursing a pint, on the edge of a group of men reminiscing about their retraining trip to the States – or so Liz deduced from the index fingers of one of the men, held level with his chest and twirling this way and that, like tassels.

‘Ladies!’ one of them said at their approach and Amanda made a show of looking over her shoulder.

‘No, you’re all clear. Carry on.’

So of course they didn’t.

‘No book with you the night?’ Liz asked Anto.

‘I was afraid it would spoil the line of my jacket.’

His jacket could have taken a couple of dictionaries without noticeable effect. All the same, Liz decided that the very fact of it, like the lack of a book, constituted a Serious Effort. As for the tie, though...

Anto flipped up the broad blade between two fingers. She must have been staring.

‘A bit of a horror show, isn’t it?’

There was tan in there, there was cream and royal blue, there were two shades of green, either side of something verging on crimson, all apparently alarmed to see one another. She returned his grimace. ‘Just a bit.’

A couple of minutes later TC arrived, looking, in his black bomber jacket and jeans, like he had made no effort at all.

‘I’m dead sorry, I came here straight from the Tech,’ he said before his smile got the better of him. ‘And guess what? I got my Level Three. No way they’re not going to make me a supervisor now.’

Amanda told him the first thing he had to do was supervise a round of drinks. Liz hugged him. Anto shook his hand. ‘Fair play to you, you worked hard for it. There’s not many your age would have the dedication.’

TC looked about him, a hundred and eighty degrees in this direction, a hundred and eighty in that. ‘I hope I didn’t miss the star turn.’

*

DeLorean had wanted to detour by Warren House, ‘get a proper look at those goddamn faucets’ – ‘what an ass,’ was all he could say afterwards – and make a couple calls, the shorter to Cristina and the kids, the longer, by several hundred per cent, to Chapman. From what Randall could not avoid hearing (DeLorean was clicking his fingers looking for something to write on) Chapman ought to have been in Dubai earlier in the month for an exhibition Grand Prix but failed to show in a fit of pique with the Formula 1 authorities who had banned his latest Lotus from two races earlier in the season. Randall had followed that part of the saga at any rate in the papers: technical violations, was the reason the authorities gave. ‘What we used to call innovation,’ Chapman was quoted as saying.

‘I am as frustrated as the next misunderstood engineering genius, but that was an opportunity missed for us,’ said DeLorean when he had put the phone down, his tongue as close to his cheek as was compatible with speech. (It was, wasn’t it?) ‘I had been talking up the Lotus link in my conversations with the sheikh. He’s a big, big fan.’

Their car, with the DeLoreland tape still playing, finally made it to the front door of the hotel only eighty minutes behind schedule.

A row of faces on the other side of the glass rearranged themselves into smiles.

‘Looks like they have laid on a welcoming committee,’ the driver said.

There were a lot of not-at-alls and of-course-of-courses as DeLorean’s hand did the rounds. The local society magazine wanted a few photos in the vestibule: the hotel manager and Mr DeLorean; the hotel manager and the hotel manager’s wife and Mr DeLorean; the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, the hotel manager and Mr DeLorean; the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, her husband, the hotel manager, the hotel manager’s wife... He left a trail of photos such as these wherever he went, a fact he had apparently alluded to in a conversation with Bill Haddad, when Bill – in his version of it, played out in the Grill Room of the Waldorf Astoria this time a year ago – had first raised concerns about some of his business dealings. ‘“Anyone wants to know where I’ve been and who I’ve been talking to any time in the last five years all he has to do is buy the papers, or find a computer that can read the papers for him.”’ It wasn’t a bad impersonation, it had to be said, and not, to Randall’s ears then, especially vindictive. ‘As though computers have nothing better to do with their brains,’ Bill said, himself again, and, yes, maybe Randall should have heard it, with a definite twist.