The rain had started up again with a vengeance, a broad band of it all the way from the Midlands to the Scottish borders. A brisk wind lashed it against the conservatory windows and it swirled in dark, glistening patterns over the glass roof.
Banks sat listening to Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Does Your House Have Lions. When you got beyond the showmanship, playing three saxes at once, for example, the man could really play. After polishing off the remains of some takeaway pad Thai noodles that were fast approaching their chuck-out date, Banks had spent much of the early evening on the telephone and computer. It was partly work, partly family, including a long chat with Tracy in Newcastle and an email to his parents, who were still on the South-east Asia cruise. Brian was in Lyon, and most likely on stage, so Banks just left a brief message on his mobile.
Now he had just finished reading through the thick file on Joe Jarvis that Annie and Gerry had quickly put together for him after their visit to Dr Mandy Parsons. Banks already knew a fair bit about Jarvis — one of his father’s heroes — as did most people who followed the news with any level of interest, but there were always surprises. He hadn’t known that Jarvis was a devoted Shostakovich fan, for example, or that his favourite reading included Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov and Émile Zola, none of whom Banks had ever read, though he had seen various versions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma on TV and had watched a few episodes of The Paradise. He had always wanted to read Germinal and Chekhov’s short stories, and perhaps now was a good time. The second-hand copies he had bought years ago were still on his bookshelf.
There were plenty of photographs of Jarvis at various stages in his career in the file, and he had certainly been a ruggedly handsome young man in the early seventies when Ronnie had known him. As time went on, and his career path took him further and further from the pit, he had come to look more distinguished. He was certainly a familiar figure, at any rate, which was hardly surprising given the number of times he’d been splashed over the media.
As the rain poured down and Roland Kirk played on, Banks closed the folder on his knee. The basic facts were simple enough. Joe Jarvis was born in 1947 in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, into a mining family that went back three generations. He had started working down the pit at the age of sixteen, and at the time of the 1972 miners’ strike, he was a twenty-five-year-old coalface worker, just a few years older than Ronnie Bellamy, and from another universe entirely.
It was after the ’72 strike that things had started to get interesting, and complicated, in Jarvis’s career. He joined the Communist Party in 1973, quickly became a pit delegate, and after that it seemed there was no stopping him. A keen supporter of education through the Workers’ Education Association, he took a part-time course in Economics and International Politics at Sheffield University in the late seventies. He had also become more active in the National Union of Miners, and over the years he rose steadily through the ranks, or climbed higher up the greasy pole, depending on your point of view: shop steward, member of the branch committee, branch delegate, and from there he moved on to paid, full-time union positions, leaving the coalface behind for ever in 1982, though he never became president of the NUM. That position went to Arthur Scargill.
A vehement opponent of Margaret Thatcher, Jarvis often appeared on TV during the 1984 miners’ strike, and he was also pictured holding banners and linking arms at pickets. He had been one of the loudest protestors of the practice of bringing in extra police from the Met to bolster containment of the picketers. These were the men who were ‘up for it’, Banks remembered, ready to crack a few northern heads, the ones his father always brought up when the matter of Banks’s career arose, the ones who had waved their rolls of five-pound notes overtime pay at the starving miners, and used it to woo the local girls, some of whom were only too willing to be wooed. At least they didn’t rape and pillage, as the Russians had in Berlin after the war.
In turn vilified and lauded, Jarvis proved an able leader of men and a tricky opponent of the National Coal Board negotiators. Loyalty and solidarity were his keywords. He would have given his life for his fellow miners. Some said he was the man behind Scargill, others that he always played second fiddle. Whatever the truth was — and he never commented on his position himself — he was always right there, up at the front line when the going got tough, as it had over the last two or three years.
Some official papers found in a Moscow basement and finally released showed that Arthur Scargill had begged the Russians for money to support the 1984 strike and asked that its source be kept secret. Of course, Scargill bore the brunt of this publicly, and did so very well, but the shadowy figure of Jarvis, though retired by then, had plenty of his own explaining to do. He had been a key figure in the negotiations and had made frequent trips to Moscow during the time he was employed by the NUM. There were also accusations of financial ties with Colonel Gadaffi’s government in Libya.
During the Cold War, of course, the Russians were interested in doing all they could to wreck the capitalist system and foment uprising all over the world, and the Libyans had no great love for England, either. Jarvis was eloquent in his own defence, but a lot of mud was slung in the media, and some of it stuck. Jarvis had always been proud to tell people he was a member of the Communist Party, even when it was unfashionable, and when leaving it and joining the Labour Party, as Scargill had done, would have furthered his career. There were rumours of MI5 investigations and hints of espionage accusations, yet even his greatest detractors would have had to admit that Jarvis didn’t have access to any information the Russians would have been interested in. What he could do, though, was stir up unrest, help to bring about the ideal conditions for a workers’ revolution — work as an agent provocateur — and the climate in the miners’ strikes had been ideal for that. But no slush fund was found, and there was no secret Moscow money stashed away in numbered Swiss bank accounts. At least, not that HMG’s best could find.
Though it was well known that Jarvis strongly disagreed with Scargill’s policy of calling the 1984 strike without taking a ballot of members, he never publicly denounced his friend and mentor, even when the latter went so far as to defend Stalin and attack the Polish Solidarity movement, or when he later sued the NUM for kicking him out and claimed expenses from the union for his expensive Barbican flat.
No charges were ever brought against Jarvis, and when the hue and cry died down, he returned to his retirement and his silence, apparently spending most of his time on his allotment in Mexborough, reading his beloved Chekhov and growing vegetables. He didn’t have an expensive flat in London, but a modest terrace in Mexborough, not too far from where he had grown up.
His address had been easy enough to find; it was in the telephone directory.
The music had come to an end, and Banks had to go through to the entertainment room to change the disc. He could have made life easier by buying an automatic CD changer that held five or ten discs, but he found that the more complicated a piece of equipment was, the more likely it was to go wrong. Besides, he never knew what he wanted to listen to next, let alone three or four discs ahead. In the end he went for something a little more relaxing than Roland Kirk as it was getting close to bedtime — See You on the Ice by Carice van Houten — and poured himself a small nightcap of Laphroaig.
The rain was still hammering down. It was like living under a waterfall. Banks supposed it would end one day soon, then they would have snow and ice to look forward to. He remembered the Arizona desert and the balmy heat and unique light of Los Angeles — Santa Monica, the Hollywood Hills, Laurel Canyon, Mulholland Drive — the breathtaking beauty of the California coast all the way up to San Francisco. He also remembered Sophia, whose ghost he had been trying to lay to rest through his travels. The sun had shone all the time he was there, though one evening, while he was enjoying dinner in Tiburon on the other side of the bay with a charming divorcee he had met at the hotel, the cityscape across the water suddenly disappeared so completely that everyone in the restaurant gasped and thought the power had gone off. It was fog, though, rolled in so quickly under the Golden Gate Bridge that nobody had noticed it was coming, and most of it had dispersed when it was time to go back to the hotel. Perhaps it was time for another big trip, he thought, if he could afford it. India, perhaps. Or China, Vietnam, Brazil? There was no shortage of possibilities. There was no one he needed to forget this time, but why should one even need an excuse to go on a long journey? He glanced at a few tour itineraries on his tablet, then decided it was about time for bed.