When he left the Council of Ministers it was dark, and he had walked up the Boulevard Charlemagne, past a bar where disinterested German journalists spent their days, to the IPC building where he had found Slater in his office. It was well after seven now and he turned away from the window to take in the figure of Slater crouched by the open drawer of a filing cabinet. The Herald man had left and the secretary, Mademoiselle Ricain, a blonde unattractive girl, was on her break. ‘I won’t be long,’ Slater said.
Bannerman looked round the cluttered office. Four desks were pushed together to form a square. They were strewn with discarded press releases, overflowing trays of copy blacks, technical journals, wordy reports and empty coffee cups. The walls were plastered with charts and maps and a door led off to an anteroom where the teleprinter shared by the Herald and the Post was set up on a trestle table. The panoramic windows looked out east across the rooftops, a forest of leaning chimneys and television aerials. Bannerman pulled up a chair and sat down, and reached for an open file. It was filled with loose newspaper cuttings from various papers. He saw a grey, smeared picture of Gryffe and he picked up the cutting. He was bored, uninterested already in Brussels and the EEC, depressed at the thought of spending as long as a month in this dreary place. He let his eyes wander over the cutting. ‘Mr. Robert Gryffe, a Junior Minister at the Foreign Office, yesterday warned at a meeting of the EEC Council of Ministers in Brussels of an impending slump...’
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Slater snatched the cutting from his hand and lifted the folder from the desk, clutching it protectively. Bannerman looked up, surprised, mildly irritated. Slater eyed him suspiciously, a fragile, ill-looking figure, all his wasted years stretching behind him like chains. He was a man who had started out on his journalistic career full of ambition and enthusiasm, only to have both gradually battered out of him through long, tired years of endless fires and murders, of knocking on doors and carving initials on court benches. There had been the anonymous pubs and reporters, drinks and stories, night shifts and fictitious expenses. And there had been, too, the moves from paper to paper until the faces had all begun to look the same, the conversations predictable, the copy more turgid. The Brussels job had come out of the blue, like suddenly rounding a bend in a long dark tunnel and for the first time seeing light at the end. It had resurrected old hopes and held out great new prospects of a brighter future. But it too had gone sour, as he should have known it would, settling into an old familiar pattern. The Post’s interest in the EEC had been too narrow. They wanted parochial Scottish angles on everything. That had limited his interest, as had the EEC itself.
He saw the Commission as a great, slow-moving machine whose purpose was simply self-perpetuation, self-justification. The Brave New Europe had never emerged and, he believed, never would. All its processes were too tortuous and obscure without ever being fully productive. Thousands of civil servants sat in spacious offices dreaming up ideas for yet more intricate legislation to weave into an already complex tapestry of international rules and regulations. The only purpose they served was to complicate further already difficult relations between member countries. And even then they were no more than ideas, though often they ran into hundreds of pages in fat, incomprehensible reports that had still to go before the Council of Ministers. Then there were the lengthy processes of review and change before some would finally go to the European Parliament, when it sat, in Strasbourg or Luxembourg. And it too, Slater thought bitterly, was an impotent body, even after direct elections.
If he had not met the girl there would have been no hope at all. Now there was the chance of escape from it all — from the crippling cynicism and loneliness of Brussels, from the memory of his wife, from the worry of his daughter. Maybe now the child would have a real chance too. Specialist treatment. But there was Bannerman, damn him. What was he after? Only a few more days and Slater could leave all this behind him. Surely Tait couldn’t know anything, have sent Bannerman to find out. Gryffe wouldn’t have talked. He wouldn’t dare. Slater decided to take a chance. ‘What are you really here for, Bannerman?’
Bannerman frowned. He had sensed Slater’s ill-ease at their first meeting, and now his extraordinary behaviour over the file of cuttings on Gryffe. ‘I already told you,’ he said. ‘What are you so jumpy about?’ He watched Slater carefully. But the reporter turned away and slipped the Gryffe file back in the cabinet and locked it. He turned again, hesitantly, to face Bannerman and seemed to consider what he should say.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t like you, Bannerman. Never have. Coming over here, digging around where you’re not wanted, imposing yourself on me for the next month, insulting guys I have to work with.’
‘Hey,’ Bannerman snapped. ‘You know none of this is my idea. The Post owns your flat here, and if Tait reckons he can save the paper money by having me shack up there then that’s up to him. If you have any objections you know where you can take them.’ He lit a cigar and Slater seemed to relent.
‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I... I, well this place gets to you after a while.’
‘Really? I thought you people had it easy out here.’ Bannerman’s sarcasm seemed to revive some of Slater’s antagonism.
‘Oh, sure, if you like the idea of quietly vegetating amongst all the decaying political ideals of a generation of squabbling Europeans.’ He hesitated and crossed to the window so that Bannerman could not see his face. ‘This is a cold, lonely city, Bannerman. It’s a God-awful place. There are more than 200,000 temporary or permanent immigrants in Brussels. Thousands of civil servants and politicians and journalists from all over Europe who have never integrated with the local population. Most of us live in the Euro-ghettos.’ He laughed sourly. ‘Sprawling wealthy suburban areas on the edge of the city where life is divided into nationality cliques and private clubs and expensive social functions. All that if you can afford it.’ He turned back to face Bannerman accusingly. ‘You think I can, working for the Post? There’s no way a paper like the Post can compete with the money that’s being earned even by the average EEC official. These guys can get anything upwards of a basic three thousand pounds a month, with all kinds of additional allowances for home entertainment, household, family, school, cost of living.’
Bannerman felt the man’s bitterness as powerfully as if he could touch it. Something about Slater intrigued him. He was more than just a disillusioned newspaper man, more than just bitter. But it was not easy to know what more there was. Bannerman knew that Slater’s wife had died shortly after the move to Brussels, that he had been left to support his autistic daughter — a girl who could not speak, who could barely write, whose terrible mental deficiency was her inability to communicate.
Slater was still talking. ‘The Belgians are okay to work with,’ he was saying. ‘But there is no way you will get to know them socially. A Belgian will never invite you into his home, even if you have known him for months, or years. They are a strange, introverted, suspicious people. I don’t like them.’
‘It seems there are a lot of people you don’t like.’
‘That’s right.’ Slater stared at him, almost defiantly, then turned to lift his coat from the stand. ‘Time we went home.’
Bannerman stood and pulled on his coat, glancing at this odd-looking man with his red hair and beard, pale face, and dark-ringed green eyes. And in that moment he knew what he had sensed in Slater. It was guilt. He had seen before how it could affect men. Perhaps it was something in his past. The death of his wife. Or maybe to do with the child.