The gates themselves stood open throughout the day, but half a dozen yards in from the road was a security barrier operated from inside a tar-roofed wooden hut by some permutation of the same three guards: the small thin one, the tall fat one and the one with the caved-in nose. They never once introduced themselves by name, or asked Randall his, but generally, if he had gone that way, whichever pair was on duty would step out of the hut the moment they saw him and stand a while with him in an informal smoking bee.
He commented one night, early in their acquaintance, on the fact that they were not armed, as guards back home would certainly be.
‘Not allowed here,’ said the guy with the nose. ‘Only cops and soldiers. Afraid of guns getting into the wrong hands.’
‘Anyway,’ said his pal (it was the small thin one tonight), ‘there hasn’t been a bit of bother since they had this barrier put in.’
Which begged the question... Randall asked it, ‘There was before?’
‘Ach, aye.’ The guy with the nose tried to make light of it. ‘Sure there’s hardly a hotel or a bar in the country hasn’t had it at some point by now. And, like, we got off lightly: wee bit of damage to the front door, couple of windows broke, no one badly hurt.’
‘Mind you, one of the bombers was shot getting away.’ The small one had clearly not picked up on his colleague’s attempt to downplay the threat. ‘Tried to hijack a car belonging to an off-duty cop.’
The guy with the nose could only suck his teeth. ‘What are the chances of that?’
But say someone was to drive up now, Randall asked, not entirely hypothetically, someone with an actual bomb. What could they do?
The small one threw down his cigarette and ducked back into the hut (glimpse of a kettle, an electric heater), emerging a couple of moments later with a lump hammer.
‘See that? That goes through the windscreen,’ he said. ‘Then me and him’ – jerking his thumb – ‘run like hell.’
And his pal laughed, smokily. ‘Don’t listen to him.’
It was from the third guy, the fat one, that Randall heard the melancholy story of Thomas Niedermayer. He had come with his family to Belfast from Nuremberg at the start of the sixties to head up the new Grundig factory, German reel-to-reel tape recorders then being seen as the answer to the already acute problem of unemployment in the city. The security guard had used to work there – in the hangar-like building Randall had seen on the edge of the DeLorean site – which was how the subject came up. (‘How long have you been doing this then...?’) Anyway, everything was fine until five or six years ago – ‘this time of year as well’ (already it had acquired the characteristics of a folk tale). Late one weekday evening, a man had knocked on the front door of the bungalow in another part of Dunmurry (‘beautiful houses’) where Niedermayer and his family were living and told one of the teenage daughters that he had reversed into their car, which was parked on the street. The wee girl went and got her father who came out still in his slippers and followed the man down the path, chatting away, but when he bent over to inspect the damage a second man appeared out of the shadows and together with the first bundled Niedermayer into the back seat of his own car – all this in full view of his daughter – since when neither hide nor hair had been seen, nor word heard, of the poor fella.
‘They’ll have taken him over the border somewhere,’ the guard told Randall. ‘That’s where they all end up.’
‘All?”
‘Oh, no, here, don’t take that the wrong way. I mean touts and the like – informers.’ He clamped the cigarette in his mouth and mimed pulling a trigger two-handed, aiming at the back of a kneeling man’s head, removed the cigarette, exhaled mightily. ‘There was a whole thing going on at the time they took him about IRA guys in prison down south. Generally they leave the foreigners well alone and, like, even if they didn’t they would never in a million years lay a finger on any of your crowd. Can you imagine the stink the Irish Americans...?’ He swallowed the end of the last word. ‘Sorry, you’re not...?’ Randall shook his head. The big guy swiped a hand melodramatically across his brow: phew! ‘Anyway, you can just imagine it, can’t you, the stink?’
Which was not quite to Randall the reassurance the big guy clearly thought it was.
He walked back up the drive to the hotel, alert to every rustle from the bushes crowding in on either side, went into the bar and had another drink, his fourth of that particular night. Well, fourth then fifth.
DeLorean returned at regular intervals throughout the autumn and winter, usually with Bill Collins in tow, sometimes with Kimmerly, now and then with a new guy, Bill Haddad, who had used to work for the Kennedys and who had been enticed away from his last job as a columnist on the New York Post – a slightly grander newspaper connection than Randall could boast, as Haddad occasionally reminded him – by the offer of Vice President for Planning. PR, from what Randall could see. DeLorean and his job titles.
The itinerary varied little from trip to trip: site visit, presentation from Dixon Hollinshead and Chuck, meeting with Mason and the Industrial Development Board, interview with one or other of the local TV channels (‘I couldn’t be happier with how things are going, couldn’t be happier at all’), then back to the airport for a late-afternoon flight out, because always, whatever his intentions, something would have come up in the course of the day that demanded he return that night to London or, if Kimmerly was with him, go on to Geneva, where it appeared there was some deal afoot, involving a new set of initials, GPD, General Products Development. (There ought to have been an S and an I as well – Services Inc – but they didn’t make the cut and Randall, with so much else to occupy him, didn’t give them, or the three letters that did, much in the way of thought.)
All of which meant that Randall’s opportunities for liaising with DeLorean one-to-one were usually restricted to the walks from building to car between meetings; the car itself, as he had observed in LA, having become a kind of motorised phone booth, where it was impossible – short of having a phone of your own to ring him on – to get a word in.
On one of these walks, early in the new year, after a working lunch with his senior managers in the Conway (left as usual largely untouched: Randall noted that his was not the only appetite to shrivel in the presence of such fastidiousness), DeLorean was delivering his customary apology for having to leave when he suddenly stopped.
‘We need a house,’ he said.
‘Right.’
‘Cristina and I, a permanent base here. Somewhere we can put visitors too when we are not around, let them relax a bit more than they can in a hotel.’
‘Right.’
‘It would need to be...’
‘Private,’ Randall was about to say. ‘Pretty secure.’
‘Of course.’
‘Some of these people might not have been here before, they might be a little nervous.’
‘There is one place I can think of straight off,’ Randall said. ‘It’s not far. I can go with you in the car and point it out.’
DeLorean thought a moment, looked at his watch. ‘Tell you what, wire me some pictures. You have experience in this field, right? I trust your judgement.’
And with that he was in the car and away again.
Warren House was not far at all, standing as it did at the northern tip of a more or less equilateral triangle whose other vertices were the factory site and the Conway itself. Randall had caught glimpses of it through the trees – multi-paned sash windows, ivy in profusion – long before he noticed the For Sale sign at the end of the lane that led up to it off the main Belfast road. Only after he had mentioned it to DeLorean and had phoned the real estate company to request a brochure did he realise that it was the same house he had looked at, albeit with a little less ivy, who knows how many times in a book on the hotel’s reception desk. Turns out it too used to belong to the family that owned Conway House – all the large houses in the district seemed to have belonged to them once upon a time although few of them had had
such a curious and colourful afterlife.
The most recent occupants had been a chapter of the Plymouth Brethren – a sect Randall had hitherto mistakenly imagined was a uniquely American phenomenon. ‘They are like hermit crabs, that crowd,’ the real estate agent said when he took Randall to see the house. Lee Bell, he had told Randall his name was: ‘Three ls, three es and a B and that’s me, nine Scrabble points.’ He wore large-framed glasses that, when you looked at him head on, had the disconcerting effect (even more disconcerting after his mention of crabs) of making his eyes appear to bulge out at either side. ‘They will move in practically anywhere, even somebody else’s church building, although they tell me they don’t believe in churches. Make sense of that if you can.’
There were still chairs arranged non-hierarchically in a circle in the drawing room, it being another guiding principle of the Brethren, Lee Bell explained (‘the things you learn in this job’), that no man had a right to be raised above, or seated at the head of another.
‘You’re welcome to keep anything here you think is of use.’
Randall was still staring at the non-hierarchical circle. Whatever it was Lee Bell read in his expression – clearly not suppressed amusement (non-hierarchical circles? DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd?) – he started stacking the chairs. ‘Not these, obviously, but anything else – fixtures, fittings...’ He gave Randall the benefit of his full, distended regard. ‘Or you can have the whole place gutted.’
‘Are you kidding me? Gutted?’
Lee Bell shrugged. ‘Well, you never know with people,’ he said, as though referring to a species distinct from real estate agents.
Randall roamed the house with his camera while in the drawing room Lee Bell caught up with paperwork, or tried to think of names with a lower Scrabble value. Several of the six bedrooms showed signs of damp; the plug sockets throughout were mounted directly on to the wooden baseboard and would have to be replaced; the kitchen looked to have been equipped by people who did not believe in food any more than churches or priests, and as for the bathroom, OK, so it was an old house, but Randall had been in more sophisticated outhouses. Nevertheless, those first few photographs were all that was needed to convince DeLorean, although Randall still returned repeatedly over the weeks that followed to take more pictures – of the plaster mouldings and cornices as well as the baseboards, of the door- and window-frames, the mantels and the fire surrounds – which he sent back along with detailed reports of sunrise and sunset (the dining room got the benefit of the latter) and even cuttings from the shrubs growing nearest to the house.
The instructions that he received in return had, he suspected, more than a little of the hand of Maur Dubin in them; Maur at his most whimsical and Margaret-Mitchell-inspired. The bathroom faucets were shipped from Harrods in London, only Harrods in London apparently stocking the style of faucet that fit with his vision, or the DeLoreans’, for the house. The label on the box said gold. Randall very much doubted it. They would not have been to his taste, that was for sure, but then Randall did not have to live with them. Or did not imagine he would have to.
It was DeLorean himself on his next but one trip across – he had flown into London from Salt Lake City, whatever had him in Utah – who suggested that Randall move in, temporarily of course, while the renovations were still being carried out. ‘There is nothing brings a house to life like human beings in it.’
‘It’s a really kind offer, but...’
DeLorean stopped him. ‘Really kind offers never require a but. Besides, you would be doing me a big, big favour.’
And big, big favours, Randall knew, did not admit of refusals, however polite.
*
Friday night in the Conway Hotel was supper dance night. Saturday was wedding day. The former varied little, only the name on the pegboards outside the function room doors distinguished this week’s brown suits and fur stoles (Friends School Old Girls Association) from last’s (Derriaghy & District Indoor Bowling League); the latter, between the white tuxedos and the blue velvet, the peach organza and the turquoise tulle, to say nothing of the hats, the hats, the hats, were an advertisement for the inexhaustible variety of the human imagination.
Randall was sitting in a secluded corner of the lounge bar late on the rainy Saturday afternoon before he moved across to Warren House, reading a magazine he had picked up in the lobby, when a man in a grey morning suit, an arrangement of a white rose and something purple in his buttonhole, rested his whiskey tumbler on the edge of the table.
‘Do you mind?’ he said, his hand on the back of the seat facing Randall. He could have had his pick of two dozen others.
‘Not at all.’
‘I was worried I might be disturbing you.’
He gestured towards the magazine. Randall showed him the cover. Homes and Gardens. He laughed. ‘Actually, you’re saving me. You’re with the wedding party, I take it.’
The man looked down the length of himself, as though surprised all over again by his get-up and the reason for it. ‘It’s my daughter’s getting married.’
‘Well that’s great.’
‘Better now the speech is out of the way,’ said the man, shaking the hand that Randall had offered in congratulation.
‘I should buy you a drink.’
‘Thanks, but I’m OK with this. I have a long night of it ahead of me.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘To tell you the truth, it was the wife’s sister asked me to come over.’
Randall looked past him, half expecting to see a face he recognised (though whose that would be he couldn’t think), half dreading the one he did not. All he saw, though, was the archway through to the rest of the bar, the doors to the function room beyond.
‘She’s’ – picking his words with care – ‘on her own.’
‘Oh, listen, that’s really thoughtful,’ Randall said, then worried that even that could be construed as an acceptance. This guy was – what? Fifty? Fifty-five? And he was trying to set him up with his spinster sister-in-law? ‘I mean, it’s just, I have a couple of calls I have to make back home, to the US.’
The man held up his hands. ‘You don’t have to say anything more. Totally understand. I told her I would come over and I did. No harm done, I hope.’
‘None at all.’
The man pushed back his chair, but only, it seemed, to inspect his shoes. Shiny like he clearly didn’t believe.
‘Have you children yourself?’
‘One,’ said Randall, ‘but...’
‘Wee boy, wee girl?’
‘Girl, but...’
‘That’s lovely.’ It was worse than trying to deflect DeLorean in full flow. Randall gave up trying. ‘You know though you’ll get your eye wiped, don’t you? You tell yourself you won’t, but you will, guaranteed.’ He leaned forward and clicked the rim of his glass against Randall’s. ‘Girls. They’re too well able for us.’
The man returned to the wedding, Randall to his magazine, although he was barely even looking at the pictures. A little later, passing the doors of the function room, he saw the man dancing with his daughter (ivory taffeta with lace neck) and, truly, a prouder man never trod a dance floor. Randall lingered a while in the doorway trying to imagine. Tamsin had still been at the clomping stage the last time he had led her round a floor – round and round and round and round – to... what? ‘Our House’? Surely not. Too neat, though she had loved it then: ‘Now everything is easy ’cause of you and our la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la...’
He actually shook his head to wipe the picture.
At a table at the top of the room a woman was sitting alone, wearing the same corsage as the bride’s father, but younger than him by a good twenty years, and beautiful. She caught Randall’s eye, held it a moment. His hand started up in a wave but before it had arrived she had set her mouth and looked away. Sorry, buster, no second chances.
6
The warren from which the name derived faced his new home across a steep-sided valley, the shallow Derriaghy Rive
r making its unhurried way across the bottom. Randall quickly realised that this was the hill where he had seen the teenage boys passing the bottles between them on the day he arrived in Belfast. Most weekend mornings and a fair few mornings in between he awoke to the sight of their debris – theirs or their fellow enthusiasts – the green glass, the empty tins, bent in the middle – and once saw a rabbit, as though remotely conjured, appear out of a striped plastic bag into which it had apparently crawled in hopes of grass greener than that which lay all around it.
On another side of the house work had already begun to clear the ground for a new private road giving direct access to the factory site, in contravention, no doubt, of all Brethren strictures about raising any one man above another, though not – Randall had sought reassurance from Jennings on the point – of the terms of the British government’s grants. ‘I suppose if it improves efficiency...’
‘And security,’ said Randall, who could not help but see the lane up from the main road through DeLorean’s eyes, although he had once or twice on his own account wished as he turned on to it that he had about him the lump hammer from the Conway’s security hut.
He had been in the house little more than a fortnight when the Labour Prime Minister, Callaghan, lost a vote of confidence in the British Houses of Parliament and was forced to call an election for the start of May.
Several times during the campaign Randall, remembering Jennings’s warning, voiced his concerns to DeLorean as poll after poll suggested the Conservatives were winning over voters with their ad campaign, a long serpentine line of the unemployed dwarfed by the slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working.’
Gull Page 6