by F. G. Cottam
‘I plan to visit that ruin in Brightstone Forest,’ she said. ‘I want to see the place where Martin got the inspiration for King Lud, to experience it first hand for myself. It’s where everything began.’
Two things happened before Ruthie had quite finished voicing this thought. The first was that the cup convulsed in Paula’s grip, spilling some of its pale contents onto the clipped grass under their feet. The second was that the skin on Paula’s face paled to a death-mask tightness.
‘That’s a bad idea,’ she said.
‘Why is it?’
‘The Fischer mansion isn’t a benign place, Ruthie. It’s … malignant.’
‘You’ve been there?’
‘It’s not a subject I wish to discuss.’
‘You have, haven’t you? My God. You’ve been there.’
‘I’m tired. I’m tired and all talked out. We’ll talk again. But now I think it’s really time you left.’
THIRTEEN
Ginger McCabe looked no different to Malcolm Stuart’s eye when the octogenarian ex-docker opened his door at 7 pm prompt on Monday evening in Bethnal Green. The suit was pale grey with a subtle green overcheck and the tie had an equestrian motif and so was probably from Hermès. There was a white rose buttonhole in the left lapel of the suit, its petals fresh-looking, the bloom probably bought at a stall at the flower market on Columbia Road.
The old man nodded appreciatively at the bottle tucked in the crook of his visitor’s right arm and then looked around Malcolm both to right and left as if to check that he hadn’t been tailed there. Malcolm thought this a little dramatic, but then remembered that Ginger had several film cameos to his name as well as a past connection with their stars. Such men had a way of seeing their lives as an ongoing drama, even perhaps in retirement.
They settled themselves in what Ginger called his parlour. There were many framed photographs on its walls and on top of the upright piano occupying half the length of one wall. Most of them had been shot in black and white, mostly with flash. Examining these was a vital part of the ritual of an encounter at his home with Ginger. Malcolm had first done this eighteen months earlier, interviewing the man for his dissertation. But it was a necessary rite and so he did it again; seeing Ginger share an evening-suited moment with Henry Cooper and Nosher Powell; seeing him with an avuncular arm around an elderly Fred Astaire. John Wayne. Burton, Niven, Diana Rigg. The Bobbies, Moore and Charlton. Peter Sellers, of course. Shirley Eaton looking gorgeous. Eastwood improbably fresh-faced.
‘You knew everyone, Ginger.’
‘A slight exaggeration, Malcolm. Only slight, mind. No complaints at all. It’s been an interesting life.’
They were two scotches apiece and twenty minutes of small-talk in when Ginger McCabe began the story of his encounter with Martens and Degrue. He did so without preamble. He drank his Chivas neat and didn’t pour singles either, but seemed completely cogent when he began his story. His voice was steady and his words precise and apparently carefully chosen. Malcolm Stuart did wonder whether alcohol was colouring the story slightly. The old man’s tone suggested it wasn’t. Though Malcolm did consider that Ginger had needed a couple of stiff ones to make him comfortable with this particular recollection.
It took him back to the spring of 1968. He’d been a shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) and that had been then one of the more powerful and influential unions representing workers on the docks.
Union membership was pretty much mandatory back then and almost everyone was in and that went for Martens and Degrue as much as it did for any company employing workers at the quayside.
‘So they were pretty normal, then,’ Malcolm said.
‘No, Malcolm, they weren’t normal at all,’ Ginger said. ‘And don’t interrupt me again.’
Ginger was thirty-five that year and in his physical prime and supplementing his docker’s pay with stunt and film-extra work and with the odd unlicensed boxing bout as well. He had become a well-known and well-respected figure on the wharves in an industry rightly renowned for its camaraderie. Dockers worked and drank together. It was shoulder-to-shoulder night and day. They all lived in the same neighbourhoods and shared their class, their values and their politics.
Or most of them did. There were exceptions. Martens and Degrue were one of those.
Regional Secretary Mick Maddigan charged Ginger with the mission at his office in Tabernacle Street in Bermondsey as a dray cart unloaded clattering barrels of beer and stout on the cobbles outside. They were piled on the pavement, above the street cellar door of the neighbouring pub. It was a hot day in May. In some of London’s green spaces and on some of the old bomb-sites too white cherry blossom was a feathery explosion in the branches of trees. Donovan was singing something jingly-jangly on the transistor radio in its punched leather case atop a grey metal filing cabinet. Maddigan lit a cigarette with a Swan Vesta from a packet of John Player Specials on his desk. Ginger was grateful for the scent of tobacco. The weather was unseasonably hot and the smoke reduced the sour tang of Mick’s body odour. Mick was a big man and he sweated in the toiling heat.
‘Hardly anyone wore deodorant back then,’ Ginger told Malcolm Stuart. ‘Hardly anyone knew about it. Christ, the stench in the high summer on buses. At the cinema.’
‘You must have been used to it.’
‘You endured it, which is not at all the same thing.’
‘They’re a problem, Ginger,’ Mick Maddigan said.
‘I’d call them more of an anomaly.’
‘Oh, they pay their dues. It’s the lack of representation. They don’t even turn up at the AGMs.’
‘What’s their voting record like?’
‘Non-existent. It’s total lip-service, they’re in the union but not of it, in only because they have to be, end of.’
‘They’re toeing the line.’
‘Barely.’
‘They’re foreign, aren’t they? Foreign ownership?’
‘Belgian. If they’re not Flemish.’
‘Well then.’
‘Spoken like a scab, Ginger.’
‘Just playing devil’s advocate, Mick.’
Mick Maddigan stubbed out his cigarette in a large rubber-tyred ashtray, glass with the Michelin Man embossed on its side. He exhaled smoke at the turning blades of his ceiling fan. He said, ‘Go and talk to them. Give them a bit of encouragement to get more involved in the body that champions their rights as workers.’
‘Do you have a contact?’
‘Surprise them, Ginger.’
Ginger McCabe thought about this. ‘My reception might not be altogether warm.’
‘Why I’ve picked you for the task, son. Horses for courses. You can handle yourself.’
‘Know any names? Every pan has a handle, Mick.’
Mick Maddigan frowned. ‘Max Askew. Import/export clerk. Loner. Spends words like a miser spending his last pocketful of pennies. You’d be wise to find someone a bit more loquacious.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Talkative, like your film-star chum.’
‘Burton? O’Toole?’
‘I was thinking the Irish feller.’
‘Richard Harris.’
‘You’re priceless, you are, Ginger. Good luck.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And Ginger?’
‘Mick?’
‘Take care.’
Ginger McCabe went to the Martens and Degrue warehouse building on the Thursday of that week. He went there unannounced, as Mick Maddigan had said he should. Before setting off, he invested fourpence in a call from a phone box alerting Mick’s secretary to the fact of his going. That was his insurance policy. There was camaraderie on the docks, but it was neither completely consistent nor universally felt. There were occasional brawls. There were thefts and there was intimidation. Violence was fairly common, because the wages were high and where there’s money among working men there’s greed, and there’s competition when it comes to earning t
hat money.
It wasn’t only a warehouse building. That much was obvious just approaching its exterior. It was very substantial and extremely well appointed, Portland stone with veined marble lintels and sills and an elaborately engraved bronze relief greening sedately on the closed door of the vast main entrance. There was no getting around to the lading side of the business facing the river. A high brick wall shouldered the Martens and Degrue edifice to either side. Getting over it would have been climbing a cliff. Ginger had no alternative but to press the ivory buzzer set into the granite doorframe. After a pause of about thirty seconds, it was opened by a liveried man who more resembled a butler than any sort of stevedore Ginger had ever encountered.
He flashed his union credentials and explained the purpose of his visit.
The liveried man merely raised an eyebrow and then said, ‘Please wait in the vestibule.’
The vestibule was more marble, this time a black and white pattern on the floor and green and veined in wall tiles. There was a staircase leading to an upper floor with a polished brass handrail rising through its centre. Commerce was present, if muffled, from somewhere at the back of the building in what sounded to Ginger’s knowledgeable ears like packing cases being hammered together, or possibly just being hammered shut, their contents checked off against an inventory, or import licence or just a bill of lading.
Ginger McCabe knew the business Martens and Degrue were involved in. They imported and exported art, most of it religiously themed. It was the sort of business that required a lot of paperwork and careful handling at either end. And evidently it was very profitable. He associated the sort of opulence surrounding him now with companies like Tate and Lyle and ICI and Shell, the great powerhouses of international industry. He hadn’t thought for a moment there could be this sort of money in icons from Imperial Russia or pious Italian statuary.
‘You live and learn,’ he said out loud, whispering into the gloom, aware of a slight echo reverberating through the cool, quiet stillness of the space he was in. He didn’t much like it there. He felt nervous. It wasn’t the nervousness he felt before a boxing bout or even at a film audition. Opponents were solid and usually predictable. Film directors were men with capricious natures and big egos. In the prize ring or the rehearsal room, you took the rough with the smooth. This was different. This was a sort of queasy trepidation Ginger thought quite unaccountable.
After a few minutes, a man in a suit appeared and introduced himself as Peter Clore. Ginger judged Clore to be around ten years his junior in age, but the man was so overweight, it was impossible to gauge this accurately. He was the size of the pianist Oscar Peterson; the size of the film director Orson Welles. He had an air about him of authority. He was management, though, and what Ginger was after was some sort of engagement not with Martens and Degrue’s bosses, but with someone from the shop floor.
As if reading his thoughts, Peter Clore said, ‘You can use my office for your meeting, Mr McCabe. I think that’s how we can best facilitate matters. I’ll get you seated and comfortable, organize some refreshments for you and we can fetch Max Askew to come and have a little chat with you about work and conditions here. You can do that confidentially. No eavesdropping.’
‘Max Askew is a clerk,’ Ginger said.
‘Yes. And a very competent clerk.’
‘He’s white-collar.’
‘He’s also a fully paid-up member of your union. Carries his card proudly. He’s the nearest thing the staff here have to a shop steward. He negotiates pay and conditions and overtime terms here on behalf of a contented workforce.’
‘He’s never attended a single AGM.’
Clore raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s between you and him,’ he said. ‘Now would you prefer tea or coffee? Or there’s wine, or beer? We can probably run to a single malt, if you’d prefer something stronger.’
‘The good old days,’ Malcolm Stuart said.
‘This wasn’t one of those,’ Ginger McCabe said. ‘And that, Malcolm the student, is the last interruption I’ll tolerate.’
Peter Clore left the room into which he’d ushered their visitor as soon as Ginger was served his coffee. He closed the door firmly behind him. And Ginger looked at the object that had claimed his attention the moment he entered, a large frame mounted on the wall opposite the single window, presumably hung there to benefit from the spread of natural light, but covered by a velvet curtain fitted to the frame to conceal entirely what was represented there.
The frame was ornate and rectangular, longer than it was wide, suggesting the dimensions of a portrait rather than a landscape. There was a pull invitingly placed to one side of the upper reach of the curtain and Ginger knew that a tug on that would reveal what the velvet concealed. He was still seated, still drinking his excellent coffee, still speculating on the subject matter of the picture when there was a light tap at the door and Max Askew walked in.
Askew was slightly over average height and slim. He was blond haired and blue eyed and Ginger McCabe judged not too far off retirement age. He had a slightly nasal local accent and an arrestingly honest gaze when speaking or when spoken to. His argument was that his firm’s workforce were exceptionally well treated and paid. He was adamant that the union members among them were loyal to the organization, though. He said that something like docks-wide work to rule or strike action would receive 100 per cent member support, but that no one in almost thirty-five years of service had been given any cause to complain specifically about the firm employing him and them. He promised to attend that year’s AGM.
‘It’ll be my last,’ he said, rising from where he’d sat to leave the room. ‘I’m almost ready for that gold watch with the bit of engraving on the case back.’
‘It’ll be your first and last,’ Ginger McCabe said. ‘And it’s a promise we’ll hold you to.’
Max Askew left the room. Ginger noticed for the first time that the sedate ticking of a wall-mounted wooden-cased clock punctuated the silence. Involuntarily, he looked at the velvet curtain concealing whatever image lay behind it. Then almost without any conscious decision, he strode over to it and tugged the cord and revealed what it had masked.
Now, recalling this moment five decades later, he asked Malcolm Stuart a question.
‘Would you happen to know what’s meant by the Sacred Heart of Jesus?’
‘Yes,’ Malcolm said, ‘I would. It’s a painted representation of Christ usually found in Catholic churches. Sometimes I think also in prayer books. Christ’s heart is revealed in the image, wrapped in thorns like the crown of thorns at the crucifixion. And with flames emerging from the top of it. It’s an image that’s meant to represent the way Christ suffered during his time on earth for mankind.’
‘Very good, Malcolm the student.’
‘I dated a Catholic girl in my first year at uni. She still went to mass every now and then. I went with her once out of curiosity. Statues, bells, candles, the works. So this painting was one of those?’
‘In every particular,’ Ginger McCabe said, ‘except for one detail, which concerned the head. This particular Sacred Heart of Jesus had the horned head of a goat.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yes. Though not entirely. The eyes in that long head were almond-shaped and painted with a feral gleam and the goat head was grinning, slyly, narrow carious teeth above a coarse brush of beard.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then I heard footsteps approach along the parquet outside. Leather, steel-tipped heels, Peter Clore’s shoes. No mistake. I remembered their hardwood clack. I pulled the drapes closed and walked back across the room as he entered it.’
‘Do you think he knew what you’d done?’
Ginger was silent for a long moment. He looked down at his empty glass and gestured at the Chivas bottle. Malcolm refilled for them both and Ginger nodded thanks and then drank his whisky down in a swallow with a slight tremor in the hand holding the glass.
‘What I think, is that they wanted me to do it. Wh
at I think, is that I was set up. It was a demonstration of their arrogance, their boastfulness. You can’t touch us, they were saying. We’re rich and we’re up to no good and you can’t do a bloody thing about it because our pockets are deeper and our morals more corrupt than you can possibly imagine. They were laughing at me. And why wouldn’t they, if they thought they could sneer at God?’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘There’s more. The image was beautifully painted. So skilful was it that I’d looked for the painter’s name. And he’d signed it, bold as brass in the bottom right-hand corner. The name meant nothing to me but a fortnight later I was on set with Harris.’
‘Richard Harris?’
‘Dickie played the Roaring Boy, all that Brendan Behan nonsense in the pub. But it was a sham, really. He wasn’t even a Dubliner. He was from a wealthy Limerick family. And when he wasn’t threatening to fight Ollie Reed in a charity bout at the Albert Hall, he wrote poetry. And he collected art. The name Arthur Sedley-Barrett meant nothing to me. But it meant something to Harris and I expect it means something to a clever lad like you.’
‘I know the prices he fetches at auction.’
‘Supply and demand, Malcolm. Sedley-Barrett’s been dead fifty years. He ain’t painting no more, is he?’
‘He was the most eminent British painter of the twentieth century. He was called that even in his lifetime.’
‘And that lot could commission him. Unless they just twisted his arm. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’
‘What happened after?’
‘The following year, Martens and Degrue shut up shop. They vacated the premises in ’69. They may have opened up for business elsewhere but if they did, they did so very discreetly because I never heard anything about it. Word was that building remained an unhappy place. It was never successfully occupied again despite the shenanigans you already know about with the fellers wearing dog collars and sprinkling holy water.’