The Storytellers (24 page)

“Good morning, Mr Mudd.”

Mary, the receptionist, looked furtive. And where the hell had ‘Harvey' gone?

“Solid piece,” remarked Porter who generally thought only something about the Royal Family worth reading. Harvey had long ago concluded that the paper's royal correspondent must have the same compulsion as those who enjoyed listening to the shipping forecast. He conceded that both did offer a kind of comforting reassurance:

Viking, southwesterly 7 to severe gale 9; Dogger, southwesterly severe gale force 9 continuing: The Queen, Honorary Air Commodore, today visited Royal Air Force Marham, Kings Lynn, Norfolk, and was received by the Station Commander. Her Majesty was received at the Weapon Load Trainer Hangar with a Royal Salute and viewed static displays, before meeting Station Officers and Airmen
.

“It must have been pretty wild up there, Harvey,” Georgina cooed as he passed – Georgina who normally paid attention to no one.

“You fairly aced that one, Harve,” Pete called out – Pete who
generally could only praise someone else's work with clenched buttocks.

Harvey stopped dead in his tracks. He had learnt to smell an office conspiracy at five paces.

“OK, people, what the hell's going on?”

He had hit the whisky bottle harder than intended the night before, trying to obliterate the fact that his life seemed to be going nowhere, and so sounded more crabby than he wanted to.

Just then George Gilder appeared from his office.

“Harvey, my boy. Come, come.”

Jesus, this must be serious, he thought: a ‘my boy' and no ‘Mudd'.

His unusually smiling editor beckoned impatiently for him to come forward and then standing in front of a mahogany door next to his own, said, “Behold!”

Harvey looked and he looked. There on the door, in discreet gold lettering, were the words:
Harvey Mudd – deputy editor
.

“Now don't get carried away, Mudd,” the great editor announced with more like his normal vim. “It doesn't really mean anything!”

A chorus of claps and ‘Go Harvey!'s came from the office floor behind him. Blushing slightly, he turned and thanked them.

“Now, back to work, you lousy bloodhounds,” George Gilder barked. “And, Harvey, there's a telephone message for you on your desk.”

Harvey entered his new room. It was not big but comfortably furnished with a mahogany writing table and dark leather chairs. St Paul's Cathedral loomed large beyond the window, the same St Paul's he had looked at when George Gilder first interviewed him and on the many occasions since when his mentor had attempted to adjust his protégé's trajectory. He imagined it would have to be ‘Harvey' from now on. He was going to miss ‘Mudd!'

Almost casually, he picked up the folded note.
Please call Frances Graham
, it read, followed by a telephone number.

C
HAPTER

I
T WAS THE DAY after what the national press had christened the Battle of Orgreave when Peter Betsworth got the call he had been expecting.

“We have a Jack Pugh in custody,” the caller said. “What would you like us to do with him?”

The intelligence officer paused for a moment. He had been thinking about this eventuality for some time.

“Release him,” he said.

“Without charge or charged?” the caller asked.

“Without charge,” he answered.

“Released by the front door or the back door?”

“By the back door.”

“Very good, sir,” the caller acknowledged and rang off.

The MI5 officer tapped the desk with a pencil. He was feeling particularly pleased with the previous day's events. His main concern now was Mona Dexter, but he thought the risk worth taking. Only Jack Pugh knew about his encounter with the service and the organizer was hardly likely to tie his release to her rather than to his own guilty secret.

The balance Peter Betsworth had to strike was between continuing to use Jack Pugh as a valuable asset, trusted by the NUM leadership, and using him to sow mistrust within its ranks. With careful handling, he hoped he could do both. He knew that it was still chaotic in the Rotherham station and so one more individual being moved around was unlikely to appear suspicious. But at some point in the future, at a time of his choosing, doubt could be sown.

* * *

“All right, brave boy, out!”

Jack sat in the back of the police car wondering what was going to happen to him next. His night in the cells alongside his fallen comrades had been unpleasant, to say the least. All of them had been caked in blood from various injuries. One had been drinking and threw up in the cell. Another must have been badly hurt because he moaned off and on all night. Jack had found one fellow inmate happy to talk about the plight of the working class and the need to smash the capitalist system until another, with a badly cut lip and peach of a swollen eye, told them both to ‘shut the fuck up!'

“Here?” Jack asked plaintively, seeing nothing but rolling fields without a house in sight.

The two officers in the front looked at one another.

“So you'd like us to drop you off at miners' headquarters, right?” said one.

Jack shrugged and tried the door, but it was locked.

“Let the lad out then.”

There was a click allowing Jack to push it open.

“Friends in high places, you?”

“What?” Jack said as he eased his bruised body from the vehicle.

“'T's a'right. Secret's safe wi' us,” one of them smirked. “'Spect Arthur put in a good word wi' duty officer at station. We are all up
wi' you miners, we are!”

Jack was tempted to give him the finger, but was sure it was already broken.

“Which way's Rotherham?” he asked instead.

“That way,” said the driver.

“Na, 't isn't. 'T's 'at way,” said his partner, pointing in the opposite direction.

Both thought that funny and drove off laughing, leaving Jack to contemplate life's uncertainties – and the Yorkshire countryside.

C
HAPTER

T
HE EVENING got off to a rocky start. They tiptoed around one another like teenagers on a first date. Harvey, who had been suppressing the possibility of this moment since meeting her, felt tongue-tied and Frances could hear herself talking like a tour guide about everything save what she wanted to.

The opera, however, helped to pull them from their mutual funk. She had chosen
L'Elisir d'Amore
because it was on her mind and only halfway through wondered if it had been too suggestive. It was to be the great Welsh baritone, Geraint Evans's, last performance as the quack doctor Dulcamara. Harvey chose Rules to go to afterwards because he had read that its food was as close to country-house cooking as one could get in London and imagined she might be missing it.

They sat at a corner table cocooned within the restaurant's heavy opulence. Their fellow diners, John Bulls to a man and woman, were devouring dishes of rabbit, pork belly, pheasant, partridge and roast loin of roe deer washed down with claret. Those further along were already chewing on cigars and murdering port, while the more recently arrived seemed to be favouring oysters. Harvey stared at
the menu and wondered what he was doing in such a place until he spotted steak and kidney pie, one of his mother's favourites.

Frances appeared to be having as much difficulty with the menu as he and eventually opted for the fillet of halibut, which sent Harvey into mental overload about what wine to choose. He went for the potted shrimps to start with and she for the terrine of foie gras, which allowed the wine waiter to suggest two half bottles for them to share, one of white burgundy and the other of claret. Its name meant nothing to the deputy editor but he worried he might never forget its price. There were bottles on the list in the hundreds.

‘Buck up, Harvey dear,' he imagined his mother saying. ‘This is what I have always wanted for you!'

“Such a wonderful performance,” Frances said when their orders had finally been taken. “It is hard to think that will be his last. He has been a fixture in my life since childhood.”

“And mine,” echoed Harvey. “My mother always liked the way he played the wise buffoon or loveable rogue. You know his father was a coal miner?”

“No, I didn't.”

“I think that was partly why my mother liked him. She couldn't abide talk about the working class as if it were a life sentence.”

“How is your mother?”

“Sadly, she died two years ago,” he told her.

“I am sorry. That would be about the same time as my husband.”

“I know,” murmured Harvey.

They sat in silence for a while contemplating their loss.

“I think the aristocracy was quite pleased with theirs, if that's what it was,” she quipped.

‘Their life sentence, you mean?' he asked, guessing she had reverted to the earlier subject.

“Yes, although it was hardly a bed of roses for them either. There's a lot more to life than fixtures and fittings.”

Harvey thought about Graham Castle but didn't want to raise the subject himself.

“You heard what happened?” she asked.

“I read about it in my own paper, as a matter of fact. I even contacted a reporter with the
Inverness News
, which broke the story, to find out where you'd gone, but he didn't know. I'm sorry. It must have been a terrible experience.”

“So you wanted to find me. How nice!”

Harvey felt blood rise to his cheeks and looked sullen, almost fierce, in his effort to compensate.

“Your mother would have been pleased,” she laughed. “There's not much room at the top. For everyone who moves up, someone else has to move down. So I've done my bit!”

“Actually, I don't think she would have been pleased at all. She liked you.”

“But she only met me once.”

“Well she liked the idea of you.”

Harvey was not about to tell her what else his mother had prophesied.

“I heard that you had been made deputy editor. Congratulations.”

“Yes, but as my editor told me at the time: it doesn't mean much!”

“George Gilder?”

“Yes. George Gilder.”

“He has quite a following.”

“I hope you like this sort of food?” Harvey asked. “I imagined it was what you were used to.”

She smiled across at him. “Actually it has never been at the top of my list of gastronomic cravings. I'm as happy with a pasta dish as anything. It must be my Italian blood.”

Harvey laughed out loud at himself and his assumptions.

“That's a great relief! I saw myself having to cook jugged hare and plucking grouse if I was ever going to get to know you properly.”

“So you cook?”

“Yes, I like cooking. And right now if I didn't I'd starve, so there is an incentive. Actually I cooked while my mother was alive from time to time, but could never match her pasta dishes. She said I came close though. I suppose it was because she was a generation nearer to Italy. She gave me my love of opera too, but I don't think that was diluted.”

“What part of Italy did your mother's family come from?”

“Genoa. Well, outside it really. They were peasant farmers, although my mother said they always lived well. According to her, the communists were always trying to persuade the family that they were being oppressed, but my great-grandfather kept asking them why he should want to be oppressed by them instead and they eventually gave up. I think she learned a lot from him.”

“You knew him?”

“No. I never met any of my Italian family. First it was the war, then the expense I suppose. And your Italian family: where did they come from?”

“Rome. They were merchants. My great-grandfather came to London as a young man and stayed. He was pretty smart, I think, and married well,” she said, poking at her halibut. “Your father was English?”

“Yes, a Londoner from the East End. He was a junior bank clerk, which I suppose squeezed us into the middle class. But he died when I was twelve. After that we lived off his small pension and my mother's cleaning jobs, so I always thought of us as working class. My mother said class talk was nonsense anyway. She thought the whole notion had been invented by intellectuals to assert their material superiority over those below them and mental superiority over those above. I'd love to have seen her and Karl Marx in a room together!”

“You went to university?” she asked.

“I did: Oxford. I think my mother was prouder of that than
anything. You could forget about class, she thought, as there were just four types of people: good people and bad people; lazy people and hard-working people; people who wanted to get on and people who didn't; people who were lucky and people who weren't. She brought me up to be good even though I often fell short; never let me be lazy but knew I sometimes longed to be; drummed into my head that I should ‘get on' and was convinced I had been born under a lucky star. When she was in the mood to talk about herself, which wasn't often, she would say, ‘You know, Harve, I want for nothing. That's the God's honest truth.' One day I'll tell you what she had in mind for you.”

“Something nice, I hope,” Frances said. “I could do with something nice.”

Harvey, who was definitely taking to the claret and worrying less about its price, adopted the appearance of a schoolboy with a secret to trade. “Yes, I think it could be nice,” he said, looking at her indulgently.

Frances studied him. She realized she was feeling excited again, but didn't feel ready to play his game.

“So tell me about these miners of yours. Are they going to bring down the country?”

“I think some of their leaders would like to, but most miners I've listened to simply want to save their jobs and their communities. One can't fault them for that.”

“No. One can't,” Frances agreed. “But change does happen. I'm a good example of that!”

“Are you angry?”

“I was, very angry, although less so now. New money has pushed aside old money since the dawn of time. That's the Prime Minister's meritocracy for you.”

“You dislike the Prime Minister?” Harvey asked.

“If some Highland chieftain, like my husband, had mounted an
attack on her and her self-righteous middle class meritocracy, I might have been inclined to follow. But that would have been the act of a romantic, wouldn't it?”

She paused and Harvey thought better than to interrupt.

“Strangely,” she went on, “my husband – who was both tough and fearless - was also a romantic. I think he considered life too rich and wonderful to calculate, at least with any precision. For him, chance was always the wild card and he loved to flirt with her. But she got him in the end.”

“I suspect our Prime Minister is more of a romantic than she realizes, but I'll tell you who I think is the biggest romantic of them all right now – it's the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill. I have him as a younger version of Cervantes's Don Quixote, fighting an enemy who is not there in order to recapture a world that no longer exists. At one level, he is hard not to like, but I fear he is leading his faithful followers into oblivion.”

“So you think the miners will lose?”

“I think that even if they win, they will lose.”

“So they might win?”

“This battle? They might. But I sincerely hope they don't because it will damage the country even more than it has already been damaged and only buy them and their families a little more time – time to do what should have been done for the last fifty years.”

“And what is that?” she asked, intrigued by his passion.

“Rebuild their communities around something other than coal. But the NUM couldn't have that, it would have done it out of a job, and successive governments were too supine to make the miners and their leadership see sense. Or perhaps no one knew how – the mining communities were never the product of governments in the first place. Anyway, past failures have now inflicted a scorched earth policy on the rest of us and yielded up to the miners their most implacable opponent yet. If grand opera were still being written, this
would be a tragedy of epic proportions!”

“This has affected you, hasn't it?” she said.

Harvey sat back from himself and felt embarrassed.

“I'm sorry. I've been going on, haven't I?”

“Yes, you have. But passion in a man is not necessarily unattractive,” she teased. “It is a great deal more interesting than some of what I have had to endure at cocktail parties, I can tell you!”

“Until a few years ago,” Harvey confessed, “I was just a rather lazy, rather cynical journalist out to unearth a story, any story really, that my editor would print. But I've seen a lot of suffering over these last several years – people's lives ripped apart, companies and communities gutted – and it's made me want to do more than just report. It's made me want to get at the truth – whatever the hell that is!”

“Which is probably why you are now a deputy editor,” Frances suggested, in a tone Harvey hoped was a benediction.

“Finally growing up!” he laughed.

“Don't we all have to do that, one way or the other,” she said with what sounded like heartfelt resignation.

* * *

By the time he got to the English cheese plate, accompanied by a glass of port, which Frances insisted he have, Harvey was starting to feel that he might have managed quite well in a country house. She, on the other hand, had picked away at her foie gras and addressed her halibut with more politeness than enthusiasm. Her lemon meringue pie, however, seemed to have gone down well and she even took a glass of port herself.

The bill, when it came, was meaningful, but the wine waiter had not overloaded his selections, which made Harvey sufficiently grateful to part with an equally meaningful tip. He also hoped this made him
look generous. In the warm night air, they both felt content and walked for a while before trying to flag down a taxi.

“No limousine then?” she commented.

“No. That was a one-off for my mother. You caught us with our best suits on.”

“And very nice they were. I enjoyed that evening.”

“Yes, so did I.”

“But tell me, what
did
your mother have planned for me?” she asked.

“She said you and I would marry one day,” Harvey told her in a fit of alcohol-induced bravery or lunacy; he wasn't sure which.

For several paces, Frances Graham said nothing.

“A perceptive woman, your mother,” she responded eventually, “but not tonight.”

“No, not tonight,” Harvey agreed and she slipped her arm through his. They could stay inside the harbour of hope for a little longer before striking out across the uncertain sea of reality.