The Siege of Broadcasting House

 

Unpredictable as ever, the police had decided not to intervene. I stood in the crowd of demonstrators outside Broadcasting House, waiting in vain for the sirens to sound and the riot vans to swerve into our ranks. But calm reigned, by order of the Police Commissioner. Double-decker buses moved along Langham Place, tourists gazing down at us, keen to observe one of London’s historic rituals, the raising of fists against the establishment.

Across the street two constables patrolled the pavement near the Chinese Embassy. A third guarded the doors of the Langham Hotel, chatting to a limousine driver. None of them took any interest in the hundred or more pro­testers now blocking the entrance to the BBC’s flagship headquarters. But without the police and a brisk confrontation, we would never rouse ourselves to action. We needed to lose our tempers, push aside the security men and seize the building.

‘They must think we’re fans,’ I muttered to the fifty-year-old woman standing beside me in a sheepskin jacket. A veterinary surgeon and volunteer sexton at the Chelsea Marina chapel, she was a neighbour of the Reverend Dexter. ‘Mrs. Templeton - why is it you can never find a policeman when you need one? They must think we’re here for some pop star . . .’

‘Mr. Markham? You’re talking to yourself again . . .’

Like most of the protesters, Mrs. Templeton was listening to her portable radio, tuned to the Radio 4 channel at that moment transmitting a commentary on the demonstration.

Microphone at his lips, the reporter stood behind the security guards in the foyer of Broadcasting House, and there were hoots of laughter at some absurd comment about our motives for picketing the BBC.

Looking at the attentive faces around me, ears to their radios, I realized that we were taking our orders from the organization against which we were demonstrating. During the past three days the one o’clock news programme had run an investigation into the unrest at Chelsea Marina, and into similar outbursts of middle-income disquiet in Bristol and Leeds.

As expected, the journalists had missed the point. They blamed the revolt on the deep dissatisfactions of the baby-boomer generation, a self-indulgent and over-educated class unable to hold their own against a younger age-group thrusting their way into the professions. Pundits, backbench MPs, even a Home Office junior minister offered similar pearls. Listening to them in Kay’s kitchen as she sliced the salad cucumber, I knew that I would have been just as glib if I had never set foot in Chelsea Marina.

So incensed by the BBC’s patronizing tone that she cut her finger, Kay set about organizing a demo. We would flood Portland Place with protesters, rush the venerable deco building and seize control of the World Today studio, then broadcast a true account of the rebellion gathering pace across the map of middle England.

A large charge of resentment waited to be lit. As Kay explained, using a megaphone to address the crowd outside her  house, for more than sixty years the BBC had played a

leading role in brainwashing the middle classes. Its regime of moderation and good sense, its commitment to the Reithian aims of education and enlightenment, had been an elaborate cover behind which it imposed an ideology of passivity and self-restraint. The BBC had defined the national culture, a swindle in which the middle classes had colluded, assuming that moderation and civic responsibility were in their own interest.

Steadying Kay as she teetered on her kitchen chair, I nodded confidently at her tirade. She introduced two fellow residents, former BBC arts producers recently made redundant. They knew their way around Broadcasting House, and would lead the assault on the World Today studio. All we lacked, when we made our separate ways across London the next morning, was a determined and ruthless enemy.

But I was still gripped by the excitements of the revolution. After leaving Sally and Henry Kendall outside Henry’s house, I had waylaid a passing minicab, and kept it waiting in St John’s Wood while I packed a small suitcase. I had no idea how long I would stay in Chelsea Marina, or how much luggage Lenin carried from the Finland Station, but I assumed that revolutionaries travelled light.

I felt a surge of relief when we reached the King’s Road, like a child returning to a happy foster home. I had taken three weeks’ leave, assuring Professor Arnold that my dying mother needed me with her. He had known her in her younger days, and was understandably sceptical. I would be happy to see Sally later, once she had emasculated Henry with her complex needs. At the moment, what was happening in this west London housing estate had far more meaning, and in some way held the key to my future.

Despite all this, the Pakistani driver refused to enter the estate, and stopped by the gatehouse.

‘Far too dangerous, sir - the police advise us to stay out. A Harrods van has been stoned.’

‘Stoned? What’s behind it?’

‘It’s a question of ethnic rivalries. The people here have their own little Kashmir problem. There’s a dominance struggle between the traditional Guardian supporters and the new middle class from the financial services field.’

‘Interesting.’ I noticed a copy of The Economist on the front seat. ‘Now which side do I belong to?’

The driver turned to peer at me. ‘Non-aligned, sir. Undoubt­edly

I paid up and left him to it, setting off on foot past the boarded windows of the estate manager’s office. A police car patrolled Beaufort Avenue, trailed by two residents in a battered Mini, which flashed its lights in warning. I expected to find Kay’s house under close surveillance, but the cul de sac was at peace, the silence broken only by the snipping of Kay’s shears as she trimmed her hedge.

She embraced me eagerly, took my hands and pressed them to her breasts, then seized my suitcase. We spent a happy afternoon with several bottles of wine, debriefing each other after the attack on the NFT. Kay had already forgotten that she had abandoned me - in the hope, I now suspected, that I would be caught and betray her. Martyrdom waited in the wings of her ambition, ready to bestow stardom. She graphically described further planned assaults on the South Bank, an outpost of the new tyranny, enslaving those who huddled for cultural shelter against its brutalist walls.

Undressed concrete, David. Alcatraz revival, always beware. Built by the sort of people who liked Anna Neagle and Rex Harrison

I was delighted to be with Kay and her chaotic enthusiasms. At night I slept soundly on another child’s mattress in her daughters bedroom, surrounded by cheerful pastel drawings of the Trojan War. Troy, I noticed, had a marked resemblance to Chelsea Marina, and the wooden horse was the first I had seen furnished with a stripped-pine penis. Shortly after dawn, when she was woken by a police helicopter, Kay slipped into bed beside me. She lay quietly in the grey London light, inhaling the scent of her daughter’s pillow before she turned to me.

During the next fortnight the Chelsea Marina rebellion made significant strides. More than half the residents were involved in the protest actions. As the Daily Telegraph - now the house journal of the revolution - noted in an editorial, many of the activists were senior professionals. Doctors, architects and solicitors took a prominent part in the sit-in at Chelsea Town Hall protesting against the new parking charges. A retired barrister led the demo outside the offices of the management company, demanding the surrender of the estate’s freeholds.

The first confrontation with the police came a week after I returned. Bailiffs tried to force their way into a house owned by a young accountant, his wife and four children. The couple refused to pay their outrageous utility bills and were threatened with repossession.

But the bailiffs were met by a force of articulate and indig­nant women, who attacked their van before they could unload the sledgehammers. Twenty minutes later, the police arrived with a French television crew in tow. A storm of missiles rained down, stones lovingly gathered from the Seychelles, Mauritius and the Yucatan. The police tactfully withdrew, persuaded by a Home Office minister whose sister lived at Chelsea Marina. But the television scenes of the accountant’s terrified children, screaming from their bedroom windows, prompted uneasy memories of sectarian violence in Belfast.

Many parents withdrew their children from their fee-paying schools, rejecting the entire ethos of private education, a vast obedience-training conspiracy. Concerned for their families’ safety  many residents took unpaid leave, hoping to give themselves time to think. Their wives and children turned to pilfering  from the King’s Road supermarkets and delicatessens. Hauled in front of the magistrates, they refused to pay their fines, and the Daily Mail dubbed them ‘the first middle-class gypsies’.

When an Inland Revenue office in Fulham was forced to close, after a walkout by the key computer managers, the authorities at last roused themselves. A sustained middle-class boycott of the consumer society would have disastrous effects on tax revenues. Investigators from the Department of Health roamed Chelsea Marina with their questionnaires, trying to isolate the underlying grievances.

The wide scatter of chosen targets made it difficult to find a common psychology at work. The pickets who blocked the entrances to Peter Jones and the London Library, Legoland and the British Museum, travel agencies and the V&A, a Hendon shopping mall and a minor public school, had nothing in common other than a rejection of middle-class life. Two smoke bombs in Selfridge’s food hall and the Dinosaur wing of the Natural History Museum seemed unrelated, but closed both institutions for a day. The ‘Destroy the museums’ cry of Marinetti’s futurists had a surprising resonance.

During a local by-election, when Kay and Vera set out for the polling station, hoping to deface their ballots, they found that the rejection of civic cooperation had become a serious threat to the democratic system. Parliamentary elections had long been run by middle-class volunteers. The stay-at-home decision by even a few experienced tellers forced a postponement, applauded by the residents at Chelsea Marina, who regarded parliamentary democracy as a none too subtle way of neutering the middle class.

Pleased by all this, Kay sent me out to buy the broadsheet newspapers, and over her wine read out the worried editorials. The Times and Guardian were baffled why so many of their readers were seceding from society. Both quoted a deputy head teacher and Chelsea Marina resident interviewed on television:

‘We’re tired of being taken for granted. We’re tired of being used. We don’t like the kind of people we’ve become . . .’

Outside Broadcasting House the demonstrators pressed closer to the entrance, pushing back the wooden barriers that the BBC security men had placed in front of the doors. A crowd of some two hundred protesters had now formed, listening on their radios to a news programme that discussed the events unfolding below the BBC’s windows.

I scanned the familiar faces of Chelsea Marina residents, but there was no sign of Kay, Vera Blackburn or Richard Gould. I knew that a protest was planned at the V&A, which Kay termed ‘an emporium of cultural delusions’. The target was the Cast Room, where the copy of Michelangelo’s David would be pulled from its plinth, in much the way that statues of Stalin and Lenin were toppled after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The David, Kay claimed, deluded the middle classes that a developed ‘cultural’ sensibility endowed them with a moral superiority denied to football fans or garden gnome enthusiasts.

‘Oh, my God . . .’ Mrs. Templeton rocked back on her heels. Around us, people were laughing in disbelief.

‘Mrs. Templeton? Has something happened?’

‘It certainly has.’ She brushed a fly from the sleeve of her sheepskin jacket. ‘Chelsea Marina is “the first middle-class sink estate”. We’re the “underclass” of the bourgeoisie. Dear God

I tried to think of an adequate response, but an angry confrontation had broken out between the security guards and a group of protesters  knocking over the wooden barriers. A tug of  war quickly followed, the security men insisting that the barrier was BBC property and taunting the demonstrators for refusing to pay their licence fees.

A thunderflash burst near the entrance, a hard explosion that cuffed our ears. In the shocked silence a cloud of blue smoke floated over our heads. Taking Mrs. Templeton’s arm, I saw a TV news car in Portland Place forced onto the pavement. White police vans, sirens seesawing, swerved through the traffic and pulled to a halt by All Souls church in Langham Place. Officers in riot gear, shields and truncheons at the ready, leapt from the vans and pushed their way through the watching lunchtime crowds.

A smoke bomb shot a gust of black vapour into the air. A startled security guard tripped over one of the barriers and fell to the ground. The protesters seized their chance and surged past him, forcing their way through the doors. Still holding Mrs. Templeton’s arm, I felt myself propelled into the foyer by the police pressure.

A hundred of us packed the reception area, overwhelming the security staff trying to guard the lifts. A group of guests cowered among the armchairs, pundits at last confronted by reality. The smoke followed us into the foyer, swirling into the lift shafts as the elevators carried the advance parties of demonstrators to the upper floors. Led by one of the BBC producers who had come over to our side, they planned to invade the news studio and broadcast the manifesto of middle-class rebellion to the listening nation, mouths agape over their muesli.

The other BBC man, a slim-faced Anglo-Indian, herded us towards the stairs to the left of the foyer. One floor above, ^we burst through a door marked ‘Council Chamber’. The high-ceilinged room, with its semi-circular south wall, was hung with portraits of the BBC’s director-generals, who had presided over the Corporation’s benevolent tyranny.

Like a revolutionary rabble breaking into an ancien regime drawing room and confronting the effigies of a corrupt aristoc­racy, we stared aghast at the portraits, dominated by the BBC’s principal architect, Lord Reith. I noticed that the subjects’ heads grew larger as the years passed and the BBC’s power increased, culminating in the smiling balloon-head of a recent appointee, an immense inflated blimp of self-satisfaction.

A nervous line of junior producers and studio engineers faced us across the chamber, barely convinced of any sacrifice they might have to make. They surrendered limply when we pushed past them. Mrs. Templeton drew an aerosol can from her handbag. As smoke drifted into the chamber from the foyer below, she expertly aimed her paint jet at the portraits, endowing them with a series of Hitler moustaches and forelocks.

Five minutes later it was all over. As the riot police manhandled us through the lobby we learned that the assault on The World Today had failed. Long before our arrival, the entire production team had moved to a secure studio in the basement. The police snatch squads had entered Broadcasting House through a side door in Portland Place. They were waiting for us, truncheons warm and at the ready, and made short work of any protesters lost in the mazelike corridors. We were roughly rounded up and ejected from the building, and the Corporation resumed its historic task of beguiling the middle classes.

Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protesters. We were saved from any real brutality by our own incompetence and the swift end to the demonstration. Helped along by kicks and baton blows, we were bundled into the smoke-stained air of Portland Place. In half an hour we would be bussed to West End Central, charged and bailed to appear before the magis­trates. First offenders like Mrs. Templeton would be spared, but I was almost certain to be given a thirty-day sentence.

Flung through the doors by a sweating constable, I tripped over a wooden barrier. A woman police sergeant stepped forward and took my arm. As she helped me to my feet I recognized the determined face of the demonstrator at Olympia who had bandaged my injured leg.

‘Angela . . . ?’ I peered under the lowered brim of her hat. ‘The cat show, Olympia . . .’

‘Cat show?’

‘Kingston, two children . . .’

‘Right.’ Vaguely recognizing me, she relaxed her strong grip. ‘I remember.’

‘You joined the police?’

‘Looks like it.’ She moved me towards the church, where the prisoners were being processed. ‘You’re a long way from Olympia, Mr. - ?’

‘Markham. David Markham.’ I stared into her steely eyes as a police van veered past us. ‘Quite a change of heart. When did you join?’

‘Four years ago. Never felt better.’

‘So, you were . . . undercover?’

‘That sort of thing.’ She led me through the throng of dog handlers and police drivers. ‘You look all in. Find a different hobby.’

Undercover?’ Remembering my £100 fine for going to her aid, I said: ‘I’m impressed.’

Someone has to keep the streets safe.’ I agree. As it happens, I was also undercover.’ ‘Really? Who with?’

Hard to explain. It’s connected to the Heathrow bomb. The Home Office is interested.’

‘Now I’m impressed.’ She pointed to the last protesters being expelled from Broadcasting House. Mrs. Templeton, her jacket torn, was complaining to a weary inspector. ‘What about today? Is this part of your project?’

‘No. It’s more serious than it looks. We have a point to make.’

‘You may be serious, but it’s a very small point. You’re wasting police time and giving cover to people who want to do real damage.’

Already she had lost interest in me. Her eyes picked up a change of mood among the police units. Handlers were urging their dogs into the backs of vans, drivers started their engines. All but a few of the officers guarding the protesters on the church steps turned and ran to their vehicles. Leaving me without a word, Angela slipped into the front passenger seat of a police car that halted briefly beside us.

Sirens wailed down Upper Regent Street as the convoy departed. Almost the entire police presence had gone, a vacuum filled by ambling tourists who began to photograph us. The protesters corralled on the church steps were listening to their radios again, and began to disperse as the constables beckoned them away.

Mrs. Templeton walked towards me, radio held to her ear. She seemed ruffled and confused, unaware of her torn jacket and the paint on her chin.

‘Mrs. Templeton? We’ll share a taxi. I think we’ve got away with it.’

‘What?’ She stared wildly at me, her attention fixed on the radio. She had lost the heel of her right shoe, and in an odd middle-class reflex of my own I felt that she was letting the side down by appearing so dishevelled.

‘We’re safe, Mrs. Templeton. The police - did they hurt you?’

‘Listen . . .’ Eyes almost crossed, she handed the radio to me ‘A bomb’s gone off at Tate Modern. Three people were killed

I listened to the reporter’s urgent voice, but around me all sound seemed to withdraw from the street. Tourists wandered past Broadcasting House, staring at maps that led nowhere. Rag-trade despatch riders hovered at the traffic lights, exhausts pumping, ready to race from one meaningless assignment to another. The city was a vast and stationary carousel, forever boarded by millions of would-be passengers who took their seats, waited and then dismounted. I thought of the bomb cutting through another temple of enlightenment, silencing the endless murmur of cafeteria conversations. Despite myself, I felt a surge of excitement and complicity.

 

White Space

 

‘If the means are desperate enough, they justify the ends.’

Kay spoke with her hands on my shoulders, standing behind me as we watched the breakfast news in her kitchen. Despite the closeness and affection prompted by the Tate bomb, I could

feel her fingers trembling as if they were trying to break free from me. I thought of the deep night we had spent together, the hours passed talking in the dark, each of us unpacking a lifetime’s memories. But the destruction at the Tate rekindled nerves that had been numbed by too much talk of violence, the conspirator’s blank cheque that might one day have to be cashed. Protest tapped all Kay’s high ideals, but violence

devalued them, making her uneasily aware that reality waited for us outside an already open door.

She squeezed my shoulders, staring through the sitting-room window at a convoy of neighbours’ cars leaving to support a rent strike in north London.

‘Kay?’

‘I’m all right. There’s so much going on.’

‘The Mill Hill demo - do you want to join them?’

‘I ought to.’ Her worn fingers felt the spurs of bone in my neck. ‘There’s a lot to think over.’

‘The two of us?’ I tried to calm her. ‘Kay?’

‘Who?’

‘You and I. Do we need to talk anything through?’ ‘Again? Slow-motion replays make me nervous. Cinema died when they invented the flashback.’ Taking pity on me, she massaged my temples with her forefingers. ‘It’s all starting to happen You can feel we’re on the edge of something.’

‘We are. Ten years in jail.’

‘That’s not a joke.’ She held my head protectively to her breast, 1’ke a mother with her child. ‘You could do some real time. I airways thought you might be a police spy. You took so many chances, and came back even though we left you in the shit. Either you were very careless or you had some special friends looking after you. But that wasn’t it at all -1 knew that yesterday. You were so involved.’

‘Good. The BBC demo?’

‘No. That was a joke. Even Peggy Templeton couldn’t get herself arrested. I mean the bomb at Tate Modern.’

‘Kay . . . ?’ I turned and held her hips, looking up at her troubled face. ‘Tate Modern? That was horrific. I wasn’t involved in any way at all.’

‘It was horrific, but you were involved.’ Kay sat down at right angles to me, looking at my face in profile, like a phrenologist trying to read my character in the angles of my forehead. ‘Last night in bed - you were so wrapped up in the violence of it, the horror of those deaths. You had the best sex in your life.’

‘Kay

‘Be honest, you did. How many times did you come? I stopped counting.’ Kay held my wrists. ‘You wanted to bugger me, and beat me. For God’s sake, I know when a man’s balls are alight. Yours were on fire. You were thinking of that bomb, suddenly going off and tearing everything apart. The meaningless violence - it excited you.’

‘Unconsciously? Maybe. Once we went to bed I didn’t talk about it.’

‘You didn’t need to. You got up to pee and looked in the bathroom mirror. You could see it in your eyes.’ Frustrated by herself, and her too tolerant responses, Kay switched off the TV set. She pointed accusingly at the blank screen. ‘Three people died. Think about it, David. Some poor warder giving his life for a Damien Hirst

The previous evening, still charged by the adrenalin rush of the BBC protest and the news of the Tate explosion, we had drunk far too much wine. The bomb, a Semtex device hidden inside a large art book, had detonated near the bookshop at 1.45 pm, killing the visitor who carried it, and blowing out a large section of the masonry above the entrance. A French tourist and a warder were also killed, and some twenty visitors injured. The police had cordoned off the surrounding area, and a forensic team was picking through the dust and rubble that covered the nearby grass and parked cars.

No one took responsibility, but the bomb gave a sharper edge to London’s grey and muffled air. Boredom and vola­tility marked the future. The device exploded on the same day as the Broadcasting House protest, and seemed to point towards Chelsea Marina and its middle-class rebellion, but Kay strongly condemned the Tate attack. Phone-in audiences who watched her TV interviews accepted this, if only because the bomb-maker’s sinister competence clearly belonged to a different realm. Chelsea Marina’s architects and solicitors, with their smoke bombs and thunderflashes, claimed that they had never tried to kill anyone. For the first time, Kay found herself regarded as a voice of moderation.

Perhaps to offset this novel image she told me as she undressed for bed that she had slept with all her lodgers, from eighteen-year-old film students to an alcoholic cartoonist ejected from his home near the marina by his exasperated wife. ‘All landladies over forty have sex with their lodgers. It’s the last surviving link with matriarchy

Taking a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, Kay set two glasses on the table. She sat down, hands pressed to her face, staring at me.

‘Kay? A little early?’

‘You’re going to need this. Me, too, as it happens. I’ll miss you.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Go back to Sally. Get in your car and drive straight to St John’s Wood. Dust off your briefcase and become a corporate psychologist again.’

‘Kay . . . ?’ Her calm tone surprised me. ‘Why, for heaven’s sake? Because of last night?’

‘Partly.’ She sipped her drink, sniffing her fingers as if the scent of my testicles still clung to her nails. ‘That’s not the only reason.’

‘I was over-excited. The BBC demo, being kicked around by the police. Then the Tate bomb. What if I’d been impo­tent?’

‘I wish you had been impotent. I’d have preferred that. Impotence would have been the normal reaction. Instead of which, you were like Columbus sighting the New World. That’s why you need to go back to Sally. You don’t belong here.’ She reached out and held my hand. ‘You’re a domestic man, David. You feel hundreds of small affections all the time. They haunt every friendly pillow and comfortable chair like household gods. Together they add up to a great love, big enough to ignore this silly man who’s hanging around your wife’s skirts.’

‘Domestic . . . ?’ I stared at my reflection trembling in the surface of my wine. ‘You make me sound like some sort of ruminant, grazing in a quiet field. I thought Chelsea Marina was trying to change all that.’

‘It is. But for us, violence is only the means to an end. For you, it is the end. It’s opened your eyes, and you think you can see a world that’s much more exciting. No more comfy cushions and friendly sofas where you and Sally watch the late-night news. It wasn’t the Tate bomb that got you going last night.’

‘Kay . . .’ I tried to take her wrists but she pulled away from me. That’s what I’ve been trying to say.’

‘It was the Heathrow bomb.’ Kay paused to watch me biting a childhood scar on my lip. ‘That’s been driving you all along. It’s why you came to Chelsea Marina.’

‘You brought me here. Remember - you found me outside the courthouse. I don’t think I’d ever been here before.’

‘But you were looking for somewhere like it. All those demos and marches. Sooner or later you would have found us. The Heathrow bomb still rang inside your head; you could hear it in St John’s Wood. A call sign signalling a new world.’

‘Kay . . . my wife was killed.’ I waved away my repeated slip of the tongue. ‘Laura. I wanted to find whoever planted the bomb.’

‘But why? You’re happily married, though you don’t seem to know it. Laura was years ago, and you didn’t even like her that much. Not the way you like Sally - or me, for that matter.’

‘Liking someone has nothing to do with our real feelings for them.’ I tried to smile at Kay. ‘Laura provoked the world. Almost everything she did, the smallest things she said, somehow changed me a little. Oddly enough, I could never work out how. She opened doors.’

‘And the Heathrow bomb was the biggest door of all. There wasn’t anything to see, but there was this huge white space. It meant everything and nothing. It gripped you, David. You’re like someone who’s out-stared the sun. Now you want to turn everything into Heathrow.’

‘Chelsea Marina? Video stores and plaster statues?’

‘You’re bored with all that.’ Kay moved aside the wine bottle and our glasses, clearing the table so that she could think. ‘You’re bored the way Richard Gould is bored. You’re looking for real violence, and sooner or later you’ll find it. That’s why you’ve got to get into your car and go back to Sally. You need those double yellow lines, those parking regulations and committee meetings to calm you down.’

‘Sally? I’d like to go back, but not yet.’ I touched my lips and pressed my fingers to Kay’s fierce forehead, grateful to her. ‘She has her own problems to work out. In some ways she’s as involved with the Heathrow bomb as I am. She needs to make sense of it.’

‘Sense? There is no sense. That’s the whole point.’

‘Difficult to put over, though. Only a psychopath can grasp it. Richard Gould thinks I’m wrong there.’

‘Richard?’ Roused, Kay looked up from her broken nails. ‘Keep away from him. He’s dangerous, David. You can stay here a little longer, but don’t get involved with him.’

‘Dangerous?’ I pointed to the elderly computer on her desk, partly buried in a pile of unread student scripts. ‘You used to run his website.’

That was in the early days. He’s moved on. Chelsea Marina failed him.’ She tried to take the cork out of the wine bottle, but gave up. ‘Richard Gould is waiting for you, David. I don’t know why, but he has been all along. When I rang him from the courthouse he asked me to bring you here . . .’

I thought about this as I changed into my tweed suit, which hung in the bedroom wardrobe among Kay’s camouflage jackets and spangly party dresses. Kay was the disappointed tan, who had once hung on every word of the charismatic ^^r Gould as he tub-thumped his way around Chelsea Marina, urging the residents to fight for their rights. But now Kay had become a political figure, arguing her case on discussion programmes, profiled in the Sunday broadsheets and backed by ambitious young lawyers with time on their hands. Gould was Peter Pan, mentally marooned on his asylum island, searching for his lost boys as reality moved towards him in the menacing form of a thousand starter homes.

As I set off for the Adler, for the first time in three weeks, Kay watched me from the door. She leaned on one foot like an usherette gazing at a film with an unconvincing plot-line.

‘David? That’s a very good impression of a man going to the office.’

‘I am. I need to cheer up my secretary, see one or two clients.’

‘And those bruises?’

‘I’m not going to undress. I’ll say I’ve been scuba-diving. I bumped into some strange fish.’

‘You did.’ She let me kiss her, and straightened my tie. ‘You look like an imposter.’

‘Kay, that’s the fate of anyone who’s too sincere. As long as I convince myself. When I can’t do that any longer I’ll know it’s time to go back to St John’s Wood.’

I stood in the sunlight, thinking of Sally, whom I had not seen since leaving her outside Henry Kendall’s house in Swiss Cottage. I missed her, but she had begun to slip into the past, part of a life that I wanted to reject, a castle of obligations held together by the ivy of middle-class insecurity.

 

The Kindness of Light

 

I waved to Kay, a husband leaving for work, watched by several puzzled residents, who stared at me as if I were an actor rehearsing an activity like maypole dancing. Self-conscious in my well-cut tweeds, I crossed the street to the Range Rover. When I opened the door I noticed that I had a passenger. A black-suited man in an unwashed white shirt lounged on the front leather seat, dozing in the morn­ing sun. He woke and greeted me with a generous smile, helping me behind the wheel. He seemed as neglected as ever, the bones of his face straining to expose themselves to the light.

‘Dr Gould?’

‘Climb aboard.’ He steered a sports bag onto the rear seat. ‘It’s good to see you, David. You don’t mind if you drive?’

‘It’s my car.’ I hesitated before inserting the ignition key, in case the safety lock had been wired up to some practical joke. ‘How did you get in?’

‘It was unlocked.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘No. The middle classes don’t steal cars. It’s a tribal thing, like not wearing a brown suit.’

‘I thought all that was going to change.’

‘Exactly. After the revolution the middle class will be shiftless, slatternly, light-fingered, and forget to wash.’ He peered into my eyes, pretending to see something. ‘Speaking as a doctor, I’d say you were in surprisingly good shape.’

‘Surprisingly? After Broadcasting House?’

‘No. After Kay Churchill. Sex with Kay is like a resuscitation that’s gone slightly wrong. You’re deeply grateful, but parts of you are never going to be the same again.’

Gould talked away to himself, enjoying his own patter. He was more relaxed than the haunted paediatrician in the asylum at Bedfont. In his shabby black suit he resembled an unsuccessful gangster let down by intellectual tastes. He had annoyed me by breaking into the car, but knew that I was glad to see him.

‘I’m heading for the office,’ I told him. ‘Where can I drop you? The West End?’

‘Please . . . Too many police wandering around in circles. We need a day in the country.’

‘Richard, I have to see my clients.’

‘Your father-in-law? See him tomorrow. The place we’re visiting is important, David. It may even shed light on the Heathrow bomb . . .’

We set off for Hammersmith, and took the flyover towards the brewery roundabout, passed Hogarth’s house and drove into the west along the M4. Gould lay back, gazing at the single-storey factories, the offices of video-duplicating firms and the lighting arrays of unknown stadiums. This was his real terrain, a zone without past or future, civic duties or responsi­bilities, its empty car parks roamed by off-duty air hostesses and betting-shop managers, a realm that never remembered itself. ‘Tell me, David - how did yesterday go? At the BBC?’ ‘We broke in, briefly. Everyone enjoyed themselves trying to get arrested. Moral indignation lit up the whole of Regent Street. A few people were cautioned.’

‘Too bad. A mass arrest would have put Chelsea Marina on the map.’

‘The police were called away. The Tate bomb stopped everything in its tracks.’

‘Grim. Truly grim. Vera and I were in Dunstable, checking out a gliding school.’ Gould covered his eyes with a shudder. ‘Looking back at the BBC demo, how do you feel about it?’

‘We all arrived on time, and knew what we were doing, parking was difficult. When Armageddon takes place, parking is going to be a major problem.’

‘But the action as a whole - what did you think of it?’

‘Broadcasting House? It was childish.’

‘Go on.’

‘And pointless. A lot of responsible people pretending to be hooligans. A student rag for the middle-aged. The police didn’t take it seriously for a second.’

‘They’ve seen too many sit-ins. They’re easily bored - we need to take that into account.’

‘Put on more lavish productions? Burning down the NFT was irresponsible. And criminal. People might have been killed. If I’d known I’d never have taken part.’

‘You weren’t fully briefed. Breaking the law is a huge challenge for professionals like you, David. That’s why the middle class will never be a true proletariat.’ Gould nodded to himself, and put his feet up on the dashboard. ‘As it happens, I agree with you.’

‘About the NFT?’

‘About everything. Fortnums, the BBC, Harrods, Legoland. Smoke bombs and pickets. A complete waste of time.’ He reached out to take the wheel. ‘Careful - this is not where I want to die.’

A horn sounded behind us, and headlamps flared in the rear-view mirror. Surprised by Gould’s comments, I had braked as we passed the Heathrow Hilton on the fast dual carriageway to Bedfont. I picked up speed again, and moved into the slow lane.

‘Richard? I thought you planned the whole campaign.’ ‘I did. When we started. Now Kay and her chums pick the targets.’

‘So the revolution has been postponed?’

‘It’s still on. Something significant is happening. You’ve sensed it, David. Chelsea Marina is only the beginning. An entire social class is peeling the velvet off the bars and tasting the steel. People are resigning from well-paid jobs, refus­ing to pay their taxes, taking their children out of private schools.’

‘Then what’s gone wrong?’

‘Nothing will happen.’ Gould examined his teeth in the sun-visor mirror, a grimace of infected gums that made him close his eyes. ‘The storm will die down, and everything will peter out in a drizzle of television shows and op-ed pieces. We’re too polite and too frivolous.’

‘And if we were serious?’

‘We’d kill a cabinet minister. Or sneak a bomb into the Commons chamber. Shoot a minor royal.’

‘A bomb?’ I kept my eyes on the traffic, conscious of the tail fins of parked airliners a few hundred yards inside the Heathrow perimeter. ‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘It’s a large step, but it might be necessary.’ Gould touched my hand with his bloodless fingers. ‘Would you do that, David?’

‘Kill a cabinet minister? I’m too polite.’

‘Too docile? Too well brought up?’

‘Absolutely. Anger was bred out of me long ago. I’m married to a rich man’s daughter who’s very sweet and very loving, and treats me like one of her father’s tenants. If she’s chasing her latest fox she gallops over my potato patch without a thought- And all I do is smile and settle her charge account at  Harvey Nicks.’

‘At least you know it.’

‘I couldn’t plant a bomb in the Commons or anywhere else. I’d be too nervous of hurting someone.’

‘You can get over that, David.’ Gould spoke offhandedly, like a doctor making light of a patient’s trivial worry. ‘If your motives are sound, anything is possible. You’re waiting for a greater challenge. You haven’t found it yet, but you will . . .’

Gould sat forward, hands smoothing his toneless face, trying to massage a little colour into his cheeks. We turned off” the airport road and entered East Bedfont, moving past a small business park towards the children’s hospice which had taken responsibility for the infants at Bedfont Hospital.

Gould guided me up a gravel drive that led to a three-storey Georgian house. There were carefully trimmed shrubs and a wide lawn unmarked by human feet. Brightly coloured swings and slides sat on the grass, but the children were absent. Leaves and rainwater lay on the tiny seats, and I guessed that this was a playground where no child had ever played.

Gould was undismayed. As we stopped by the rear entrance to the hospice he lifted the sports bag from the seat. He opened it on his lap, revealing a selection of plastic toys. Pleasantly surprised, he began to test them, and his face came alight when one of the dolls began to talk back to him in her recorded voice.

He stepped eagerly from the car, like a devoted godparent at a birthday party, and drew a white coat from the sports bag. He pulled it over his suit, hunted the pockets and found a name-tag, which he pinned to my lapel.

‘Try to look professional, David. It’s surprisingly easy to impersonate a senior consultant.’

‘”Dr Livingstone”?’

‘It always works. You’re a colleague of mine at Ashford Hospital. Now . . . you’ll like the children, David.’

‘Are we allowed in?’

‘Of course. These are my children. The world is meaningless to them, so they need me to show them they exist. In a way, they remind me of you

with the children. Sometimes I wonder what he’ll do when _the last of them goes

When I returned to the ward Gould was sitting beside the cot of a three-year-old boy with a shaved head. A wide scar ran across his scalp, crudely stitched together. His eyes had shrunk into his face, but were fixed unblinkingly on his visitor. Gould had lowered the side of the cot and sat forward, an arm under the wool blanket. He looked up at me, waiting for me to go, making it clear that I was intruding on a private moment.

 

 

We entered a rear hallway beside the kitchens, where lunch was being prepared for the small staff. Gould kissed the nursing sister in charge, a handsome black woman with a welcoming manner. Gould held her arm while they climbed the stairs, as if they were fellow conspirators.

The three sunny wards held thirty children, almost all bedridden, passive little parcels posted to death soon after they were born. But Gould greeted them like his own family. For the next hour I watched him play with the toddlers, making glove puppets out of old socks and Christmas tape, swooping around the ward with his arms raised, handing out toys from his holdall while wearing a Santa Claus jacket borrowed from the sister. She told me that he had brought Christmas forward for the children living out their last weeks.

I followed her from the ward when she left Gould to his high spirits. She accepted a cigarette and lit it for herself.

‘You do a remarkable job,’ I complimented her. ‘The children seem very happy.’

‘Thank you . . . Dr Livingstone? We do what we can. Many of the children will soon be leaving us.’

‘How often does Dr Gould come here?’

‘Every week. He never lets them down.’ Her smile drifted across her broad face like a sunny cloud. ‘He’s very involved with the children. Sometimes I wonder what he’ll do when the last of them goes.....

When I returned to the ward Gould was sitting beside the cot of a three year old boy with a shaved head. A wide scar ran across his scalp, crudely stitched together. His eyes had shrunk into his face, but were fixed unblinkingly on his visitor. Gould had lowered the side of the cot and sat forward, an arm under the wool blanket. He looked up at me, waiting for me to go, making it clear that I was intruding on a private moment.

 

Later, when Gould appeared in the car park, I said: ‘I’m impressed. No computer could have done all that. One or two almost recognized you.’

‘I hope so. David, they know me. I’m one of them, really.’

He tossed the empty sports bag and the white coat into the rear seat of the Range Rover, and then stared at the lawn with its silent slides and swings. He seemed almost boyish in his edgy way, younger but more intense than the amateur terrorist I had met in the gondola above the National Film Theatre.

Trying to reassure him, I said: ‘You help them, David. That’s worth something.’

‘No.’ Gould’s fleshless hands warmed themselves on the car roof. ‘They’re not really aware of me. I’m a vague retinal blur. Their brains have switched themselves off.’

‘They could hear you. Some of them.’

‘I doubt it. They’re gone, David. Nature committed a crime against them. Besides, certain things are meaningless. After all the theorizing, all the chains of cause and effect, there’s a hard core of pointlessness. That may be the only point we can find anywhere . . .’

I waited before starting the engine, while Gould stared at the windows of the wards on the first floor.

‘Richard, tell me - did you touch that little boy?’

Gould turned his head to look at me, clearly disappointed. ‘David? Would it matter?’

‘Not really. It’s arguable.’

‘Talk it over with Stephen Dexter.’

Impatient to leave, he reached across me and turned the ignition key.’

After an hour’s drive, we reached a small gliding school high in the Marlborough Downs. Gould had enrolled by e-mail for a course of lessons, but the school’s secretary seemed surprised by the undernourished and unkempt appearance of this odd young doctor with his white skin and shabby suit. I offered to vouch for Gould, but he sent me back to the car. As I knew he would, he soon convinced the secretary of his powerful need to fly.

I sat in the clubhouse and watched Gould inspect the tandem cockpit of a training glider. Through the open windows I listened to the flutter of air over the grass aerodrome, the fabric of parked gliders shivering in the cool wind. Gould nodded to the woman instructor, eyes on the sky as if already planning to stow himself away on the Space Shuttle.

‘Right,’ he told me when we walked back to the car. ‘Trial flight next week. You can come and watch.’

‘I might.’

‘It’s a challenge, David.’ He touched his ear. ‘I have a small problem with my balancing organ. Oddly enough, airline hijackers tend to suffer from it. One could see the hijack as an unconscious attempt to solve the problem.’

‘Far-fetched?’

‘Why?’ He looked back as a glider rose into the air, released the towing cable and soared away with the icy grace of a Condor. ‘Besides, it’s all part of the great search.’ ‘For what?’ ‘This and that. Some kind of tentative explanation. The mystery of space-time, the wisdom of trees, the kindness of light

‘Gliding? More than powered flight?’

‘Heaven forbid. The world turned into noise; life and death measured by legroom.’

‘And gliding?’

‘You’re above the sky.’

He lay back in the passenger seat as we headed for the motorway, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, unpacking himself for the sun.

I switched on the radio, flattering myself that the Broadcasting House invasion would lead the news. The bulletins were dominated by the bomb at Tate Modern, the most popular cultural centre in London, which performed the role once assigned to the Dome. No group admitted its part in the attack, and security had been tightened at the British Museum and the National Gallery.

‘From now on it’s going to be a lot harder,’ I commented. ‘The Science Museum, the British Library

‘David, they’re the wrong targets.’ Gould closed his eyes in the sun, lost in a reverie of wings and light. ‘They’re the targets people expect us to hit. They’re zebra-crossing protests writ large, educated mothers demonstrating for speed humps outside schools. It’s what the middle classes do.’

‘Anything wrong with that?’

‘They’re too predictable, too sensible. We need to pick targets that don’t make sense. If your target is the global money system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam shop next door. Deface the cenotaph, spray Agent Orange on Chelsea Physic Garden, burn down London Zoo. We’re in the business of creating unease.’

‘And a meaningless target would be the best of all?’

‘Well said. You understand me, David.’ Gould touched my hand, pleased to be driven by me. ‘Kay and her crowd, they’re still locked into honesty and good manners. All those architects and lawyers - the most radical thing they can imagine is burning down St Paul’s School for Girls. They don’t realize their lives are empty.’

‘Is that true? Most of them love their children.’

‘DNA. Biology’s first commandment. Take no more credit for  loving your children than birds take credit for nest-building.’

‘Civic pride?’

‘The gene pool’s neighbourhood-watch scheme. Look at you, David. Concerned, thoughtful, kindly, but nothing you do matters a damn.’

‘You’re right. Religious faith?’

‘Dying. Now and then it sits up and seizes the undertaker by the wrists. A pointless act has a special meaning of its own. Calmly carried out, untouched by any emotions, a meaningless act is an empty space larger than the universe around it.’

‘So we avoid motives?’

‘Absolutely. Kill a politician and you’re tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger. Oswald and Kennedy, Princip and the Archduke. But kill someone at random, fire a revolver into a McDonald’s - the universe stands back and holds its breath. Better still, kill fifteen people at random.’

‘Better?’

‘Figuratively, that is. I don’t want to kill anyone.’ Keen to reassure me, Gould rehearsed a disarming smile in the visor’s mirror, and then treated me to the full grimace. ‘You see all this, David. You’ve grasped the point. That’s why I trust

People are nervous of violence. Excited, of course, but f_t unsettles them.’

‘Not you?’

‘You’ve noticed that? I suppose it’s true. Violence is like a hush fire, it destroys a lot of trees but refreshes the forest, clears away the stifling undergrowth, so more trees spring up. We’ll have to think of the right targets. They need to be completely pointless

Keats House, the Bank of England, Heathrow?’

‘No, not Heathrow.’ Distracted by a roadside sign, Gould reached over and held the wheel. ‘Slow down, David - there’s something I want to see . . .’

We were passing through a pleasant country town a few miles from our junction with the motorway. The traffic was surprisingly heavy, tourists peering through their car windows. On the outskirts of the town there were bosky lanes and high sycamores, and Gould gazed at the distant boughs like a latter-day Samuel Palmer, searching the window of the sky for a glimpse of the light beyond. His pale hand traced the overlay of branches, as if working out a route through a maze.

But the town itself was nondescript, cottages with simulated thatch roofs converted into dry-cleaners and video shops, a half-timbered Chinese takeaway, souvenir stores and coffee bars. There was a forest of signs helpfully guiding the visiting motorist to the car parks, though it was unclear why the town should have so many visitors or why they would want to park there.

Yet Gould seemed satisfied, smiling over his shoulder as we approached the motorway.

A charming place, David. Don’t you think?’

‘Well . . . Watford with fields?’

‘No. There’s something very special. You saw all those tourists. It’s almost a place of worship.’

‘Hard to believe.’ I followed the slip road and joined the motorway traffic. ‘Where is it, exactly?’

‘It’s off the A4, on the way to Newbury.’ Gould lay back, inhaling deeply, as if he had held his breath for minutes. ‘Hungerford . . . it’s where I’d like to end my days.’

 

 

Hungerford? The name flitted around my mind like a trapped moth as we drove back to London. I was surprised by Gould’s response to the town, and I suspected that our visit to the gliding school had been an excuse to drive through its streets. If he became a glider pilot he would be able to fly over its car parks and souvenir shops, satisfying some deep dream of rural peace.

Childhood arsonists carried their apocalyptic fantasies into adult life. Fire and flight seemed to fill Gould’s mind. I watched him dozing beside me, only stirring when we approached Heathrow. The airport had as great a hold on his imagina­tion as it did on mine, binding us together in an unusual partnership. I had wasted half a day driving him into the country, hoping that he would reveal more of himself. But in fact he had ensnared me in his bizarre world, drawing me into his fragmentary personality, almost offering him­self as a kit from which I could construct a vital figure missing from my life. I admired him for his kindness to the dying children, and he had skillfully played on this, and on my own weaknesses. I was drawn to him and the way that he had sacrificed everything to his quest for truth, an exhausted captain still ready to feed his own masts into the furnace.

All these thoughts left my mind when I dropped Gould off at Chelsea Marina and went on to the Institute. Buying an evening paper that headlined the Tate bomb attack, I read the of the three victims, a warder, a French tourist, and a Chinese woman living in west London. Joan Chang, Reverend Dexter’s friend in the Puffa jacket . . .

 

A Visit to the Bunker

 

The thames shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it. Below Westminster the Thames became a bruiser of a river, like the people of the estuary, unimpressed by the money terraces of the City of London.

The dealing rooms were a con, and only the river was real. The money was all on tick, a stream of coded voltages sluicing through concealed conduits under the foreign exchange floors. Facing them across the river were two more fakes, the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe, and an old power station made over into a middle-class disco, Tate Modern. Walking past the entrance to the Globe, I listened for an echo of the bomb that had killed Joan Chang, the only meaningful event in the entire landscape.

I had parked in Sumner Street, a hundred yards from the rear of the Tate. Police vehicles surrounded the gallery, and crime-scene tapes closed the entrance to the public. I took the long route round, down Park Street to the Globe, then turned onto the embankment. I strolled through the tourists drawn across the Millennium Bridge, eager to see the damage to this bombastic structure, more bunker than museum, of which Albert Speer would have thoroughly approved.

Like all our friends, Sally and I saw every exhibition held in

massive vault. The building triumphed by a visual sleight _Of hand, a psychological trick that any fascist dictator would understand. Externally, its deco symmetry made it seem smaller than it was, and the vast dimensions of the turbine hall cowed both eye and brain. The entrance ramp was wide enough to take a parade of tanks. Power, of kilowatt hours or messianic gospel, glowered from the remote walls. This was the art show as Fuehrer spectacle, an early sign, perhaps, that the educated middle classes were turning towards fascism.

I walked through the tourists to the main entrance, and stared across the grass at the bomb damage. The device had detonated at 1.45 pm, as I was being led from Broadcasting House by Sergeant Angela. Witnesses stated that a young Chinese woman was running around the bookshop. Evidently distraught, she seized a large art book from the shelves and ran into the turbine hall. The staff chased her, but gave up when they realized that she was warning people away. At the top of the entrance ramp the book exploded in her hands, its force amplified by the sloping floor. Glass and masonry lay across the grass, and covered the cars parked in Holland Street.

I thought of Joan Chang, sitting cheerfully behind Stephen Dexter on the Harley-Davidson. I guessed that after viewing an exhibition she had passed a few minutes in the bookshop, and by tragic mischance saw the terrorist plant his bomb, a lethal device intended to inflict the largest number of casualties. The police had identified the injured victims, but Stephen Dexter was not among them. The clergyman had vanished from Chelsea Marina, leaving his Harley sitting in the rain outside his chapel. Kay had telephoned a friend in the film unit at the Tate, but no one remembered seeing Dexter in the bookshop or galleries. Weeping over the Chinese girl’s death, Kay assumed that he had fled London and gone to ground at some religious retreat.

Remembering the devastation at Heathrow, I knew that Dexter and I now had something in common. A terrorist bomb not only killed its victims, but forced a violent rift through time and space, and ruptured the logic that held the world together. For a few hours gravity turned traitor, overruling Newton’s laws of motion, reversing rivers and toppling skyscrapers, stirring fears long dormant in our minds. The horror challenged the soft complacencies of day-to-day life, like a stranger stepping out of a crowd and punching one’s face. Sitting on the ground with a bloodied mouth, one realized that the world was more dangerous but, conceivably, more meaningful. As Richard Gould had said, an inexplicable act of violence had a fierce authenticity that no reasoned behaviour could match.

A rain squall, thrown up by the strutting river, lashed the face of the gallery. The crowd scattered to the shelter of the side streets, leaving the police forensic team to work on, sifting the debris and decanting the broken glass into plastic bags.

A constable shouted to two German women who crossed the crime-scene tapes and took refuge behind a police van. They moved away, buttoning their raincoats as they hurried past a small car covered with dust and fragments of masonry.

I followed them, but stopped beside the car, a Volkswagen Beetle. Under the coating of dirt and rubble I could see the white paintwork of a car identical to Joan Chang’s. I watched the constable guarding the forecourt, stamping his feet and talking to the forensic officers sheltering in the entrance.

Already I had decided to make a forensic examination of my own.

I returned from Sumner Street ten minutes later, wearing the white coat that Gould had bundled into the back of the Range Rover when we left the children’s hospice. The constable was busy with the tourists brought out by the fitful sun and the forensic team pegging out their stakes and barely glanced at me, assuming that I was a Home office investigator, perhaps a pathologist searching for human remains.

I approached the Beetle and gripped the door handle, ready to break the driver’s window with my elbow. As I raised my I felt the mechanism open smoothly under my thumb. she stepped from the car, Joan had forgotten to lock it, perhaps distracted by a passing vehicle or some acquaintance she had agreed to meet.

I eased back the door and slipped into the seat, recognizing the pale scents of jasmine and orris oil. The windows were thick with a bricky dust, streams of ochre mud that hid me from the police twenty yards away. I turned and scanned the rear seat, a clutter of tissues, discarded perfume samplers and a tourist guide to China, pages turned back to a five-day boat trip through the Yangtse gorges.

Stretching my legs, I pressed the brake and clutch pedals, barely able to reach them. The seat had been racked back, giving room to longer legs than Joan Chang’s. Driving the Beetle, the petite Chinese sat with her chin touching the steering wheel.

Someone else, almost certainly Stephen Dexter, had driven Joan to the Tate. Uncomfortable with my legs extended, I felt below the seat and searched for the release handle.

There was a faint bleep of electronic protest. I was hold­ing a mobile phone. Waiting for it to ring, I placed it against my ear, almost expecting Joan’s piping voice. The phone was silent, and had been lying under the driving seat for the past two days, unnoticed by the police inves­tigators.

Through the smeary windscreen I watched the forensic team at work, dividing the forecourt into narrow allotments, ^a laborious anatomy that might yield a few pieces of bomb mechanism. I rang the last number dialled, and listened to the ringing tone.

‘You are calling Tate Modern.’ A recorded voice spoke. ‘The gallery is closed until further notice. You are calling ...”

I switched off the phone, assuming that Joan had rung the Tate before setting out, perhaps to book a restaurant table. As I sat in her car, with her mobile in my hand, I felt that I was reliving the last moments in the life of this pleasant young woman.

A hand fumbled at the driver’s door, scraping the wet dust over the window. I had locked the door from the inside, pushing down the safety toggle. Fingers scrabbled at the glass, like the paws of a huge dog. I could see the blurred face and shoulders of a man in a black raincoat, perhaps one of the detectives working on the case.

I wound down the window. A faint rain was falling again, but I recognized the stressed and dishevelled face of the man who looked down at me.

He reached out and pulled me against the door pillar. ‘Markham? What are you doing here?’

‘Stephen ... let me help you.’ I pulled his hand from my shoulder, but hesitated before opening the door. Sweat sprang from the clergyman’s forehead, beading around his enlarged eyes. He had lost his dog collar, torn away in his panic, and his unshaven cheeks were flushed and swollen, as if he had been weeping as he ran all night through profane and empty streets. When he gazed into the car, aware of its impossible void, I thought of him running along the river through the nights to come, forever following its journey into the dark.

He peered at my face, confused by my white coat, and showed me a set of ignition keys, clearly hoping that he had approached the wrong vehicle. ‘Markham . . . ? I’m looking for Joan. Her car’s here . . .’

pushing back the door, I stepped into the rain. I placed my hands on Dexter’s shoulders, trying to calm him.

‘Stephen . . . I’m sorry about Joan. It’s horrific for you.’

‘For her.’ Dexter forced me aside, and stared at the rubble-strewn entrance to the Tate. ‘I wanted to call her.’

‘What happened? Stephen?’

‘Everything. Everything happened.’ He stared into my face, fully recognizing me for the first time, and stepped back, flinching from me as if I were responsible for Joan Chang’s death. In a rush of words, a blurted warning of approaching danger, he shouted: ‘Go back to your wife. Get away from Richard Gould. Run, David

He turned from me, one hand still gripping my shoulder, and pointed across the roof of the car. Thirty feet from us, a young woman with rain-soaked hair was standing on the embankment. Her patent leather coat streamed with moisture, as if she had just emerged from the river, or stepped from a dark barge that plied the deeper tides below its surface. She watched the clergyman with the punitive gaze of a wronged parishioner set on revenge.

Dexter’s grip tightened on my arm. He was clearly cowed by the young woman, who seemed to have punished him once and would soon punish him again. Staring at the inflamed scar on his forehead, I thought of the Philippine guerrillas whose whips had broken his spirit.

‘You two . . . off!’ A policeman shouted to us from the Tate entrance, waving us away from the impounded cars. I saluted him, and turned to steer Dexter across the crime-scene tape. But the clergyman had left me. Head down, hands sunk in the pockets of his raincoat, he moved in a half-run down Sumner Street and set off for Blackfriars Bridge.

The bare-headed young woman was hurrying towards the Globe theatre. Seeing her from behind, I recognized her quirky walk, part fussy schoolgirl, part bored tour guide. She was smart but drenched, and I guessed that she had been walking the streets around the Tate for hours, waiting for Stephen Dexter to appear.

A tugboat’s siren vented itself across the river, emptying its deep lungs in a threatening blare that rebounded from the facades of the office buildings near St Paul’s. Startled, Vera Blackburn tripped on her high heels. I caught her before she could fall, and led her into the entrance of the Globe, joining a small party of American tourists sheltering from the rain.

Vera made no attempt to resist. She leaned against me, smiling sweetly, self-immersed and emotionally dead, a vicious and lethal child. Watching her size me up, I saw again the chemistry prodigy in the suburban back bedroom who had graduated into a Defence Ministry pin-up, the dominatrix of every deskbound warrior’s dream.

‘Vera? You’re out of breath.’

‘”Dr Livingstone”? You’re quite convincing. Who would dare presume?’

‘One of Richard Gould’s disguises. He left it in my car.’

‘Get rid of it.’ Her fingers opened the top button. ‘People will think I’ve escaped from a mental home.’

‘You have.’

‘Really?’ Her hand lingered over the buttons. ‘Is that a compliment, David?’

‘In your case, yes. Tragic about Joan Chang.’

‘Appalling. She was so sweet. I had to come here.’

‘You saw Stephen Dexter?’

Her face remained composed, but a raindrop winked from her left eyebrow, signalling a covert message. She was more unsettled than she realized, and a tic jumped across her upper lip. For once the real world had made a bigger bang.

‘Stephen? I’m not sure. Was he by the car?’

‘You’re sure.’ The damp tourists had entered the Globe and were gazing at the rain-swept gallery. I raised my voice. ‘You were following him. Why?’

‘We’re worried about Stephen.’ She took the white coat from me and folded it neatly, then dropped it into a litter bin. ‘He’s very upset.’

‘That isn’t the reason.’

‘What else?’

‘I’m trying to guess. Did he know about the bomb?’

‘How could he?’ She touched my chin. ‘He’d never have let Joan get near it. People saw her running with the thing.’

‘It’s amazing how she found it. All those thousands of books, and she managed to pick one with two pounds of Semtex between the covers.’ I watched the rain retreat across the river. ‘I think Stephen was sitting in the car.’

‘When the bomb went off? Why?’

‘The seat was racked back. Joan’s feet wouldn’t have reached the pedals. Almost certainly he drove her to the Tate.’

‘Go on. You think Stephen was the bomber?’

‘It’s just possible. They may have been working together. She took the bomb into the bookshop and left it on a shelf. For some reason she had a change of mind.’

Vera opened her compact and scanned her make-up. She glanced at me, unsure whether I was being naive or trying to lead her on.

‘A change of mind? Hard to believe. Anyway, why would Stephen want to bomb the Tate?’

‘It’s a prime middle-class target. He’s a priest who’s lost his faith.’

‘And detonating a bomb . . . ?’

‘- . . restores his faith. In some lonely, deranged way.’

‘How sad.’ Vera lowered her bony forehead as two police­men walked along the embankment. ‘At least you don’t think

was behind it.’

‘I’m not sure.’ I held Vera’s arm, and felt the pulse beating above her elbow. ‘Some very dangerous people are being : tempted into the violence game. You might have made the bomb, but you’d never have handed it over to a pair of amateurs. You’re too professional.’

‘That Ministry of Defence training. I knew it would come in useful.’ Pleased, she brightened up, smiling as the sun wavered behind the clouds. ‘Still, poor Stephen.’

‘Why did you want to meet him here? He’s frightened of you.’

‘He’s in a dangerous state of mind. Think how guilty he feels, even if he didn’t plant the bomb. He might talk to the police and make something up.’

‘That could be dangerous for you?’

‘And for you, David.’ She brushed a few fragments of mortar from my jacket. ‘And for all of us at Chelsea Marina . . .’

I watched her walk away, chin raised as she passed the police. I admired her chilly self-control. As Richard Gould had said, the senselessness of the Tate attack separated it from other terrorist outrages. Not one of the works of art in the gallery remotely matched the limitless potency of a terrorist bomb. I tried to imagine how Vera Blackburn made love, but no lover would ever equal the allure and sensual potency of primed Semtex.

I returned to Sumner Street and sat behind the wheel of the Range Rover, watching the parking ticket flap against the windscreen. I felt closer to the truth about the Heathrow bomb than I had been since arriving at Chelsea Marina. Kay was glad that I shared her bed, but was still urging me to go back to Sally and St John’s Wood. But I needed to spend more time with Kay and Vera, and above all with Richard Gould. A strange logic had emerged from the borders of Chelsea and Fulham and would spread far beyond them, even perhaps to the carousel at Terminal 2 where Laura had met her death

I picked up the car-phone and dialled the number of the Adler  Institute. When the receptionist replied I asked for professor Arnold.

The Last Stranger

 

‘Henry is coming over,’ Sally told me. ‘That won’t worry you, David?’

She sat in my armchair, legs stretched out confidently, sticks long returned to the umbrella stand in the hall. She was at her prettiest in this pleasant room, smiling at me with unfeigned pleasure, as if I were a favourite brother home on leave from the front. Being away from me, I had to admit, had markedly improved her health.

‘Henry? No problem at all. I talked to him yesterday.’ ‘He told me. You rang from somewhere near the Tate. Horrible, wasn’t it?’

‘Grim. Very nasty. Impossible to grasp.’ ‘The Chinese girl - did you know her?’ ‘Joan Chang. She was a charmer. A kind of club-class hippy - motorbike, platinum Amex, clergyman boyfriend.’ ‘I wish I’d met her. The bomb wasn’t part of. . . ?’ ‘The campaign at Chelsea Marina? No. Violence isn’t our thing. We’re much too bourgeois.’

‘So were Lenin and Che and Chou En-lai, according to Henry.’ Sally sat forward, taking my hands across the coffee table. ‘You’re different, David. You look slightly windblown. I’m not sure it suits you. When are you coming home?’

‘Soon.’ Her fingers were warm, and I realized that everyone at Chelsea Marina had cold hands. ‘I need to keep an eye on things. There’s a lot happening.’

‘I know. It sounds like a playgroup that’s out of control.

accountants and solicitors giving up their jobs. In places like Guildford, for God’s sake. That really means some­thing-‘

‘It does. Revolution is hammering on the door.’

‘Not in St John’s Wood. Or not yet.’ Sally shuddered, eyes drifting to the safety locks on the windows. ‘Henry says you might resign from the Institute.’

‘I need to take six months’ leave. Arnold is unhappy with that — I’d have to give up your father’s consultancy. Don’t worry, he’ll double your allowance.’

Sally touched her fingertips, working through more than the arithmetic involved. ‘We’ll get by. At least you’ll feel honest for once. That’s been the problem, hasn’t it? Daddy pays for everything.’

‘”Daddy pays . . .’” I remembered hearing the phrase at University College, and the middle-class freshers with their expensive luggage, helped out of Daddy’s Jaguar. ‘Anyway, it’s time I stood on my own feet.’

‘Nobody does, David. That’s something you’ve never understood. Henry says -‘

‘Sally, please . . . it’s bad enough that he sleeps with my wife. I don’t want to hear his latest opinions on everything. How is he?’

‘Worried about you. They all want you back at the Institute. They know this “revolution” will peter out and a lot of sensible people will have wrecked their lives.’

‘That could happen. But not yet. I’m still working on the Heathrow bomb. The clues are starting to fall into place.’

‘Laura . . . you’ve really done your best for her.’ Sally waited as  I tried to avoid her eyes. ‘I never actually met her. Henry told me a lot of things I didn’t know.’ About Laura? Gallant of him.’

‘And about you. Husbands are the last strangers. Are you ready to visit your mother? The manager at the home called I several times. She’s started talking about you.’

‘Has she? Too bad. It’s not my favourite topic.’ I stood up I and walked around the settee, trying to work out the altered | positions of the furniture. Everything was in the same place, but the perspectives had changed. I had tasted freedom, and grasped how unreal life in St John’s Wood had become, how absurdly genteel. To Sally, I said: ‘That sounds callous, but I’ve given up a lot of heavy baggage - guilt, bogus affection, the Adler...’

‘Your wife?’

‘I hope not.’ I stopped at the mantelpiece and smiled at Sally through the mirror, warming to her Alice-like reflection in my old husbandly way. ‘Wait for me, Sally.’

“I’ll try.’

A car was being parked outside the house, edging into the space behind the Range Rover, shunting and reversing as the driver made a point of not touching my rear bumper. Henry Kendall stepped out, dapper but uncertain, like an estate agent in a more exclusive neighbourhood, where different social rules applied.

After speaking to Professor Arnold I had called Henry from outside the Tate, and asked him if he still had his Home Office contacts. I needed to know if the bomber had made a warning call to the Tate in the minutes before the explosion. Glad to get off the phone, Henry promised to pursue his sources.

Now we faced each other across a domestic hearth, try­ing to decide which of us would first invite the other to sit down. Henry was eager to yield to me, and was sur­prised that I seemed keen for him to assume the duties of man of the house. Already he looked at me with the sudden panic of a lover who realizes that the cuckolded husband is only too happy to leave him in full possession of his wife.

When all this was settled, Sally left us and we sat over Scotch and sodas.

‘You’ve changed, David. Sally noticed it.’

‘Good. How exactly?’

‘You look stronger. Not so evasive, or calculating. The revolution’s done you good.’

I raised my glass to this, deciding that I had never fully grasped how boring Henry was, and how much I resented the years I had spent in his company. ‘You’re right, I was a mess. As it happens, I’m not playing any real part.’

‘You were at Broadcasting House.’

‘Someone told you about that?’

‘The Home Office take a keen interest in everything.’

‘They must be worried.’

‘They are. Key people in Whitehall resigning their jobs? Seniority, pension rights, gongs and knighthoods, all thrown out of the window. It undermines morale, breaks the chains of envy and rivalry that hold everything together.’

‘That’s the idea. You can thank the revolution.’

‘Rather silly, though?’ Henry treated me to an understanding smile. ‘Boycotting Peter Jones, letting off smoke bombs in school outfitters

‘Middle-class pique. We sense we’re being exploited. All those liberal values and humane concern for the less fortunate. Our role is to keep the lower orders in check, but in fact we’re policing ourselves.’

Henry watched me tolerantly over his whisky. ‘Do you believe all that?’

‘Who knows? The important thing is that the people at Chelsea Marina believe it. It’s amateurish and childish, but the middle classes are amateurish, and they’ve never left their childhoods behind. But there’s something much more important going on. Something that ought to worry your friends at the Home Office.’

‘And that is?’

‘Decent and level-headed people are hungry for violence.’

‘Grim, if true.’ Henry put down his whisky. ‘Directed at what?’

‘It doesn’t matter. In fact, the ideal act of violence isn’t directed at anything.’

‘Pure nihilism?’

‘The exact opposite. This is where we’ve all been wrong - you, me, the Adler, liberal opinion. It isn’t a search for nothingness. It’s a search for meaning. Blow up the Stock Exchange and you’re rejecting global capitalism. Bomb the Ministry of Defence and you’re protesting against war. You don’t even need to hand out the leaflets. But a truly pointless act of violence, shooting at random into a crowd, grips our attention for months. The absence of rational motive carries a significance of its own.’

Henry listened to Sally’s footsteps in the bedroom above our heads. ‘As it happens, people at the Home Office are thinking along similar lines. The revolt at Chelsea Marina is a sideshow. The really dangerous people are waiting in another corner of the park. Take this Tate bomb, clearly the work of hard-core terrorists - renegade IRA, some demented Muslim group. Be careful, David ……’

 

When I let myself out, half an hour later, I could hear Sally’s bath running. I thought of her emerging from a cloud of talc and scent, ready for Henry and a long and pleasant afternoon.

‘Henry, say goodbye to Sally for me.’

‘She misses you, David.’

‘I know.’

We both hope you’ll come back.’

‘I will- I’m involved in something that needs to be worked out. All these duties, they’re like bricks in a rucksack.’

‘There are cathedrals built of bricks.’ Henry straightened his tie as two of my neighbours walked by. Forever doomed to feel the interloper, he could still not accept that he had pulled off his extramarital coup. He leaned into the driver’s window when I sat behind the wheel. ‘You were right, by the way. There was a warning call.’

‘At the Tate?’

‘A few minutes before the bomb went off. Someone rang the main desk at the gallery.’

‘A few minutes?’ I thought of Joan Chang, running fran­tically around the bookshop. ‘Why didn’t they clear the building?’

‘The caller said the bomb was under the Millennium Bridge. The staff assumed it was a hoax, some kind of joke about the famous wobble.’

‘Who made the call? They must have traced the damn thing.’

‘Naturally, but keep it to yourself. It came from a mobile phone, stolen about a week ago from Lambeth Palace. A Church of England task force was meeting there, looking into social unrest among the middle classes. The phone was stolen from the Bishop of Chichester . . .’

 

I started the engine, and watched Henry walk back to the house. Sally was at the window, towel wrapped under her arms. She waved to me, like a child watching a parent leave on a long trip, wistful despite her hopes of seeing me again, realizing that a small revolution, however misguided and amateurish, was at last touching her.

She had invited me to the house, but made no serious attempt to win me back, leaving me alone to talk to Henry. As she stood by the window I sensed that she was glad to remind herself of my inexplicable behaviour, which went against everything in my nature. That someone as straight and stuffy as her husband could act out of character helped to explain the cruel and meaningless event that had taken place in a Lisbon street. Anger and resentment were fading, pushed into the umbrella stand with her walking sticks. In a sense I was helping to free Sally from herself. The world had provoked her, and irrational acts were the only way to defuse its threat.

 

 

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