Bill Williams had known the dynasty family would one day-sell and that he would move on. He’d known there was a new-brutality abroad in the cut-throat newspaper world. Knowing hadn’t prepared him for the abruptness, the ferocity, or the total lack of even a shred of courtesy from any side. There had been no handshakes, no apology, certainly no good wishes, simply a blunt dismissal message among his private e-mail.
From the general peace in the long room he realised that the new owners had so far told no one else about the change of regime. It suited him fine. His last three issues — Saturday, Tuesday and Saturday — would be the best he could do. And after that...
Toughening his mind, he pulled onto his screen the names of all newspapers published in London, together with their owners. He had served his time in the provinces — like the horses going up and down on the outside ring of a roundabout, and he reckoned he had earned a hand on the levers. If he didn’t tell the ringmasters he was free out there and willing, he thought, mixing his metaphors cheerfully, how would they know?
He phoned and wrote letters and e-mail and sent copies of the Voice all over the place. His CV was impressive, but the ringmasters seemingly were deaf.
From a conglomerate known for treating their journalist staff badly, he did at least get one firm offer to meet. Dinner for four at a place of Williams’ choosing. Outside London, they stipulated. Williams to pay.
It was by then Thursday of his last week at the Voice. Once the Saturday paper was on the street, he would be done. Philosophically he accepted the conglomerate’s reverse invitation and made a booking for a table in a restaurant beside the River Thames south of Oxford. His food column writer had raved about the place for a month.
The Voice’s racing writer, after a series of telephone enquiries, had finally located the hopeful Dennis Kinser and, not yet aware that the ‘blue-pencilling bastard’ of an editor would be chasing him no more after Saturday, he had actually stirred himself to drive sixty miles for a face-to-face enlightenment.
When he tried, the racing writer’s assessment of people and horses tended to be stingingly accurate, which was why Bill Williams put up with him. The racing writer saw faults and said so, and was often enough proved right.
He saw faults in Dennis Kinser that others might have thought virtues, the first of them being overweening confidence in himself. Kinser’s aim in life began at reigning as champion trainer: after that, the world.
The racing writer listened to the cockiness with weary disillusion and made shorthand notes on spiral-bound pages as if tape-recorders hadn’t been invented. He would have described Kinser as an envy-driven bumptious self-important snake-oil salesman had he not been sure the little blue-pencil devil would let him get away only with ‘ambitious’.
Dennis Kinser at thirty had developed a game-plan for his life which involved a swift future shinny up the celebrity ladder to a first-name clap-on-the-shoulder familiarity with any well-known achiever. He would pay restrained respect to every inherited title. He would do favours that required favours in return. He needed a first public toehold for this upward mobility and the Cotswold Voice sports pages’ leading article would give it to him.
He told the racing writer with faintly defiant pride that as he’d been too heavily built to make it to the top as a jump jockey he had spent six years as a stable-lad, ‘doing his two’ and living in squalor in a hostel.
‘Was that part of the game-plan?’ the racing writer asked.
‘Sure,’ Kinser said, lying.
The racing writer wrote on his notepad, ‘The time to make friends with this guy is now.’ He said, ‘What do you intend to do next?’
Kinser told him exhaustively. He would beguile the owners of the horses he’d looked after to send him some to train. Their horses had won, he would smilingly assure them, because of his knowledgeable care. Then he would publicise and glamorise the syndicates and welcome all part-owners warmly. He would be given a trainer’s licence because he’d completed all three of the British Racing School’s official courses — in horse, business and people management.
‘Top class manipulator’ the racing writer noted and in the evening wrote one of his very best pieces for the Voice, giving Kinser the benefit of the self-made doubt.
Bill Williams, still the editor on the next day, Friday, walked down the quiet editorial floor carrying the sparkling pages and sincerely complimented his racing writer. Then he called his staff together and unemotionally told them that a different editor would be running the paper from Sunday.
Bill Williams, whose odd-ball father had burdened him with Absalom, Elvis and da Vinci, had spent his council house and comprehensive school years hiding his brains in order not to be bullied. His teachers declared him puzzlingly dumb: not stupid themselves, they saw flashes of stifled brilliance and went into an ‘I thought so all along’ mode when A. E. da V. Williams, insisting against their moderating advice on aiming for the top and trying for Cambridge, had won scholarships all over the place with a subsequent clutch of Firsts and Doctorates in his fist.
As an undergraduate A. E. da V. Williams had founded and edited Propter which, like Granta before it, had quickly become the most prestigious of all academic university newsprint publications. Dr Williams, MA, PhD, distinguished at twenty-seven, turned down a lectureship, left Cambridge and academe behind and humbly free-lanced as a roving journalist with comment pieces and reviews until the Cotswold Voice dynasty liked his style and took him on as an editorial gamble.
His fast temper mostly controlled and internalised by inclination and habit, Bill Williams spent his holidays (and much of his life) alone. Unlike many solitary people, though, he bubbled not far below the surface with a self-deprecating sense of humour that stopped him taking himself too seriously: which was why, in the August of what he now thought of as the ‘Summer of the Lost Voice’, he decided not to change the restful plans he’d had for his week off, but to rent a punt high up the River Thames, as he’d intended, and steer it down with the current to Oxford.
He thought pragmatically that since he had arranged the dinner meeting with the unsatisfactory conglomerate to take place at a restaurant lower down the river from Oxford, and since he had no job to hurry back to, he would extend his water journey in time and distance, and rest-cure his bruised expectations while mentally rehearsing how to cajole juice from conglomerate flint.
At Lechlade, the town at the highest navigable point on the Thames, the boatyard had allocated one of its newly refurbished punts to Mr Williams, in consideration of his having paid extra for the best. The varnish on the solid wood was rich and dark and there was new blue velvet upholstering the wide comfortable reclining seat that would extend down to be a mattress for sleeping on.
From each end a canopy could unfold, meeting in the middle to keep out the night and the rain, and the boatyard also provided mooring ropes, a gas lamp, rowlocks and oars for alternative manoeuvrability, a six-foot pole with a hook on the end of it, and a twelve-foot punt-pole for propelling the eighteen-foot flat-bottomed boat along on top of the water.
Bill Williams had learned to punt on the Backs, the backwater system of the river at Cambridge, and felt peacefully at home on the rudderless engineless craft, much preferring to punt than to row. With deep contentment he smelled the new varnish and tested the weight, flexibility and balance of the long pole. He asked questions that reassured the boatyard people and bought a few basic provisions from their handy shop. They seldom had customers who travelled as far down river as this one proposed to, but they willingly agreed to keep his car safe while he was away, and to retrieve him and their boat whenever he’d had enough.