A celebration which proves that there is no goodness without malice
It was below freezing, nothing like as bad as the winter of 1962, of course, which people still talk about here, a winter when they say you couldn’t have gone outside for fear of blinking and your eyeballs freezing over, a winter when the headlines from the Impartial Recorder told pretty much the whole story: ‘THE BIG CHILL’, announced the paper one week, and then ’THE BIG FREEZE’ the next and, finally, ’THE BIG THAW’. Back then, when the thaw eventually turned to flooding, the sewers collapsed at the top of Main Street and there was a tide of unspeakable waste – about fifty years’ worth of town centre dregs and spoilings – that swept down towards the Quality Hotel and took half the new tarmac road surface with it. The Impartial Recorder – whose own basement composing room and presses were under 3 feet of filth and water, and which only made it to the news-stands due to the valiant efforts of Ron English, who had served at Verdun in the First World War and who had sandbagged around his precious old Linotype machine – ran a one-word headline: ’DELUGE!’* The last time the paper had resorted to an exclamation mark was on VE Day, and since 1962 we’ve had only four more: President Kennedy, men on the moon, Princess Diana and the big winds in 1989.
It’s nothing like as bad as that now, nothing like exclamation mark weather, but it’s certainly cold enough to make you catch your breath – it’s more like comma kind of weather, you might say, or maybe a semicolon. You could feel the cold from the top of your balding head right through to the bottom of your thin-soled shoes as soon as you stepped Outside the door, and you could tell that people all across town were making a mental note to ask for a hat-and-glove set this year from Santa, and to go up and see John ‘The Leatherman’ Brown, who has relocated from his old premises on the windy exposed corner of Commercial Street and Main Street, to the twenty-four-hour warmth of Bloom’s, but who has retained his same sense of humour, the same mechanical cobbling gnome and the same sign in his window: ‘Time Wounds All Heels’. And he still doesn’t accept cheques or credit cards.
We like to drive everywhere here in town, obviously, if we can, from home to school to work, to Bloom’s and back again, to avoid walking, even in summer, but in this weather you tend to see even fewer people out on the streets than usual. Sales of de-icer and thermal socks and Bisto and Bird’s custard powder were brisk, and in Scarpetti’s, Mr Hemon was dismayed to see only his regulars. It was not weather for passing trade or for popping out for a cup of tea, chips, peas and Irish stew (£2) or a curry sauce baked potato with cheese. It was weather to stay at home, to put on your slippers and to eat cook-from-frozen supermarket pies, sweet or savoury, or preferably both.
But Christmas was coming and at Christmas you can learn to love the cold a little, you can learn to reach out and linger with it for a moment, to appreciate that festive chill as you stride to the bus stop or to the car with your kettle, allowing your shiver merely to increase the anticipation of your first warming glass of wine at your office party, or your seasonal Advocaat with lemonade and a glacé cherry, or that extra £20 in the pay packet. Christmas was coming, thank goodness, and the sun had been shining all day, high in a cold blue sky, and there had been a slow and steady build-up of heat and excitement in the glass-fronted offices of the Impartial Recorder. Looking out from the freezing, broken windows of the Quality Hotel, if you were a pigeon, say, or a big fat chilly rat up from the sewers, looking out across the car park deserted by even the most hardy of skaters towards the red neon lights of the Impartial Recorder, you’d have been feeling pretty jealous of what we humans sometimes get to enjoy, even in the depths of winter. In the offices of the Impartial Recorder the egg-nog, the champagne and the cocktail sausages were flowing, and anyone or anything, a pigeon even, or a rat, from a distance, could have sensed that strange human glow, that exaggerated, cartoonish extra-physical presence of people with something to celebrate. It was difficult even for Colin Rimmer not to feel excited.
Like most of us, Colin preferred to hide his emotions, if at all possible. He was impassive – not a word we use often here, but if we did, we would use it as a term of praise. Impervious is good also, obviously, and imperturbable is a state to aspire to. Before Colin, the editor of the Impartial Recorder had been a man called Ivan, Ivan Nolan, who had a Russian name and a Mediterranean temperament, but who came from Magherafelt. Ivan was the classic hysterical style of editor, one of the rant-and-tirade brigade, who’d had a brief career on the night desk on a tabloid in London and who was someone as likely to embrace you when you’d found a good story as to shout at you when you hadn’t. Ivan was a man of the moment, and it showed, both in his life and in his death. Basically, Ivan lived the life of a feral animal – he had the intelligence of a fox and the instincts of a polecat, and all the appetites of a grizzly bear – and he died of a heart attack, while drinking champagne out on his yacht, a ridiculous luxury he could hardly afford and could barely sail, while married to his third wife, who was twenty-two years younger than him and a former model.
‘Where did it all go wrong?’ people asked at his funeral.
Colin isn’t like that. Colin is going to die of cancer, probably, slowly, alone and with grim determination. Colin was not Ivan. Colin valued consistency and he’d always tried to be measured: tough but fair, that was his motto. To be honest, Colin believed that you couldn’t afford to have emotions in his line of work. He believed you had to choose very carefully what to get upset and excited about, even though we don’t actually have that much to get upset and excited about here in town and frankly the chance would be a fine thing. Nonetheless, as the editor of a journal of record, Colin felt that he could not allow himself to get carried away even with our little dramas, our little local triumphs and tragedies. He believed you had to keep things in perspective, even here, a place of infinite receding perspectives. There were only so many times, it seemed to Colin, that you could write the words ‘The driver of the vehicle, who has not been named, died when the car struck the tree’, or ‘The couple, who were engaged to be married, were both killed instantly when the car they were travelling in crossed the central reservation’, only so many times you could write those words before your emotions learnt to take the back seat and wear a seat belt. In twenty years of reporting for local newspapers Colin had had to cover every kind of fatal car crash, house fire and miserable scene of crime and suspected suicide, and you simply could not afford to get caught up in all that. ‘Local family struck by tragedy’, these were words that Colin had written many, many times, but you always had to handle them carefully: they had a way of creeping up your arm and into your mind, killing off a little part of you, a part which Colin tried to keep alive by listening to the music of U2, buying box-set videos of classic TV comedy series and working on his magnum opus. There were also sentences, of course, which began ‘He grew the 10-foot sunflower in a bag of tomato feed’, or ‘The congregation presented him with an inscribed crystal vase’, or ‘Five-times local pie-eating champion’, and these words and phrases killed off other parts of the self, parts which Colin did his best to keep alive by reading hard-boiled American crime fiction, watching thrillers and smoking cigars at every opportunity. To be an editor, particularly the editor of the Impartial Recorder, is to learn to maintain oneself between contraries. To be fully human here, we believe, is to learn how to keep a straight face: smiles are frowned upon and frowns are for the short-sighted.
Tonight, though, was a night to let it all hang out, a night for enthusiasm and emotions, and big grins. Tonight it was a cigar for yourself and for all your friends.
Unfortunately, Colin does not believe in friends. In a small town like ours, where there is only so much love and hatred to go round, some of your friends will eventually inevitably become your ex-friends and some of them will become your enemies. Colin did not wish to run this risk. He was divorced already, after all, and so his ex-friends included his children, his erstwhile in-laws and everyone who had forked out for wedding presents. Friendship, in Colin’s opinion, like marriage, marble cheese domes and non-stick frying pans, was overrated. He didn’t really have time for friends, unless those friendships were carefully cultivated, in which case they became contacts rather than friends, part of the network, part of Colin’s local landscape of stories and sources. Colin felt happier dealing with employees, people whom he could rely upon, because they were being paid money to perform a task.
It was cigars for your employees, then, tonight.
A cigar for Billy Nibbs, his top undercover reporter. And for good old Tudor Cassady, who handled Arts and Features. For Gilbert, on Sports. For the whole team, for the reporters, the subs, the production staff. For Mervyn, Minnie, Rosie, Terry, Elaine, Joan, Patricia, Archie and for Lena, Regina and Philomena, the weird sisters, as Colin called them, the three newsroom managers, who kept the whole place going and who got through a packet of biscuits each per day, bourbons for Lena, custard creams for Regina and Rich Tea for Philomena, who’s on a diet. Colin paid for the biscuits out of his own pocket; it was important to keep the ladies sweet. A cigar and a biscuit even for Justin Grieve, with his novelty cuff links and his £30 haircuts, who was the advertising manager and a thorn in Colin’s side. A cigar, certainly, for the office cleaner, Mrs Portek, who had given up smoking, with her husband, using the patches, two years ago, and who had a mouthful of gold teeth. She said she’d keep the cigar for her son, Johnny, who was back in Poland at the moment, looking for a wife. Local girls lacked a little something, according to Mrs Portek. Class, perhaps. Or warmth.
Mrs Portek called Colin the King Pig, because his office was a mess. It was like a pigsty, according to Mrs Portek, although in fact it was more like a hamster cage or a cat litter tray. Colin lived among newspapers much as a pet hamster lives among them. They were everywhere, the papers, little scraps torn out and tucked into box files with no names or sorted into vast yellowing piles. Colin read all the dailies and the Sundays, and he also subscribed to Time magazine, Hello!, the New Yorker and The Economist, and he occasionally bought men’s magazines, purely for research. He had two computers, two TVs and two radios in the office, which were on all the time. At home he had broadband, satellite, and a TV and radio in every room, and he’d had to install an alarm – someone had tried to get in one night, whether to get hold of some of his many consumer durables or for some other purpose it wasn’t entirely clear. The police had suggested that Colin might like to review his personal security measures: he was the editor of a paper, after all, which meant some people were going to take exception to what he printed, even if it was only inaccurate cinema listings or grammatical errors, and Colin had indeed received calls in the night sometimes, telling him that they were coming to get him, but they never did.
Colin knew that there were some strange people out there, people who were obsessed with split infinitives, for example, and who clearly had too much time on their hands, but he didn’t think they were mad enough or bored enough actually to come and kill him, so he wasn’t too concerned. Even the threatening letters he’d been receiving had turned out to be from Spencer Bradley, who was upset about losing his bat watch column. Colin had decided not to press charges. But there were a few others, more serious, who might have been keen to get at him: there was a garage owner, Roger Manon, for example, who’d been exposed by the Impartial Recorder and taken to court over his Health and Safety record. One night Roger had arrived down at Colin’s house with a big knife and a claw hammer, and had proceeded to ring on Colin’s front door and show him what he intended to do to Colin the next time he gave him any trouble, by slashing the tyres on his car, smashing the windscreen and breaking off the wing mirrors. Unfortunately for Roger, it wasn’t actually Colin’s car; it was his next door neighbour’s, Brendan’s, and you don’t mess with Brendan. Brendan drives a lorry for T. P. McArdle, and T. P. is one of Roger’s best clients at the garage, so mad Roger Manon had gladly agreed to pay for the damage and then some on top, and so his little plan of intimidation hadn’t worked, although for a while afterwards Colin did get dog shit through the letter box. Even Roger couldn’t miss with dog shit.
Colin loved it, though. It was a sign he was doing something right. It made him feel like someone important. That’s what kept him going, to be honest.
So, it was cigars tonight, for everyone, for Spencer Bradley and Roger Manon even, in their absence and their madness, for the whole bloody lot of them. A cigar for everyone who had ever read the Impartial Recorder, or appeared in its big beautiful pages. Which is pretty much all of us.*
Colin had always loved the idea of working for a paper. Not necessarily the Impartial Recorder, of course – he thought maybe it would be something more like the Washington Post, or the Boston Globe, or the Sunday Times. He’d always loved everything about newspapers. When he was growing up, his parents, Fee and Philip, used to spend most of a Sunday reading the papers, drinking sherry, eating roast beef, taking walks and attending evening service at St Martin’s, the parish church, and so newspapers were for ever associated in Colin’s mind with all the forces of good in the world. His heroes when he was growing up were the Sunday Times Insight team, and Woodward and Bernstein, but of course no one on his staff had even heard of Woodward and Bernstein, and the Sunday Times is now merely an advertisement for expensive ladies’ underwear and London restaurants. Everyone on the staff these days just wanted to write hilarious columns about their boyfriends and their crazy lives, just like in the Sunday Times. No one these days seemed to remember what a paper was really for. A paper is supposed to ask the six essential questions: What? When? Who? Where? How? Why? In that order. Although, actually, to be honest, with the Impartial Recorder it was usually just the one essential question, plus a query and a satisfied sigh. Who? Really? Well, well, well.
Everything had changed on the papers within Colin’s lifetime. Colin was old enough to remember galleys, and men in pork-pie hats in pubs, and boys running around with corrected proofs, and cigarette ends piling up in clamshell ashtrays next to typewriters and waste-paper bins full to overflowing. It wasn’t like that now. It was all done on screen now, and e-mail, and press releases, and he seemed to spend half his time in meetings with Justin, talking about advertising features and how much they could wring out of the DIY superstore or Bob Savory if they granted them a full-colour eight-page insert. All the fun had gone out of it. But a night like tonight made it all seem worthwhile.
Colin’s success as an editor and his prodigious work rate he ascribed to his constitution, to alcohol, to Scarpetti’s fried breakfasts with grated Parmesan cheese, to high-tar cigarettes and to prescription drugs. He’d been taking Prozac for about five years now, ever since his wife had left him. You weren’t supposed to be on it for that long, but Doctor Armstrong at the Health Centre didn’t seem too bothered about it, so neither was Colin. He simply kept on with the repeat prescription and there was never a problem. The great thing about the Prozac, Colin had found, was that it smoothed you out. It left you feeling a little less on edge, more satisfied, like you’d already had a couple of glasses of wine, and maybe a gin and tonic a half-hour or so before that, and a small ramekin of hand-cooked crisps, or some Bombay mix. With the Prozac Colin found it easier to take difficult decisions. For example, the decision he had just made: he knew that if he went to press with what he had on Frank Gilbey there’d be trouble. But the Prozac had helped him to understand that he really had no choice. The Prozac offered him the reassurance he needed.
Colin had said to himself, ‘I don’t know about this. This story is going to be controversial.’
And the Prozac had said, ‘Whatever.’
This was going to be Colin Rimmer’s ticket out of here. This was what was finally going to release him from his dependence, his addiction to this town. He had solved a bona fide mystery and now he could leave. He had earned his passage. He was away. Colin had always kept a cycling machine in his office, because he’d read that Harold Evans used to keep a machine in his office, and Harold Evans was another hero. Colin’s cycling machine was planted right in front of the window, amidst the piles of papers, overlooking the car park and the Quality Hotel, and he liked to cycle for twenty miles every morning while watching the breakfast news, and sometimes while he cycled and watched TV he imagined himself cycling up and out of the window and up and up and over the car park, over the top of the Quality Hotel, like the boys in ET, which was his all-time favourite film, and over the ocean to the offices of the New Yorker, where he would park his bicycle outside, and go upstairs and sit down at his manual typewriter and bang out a Talk of the Town. *
Recently, while he’d been cycling, though, Colin had not been thinking about ET or the New Yorker. He had been thinking about Frank Gilbey. There had been plenty of times the Impartial Recorder could have gone for Frank, but they hadn’t; Colin had held off, or his hand had been stayed. There was the mysterious slurry run-off, for example, a few years ago, on the fields around Bloom’s, which had ruined many farmers’ land, and which had allowed for the mall development not only to go ahead but to expand far beyond its original intended limits: Frank was behind it, Colin was sure, but he’d been unable to get enough proof. Then there was the problem with the supply of shoddy materials being used in the building of Bloom’s: large parts of the roof had to be replaced within six months of the mall having opened, at huge expense; the main roofing contractor had subcontracted to a subcontractor who had subcontracted to one of Frank’s development companies, but the complicated paperchase had been too much for Colin to handle on his own. And then, of course, there was the general, unexceptional, unremarked awarding of council contracts to companies either owned by or connected to Frank: Colin knew what went on, everyone knew what went on, but that was just the way things were around here and if that’s the way things were, that’s the way they stayed. There was nothing you could do about it. Colin had other fish to fry. He couldn’t get too excited about it. He remained, as it were, impassive. But in late November, Frank Gilbey had given Colin the excuse he needed and the determination to become implacable.
Colin could just about cope with running sycophantic interviews with councillors: that was part of the job. He could just about cope with the paper’s ridiculous new red masthead, which made it look like an amateur tabloid, but which he agreed was a necessary updating, and he’d managed the big change from the old Linotype machines to computers and photocomposition, which, in his opinion, made the paper look like a cheap photocopied newsletter, and which took away all the romance involved in going to press. He could just about cope with Justin’s continual demands for increases in advertising space, which paid for the paper, after all, and the occasional use of press releases as news, which Colin justified to himself as being due to a lack of staffing. He could even cope with the ghastly syndicated pictures of so-called celebrities, which had begun to creep into the pages, and the slow steady drip of disinformation from the council’s press officer, who now handled all enquiries regarding local council business. The police were the same: you couldn’t get to talk to anyone any more up at the station or in the pubs. It all went through the press office. That was understandable, that was OK. What Colin could not cope with, though, was the distortion of facts. Colin may not have been a Woodward or a Bernstein, he may have failed in all his early ambitions, but he liked to think that his paper stuck to the facts. Facts, Colin believed, were the life and blood of a paper, the spirit and the soul, and they were sacred. Facts could not be bought and sold, and to suggest that they could was sacrilege. So as far as Colin was concerned, Frank Gilbey had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit.
In early November, Frank had asked Colin to run a story suggesting that Bloom’s would be reporting a pre-Christmas surge in profits and that they were predicting their best Christmas yet.
But Colin knew for a fact that this was not the case.
Colin knew that consumer spending was down. He had enough contacts at Bloom’s himself to do his own digging. John ‘The Leatherman’ Brown had been a friend of Colin’s parents – he was into light opera and listened all day to Classic FM – and he kept Colin informed of what was happening up there at the mall. There were rumours, according to John, that some of the bigger stores, which were owned by multinationals, were going to be issuing profits warnings.
Frank had suggested to Colin, over lunch in the Plough and the Stars, that the story had to be run ‘for the sake of the town’, and that was it, that was too much for Colin. For the sake of the town! Frank Gilbey was not interested in our town. Frank Gilbey had destroyed the town. Frank was responsible for the three things that had ruined the way we were, the way Colin remembered things: the ring road, Bloom’s and the luxury apartments. These three things had destroyed the little micro-communities that had made up the town, communities that you’d have hardly known existed, but which made the town what it was, the little communities where people had grown up, where Colin grew up, and Davey Quinn, and Francie McGinn, and Bob Savory, and Cherith, and Sammy, and Bobbie Dylan, all of us, places with no names but with their own little small row of shops, and a patch of waste ground or a scrap of park where you could play football and smoke, and fight wars, places where twenty-four-hour garages had now replaced the shops, and where the waste ground now housed exciting developments of luxury loft-style apartments, with electric gates and high fencing all round. Colin knew that this was progress, but he wasn’t so foolish as to think it was a good thing. The town had been destroyed and Frank Gilbey was largely responsible, so when Frank stuffed a big artery-clogging slice of Banoffee pie into his big fat greedy mouth and uttered that phrase, ‘for the sake of the town’, Colin’s heart was hardened against him.
Over coffee – which he took black, no sugar, with characteristic fortitude – Colin decided to return to the chase. He had a paper to run and his resources were limited, but he had someone now he could trust, who would do his bidding and do his digging for him, and that someone was Billy Nibbs.
Billy had loved being a part of the paper. He loved being among people who regarded writing as a natural, normal experience, and an activity for which it was possible to get paid. To get paid, for writing: that was just incredible for Billy. For Billy, writing had always been a troubled and troubling enterprise, something you did in private and in secrecy, and which offered no prospect of paying its own way. To Billy Nibbs working at the Impartial Recorder was therefore like attending a banquet at the court of an all-powerful king – it was both delicious and corrupting. In his first few weeks at the paper he’d been invited out a couple of times by the legendary Tudor Cassady, the Arts and Features editor, a man almost as wide as he is tall, who lives up to his name by resembling in all but crown and furs the late Henry VIII and who writes the ‘Forks and Corks’ column, and who has done so for over thirty years, and whose little chin-bearded face peers out from a photograph at the top of the page, for all the world as if he were about to issue the command, ‘Off with Their Heads!’ Billy couldn’t believe he was actually being paid to eat out. Tudor also gave him a few books from the stash on his desk. They were first novels, mostly, but still. They were free – free books! He was even sent to see a play for free. It felt like he’d died and gone to heaven. Billy had had no idea that this sort of thing went on, in our town.
It was when he wrote his first review that Billy finally felt he had crossed over. He was no longer a creator but a destroyer and he realised that there was no going back. He was no longer a poet. He had become a journalist. The play he went to see was in the town’s playhouse – and yes, we do have one, although it remains a well-kept secret, Dreams, a tiny theatre on McAuley Street, which is in the premises of the old Home for the Industrious Blind, and which exists largely because of the fund-raising efforts of Colin Rimmer’s parents, Fee and Philip, who believed that what our town really needed back in the dark days of the 1970s was somewhere people could go to see Alan Ayckbourn plays and hear Gilbert and Sullivan. In fact, Dreams is used mostly for theatre in education projects, where children are taught about the evils of drugs and under-age sex by out-of-work actors from the city who stand outside after their performances, smoking, signing autographs and struggling with their sexuality.
Billy knew people in the play he was sent to review, which was a modern dress version of The Duchess of Malfi – he’d actually been to school with the Duchess herself, who was played by Laura Buckle in a black wig and a 1920s cocktail dress. He sat up all night after the performance, eating biscuits and drinking cans of Red Bull, and writing what amounted to a complete demolition, a total destruction of what he’d just seen: if he could have pulled down the scenery and the proscenium arch as well he probably would have done. He spent a lot of his time trying to find synonyms for ‘pathetic’ and ‘risible’ in Roget’s Thesaurus, and consulting Colin Rimmer’s in-house style book, which now took pride of place on his desk at the end of his bed, replacing his once prized rhyming dictionary. When he handed in the piece the next day, Colin himself had seen to it, ripping through it with a red pen and interrogating Billy over every phrase and sentence – ‘What do we mean here?’ he would ask and Billy would try to explain, and Colin would say, ‘No, I think what we mean here is this’ and then he’d rewrite the passage, minus adjectives and clauses. When the piece was published later that week Billy bought two copies of the paper – one for everyday use and one to keep – and when he read the review he did feel a little guilty about what he’d written, particularly his criticism of the Duchess, whom he described as having a face like a mouldy potato and a voice like toasted ham and cheese, which was supposed to be a joke, but then he bumped into Laura Buckle when he was in Tom Hines’s one day buying his bacon, and he tried a sheepish smile, but she looked right through him and he realised that that was that. It was too late. There was no going back. The die was cast.
Billy gave in, then, to the impulse to criticise everything and everybody. There was hardly a meal or a play or a book or a film that came his way that was not in some way deficient and which Billy did not take great pleasure in picking apart, for his own education and amusement, and for the education and amusement of others. Unknown to him, he had passed the test: Colin had wanted to see if he had what it took. And he did. Billy had proved to have that rare combination of utter cynicism and unbounded enthusiasm which was required by the good jobbing journalist. Years of working at the dump had already confirmed Billy in his belief that people are basically dirty, smelly, waste-producing animals, whose remains and discards are good merely as food for vermin, wild dogs and seagulls, with the rest fit only to be burned or buried in a hole, and his reading of the work of the great modernist writers had convinced him of the same. He therefore had the makings of a truly great local journalist: he was a bitter man with huge dreams who was capable of infinite disappointment.
So he was more than prepared when Colin had set him on to Frank Gilbey.
‘Imagine you’re writing a review, ’ Colin had said. ‘Except this time it’s a review of someone’s life.’
Billy had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew where to start and he spent weeks in the Impartial Recorder’s old basement composing room, which had become the de facto library and archive, trawling through back issues of damp and crumbly bound volumes. He took notes and he set up interviews.
But the breakthrough, when it came, like every lucky break, was not from some insight gained through research, but from a tip-off from a man in a pub. Billy had been in the Castle Arms, talking to his old friend Noel Savage, who is a landscape gardener. When he was still working up at the dump Billy used to allow Noel to offload straight from his trailer without using the weighbridge: tradesmen were supposed to pay a small fee for dumping, according to the size of the load, but Billy turned a blind eye for friends and people who were polite. Noel happened to mention to Billy that he was working on Frank Gilbey’s garden, thinning out some of the trees, sorting out a couple of the borders, and Billy had asked Noel, offhand and unthinkingly, if he’d seen the famous horse trough and the drinking fountain that had gone missing, all those years ago, and which people always claimed had ended up at Frank’s. Noel laughed and said he couldn’t remember seeing them, but he said that Billy could accompany him to the garden if he wanted to, to check for himself.
Billy checked back first in the basement for old photos of the trough and the fountain, and he found some archive pictures from the 1950s, when the town still looked complete and still made sense, untouched by the spoiling hand of developers. It wasn’t until 1984, after the completion of the road-widening scheme at the junction of High Street and Main Street that anyone noticed that the trough and the water fountain had gone missing, and before anyone could protest they had been replaced with concrete bollards and a couple of trees in circular tree grates, and a bronze so-called piece of sculpture which looked like a man with half his head melted, all supplied by a firm owned by Frank Gilbey.
Billy dressed in his old boots and boiler suit to accompany Noel to the garden. It was a nice garden. Gardens in our town tend not to contain many mature trees, or flowers – they’re more trouble than they’re worth. We’re more of an evergreen shrubby kind of a town, with the average plot not in excess of about 12 foot by 8. Frank’s garden, in comparison, was something more like the forest of Arden, or the grounds at the palace at Versailles. Frank lives in a big bluff red-brick mansion, the biggest and the bluffest in town, right up at the far end of Fitzroy Avenue, where the town used to become country, and where it now becomes the ring road. Noel pointed out to Billy some of the plants trained up against the house: a wisteria, and a magnolia lennei, he said, and a palm, a trachycarpus fortunei. Billy wrote these words down in his notebook and asked Noel to spell them for him, in case they came in useful, ‘for colour’, Billy had said and Noel had nodded, impressed. Noel had only known Billy as the man at the dump, and Billy only knew Noel as a gardener; he had no idea that a gardener might know some Latin, and Noel had no idea that Billy might want to write. It is customary here in town to underestimate other people – this is how small towns work. If you want a slap on the back for just being who you are, well, you’re welcome to live in the city, where there are plenty of people who’ll tell you how great you are. In a city, people talk each other up, that’s the deal: everybody’s great and everything is wonderful. In a town, we prefer to talk things down. If you think you’re special, or you want people to think you’re a genius, don’t get to know your neighbours.
Spreading out in front of the flagged terrace at the back of the house there was a huge lawn, surrounded by mixed borders, and again Noel pointed out various shrubs and herbaceous plants. ‘Nicely done, ’ he said, indicating to Billy how the shrubs broke up the line of vision, and created the impression of depth and space.
Billy agreed and he was pleased for Noel, that he was obviously an artist too, but he still couldn’t see what he was looking for. Then, at the end of the lawn they passed through into a rose garden, with some old-fashioned shrub roses on trellis-work, and they came upon some pathways leading to different areas – an enormous old greenhouse at the end of one path, a small pool surrounded by hostas and shaded by tall trees down another. Variegated poplars, Billy wrote in his notebook, prompted by Noel. Mature oak. Eucalyptus.
‘What about down here?’ Billy asked eventually, pointing down another gravel pathway. Noel had never been down there, and so they crunched their way past a long winding hedge and there, in the very farthest corner of the garden, hidden from the view of the house and from the Old Green Road running along outside, was a patio area, set with tables, and a large stone horse trough and a marble drinking fountain.
Billy had his scoop. He’d brought a camera with him. He took the photos.
Cigars all round.
As soon as he got the photos, Colin had made an appointment to go and see Sir George Sanderson, the proprietor.
Colin did not like Sir George, but he had to admire him, because Sanderson was old enough and rich enough not to care what people thought about him or his opinions, and actually his opinions happened to be pretty much Colin’s own: like Colin, Sir George was counter-intuitive, except he was counter-intuitive by breeding rather than by choice. He simply knew that what most people thought was right was often wrong, that hunting was a good, for example, and that nuclear power was absolutely fine and not something to get all fussed-up about. He didn’t need to work out his opinions, like his wife had to. He had inherited them, along with the estate.
When Colin arrived he found Sir George and Lesley Sanderson in the library, hoovering. They no longer kept a staff and they did pretty much everything themselves. Colin knew they’d lost a lot of money a few years back, when the dotcom bubble burst, having invested heavily in their gay son’s on-line dating business, but this was something that was not talked about.*
‘Rimmer!’ said Sir George. ‘Good of you to come. Well?’ Sir George did not waste his words. You didn’t get to where Sir George is on pleasantries and chat.
‘I have a story that I want to run, but it might be a bit controversial, ’ said Colin, who wasn’t a great one for the small talk himself.
‘Controversial! Good! That’s what the place needs. A good shaking up. Nothing to do with me I trust?’
‘No. But it does concern Frank Gilbey.’
Sir George had known Frank Gilbey for many years and he’d done a lot of business with him – who hadn’t? – so there was a bond of loyalty there. Then again, Frank was a horrid little man, who’d ogled Lesley at one of those dreadful Rotary Club dinners a few years ago, and he dressed like an American gangster. Sir George glanced at Lesley, who raised her eyebrows non-committally – she’d never liked Frank, for obvious reasons. He was common.
‘Is it business?’ asked Sir George.
‘No, ’ said Colin. ‘It’s personal.’
‘Well, I can’t see any problem then.’
Colin started to open his mouth to tell Sir George the details.
‘No!’ said Sir George. ‘No need to know.’ If he didn’t know he could always deny it. ‘Run it past the lawyers, though, won’t you?’
End of conversation.
End of Frank Gilbey.
The story was going in tomorrow.
And there was still champagne to be drunk tonight.
* Ron died in 1990, one of our last veterans of the Great War. He was from London originally, a proper cockney, but he married a local girl, and he was typical of his generation, a modest, practical, gentle man who in old age – from fifty – sported a thick white moustache, who wore a waistcoat with a fob watch and suits on Sunday, who kept an allotment and rode a bicycle with no gears in all weathers to the market on Wednesdays and who called black people ‘darkies’, who despised ‘homosexualists’ and who, having had the privilege of travelling abroad to fight for king and country, knew for a fact that this is the best of all possible worlds and ours the best of all possible towns: we won’t, as they say, see his like again.
* It’s a rare individual who doesn’t feature in a cutting somewhere, but there are some, a few, people who live lives even quieter than the average here, which is already of course quite a way below the national average, and which may even compare with the average excitements in the lives of hermits, say, or anchorites, or prisoners in solitary confinement, or vegetarians in primitive tribal societies. There is Clarence Kemp, for example, who lives alone on Prospect Road, near the crematorium, and who has never married, who was an only child and who is retired now, but who worked all his life as a cleaner at the council offices. Clarence drinks only Bovril and eats only ready-meals – years ago we would probably have called Clarence simple, but these days you might say he has special needs. You’d think that Clarence would hardly have any story to tell, but he has a big collection of beer mats, and he knows a lot about Tamla Motown, and when he was fifteen years (Id his father hit him so hard that he broke Clarence’s jaw, and Clarence had to have it wired up for two months, and he couldn’t clean his teeth, and when the dentist, P. W. Grieve, took the brace off and took a look in Clarence’s mouth, he decided it would be just as easy to whip out all Clarence’s teeth rather than try to repair the damage, making Clarence the youngest possessor of a set of false teeth in town, and possibly in the county, quite an achievement, in a place as fond of sweets as we are. This is a true story and clearly of some human interest, but even the Impartial Recorder would have had trouble knowing exactly what to do with it, a story which is neither exactly happy nor exactly sad, and which just goes to show that there’s a surfeit out there, more stories than we can ever know what to do with, and even a paper is only just scratching the surface. The cuttings are not a summary. The cuttings are only the beginning.
* And it’s not completely unfeasible: we do feature in the New Yorker, after all, or we have done in the past, just the once, admittedly, but that’s better than nothing, courtesy of the tap-dancing McLaughlin twins, who got a mention in a ‘Notes and Comments’ in August 1943, the great E. B. White comparing the McLaughlins’ ‘bouncy little dance’ in the Broadway musical Hold on to Your Hats with the frantic mating rituals of the natural world. Two of our local boys, two of us, exciting a lovely little bit of thistledown prose from a master of the form with their soft-shoe shuffle; that certainly put us on the map. The cutting still survives, framed in gilt, on the wall of Dot McLaughlin’s Happy Feet Tap and Ballet School, and ‘That’s what can happen, if you practise, ’ Dot tells her pupils, tapping the frame: she means it as an encouragement, but a lot of her pupils look at the fading yellow scrap and regard it as a warning. ‘That’s it?’ they think. ‘That’s as good as it gets?’ Well, yes, it is.
* Alex, their son, was a merchant banker who’d attended Barneville House and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and who had a Harvard MBA and who’d lived for some years in New York and who thought he was pretty smart, actually, all things considered, and who moved to London to ride the crest of the dotcom wave, back in 1999, and who’d persuaded his parents and some venture capitalists to plough vast amounts of money into his can’t-fail on-line dating business, and who was bankrupt within a year. He’s bounced back, though, of course – you can’t keep the likes of Alex down. He’s in Moscow now, working for Coutts, and he owns his own dacha and at weekends he drinks vodka until he can’t see and he entertains young Russians in his private banya, beating them with twigs. Life’s not so bad, for Alex – he lives a life not dissimilar to his ancestors – but, alas, relations with his parents have irretrievably broken down.