The Rotters' Club (33 page)

Soon there was another noisy eruption from the crowd below. A throng of boys had descended on the finishing line, and through them Philip could glimpse Culpepper crouched on the grass, head in hands, his shoulders heaving.

‘Shit!’ said Philip, jumping to his feet. ‘I’ve missed another one!’

This time it was the 1500 metres, which Steve appeared to have won, again by the narrowest of margins. There were only two more races to be run, now. It was still impossible to say who would emerge victorious.

*

With the wistful strains of the ‘Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus’ murmuring behind them, Benjamin and Harding continued to discuss their love of Vaughan Williams. They had both agreed that the third and fifth symphonies were masterpieces, and that the eighth was severely underrated. They talked about the London symphony and wondered whether it would be possible for anybody to write a ‘Birmingham symphony’ of the same grandeur and resonance. Benjamin thought not. He recommended that Sean (he was calling him Sean, now, without hesitation or embarrassment) should check out the oboe concerto: a minor work, but very beautiful. Sean said that his personal favourite was the ‘Serenade to Music’, a choral and orchestral setting of lines from
The Merchant of Venice.
It had been his introduction to this composer; he had heard his mother sing one of the solo parts when he was only eight years old, at a performance given by the local choral society.

‘I didn’t know your mother was musical,’ said Benjamin; reflecting, as he said it, that he actually knew nothing about Sean’s parents at all.

‘Mum and Dad have both got good voices,’ he said. ‘They were always singing together. It was one of the things they used to have in common.’

‘Used to?’

‘They’re living apart at the moment,’ he confided. It was amazing how this music was loosening his tongue, like wine. ‘Dad moved out a few weeks ago.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

He crossed over to the other side of the room, picked up a record sleeve, pretended to read it. It must have been difficult for him to reveal so much. ‘It’s been building up for some time,’ he said. ‘Dad comes from a big Irish family, Mum’s English through and through. And she can be… well, she can be a difficult person to be around. She’s pretty strict.’

Benjamin thought for a moment about the bizarre fantasy world Sean had created around the Pusey-Hamiltons – the shy, stunted boy subjected to a punishing parental régime, the insane lampoon of anti-Irish prejudice – and found himself wondering for the first time whether there was more to his humour than simple anarchic clowning.

‘When you say strict…’ he prompted.

And then Sean said, very quickly and emphatically: ‘I love my mother.’ Benjamin had not meant to suggest otherwise, but it seemed of paramount importance that this fact should be stressed. ‘She’s an incredible woman. One in a million, actually.’

After that he abruptly clammed up, and for a while there was only music to fill the silence. Luckily, before very long, they heard a gentle knock on the door.

Sean shouted, ‘Come in!’

It was Ives. It was five to three, he was out of breath, and he had beneath his arm a carrier bag from Vincent’s, a classical record shop in central Birmingham.

‘Well? Did you get it?’

‘Yes. It was 20p more than you said it was going to be.’

‘Never mind that.’

He opened the bag and inspected its contents with a cry of satisfaction. It was another record of Vaughan Williams orchestral pieces. This one included the tone poems ‘In the Fen Country’ and ‘Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1’.

‘You’ve got to hear this, Ben,’ he said, cutting ‘Dives and Lazarus’ off in mid-stream and slipping the record on to the turntable. ‘I couldn’t believe they didn’t have this one in the library. It’ll blow you away.’ Ives was still loitering in the doorway. ‘Run away, little boy,’ Sean chanted, waving him off impatiently. ‘Don’t worry about the money. I’ll pay you later.’

‘Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1’ began with a thin, misty shimmer of strings, over which a solo clarinet scattered plaintive fragments of melody. Then, as the other instruments started to add their voices, a theme slowly emerged: a long, wandering tune, impossibly noble, impossibly sad. It felt like a melody Benjamin had known all his life, even though it had until now been kept secret, locked in some hidden, innermost chamber of the heart.

‘Oh,’ he sighed, and found only these insufficient words: ‘That’s nice.’

‘It’s a folk tune,’ said Sean. ‘He found it in King’s Lynn.’ As the music continued, he sat down opposite Benjamin and began to explain, animatedly: ‘Picture it. It’s 1905. He’s spending day after day cycling round these Norfolk villages. Whenever he can he goes into a pub and he gets talking to people, and after a while he asks them to sing for him. Old people, especially. This guy in King’s Lynn was seventy. A seventy-year-old fisherman! Just imagine. Vaughan Williams buys him pint after pint. Maybe he slips him a shilling or two as well. And then after a couple of hours – just before closing time, say – he starts to sing. And this,
this
is what he comes out with! Did you ever hear a tune like it?’

‘Does it have a name?’

‘“The Captain’s Apprentice”. Vaughan Williams loved this tune. He used it again and again. And do you know what the words are about? It’s about a bloke who’s lying in prison. He’s lying in prison on a charge of murder. He was a sea-captain and this fatherless boy was bound apprentice to him, and one day the boy annoys him somehow – the captain doesn’t say how, he disobeys him or something, I suppose – so do you know what the captain does? He ties him up to the mast, and he gags him, and he beats him to death with a piece of rope. He spends the whole day on it. The whole bloody day beating this poor little kid to a pulp. And now he’s lying in prison saying how sorry he is about the whole thing.’

Benjamin listened to the song’s dying fall, and felt a shiver run through him. ‘Wow. But it’s so beautiful, and so… English.’

‘Have you ever been to Norfolk?’ Sean asked.

‘No.’

‘You should. It’s an incredible place. Parts of it are like the end of the earth.’ Reverently, he allowed the music to fade away into absolute silence, then he raised the stylus. ‘The English are a very violent people,’ he said as he did this, talking half to himself. ‘People don’t realize it, but we are. We repent afterwards, which is why we’re so melancholy. But first of all we do… whatever has to be done.’

Benjamin pondered these words as he walked slowly down to the bus stop a few minutes later. Violence and melancholy… They were both in the air that day. Philip telephoned in the evening to let him know the Sports Day results, and Benjamin shuddered to think of the anger that must have burned in Culpepper’s breast when Steve was crowned
Victor Ludorum.
As for Steve himself – what had he felt when he accepted the trophy? Only triumph, or was it tinged, as well, with sadness, and the wish that it was Valerie’s lost love-token that he was kissing and raising high above the cheering crowds?

18

Benjamin’s conversation with Harding may have revealed that they shared some musical enthusiasms, but otherwise, the consequences were disappointing. It didn’t lead to any significant renewal of their friendship. The summer holidays intervened too quickly. By the time of the new term, with rumours circulating that his father had left home and returned to Ireland, Harding seemed to have become even more solitary and difficult. His jokes continued; or at least, whenever any particularly outlandish incident disturbed the regular flow of school life, Harding was given credit for it. Culpepper, for instance, passed his driving test and began driving into school, and one afternoon in October he unlocked his car only to find that there was a heavily sedated goat stretched out on the back seat. But Harding never admitted to any involvement in the event, and no one could ever explain where he might have obtained the goat.

Philip gave up on his musical ambitions, sold his guitar through the school notice board and used the money to add to his growing library of volumes about ‘hidden’ Birmingham, its history and architecture. Benjamin saw little of Cicely. The police sent a letter to Claire’s father saying that the file was still open on his daughter’s disappearance, but no further progress had been made. Claire and Doug went on three or four dates but then called it a day. Life, in other words, continued.

This had been a stagnant summer. Issues were left unresolved, narratives failed to reach their conclusion. The Grunwick workers’ strike and the affair between Mrs Chase and Miles Plumb had started almost at the same time, in the late summer of 1976. Now, more than a year later, neither was showing any sign of coming to an end. In both cases, there had been long periods of deadlock and sudden flurries of activity; there had been negotiation, followed by breakdowns in communication; the judgement of external advisers had been sought. But even after all this time, the Grunwick employers still refused to acknowledge their workers’ right to join a union, and Miles Plumb could not recognize or accept the integrity of Barbara’s marriage to Sam. The difficulties remained intractable.

On November 7th, 1977, the Grunwick strikers called for a new mass picket of the factory, and among those being bussed in to offer support from around the country was a British Leyland delegation led by Bill Anderton. They hired a coach from a local firm, and the driver turned out to be Sam Chase. He spent most of the three-hour journey to London thinking vengeful thoughts about Miles Plumb and nearly drove the coach right off the hard shoulder on the M1 just past Northampton.

They stopped for breakfast at Watford services. Sam settled into his driver’s seat and told them not to be more than twenty minutes.

‘Are you not coming with us, then?’ Bill asked.

‘No, thanks. I’d rather just sit here with a good book. Bring us a cup of tea, if you can.’

As it happened, he had two good books with him:
Twenty-five Magic Steps to Word Power,
by Dr Wilfred Funk, and a battered American paperback called
Change Your Life with the Power of Words,
picked up last July at a local jumble sale. He had read these books again and again over the last few weeks. He had learned passages by heart and made whole exercise-books’-full of notes. But still he felt that his life had not been fully transformed by them. Still he was convinced they must have further mysteries to yield.

He opened one of the books at a well-thumbed page and began by reciting what had recently become his personal mantra:

‘My words are daily dynamite.’
‘My words are easy energizers.’
‘My words are helpful friends.’
‘My words are confidence-builders.’
‘My words are the new me.’

Then he turned to the contents page.

You Can Choose The Way You Speak.
Learn To Correct Your Verbal Responses and You’ll Be Calm In Any Situation.
Energize Yourself With Verbal Vitamins.
Power-Packed Speech Means Power-Packed Experiences.
Command Your Speech and You’ll Hear Your ‘Enemies’ Surrender.
Positive Words Are Elevators. Are You Going Up?

Bill Anderton arrived with his cup of tea.

‘Here you are, Sam, get it down you.’

Sam looked at the grey concoction being handed to him in a plastic cup. A mottled, particularly unappetizing film of some sort had already formed on the surface.

‘Thanks, Bill,’ he said; then added, by way of experiment, ‘The fervour of my gratitude is well-nigh inexpressible.’

Bill gave him a worried look and went back inside.

*

The coach arrived in Willesden, north-west London, at about half-past seven. As Sam drove carefully down Dudden Hill Lane, he found that he couldn’t turn into Chapter Road, where the main gates to the Grunwick factory were located. His way was blocked not by pickets but by police. There seemed to be many hundreds of them.

‘I’m going to have to leave you here,’ he told Bill. ‘There’s no way that lot are going to let me through.’

The seventy-odd Leyland workers filed off the bus, and Sam watched as Bill Anderton negotiated with one of the policemen for access to the Chapter Road entrance. Beyond the heavy cordon of police, standing five or six deep, Sam could see an even bigger but more ragged crowd of pickets awaiting the arrival of the bus which had been chartered to bring in those Grunwick workers who had chosen to break the strike. He watched as the police drew back, very slightly and with obvious reluctance, to allow Bill and his men to pass through and join the picket. Then he drove the coach another hundred yards up Dudden Hill Lane and parked it by the kerb.

‘It’s time you became a word-collector!’
he read.
‘As some people collect stamps or match-boxes of all nations, you should systematically add to your store of words.

‘The word-collector must train himself to be a careful observer, able to ignore the common specimens, but to be instantly alert for new and unusual words. And as the butterfly-collector mounts his captures on card and knows them all, the word-collector must write his new specimens in a small notebook and memorize them.’

He turned to today’s exercise.

‘V is for VARIETY. Try your hand at the meanings of these twenty words, all beginning with the letter “V”. Then look at the answers on
page 108
for the measure of your success.’

Viscous   Vortex
Vicarious   Volition
Vainglorious   Versatile
Venerate   Vigil
Venal   Viand
Venial   Vernal
Veracious   Vernacular
Voracious   Verify
Vixen   Verbatim
Votive   Vacuity

Sam did the test and found that he scored four out of twenty. Yesterday, on
‘U is for UNUSUAL’
he had scored six, and the day before, on
‘T is for TABLE-TALK’,
a confidence-boosting eleven. And now four! It was incredible! He was getting worse!