Gull (12 page)

*

Randall took a call on Thursday evening. DeLorean in LAX. The irresistible lure of the last phone booth before embarkation. ‘I am going to be in London this weekend. I was hoping you could meet me... You’re not doing anything that can’t be dropped, are you?’

What was he going to say? ‘Funny you should ask, I was hoping I might take a stroll in the Botanical Gardens.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not at all.’

He flew over on Saturday morning, later than intended. The flight was delayed due to the cancellation of the previous night’s last inbound flight from Heathrow: a regular occurrence in Randall’s limited experience. ‘Any time there’s an emergency on another route they pinch a plane from Belfast,’ the woman who took his ticket said with a smile. ‘I suppose they think, sure who’s going to notice?’

He rang the Ritz from the arrivals lounge. Mr DeLorean had already gone out, but he had left a message to meet at three p.m. in Soho Square.

‘Soho Square?’ Randall asked. ‘What is that? A restaurant?’

‘No, it’s a park.’

Randall did not think he had ever seen DeLorean out of doors when there was not a factory to be an announced or a car to get into. He was half expecting to find a film crew in attendance, or at the very least a photographer, but instead the only cameras on display in the square (‘park’ was maybe stretching it a little) were being wielded by tourists arranging others of their party around the plinth of the statue of the man in stockings and wig at its heart, or trying to get an angle on the curious half-timbered building out of which the gentleman on the plinth might have stepped moments before he was petrified and in the lee of which (and not, Randall thought, incidental to the photograph being composed) stood three bona fide London punk rockers, all spikes and studs and sideways snarls.

He had sat on a wooden bench for almost twenty minutes before he spotted DeLorean coming –
walking... alone
– along the narrow street to his right. He was carrying a paper bag under his arm. A book it looked like. ‘Instructions from Maur,’ he explained as he sat and placed the bag on his lap. He eased the book out part way. Faded blue slipcover, an eight- or nine-line title, of which Randall took in only the words in larger font:
Morris Movement
and
Fiftieth Anniversary
. ‘Hard to come by, he tells me, even in New York.’

DeLorean looked about him, filling his nostrils with Soho Square air, nodded, yes, this was exactly how he had he expected it. ‘What I like about London is how inconspicuous it lets you be.’ He turned a smile on Randall. ‘Even the sex shops I passed are discreet compared to Times Square. You could take your grandmother for a walk around here.’

‘Without someone trying to buy her off you, you mean?’

They sat a moment or two more. ‘What do you know of Lear Fan?’ DeLorean said then.

‘The plane?’

‘The factory.’

Randall shrugged. ‘Only what we have already discussed. I met Moya Lear at a reception a few weeks back. A handshake, nothing more.’

DeLorean’s nod this time was slower, shallower. ‘I knew Bill better.’ Bill Lear had died a couple of years earlier. His wife had made a mission, at an age when most people were thinking of retiring, of seeing his plane through to production. ‘Another guy I know, Morgan Hetrick, used to fly people down to parties in his house.’ Randall had heard that name Hetrick somewhere before. He must have frowned trying to dredge it up. DeLorean took it the wrong way. ‘Oh, it was quite the thing then flying people in for parties. I guess Moya was just never around for Bill’s. I sometimes wondered if that wasn’t where he got the idea for that little jet of his... Eight guys bouncing down to the Caribbean for the weekend... Or girls...’ A sideways glance as he said this then a shake of the head, he was straying from the point: the factory. ‘I’m worried that Thatcher has made it her pet project. I was assured she didn’t much care for other women, but she seems to have made an exception for Moya. As long as she doesn’t try to use her to make an example of me as well, you know: Good American, Bad American.’ He straightened the book bag on his lap. ‘What I’m trying to say is you are there day to day, you talk to people, they talk to you, anything you pick up that might be of interest let me know.’

‘I think you are maybe overestimating my social circle, but OK, I will let you know if anything comes my way.’

They talked a while longer. Maur wanted some more photographs of the house. Dick and Roy were still racking up the dealer numbers: getting on for four hundred now. Eventually there was a silence. They seemed to have exhausted everything.

DeLorean looked at his watch. ‘How’s Chuck?’ The question – addressed more to his wrist than Randall’s face – took Randall almost as much by surprise as the earlier one about Lear Fan.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I mean, I hardly see him. You know Chuck, how much he takes on.’

DeLorean breathed in audibly through his nose: he knew all right.

A heavily bearded young man in a plaid work shirt had crouched down beside an olive drab gear bag on the grass about ten yards away. He proceeded to take from it a camera with a hole where the lens ought to have been. The lens came from a separate smaller nylon bag on his other shoulder: four, maybe five inches in length. He wasn’t intending to take tourist snaps with it.

DeLorean clapped his hands on his thighs, tucked Maur’s book back under his arm. ‘Listen, I have another appointment now.’ The young man stood as DeLorean did. So there was a photographer after all. ‘I would say stick around, but I fear the next half-hour or so will be immensely dull.’ It was as though he had forgotten in the novelty of walking that Randall hadn’t just strolled down to this square this afternoon too. He leaned a little closer. ‘The only thing that keeps me smiling is the thought that if this winds up on a cover it’s worth eight million dollars to us in publicity.’

And he smiled, half, shook Randall’s hand, and walked out to do again what he had to do to make the world want his car.

*

So that was it. He wasn’t expected to stay the night. He got about fifty yards down Oxford Street, vaguely intent on the British Museum, when he saw a London cab coming his way, its roof-light lit. He stuck out his arm. ‘Heathrow Airport, please.’

There was a traffic accident just beyond the start of the overpass at Chiswick – a ‘proper pile-up’ the taxi driver called it. ‘I hate to tell you, mister, but you ain’t going nowhere at this rate.’ Randall looked at his watch twice a minute for a quarter of an hour then resigned himself. An ambulance passed on the shoulder, a fire tender, another ambulance. The taxi driver whistled through his teeth, breaking off every now and then to toss a question into the back. Where had Randall been, then, in London? What did he reckon to the food? The weather? Then, ‘Hang on’, the car in front rolled forward a foot, braked, rolled forward another two, braked before rolling again, and in that stop-start way they covered half a mile in first gear until the flashing blue lights and the tow trucks were all behind them. He made it to the airport minutes before the last flight of the day was scheduled to leave, although as the airline was still making up the time lost earlier in the day he had another hour to wait. It was well past eleven by the time he got back to Warren House. No sign of Bennington.

No sign either the next morning.

Sunday.

Randall decided to take the train. There were so many restrictions on parking – so few secure car parks – he was surprised anyone drove into the city ever. The train halt (it was no more than a couple of benches and a Plexiglas shelter) was less than a fifteen-minute walk, but once there he stood for almost four times as long without seeing a train in either direction. After the twenty-four hours that had preceded it he would nearly have been surprised if it had been otherwise.

Someone had set fire to the post on which the timetable was mounted; vandal or amateur surrealist, the melted glass had a Dali-esque appearance,
The Disintegration of the Persistence of
Hope
, perhaps. The instant I walk away a train will come, he told himself for the last thirty minutes of the fifty-five that dragged by before the train finally arrived: two carriages, the first of which was completely empty, for the very good reason – as he discovered before joining the other eight passengers in the second – that it stank of urine.

(No way was that a single person’s doing. There had to have been a gang of them: jump on, pee like fury, jump off again... Or sit in the adjoining carriage as though they had never met one another.)

It was one of those days that could turn up in any of the city’s seasons: warm for one, cool for another, about average for the other two. The train window offered him an overview of Belfast’s pastimes and preoccupations, garden sheds and vegetable patches, succeeded at length by yard walls – soccer goals here and there etched on the bricks, jerry-built pigeon lofts balanced on top or, more precarious still, kitchen chairs angled to catch the sun.

On the opposite side a goods yard piled high with metal beer kegs gave way to a stadium – as inviting in its concrete fastness as one of their neighbourhood police stations – hard by which was a wall entirely covered with a painting of a man in a scarlet coat and voluminous black wig, smiling blandly astride a white, rearing charger.

I think I might have seen a buddy of yours in London yesterday. Looking OK for his age, but maybe a little off-colour in comparison.

A voice came over the speaker at the head of the carriage: the next stop was Botanic Station, Botanic Station was the next stop (twice they said everything, everything, in a different order, they said twice). Eight pairs of eyes watched Randall alight. He had overheard a couple of the contractors building the factory talking once about Americans and their shoes. A dead giveaway, one of them said to the other, you don’t even have to wait for them to open their mouths. He looked down at his own. Florsheim Royal Imperial Oxfords. They might as well have been painted with Stars and Stripes.

They carried him, the Oxfords did, along the platform, at the bottom of a steep cutting, thick shrubs overhanging, and up a flight of steps to street level. Past a ticket booth they went then, through a turnstile, and out on to a shabby avenue of nineteenth-century townhouses – about one in two a shop or office, all, this Sunday morning, closed – with trees not so much lining the pavement as interrupting it, angled like arrows fired blind by a giant in one of their old tales.

(
There
was a thing that no one had explained to him, how a people that claimed such heroes in their lineage had come to be burying fathers of teenage girls face down in shallow graves.)

After a moment or two getting his bearings (away from the city centre: so, left), he strolled up the avenue, passing behind what he assumed was the university and into the Botanic Gardens by a narrow side gate, a sign beside it informing him that after five o’clock this evening there was no way out again. He passed a sunken garden, water trickling nearby, a down-at-heel glasshouse – two long wings with a dome at the centre – and a roofed-in man-made ravine, the doors to which, like the doors to the glasshouse, like the doors to the museum they shared the gardens with, were currently chained shut.

All the same, the woman, Liz, was right, it was – they were – lovely. He spent about an hour, until past noon, just sitting on a bench before the glasshouse, arms stretched out along the back, or forward, resting on his knees, watching the people come and go: the young, it seemed, and the very old, and not much in between.

He tried not to let it harden into conviction, but he felt about getting up from the bench what he had felt earlier about walking away from the railway platform with the melted timetable, that it would make happen – and therefore make him miss – the very thing he was waiting there for, though with even less reason for hope in this instance. (She had said it was a nice place to visit on a Sunday morning, that was all.)

As it was when he could wait no longer – could scarcely physically sit another minute – he looked back over his shoulder every third or fourth step until he had reached the little gate once more.

And it didn’t happen. And the train would have come when the train did come whether he had stayed on that platform or walked away.

*

In the middle of the following week DeLorean sent Chuck Bennington to Coventry. The official line was that he was to start work on the development of a right-hand drive model of the DMC-12 – why shut the gull-wing door on a third of the motoring world, after all? His work in Belfast was done. Randall couldn’t imagine, though, that Chuck would have chosen to go before the first cars had even come off the line.

Thinking back to the conversation in Soho Square, he was afraid that he might inadvertently have hastened his departure. It was a short step from taking a lot on to taking on too much, spreading yourself too thin. Chuck, however, on the one occasion that their paths crossed in the house after the announcement, appeared willing to shoulder the blame himself.

‘We’re more than six months behind. Someone has to take the rap.’

But the circumstances, Randall said, the complete overhaul of the design...

‘That’s what you say to your financiers, but they still expect to see you make changes. Anyway’ – he paused to crush one cigarette and light another – ‘John’s right, we need that right-hand model.’

A new managing director arrived – straightway: further proof, Randall consoled himself, that the decision had already been made before the conversation in London – a Canadian, Don Lander, who had done time with Chrysler in Africa and the Middle East. Less edgy than Bennington, more communicative. ‘I have been brought in to get the cars out, as simple as that,’ he told Randall and the other senior staff, gathered in the newly fitted out boardroom. ‘And you are here – thank you very much – to make sure I don’t fail in the attempt.’

He took Randall aside. ‘I understand from John that you have been here from the very start.’

‘Practically the only one left,’ Randall said, ‘now that Chuck has moved on.’