Engleby (30 page)

‘I’ve heard of Montrachet. It’s famous, isn’t it?’

‘Not Mon-
trash
-ay, Groucho. The “t” is silent. Think of it like Mont Blanc. Mont Rachet.’

‘I’ve only heard it said the other way.’

‘A common error. In both senses. I’m having Chicken Madras.’

I didn’t mind Stellings correcting my pronunciation. Fine wines was not an area Mug Benson took us into during preparation for O-level oral, though come to think of it, he did provide that natty phrase
angoisse des gares
. Perhaps it was his translation that stuck in my mind: ‘It’s that moment when your parents put you on the train at the age of eight and as you puff out of the station you think that you might never see them again.’

Stellings poured the wine, whatever it was called, and banged on euphorically. He seemed to be high on something. ‘Things are changing, Mike. Faster than they’ve ever changed in our lives. Take Gorbachev, for instance. I think he’s going to bring the Cold War to an end.’

‘But he’s a KGB man, isn’t he? Andropov’s protégé?’

‘Yes, but he’s seen the writing on the wall. Do you know how many heart clinics there are in Moscow? One. It’s on the eighth floor of an old building. And there’s no lift. Do you know what the most common form of birth control is in the Soviet Union?’

‘No.’

‘Abortion. The average Soviet woman has six abortions in her life. It’s cheaper than the Pill. Gorby knows they have to have more money. They have to open up to trade.’

‘I feel a bit nostalgic at the thought of that era coming to an end,’ I said. ‘I grew up expecting to die in a nuclear war.’

‘Me too. For the first time in my life, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The fax machine is also partly responsible. And the proliferation of telephones. You can only run a totalitarian society if you keep your citizens in the dark. But the means of information have now overrun their defences. Your average Joe in Irkutsk knows about what’s on offer in the West. He wants colour television, Coca-Cola, Scotch whisky and a choice of candidates. Plus if they don’t make more money they won’t even be able to manufacture tanks.’

Lunch with Stellings brought home to me how little the world had changed in the 30-plus years I’d lived in it. It seemed to me that the divide between West and East was exactly as it had been since 1946, but more deeply entrenched. The Terrors and Gulags and invasions, and all the lies and oppression needed to deny or enforce them, had only made it more difficult for the Eastern Bloc to compromise. They reminded me a little of the police psychologists in the Sutcliffe case. The more you’re challenged, the more rigidly you assert your beliefs. You have nothing to lose because without your beliefs you’re nothing anyway: they make you what you are. It’s shit or bust.

I thought Stellings was mad to think that the Cold War could just come to an end – snap your fingers and it’s over. Say what you like about totalitarian communism, it’s been in Darwinian terms quite a ‘successful’ organism. Because it’s a closed system, it’s to some extent immune to reasoned criticism. Like Christianity or Freudianism, its core beliefs are self-verifying. This may make it ‘unscientific’, but it also makes it formidable.

Future generations may be surprised to know that growing up in a world that you expected to explode at any time was not as frightening as it sounds. But in order to manage the background fear, you had to put it to one side of your mind. And by making that manoeuvre you tacitly admitted that you had – with whatever reservations – accepted the status quo. I found the prospect of it all changing, as outlined by Stellings over a second bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, rather unnerving. A free world? How on earth would the Russkies manage that? No imminent Armageddon? How were any of us meant to live with
that
?

‘And apartheid,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that’ll soon be all over, too.’

‘Shouldn’t wonder,’ said Stellings, sticking a shard of poppadom into the mint sauce.

‘You mean Botha’s just going to say, Sorry, Kaffirs, it’s all been a big mistake. Let’s have elections. And while I’m at it, Mandela can come out of prison. For a start, all the Nelson Mandela student union bars in Britain would have to rename themselves.’

‘I promise you it’ll happen within ten years. Botha won’t last forever. There’s this guy de Klerk coming up. He’s a realist.’

‘I bet you a hundred pounds it doesn’t happen in the next ten years.’

We shook hands.

‘All right, Stellings, here’s one last test before we send for the straitjacket. Women.’

‘What about them?’

‘You know what it’s like at the moment. How we have to pretend that they’re the same as men in every respect. Otherwise you’re a sexist.’

‘You mean the feminism thing.’

‘Yes. We make out that they think, act and feel identically to men. Not just that they deserve equal opportunities and equal pay but that they are at all levels already indistinguishable from men. We know it’s not true. But that’s not the point. What’s required is to pretend that we’re identical. They also know it’s not true. We know they know it’s not true. And they know we know they know we know they know it’s not true. Yet every occasion at which women are present is a test of your orthodoxy. One deviation – and it’s all over. The whole room turns on you and you might as well—’

‘Christ, you must know some real schnauzers out there in Bayswater, Groucho. You should meet Clarissa. Come to dinner one day. After all—’

‘But you know what I mean.’

‘It’s called politics, Groucho. That’s how politics work. You overstate the case. You brook no compromise, take no prisoners, till you’ve got what you want. Equal pay, equal everything. Then you relax.’

‘And when’s that great volte-face due? Friday?’

‘We have to live through this. It could be worse, Mike. If we’d been born in the 1890s we’d have been killed in the first weeks of the Great War. Or twenty years later, on the Normandy beaches. If all our generation has to endure is a bit of flak from grumpy feminists, then—’

‘But what about the whole generation of men who—’

‘It’s better than the Somme.’

‘And do you think that when it’s over we’ll forget the lies we all subscribed to?’

‘Of course! Because it’ll be so much fun we won’t want to bring up the past, we’ll want to forget it asap. By the end of the century it’ll all be forgotten. You’ll have women writing books about their own girlishness. Female chief execs of public companies admitting they can’t read a map. They’ll take pleasure in it. Because they’ll have won the war, they’ll be generous in the peace. There’ll be a boom in pink lipstick and lacy underwear.’

I had to laugh. ‘And will they let us call them “girls” again?’

‘My dear boy, they’ll call
themselves
“girls” again. They’ll call their own films “chick-pics”.’

‘Are you on drugs, Stellings?’

‘Curry leaves and Puligny.’

‘You’re on a different planet.’

‘Though sometimes I do have a tiny sniff of charlie at this time of day. It gets me through the afternoon. Want to join me in the Gents? The manager doesn’t give a stuff.’

I looked at Stellings through the remains of the disembowelled paratha and the empty green Perrier bottle. I hadn’t got much on that afternoon, so I followed him into the toilet.

Things have been going well with Margaret, the woman’s page sub-editor. Since I couldn’t face the canteen, I decided to ask her out to lunch with me. Most journalists don’t eat at lunchtime, they only drink, so it’s quite a palaver proposing a real lunch with knife and fork: people think you’re odd. I already knew Margaret wasn’t a big boozer and that she did eat sometimes (that half-invite to the canteen), so I was hopeful of a yes. First I had to steel myself to ask. I didn’t want to go to the usual place in case I was seen, so I took a blue pill, had a couple of pints of cloudy Burton and large vodka chaser in a fiendish little slit of a pub called the King and Keys, which was full of red-faced men from the
Telegraph
with grey hair and ash on their suits, haranguing one another, already drunk by five past twelve. When I got back, I took the lift to the woman’s-page office on the fourth floor, put my head round the door and popped the question. Margaret looked a bit embarrassed to be asked in front of all her colleagues, but agreed to meet me at the front door at ten to one, by which time she was looking slightly more made-up and coiffed.

We went to a Chinese called City Friends, near the Old Bailey. She told me she’d been married and divorced. He was a crime reporter for the
Sunday Express
and they’d met when both were working briefly for some regional paper. I gathered he was a big drinker and used to knock her about. She had custody of a girl, now ten years old, called Charlotte; they lived in a flat in Holloway. Derek, the husband, no longer visited, though his standing order towards maintenance had so far been honoured.

Margaret squeezed some rice between her chopsticks. ‘I always look at the
Sunday Express
first and make sure he’s got a piece in. That way he’ll be happy and won’t drink so much and he’ll keep his job.’

Like me, she’d stumbled into newspapers. She came from Hertfordshire somewhere and, reading between the lines, I gathered that her family were a bit smarter than the Englebys (hard not to be). Local high school, some sort of further ed at the tech. Then, after spells as a secretary and a job in ‘marketing’, she met someone who suggested she train at Hemel Hempstead with a newspaper group. Thence to the regional rag where she met boozer Derek: a bit of news, some feature writing, but she had no ambitions in that direction, she preferred editing and layout. Couple of jobs with IPC (
Woman’s Realm, Woman’s Work, Woman’s Trouble
), and then on to the Sunday paper, where she liked it very much indeed. She was six years older than I was, though she could have passed for a bit more. Marriage, children, the uncertainty of Derek . . . I don’t know; but while she wasn’t exactly motherly, she seemed experienced. What was nice about her was that she didn’t come over as embittered. She was candid, optimistic and polite. She offered to pay for lunch, but I didn’t let her.

I hadn’t a clue how to move on to the next stage, whether she wanted there to be a next stage, or in fact whether
I
wanted there to be one. I hoped, perhaps, that with her greater worldliness she might take charge.

The interview with Ken Livingstone didn’t go quite as well as I’d expected.

I did try to be something completely new – disarming, liberating, original – but he treated me with world-weariness, as though he’d dealt with my type a million times before.

We met in the Greater London Council offices at 10.30 on 29 May, 1985. It’s always rather odd when you meet someone who’s been so much written about. I couldn’t help but expect a bloody-handed ogre of the tumbrils; instead, I saw a tall, knock-kneed figure emerge from the humdrum twilight of a local government committee room, at the end of a long wood-panelled corridor. I wasn’t sure if it was Robespierre or the borough surveyor of Dudley.

We had some milky coffee from a trolley brought in by a tea lady. Mrs Thatcher doesn’t like Ken’s policies, but he keeps getting elected, so she’s had to close down the whole GLC. It was the only thing she could do. Short of having him rubbed out, I suppose. He’s off to be an MP now for Brent East, wherever that is. It’s a parliamentary invention rather than a real place; there was nowhere called Brent in the
A to Z
when I looked. I think it may take in the area round Harlesden and Dollis Hill. I remember taking the Harlesden night bus once and I was the only white man on it. (Ken must know where it is, though, because the very last thing he did as GLC leader was to give Brent, his future base, a ‘stress grant’ of two million pounds.)

He had no qualms about leaving his fellow-travellers in the scuppered GLC. He was quite perky about the whole thing, in a sour, corner-of-the-mouth way. ‘The orthodox Trots have never taken on board minority groups, like blacks and gays,’ he said. ‘But we can now make a permanent new governing majority in Britain.’

I tried to picture the kind of cabinet this grouping might throw up.

‘By the “orthodox Trots”, do you mean people like . . . Like what’s his name. The leader of Lambeth Council.’

‘Ted Knight. Yeah, those people live in a workerist laager.’

Wow. I hadn’t heard anyone speak like that since I was a student. Anyway, I quickly got the boring stuff out of the way, and began to ask from my list of ‘interesting’ questions.

‘What are your favourite books?’

‘I never went to college so I never got into reading much.’

‘You must have gone to school?’

‘Yeah, but I was useless at school.’

‘Isn’t it a problem being badly educated?’ (I was thinking how I could be working in the paper mill.)

‘No. It teaches you to trust gut prejudices. You mustn’t allow facts to divert your instincts.’

‘But you must have read
something
?’

‘Yeah, well I suppose about seventy per cent of what I’ve read’s been science fiction.’