almost curt manner which, he suspected, was partly to do with the fact that when she started her training, fresh from university, he was already working as a researcher. At the beginning she had been warmer. Discussing his proposal in her office for the first time she had brought him a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of her desk swinging her legs which were clad in battered jeans. It was more or less what he would have expected, given their previous acquaintance as colleagues, and she had been friendly and sympathetic, nodding as she listened, then commenting that his passion was exactly the kind of motivation the series needed. Viewing his first draft, however, she seemed to have forgotten her initial enthusiasm.
‘It would be okay in a multi-cultural slot,’ she said, ‘but we’re dealing with a general audience here. All these guys are talking in generalisations. It’s too abstract. They’re like experts rambling through history trying to come up with an overview. Half the time they’re talking about events at which they weren’t present. It’s all very well going on about riots or what some politician said, but if they weren’t there, what’s the point?’
They were all intelligent men, he explained, who imagined they were communicating a thoughtful view of the history through which they had lived. If they made it sound impersonal it was because their own equilibrium demanded some distance between themselves and the most unpleasant events.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Hattie interrupted, ‘but that’s not the point. The central issue is how the audience reacts to these people. They’re saying complex and difficult things. That’s no problem. Let’s take it for granted that their analyses are correct and they’re telling the truth. It still doesn’t work unless you give the audience characters with which they can sympathise and identify.’
Joseph brought out his best arguments, but there was no shifting her.
‘I have a suggestion,’ she said eventually. ‘Do another edit. Keep the same structure, but take out every story and every statement which doesn’t begin with the word I.’
Joseph went back to the drawing board, but his second effort had no more success.
‘Maybe you’re too close to it,’ Hattie said before she left.
The next day Joseph got a message from her asking for copies of the transcripts of his interviews, and the following day she gave them back to him, several pages marked with yellow highlights.
‘Try editing these in,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the length. We’ll bring it down later.’
The final product was a long way from the film Joseph had set out to make, but Hattie’s satisfaction was infectious. His success in this project, she hinted, would make the going a lot easier when he put in for his next commission. Joseph had felt more or less vindicated, and Mr Mensah’s comment after the preview in Soho was the first indication that his pleasure might have been misplaced.
That afternoon he sat watching the film, spooling back to see various sections and trying to separate himself from it for long enough to gauge what an objective observer might think. He reached his conclusion in a time so short that he understood he had already known it. The context of political action and social change that the old men had struggled to outline had disappeared, and with it the story about the courage and perseverance of his father’s generation, which he had hoped to tell. Instead, he had produced a gallery of entertaining characters, their features drawn as clearly as if he had asked them to act out the parts. There was a funny man, a romantic, a rogue, and someone else whose ludicrous argumentativeness had become a running theme. His father, too, had become a character in the show, aloof and a little enigmatic. Mr Mensah was right, Joseph thought bitterly, the whites would love it. There was nothing here to disturb the sleep of the great British public, no reflection of the anger and grief he had experienced while listening to the old men, and remembering Mr Mensah’s smile he guessed they believed he had made a deliberate choice to misrepresent and trivialise them.
In that mood, he telephoned Kofi.
‘I understand what Mr Mensah was trying to say.’
‘Don’t let it worry you.’
Joseph couldn’t read his father’s tone, but he knew that, somehow, he needed to explain. Without giving Kofi a chance to interrupt he began quickly to describe the long process of editing, and the way that the company exerted its control over the product.
‘I would have done it differently if I could,’ he ended.
‘I know that,’ Kofi said. ‘We all knew that. The man who pays the piper gets to call the tune. That’s what they say, and why would she want our version of a story she thinks she owns?’ Joseph heard him chuckling down the line. ‘None of us would have done any better. History is written by the winners. They will never allow you to say what they don’t want to hear.’
Joseph guessed that these words were meant to be reassuring, but their cynicism didn’t make him feel any better, partly because his unease was compounded by the sense that if he had fought harder he might have been able to preserve some of his original vision. To make matters worse, during some of his arguments with Hattie he had experienced the same feeling of powerlessness he used to feel in his quarrels with his mother. Some of it was due to the way she had always forced him to question himself and his own motives. Coming home with some story of a fight in the playground, or an insult in the classroom, she would look at him sternly – ‘Are you sure you did nothing to provoke them?’
As he grew older he stopped talking to her about the anger and outrage he felt at these times. If his father had been there, he thought, he would have understood. As it was his mother’s questions made him feel isolated and alone. Years later, as a resentful fifteen-year-old, he accused her of undermining his confidence and filling his mind with self-doubt. She’d heard him out with a puzzled frown. ‘I didn’t want you to be full of hate,’ she said. ‘Like your father.’
It was only after she died that, free of guilt, he allowed himself to know his father better. At that point he realised, with an odd pang of sorrow, how little she had understood about either of them. On the surface there was practically no resemblance between Hattie and his mum, but there had been times, while they wrangled about the editing, that he had seen the same look crossing her face. It was a look he had frequently seen on the faces of white people he knew well, an expression which hinted that whatever the problem was, he was somehow denying the fact that it was his own fault.
Joseph would have been too embarrassed to tell Kofi about any of this, so he accepted his father’s implied rebuke in silence. Luckily, he had a couple of months’ grace before the series was broadcast to reassemble his confidence, but apart from a couple of short newspaper features he hadn’t been required to talk in any great detail until the World Service interview. By the time he was invited to the festival in Prague, he had almost forgotten the misery and embarrassment he had felt on the afternoon of the first preview.
Oddly enough, sitting in his hotel room in Holesovice he had been thinking about Mr Mensah. If what George said was all true, did his father’s friends know? Why had Kofi never told him?
He leant over to pick up the telephone, but as he did so the volume of music outside increased another notch. He got up and pushed the window shut, then, glancing at the clock, realised that he had been sitting on the bed for more than half an hour. He moved quickly to the door, then slowed down, thinking about how to deal with George. He dialled London again. Still no answer. Perhaps, he thought, putting the phone down at last, the man might have got fed up waiting and left.
As he got out of the lift he was still torn between curiosity and a kind of reluctance to encounter George again. Instinctively he looked at the armchair, but now it had been turned round to face the room, and it was occupied by a bulky old man with a bald head and a bushy beard. Joseph felt a surge of relief, then a movement caught his eye and he saw George sitting at the bar waving at him, his hand raised above his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ Joseph said. ‘I had some things to do.’
George shrugged.
‘I understand.’
He