Authors: Jonathan Coe
It was not a success. Mark stood at a window overlooking the beach and listened in silence as the negotiations broke down amid accusations of hidden agendas on the one hand and over-regulation on the other. Never once taking his eyes from the strip of silver sand, he heard the Americans snap their cases shut and walk out. He heard Hussein grunt and complain that ‘Those guys need their brains examining. They just threw away the chance to become rich.’ Mark didn’t answer. He was the only person in the room not to have lost his temper. The money would have been useful, but he would make it up. He’d try the Germans next.
The day before, he had driven out through the Everglades to the Gulf Coast. A morning’s drive took him to Naples, along the Tamiami Trail with its Indian villages reconstituted as tourist attractions, its airboat rides and roadside cafés offering frogs’ legs and gator-burgers. From there he took the freeway north through Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, and arrived outside Sarasota late in the afternoon. His mother’s address, although he had never used it on any letter, was committed to memory. But Mark did not want to speak to her even now. He didn’t even ask himself why he had come. Once he had found the house, he drove another half a mile down the ocean road and turned off down a dirt track which led to the beach. When he parked at the end of this track, he had a good view of the house.
Her husband was shopping in town that afternoon, but as chance would have it Mildred herself was in the garden. She’d meant just to sit out and read a magazine, maybe start a letter to her stepdaughter in Vancouver, but she could see that the gardener had made a poor job of weeding the lawn, as usual, and was soon down on her knees pulling the more obstinate specimens up by the root. Almost at once she noticed the man leaning against the bonnet of his car and staring at her. She stood up and looked at him, shielding her eyes against the sun. She recognized him now, but didn’t move, didn’t wave, didn’t call out his name; just returned his impassive gaze. There were hollow spaces where his eyes should have been. At closer quarters, she would have realized that he was wearing mirror sunglasses which reflected nothing but the sky’s deep blue. But Mildred stayed where she was, and after a minute or two she knelt down again and resumed her weeding. The next time she looked up, the man was gone.
∗
September 1988
As Graham’s researches progressed, he began to feel that it would be useful to know something about Mark’s family background, and he remembered that there was someone who could probably help him. Michael Owen’s name had disappeared from the arts pages of the newspapers over the last few years, his novels were no longer to be found anywhere in the shops, and his book about the Winshaws was yet to be published. Perhaps the whole project had never come to anything; but it was just possible, Graham reasoned, that he would still be working on it, and if this was the case, he might have gained access to any amount of valuable inside information (not that he would know what to do with it, since the depth of his political naívety had been made fairly clear even from their few conversations). It was, at the very least, worth making a few phone calls.
The first of these calls was to Joan. It was two or three years since they had been in touch, and he wasn’t even sure that she would still be living in Sheffield, but she answered on the third ring and there was no mistaking the delight in her voice. Yes, she was still in the same job. No, she didn’t let out rooms to students any more. No, she hadn’t got married or started a family or anything like that. Yes, she could certainly try to contact Michael for him, although she didn’t have a current address. Funnily enough she’d been thinking of phoning Graham in the next couple of weeks, because there was a conference in Birmingham at the end of the month, and she’d wondered if he might be interested in meeting up for a drink or something. For old times’ sake. Graham said yes, of course, why not. For old times’ sake.
The strange thing was, as they both reflected afterwards, that in all of the ‘old times’ for the sake of which they had agreed to meet up, they could not remember a single evening which had ended with them leaning across the table to kiss each other, or lying down on the sofa with their arms around each other and their tongues in each other’s mouths, or falling into bed together and making love as if their lives depended on it. And yet all of these things happened, in sequence, when Joan came down for her visit to Birmingham. And once they had happened, she found herself curiously reluctant to leave and return to her house, and her job, and her solitary life back in Sheffield. And although she did return, after taking a few days’ unpaid leave (quite a bit of it being spent in bed with Graham), one of the first things she did was to put the house up for sale. At the same time she started looking for jobs in the Midlands. It took a while, because jobs were not easy to come by, not even for someone as experienced and well-qualified as Joan, but in the new year she managed to get a position running a women’s refuge in Harborne, and she moved in with Graham, and one day in February they both took time off to visit the local register office, and then suddenly they were married: he who had always believed that he wasn’t the marrying type, and she who had begun to think she had left it too late to find anyone to marry her.
And so Graham’s initial phone call had by no means been wasted, even though he never did manage to get in contact with Michael. He seemed to have gone away for a long holiday: or perhaps he just wasn’t answering the telephone any more.
∗
1981
The wedding of Mark Winshaw to Lady Frances Carfax in the chapel of St John’s College, Oxford, had been an altogether grander affair. Britain may have been in the grip of recession, but it seemed to have had little impact on those select members of the aristocracy and business community who attended the ceremony and afterwards convened at the country seat of the Carfax family for a lavish party which was still going strong (according to at least one of the newspaper reports) at four o’clock the next afternoon.
The party, in fact, lasted longer than the marriage.
Mark and Lady Frances had departed the revels early in the evening and joined a flight to Nice: from there, a taxi took them to Mark’s villa on the Riviera, where they were to begin their honeymoon. They arrived shortly after midnight, and slept in until lunchtime the next day, when Lady Frances borrowed one of Mark’s cars to drive into the nearest village and buy some cigarettes. She had only driven a few hundred yards when there was a huge explosion and the car burst into flames, careering off the road and into the stony mountainside. She was killed instantly.
Mark was devastated by the loss. The car was a 1962 Morgan Plus 8 Drop Head Coupé in midnight blue, one of about three or four left in the world, and it would be impossible to replace. He contacted his cousin Henry, who instructed the intelligence services to find out who was responsible, but didn’t have to wait for the results of their inquiry. Three weeks later an Iraqi diplomat contacted him and arranged a rendezvous in Cavendish Square. From there they drove to a secluded house in the Kent countryside. A pristine, off-white 1938 La Salle convertible sedan was parked in the forecourt.
‘It’s yours,’ said the diplomat.
He explained that a comical misunderstanding had arisen. They were well aware, of course, that Mark did business with the Iranians as well as with themselves: they would have expected nothing less from any serious entrepreneur. However, it had been wrongly suggested by an informer that Mark had also been using his position to trade military secrets. Saddam had been most upset to hear this, and had ordered swift retribution. Now the information was found to have been false: the real culprit had been identified and promptly disposed of. They could only be grateful, he said, that chance had intervened to save the life of an innocent man and a most valued friend of the Iraqi people. They were acutely conscious of the damage done to his property, and hoped that he would accept the gift of this car as a token of their continued affection and esteem.
Mark’s formal expressions of gratitude concealed his genuine annoyance at this incident. Marriage to Lady Frances would have been useful. He had been rather looking forward to the sexual aspect – although, to be honest, in terms of imagination and athleticism she could not really compare with the prostitutes whose services he was usually offered on his trips to Baghdad – but, more importantly, her father had a number of influential contacts in the South American market, which he was anxious to infiltrate. In all probability he would still be able to use them, but it would have been easier if his young and glamorous wife had been there to help.
Above all, Mark found it unacceptable that someone should have been telling lies about him, and he was determined to have his revenge. After several months’ sporadic investigation it emerged that the informer had been a leading Egyptian physicist recently recruited to Iraq’s nuclear programme. Anxious to ingratiate himself with his new employers, he had repeated this piece of idle gossip after overhearing it from a conversation between two colleagues; but he had not bothered to find out whether it was accurate or not. Although the Iraqis were furious to discover that they had been misled, the physicist himself was too valuable to be eliminated, and nothing was ever done about it. Mark, however, had other ideas. He knew that the Israelis would be only too pleased to be presented with an opportunity for thwarting Saddam’s military ambitions, and some discreet words in the ear of a contact at Mossad were enough to seal the luckless Egyptian’s fate. It happened when he was staying in Paris,
en route
from the experimental research centre at Saclay where Iraqi technicians were routinely trained under a nuclear cooperation programme with France. He retired to his hotel bedroom early and the next morning his crushed and battered body was found at the foot of his bed by a chambermaid. Beating a man to death is a long, noisy and difficult business, and Mark was surprised that they had chosen this method. Even so, he permitted himself a private smile when the news was announced on Israel radio the next evening; and when he heard the reporter add that ‘Iraqi projects to acquire an atomic bomb have been set back by two years’, he smiled again, because his own fortunes, after all, were hardly likely to suffer as a result.
∗
October 1986
‘So tell me about this Hussein character,’ said Henry, as he and Mark sat in a state of post-prandial near-collapse on opposite sides of a blazing log fire in the withdrawing room of the Heartland Club. The family small talk had been disposed of (never a lengthy process with the Winshaws) and they had just lit up two enormous Havana cigars.
‘What do you want to know?’ said Mark.
‘Well, I mean, you’ve met him personally, haven’t you? Done business with him, and so on. What sort of cove is he?’
Mark puffed thoughtfully. ‘Difficult to say, really. He doesn’t tend to give much away about himself.’
‘Yes, but look,’ said Henry, leaning forward. ‘We’re treading on very delicate ground here. The man’s offering to write a blank cheque for us, as far as I can see. Guns, planes, missiles, bombs, bullets – you name it, he wants it, and if we aren’t prepared to sell then he’s just going to go to the French or the Germans or the Yanks or the Chinese. We can’t afford to let this opportunity slip. The export figures are terrible enough as it is – even after we’ve finished tinkering with them. But, you know, there may be a few eyebrows raised if we start getting too friendly with a chap whose idea of fun is shooting a couple of thousand volts through the odd political prisoner. Which I gather he’s not averse to doing.’
‘Malicious rumour,’ said Mark, waving his cigar smoke away airily. ‘I’ve seen nothing to substantiate it.’
‘Take a look at this, for instance,’ said Henry, producing a crumpled pamphlet from the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘We were sent this thing from’ (he looked at the name on the first page) ‘SODI, they seem to call themselves. The Supporters of Democracy in Iraq. I tell you, it makes pretty nasty reading. What do you make of it?’
Mark glanced over the pamphlet, his eyelids half-closed. Most of the details were already familiar to him. He knew all about the arbitrary arrests, the midnight raids, the trumped-up charges of dissidence or subversion, of belonging to the wrong sort of organization or attending the wrong sort of meeting, of refusing to join the Ba’ath party or agreeing to join the wrong wing of the Ba’ath party. He knew all about the unimaginable conditions in Baghdad’s ‘Department of Public Security’, where detainees would be held in solitary confinement for months at a time, or made to lie on the floor of a cell with fifty or sixty other prisoners, listening to the recorded screams of torture victims by night and the real screams by day. And he knew all about this torture, too: how men and women were flayed, burned, beaten and sodomized with truncheons and bottles; scalded with domestic irons, their eyes, ears, noses and breasts cut off, electric shocks applied to their fingers, genitals and nostrils; how the torturers would wear animal masks and play tape recordings of wild animals as they went about their business; how children were tortured in front of their mothers, and placed blindfold in sacks filled with insects or starved cats; how men and women would be made to lie on their backs on the floor, their feet supported by wooden stocks, then beaten on the soles of their feet with truncheons and forced to walk or run over floors soaked with hot salty water. Mark had heard it all before, which was why he barely glanced at the pamphlet through half-closed lids before handing it back to his cousin.
‘Wildly exaggerated, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘These fringe groups do tend to attract fanatics: you can’t take anything they say at face value.’
‘So you don’t think Hussein is involved with any of this?’
‘Well, he’s firm, there’s no denying that,’ said Mark, pursing his lips. ‘Firm but fair: that’s how I’d describe him.’
‘A bit of a rough diamond, you mean?’
‘A rough diamond. Exactly.’