hospital,’ said Charles to Carla, ‘they’d locked the gates, and I had to leave the car in the college car park overnight, and as I don’t have a permit they had the cheek to fine me £15 for unauthorized parking. Bloody inhuman, if you ask me, and now they’ll be on the look-out for me whenever I use the park again.’
That’ll teach you to go jogging,’ said Carla, sipping her Scotch.
‘If I hadn’t been a jogger, I’d never have been fit enough to run away. I might have been dead in the gutter by the rose garden,’ said Charles.
‘If you hadn’t been a jogger, you wouldn’t have been mugged in the first place,’ said Carla.
His nose had been broken and pushed sideways across his face. Would it go back to where it had come from, Carla wanted to know? God alone knows, said Charles, who was cheering up under the stimulating influence of Carla and Scotch.
He did not divulge to Carla his mixed feelings about Regent’s Park, which had somehow broken out in this broken nose. Once he had lived a short walk from Regent’s Park, with his second wife Liz Headleand: once he had lived in a grand eighteenth-century house in Harley Street: once he had been able to take a turn beneath the red horse-chestnuts while the potatoes boiled. Now, thanks to the legitimate claims on his estate of his second wife, the extravagance of his third wife, the demands of his five offspring, and the insolvency of his business, he was obliged to live in a flat in Kentish Town, drive his car to Regent’s Park to jog, and park illicitly in the grounds of Regent’s College. Regent’s Park represents all that is gracious in London living, all that Charles had lost, all that need never have been forfeited had he lived more prudently. Outer circle, inner circle, little bridges, roses, ducks, tennis courts, avenues of trees, urns with wallflowers, pink blossom in spring. Charles is not much interested in flowers, but he has, partly through Liz’s influence, become accustomed to them, both indoors and out. His own flat, where he lives alone, is flowerless. Sometimes he buys himself a bunch of daffodils and shoves them in a jug, but they never look convincing.
Carla has dried flowers. Honesty, sea lavender, all a little dusty. She rarely indulges in the freshly cut variety.
However, Charles continues, some good has come out of his misfortune. This unexpected, bloodstained renewal of acquaintance with Melvyn Stacey may bear fruit. Melvyn had rung Charles that morning at nine, to ask after his nose, and Charles had managed to engage his interest in the plight of Dirk Davis, languishing forgotten in Baldai. The International Red Cross was one of the only channels through which one could get a visa to Baldai these days. Journalists were unwelcome in Baldai. Charles had raised the subject at once, in what seemed uniquely favourable circumstances, and he and Melvyn were to meet for lunch the following week.
‘Well done,’ said Carla. Her large eyes swim with pain, with anger, with subjection. She and Charles stare at one another, the bruised and the broken-nosed. They stare and stare, attempting to read what they see. Aggressors and victims. Once, years ago, Charles Headleand and Dirk Davis had come to blows, in a carpark in East Acton, on Bonfire Night. Over a union dispute. Blood then had flowed also, and silence had followed. The silence of the seventies, of the eighties.
‘Anyway,’ said Charles, ‘at least they didn’t break my teeth. They cost a fortune, my front teeth. I’ve spent a fortune on these teeth.’
He bares them at Carla, in what passes for a smile.
Shirley Harper finally plucked up her courage and made an appointment to see Clive Enderby, solicitor and executor of her mother’s will. It was not the will that worried her, but her husband’s business. She could tell Cliff was in trouble: his little empire of wing mirrors and picnic sets was rusting, unassembled, as the bills poured in. What if he went bankrupt? Where would that leave her? She had consulted her sister Liz Headleand, with whom she was not on intimate terms, but for whose financial sense she had some respect: Liz claimed to know nothing about money at all, but she always seemed to land on her feet, and Shirley thought that must mean something. One did not live comfortably in a handsome freehold house in St John’s Wood by chance, thought Shirley. Liz had suggested Clive Enderby. ‘And while you’re at it,’ she had said, ‘you can ask him about probate on Mother’s estate. It can’t still be dragging on, can it? It sounds to me as though you could do with the money.’
The scheme had seemed sound to Shirley, but it was nevertheless with a heavy heart that she made her way to Hansborough to keep her appointment. Enderby & Enderby had moved to new premises. They had abandoned the poky but rather charming little early-nineteenth-century house in Dilke Street, with its pretty little stained-glass windows where swans floated amidst water lilies. They had moved uphill and up-market to an office in a fine new building, deep carpeted, air-conditioned. It was smart, functional, unwhimsical, for the quainter fancies of Post-modernism had not yet hit Hansborough: in fact, its modernity was already a little old-fashioned, but Shirley did not recognize this, and neither, yet, did Clive Enderby, who rather liked its grey steel and sheet-glass and large windows.
These large windows survey one of the most spectacular views of dereliction in twentieth-century Britain. From the fifth floor, where Clive sits, one can see all the way from Hansborough to Northam, across the waste land of demolition. It is a beautiful view. Clive Enderby has plans for it. He regrets the failure of the Enterprise Zone Scheme, of the Rate Reduction Incentive, of the scores of variants of YOPS and TOPS and Restarts and Jobbangs and Youth-boosts and Community Programmes that have tried, piecemeal, to rescue the area, but he is not surprised by their failure. Messy, confused, contradictory, piddling little schemes, doomed to disaster. Clive has his own Master Plan, his own Operation Pegasus. He can foresee that whatever happens at the next election (and he confidently predicts a handsome Tory victory) something will have to be done about dereliction and the inner cities, and Clive means to make sure that Hansborough will be in a position to get what is going. From this rubble will arise the winged white horse of new industry: the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the right-wing Chamber of Commerce will work hand in hand with the left-wing Council. The right hand shall know what the left hand is doing, in Clive Enderby’s scenario, and a glittering new high-tech industry, clean and sparkling, will arise from the ashes to employ the redundant hordes and to dazzle the envious soft hearts of the lascivious south and the less forward-looking dumps of Tyneside and the Black Country, of Liverpool and South Wales. It is a vision of a fabulous rebirth. Clive Enderby, in his own way, is a dreamer.
But his dream is in the future, and will not much help the struggling small businessman in trouble. Shirley now sits before Clive Enderby, with her back to the view, and listens patiently as he explains about her mother’s will. He assures her that everything is in order, that the house in Abercorn Avenue is sold, and that cheques will be on their way to Shirley and her sister Dr Headleand in a month or two at most.
‘These things always take time,’ he says. ‘You did receive the interim statement I sent you, didn’t you?’
Shirley nods.
‘I’m afraid we’ve been a little held up in our regular work by the removal,’ he says, conversationally, as she continues to say nothing. ‘It was shifting the papers that was the problem. Mountains of stuff, going back to my grandfather’s day. You can’t throw it all away without looking, though, can you? Some of it probably has historical interest, if you go in for that kind of thing. You know, local history. Archives. But most of it went into the shredder, I’m afraid.’
‘It was the same with the stuff at my mother’s house,’ says Shirley, with an attempt at interest, at politeness. The things people hoard. We burned boxes full of paper.’
‘Really?’ Clive looks at her with sudden acuteness.
‘Boxes,’ repeats Shirley, dully. The very thought makes her feel tired.
‘Lucky she kept the will in a sensible place,’ says Clive, slightly probing.
‘Yes, very lucky,’ says Shirley, bored.
Clive explains to her the capacities of his new shredding machine, but she does not listen. Gradually she works the conversation round to Cliff’s ailing business, to her own liabilities as a director.
‘I