by Ian Mcewan
Despite the dissenting voices, a broad consensus was emerging that the Judge was a decent, fighting paper, and that the government had been in power too long and was financially, morally, and sexually corrupt, and that Julian Garmony was typical of it and was a despicable person whose head was urgently needed on a plate. In a week, sales were up by a hundred thousand, and the editor was finding he was arguing into silence from his senior editors rather than protests; secretly they all wanted him to go ahead, as long as their principled dissent was minuted. Vernon was winning the argument because everyone, lowly journalists included, now saw they could have it both ways—their paper saved, their consciences unstained.
He stretched, shuddered, yawned. There were seventy-five minutes before the first meeting and soon he would get up to shave and shower, but not yet, not while he was holding on to the day’s only tranquil moment. His nakedness against the sheet, the wanton tangle of bedclothes by his ankle, and the sight of his own genitalia, at his age not yet fully obscured by the swell and spread of his gut, sent vague sexual thoughts floating across his mind like remote summer clouds. But Mandy would be just leaving for work, and his latest friend, Dana, who worked at the House of Commons, was abroad until Tuesday. He rolled onto his side and wondered whether he had it in him to masturbate, whether it might serve him well to have his mind cleared for the business ahead. He made a few absent-minded strokes, then gave up. These days he seemed to lack the dedication and clarity or emptiness of mind, and the action itself seemed quaintly outmoded and improbable, like lighting a fire by rubbing two sticks.
Besides, in Vernon’s life lately there was so much to think about, so much of the real world that thrilled, that mere fantasy could hardly compete. What he had said, what he would say, how it went down, the next move, the unraveling consequences of success … In the accumulating momentum of the week, practically every hour had revealed to Vernon new aspects of his powers and potential, and as his gifts for persuasion and planning began to produce results, he felt large and benign, a little ruthless, perhaps, but ultimately good, capable of standing alone against the current, seeing over the heads of his contemporaries, knowing that he was about to shape the destiny of his country and that he could bear the responsibility. More than bear—he needed this weight, his gifts needed the weight that no one else could shoulder. Who else could have moved so decisively when George, concealing his identity behind an agent, went on the open market with the pictures? Eight other newspapers put in bids, and Vernon had to quadruple the original price to secure the deal. It seemed strange to him now that not so long ago he had been afflicted by a numbness of the scalp and a sense of not existing that had provoked in him fears of madness and death. Molly’s funeral had given him the jitters. Now his purpose and being filled him to his fingertips. The story was alive, and so was he.
But one small matter denied him complete happiness: Clive. He had addressed him in his mind so often, sharpening the arguments, adding all the things he should have said that night, that he could almost convince himself that he was winning his old friend round, just as he was triumphing over the dinosaurs on the board of directors. But they hadn’t spoken since their row, and Vernon was worrying more as publication day approached. Was Clive brooding, or furious, or was he locked in his studio, lost in work and oblivious to public affairs? Several times during the week Vernon had thought of snatching a minute alone to phone him. But he worried that a fresh attack from Clive would unsteady him in the meetings ahead. Now Vernon eyed the bedside phone beyond the heaped and buckled pillows, and then he made a lunge. Best not to let forethought make a coward of him again. He had to save this friendship. Best to do it while he was calm. He already had a ring tone when he noticed it was only eight-fifteen. Way too early. Sure enough, something in the fumble and clatter of Clive’s pick-up suggested the near-paraplegia of shattered sleep.
“Clive? It’s Vernon.”
“What?”
“Vernon. I woke you. I’m sorry.”
“No, no. Not at all. I was just standing here, just thinking …”
There was a rustle of sheets in the receiver while Clive rearranged himself in his bed. Why did we so often lie about sleep on the phone? Was it our vulnerability we defended? When he came on again, his voice wasn’t quite so thick.
“I’ve been meaning to phone you, but I’ve got rehearsals in Amsterdam next week. I’ve been working so hard.”
“Me too,” Vernon said. “I haven’t had a spare minute this week. Look, I wanted to talk to you again about those photographs.”
There was a pause. “Oh yes. Those. I suppose you’re going ahead.”
“I’ve canvassed a lot of opinion and the consensus is that we should publish. Tomorrow.”
Clive cleared his throat softly. He really did sound remarkably relaxed about it. “Well, I’ve said my say. We’ll just have to agree to differ.”
Vernon said, “I wouldn’t want it to come between us.”
“Of course not.”
The conversation moved on to other things. Naturally, Vernon gave a rather general account of his week. Clive told him how he’d been working through the nights, and how he was making great progress with the symphony, and what a good idea it had been to go walking in the Lake District.
“Oh yes,” Vernon said. “How was that?”
“I walked over this place called Allen Crags. That’s where I had the breakthrough, pure inspiration, this melody, you see …”
It was at this point that Vernon became aware of the call-waiting bleep. Twice, three times, then it stopped. Someone from his office. Probably Frank Dibben. The day, the last and most important day, was getting into gear. He sat naked on the edge of the bed and snatched up his watch to check it against the alarm clock. Clive wasn’t angry with him, so that was fine, and now he needed to get going.
“… they couldn’t see me from where I was and it was looking nasty, but I had to make a decision …”
“Mmm,” Vernon repeated every half-minute or so. He was right out at the end of the stretched telephone cord, standing on one foot, reaching with the other for clean underwear from a pile. The shower was out. So was the wet shave.
“… and he might have beaten her to a pulp for all I know. But then again …”
“Mmm.”
With the phone wedged between his shoulder and the side of his head, he was trying to ease a shirt out of its cellophane wrapper without making a din. Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt-service people do up every single button?
“… about half a mile away and found this rock, sort of used it as a table …”
Vernon was halfway into his trousers when the call-waiting sounded again. “Absolutely,” he said. “A rock table. Anyone in their right mind would use one. But Clive, I’m late for work. Gotta run. How about a drink tomorrow?”
“Oh. Oh, all right. Fine. Drop by after work.”
iii
Vernon extricated himself from the back of the tiny car his paper allowed him and paused on the pavement outside Judge House to straighten his rumpled suit. As he hurried across the black and ginger marble vestibule, he saw Dibben waiting by the lift. Frank had become deputy foreign editor on his twenty-eighth birthday. Four years and three editors later, he was still there and rumored to be restless. They called him Cassius for his lean and hungry look, but this was unfair: his eyes were dark, his face long and pale, his stubble heavy, giving him the appearance of a police cell interrogator, but his manner was courteous, though a little withdrawn, and he had an attractive, wry intelligence. Vernon had always detested him in an absentminded way but had come round to Frank in the early days of the Garmony turmoil. The evening after the chapel passed its no-confidence vote in the editor, the evening after Vernon’s compact with Clive, the young man stalked Vernon’s hunched figure down the street at dusk and finally approached, touched his shoulder, and suggested a drink. There was something persuasive in Dibben’s tone.
They stepped into a side-street pub
unknown to Vernon, a place of torn red plush and dim smoky air, and took a booth right at the back, behind a giant jukebox. Over gin and tonics Frank confessed to his editor his quiet outrage at the way things had turned out. Last night’s vote had been manipulated by the usual chapel suspects, whose beefs and feuds stretched back years, and he, Frank, had stayed away from the meeting pleading pressure of work. There were others, he said, who felt the same way, who wanted the Judge to broaden its appeal and get lively and do something bold like stitching up Garmony, but the dead hand of the grammarians was on every lever of patronage and promotion. The old guard would rather see the paper die than let it reach out to an under-thirties readership. They had fought off the bigger typeface, the lifestyle section, the complementary health supplement, the gossip column, the virtual bingo, and the agony uncle, as well as snappy coverage of the royal family and pop music. Now they were turning on the one editor who could save the Judge. Among the younger staff there was support for Vernon, but it didn’t have a voice. No one wanted to stand up first and be shot down.
Feeling suddenly light on his feet, Vernon went to the bar for another round. Clearly it was time he started listening to his junior staff, time he brought them on. Back at the table, Frank lit a cigarette and politely turned in his chair to blow his smoke out of the booth. He accepted the drink and continued. Of course, he hadn’t seen the pictures, but he knew it must be right to run them. He wanted to give Vernon his support, and more than that. He wanted to be of use, which was why it wouldn’t be right for him to be openly identified as the editor’s ally. He excused himself and went to the food counter to order sausage and mash, and Vernon imagined a bed-sit or studio flat and no one there, no girl waiting for the deputy foreign editor to come home.
When Frank sat down again, he said in a rush, “I could keep you in touch. I could let you know what they’re saying. I could find out where your real support is. But I’d have to look uninvolved, neutral. Would you mind that?”
Vernon did not commit himself. He had been around too long to let himself sign up an office spy without knowing more. He turned the conversation toward Garmony’s politics, and the two passed an agreeable half-hour exploring a shared contempt. But three days later, when Vernon was beginning to run the corridors, startled by the frenzy of opposition and starting—but just slightly—to waver, he returned with Dibben to the same pub, to exactly the same booth, and showed him the photographs. The effect was heartening. Frank gazed at each one at length, without comment, simply shaking his head. Then he put them back in the envelope and said quietly, “Incredible. The hypocrisy of the man.”
They sat in thoughtful silence a moment, then he added, “You have to do it. You mustn’t let them stop you. It’ll wreck his chances for PM. It’ll finish him completely. Vernon, I really want to help.”
The support among the younger staff was never quite as identifiable as Frank had claimed, but during the days it took to bring the Judge as a whole to quiescence, it was invaluable to know which arguments were hitting the mark. Through his rendezvous behind the jukebox, Vernon learned when and why the opposition was beginning to divide and when to press home his points. During the planning and execution of the buildup, he knew exactly whom to isolate and work on among the grammarians. He was able to bounce ideas for the buildup off Frank, who came up with some good suggestions of his own. Most of all, Vernon had someone to talk to, someone who shared his sense of historical mission and excitement and instinctively understood the momentous nature of the affair, and who offered encouragement when everyone else was so critical.
With the managing director on board and the buildups and trails written, with circulation rising and a muted but unforgiving excitement trickling through the staff, the meetings with Frank had no longer been necessary. But Vernon was looking to reward his loyalty and had it in mind to put him up for Lettice’s job, features editor. Her foot-dragging over the Siamese twins had put her on probation. The chess supplement had been her death warrant.
Now, this Thursday morning, last day before publication, Vernon and his lieutenant rose together to the fourth floor in an ancient lift that seemed to have the jitters. Vernon was taken back to his undergraduate acting days, the final rehearsal, the sticky palms and swooping gut and loose bowels. By the time the morning conference ended, all the senior editorial staff, all the senior journalists, and quite a few more besides would have seen the photographs. The first edition went to press at five-fifteen, but not until nine-thirty, the late edition, would Garmony’s image, his frock and his soulful gaze, be a furious blur on the steel rollers at the new Croydon plant. The idea was to deny the competition any chance of running a spoiler for their own late editions. The distribution lorries would be on the road by eleven. Then it would be too late to recall the deed.
“You saw the press,” Vernon said. “Pure bliss.”
Today all the papers, broadsheets and all, had been obliged to run related features. You could see the reluctance and the envy in every caption, in every busily researched fresh angle. The Independent had come up with a tired piece on privacy laws in ten different countries. The Telegraph had a psychologist theorizing pompously on cross-dressing, and the Guardian had given over a double-page spread, dominated by a picture of J. Edgar Hoover in a cocktail dress, to a sneering, wised-up piece on transvestites in public life. None of these papers could bring itself to mention the Judge. The Mirror and the Sun had concentrated on Garmony at his farm in Wiltshire. Both papers displayed similar grainy long-lens photos of the foreign secretary and his son disappearing into the darkness of a barn. The huge doors gaped wide, and the way the light fell across Garmony’s shoulders but not his arms suggested a man about to be swallowed up by obscurity.
Between the second and third floors Frank punched a button to brake the winching mechanism and stopped the lift with a horrible jolt that clutched at Vernon’s heart. The ornate brass and mahogany box creaked as it swayed above the shaft. They had held a couple of quick conferences like this before. The editor felt obliged to conceal his terror and appear nonchalant.
“Just briefly,” Frank said. “McDonald will be giving a little speech at conference. Not quite saying they were wrong, not quite forgiving you either. But you know, congratulations all round and since we’re going ahead, let’s pull together.”
“Fine,” Vernon said. It would be exquisite, listening to the deputy editor apologize without appearing to do so.
“Thing is, others might chime in, there might even be some applause, that sort of thing. If it’s all right with you, I think I should hang back, not show my hand at this stage.”
Vernon felt a faint, brief inner disturbance, like the tightening of some neglected reflexive muscle. He was touched by curiosity as much as distrust, but it was too late to do anything now, so he said, “Sure. I need you in place. The next few days could be crucial.”
Frank hit the button and for a moment nothing happened. Then the lift plummeted a few inches before lurching upward.
As usual, Jean was on the other side of the concertina gates with her bundle of letters, faxes, and briefing notes.
“They’re waiting for you in room six.”
The first meeting was with the advertising manager and his team, who felt this was the moment to hike the rates. Vernon wanted to wait. As they hurried along the corridor—red-carpeted, as in his dreams—he noticed Frank peeling away just as two others joined them, people from layout. There was pressure to crop the front-page picture to make way for a longer standfirst, but Vernon had already made up his mind about the copy he wanted. The obituaries editor, Manny Skelton, scuttled sideways out of his cupboard-sized office and pushed a few pages of typescript into Vernon’s hand as he strode by. This would be the piece they had commissioned in case Garmony offed himself. The letters editor joined the throng, hoping for a word before the first meeting began. He was anticipating a deluge and was fighting for a whole page. Now, as he paced toward room six, Vernon was himself again, large, benign, r
uthless, and good. Where others would have felt a weight upon their shoulders, he felt an enabling lightness, or indeed a light, a glow of competence and well-being, for his sure hands were about to cut away a cancer from the organs of the body politic; this was the image he intended to use in the leader that would follow Garmony’s resignation. Hypocrisy would be exposed, the country would stay in Europe, capital punishment and compulsory conscription would remain a crank’s dream, social welfare would survive in some form or other, the global environment would get a decent chance, and Vernon was on the point of breaking into song.
He didn’t, but the next two hours had all the brio of a light opera in which every aria was his, and in which a shifting chorus of mixed voices both praised him and harmoniously echoed his thoughts. Then it was eleven o’clock, and far more than the usual number were cramming into Vernon’s office for the morning conference. Editors and their deputies and assistants and journalists were crammed into every chair, slouched against every inch of wall space, and perched along the windowsills and on the radiators. People who could not squeeze into the room were bunched around the open doorway. Conversation stopped as the editor edged himself into his chair. It was positively raffish, the way he started without preamble, as always, and stuck to the routine—a few minutes’ postmortem, then a run through the lists. Today, of course, there would be no bids for the front page. Vernon’s one concession was to reverse the usual order so that home news and politics would be last. The sports editor had a background piece on the Atlanta Olympics and a why-oh-why on the state of English table-tennis doubles. The literary editor, who had never before been in early enough to attend a morning conference, gave a somnolent account of a novel about food that sounded so pretentious Vernon had to cut him off. From arts there was a funding crisis, and Lettice O’Hara in features was at last ready to run her piece on the Dutch medical scandal, and also—to honor the occasion—was offering a feature on how industrial pollution was turning male fish into females.