‘I beg your pardon,’ Bill Williams said, thinking it a joke. ‘What do you mean, leave?’
‘The dining-room is fully booked for tonight.’
‘Oh,’ Bill Williams laughed, ‘that’s all right then. I booked a table for tonight two weeks ago.’
‘You cannot have done!’ The young man began to lose his bounce. ‘It is impossible. We do not accept boats.’
Incredulously, Bill Williams looked around him. He said, ‘This restaurant is called Mainstream Mile. It is on the bank of the Thames. It has a proper pier, to which you see I am properly moored. How can you say you don’t accept boats?’
‘It is the rule of the house.’
Bill Williams lost more than half of his temper. ‘You go and tell the house,’ he said forcefully, tapping the young man’s chest with his forefinger, ‘that I booked a table here two weeks ago, and no one said anything about not accepting boats.’
The editorial floor of the Cotswold Voice knew better than to argue with a Williams’ righteous rage. The young man backed off nervously and said, ‘What name?’
‘Williams. Four people. Eight o’clock. I am meeting my three guests in the bar here at seven-thirty. You go back and tell that to the house.’
Mrs Robin Dawkins drove north-westwards from London in a bad mood made worse by the dipping sun shining straight into her eyes.
Beside her sat F. Harold Field with Russell Maudsley behind her, belted into the rear seat. Mrs Dawkins had wanted the company chauffeur, not herself, to be at the wheel of the firm’s Daimler for this aggravating expedition, but had been outvoted on the good grounds that the chauffeur’s discretion leaked freely if offered enough cash.
Mrs Robin Dawkins, Mr F. Harold Field and Mr Russell Maudsley collectively owned the newspaper conglomerate, The Lionheart News Group. All were hard-eyed bottom liners. All were fifty, astute and worried. The circulation of all newspapers had dropped owing to television, but theirs more than most. Boardroom rows were constant. Each of the three proprietors strongly disliked the other two, and it was the feuding between them that had led to the last disastrous choice of editor for the Daily Troubadour.
Mrs Robin Dawkins thought it completely pointless interviewing a thirty-three-year-old from the boondocks, and only desperation had persuaded her onto this road.
The Lionheart News Group’s Daimler reached the Mainstream Mile restaurant at seven thirty-five and the proprietors walked stiffly into the bar. There were several sets of people sitting at little tables with no one approximating Mrs Robin Dawkins’ idea of a newspaper editor in sight. Her glance swept over the young man standing to one side, holding a file-folder, and it was with depression that she realised, as he came tentatively towards her, that this, the personification of a waste of time, was the person they’d come all that way to meet.
F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley shook his hand, introducing themselves, and both were dismayed by his youth. In dark trousers, white shirt and navy blazer he looked right for a summer Thursday evening dinner by the Thames, but wrong for their idea of bossing a news room. Bill Williams, more anxious than he would admit about his job prospects, was also disconcerted by the restaurant’s on-going hostility towards him, for which he saw no logical reason. Why ever should he not arrive in a punt?
In the bar Bill Williams seated his guests at a small table and ordered drinks, which were a long time coming. The bar filled up with people and then began to empty again as the head waiter in a formal dinner jacket began distributing menus and taking orders and leading guests away to seat them in the dining-room. Other guests: not the Williams party.
Irritated at being overlooked, Bill Williams asked the head waiter for menus, as he passed by with smiling customers in tow. The head waiter said, ‘Certainly,’ frowning, and took five minutes over returning.
Mrs Robin Dawkins seethed at the off-hand treatment and waited, fuming, for her host to assert himself. Bill Williams twice insisted that the head waiter seat them for dinner, but he and his guests were last out of the bar and last in the dining-room, and were allocated the worst table, in a corner. Bill Williams came near to punching the smugness off the head waiter’s face.
Unbelievable, Mrs Robin Dawkins thought. The food she ordered came late and cold. F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley tried to assess this Williams boy’s capacity to run a newspaper, which was what they had come for, but were distracted by the restaurant staff’s ungracious service at every turn.
Bill Williams, with bunched but helpless fists, furiously demanded an improvement in the waiters’ manners and didn’t get it. When Mrs Robin Dawkins requested coffee, she was told it was available in the bar.
Every table in the bar was by that time filled. Mrs Robin Dawkins headed straight out of the exit door to the car park without looking back. F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley judiciously shook their heads at Bill Williams and vaguely said they would let him know. Bill Williams thrust into F. Harold Field’s arms the file-folder he’d been nursing all evening, and F. Harold Field, though looking at it as if he thought it contained dynamite, held onto the file, gingerly at first, and then strongly gripped it, and followed Mrs Dawkins and Russell Maudsley out to their car.
‘I told you so,’ Mrs Robin Dawkins ground out, thrusting out her jaw and driving fiercely away, ‘a wimp of a boy who couldn’t organise a sandwich.’
F. Harold Field said, ‘I got the impression that Williams would have hit that head waiter if we and everyone else hadn’t been watching.’
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Dawkins contradicted, but F Harold Field knew what he’d seen. He fingered the file that had been pushed into his arms and decided to read the contents in the morning.
Bill Williams returned to the dining-room, which was now empty of guests and being set up for the morning, and demanded to see the head waiter. None of the busy under-waiters hurried to help him, but one finally told him that the head waiter had gone home, his work finished for the night.
Bill Williams, rigid with unvented anger, stood as if planted immovably and insisted on seeing whoever was now in charge. The waiters shuffled a bit from foot to foot. People on boats were supposed to go quietly, not look as if at any minute they’d have the whole crew of them walking the plank at the end of the pier.
Perhaps he’d better see the management, one of them eventually and weakly suggested.
‘At once,’ Bill Williams said.
The management, located in a small room down a passage behind the bar, turned out to be an imposing woman in a flowing red and gold kaftan counting money. She was sitting behind a desk. She did not invite Bill Williams to sit in the chair across from her, but he did, anyway. She looked down her long thin nose.
She said, sounding as if such a thing were impossible, ‘I’m told you have a complaint.’
Bill Williams forcefully described his ruined evening.
The management showed no surprise. ‘When you booked a table,’ she said, not disputing that the table had been booked, ‘you should have said you would be arriving on a boat.’
‘Why?’
‘We do not accept boats.’
‘Why not?’
‘People on holiday on boats behave badly. They break things. They’re noisy. They dirty our lavatories. They have wild children. They complain of our prices.’
‘I booked a table in the ordinary way,’ Bill Williams said with slow, distinct and heavy emphasis, ‘and I am angry.’