The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  “Hairy Guy seeks Chick. Birmingham area.”

  2

  Meanwhile, Lois’s father Colin was sitting in a pub called The Bull’s Head in King’s Norton. His boss, Jack Forrest, had gone to the bar to get three pints of Brew XI, leaving Colin to make halting conversation with Bill Anderton, a shop steward in the Longbridge underseal section. A fourth member of the party, Roy Slater, was yet to arrive. It was a great relief when Jack came back from the bar.

  “Cheers,” said Colin, Bill and Jack, drinking from their pints of Brew. After drinking in unison they let out a collective sigh, and wiped the froth from their upper lips. Then they fell silent.

  “I want this to be nice and informal,” said Jack Forrest, suddenly, when the silence had become too long and too settled for comfort.

  “Informal. Absolutely,” said Colin.

  “Suits me,” said Bill. “Suits me fine.”

  Informally, they sipped on their Brew. Colin looked around the pub, intending to make a comment about the décor, but couldn’t think of one. Bill Anderton stared into his beer.

  “They brew a good pint, don’t they?” said Jack.

  “Eh?” said Bill.

  “I said they serve a good pint, in this place.”

  “Not bad,” said Bill. “I’ve had worse.”

  This was in the days before men learned to discuss their feelings, of course. And in the days before bonding sessions between management and workforce were at all common. They were pioneers, in a way, these three.

  Colin bought another round, and there was still no sign of Roy. They sat and drank their pints. The tables in which their faces were dimly reflected were dark brown, the darkest brown, the colour of Bournville chocolate. The walls were a lighter brown, the colour of Dairy Milk. The carpet was brown, with little hexagons of a slightly different brown, if you looked closely. The ceiling was meant to be off-white, but was in fact brown, browned by the nicotine smoke of a million unfiltered cigarettes. Most of the cars in the car park were brown, as were most of the clothes worn by the patrons. Nobody in the pub really noticed the predominance of brown, or if they did, thought it worth remarking upon. These were brown times.

  “Well then, you two—have you worked it out yet?” Jack Forrest asked.

  “Worked what out?” said Bill.

  “There’s a reason for this evening, you know,” said Jack. “I didn’t just pick you out at random. I could have got any personnel officer, and any shop steward, and set this evening up for them. But I didn’t do that. I chose you two for a reason.”

  Bill and Colin looked at each other.

  “You have something in common, you see.” Jack regarded them both in turn, pleased with himself. “Don’t you know what it is?”

  They shrugged.

  “You’ve both got kids at the same school.”

  This information sank in, gradually, and Colin was the first to manage a smile.

  “Anderton—of course. My Ben’s got a friend called Anderton. They’re in the same form. Talks about him from time to time.” He looked at Bill, now, with something almost approaching warmth. “Is that your boy?”

  “That’s him, yes: Duggie. And your son must be Bent.”

  Colin seemed puzzled by this, if not a little shocked. “No, Ben,” he corrected. “Ben Trotter. Short for Benjamin.”

  “I know his name’s Benjamin,” said Bill. “But that’s what they call him. Bent Rotter. Ben Trotter. D’you get it?”

  After a few seconds, Colin got it. He pursed his lips, wounded on his son’s behalf.

  “Boys can be very cruel,” he said.

  Jack’s face had relaxed into a look of satisfaction. “You know, this tells you something about the country we live in today,” he said. “Britain in the 1970s. The old distinctions just don’t mean anything any more, do they? This is a country where a union man and a junior manager—soon to be senior, Colin, I’m sure— can send their sons to the same school and nobody thinks anything of it. Both bright lads, both good enough to have got through the entrance exam, and now there they are: side by side in the cradle of learning. What does that tell you about the class war? It’s over. Truce. Armistice.” He clasped his pint of Brew and raised it solemnly. “Equality of opportunity.”

  Colin murmured a shy echo of these words, and drank from his glass. Bill said nothing: as far as he was concerned, the class war was alive and well and being waged with some ferocity at British Leyland, even in Ted Heath’s egalitarian 1970s, but he couldn’t rouse himself to argue the point. His mind was on other things that evening. He put his hand inside his jacket pocket and fingered the cheque and wondered once again if he was going mad.

  Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite Roy Slater along. The thing about Slater was that everybody hated him, including Bill Anderton, who might have been expected to show some solidarity with his putative comrade-in-arms. But Slater was the worst kind of shop steward, as far as Bill was concerned. He had no talent for negotiation, no imaginative sympathy with the men he was supposed to represent, no grasp of the wider political issues. He was just a loudmouth and a troublemaker, always looking for confrontation, and always coming out of it badly. In union terms he was a nobody, way down the hierarchy of the TGWU’s junior stewards at Longbridge. It was all Bill could do to be civil to him, most of the time, and tonight he was expected to do more than that: honour demanded that the two of them put up some sort of united front against these alluring management overtures. It was enough to make him suspect calculation on Jack’s part. What, after all, could be more effective than to divide the opposition by pairing up two shop stewards who famously couldn’t stand each other?

  “Bit of all right, this, isn’t it?” said Roy, nudging Bill fiercely in the ribs as they studied the menus in their red leather wallets. They had adjourned, by now, to a Berni Inn on the Stratford Road.

  “Don’t wet yourself, Slater,” said Bill, taking out his reading glasses. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch in this business, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “On this occasion,” said Jack, “that’s exactly where you’re wrong. You’re all here as my guests, and you can order anything you like. The tab for this is being picked up by the British Leyland Motor Corporation, so expense is no object. Go for it, chaps. Let your imaginations run wild.”

  Roy ordered fillet steak and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others. As they waited for the food to arrive, Jack tried to instigate a discussion about the marital prospects of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, but it failed to catch fire. Roy seemed to have no strong views on the subject, Bill wasn’t interested (“Bread and circuses, Jack, bread and circuses”) and Colin’s attention was beginning to wander. He stared out at the night, beyond the car park, into the charcoal distance, the cars winking past on the Stratford Road, and it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Worrying about Ben, and his school nickname? Missing Sheila, and the hiss of the coal-effect fire? Or perhaps longing to go back to those days in the design room, before he had taken this job, this stupid job that had looked like a step up the ladder but turned out to be a nightmare of human complication.

  “You know, this won’t work, Jack,” Bill was saying, his tone friendly but combative, his fifth pint of Brew now having a decidedly mellowing influence. “You can’t wipe out social injustice by taking the enemy out for steak and chips every so often.”

  “Oh, this is nothing, Bill. This is just the beginning. In a couple of years’ time, employee participation is going to be codified. It’s going to be government policy.”

  “Which government?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. I’m telling you, we’re going to be entering a whole new phase. Management and workers—elected representatives, that is—are going to
sit around the table and take decisions together. Looking at the forward plans of the company together. Mutual interests. Common ground. That’s what we’re looking for. And it’s got to happen because at the moment confrontation is crippling the industry.”

  “This,” said Slater, suddenly and irrelevantly, “is a bloody good steak.” His meal had arrived first, and he hadn’t waited for the others before starting. “Give me something like this every day of the week and we might be talking, do you know what I’m saying?”

  Bill ignored him. “The point is, Jack, that it’s not confrontation for the sake of it. That’s what you people never seem to understand. There are grievances, you see. Real, proper grievances.”

  “And they’ll be addressed.”

  Bill paused for a while, sipping his beer, his eyes narrowed. A waitress arrived with their food and he was distracted, momentarily, by the sight of his steak and then, more extensively, by the sight of her calves and slender thighs encased in sheer nylon, the promise of an untried body insinuated by the fall of her white blouse. The old habit. Never shaken. He forced his gaze away from her and towards Jack, coating his chips with salt and tomato ketchup as if there were no tomorrow. Bill cut off a wedge of steak, chewed on it with undeniable relish (you didn’t get this at home) and said:

  “Of course, I can see where this is leading.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s the usual tactic, isn’t it? Divide and rule. Take a few shop stewards, invite them upstairs, sit them round the conference table, make them feel important. Let them in on a few secrets—nothing too sensitive, mind, just a few little titbits to make them think they’re in the know. And suddenly they’re feeling very full of themselves, suddenly they’re beginning to see things from the management’s point of view, and as for their members . . . Well, they’re beginning to wonder why these guys are spending half the day up in the boardroom, why they’re not around on the shop floor any more when there’s a problem to solve. Isn’t that the way it’ll be, Jack?”

  Incredulous, Jack Forrest laid down his cutlery and said to Colin, “Do you hear that, though? Do you hear the kind of thing we’re up against? That typical trade-union paranoid mentality.”

  “Look, mate,” said Roy to Bill, speaking indistinctly through a mouthful of chips, “if these two gentlemen want to treat us to a nice dinner every now and again, put their point of view across, what’s the problem, eh? You’ve got to take what you can in this life, mate. It’s every man for himself as far as I can see.”

  “Spoken like a true pillar of the Labour movement,” said Bill.

  “What do you think, Colin?”

  Colin glanced at his boss nervously. He had a hatred of confrontation, an undoubted drawback for someone saddled with a job in industrial relations.

  “It’s the strikes that are holding this company back,” he said at last, talking into his plate, giving voice, reluctantly, to a firm conviction that nevertheless had to be dredged up from somewhere remote and unvisited, in his profoundest depths. “I don’t know if this is the way to stop them, but they’ve got to be stopped somehow. It doesn’t happen in Germany or Italy or Japan. Only here.”

  Bill stopped eating, and held Colin in a thoughtful, penetrating gaze. Of all the things he could have said, he chose only: “I wonder what your son and my son talk about on the bus home.”

  Jack saw the chance to inject a note of levity. “Girls and pop music, I expect,” he said, and after that Bill gave up, turning his attention to the food and his sixth pint of Brew. A steak was a steak, after all.

  Bill and Roy, their paths lying in the same direction, were obliged to share a minicab home. Roy pulled a face when he saw the turbaned driver sitting behind the wheel, and turned to his companion, ready to share some blokey, insulting witticism. But Bill wasn’t having any of it. He let Roy get into the back and then pointedly made for the passenger seat, where he chatted to the driver for most of the twenty-minute journey. He learned that he and his wife were second-generation immigrants, living in Small Heath; that they liked Birmingham because it was full of parks and you didn’t have to drive far to get out into the hills; that his eldest son was training to be a doctor, but the youngest was having trouble with bullies at school.

  Overhearing this last fragment, and sensing a lull in the conversation, Roy leaned forward and said to Bill:

  “That thing you said to Trotter, about your kids talking on the bus home: what was that about?”

  “It was just a comment, that’s all,” Bill answered.

  “Your kids go to the same school, then? Is that it?”

  “What’s it to you, Slater?”

  “Trotter’s boy goes to King William’s, doesn’t he? That fucking . . . toffs’ academy in Edgbaston.”

  Bill snorted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. We don’t pay anything for him to go there. It’s a direct-grant school. He’s a bright lad and he passed the exam. All I’m doing is giving him the best start in life.”

  Roy didn’t reply to this, but sat back, satisfied, believing apparently that he had located some chink in his colleague’s armour. They said nothing more to each other that night, apart from the most cursory goodbyes.

  When Bill got home he found that Irene had already gone to bed. He scowled at the heap of paperwork waiting for him on the dining-room table and decided that he would leave it for another day. It was almost midnight. But he took the cheque out of his jacket pocket one more time and examined it again by the light of his reading lamp.

  It continued to puzzle him. A cheque for £145, drawn on the Charity Committee account, made out to a name he didn’t even recognize. Signed not by Harry, the chairman, or by Miriam, the highly fanciable secretary (and was it his imagination, by the way, or had she been staring at him through most of the meeting the other night?) but by himself. And yet he could remember nothing about it. What was more, the bank had returned this cheque because the amount had only been written out in words, not figures: again, a mistake he was very unlikely to make. Unless he was cracking up. Unless the pressure was getting to him.

  He filed the cheque away in his bureau and poured himself one more beer before going to bed.

  Jack Forrest and Colin had said goodnight in the restaurant car park. Jack seemed ambivalent about the evening, not sure that it had been worthwhile. “Was that a success, d’you reckon?” His breath was cloudy in the winter air. There would be frost before morning.

  “I think so,” said Colin, who always wanted everything to be for the best. “I think it was, well . . .”

  “Constructive?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Good. Yes, I think you’re right. I think it was constructive.” He rubbed his hands, clicked back the knuckles of his long fingers. “There’s a nip in the air tonight, though, isn’t there? Hope the wife’s remembered to put the blanket on.”

  They shook hands and parted. Their cars were on opposite sides of the car park. Colin tutted, then allowed himself a few mild swear words as he wrestled with the lock of his brown Austin 1800, struggling to free the obstinate catch he had personally designed, a few years ago, with such confidence.

  3

  On Wednesday afternoons they had double English, taken by a Scotsman called Mr. Fletcher who slurred his words and whose accent was hard enough to understand in the first place and who they all suspected of being an alcoholic. Most of them were frightened of Mr. Fletcher, because he shouted whenever he lost his temper and lost his temper every lesson, sometimes twice or even three or four times. The only person who never seemed to be frightened of him was Harding. But then everybody— especially Benjamin—had been known to wonder exactly what it would take to frighten Harding.

  Double periods were different. When the bell went after forty minutes you just had to sit there, as if nothing was happening. More often than not, the master would actually make a point of talking through it, as if to emphasize that this was nothing special, only a halfway point, but it
was hard to hold the boys’ attention for those few minutes, with the corridors outside roaring beneath the impact of hundreds of youthful feet, as the rest of the school thundered from classroom to classroom. Slowly the rumble of footsteps, the banging of doors would fade away, silence would settle again, and you had no further excuses for not listening to the queasy fits and starts, the lurching monotone of Mr. Fletcher’s voice.

  “That was a masterpiece, Spinks, a veritable masterpiece,” he said, as three red-faced boys returned to their desks. Sarcasm, unleavened by humour or playfulness of tone, was a fixed habit of mind for Fletcher. “When Hollywood comes to make the inevitable film of Catcher in the Rye, you will undoubtedly be called upon to play Holden Caulfield. You’ve got him perfectly, right down to the Brummie accent. Peter Fonda won’t get a look-in. Right—” he raised his voice to quell an upsurge of laughter which never materialized “—who’s next? Trotter, Harding, Anderton, Chase. Sounds like a bloody legal conglomerate. Solicitors and commissioners for oaths. What have you got for us?”

  The three of them stood up (Harding had asked to be excused, a few minutes ago, and was expected back any moment) and Philip Chase, as unofficial spokesman, announced: “We’re doing the trial scene from To Kill a Mockingbird, sir. Dramatized by Trotter and I.”

  “Trotter and me, Chase. Trotter and me.”

  “Yes, sir. I play Atticus Finch, the defendant.”

  “The defence lawyer, not the defendant.”

  “Yes. Sorry, sir. Anderton is playing Mr. Gilmer, the, er . . . the prosecuting lawyer. Trotter is going to play Judge Taylor, and Harding—”

  At which point the door was flung open and Harding reentered the classroom, to howls of laughter and delight.