The Rotters' Club (19 page)

And those were the last ominous words that had been spoken on the subject. Philip had no idea what his father might have meant.

Needless to say, he could not mention any of this to his friends.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he answered, in a tone of abject despair. And when they looked unconvinced, he was forced to improvise: ‘I’m just… worried about this Closed Circle article, that’s all. I’m not sure we’re going down the right road.’

Doug shook his head in disbelief. ‘We went over all that at the last meeting.’

‘I know we did. I’m still not convinced.’

The Closed Circle was a select debating society, composed of no more than sixteen members at any one time, drawn mostly from the upper sixth and very occasionally from the year below. Nobody outside the society knew how often it met, or where, or what exactly went on at the meetings. Everything about it was cloaked in impenetrable (and somehow infantile) secrecy.

‘The Closed Circle is a nasty, divisive bit of elitist bollocks,’ said Doug. ‘It’s like a bunch of schoolkids pretending to be the fucking masons. It’s high time somebody did a proper exposé of the whole thing and showed these guys up for the self-important wankers they are.’

‘Have
you
been asked to join?’ a voice asked.

Doug wheeled around to find that Paul, Benjamin’s unsavoury little brother, was sitting directly behind him.

‘What are
you
doing here?’ Benjamin asked. Even after three-and-a-half terms, he had still not adjusted to the horror of realizing that Paul now attended the same school, and travelled home on the same bus. There was no end to the nightmare of his continued presence.

‘It’s a free country, isn’t it?’ said Paul. ‘Besides, there aren’t any other seats.’

This, unfortunately, was true.

‘Well, look, we don’t want you talking to us.’

‘It’s a free country, like I said. Anyway,’ (he was addressing Doug now) ‘I asked you a question.’

Doug could not believe the boy’s presumption. He gazed at him with the cold disdain of a pedigree bloodhound whose tail has just been tweaked by a mongrel pup.

‘Have
you
been asked to join?’ Paul repeated.

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, there you are then. You’re only jealous.’

‘
Jealous?
’

‘You don’t fool me with all that guff about elites. If you’re not an elitist, what are you doing at this school? You had to take an entrance exam, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Elitism’s a good thing. Everyone but a handful of blinkered ideologues knows that. Elitism leads to competition and competition leads to excellence. And as for The Closed Circle,
I’m
going to ask if I can join.’

Benjamin howled with incredulity. ‘
You?
You’re about five years too young, for one thing. And you don’t
ask
to join.
They
have to ask
you.
’

Before Paul could enrage him any further the bus reached Northfield, and it was time for Claire and Philip to get off. As they said goodbye Benjamin looked out of the window again, not meaning to be rude, but wanting to avoid Claire’s eyes; he knew that when she said goodbye he would find a challenge there, that she would try to force some kind of response, just as she had been trying to do ever since he had first taken notice of her, at this same bus stop, three long years ago. Since then he had probably been the last person, out of all his friends, to recognize the obvious fact that she nursed a passion for him, an inexplicable crush which he had done nothing to encourage. It had become a source of monstrous embarrassment between them. Even Claire, at some level, seemed to hate herself for it; but there it was. Apparently these things couldn’t be reasoned away. And it was hard on Doug, as well, who had his own feelings for Claire, but had never met with the slightest encouragement. So there was always a little tension in the air, between Benjamin and Doug, whenever Claire was around, or in their thoughts. Which was why, perhaps, they said nothing to each other for a while (Doug having moved on to Benjamin’s seat) after she had gone.

‘So,’ Doug asked finally, ‘are you coming to London with me at the weekend?’

This, too, was ground they had covered before.

‘I don’t think I should,’ said Benjamin. ‘I haven’t been invited.’

‘I’m not the only one who’s been invited. They’d like to meet anyone from the magazine.’

Benjamin squirmed in his seat.

‘I think you’d better go by yourself.’

Doug looked at his friend for a moment, then laughed – a short, sad laugh – and said: ‘You just won’t do it, will you?’

‘Do what?’

‘You won’t get out there. You won’t take life by the throat and give it a good old shaking. You’ll never do that, will you, Benjamin? You’ll never take your chances. Someone gives you a way to get
out
of this shitty place for a day or two, and go and see something
happening,
something really happening, but no, you won’t do it. You’d rather stay home with your mum and dad and… I don’t know, put your stupid record collection in alphabetical order, or something. Make sure your Soft Machine comes before your Stackridge.’

Benjamin could feel the sharp justice of these words. They were like a rain of blows, each landing on their target with perfect aim. He cowered beneath them. It was true, he would never have gone down to London with Doug, whatever the circumstances. He could never walk brazenly into an unfamiliar office and introduce himself to a roomful of strangers, all older than him, all more experienced and knowing and bristly with metropolitan cool. The very idea terrified him. But he also had an excuse, a real excuse, and he felt entitled to use it.

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I just have to be back here on Saturday. There’s something I always do on Saturdays.’

And he told Doug that on Saturdays, he always visited the asylum. Which was true. And so Doug said that he was sorry and then fell silent. There could be no arguing with that.

4

Every time he drove past the end of her street, Bill felt peculiar. This, after all, was not just where she had lived, but where he had last seen her. It was here that she had broken down in his car and begun screaming, threatening to kill herself if he did not leave Irene. He had pulled over to the side of the road and attempted to comfort her. For five or ten minutes they had raged at each other and later that day he could barely remember a word they had said. And even now, so long after the event, this otherwise anonymous junction where her street intersected with the Bristol Road preserved the terrible, savage energy of that encounter somewhere in its memory; Bill had to pass through it, like a forcefield, every time he drove this way into central Birmingham.

She had not turned up at his house, as he had feared. She had attempted to contact him only once, phoning him at home and requesting that they have an urgent conversation. He had agreed to see her at their regular meeting-point, one of the shower blocks at the plant, the scene of some of their most frantic clandestine lovemaking. But Bill didn’t go. His nerve had failed him.

For most of the next two evenings he had surreptitiously left his phone off the hook, wedging the receiver away from its cradle with a pellet of india rubber, but it soon occurred to him that he couldn’t do this forever. At 9.30 on the night after he had broken his appointment, he returned the telephone to its normal state, and within five minutes it was ringing. He picked up the phone and found himself speaking to Donald Newman, Miriam’s father. He seemed to be on the verge of hysteria and the first thing he did was to threaten Bill with murder, but Bill was not scared of violence, and he knew that he had to allow this man to confront him. They arranged to meet in The Black Horse in Northfield, half an hour later, and that was where Donald had told him the extraordinary news: Miriam had disappeared.

He
was
a violent man, Bill could see that. Potentially, at any rate. But that night he confined himself to abusing Bill verbally, calling him every filthy name in the dictionary, accusing him of having seduced his daughter and corrupted her and defiled her and probably getting her pregnant and forcing her to have any number of abortions and anything else that was thrown up by an imagination Bill might have characterized as raving if so many of the accusations had not been, in point of fact, uncomfortably close to the truth. Anyway, he barely heard or understood most of what he was being told: his mind was reeling from the impact of so much new and horrific information. Miriam had kept a diary, apparently. She had never told him that. Not for the whole of their time together, thank God, but certainly at the beginning, and now her father had read all of it. Humiliation and exposure stared him in the face that night – the end of his marriage, the loss of his job – and he found himself pleading with Donald, begging him for the sake of Irene and Doug to keep the affair secret. But Donald wasn’t interested in any of this. All he wanted to know was where Miriam was. Where is she, he kept repeating, where is my daughter, and all that Bill could answer was, I don’t know. I really, really don’t know.

The only thing he could think to tell Donald was about the other man. He remembered the teasing way – except that it was too reckless to be called teasing, too desperate – Miriam had led him to believe that there was someone else, another lover, some unnamed rival who was ‘not from the factory, not from anywhere round here’. She had even threatened to run off with him, and perhaps that was what she had done. Donald pressed him for the man’s name but he didn’t know it. And then Donald asked: Do you think she could have killed herself?, and once again Bill shook his head and this time behind his wire-rimmed glasses his haggard grey eyes were pooled with tears as he said: I don’t know.

Donald had gone.

Eight anxious days later there had been a curious, inconclusive postscript. Bill had contacted some of his friends in the Anti-Nazi movement and made some further inquiries about the Association of British People, the group to which Roy Slater belonged. It turned out to be just the sort of rabble he had expected, on the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe, too minor to be considered dangerous although it had a record of involvement with small-scale racial violence. Bill had called for a meeting with Roy Slater and accused him of disseminating racist propaganda in the workplace. Slater asked him what he was going to do about it; Bill said that he would report it to the union, with the recommendation that Slater was stripped of his position as shop steward and, quite possibly, his job.

‘Do it if you like,’ Slater had answered, unexpectedly. ‘But if you do – I’ll tell Irene about you and Miriam Newman.’

The blackmail had worked. Bill said nothing to his union colleagues, and Slater had been more than true to his word. The last thing he had told Bill at that meeting was: ‘No one will hear about it, Brother Anderton. Ever. You have my personal guarantee.’

Bill didn’t know what he had meant by that, exactly, any more than he knew how Slater had found out about the affair in the first place. He decided, in the end, that he had probably heard about it from Victor Gibbs, and he continued to suspect that there was some murky, unfathomable conspiracy between the two of them. But he had no evidence more concrete than the words in which they had both, independently, described Doug’s school – ‘that toffs’ academy’ – and later on, when he was able to reflect upon the whole business more calmly, he even wondered whether Gibbs
had
known so very much about Miriam and him. Had it not been all bluster, and Bill’s own paranoid imagination? Speculation was pointless by now. Gibbs’s embezzlement and forgery were exposed and he had been dismissed. Bill never heard from him again. And one year later, Slater got married, moved to Oxford, and managed to get himself a job at Leyland’s Cowley plant, with the help of a laudatory reference provided, in what he was determined should be his final act of dishonesty, by Bill himself.

As for Miriam, he did his best to forget. It had been impossible at first. Night after night he found himself on the point of phoning Donald Newman and asking if there had been any news. Each time, he stopped himself; he couldn’t face the man’s rage and contempt a second time. There was no story in the newspapers, and no word in the factory except a fragment of conversation, half-overheard one day in the canteen, about Miriam having run away with another man. Bill could never know how well-informed this gossip had been, but he was forced to accept, in the end, that the other, mysterious lover must have existed, and that she had fled to him. For months relief and jealousy fought for supremacy in his heart and in the end they called an exhausted truce. Nothing took their place. He struggled to kick the habit, the draining, corrosive habit of thinking about Miriam day in day out, and tried to reconcile himself, instead, to the virtues of routine, of self-control; of marriage. He had stayed faithful to Irene from then on, in deed if not in thought. But even now, almost two years on, all it took was a journey like this, a quick glance out of the car window, to bring all the grimness of that final weekend back to him. To have come so close to the brink, without even knowing it, without having the faintest idea, really, what he had been dealing with! A long shudder rippled through him whenever he thought of it.

He found that he had driven almost as far as King William’s, and could remember nothing about the last four miles, not even the Selly Oak stretch where there must have been heavy traffic. It was a miracle that he never had an accident. Doug was waiting for him outside the school gates. He had changed out of his uniform, which he had scrunched up and rolled under his arm. After years of wearing flares, he had suddenly converted to black drainpipe jeans which made his legs look impossibly thin and reedy. He was wearing no jacket, just a white T-shirt.

‘Get in, for God’s sake,’ said Bill. ‘You must be freezing out there. What’s happened to your jacket?’

Doug threw his uniform and his black sports holdall into the back of the car, then climbed into the passenger seat next to his father.