He turned away. The gardeners were stamping down the earth, hammering in a stake to support the tender growth: they were shuffling back to their shed. But the woman was the crime. A taboo had been wilfully broken. She had witnessed a moment of ceremonial magic. Punishment was inevitable. Triscombe was not implicated. ‘The rest is not our business.’
Edith was smiling: none of this mattered. It was happening to somebody she had known once, and left behind. The researcher tried to cross the park towards her; but time was frozen, the ‘long second’ of science fiction — everybody else was moving so slowly through solid air that was turning into ice. He closed his fist around Gelert’s collar and hauled him, choking, back to the Jaguar. A track was visible where the animal’s weight had resisted, and flattened the wet grass. The engine was over-revving: the car backed up over the flower beds, spinning earth, then jolted out under the arch, and away into the traffic of Roman Road.
Playing its part, the rain began to fall with more purpose. Edith turned up her collar. She seemed to be quite alone, under the tree, on that dismal ground. Even if she had been searching for one, there was no way out: she was trapped, blocked in by the flats and the railway. Then some men, who had been casually watching, talking among themselves, walked out of the pool of shadows beneath the embankment wall, and came quickly towards her.
IV. Living in Restaurants
‘The beetles dying of the plague
don’t care what railways are like’
We had hardly begun: we were no more than two or three lunches into the project when I first heard the term ‘kill fee’. The trainee director assigned to vet our suitability let it fall from a peak of feigned excitement and urgency: as if this film was the one he had been searching for to launch not only his career, but… ours as well. Together we were a dream-ticket: Ken Loach paired with… Tom Wolfe. We were irresistible. He smiled, and looked from Fredrik’s face to mine in the vain hope of approval. I thought his team sounded, well, a little… over the hill. Museum-bait, in fact. Kitchen-table socialism vampirizing a seizure of good-old Southern-style carpetbaggery. And there was a definite limit, now rapidly approaching, to the number of metaphorical pause-bubbles (…) I could swallow, without punching the over-articulate director in the mouth. I was prepared to suffer just so much in the cause of gluttony.
Our boy was clearly a non-combatant. And we were the end of the line. A good way of stiffing him from the payroll. We were a dangerous mess, waiting for some fool to tread in it. There was, sadly, a saturation point to how much flaky carnival footage this man could pump through the schedules on the ‘ethnic guilt’ quota, before somebody noticed. It was time to make his play. ‘Kill fee’: it hung there, slightly obscene, a dagger of ice suspended over the pink lawn tablecloth; reminding us of exactly who held the whiphand, and who we were working for. One unjustifiable paragraph, one location more than half a mile from a three-star diner, and we were back on the street, with not much more than our bus fare to show for four months of heroic eating.
The ‘Corporation’, as is well known, is a Christian version of the Vatican, with all the immemorial chains of command, schisms, heresies, court favourites, interrogations, excommunications, icons, martyrdoms, and public burnings: thickets of conspiracy in which the left hand denies all knowledge of the pocket the right hand is picking. The Vatican has its global responsibilities (getting the dirt out of banknotes, and promoting moon-tested golf-buggies); but the Corporation yields nothing as a fountainhead of dogma. White papers, touched by the hand of Reith, are eternal and infallible:
(1) There are two sides (and only two) to every argument.
(2) We shall offer them, without fear or favour, equal air-time.
(3) The only good book is a dead book. (And grant, O Lord, that it be set in Africa.)
(4) Yesterday’s dross, if repeated often enough, is today’s classic. (Memo to Contracts: Tighten up on those Repeat Fees.)
(5) It is always better to employ Irish Jokes, than to tell them. We are never vulgar. Especially about money.
(6) If the Irish are ‘men of violence’ they may speak only in subtitles.
(7) It is a short step from the Department of Religious Affairs to the throne of the Director-General.
(8) Only Accountancy is a Higher Calling. The ‘Accountant’ is the person who is accountable to no one (except, of course, She-Whose-Name-May-Not-Be-Taken-In-Vain).
The Corporation, in its perpetual and never satisfied search for ‘The New’, operates a nervous compromise between greed and caution: a sinister cloud of anti-matter, giving off odours of sanctity and expensive aftershave, trawls for virgin energies to subvert. Two of the sharpest headhunters, pulling their faces out of their coffee cups with an audible ‘Eureka!’, stumbled, at the same moment, on the name of Fredrik Hanbury: who was so prolific in his journalism, so much in demand, he seemed to be reviewing half-digested pastiches of his own work, flashing from magazine to newspaper in an exuberantly Socratic dialogue that only he was fast enough to follow. This banal coincidence in the recognition of a name it was harder to avoid than to notice was elevated — by a species of desperate occultism that lurks in all stagnant bureaucracies — into a significantly compelling synchronicity. And so, only a year after his seminal book of essays went out of print, the word from the Bush was — bring me the head of Fredrik Hanbury!
Fredrik had done a number in the London Review of Books on a novel I had recently published; which would otherwise, despite the gallantly double-glazed ‘doorstepping’ of my publisher, have sunk into necessary and well-deserved obscurity. Fredrik suggested that Spitalfields was, currently, a battleground of some interest; a zone of ‘disappearances’, mysteries, conflicts, and ‘baroque realism’. Nominated champions of good and evil were locking horns in a picaresque contest to nail the ultimate definition of ‘the deal’. We had to get it on. There were not going to be any winners. If we didn’t move fast, any halfway-sharp surrealist could blunder in and pick up the whole pot.
‘Spitalfields’: the consiglieri liked the sound of it, the authentic whiff of heritage, drifting like cordite from the razed ghetto. But, please, do not call it ‘Whitechapel’, or whisper the dreaded ‘Tower Hamlets’. Spitalfields meant Architecture, the Prince, Development Schemes: it meant gay vicars swishing incense, and charity-ward crusaders finding the peons to refill the poor benches, and submit to total-immersion baptism. It meant Property Sharks, and New Georgians promoting wallpaper catalogues. It meant video cams tracking remorselessly over interior detail, and out, over lampholders, finials, doorcases, motifs, cast-iron balconies; fruity post-synch, lashings of Purcell. And bulldozers, noise, dust; snarling angry machines. Ball-and-chain demolitions. Sold! There’s nothing the cutting-room boys like as much as a good ball-and-chain: especially with some hair-gelled noddy in a pin-stripe suit at the controls. Skin-deep Aztec fantasies of glass and steel lifting in a self-reflecting glitter of irony from the ruins. Spitalfields was this week’s buzz-word. And Spitalfields meant lunches.