Her thoughts wandered to her conversation with her agent.
The local party chairman had been badgered again by Central Office with regard to her profound Euroscepticism. The PM was endlessly and yet again calling for unity; which meant silence from all who disagreed.
There was a women's coffee morning after surgery, an encounter with the remnants of blue rinse loyalty and the fanatical devotion to whatever leadership was in place of the bottle-blonde, sun bed new generation of local committee-women who were the inheritors and perhaps even the daughters of the blue-rinse matrons.
'… bankrupt," she heard, startled into attention. His features indicated that he understood she was inappropriately unheeding.
"I'm sorry, Ray, but I don't understand," she recovered. Things have been bad in the construction industry, I know, but—" 'I didn't come for the party line," he replied sourly, then immediately altered his expression to one of apology. There's work, but there's no bloody money for it.
That's what's wrong — Marian."
"Cash flow, is that it?"
"Cash flow? There's not a bloody trickle, I can tell you!"
"But you've work?"
He nodded vehemently.
"If you can call it that. I've got contracts is more like the truth."
He sipped viciously at his wine and drops spattered the florid tie and the lapels of his grey suit. She blew smoke at the ceiling. He continued: "It's this bloody Millennium Project the Venice of the Midlands crap! I won supply contracts, grants, contracts for construction… it all looked bloody marvelous on paper which is where most of it stayed, on paper!"
"Money from Brussels hasn't materialised?"
"It did, at first. Trickle-down economics at its best money trickling down from the main contractors, handed out to them by the appropriate officials and departments. Wonderful artists' impressions and architects' models, great site clearance lots of hype… We were all over the bloody moon, for months!" He paused, staring into his empty glass.
"You ready for another?" She shook her head.
"Won't be a mo—" The Millennium Project was vast and crucial to the conurbation. Only a tiny fragment of the huge urban redevelopment fell within the boundaries of her constituency some canal side prettifying, some executive apartment buildings from resurrected waterside factories and warehouses, a small part of the huge leisure complex around the canal basin. The rest of the development the symphony hall, the conference centre, the office blocks and living and playing acreage, the new roads, the airport expansion… all lay outside the constituency. Thankfully, she had always thought, taking into account her own Euro-sceptic credentials and the hundreds of millions that Brussels was pouring into the entire project. Wise old birds with long experience of Whitehall and Westminster murmured, out of the hearing of Whips and Permanent Secretaries, that it was simply a way of bribing the most sceptical electorate in Europe that the EU was a good thing, a source of endless bounty.
She was not disinclined to believe such judgements. Now — unfortunately, she considered one of her constituents had brought the problem to her doorstep.
What problem—?
Banks returned to the table, making it scrape on the flag-stoned floor of the wine bar as he clumsily, angrily sat down. This time, he had bought a bottle of the house white. He drank greedily and refilled his glass at once, waggling the bottle at her. She nodded, out of insinuation, and he topped up her glass. Marian lit another cigarette.
"What precisely is wrong, Ray?" she soothed.
"Bloody everything!" he announced in a hoarse whisper, leaning across the table at her almost in challenge.
"Look, I raised this matter' his Midlands accent had become more pronounced, as if he was consciously reinventing a former self, the rough, pushy, relatively honest jobbing building from the Black Country
'at the last meeting with the main contractors. Fat lot of bloody use that was!" He seemed to become distracted by his anger.
"I could have sold the business five years ago for over two million you know that? I didn't. Bloody my business and it stays my business, I thought. Wish I bloody had, now!"
"What's wrong?" she insisted. The undisguised emotion, the sense of a long perspective of bitterness, intrigued her further.
"The main contractors asked me to be patient! The grants or whatever from Brussels had been delayed, they were in the bloody post or something!" Despite himself, he grinned.
"I told 'em I thought they were hanging on to the money and us small fry could get stuffed, just so long as the flash projects were on schedule! They didn't like that!"
"Neither would I," she murmured, 'if I had a knighthood and an income of three quarters of a million a year and sat on the boards of four other companies." He returned the smile.
"No, not Sir Desmond only the whole bloody gang of 'em. Banks, the local politicians, the main contractors, the architects. Yes, the bloody symphony hall's on schedule, and the most pricey apartments, the office blocks. That's the facade.
There's bugger all being done on other parts of the project. Piles of bricks and mountains of conduits lying around. Bloody scandal! And us poor buggers not getting paid, not even being allowed to get on with the first stages. So I'm left hanging on by my balls with the bank manager trying to climb up my backside to pull my teeth out!" His features were crimson, then suddenly abashed.
"Sorry…"
"Could you really become bankrupt?"
Two months at most." He refilled his glass.
"Two bloody months before they wipe out twenty bloody years. And I'm not on my own. There's dozens of chippies and sparks, all small firms, suppliers and fitters, carpet, lighting, double-glazing… I was speaking for them as well as myself."
"How much isn't being done to time?"
"About twenty-five per cent, maybe more… half a billion? A third, anyway. There's local money, from the councils, not up front yet. But that's normal for those tightfisted buggers. And the Brussels money.
Fifty, sixty million that's not appeared monthslale."
"You want me to make a fuss, is that it?" His eyes glowed, as if he had somehow encountered a movie actress long admired.
"Questions in the House, see the Minister, invite someone in front of the Select Committee…?" He was nodding as eagerly as if she were proposing a series of increasingly bizarre erotic fantasies.
"Could you? I mean would you?"
"I don't see why not. I'd like more information before I do, though and no, not this evening. I have a lot of preparation for my surgery tomorrow. Can I ring you next week?" It was as if she had whisked away the prospect of sexual gratification, and with it his wallet. His lugubrious disappointment amused Marian.
"I will ring you, Ray don't worry."
Reluctantly, he acquiesced, then burst out:
"You could try asking them to stop putting the frighteners on, too, while you're at it!" His voice was barely above a fierce whisper, his face close to hers, his breath rancid with cheap wine. His sincerity was not in doubt, nor was his sudden, unnerved fear.
"I don't like it—"
"What's happening? What sort of thing?" There was a momentary image, no more than a single, subliminal frame of film, of Lloyd's body. There was the same impression of endangerment about Banks' words, the sweat on his damp brow, his high colour.
Two small companies a sparks and an air-conditioning contractor.
They've both had recent fires at their premises. Yobbos, the police say. Vandals." He breathed noisily.
"A car followed my Sandra home from school the other day. She couldn't get the number because it was covered up with mud, she said. I believe her!"
Until that moment, the room their conversation had inhabited had been familiar, and furnished as she would have expected, with all the glossy appurtenances of graft, fraud, bribery. Banks seemed to have pushed her through a door into another, unfamiliar room, where arson had occurred and a schoolgirl had been terrified on her way home.