The Storytellers (22 page)

C
HAPTER

F
RANCES GRAHAM sat in reception. Over the twenty-one months since her husband's death she had been in and out of Butterfield de Souza, her late husband's solicitors, more times than she cared to count. Even now there seemed to be a hushed frisson about the place. People came to discover their fate. In ancient times, they would have entered a holy place with an offering in the hope of guiding providence. Now they approached gatekeepers like Butterfield de Souza.

On one side of the gate, an often anxious individual; on the other a cold cosmos which owed them nothing more than they could prove was their due. In the middle were the temple priests, men and women who toiled to interpret laws they had helped draft to regulate the universe but which possessed sufficient ambiguity to make intercession highly profitable.

“Frances, I hope you have not been waiting long. Come on in.”

Robert Cohen was in his late fifties and now the senior partner in Butterfield de Souza. He looked like a baggy-skinned bloodhound with an avuncular manner, but between his oversized ears, sharp eyes expressed a fierce intelligence and a determination never to be
bested. For reasons she could not quite explain, Frances found him strangely attractive, just as she had Henry Kissinger.

Richard Nixon's foreign policy maestro had once taken a shine to her at a party in Winfield House, the American Ambassador's London residence in Regent's Park. Purchased and rebuilt by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, in 1936 and sold by her to the US government for $1 in 1950, the neo-Georgian mansion was surrounded by the largest private gardens in the capital after Buckingham Palace. This said a good deal about Britain's ‘special relationship' with its former colony, David Graham had grumbled on the way home that night, faintly irritated by his wife's success. Frances remembered feeling quite proud of herself. In her mind she had chalked up her conquest as a small victory for the old world, although Kissinger was hardly a stranger to it, being born as he was in the Weimar Republic to a family of German Jews.

But these last months had been the most painful of her life. First there had been her husband's death. She had not even known he was in the Falkland Islands. He would often go away for weeks at a time. Back on such and such a day, Fran, was all he would say. That was the man she had married. Then to be told by Robert Cohen that David's finances had been ‘a little tangled' – so tangled, in fact, that she had been forced to sell her home to pay his debts – had piled night-destroying anxiety and then anger onto grief. It seemed he had borrowed money which was unlikely to be repaid without him, and his creditors had called in their loans.

“Well, I think we are nearly there, Frances,” her lawyer said as he poured tea into Meissen cups from a matching pot – a ritual Frances found reassuring as she was doubtless meant to. As long as there was tea, the world could not be wholly bad. ‘David's creditors have been reasonable. You won't be destitute.”

“That's something,” she answered. “There were days when I feared I might end up with nothing.”

“Oh no, we couldn't have allowed that!”

Frances looked at him as if to say, “Then why did you allow any of it?”

“Your husband was a forceful man,” he explained, fully aware what her look had implied. “This room bore witness to many battles between us. Whenever I asked him what would happen to you and the children if he was killed he would just shrug and say, ‘If you live fearing death, you are dead already.' But I did persuade him to put some things into yours and your children's names, so he wasn't entirely blind to the possibility. How are the children taking it?”

“They've been marvellous. I'm not sure I could have coped without them, frankly. Now they just want to get on with their lives.”

“And you?”

“I think I must get on with mine.”

“You must. I feel for your son, though,” he said: “the name, the history, a feeling of shame even, however unjustified.”

“The curse of expectations!”

“Yes, we are slaves to our past. As a Jew, that is something I know only too well! Perhaps we shouldn't be, at least not so much.”

“They are all strong teenagers. They can cope.”

“That
is
a blessing.”

“So what more needs to be done, Robert?”

“Nothing I can't handle. You are free, Frances, so go and live your life. It may not be Graham Castle, but you have a house to live in and enough money to get by on and most of all, you have yourself.”

Robert Cohen looked at her with genuine affection. He hardly dare admit it, even to himself, but he was a little in love.

“I couldn't have done it without you.”

“Of course you could, dear lady. You'd have just found some other overweight, overpriced lawyer!”

Frances Graham laughed that bell-like laugh that drew men to her like congregants.

* * *

Back in her small London house, she collapsed onto a sofa, exhausted. The tears of anger, frustration, shock and anguish she had bottled up at last poured free, along with great sobs and gulps for air squeezed out by the contractions which were giving birth to a new life.

Much later, while she was busying herself around the house, moving things from here to there and back again, she came upon the advertisement for a performance of Gaetano Donizetti's
L'Elisir D'Amore
. She knew the story. A peasant girl, Adina, aware of her beauty and frustrated by the timidity of her long-term suitor, Nemorino, agrees to marry Belcore, a visiting soldier on the lookout for recruits. Distraught, Nemorino turns to the quack Dr Dulcamara who sells him some cheap Bordeaux wine as a love potion. Emboldened by the alcohol, he struts around the village attracting the attention of the other girls. To pay for a second bottle of the magical elixir, he takes the fee offered by Belcore for joining the army. Now with visions of himself as a great soldier, he spurns Adina's attempts at reconciliation. Distraught, she confesses to Belcore that she can't marry him and buys back Nemorino's contract. Meanwhile the villagers learn, before Nemorino does, that his uncle has died and left him money and so pay even more attention to him. Convinced all this is a consequence of the elixir, he brags to Adina that he intends to die in battle as a soldier in any event, at which she faints into his arms and the villagers queue up to purchase Dr Dulcamara's cheap wine.

If her life were an opera, it would have become a tragedy. That had to change. Her mind turned to Milan, to a chance encounter, to the limousine, to Sylvia and to Harvey Mudd.

“But why,” she wondered in a crippling loss of confidence, “would he be interested in me?”

C
HAPTER

T
HE STRATEGY was clear enough: the government would not be defeated by the National Union of Mineworkers this time. Preparations had been extensive and long in the making. The Prime Minister had been expecting a strike towards the end of 1984 when the nation would be heading into winter and required the most energy, but the NUM President, Arthur Scargill, had been forced by the National Coal Board's announcement of pit closures to respond. The NCB Chairman, Ian MacGregor's, deliberate provocation had seen to that. But the government's pollsters were finding that the Scottish-American's gruff manner was not proving popular.

* * *

“I know, Peter, it is essential we get public opinion behind us. You are going to have to rein Ian in.”

“I think he's aware of the problem, Prime Minister. I suggest Tim handles all his public statements. Tim's agency still seems to have a sure touch.”

“Yes, they did a splendid job in the run-up to the seventy-nine
election; just splendid. How widespread is the strike?”

“From what I understand, it's quite solid, Prime Minister. The South Wales pits were grudging at first. They felt they had received less backing than they should have when they came out in support of the steel workers in 1980. The Nottinghamshire pits are lukewarm by all accounts. But elsewhere, miners seem to be falling into line. There is a long history of solidarity, as you know.”

“That man's use of Rule 41, without calling a national strike, was utterly ruthless, Peter. Sending his militant shock troops to lock in support across the industry has proved most effective.”

“Yes and I think we all know that defeating this strike will need more resources than the Coal Board can muster.”

The Prime Minister's countenance was explosive.

“People should be free to work. They cannot be denied that right by Scargill's pickets.”

She could hardly bring herself to mention the NUM President by name.

“Ian is threatening to take out an injunction against the NUM, Prime Minister, because the police are simply not upholding the law.”

“I will not have it, Peter. We cannot surrender to the mob. The right to work has to be upheld. The Home Secretary must make that clear. I'll speak to Leon.”

* * *

In March, Walter Marshall, chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, ordered all stations able to do so to switch to oil. The switch-over from coal to oil took time but his prompt action meant that, by September, half of the nation's electricity generation would no longer be powered by coal.

* * *

At ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Public Order Tactical Operations Manual had been revised to take account of the 1980 and 1982 laws on picketing. Strictly speaking, only six pickets could legally remonstrate in a peaceful manner with individuals wishing to work. The long and short shields were almost ready for deployment. The first would afford officers substantial protection, especially in battle formation when held overhead by back rows and vertically in front. The second could be used as a weapon for making arrests and for crowd dispersal.

Truncheons were only to be used in self-defence and never applied to the head and although mounted police were permitted to charge at a crowd for the purpose of intimidation, they were not permitted to ride into it or through it. There had been much discussion about when to use local police or those drawn from outside an area. Some officers felt that local police would have a deeper understanding of their communities and so be better able to head off trouble. Others felt that local police might be inhibited from applying the full force of the law against people they knew.

There was a heightened sense of tension and some excitement across the police service, together with the hope that the coming weeks would lead to generous overtime earnings. The Met, London's Metropolitan Police Force, fully expected to be deployed around the country to counter the NUM President's army of flying pickets and most of its members were looking forward to this change in routine.

There were some who remembered what became known as the Battle of Saltley Gate. To combat the ravages of inflation in 1972, the miners went on strike for a 43% pay increase. Concerned that his flying pickets (never used before in such large numbers) had failed to shut the Saltley Gate Coke Depot, Arthur Scargill, then a young union activist, called upon local engineering unions for support. When 10,000 engineers from around Birmingham joined around 2,000 miners picketing Saltley Gate, the 700 police, who had kept the
facility open, became overwhelmed and were forced to close it. This deprived the depository's dependent power station of fuel forcing Edward Heath's Conservative Government to capitulate. The police, as well as the government, had a score to settle.

C
HAPTER

J
ACK was happier than he had ever been. At last he was working for men with real vision, even if the union vice-president, Mick McGahey's, accent frequently confounded his comprehension. This did put the boot on the other foot, as many of his own more esoteric pronouncements confounded everyone else's. Arthur Scargill had been his hero ever since the Battle of Saltley Gate. And he knew that Peter Heathfield, who had become general secretary of the NUM in March, had stood aside to give Arthur a clear run at the presidency. He also knew that Peter's wife, Betty, had been a member of the Communist Party for over thirty years. Bob Dylan's 1960s prediction was finally coming true:
the times they
were
a-changin'
.

He visited every pit, every dock, every branch of the Transport and General Workers' Union, calling upon the brotherhood to support the miners and bring the government to its knees. Only in Nottinghamshire was he not welcomed as enthusiastically as he considered his due and so had handed that area over to John Preston whose ideological reticence was riling his nerves.

The humiliations inflicted on him by Miranda de Coursey were becoming a faded memory, although he did occasionally fantasize
about impaling her on a stake as the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible had done to his enemies – but
he
would do so for the pleasure of the people. The French revolutionaries certainly understood how cathartic an execution could be, especially when guilt was decided by hatred rather than due process: such a bourgeois concept in any event and so wasteful of resources.

His personal life had taken a 180 degree turn for the better. In Mona Dexter he felt sure he had found a soulmate. She soaked up his wisdom, had eradicated his self-doubt and would have won a gold medal for her sexual inventiveness if the Olympic committee had been sensible enough to offer one. It was true that she did not seem as stimulated as Miranda had been by ideas such as the need for permanent revolution or for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but everyone might be allowed a few failings.

* * *

Peter Betsworth hurried to his meeting. Stacy had indicated its urgency. The June weather was starting well, warm and dry, ideal for one of his park encounters. His diary informed him that he was in a leap year with 366 days, the extra one needed to keep the human calendar and astronomical seasons synchronized. He couldn't help reflecting that 1984 was also the year chosen by the novelist, Eric Blair, for a book in which Winston Smith has to disavow his love for Julia in order to prove he is worthy of a greater love, that of the state.

Written nearly forty years before, under his
nom de plume
, George Orwell, the author conjured up a super-state called Oceana of which Airstrip One, formerly Great Britain, is a province. Winston toils within the Ministry of Truth concocting lies, next to the Ministry of Peace which deals in war and the Ministry of Plenty which deals with rationing and starvation.

When Julia, who repairs Minitrue novel-writing machines and is
a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, falls for him, the Thought Police are summoned to detain the deviants as love is not permitted. Charged with Thought Crime they are captured and taken to the Ministry of Love for torture and interrogation. Told that the only reality is that proclaimed by the state and that only acceptance will set them free, they are ushered separately into Room 101 to be confronted by their greatest fear. Rather than submit to this, each disavows the other and Winston emerges broken but eager to use what remains of his body and soul in the service of state tyranny, epitomized by Big Brother.

In Orwell's novel, there were three classes of people after Big Brother: the Inner Party comprising less than 2% of the population, the Outer Party which included middle-class functionaries like Winston and the Proles who made up some 85% of the state. The intelligence officer smiled to himself. Was it ever thus and would it always be so? Perhaps the proportions had changed with fewer Proles and more in the Outer Party. Democracy, he thought, had seen to that. But the dynamic was essentially the same.

The state was held together by a story about itself – the pronouncements of Big Brother – that most people went along with and which justified membership of the Inner Party. The battle he was engaged in was against those who wished to propagate a different story and elevate themselves to the Inner Party. But to assert one story over another required that the besieged story appear threadbare by comparison. The dislocations in people's everyday lives, culminating in the Winter of Discontent, had created the space for this to be possible.

Eric Blair's bleak forecast of life in 1984 had not altogether turned out as he expected. Post-war governments in general and socialist ones with their Labour Party and trades union constituents in particular, had found themselves in a bind: how to reconcile their support of organized labour (tacit or overt) with what were often
harsh economic realities. Had Britain been isolated from the rest of the world this consensus story could have remained unchallenged, at least until the oversized state-run industries, created out of a naïve faith in the efficacy of large scale, politically-controlled bureaucracy, had crumbled under their own weight. But given the power of their purse, their vote and that derived from their largely free access to information, individuals came increasingly to demand better.

Governments of most political hues had attempted to buy their way out of trouble – the trouble caused by a mismatch between those expectations Big Brother's propaganda had stimulated and economic reality – by taking on debt to pay for their promises. Although successful at first in electoral terms, it led ultimately to inflation and insolvency which only currency devaluation, or the kind of deep recession they were now in, could wash away. Faced with the rapid erosion of their living standards, it was hardly surprising that working men in state-run industries turned from their official trade unions to shop stewards that they knew personally who offered them a better-sounding story. He had concluded that, in times of crisis, whoever was able to tie force to the most popular account of how the world worked would inherit Big Brother's mantel.

Faced with the prospect of losing power, most members of Oceana's Inner Party realized that they needed to embrace a new narrative, but without appearing to do so. Monetarism, a set of ideas which held that the problem was invariably too much government rather than too little, and that free markets served people's interests better than state bureaucracies, seemed to offer a way out. So when Margaret Thatcher and her cohort appeared on the scene espousing such a story, she faced an already defeated political enemy at the top, most of whose members secretly wanted her to confront a far more dangerous one struggling to emerge from the bottom.

What Peter Betsworth knew but the Proles and most of the Outer Party did not, was that even members of the socialist Inner Party had
been running scared for years. It had been a Labour Government in 1975 that broadened the definition of subversion to include ‘organizations and individuals whose intention was to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means' and it was this which underpinned his activities now.

He saw Stacy waiting for him on the bench and glanced at his watch.

“I'm late,” he said sitting next to her, thinking that they must look like a father and his daughter or an older man with a substantially younger lover. “It's a nice day at least.”

“Yes. I've been watching the geese beside the lake. They waddle and honk with great busyness.”

Peter glanced across at a group of five cutting a swathe through children on scooters, anxious adults and wary dogs, their black heads bobbing back and forth like rabbis in earnest discussion, oblivious to the world they were dissecting.

“I take it we have some movement?” he said.

“Mona tells me they are going to go after the Orgreave coking plant which serves British Steel.”

“South Yorkshire?”

“I believe so.”

“I thought the NUM had given the steelworkers dispensation for limited deliveries, just to keep their furnaces ticking over and hopefully to get them on side.”

“Apparently they have been outmanoeuvred by British Steel and its union with far more being shipped out than the NUM realized. King Arthur was furious when he found out, Mona tells me. They plan to send in pickets from around the country to close the depot down.”

“Do we have a date?”

“The eighteenth.”

“Of this month?” Peter sounded alarmed.

“That's the date Mona has given me.”

“Can she be sure?”

“I think she is quite sure.”

“What's her source?”

Stacy was surprised by the question.

“Jack Pugh, naturally. He's been helping to organize it.”

“Yes, of course,” he responded, but she could see that his mind was racing ahead.

“Anything else?” he asked. “What's their mood at the moment?”

“Very determined, very confident, Mona says.”

“We'll have to change that,” he grumped, his brow now furrowed in concentration. “And my Marx, what's my Marx up to these days?” he asked. “I think I must see him again soon.”

“He and Jack Pugh have had something of a falling out, although, to be honest, they never really had a falling in. Jack's sent him off to cover the Nottinghamshire pits because Jack doesn't feel welcome there.”

“Perfect, absolutely perfect!” Peter seemed ecstatic. “Tell him to come and see me soon. And you? How are things with you?”

“All right, I suppose.”

“Romance cooling?”

Stacy shrugged. “I think you know me by now,” she said. “I like a mission but right now I'm little more than a part-time girlfriend and a post box between you and Mona Dexter.”

“So you want to keep working for the service?”

“Of course!”

Peter Betsworth nodded. Agents like her were hard to come by. When all of this was over he was sure he'd have little difficulty thinking of something. With her charm and sophistication, she'd be perfect for the embassy circuit.

“Well, Stacy, I think that's it for now,” he said. “Keep close to your source. I need to know how the mood of the NUM leadership
is evolving over these next months. With luck, it should all be over by Christmas.”

“I certainly hope so,” she said with a resigned smile and he left her on the bench looking at the Canada geese, the lake and the people ribboned around it, half-wishing he was twenty years younger.