In the pub Vanessa and Ben held hands. They were both very fair, Ben’s burnt nose was still peeling from his holiday. Vanessa was on the verge of asking him to move into Rutherford Street with her. They’d spent last night there together, after they got back from the package tour to Portugal, and she’d felt very happy with Ben in the house, safe, for once, from the invisible presence of Geoff Doyle. Apart from anything else, as a reporter, Ben was on reasonable terms with the local police, which might be a help if she had any more trouble with Geoff. But she was holding off her invitation. Once burnt, she was twice shy and didn’t want to make a foolish move. She wasn’t sure Ben might not think she was jumping the gun. Perhaps he didn’t want to live with her. He’d just split up with his wife, leaving her in the house they owned, with their toddler, a boy called Martin. And now she was disconcerted by what she heard from Ben.
‘Frances seemed to know I’d met somebody,’ he was saying. ‘She rang me at work, said she’d been trying to get hold of me all the weekend. Normally, she never rings me. I ring her, to go and see the boy. Then half the time she says it’s not convenient. But she says I can come this evening. She suggested it. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No, of course not,’ Vanessa lied.
‘I don’t want you to get upset. It’s only that I want to see Martin. I told you what it was like – after what I went through with her I don’t want to see her any more.’ Ben had told Vanessa in Portugal how his wife Frances had rejected him, for reasons he could never get her to explain or understand himself. Now he returned to the subject. ‘She just turned away from me after she had the baby. She went right off me, finally she told me to leave. I pleaded with her – I suggested marriage guidance – it was no good. I had to go, get a room, tried to get on with life, sort of hoping she’d have me back. Believe it or not, I ended up in the pub, telling my father about it and I broke down, suddenly, I couldn’t help myself. Imagine that, you’re in a pub in Leadham Common full of men on a Sunday lunchtime, sobbing your eyes out. They all looked away, pretended I wasn’t there. Some of them were my dad’s friends …’
They had found a corner in the saloon bar at the Duke of Westminster, Frank Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York’. ‘I daresay most of them had cried, one time or another,’ Vanessa told him consolingly.
‘Not in a public bar at Sunday lunchtime,’ Ben said. ‘With blokes trying to have a pint and playing a quick game of darts before they went home for their dinners.’
Now she said tentatively, ‘You’d never – go back to her.’
He shook his head. Vanessa didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
‘There’s Martin …’ she suggested, feeling she must know her chances.
‘No,’ he said glumly, and changed the subject. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any contact with Kenton planning department, have you?’ Suddenly he became the reporter again.
‘Are you joking?’ Vanessa asked indignantly. ‘After what I told you about my husband and Cindy Abbott?’
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m just asking around. There’s a plan to widen Savernake Road up from the river to Foxwell High Street and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It must be the only road in London which doesn’t need widening. But I can’t get an answer from my contact in the planning department. She thinks there’s something funny going on. The plans are in a locked filing cabinet they used to have access to. And something’s up with the computers. A bit they can’t get into – a missing code. Now, Sam Abbott’s the second in command there—’
‘I’m the last person to ask,’ Vanessa protested. She was getting depressed now, as she thought about the Abbotts and Geoff Doyle and Ben’s wife wanting to see him. She felt weakened. Had her affair with Ben been only a holiday romance? The Arcadia, on which she’d pinned so many hopes, was going wrong. Suddenly it seemed to her nothing was ever going to be quite right again. Her good days were over.
Ben sensed her mood, and patted her arm. ‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘I’ve fixed that write-up about the restaurant in the paper. Can I come round late, after I’ve seen Frances?’
Vanessa smiled, happier again.
That evening, while Vanessa was bathing Alec, Annie dropped in on her way to the restaurant. ‘Something important came up while you were away …’ And having warned Vanessa she wasn’t going to like the news, she told her about Sam Abbott’s offer to buy the Arcadia.
She was surprised by Vanessa’s reaction. Hauling Alec from the bath and wrapping him in a towel, Vanessa frowned. ‘Funny, that’s the second time Abbott’s name’s cropped up today.’ She told Annie about the widening of Savernake Road. ‘You can see it doesn’t make sense,’ she added. ‘Savernake Road’s just a normal grotty little street. Ben can’t understand why they want to widen it.’
‘Who is Ben, by the way?’ asked Annie irrelevantly. ‘Melanie’s very depressed. She seems to think he’s a threat to her.’
‘Silly girl,’ exclaimed Vanessa.
‘That’s what I told her,’ Annie stated, waiting.
‘I met him in Portugal, Annie. I really like him,’ Vanessa said. She was putting Alec into pyjamas. ‘But he’s still married to his wife, separated, you know, but not divorced.’
‘Oh,’ Annie said flatly.
‘It’s not like that,’ Vanessa protested.
‘No,’ Annie said. ‘Well – here’s hoping.’
‘I can’t make up my mind about the Arcadia, Annie,’ said Vanessa, returning to their joint preoccupation as she persuaded Alec into his sleeping suit. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Annie said. ‘We know if it operated as it’s supposed to we’d both have a living, but at the moment it’s not. At the moment it’s not a living, it’s an incipient disaster.’
‘Your house is backing it. You’ve got the most to lose so you should have the biggest say in the decision.’
Annie pointed at Alec, now staring from face to face as they spoke. ‘My house, your children – and your father’s guarantee – we’ve both got a lot to lose.’ They stared at each other. Alec looked grave.
‘I feel sick,’ claimed Vanessa.
‘I do, too,’ Annie said.
Only seven customers ate in the Arcadia that night. Melanie, who had been to the cinema, put her head round the door and grimaced. Annie went over to talk to her outside.
‘Not many in,’ said Melanie, eating a hamburger.
Edward stood well away, in case a passing group of friends thought he had anything to do with her.
‘You don’t have to tell me!’ Annie said.
‘I think a bigger bar would go down better round here.’
‘You’ve mentioned that before,’ Annie said. ‘You might be right, but I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying it.’
‘A really good club would be great,’ Edward butted in. ‘Good music—’
‘Go home, Melanie,’ Annie ordered. ‘Edward, you might as well push off, too. Maybe you could just see Melanie up the High Street, to the corner of Rutherford Street.’
‘I don’t need a minder,’ protested Melanie.
‘Please,’ Annie said dispiritedly. Edward, whose bosses came in every week and collected a large sum from the Arcadia’s overdraft, might as well do something more useful than waiting outside the Arcadia, on a quiet night, frightening no one but his own employers when they thought of his connection with the intimidating Andy Campbell.
But as it turned out, sending Edward away was a mistake. Half an hour later three of the kind of shaved-head young men who used to hang about outside when the shop belonged to the old barber with his fascist views, tried to get in. When Annie refused them, they pushed her aside, shoved in, sat down and began to abuse two middle-aged women customers. Annie phoned the police, but by the time they came the young men had gone, though threatening to return. Departing, one spat on the floor by the till. Annie was shaken.
‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d get the trade for this type of restaurant in this sort of area,
’ observed the police sergeant.
Annie looked at him despairingly.
‘I must bring my wife along some evening,’ he said kindly. ‘She’s all for gourmet food.’ But Annie, frightened by having to have Andy Campbell’s Edward to keep off other marauders, was thinking about Sam Abbott’s offer.
13
Public and Private Developments
That same night, in the discreet restaurant of a central London hotel, two men who might have been assumed to have nothing in common, indeed, to be natural enemies, met over dinner.
Sir Bernard Fellows, chairman of Samco, a great billion-pound pyramid of companies from supermarket chains to helicopter manufacturers, poured more wine for his guest, Joe Banks, leader of the Labour majority on Kenton Council. Joe, now sixty, son of a dockworker more in than out of work during the Depression, had been born in an upstairs flat in Savernake Street and brought up, he said, on bread and dripping. He’d done well at school, gone to a teacher training college, married another Labour Party activist and been elected to Kenton Council at the age of twenty-five. He’d been there ever since, fighting the left of his own party as hard as the few Conservatives on the council. Fighting and, on the whole, winning. He was a short, thickset man with a reddish complexion and broad shoulders. To a superficial observer, such as one of the restaurant’s underpaid Mediterranean waiters, he might have appeared not dissimilar to his host, though Sir Bernard was slightly taller and more tanned and his suit was considerably more expensive. Both men looked overweight and uneasy. Both, if the truth were told, had unsatisfactory family lives. They were also earnest, practical, and after a result.
Seven million pounds was their subject. They had settled that this would be the sum the Samco Corporation would pay Kenton Council for a hundred-year lease on the eight acres of Savernake Park and vacant possession of the 104 flats and houses of the Savernake Estate. Savernake House and Rodwell House, each fifteen storeys high, housed sixty families; Grenfell and Raleigh Houses, both low blocks, each contained twenty-four flats, and there were twenty small houses. All in all, the sale would involve around five hundred Savernake Estate residents, men, women and children, tenants and owners, from bank clerks to. traffic wardens, many of them discontented with the estate’s sweating and cracked walls, flats in poor repair, lifts out of action, dirty stairs and balconies, and their lives made unhappy by the high level of sickness in children, caused by damp, isolation in tower blocks, the noise of the estate’s disaffected teenagers, the barking of large dogs kept to deter breakins, next door’s record players and television heard through thin walls – and fear, especially in women and the old, of going out at night. Savernake was not a bad estate, just not a good one. The question for Sir Bernard and Joe Banks was how many people, happy or discontented, would, in the event, be prepared to leave the estate without a fuss.
‘So,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘Can you guess at all how many of the tenants and owners will be prepared to leave at stage one?’
‘Owners – offer a decent price and you should pick up a third to a half of them, possibly more. Tenants – well, we’ll be making it plain we’re moving against those in arrears – that’s a good half of them. That way they’ll be keen to take an offer – we offer them a lump sum, as agreed, no more said about the arrears and a clean start in alternative accommodation. That could leave about a hundred not wanting to sell, and half the tenants not prepared to go. What they’ll do, I don’t know. You just can’t predict these things. It also depends on how strongly they can organise, who’s organising, if they get outside help and support and who from. These are imponderables. I’d be mad to predict, but one thing I’m sure of – we’ll win.’
‘How long?’ enquired Sir Bernard.
‘Three months at best, nine at worst. The more people we can clear out at stage one the better – the construction work will get the rest out, noise, dirt, etc.’
‘And will members of your own council put up serious opposition to the sale?’ Sir Bernard asked.
Joe Banks looked uncomfortable for just a second, then responded, ‘I’d be a liar if I told you that might not happen.’
‘And the vote?’ The vote by the tenants about whether they wanted the sale at all was the most important issue, as they both knew.
‘In August,’ Banks said. They stared at each other.
Sir Bernard nodded. ‘According to the regulations, those residents who do not vote are counted as having voted yes to the sale of a council estate?’ he suggested.
Banks nodded. ‘Correct.’
‘Excellent,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘I believe you know I have the ear of a senior person at the Department of the Environment?’
‘Gerald Rafferty,’ Banks said in a low voice. Sir Bernard’s glance confirmed this. ‘I hope we won’t need …’
‘I, also,’ agreed Sir Bernard. ‘But it never hurts to have a friend at court.’
Their waiter solicitously enquired if they required dessert. Sir Bernard ordered profiteroles for Joe Banks and chose bread and butter pudding for himself. ‘My wife would disapprove,’ he said. Banks sympathised.
‘Not much red meat seen at home in the past few years,’ he said. ‘It’s well meant, I suppose. They’re trying to keep us on our feet. What’s the difference between a wife and a terrorist?’ he asked Sir Bernard.
‘You can negotiate with a terrorist,’ Sir Bernard replied promptly.
‘Right,’ said Joe. The men smiled as the waiter brought their puddings.
‘So,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘If everything’s in place I take it you’ll reveal details of the scheme as soon as you can.’
‘Neither of us wants delay,’ said Banks. ‘One of our information officers, sworn to secrecy of course, is liaising with your – Samco’s – PR firm and they expect to finalise the relevant material in a few days – that’s leaflets for all households affected, giving details of the offer, a press campaign in various stages over several months and the like. The posters are already printed – followed by a leaflet to all the tenants and owners on the estate. Of course, there’ll be a letter making an offer to each household first. Then posters – simultaneously, of course, a press conference to selected members of the press. We know there might be public opposition to all this. We’ll need to be very careful to put this in a favourable light. Your PR firm is seconding an executive to Kenton information department for up to five months, depending on the public reactions.’
‘We’ll do it,’ declared Sir Bernard.
Banks nodded. ‘There are only about four hundred adults on that estate – we can’t be sure of the exact numbers. The poll tax returns ought to show us, but of course, they don’t. They can’t be allowed to stand in the way of the benefits the Samco money will bring to the borough.’
‘Quite agree. We’ve got to move quickly now. Leaks would be fatal. But so far we’re ahead of the leaks and I believe we can strike first. What will you do with the money?’ asked Sir Bernard.
‘A new old folk’s home, modernisation of a couple of others. A crèche, a repair fund for existing properties, sports facilities.’
‘Very nice,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘Brandy?’
‘I’ll take an Armagnac, thank you kindly.’
Banks conjured up in his mind a running track, Astroturf, a gym, showers, the Joe Banks Stadium, the Joe Banks Retirement Home, company directorships, a knighthood. The face of Mrs Roxanne Fuller, Mayor of Kenton, loomed up in front of him, large, black, righteous and angry. He pushed the face back. Outside the restaurant he saw his host into a taxi, shook hands through the window and heard Sir Bernard tell the driver, ‘Colindale, sixty-three Hall Avenue.’ Banks took himself to the tube station.
Foxwell High Street was crowded that Saturday morning. It was hot, the traffic fumes seemed worse than usual. George’s was crammed. Vanessa and Melanie stood behind the counter, while Annie, near them in the corner, served ices and cold drinks from the new fridge she had installed. Though the till clanged merrily open and shut i
t was small comfort when Annie and Vanessa thought of the static, empty Arcadia next door, swept and garnished, expensively appointed, waiting to do another slow, expensive night’s business, its till a funeral march to the café’s fandango.
Ben Gathercole charged in, accompanied by a slight, fair woman with cropped hair who, Vanessa knew, was not Frances Gathercole. Vanessa had seen Ben’s wife in a photograph and she was a tall, dark woman, with a big nose, not as pretty, she noticed happily, as Vanessa herself. She summed up Ben’s companion quickly as a radical activist, from her large canvas shoulder-bag to her small feet in round-toed black shoes. Ben, meanwhile, had grabbed the only free seat in the café by the window, having managed to glare a woman finishing her cup of tea out of her chair, which he had plonked himself down in. On the other side of the table Madame Katarina made room for his long legs and big feet by politely moving the suitcase she was about to take down to Brighton for a week of consultations at her south coast practice. Ignoring her, Ben said to the slight woman who squeezed in next to the clairvoyant, ‘So what’s it all about, Sue?’
‘Most of it’s in the print-outs. Look – I’ll shove them to you under the table. I don’t want to be conspicuous. They’re all labelled “Secret” – nice, isn’t it, in the so-called Socialist Republic of Kenton?’
‘OK, just push them to me casually. Thanks, by the way.’
‘Don’t thank me, just do something. In the end, I don’t care if I lose the job. I’ve had it up to here with Kenton Council anyway – I don’t care if I sell my flat and go back to Leeds. I want to nail that bastard Joe Banks. Socialist? He’s about as red as your laundry when it goes pink in the washing machine. What you’ve got there, no doubt about it, is the plan to sell off Savernake Park and the Savernake Estate to a property firm, Savernake Developments. And, of course, before that they’ve got to get the tenants out fast, so they can go ahead. Can you get that on the front page of the Kenton Post?’
In Search of Love, Money & Revenge Page 18