by Tim Pears
James sometimes asked himself whether he didn’t take photographs to keep the world away. Every time he clicked that shutter he recorded people at a particular distance from him. If they came too close they went out of focus; he lost focus, the world came crowding in on him and he could feel himself losing definition. Sometimes taking photographs he forgot himself in a state of intense concentration and was aware only of what he saw: he became a pair of eyes – one eye, looking through the viewfinder – and the rest of him was lost to himself, as well as invisible to other people. When that happened (which was generally sporadic and unpredictable) he became attuned to gesture, stance, composition of people before him that (he hoped) betrayed in an instantaneous image some truth of their being.
And at weddings James entered that state and remained in it, an eye circling scenes, infiltrating groups, invisible, clicking the shutter and moving on.
Afterwards, exhausted, he came back to himself as if out of a trance, and found he was clutching a dozen rolls of film.
In October James took Sonia and her boys to his Aunt Margaret’s farm to pick apples. He hadn’t seen Margaret for years; he knew that since her partner Sarah had died five years ago she’d become reclusive (she’d long since stopped hiring farm-girls and let the dairy herd dwindle, as well as most of the other animals). Her sister Clare lived on the neighbouring farm and kept an eye on her but she was a tough old boot, as Sarah had often called her, content now with solitude and scornful of anyone’s pity.
James wanted to show Sonia a part of his past life, and it was a good idea to let the boys run wild in a country field, outside the town in the valley. So he rang Margaret to propose a visit.
‘What did you say!?’ she shouted down the line, as if he were still whispering. ‘Speak up! What did you say your name was?!’
‘It’s James,’ he told her, ‘your nephew, Aunt Margaret.’
‘James!’ she shouted. ‘Of course it is! How’s school, young man?’
* * *
The yard they drove into was just as scruffy as it always was, and although there were no bad-tempered geese to greet them there was a sheepdog dozing in the porch, and it stood wagging its tail in meek welcome. Margaret, too, as she stepped outside, looked unchanged. She even seemed to be wearing the same old cords and buttonless jacket, and she looked as sturdy and ruddy-cheeked as ever. Only her wiry hair had become the colour of mist.
Margaret came towards them. She took in Sonia and David with a glance but scrutinized John a moment longer, then James, then John again, before appearing to come to a decision: she reached her hand towards James.
‘How are you, young man?’ She clasped his hands. ‘How nice to see you. Come on in. I’ve got some tea brewing.’
As he stepped through from the hallway into the big kitchen James’ heart sank. The room had been transformed. Sarah’s clean domestic scene was now a squalid mess of encrusted utensils, mouldering food, dirty clothes, dust and soot. The aromas he remembered of baking and roasting and fresh herbs had been replaced by a stale, crusty stink. James felt ashamed for his aunt, especially since she appeared unaware of the degradation and was fussing about with filthy mugs at the greasy sink. James realized that there was no way in the world Sonia would let a single morsel of anything in this room pass her sons’ lips.
‘Actually, Margaret,’ James said, ‘we’ve just had tea. Can we go outside? We’ve been cooped up in the car.’
‘Good idea,’ she replied. ‘Let these lads run around, eh?’ she said, slapping John on the back. As they left the room James glanced out at Sarah’s old kitchen garden at the back of the house. The manicured lawn grew thick and coarse and the vegetable patch was overgrown with weeds, except for a line of blackcurrant bushes that looked as if they’d been capably pruned that spring and not neglected for the past five years.
The orchard had been neglected for much longer. When James had gone out to the farm fifteen years before they still picked apples worth sending to a local chutney factory, but that activity, too, had long since ceased. Walking towards the orchard, James took in the empty pastures, broken fences, eerie silence. It struck him that the old sheepdog in the porch was the only animal left on the farm – apart, no doubt, from rabbits and rats. At that moment Margaret stopped and put a hand on his arm.
‘The other morning,’ she said, pointing towards the stream beyond what had been the cow pasture, ‘I saw soldiers coming out of the fog.’ She took her hand off his arm. ‘Down there in the valley,’ she added, and set off again, into the orchard.
They spent two hours picking small, wrinkled apples that were quite inedible. It was a complete waste of time but James didn’t want to hurt Margaret’s feelings by abandoning the activity, and the boys were enjoying themselves climbing among the twisted, brittle branches. James exchanged glances with Sonia, hoping she understood, and played through the sad charade.
They carried carrier bags full of apples back to the car. Saying goodbye, Margaret said: ‘Do come again, young man. Bring a loaf of bread next time, would you? I always seem to be out of bread and you can’t buy flour for love nor money these days, you know.’ Then she clapped the boys on their backs and they got into the car. James sat in the passenger seat and wound the window down.
‘Goodbye, Margaret,’ he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘You know, James,’ she told him. ‘That was a very nice summer. You were here a lot, weren’t you? Sarah was very fond of you. I think it was our favourite summer.’ Then she stepped back, and waved them away.
‘My God!’ said Sonia. ‘What a cornflake! It’s a good thing I haven’t got too attached before meeting your family.’ She shook her head. ‘What a fruitbat.’ Only then did she glance at James.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean it.’ She took a hand off the wheel and tugged in one of her jean pockets, pulled out some crumpled tissue and passed it to him. James blew his nose. The boys in the back seat stared at him.
‘She used to be so strong, she was a one-off, you know?’ he said.
‘What a shame,’ Sonia said.
‘Yeh. Well, I’ll call Clare, her sister, when we get back. Although I suppose she is coping on her own.’
‘Sure she is,’ Sonia agreed. ‘She’s fine.’
That winter James spent so much time with Sonia he wondered whether he shouldn’t pay rent to her instead of his landlady. In December he emptied the last jar of coffee in the bedsit and pulled plugs from the mains.
‘Why don’t you move in for good?’ Sonia asked him.
‘No,’ James demurred. ‘I don’t want to feel like I’m edging you into something. I know you don’t want to make a commitment.’
‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘I mean, I don’t. Still, the boys really like you.’
‘I like them.’
‘And anyway, if you’re here I can keep an eye on you, right?’ she whispered, fondling his crotch. ‘And keep my eyes off other men.’
The weather turned cold right after that Christmas of 1985 and when they weren’t invited to dinner somewhere they ate out at restaurants around town, compiling a Michelin star system of their own devising. For the first time in James’ life he began to relax and let go of the twin conditions of existence he thought were inescapable: loneliness and freedom.
Afterwards, weighed down with food and drowsy with wine, they went back to Sonia’s airy house and made love slowly, into the early hours; sometimes neither of them came, and neither were sure whether it was because they wished to prolong the pleasure for the other or whether greater passion was drifting beyond them.
‘You make me irresponsible,’ she told him.
‘I do?’ he asked.
‘Too much sex. Not enough sleep,’ she yawned. ‘And too much wine,’ she added. ‘I can’t concentrate on my cases. I nod off after lunch. And then I think of you instead of the brief I’m meant to be writing. And then suddenly it’s time to leave. I told you I’d be offered the partnership, bu
t it’s not actually a formality.’
‘I’m sorry,’ James said.
‘We should go easy on the wine,’ she told him.
The picket line at the gates of the factory struggled on through the winter. The brazier was lit every day, fuelled by coal donated by an ex-mining village in Wales. The picketing men no longer yelled ‘Scab’ at those passing them; sometimes ex-colleagues dropped off sausages to roast in the flames on their way into work. Motorists still honked their horns, but a note of derision seemed to have entered the sound. James had got into the habit of stopping whenever he passed and taking a quick photograph, which he handed over to Roger back at the office: every now and then, when they had a space to fill, they put it in the paper. The last one appeared in February. By the end of that month the Freeman Ten were down to seven; it was clear that this was a lost cause.
They made their last day a Wednesday in the middle of March, and took away their banners, brazier and foldaway chairs, exchanging pathetic handshakes of solidarity in defeat. The next day, however, the Wire turned up on his own, just to show the world that he wasn’t beaten: there was going to be no offer of either job or compensation but that, he wished to show, was no longer the point. You had to show defiance even when you’d lost.
For the first time in six months Garfield Roberts stopped his bicycle; for six months he’d seen the Wire as a blur at the side of his vision, and heard his rasping voice: ‘Blackleg!’
Now Garfield stopped and looked the young man in the eye. The Wire looked back at him: the old colleagues become adversaries. Perhaps in truth, Garfield considered, they were always adversaries; perhaps, thought the Wire on the other hand, they were still colleagues. He suddenly grinned.
‘Well, uncle,’ the Wire said, ‘you’ve always come to work on that rusty old bicycle, I’ll give you that. You never sneaked in, like some of them.’
Garfield pondered. ‘You’re a good man, Steven,’ he said at length. ‘What do you plan to do now that it’s over?’
‘Over?’ the Wire exclaimed. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
Garfield paled.
‘Nothing’s over, uncle. Have you not heard about this new Community Charge to replace the rates? This time they’re really taking the piss: it’s a return to a poll tax. They’ve smashed a union but they’ll never break the working class. You wait and see.’
Charles, meanwhile, was thriving. The strike and its conclusion, and even the picket line outside his factory gates, seemed to have given him renewed vigour. Those who’d worked for the company all their lives said it was like the old days: the man-in-charge was once more a rampaging elephant. Evidence of his idiosyncratic behaviour abounded: on the last day before the privatization of all catering facilities secretaries from the typing-pool had to push the tea-trolleys around the factory floor in their skirts and heels, because the boss had swept the four retiring tea-ladies into his Rover and taken them off to the seaside for the day.
A couple of weeks later Charles went to London for some meeting accompanied by two of his managers. One of them – David Canning, the young head of sales – disagreed with the boss about something (no one knew what, every account differed) and Charles ordered his chauffeur to pull over to the hard shoulder. Charles not only fired David Canning on the spot, he made him get out of the car at the side of the M1 and make his own way home.
It was true, Charles was reinvigorated. He’d long since made his fortune, and then spent twenty years doing little more than administer it. Now he had other plans. Having discovered the purity of making money as a single, simple priority, the complexities of life fell away and Charles’ bombastic blood flowed freely through his veins; the zeal of a convert gave him the courage to trust his gut instincts. He began to buy up small rival companies in order to close them down. His managers told him it made no financial sense and he browbeat them into acceptance by claiming that it was time to diversify, he was killing two birds with one stone, exterminating competition and entering the property market in one fell swoop. Or else he bought strategic stakes in ailing companies that were in the midst of hostile takeover bids. Charles presented himself as an impromptu arbitrageur, a white knight; only to then offer his shares to both sides, encouraging them to bid against each other, to his profit.
Charles had never given a damn what people thought of him.
‘Father? He doesn’t give a flying fuck, darling,’ Simon told Natalie admiringly.
‘Sticks and stones, Simon,’ Charles told his eldest son. ‘Weak men’s bones are broken by other men’s tongues. They don’t realize an insult’s simply another form of flattery.’
His personal assistant, Judith Peach, had aged gracefully: she was now a middle-aged matron, but she retained the ripeness of her twenties and remained an object of fantasy for the clerks of the head office. Judith went through the newspapers each morning cutting out any articles about her boss and put them on his desk. The more vehement the criticism, the more ghoulish the caricature, the more Charles laughed. With the strike, the young entrepreneur of twenty years before who spoke in bewildering aphorisms was back in the national headlines. In February a member of a right-wing think-tank who was also a junior minister at the Treasury produced a confidential report proposing the introduction of Charles’ pay cuts into the public sector: the report argued that raising pay in line with inflation provided no incentive for workers to see inflation brought down; all they understood was money in their pockets. Whereas an annual cut in wages meant that curbing inflation was in everyone’s interest.
What the report called Freeman’s Dictum made Tory backbenchers and captains of industry swoon at its beautiful logic. The report was leaked to the media before the Cabinet had a chance to discuss its implications. In the resulting furore the junior minister was sacked, a senior minister resigned from the Cabinet complaining of a breakdown in constitutional government (the leak was traced as far as the back door of No. 10 Downing Street) and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was forced to issue a statement in the House of Commons making it categorically clear that such a lunatic proposal would never become the official policy of Her Majesty’s Government.
Charles didn’t mind a bit. He enjoyed the notoriety, even the vilification, which increased in May when he announced a massive pay rise for his senior executives and one of 73 per cent for himself.
‘It’s perfectly rational,’ he told a television interviewer. ‘It provides an incentive for others to work their way up. That’s what they want. But what’s more,’ he emphasized, ‘we’ve earned those rises by the profit the company’s made.’
‘But aren’t they in part Profits from other people’s lost jobs?’ the interviewer challenged him.
Charles frowned. ‘Yes, we’re more efficient now,’ was all he said. He didn’t seem to understand the question.
Charles enjoyed being in the news. He was puzzled by those tycoons who brought injunctions and libel suits against the media. He admired moguls prepared to promote free speech by becoming newspaper proprietors in addition to their other responsibilities, despite the fact that in making necessary technological changes they had met insufferable resistance from the trade unions; their strikes and demonstrations, outside newspaper buildings, gained a lot more coverage than Charles’ own picket, the Freeman Ten.
They were national newspapers. Once the technological revolution was effected in London it would be the turn of the provincial papers. And one day Charles heard on the grapevine that the proprietor of the Echo, an old Harrovian who left editorial matters to Mr Baker, was looking for a buyer. He’d inherited the group from his father forty years earlier, and it had leached most of the family fortune; and what’s more, unlike Charles Freeman, he was too old for revolution, too tired for conflict.
One Sunday lunchtime Zoe revealed her plan to renovate her cinema by splitting it in two, with separate screens. ‘Expanding the market,’ Charles realized. ‘Excellent idea!’ he enthused, and offered his niece a loan, because he didn’t bear grudge
s and saw no need to let their political differences get in the way of a shrewd investment. Zoe, though, refused, preferring a bank loan.
‘You’re a hippy entrepreneur,’ James told her that evening.
Zoe was indignant. ‘No, I’m not,’ she replied. ‘I’m making money without meaning to.’
‘Nobody does that,’ James argued.
‘I’m just doing what needs to be done,’ she claimed. ‘It’s all a big gamble. I might be bankrupt tomorrow for all I know.’
She’d already proceeded with another gamble: films on videotape had entered the market place and achieved an instant popularity; Britain soon had the highest number of video players per household in the Western world. Shops renting out cassettes sprang up in every corner of the town. Most of the tapes were trashy slasher movies and pornographic films, resurrected from studio vaults for a public beguiled by the idea of miniature cinemas in their own living-rooms. A generation changed their Saturday-night social habits overnight: instead of going out for the evening they ordered a takeaway pizza and stayed in to watch a horror film instead.
Far from being dismayed at these events, as other cinema proprietors were, Zoe saw the opportunities on offer in the coming communications revolution. ‘We’ve got cable television, satellite dishes here, more channels coming,’ she explained to James. ‘It’s a novelty. In the future we’re going to have unimaginable choice, which means there’ll be plenty of room for quality as long as we provide it.’
And so Zoe started up a new company making tapes of her back catalogue of foreign films under the banner of Electra Video Classics.
‘What about the cinema?’ James asked her. ‘You’re helping them cut your own throat.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she told him. ‘I think it’ll bring them back into cinemas. It’ll develop the audience for quality films.’
‘There must be a logic there somewhere,’ James said.