Claire spent most of the next two days on the beach, in the water, or sitting on one of the sun terraces reading. There were no books in the house, apart from a locked and alarmed glass-fronted display cabinet containing modern first editions (Thornton Wilder, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck) and some eighteenth- and seventeenth-century volumes, none of which looked as though they were intended to be read; however, she had brought plenty of her own. She saw little of Patrick and Rowena, who would disappear to go diving and snorkelling for hours at a time. They met only at mealtimes, which proved to be fraught with problems of etiquette. The first night, their dinner was prepared for them by the resident cook. They felt so uncomfortable with this arrangement, and the staff who served the food appeared, in turn, to feel so uncomfortable about the guests’ attempts to be friendly with them, engage them in conversation and generally treat them as living, breathing human beings rather than items of household furniture, that Claire decided she couldn’t go through with it again. For the next two nights, they ate out at restaurants in Bodden Town. Even then, George insisted on driving them to their destination, and waiting for them in the car outside until they were ready to go home. Claire did her best to draw Rowena out on these occasions, but she found her cold and remote, almost to the point of rudeness. She and Patrick seemed to have almost nothing in common; there seemed to be no rapport between them except for the obvious physical one. Claire gave the relationship until Christmas at the latest.
By the end of the third day, Michael had still not appeared; and it was already time for Patrick and Rowena to fly home. They were both in their gap years between school and university, and in two days’ time Rowena would be starting a temporary job at her uncle’s architectural practice in Edinburgh. Patrick, chivalrously, had offered to drive her all the way there. Claire waved goodbye as George swept them off to the airport, and then spent thirty-six even more bizarre hours alone in the house, with no one for company but half a dozen servants who appeared to be under written instructions not to talk to her, although they were endlessly hovering on the edges of whichever room she happened to be in, ready to refill her glass or clear away her plate as soon as it was done with.
She began to feel more than slightly strange. She could not reconcile her sense of being entirely alone with the knowledge that she was always under surveillance (whether by the wordlessly vigilant servants, or the security cameras which switched themselves on with a click and a whirr and began tracking her progress as soon as she entered a room). She did not know what she was doing here. She felt more like a prisoner than a guest. Her sense of identity was starting to fracture. She had begun to feel like the Catherine Deneuve character in a big-budget, full-colour Hollywood remake of Repulsion.
Michael’s long-delayed arrival made a certain amount of difference, but not as much as she had been expecting. They went diving together, they swam together, they ate meals together in the evening by the side of the swimming pool. One night he took her out in a speedboat and they had dinner with a friend who had a yacht moored a few miles along the coast towards Long Coconut Point. They made love on the beach, in the bedroom and even (once, rather precariously and disastrously) on the rowing machine in the gymnasium. The only thing they didn’t do, in fact, was talk. All of Claire’s resolutions about confronting Michael with her growing despair about the future of the relationship were thwarted by his constant air of preoccupation, his magnificent unreachability. He could be talkative when he wanted to be: they had their usual, half-serious, half-facetious political arguments; he would discuss current affairs, the state of the economy, the looming war with Iraq (which he opposed) and even, occasionally, more trivial things like Caribbean cuisine or the education of his children (who were all at boarding school). But every attempt to shift the conversations on to an emotional level met with blankness.
Claire began to ask herself, again, why she had come to this place. In the main reception room, she watched Michael pressing a button on the remote control so that a widescreen plasma TV rose up from beneath the floor like something on the console of the Starship Enterprise, watched him flicking between Bloomberg and the other satellite business channels, and kept asking herself, over and over: what am I doing here?
It was not that he spent the whole time working. Whatever crisis had delayed him back in London seemed to have been successfully resolved. He only spent an hour or two every day in the study. When a call came through on his mobile, he would check the number first, and only answer about one in four. Sometimes, if Claire asked him what the call had been about, he would even try to tell her. She did not really understand business jargon, and she always got the sense that he was being fairly selective with the information he chose to share with her, but all the same, she felt that he was making a decent effort to help her understand what was on his mind. She did not feel that she was being deceived, or kept out of a loop. She knew that the company was in the process of disposing of some of its surplus land and plant: there were repeated references to premises near Solihull, just outside Birmingham. The deal seemed to be in its final stages. It appeared to be going well, and that, for Claire, was the important thing. It meant that Michael was in a good mood.
At about ten o’clock one morning, she came out of the shower and saw that Michael was sitting on the balcony outside their bedroom, overlooking the beach. Breakfast had been served and he was talking on his mobile while drinking coffee and picking with his fork at some eggs benedict. Still wearing only her dressing gown, she sat down at the table opposite him, poured some coffee into a bone china cup, and carried on reading the novel she had started the night before. Michael glanced at her, telling her with his eyes that he would not be on the phone for much longer. She lost interest in the novel after a sentence or two, and sat admiring the view instead, sundrunk and mesmerized by the subtle movements of palm trees against an azure sky as the morning breeze rustled their leaves.
“So that’s definite, is it?” Michael was saying. “One hundred and forty-six is the final figure?” There were some words of confirmation at the other end of the line, and he nodded approvingly, looking very pleased with this development. “Excellent. OK. Well I think we can release that in a few weeks and there won’t be much fall-out. No—after Christmas, definitely. Just after.”
Shortly afterwards he clicked the phone shut, smiled at Claire, and leaned across the table to kiss her good morning.
“Good news?” she asked, filling his coffee cup.
“Very satisfactory.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but it seemed he had no intention of doing so. Claire was annoyed by this, for some reason, but managed to keep her tone of voice airy as she asked: “So—a hundred and forty-six, eh? Is that million?”
He looked up from his breakfast plate. “Mm?”
“Is that how much you’re going to get—for selling the Solihull buildings?”
“Oh.” He laughed, dismissively. “No. Not at all.”
“Don’t tell me, then: it’s going to be your Christmas bonus this year?”
He laughed again. It was perfectly relaxed laughter. Whatever it was that he had just confirmed over the telephone, it was nothing that caused him any embarrassment, or he felt obliged to conceal from her.
“Hardly,” he said. “Sorry not to tell you anything more dramatic, but it’s just plain one hundred and forty-six, I’m afraid. We’re closing down the R&D department completely. Not paying its way. We’re shutting it down and selling off the plant. That means we’ll be making a hundred and forty-six people redundant.”
“Oh,” said Claire. “I see. And why’s that good news?”
“Because I was afraid it was going to have to be more than that. Anything over two hundred would have been a PR disaster. But a hundred and forty-six is nothing, really, is it? People are barely going to notice.”
“No,” said Claire, thoughtfully. “I suppose they won’t.”
Not long afterwards, Michael disappeared inside to have a shower, leav
ing Claire to ponder these words. She made no attempt, this time, to pick up her novel again. Instead, she could feel a kind of numbness spreading over her. It was not new, this feeling: she realized now that it had been growing inside her all week. And what she had just heard from Michael made no difference, in a way: it was not as if this was a turning point, or a moment of revelation. Perhaps the numbness was now, at least, beginning to assume a shape; or perhaps it had become so pressing that she knew she could not ignore it for much longer. Whatever the reason, all at once she felt deeply, oppressively unhappy to be sitting there on this sundrenched balcony, the sparkle of ocean laid out before her, thousands of miles from the world she knew, the world she understood. She felt a pang of almost unbearable longing for her little terraced house on the slopes of Great Malvern.
A few minutes later she went inside, changed into her bathing costume and left the house without saying anything to Michael. She walked to the beach.
She was not outraged by anything she had heard; she was not naive; she knew what it was that Michael did for a living. People lost their jobs all the time; and this inevitably meant that somebody, somewhere, had to make the decisions which led to those job losses. It just so happened that this particular decision had been made this morning, just across the table from her, on a Caribbean island, by a man she had chosen to become intimate with, on a balcony outside the bedroom she was sharing with him. What difference did that make? It shouldn’t make any difference at all. And he was right. One hundred and forty-six wasn’t such a big number. You regularly saw stories in the newspapers about thousands of people losing their jobs.
So why did she suddenly feel sick to the stomach?
Perhaps that was precisely the problem. Five thousand would have been an unimaginable figure. It would have seemed meaningless. Whereas, there was something obscenely specific and graspable about the number one hundred and forty-six. As Claire dropped her towel on the scorching white sand at the water’s edge, and waded out to the point where the waves would break against her, she thought about the one hundred and forty-six families who would be receiving that news shortly after Christmas. Doubtless Michael was right to have done what he did. And it was thoughtful of him, too, to wait until Christmas was over before telling them. He wasn’t a bad man, she could see that: but she couldn’t love him, either. She couldn’t love the man who made those decisions and took satisfaction in them. Perhaps somebody else could. She hoped so.
The warm water foamed around her thighs, her waist. She took a breath and dived into a breaking wave. The shock of it stung her face, set her ears ringing, and when she surfaced a few seconds later the sunshine all around her was almost too much to bear. She shielded her eyes against the dazzle and glimmer, then dived again, repeatedly, hurling herself into each oncoming wave, and every time she dived, it was like a slap in the face, a wake-up call from an unforgiving but well-intentioned friend.
Soon afterwards, she walked back to the house. Thankfully, Michael was nowhere to be found. She packed her bag and left a simple note, saying “Thanks for all the good times, but better make that 147.” Then asked the ever-dependable George to drive her to the airport.
Claire finished her coffee, gave up on the hot chocolate, and ran back to the Modern Records Centre with her raincoat pulled up over her head. The rain was starting to ease off anyway.
The coffee had revived her. She knew that she was strong enough to look through the folders now, and was ready for anything that they might reveal. (The only thing that scared her, in fact, was the thought that they might reveal nothing.) Reflecting on the holiday had only made her understand, with more clarity than ever before, who she was and why she had come here. This rain, these grey English skies, this scurrying, preoccupied mass of dour and dampened humanity: these were the things that defined her. If her life for the last twenty-eight years had been leading anywhere meaningful at all, it was here: to this campus, and this library. Anything else, she knew now, was an irrelevance. She would never be able to move on, until she had confronted whatever it was that this place was now ready to disclose to her.
She began reading.
Whatever else she had been expecting from Bill Anderton’s papers, she had never thought that they would be so involving. She had assumed they would be dry and guarded, written only so as to preserve the tersest and most official of records. Instead, she found a whole world, and a whole era, summoned up for her.
As Convenor of the Works Committee, it seemed that Bill had been something more than just the spokesman for his workforce. He had been agony aunt, political agitator, resolver of disputes and keeper of secrets. People had written to him on almost every conceivable subject: from a fellow shop steward in the forging factory, who had complained that his men’s pay was being docked for time spent washing down in the showers after their shift (a complaint that had ended in a walk-out), to a distraught father who had penned a closely written, five-page letter claiming that his daughter was being tortured and held prisoner by nuns at a convent in Gloucestershire. It was not clear whether Bill had replied to all of these letters. Certainly he had replied to many of them, and the work must have kept him extremely busy. Claire had never thought of the 1970s as being a distant era, but she found that the tone and the discourse of the correspondence now seemed touchingly archaic. She was struck by Bill’s unironic use of the word “Brother” when writing to the other union members, and by the way he signed off each letter with “Yours fraternally.” She was struck, too, by how much of his paperwork related to the National Front, and to the ways in which various elements from the far right had attempted to infiltrate the Longbridge factory in those days. There was a letter frostily refusing a member of the National Front permission to use union facilities for one of their meetings; a copy of an almost illiterate message inviting workers (incredibly, it seemed to Claire) to a party in Birmingham celebrating Hitler’s birthday on April 20th, 1974; and a statement from the Works Committee which condemned
. . . the outrages that occurred in Birmingham on Thursday night the 21st November 1974. We urge our members to exercise restraint, and not to allow the instigators of these acts to create divisions among working people. The most positive manner to help and express our sympathies is to contribute to a massive collection in this factory, and not to participate in demonstrations called by outside organizations.
But where was Miriam in all of this?
Claire did not imagine that she would find any love letters. There would be nothing as obvious as that, surely: personal documents would have been sifted out by the archivist, she supposed, and discreetly returned to the Anderton family. If there was to be any direct reference to her sister, the likelihood was that it came in the folder marked “Charity Fund Committee.” Bill had been the Chairman of this committee, and Miriam had been its secretary. That was how they had met in the first place, she seemed to remember. But she had not opened this folder yet. She had placed it carefully to one side, intending to leave it to last. She had been determined to go through this material in sequence, patiently.
But that resolve did not last for very long. The Charity Committee folder was the second that she opened, after only twenty minutes.
The papers here were not arranged chronologically. At the top of the pile was a thick sheaf of legal documents relating to one Victor Gibbs, who appeared to have been the treasurer of the committee, and who had been caught out by Bill in the act of forging cheques and embezzling funds. He had been dismissed from the company, according to Bill’s notes, in February 1975, although no criminal proceedings had been brought against him.
Claire recognized this name; or thought that she did. Hadn’t Miriam once referred, in one of her diaries, to somebody called “Vile Victor?” It must be the same person. She tried to remember what she had written about him, but nothing surfaced. Why had she called him “Vile”? His forging and embezzling didn’t imply an especially attractive personality, of course: but was it something more than that? Had he don
e something to Miriam— victimized her in some way—to make her write about him with such repugnance?
The minutes of the Committee followed next, at considerable length. The chief interest of these, for Claire, lay in the fact that her sister must have typed them. Otherwise, they were not especially revealing. None of the names of the other committee members was female, she noticed. Women were still barely getting a look-in, in those days. Claire tried to imagine what the atmosphere must have been like in the committee room, on those wintry weekday evenings. She pictured cigarette smoke, curling in the light of a naked sixty-watt bulb or fluorescent tube. A group of men sitting around the table, the sweat and grime of a nine-hour shift at the factory still thick upon their bodies. Miriam, sitting next to Bill, scribbling everything down in her haphazard Pitman shorthand. They would all have been looking at her. She had been beautiful. She had always found it easy to attract men, and had always enjoyed the power she exerted over them. What a focus of rapt, furtive attention she would have been! Had Victor Gibbs been one of that circle, resentfully captivated, unable to take his eyes off her, and had she made it clear that she wasn’t interested? Was that the cause of the animosity between them?