Lunching at Laura's

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Ought to be more businessmen like you, these hard times. We need people who create jobs, hmm? I wish I could –’

  ‘Well, come on now, Malplackett, it’s different for you! Commission agent – not the same at all. You don’t manufacture, you see, that’s the thing. Business needs you, of course – you keep the wheels turning and so forth – but it’s not the same as making something. The rag trade, you see – it’s different.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ Malplackett said feelingly and smiled again as they reached Levy’s shop. ‘I think, you know, I might pop in. I could do with a new suit. Been thinking about it for a few months, but you know how it is. It’s a matter of getting round to it. A nice medium weight worsted? In a fine stripe, perhaps? Navy – now that’d make a change for me. I’ve been wearing grey for too long –’

  ‘I’ve got a fantastic piece of cloth, fantastic – a fourteen ounce West of England – it makes up like a dream –’ At once Leo was all tailor, and he urged his companion towards his shop door. ‘You’ll love it –’

  ‘And I was thinking,’ Malplackett murmured, ‘I can put some business your way, perhaps. I get to so many of the big offices, possibly I can arrange for your chap to come in some time, with a few swatches, a style book, even take some measures? Get a busy chap in his office and you can do very good business – it’s just an idea.’

  ‘And it’s one I like,’ Leo said delightedly. ‘I’ve been thinking vaguely along those lines anyway. Great minds, hey? Great minds –’

  ‘And we’ll see what I can do about stuff for the newsletter, hmm? I’ll just need a letter of authorisation from you and then I can get all the information I want. I dare say you can arrange that?’

  ‘Of course,’ Leo said as they disappeared into the shop. ‘Of course! Now, the cloth I want to show you is just over there. Mary? Hey, Mary! Get me that bolt of eleven seventeen, will you, from the back shelves?’ and the door closed behind them with a little snap.

  Joel Coplin came out into Frith Street and stood for a moment with his hands in his pocket and his chin up, breathing deeply. It had been an excellent lunch; rather too excellent, for he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten quite so much at one sitting, and he made a little grimace as he remembered the way the others had out-gobbled him with enormous gusto and shown no ill effects whatsoever. He felt stuffed and it wasn’t the most agreeable of sensations. Buzzy Lethbridge had been highly amused when he’d been unwary enough to say so, laughing at him loudly, so that the rest of the table could share in his discomfiture.

  ‘Told you Americans weren’t used to good food, old boy, didn’t I? If you’ve been feeding on hamburgers and ice cream all your life Laura’s has to be a revelation – you’ll get used to the right sort of living, don’t you fret. Now you’re with City, old man, you’ve no notion how your ways’ll change!’

  ‘Buzzy, you’re an ignorant slob,’ Alistair had said amiably and grinned at Joel. ‘Ignore him, Coplin. It’s all a pose, you know. He likes to pretend he’s your bluff Britisher, that everyone in the world is bloody except Englishmen, and that anything Americans do they have to do worser. It doesn’t mean a thing. He’s trying to rile you. Don’t be riled.’

  ‘I’m not. Not in the least,’ Joel said as easily as he could, hating Lethbridge more cordially by the second. ‘Just a shade overfed, was the point I was trying to make. An excellent lunch, sir.’

  ‘Don’t sir me, for Christ’s sake,’ Balfour said, and grinned even more widely. ‘Or you’ll confuse Lethbridge so much he’ll blow up. And then who’ll pay out our expenses? Glad you enjoyed it. Have you got a folder, by the way? Sally, give Mr. Coplin a folder. Time we pretended to get some work done here, I suppose, dammit –’

  Standing now in Frith Street Joel looked back over the past hour with gloom adding to his existing discomfort. He’d joined City because they’d seemed a lively and forward looking company who’d given him the chance to do some interesting work. He’d been happy enough making his commercials in Toronto, and would have been there still if he hadn’t had a letter from Jeffrey Charlton offering him the chance to work in England; the award he’d got at the last Cannes affair had clearly been of some value after all, he’d thought, when the letter had come. He knew now that it was a routine thing with City. Anyone who won an award was immediately offered a short term Contract; then the company could boast legitimately of the quality of its creative team. It was a shabby ploy, he now felt, and he’d been a fool to be hooked by it, but there it was; the combination of the flattery of being headhunted across the Atlantic and the company’s address in Frith Street had been enough to uproot him. And now, he told himself, remembering the way they had talked, now his roots were bleeding damned painfully.

  The floweriness of that thought made him grin then; stupid bugger I am, he told himself. They’re not that much worse than any of the companies I worked with in Canada, after all. This is a lousy competitive business, the worst there is, so there’s always this sort of bullshitting; what am I complaining about? And didn’t I get what I wanted? And again he took a deep breath and his stomach began to settle and he felt a little better.

  Getting what he’d wanted had been a surprise, seeing that he hadn’t realised he’d wanted it. They had talked in a desultory sort of fashion about the work of the previous year; the company had actually made a good deal of money, he heard – a comforting discovery that – and had a fair quantity of bread and butter work lined up; training films for Government funded bodies and one or two big commercial companies, a contract to make a children’s series for France and some very lucrative language teaching films for Saudi Arabia as well as some equally valuable contracts for schools’ television in Nigeria. But they wanted more than just moneymaking projects, he discovered, listening to Jeffrey Charlton as he prodded at them all.

  ‘It’s not enough just to know we’re secure at present,’ he had said, his voice crackling dryly, and his face set in its lugubrious lines. ‘What we need is to make more impact on Channel Four. I want to be a class company, not just a bunch of drears turning over the same old money. Real money comes from creative force – and we aren’t using enough. I’m sick of seeing other people’s logos littering my bloody screen at home. There should be more City stuff – and there won’t be till we get some sound documentary ideas. And drama too, of course. That’s the new departure for this year, if I get the chance. But it’s Docs that matter most at the moment. We’re prepared to invest in good ones, right, Buzzy? Yes, right. We’re prepared to invest. But we need some better ideas than the rubbish here –’ And he’d flicked disdainfully at his copy of the folder they’d all been given.

  Joel had agreed with him. He’d gone through the folder which listed, as well as the previous year’s efforts and the still outstanding work for the year, a list of documentary ideas that had been put up by various members of the department, and a drearier lot of turgid rubbish, he told himself, he hadn’t seen for a long time. No wonder they’d headhunted him if this was the best work they could field. Anything would be better than what they had; it reflected little credit on him that they’d come after him, even as a routine. They’d have taken anyone new without as well as with Cannes awards, he suspected, who could come up with better ideas than this. There wasn’t one that hadn’t been done umpteen times before.

  ‘There isn’t one idea here that hasn’t been done umpteen times already,’ Brian Crowner said loudly, and Joel felt even more depressed. Christ, was it so infectious being here that he was thinking the same thoughts as this dreary lot already? Would his own ideas be as useless as this list?

  ‘I mean, look at it!’ Crowner went on. ‘Surrogate mothers, test tube babies, abortion, teenagers on the Pill – not one the Beeb hasn’t done in the last season and –’

  ‘If I’m offered any more gynaecological television I shall throw up,’ Charlton said. ‘I’ve seen enough festering fannies on the screen to send me into a bloody monastery. Oh, all right, Sally –’ as the gi
rl sitting at the end of the table glowered at him. ‘No offence meant, but dammit, even you have to agree we’ve had enough of that sort of thing –’

  ‘Women don’t get all that much air time,’ Sally said loudly. ‘And if you really want to get to Channel Four it’s women you should be thinking about. And there are plenty of viewers who’d rather have fannies than all your macho balls winging, I can tell you –’

  ‘If we get into another of these pro and anti feminist arguments I’m leaving right now,’ Alistair said. ‘Sally is right, Jeffrey is right, everyone’s bloody right and I don’t want to hear another word on it. Sorry, Jeffrey, but there it is. I’m bored out of my skull with hearing the same old business trotted out –’

  ‘Northern Ireland,’ Crowner said quickly. ‘There are three subjects out of Ireland here. I suppose that’s a possibility if it’s Channel Four you’re after –’

  ‘I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole,’ Balfour said firmly. ‘Not after the hash the Beeb made last year. Do you want pickets up and down Frith Street? I want no dramas of that sort, thanks all the same. Ireland is out. So is the Middle East and –’

  ‘That’s news,’ someone said mildly from down the table. ‘I wanted to go to Beirut and you know what you said – that was news, not features –’

  ‘Most news is features these days,’ Charlton said gloomily. ‘The way they comment you’d think the newsreaders mattered more than what they were reading, and that chat came before fact. Anyway, I don’t want politics whether it’s labelled news, features or crumpet. Not that sort anyway.’

  There had been a long silence then, and eventually Crowner had looked down the table at Joel and said with an edge of spite in his voice, ‘How about our new boy? Any ideas, Coplin? You can see we need ’em.’

  Joel sat staring down at the list in front of him and then said as easily as he could, ‘It’s a bit of a problem, not knowing enough yet about the company’s drift and the sort of stuff you’ve done in the past. But –’ He lifted his chin and looked at the window and the sliver of sky and scudding spring clouds that it showed. ‘I have wondered about something very close to home.’

  ‘The structure and distribution of the hamburger?’ Buzzy said and laughed and Joel, with a considerable effort, didn’t look at him. Why was this man being so stupidly offensive?

  ‘This part of London – it’s rather special. Always has been.’

  ‘Special? Old, you mean? Most of London’s old, dear boy,’ Balfour said kindly.

  ‘I know that. Even in the wilderness of North America we know that.’ He still didn’t look at Lethbridge. ‘But there’s more to it than age. There’s people.’

  The silence that greeted him was polite but there was an undertow of impatience in it and he turned his head to look at them all. Sally gazed encouragingly back at him so he spoke what he had to say to her, very aware of the blankness of the other faces around the table.

  ‘I thought it would be interesting to match the people who live in these streets now with some of those who lived here in the past. I imagine there’s some still photographs around of the area. Could be some film archive too, once we start looking. Perhaps matching past and present buildings, street activities, see what’s changed, what’s stayed the same. It’d be documentary because it’s social observation, but it’ll be history too. Could give it another dimension – depending on the families we find.’

  ‘Genealogy,’ someone said flatly from the far end of the table. ‘They did that over at Villiers House when I was with the Beeb. How to work out your family tree in ten easy stages. Bit after eleven at night, if you ask me. Won’t get much in the way of a rating, even if it makes the Channel. Too specialised.’

  ‘Family trees might come into it, but that wouldn’t be the main purpose,’ Joel said carefully. The idea was growing in his head as he talked. He’d not planned to say anything at this meeting; indeed he hadn’t realised fully until the lunch had started that it was an ideas session at all, but now it was developing inside him like an organic thing.

  ‘What I want to do is show how buildings and streets and the way a district looks affects people. How it becomes part of the – of the fabric of their lives, makes them behave in particular ways, perhaps. It’s why people follow in family businesses. It’s why they live where they do, why they are what they are, why they marry as they do, even –’

  ‘Impact of environment on personality,’ Sally said. ‘I like it.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of calling it anything quite so academic,’ Joel said, a little alarmed. ‘It’s just – people and places. That’s all. People and places.’

  ‘Nice,’ Sally said again. ‘It’ll be women, of course. Women and houses – they get stuck together, like it or not –’ And she looked triumphantly at Jeffrey Charlton.

  ‘Tracing families round here?’ Jeffrey said, and stared down the table at Joel with an even more than usually gloomy expression on his face, which, Joel was beginning to realise, meant he was interested. ‘Why round here?’

  ‘Because we’re here,’ someone said. ‘Like Everest,’ and there was a ripple of laughter.

  ‘There’s a lot to be said for sticking near the office,’ Lethbridge said unexpectedly. ‘Keeps the location costs down.’ And he laughed loudly. ‘You’re mad to offer this one, Coplin. You’ll never be able to pad your exes on a project like this. Honest people, you Americans.’

  ‘The possibility of padding expense claims is not one of my first priorities,’ Joel said and now he did look at Lethbridge and suddenly laughed. ‘Thank God, I’m not a money man,’ he said feelingly and there was a snigger from some of the other people around the table and for a moment Lethbridge looked put out. But not for long.

  ‘We don’t have much evidence so far that you’re any sort of man,’ he murmured and smiled sweetly at Joel and he opened his mouth to answer and then closed it. Not worth the effort.

  ‘So?’ Charlton said again. ‘Why here?’

  ‘Because it’s – it’s Soho, isn’t it? And because Friese Green worked here – birth of television and so forth. Why not?’

  I’m not going to tell them why, Joel was thinking, staring back at Charlton with his face as expressionless as he could make it. That’s my affair. I shan’t tell them –

  Charlton stared back at him and then nodded slowly. ‘Any other suggestions?’ he asked in a general sort of way, and there was a long and rather lumpy silence and then he sighed and stood up. ‘Well, we never do get much out of this affair, do we Balfour?’ he said and for the first time his face looked almost cheeful. ‘Not that I didn’t warn you – the best ideas never come to people over lunches like this. Still, it was a good lunch –’

  ‘I get my best ideas when I deal with the other end of my gut,’ Crowner said. ‘Ought to send everyone to sit in the bogs, Alistair. Then we’d get something we really could turn into product.’

  ‘I thought that was just the sort of product we did have,’ Sally said. ‘Real shit –’ and a few people laughed. But not Charlton. And there was a little silence, suddenly.

  ‘You want me to forget this idea, then?’ Joel said wanting to break the quiet and Charlton looked at him, long faced again.

  ‘Of course not. Thought that was understood. Right, Alistair?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’ Balfour nodded affably at Joel. ‘Could be a goer, that one. Get some preliminary research done, bring it in as an offer. Three or four folios, that’s all. Then we’ll beat Buzzy around the ears and get you a budget for a pilot.’

  ‘Oh.’ Joel was nonplussed and knew it showed.

  ‘Never mind, my boy. You’ll get used to us and our funny little ways,’ Alistair said kindly. ‘On your way then. Have a look round, see what you can dig up. See you in a couple of weeks or so, then, hmm? Don’t suppose you’ll be in the office much till then, hey?’ And in a noisy huddle the documentary department of City Television went downstairs and back to the office in Frith Street, leaving Joel standing on the kerb an
d thinking.

  And feeling, he reminded himself, uncomfortably overfed. ‘I think what I need is some exercise,’ he murmured into his coat collar, and shoving his hands deep into his pockets he turned and began to walk north along Frith Street.

  To be paid to wander these streets and nose around among the people and the buildings – now, that was an agreeable prospect. Perhaps getting involyed with this company had been worth it after all, if it meant he’d get to know more about the people who lived here. Even his own people –

  But that, of course, was a ridiculous thought.

  7

  At last everything was clean and quiet again. The tables had been cleared and relaid, the floors swept, the Extras stripped and aired. In the kitchen everything shone with the boys’ efforts, the bain marie stand, the hobs and ovens, the big stainless steel tables with their mixers and chopping boards, and the water jets in the steamer hissed gently while the fridges and freezers hummed in counterpoint. In another couple of hours it would all start again. There were salads to be prepared, vegetables to be organised, meat to be marinaded, fish to be boned and sauced ready for the evening’s trade, but now all was quietness, a waiting watchful breathing time among the blue and white tables, winking with their silver and crystal, as well as in the quiet empty kitchen.

  Laura stood at her desk in the corner and closed the cash box and ledgers. A short walk to the bank in Shaftesbury Avenue to put the cash in the night safe, and then she was free till six thirty. There’d be time to go home to the flat and change, after all; she’d been afraid that with all the extra work involved today it wouldn’t be possible, but everyone had worked very hard and got straight again much faster than she’d expected, and she felt a sudden surge of intense affection and gratitude for them all. Her staff; good, caring people who gave her so much more for the money she paid them than she had any right to expect; she hoped she showed how much she valued them, that they knew how important they were to her. She gave good wages, a little more than most of the Soho restaurateurs, and she knew that helped to tie her people to the place, but she hoped it was more than that, and she looked up as Angie came in from the kitchen, pulling on his jacket, and smiled warmly at him.