No murder here. No blood.
PREJUDICE, sure, and PRIDE, OK, but this isn’t Austen Bonnet and Bennet land; this is today’s out-of-work newspaper editor versus a brash operator putting his foot in it.
With a mug of strong black coffee at his elbow the editor of the Cotswold Voice sat at his desk in his shirt sleeves and read the splashy column that would lead the newspaper’s racing pages the next day, unless he vetoed it. The words were a blur. His mind spun from being sacked.
Twice a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays, from uninspiring factory-type premises on an industrial park west of Oxford, the Cotswold Voice fed a stream of lively newsprint into the towns and villages along the Cotswold hills.
On Tuesdays the slant was towards news, comment and interpretation and on Saturday to sport, fashion and general knowledge competitions. Something for everyone, the paper announced. Something for mums, dads, kids and aunties. Births, deaths and ‘wanted’ ads. Lots of verve. Horoscopes, scandal... All a succulent worm for a hawk.
The present editor of the Cotswold Voice, twenty-nine years old when he’d been surprisingly appointed, had in four short years doubled the paper’s circulation while himself being reasonably mistaken for the office gofer.
Short and thin, he had exceptionally sharp eyesight, acute hearing and a sense of smell that could distinguish oil on the north wind and sheep on the west. His accent was a mixture of Berkshire, Wiltshire and the University of Cambridge. He could read at light-speed, his brain a sponge. He’d been christened Absalom Elvis da Vinci Williams, and he could lose his cool like a bolt of lightning. His staff, who recognised power when they felt it, walked round him warily, and at his bidding called him Bill.
The editor — Absalom Elvis et cetera Williams — scanned the racing pages’ leader over again. Concentrate, he told himself. Don’t leave with a whimper.
He read:
‘Coronary cases, don’t read on. Others, give your valves aerobic work-outs while couch-potatoing it Saturdays p.m. Snap a can. Feet up? Down to the start, and they’re off!’
The work was technically perfect; neat typing, double spacing, an impeccable paper print-out of a computer disc. This racing correspondent never scattered his pages with messy amendments.
A wade through another couple of florid paragraphs encouraging heart-thumping indolence finally revealed the core of the guff to be advice on buying shares in syndicated racehorses.
Bill Williams frowned. Syndicated racehorses were hardly hot news. What made this spiel different was that the meat of it explained that the syndicated horses, when acquired, would not be sent to an established trainer, but would form the nucleus of a new stable with a new trainer, one Dennis Kinser.
The Voice assured its readers the scheme was an exciting financial prospect. Buy, buy, and — er — buy.
The editor picked up the pulse-stirring article and walked unhurriedly down the lengthy editorial floor to where his chief racing writer awaited a verdict. The whole busy room was noticeably quiet owing to the editor, during his first weeks in office, having had the last of the crash-tinkle tap-tap typewriters pensioned off and the squeaky functional vinyl flooring covered in dark blue sound-absorbing carpet tiles. The frenetic hyper-activity common to newspapers had died with the clatter, but productivity had nevertheless soared. The older hands yearned for a return to noise.
The editor sat on a rolling stool drawn up beside the racing writer’s desk and, floating the typed pages in front of him, asked without belligerence, ‘What’s all this really about?’
‘Well... syndicates.’ The racing writer, lazy, middle-aged, heavily moustached, showed more energy on the page than off it.
‘This Dennis Kinser,’ the editor asked, ‘have you yourself met him?’
‘Well... no.’
‘Where did you get the story?’
‘From the agent who’s putting the syndicates together.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘No. He phoned.’
The editor drew a blue-pencil line through the multiple advice to buy and buy, and initialled the rest of the column for publication. There was little of more pressing interest: it was August, the month of newspaper and racing doldrums.
‘Follow up the story,’ he said. ‘Do a personality piece on Dennis Kinser. Get a picture. If there are no bigger stories and no one scoops you, we’ll run it next Saturday.’
‘What if he’s a fraud?’
‘Frauds are news,’ the editor said. ‘Be sure of the facts.’
The racing writer winced, watching the editor walk away. Bone idle, the racing writer had once written a cuttingly satirical ‘eye-witness’ account of a much looked forward to parade of champions that had in fact been cancelled by heavy rain. The editor’s fury had frightened the racing writer into diarrhoea and the shakes. This time, he morosely supposed, he would actually have to get off his backside and track down the wannabe trainer. (The racing writer thought in journalese, much as he wrote.) The only bright area on his constricted horizon was that after next Saturday the editor would be out on holiday for a week. The racing writer could get away with much sloppier reporting, he cosily reflected, when the sharp little blue-pencil bastard wasn’t creeping around demanding actual physical work. The racing writer liked to gather his information via the telephone, sitting down. He picked up the receiver and talked to the syndicate-arranging agent.
Bill Williams went back to his desk and drank his left-over lukewarm coffee, his thoughts as stark and black as the liquid. The Voice had belonged to a dynasty whose kindly head had recently died. The descendants, wanting to divide the cash, had sold their biggest asset to a multi-faceted company as just one more local rag in their commercial chain. Individualism the new men did not want. Maximum profit, they did. As far as possible, their array of provincial papers would all speak economically as one. Consequently, they would appoint their own rubber-stamp editor for the Voice. It was fortunate that ex-editor Williams was due for a week off. He could clear his desk and not come back.
Bill Williams had known the dynasty family would one day-sell and that he would move on. He’d known there was a new-brutality abroad in the cut-throat newspaper world. Knowing hadn’t prepared him for the abruptness, the ferocity, or the total lack of even a shred of courtesy from any side. There had been no handshakes, no apology, certainly no good wishes, simply a blunt dismissal message among his private e-mail.
From the general peace in the long room he realised that the new owners had so far told no one else about the change of regime. It suited him fine. His last three issues — Saturday, Tuesday and Saturday — would be the best he could do. And after that...
Toughening his mind, he pulled onto his screen the names of all newspapers published in London, together with their owners. He had served his time in the provinces — like the horses going up and down on the outside ring of a roundabout, and he reckoned he had earned a hand on the levers. If he didn’t tell the ringmasters he was free out there and willing, he thought, mixing his metaphors cheerfully, how would they know?
He phoned and wrote letters and e-mail and sent copies of the Voice all over the place. His CV was impressive, but the ringmasters seemingly were deaf.
From a conglomerate known for treating their journalist staff badly, he did at least get one firm offer to meet. Dinner for four at a place of Williams’ choosing. Outside London, they stipulated. Williams to pay.
It was by then Thursday of his last week at the Voice. Once the Saturday paper was on the street, he would be done. Philosophically he accepted the conglomerate’s reverse invitation and made a booking for a table in a restaurant beside the River Thames south of Oxford. His food column writer had raved about the place for a month.
The Voice’s racing writer, after a series of telephone enquiries, had finally located the hopeful Dennis Kinser and, not yet aware that the ‘blue-pencilling bastard’ of an editor would be chasing him no more after Saturday, he had actually stirred himself to drive sixty miles for a face-to-face enlightenment.
When he tried, the racing writer’s assessment of people and horses tended to be stingingly accurate, which was why Bill Williams put up with him. The racing writer saw faults and said so, and was often enough proved right.
He saw faults in Dennis Kinser that others might have thought virtues, the first of them being overweening confidence in himself. Kinser’s aim in life began at reigning as champion trainer: after that, the world.
The racing writer listened to the cockiness with weary disillusion and made shorthand notes on spiral-bound pages as if tape-recorders hadn’t been invented. He would have described Kinser as an envy-driven bumptious self-important snake-oil salesman had he not been sure the little blue-pencil devil would let him get away only with ‘ambitious’.
Dennis Kinser at thirty had developed a game-plan for his life which involved a swift future shinny up the celebrity ladder to a first-name clap-on-the-shoulder familiarity with any well-known achiever. He would pay restrained respect to every inherited title. He would do favours that required favours in return. He needed a first public toehold for this upward mobility and the Cotswold Voice sports pages’ leading article would give it to him.
He told the racing writer with faintly defiant pride that as he’d been too heavily built to make it to the top as a jump jockey he had spent six years as a stable-lad, ‘doing his two’ and living in squalor in a hostel.
‘Was that part of the game-plan?’ the racing writer asked.
‘Sure,’ Kinser said, lying.
The racing writer wrote on his notepad, ‘The time to make friends with this guy is now.’ He said, ‘What do you intend to do next?’
Kinser told him exhaustively. He would beguile the owners of the horses he’d looked after to send him some to train. Their horses had won, he would smilingly assure them, because of his knowledgeable care. Then he would publicise and glamorise the syndicates and welcome all part-owners warmly. He would be given a trainer’s licence because he’d completed all three of the British Racing School’s official courses — in horse, business and people management.
‘Top class manipulator’ the racing writer noted and in the evening wrote one of his very best pieces for the Voice, giving Kinser the benefit of the self-made doubt.
Bill Williams, still the editor on the next day, Friday, walked down the quiet editorial floor carrying the sparkling pages and sincerely complimented his racing writer. Then he called his staff together and unemotionally told them that a different editor would be running the paper from Sunday.
Bill Williams, whose odd-ball father had burdened him with Absalom, Elvis and da Vinci, had spent his council house and comprehensive school years hiding his brains in order not to be bullied. His teachers declared him puzzlingly dumb: not stupid themselves, they saw flashes of stifled brilliance and went into an ‘I thought so all along’ mode when A. E. da V. Williams, insisting against their moderating advice on aiming for the top and trying for Cambridge, had won scholarships all over the place with a subsequent clutch of Firsts and Doctorates in his fist.
As an undergraduate A. E. da V. Williams had founded and edited Propter which, like Granta before it, had quickly become the most prestigious of all academic university newsprint publications. Dr Williams, MA, PhD, distinguished at twenty-seven, turned down a lectureship, left Cambridge and academe behind and humbly free-lanced as a roving journalist with comment pieces and reviews until the Cotswold Voice dynasty liked his style and took him on as an editorial gamble.
His fast temper mostly controlled and internalised by inclination and habit, Bill Williams spent his holidays (and much of his life) alone. Unlike many solitary people, though, he bubbled not far below the surface with a self-deprecating sense of humour that stopped him taking himself too seriously: which was why, in the August of what he now thought of as the ‘Summer of the Lost Voice’, he decided not to change the restful plans he’d had for his week off, but to rent a punt high up the River Thames, as he’d intended, and steer it down with the current to Oxford.
He thought pragmatically that since he had arranged the dinner meeting with the unsatisfactory conglomerate to take place at a restaurant lower down the river from Oxford, and since he had no job to hurry back to, he would extend his water journey in time and distance, and rest-cure his bruised expectations while mentally rehearsing how to cajole juice from conglomerate flint.
At Lechlade, the town at the highest navigable point on the Thames, the boatyard had allocated one of its newly refurbished punts to Mr Williams, in consideration of his having paid extra for the best. The varnish on the solid wood was rich and dark and there was new blue velvet upholstering the wide comfortable reclining seat that would extend down to be a mattress for sleeping on.
From each end a canopy could unfold, meeting in the middle to keep out the night and the rain, and the boatyard also provided mooring ropes, a gas lamp, rowlocks and oars for alternative manoeuvrability, a six-foot pole with a hook on the end of it, and a twelve-foot punt-pole for propelling the eighteen-foot flat-bottomed boat along on top of the water.
Bill Williams had learned to punt on the Backs, the backwater system of the river at Cambridge, and felt peacefully at home on the rudderless engineless craft, much preferring to punt than to row. With deep contentment he smelled the new varnish and tested the weight, flexibility and balance of the long pole. He asked questions that reassured the boatyard people and bought a few basic provisions from their handy shop. They seldom had customers who travelled as far down river as this one proposed to, but they willingly agreed to keep his car safe while he was away, and to retrieve him and their boat whenever he’d had enough.
Among the essential comforts their customer took with him were a sleeping bag, binoculars, swimming shorts, pens and writing paper, clean clothes, a battery razor and ten books. Stowing all these safely, he stripped off his sweater, and in T-shirt, jeans and trainers jumped lightly onto the poling platform at one end of the boat. He looked young and unimportant and not in the slightest like the editor of any newspaper, let alone the vivid and successful Cotswold Voice.
He poled his flat craft along with an ease that had the boatyard staff nodding in approbation, and they watched him until he was out of sight round the first slow bend. Bill Williams, looking back across the fields to the small town with its church spire shining in afternoon sunlight, felt an enormous sense of release. There was nothing to clutch him, no crisis to demand his return to his desk: he had even deliberately not brought with him his mobile phone with its brigade of charged-up batteries, normally the first objects of his packing.
Two days earlier his Saturday edition — his last — had been a triumph, sold out. He’d used all the crowd-pleasing ideas he would in past years have spread over the autumn and with breath-shortening delight he’d sat in a pub window across the road from a large newsagent and in the early evening watched copy after copy of the Saturday Voice being carried away. Word of mouth in action, he’d thought. Absolutely bloody marvellous.
Quiet and contented on the river on Monday as the long August dusk lengthened, Bill Williams steered his unaggresive boat to a stretch of sweet-smelling bank, and tied a mooring rope to a sapling willow. The little sounds of water birds snuggling down for the night in a patch of reedbed, the whisper of the faintest of wind movement in dead and dry grass stems along the bank, the faint chuckle of the current as the river gently bypassed his inert boat, all the tiny natural things obliterated for a while the clamour of the raucous outside world that had to be dealt with and lived in, and if possible changed for the better. Long ago, to his surprise, young Dr A. E. da V. etc. had come to the self-knowledge that if a cause were just, he would kill for it.
Death on the Thames that week came no nearer than river-rage, with motorway bad manners spilling over into raised voices and shaken fists. The punt was slow. Fast fibreglass cruisers filled with holidaymakers in a hurry swept past with boom boxes thumping. Anglers sitting half-hidden on stools along the bank (patiently waiting to hook the uneatable) cursed the silent punt for dragging their lines. Lock-keepers stifled impatience while the boat with no rudder but a trailing punt pole manoeuvred difficult eddies at the entrances and exits of the locks.
Bill Williams, expert though he was, attracted abuse.
On the credit side he watched the sunsets after the busy river was quiet, and listened to geese honking on the meadows above Oxford, and ate at an inn with peacocks on the roof and once, half disbelieving, caught the bright blue flash of the wing of a rare kingfisher on the hunt.
He lived down among the moorhens with snapdragons and floppy poppies growing wild beside him. He floated eye-ball to eye-ball with bad-tempered hissing swans and was looked down on superciliously by alarmed herons who plucked up their feet fastidiously and stalked away.
By the time Bill Williams reached the public mooring at Oxford his mind was filled with amusement and his arms were fit and strong from swinging and leaning on the punt-pole. He had written a leading article (from habit) and read nine of his books.
He went ashore for food, and from a public phone called up the message service he used in his rare absences. Most of the messages were from disgruntled Voice readers as usual. There were no offers or even expressions of interest from any people who could give him a job.
In Oxford he bought as usual every local and London newspaper he could lay his hands on, and went back to the boat.
It was a Tuesday. He had been travelling down the river for eight undemanding days and would easily, in two days more, reach the restaurant for his dinner meeting with the conglomerate-proprietors. Much now, it seemed, depended on their assessment of him. He read their papers first.
There were two of them, the Blondel News and the Daily Troubadour, each split into two sections, with sport, art and finance coming second.
He knew of course that as broadsheets both papers took responsibility seriously and seldom bared a breast. He knew also that the fierce in-fighting with others in the circulation war had meant they’d sprouted off-shoots of glitz on Sundays. He considered that that Tuesday’s edition of the Troubadour was boring; and he found the same story (identical paragraphs) unforgivably printed on two different pages. He felt not in the least downhearted but more like taking the Troubadour by its complacent sloth and giving it a colossal shake.
Later, moored comfortably downstream in the dappled shade of a graceful willow, he read, with carefully throttled emotion, that day’s — Tuesday’s — Cotswold Voice. The previous week’s two editions, read in pubs upstream, had both partly carried his own recognisable imprint. This Tuesday’s issue, the third of the new owners’ reign, had wholly reverted to the shape of the old Cotswold Voice, before young da V. Williams got his hands on it.
Bill Williams sighed.
The racing writer of the Cotswold Voice was missing the little creeping blue-pencil bastard something chronic (as he put it).
He’d been immediately told by the new editor, a large man with a bullying manner, that in future the Voice would use a centrally written opinion piece as their leader on the racing page. The present racing writer would take second lead, and yes — grudgingly — as there still seemed to be no great fresh news, he could do a follow-up piece this week about Dennis Kinser and his syndicates, always supposing the Voice itself had succeeded in launching the Kinser training career. After that, the racing writer would do no more features, but concentrate on tipping winners.
Aggrieved, the racing writer phoned Dennis Kinser, and he and Dennis Kinser between them, prompter and prompted, concocted a totally false account of the new trainer being flooded by applications to take horses from excited would-be syndicate owners, thanks to the enthusiastic support of the Cotswold Voice.
The new editor nodded over the piece sagely and initialled it for publication. The ex-editor shook his head, and, knowing his racing writer and reading his Saturday gush in an up-river bar, didn’t believe a word of it.
Bill Williams floated down in two days from Oxford to the meeting-place, a restaurant by the river — imaginatively named Mainstream Mile — and in late afternoon sunshine tied his mooring ropes tidily to the pier provided. He agreed at once with his food columnist’s statement that, from the water at least, the dining-room of Mainstream Mile was one of the most attractive on the Thames, with tables set on terraces behind a sheet of glass, so that diners could have a grandstand view of river traffic.
There was a short patch of rose garden between the building and the river, with a path winding upwards from the pier. Down the path, as Bill Williams stood on the pier, stretching and relaxing in his jeans and T-shirt after his completed journey, a young dark-suited man bounced with a self-satisfied air and told the visitor to leave at once as he was not welcome.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Bill Williams said, thinking it a joke. ‘What do you mean, leave?’
‘The dining-room is fully booked for tonight.’
‘Oh,’ Bill Williams laughed, ‘that’s all right then. I booked a table for tonight two weeks ago.’
‘You cannot have done!’ The young man began to lose his bounce. ‘It is impossible. We do not accept boats.’
Incredulously, Bill Williams looked around him. He said, ‘This restaurant is called Mainstream Mile. It is on the bank of the Thames. It has a proper pier, to which you see I am properly moored. How can you say you don’t accept boats?’
‘It is the rule of the house.’
Bill Williams lost more than half of his temper. ‘You go and tell the house,’ he said forcefully, tapping the young man’s chest with his forefinger, ‘that I booked a table here two weeks ago, and no one said anything about not accepting boats.’
The editorial floor of the Cotswold Voice knew better than to argue with a Williams’ righteous rage. The young man backed off nervously and said, ‘What name?’
‘Williams. Four people. Eight o’clock. I am meeting my three guests in the bar here at seven-thirty. You go back and tell that to the house.’
Mrs Robin Dawkins drove north-westwards from London in a bad mood made worse by the dipping sun shining straight into her eyes.
Beside her sat F. Harold Field with Russell Maudsley behind her, belted into the rear seat. Mrs Dawkins had wanted the company chauffeur, not herself, to be at the wheel of the firm’s Daimler for this aggravating expedition, but had been outvoted on the good grounds that the chauffeur’s discretion leaked freely if offered enough cash.
Mrs Robin Dawkins, Mr F. Harold Field and Mr Russell Maudsley collectively owned the newspaper conglomerate, The Lionheart News Group. All were hard-eyed bottom liners. All were fifty, astute and worried. The circulation of all newspapers had dropped owing to television, but theirs more than most. Boardroom rows were constant. Each of the three proprietors strongly disliked the other two, and it was the feuding between them that had led to the last disastrous choice of editor for the Daily Troubadour.
Mrs Robin Dawkins thought it completely pointless interviewing a thirty-three-year-old from the boondocks, and only desperation had persuaded her onto this road.
The Lionheart News Group’s Daimler reached the Mainstream Mile restaurant at seven thirty-five and the proprietors walked stiffly into the bar. There were several sets of people sitting at little tables with no one approximating Mrs Robin Dawkins’ idea of a newspaper editor in sight. Her glance swept over the young man standing to one side, holding a file-folder, and it was with depression that she realised, as he came tentatively towards her, that this, the personification of a waste of time, was the person they’d come all that way to meet.
F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley shook his hand, introducing themselves, and both were dismayed by his youth. In dark trousers, white shirt and navy blazer he looked right for a summer Thursday evening dinner by the Thames, but wrong for their idea of bossing a news room. Bill Williams, more anxious than he would admit about his job prospects, was also disconcerted by the restaurant’s on-going hostility towards him, for which he saw no logical reason. Why ever should he not arrive in a punt?
In the bar Bill Williams seated his guests at a small table and ordered drinks, which were a long time coming. The bar filled up with people and then began to empty again as the head waiter in a formal dinner jacket began distributing menus and taking orders and leading guests away to seat them in the dining-room. Other guests: not the Williams party.
Irritated at being overlooked, Bill Williams asked the head waiter for menus, as he passed by with smiling customers in tow. The head waiter said, ‘Certainly,’ frowning, and took five minutes over returning.
Mrs Robin Dawkins seethed at the off-hand treatment and waited, fuming, for her host to assert himself. Bill Williams twice insisted that the head waiter seat them for dinner, but he and his guests were last out of the bar and last in the dining-room, and were allocated the worst table, in a corner. Bill Williams came near to punching the smugness off the head waiter’s face.
Unbelievable, Mrs Robin Dawkins thought. The food she ordered came late and cold. F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley tried to assess this Williams boy’s capacity to run a newspaper, which was what they had come for, but were distracted by the restaurant staff’s ungracious service at every turn.
Bill Williams, with bunched but helpless fists, furiously demanded an improvement in the waiters’ manners and didn’t get it. When Mrs Robin Dawkins requested coffee, she was told it was available in the bar.
Every table in the bar was by that time filled. Mrs Robin Dawkins headed straight out of the exit door to the car park without looking back. F. Harold Field and Russell Maudsley judiciously shook their heads at Bill Williams and vaguely said they would let him know. Bill Williams thrust into F. Harold Field’s arms the file-folder he’d been nursing all evening, and F. Harold Field, though looking at it as if he thought it contained dynamite, held onto the file, gingerly at first, and then strongly gripped it, and followed Mrs Dawkins and Russell Maudsley out to their car.
‘I told you so,’ Mrs Robin Dawkins ground out, thrusting out her jaw and driving fiercely away, ‘a wimp of a boy who couldn’t organise a sandwich.’
F. Harold Field said, ‘I got the impression that Williams would have hit that head waiter if we and everyone else hadn’t been watching.’
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Dawkins contradicted, but F Harold Field knew what he’d seen. He fingered the file that had been pushed into his arms and decided to read the contents in the morning.
Bill Williams returned to the dining-room, which was now empty of guests and being set up for the morning, and demanded to see the head waiter. None of the busy under-waiters hurried to help him, but one finally told him that the head waiter had gone home, his work finished for the night.
Bill Williams, rigid with unvented anger, stood as if planted immovably and insisted on seeing whoever was now in charge. The waiters shuffled a bit from foot to foot. People on boats were supposed to go quietly, not look as if at any minute they’d have the whole crew of them walking the plank at the end of the pier.
Perhaps he’d better see the management, one of them eventually and weakly suggested.
‘At once,’ Bill Williams said.
The management, located in a small room down a passage behind the bar, turned out to be an imposing woman in a flowing red and gold kaftan counting money. She was sitting behind a desk. She did not invite Bill Williams to sit in the chair across from her, but he did, anyway. She looked down her long thin nose.
She said, sounding as if such a thing were impossible, ‘I’m told you have a complaint.’
Bill Williams forcefully described his ruined evening.
The management showed no surprise. ‘When you booked a table,’ she said, not disputing that the table had been booked, ‘you should have said you would be arriving on a boat.’
‘Why?’
‘We do not accept boats.’
‘Why not?’
‘People on holiday on boats behave badly. They break things. They’re noisy. They dirty our lavatories. They have wild children. They complain of our prices.’
‘I booked a table in the ordinary way,’ Bill Williams said with slow, distinct and heavy emphasis, ‘and I am angry.’
The truth of that statement reached the management heavily enough to send a tremble through the kaftan, but she licked her lips and obstinately repeated, ‘You should have said you were coming on a boat. When you booked the table you should have said it. Then we would have been prepared.’
‘When I booked the table, you didn’t say, “How will you be arriving?” You didn’t say, “Will you be arriving in a Rolls-Royce?” “Will you be arriving on a tractor?” “On a bicycle?” “On foot?” My three guests came in a Daimler and you treated them as if they were here to steal your forks.’
The management tossed her head, compressed her lips and stared blindly at her wronged and steaming customer. She wanted him to go away. She had no appetite for a fight.
Bill Williams, who did have such an appetite, felt the militancy drain away in the management and, as always when he had won, his own hostility weakened. Lowering one’s guard is lethal, he’d been often warned, but he’d never got the knack of kicking the fallen foe. He rose abruptly from the management’s chair and sought the fresh night air and the path through the rose garden and the blue upholstered mattress in the punt.
He changed his clothes, folded back the punt’s anti-rain canopies and lay in his sleeping bag looking up at the dry clear sky. He knew he’d lost any chance of editing the Daily Troubadour. He spent the night not sleeping but ceaselessly revolving in memory the humiliations heaped on him undeservedly and his own failure to make a public fuss. And would the public fuss have won him the Troubadour? Would it not more likely have passed into snigger-raising mythology, whereas now, if he read Mrs Robin Dawkins right, the evening would merely give her an ‘I told you so’ weapon in her internecine wars?
He fantasised about an appropriate revenge, doubting his ability to carry it out. As ex-editor he couldn’t get the food columnist to do a demolition job: the same columnist that had given the recently opened restaurant a ten-star rave. As Mr Ordinary Citizen, he might fume without costing Mainstream Mile a fraction of his sleepless night.
Dawn brought him no sweet dreams. Full daylight found him putting the punt ship-shape, though there was no joy left in his journey. In the next town downstream he would summon the Lechlade people to collect their boat.
Down the path through the rose garden came the same dark-suited waiter as before, though this time without the bouncing smirk.
‘The management,’ he said, ‘invite you to take coffee ashore.’
‘Coffee?’
‘Served in the bar.’
He turned away and departed without waiting for a response.
Bill Williams didn’t know, in fact, what response to make. Was coffee an olive branch? An apology? He felt far from accepting either. Could coffee, though, be a preliminary to the cancelling of his credit card slip? Had the management decided he shouldn’t have to pay for their appalling treatment?
The management had not. It wasn’t in any case the money that had infuriated Bill Williams, since his abrupt removal from the Voice had cost the new owners several noughts. He entered the restaurant intending to accept a refund grudgingly, but was offered not a cent.
He went into the bar, which was shuttered and dark at breakfast time. A waiter slowly came in and put on one of the small tables a tray bearing a cup and saucer, a cream jug, sugar, and a china pot of coffee.
And that was all. In cold disbelief Bill Williams drank two solitary cups of admittedly good strong coffee. No one came into the bar. No one said anything at all.
If the coffee were an olive branch, it was also an insult.
When he’d finished the second cupful Bill Williams rose from his small table and, going across the room, opened the exit door which led through a small vestibule to the car park outside. Over the entry door of every place in Britain licensed to sell alcoholic drink there has to be displayed by law the name of the licensee. Bill Williams, without a clear plan of retaliation, went to see at least the name behind the affront.
The name over the entrance door of Mainstream Mile was Pauline Kinser.
Kinser. A coincidence, but odd. Bill Williams turned back into the bar and found it, this time, not empty. The management lady from the previous evening stood there, flanked by four of her staff. They stood stiffly, bodyguards, but also vigilant that she shouldn’t blame them for their behaviour.
‘Are you,’ Bill Williams asked the woman slowly, ‘Pauline Kinser?’
She reluctantly nodded.
‘Do I get an apology for last night?’
She said nothing at all.
He asked, ‘Do you know anyone called Dennis?’
Bill Williams was aware only of deepening silence. Pauline Kinser’s eyes stared at him darkly, wholly devoid of any admission of fault. He shook with a primitive impulse to slam her against the wall and frighten her into speech but was constrained not by clemency but by the thought of handcuffs.
Pauline Kinser felt relieved to see her difficult customer return to his punt and move off down river, and she believed she’d heard the last of him. She didn’t even mention what she thought of as ‘the unpleasantness’ when her nephew Dennis Kinser drove in for one of their frequent business meetings. Dennis Kinser, always golden tongued, had first persuaded his unmarried aunt to sell her house to start the restaurant and then had raised a mortgage on it to set himself up as a racehorse trainer. His Aunt Pauline balked at putting the proceeds of her house directly into a racing stable as she didn’t like horses. Apart from that, in her eyes Dennis could do no wrong. Dennis it was who had chosen the comfortable chairs in the restaurant dining-room and the handsome tableware, Dennis who had engaged a chef of renown, Dennis who had dressed her in kaftans, Dennis who had enticed newspaper columnists to visit and dazzled them with excellence, and Dennis, too, who had made the rule of no boats.
‘Restaurants in London turn away people they don’t want,’ he’d told his aunt. ‘And I don’t want vulgar hire boats clogging up our pier and attracting the hoi polloi.’
‘No, Dennis,’ his aunt said staunchly, seeing the sense of it.
Her nephew heard about the customer in the punt from the waiters in the kitchen and, vaguely troubled by their evasive self-justifications, he asked his aunt what had happened.
Dennis Kinser was only moderately dismayed. However badly he’d been wronged, one disgruntled diner couldn’t ruin a brilliantly successful enterprise.
‘This punt guy,’ he said, looking through ledgers, ‘he really had booked a table?’
‘Yes, he had.’
‘Then you should have served him decently, same as everyone else.’
‘But you said no—’
‘Yeah, yeah, but use some sense.’
Pauline Kinser’s reservations book lay open on the desk. Dennis Kinser, glancing at it, asked, ‘Which booking came from the man in the punt?’
‘That one.’ His aunt pointed. ‘The first one for yesterday. Williams, four people, eight o’clock. We took his phone number too, of course.’
Dennis Kinser glanced at the phone number and his whole body lurched. He knew that number. He couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. He tugged his aunt’s phone roughly towards him, pushed the buttons and listened to the woman answering saying ‘Cotswold Voice, good morning.’
Half speechless, Dennis Kinser asked to be connected to the racing writer who, as usual, was leaning back in his chair cleaning his nails.
‘Williams?’ the racing writer said. ‘Sure, of course I know him. He used to be our editor. Bloody good at it too, though I wouldn’t tell him. It was thanks to him you got all that publicity for your racing syndicates and such. He sent me to interview you, that day we had the photographer for the pics. What do you want him for?’
‘I... er... I just wondered.’ Dennis Kinser’s throat felt glued together.
‘Don’t mess with him,’ the racing writer said with half-solemn warning. ‘He may look small and harmless but he strikes like a rattlesnake when he’s angry.’
Swallowing, feeling light-headed, Dennis Kinser spoke next to the food columnist who’d given his Aunt Pauline the puff that had sent her soufflés soaring.
‘Williams?’ the food man said. ‘He used to like me to do recipes. The new editor’s got a chips and ketchup complex. Bill Williams asked me — well, he was probably joking, but he asked me where to take three business people to dinner who could make or break his whole future, so I said your aunt’s place, and I know he phoned up straight away.’
Dennis Kinser put down the receiver with his whole brain repeating ‘Oh my God’, ‘Oh my God’, like a mantra.
‘What’s the matter?’ his aunt asked. ‘You’ve gone white.’
‘That man Williams...’ Dennis Kinser sounded strangled. ‘What did you say to him to put things right?’
Pauline Kinser wrinkled her forehead. ‘I gave him some coffee.’
‘Coffee! And an abject apology? And his money back? And the grovel of the century?’
Confused, she shook her head. ‘Just coffee.’
Her nephew, frightened, screamed at her, ‘You stupid bitch. You bloody stupid bitch. That man will find a way of bankrupting us both. He writes for newspapers. And I owe him... God, I owe him... and he’ll ruin us for last night.’
His aunt said mulishly, ‘It’s all your fault. It was you who said to turn away boats.’
In London that afternoon the Lionheart News Group held a monthly progress meeting consisting of the three warring proprietors, the business managers of all the Group’s many newspapers and periodicals, and sundry financial advisers. No editors or journalists were ever invited to this sort of affair: to Mrs Robin Dawkins — acting as Chairman — they were merely the below-stairs hired help.
Mrs Dawkins treated the urgent need for a replacement editor for the Daily Troubadour — fourth on the agenda — as if she were lacking a butler. As long as he knew his place and was metaphorically good at keeping the silver untarnished, she could overlook an afternoon fondness for port. The dismayed managers tactfully tried to point out that the present editor’s fondness for afternoon port was three-quarters of the trouble.
Russell Maudsley forcefully reported that Absalom Williams, ex-editor of the Cotswold Voice, whom they had at first considered, need not now be borne in mind, and F. Harold Field declared with even more emphasis that Absalom Williams at thirty-three was too young, had too many academic degrees and couldn’t insist on getting his own way.
Several of the managers held their breath, not least a competent but thwarted woman from the Daily Troubadour who knew from experience that when Field and Maudsley agreed against a course of action Mrs Robin Dawkins would suddenly be for. As the majority shareholder she would insist, and the two men would shrug and give in.
The Daily Troubadour manager knew that most great editors hit the top in their middle thirties: that like orchestral conductors they either did or didn’t have the flair. She listened to Mr Field complaining to Mrs Dawkins that moreover Williams couldn’t even write, and then she read a portion of only one of the photocopied sheets that F. Harold had been lackadaisically distributing all round the table from a folder, and felt the instant impact of the fizzing Williams’ talent on the page. Not write? This was Gettysburg stuff.
Looking up, she saw F. Harold Field watching her. He smiled. He wants this Absalom, she thought.
That same afternoon Dennis Kinser’s first explosive rage against his aunt had deepened painfully like mustard-gas burns. He sat leaning his elbows on her desk with his head in his hands, seeking a way out of a quicksand of debt.
His aunt grumbled repetitively, ‘It was you who said no boats.’
‘Shut up.’
‘But—’
‘Bugger the boats,’ Dennis Kinser said violently, and his aunt, regally distinguished in a blue, silver and purple kaftan of Dennis’s choosing, retired hurt and wept in the tiny sitting-room that held all that was left of her former home. She’d given Dennis everything else. She couldn’t bear his anger. She didn’t like horses. She hated the man in the punt.
Dennis Kinser’s wheeler-dealing relied entirely on Mainstream Mile flourishing as the rave of the region. In spite of the Voice racing writer’s golden superlatives there hadn’t so far been enough promises of response to the couch potato gambling syndicates to fill even a short row of boxes, let alone the whole sparkling stable he craved. To bamboozle the horse-racing licensing department into believing that he had the qualifying dozen horses in his yard, he’d invented a few and brought in others limping from their retirement fields; and in a burst of typical hubris he’d promised to sponsor a two-mile hurdle at Marl-borough races — the Kinser Cup. Fame would follow. Rich owners, impressed, would eat at his restaurant and send him horses galore. Fame and riches attracted fame and riches. He’d seen it. He, Dennis Kinser, would have both.
His trouble was, he was in too much of a hurry. He had that very morning sent out press releases to every publication even distantly aware that racing existed. His invitations to every influential pen couldn’t be retrieved from the Royal Mail. He would in effect be shouting ‘Look at me, I’m great’, and the rattlesnake in the punt could print and publish, ‘Look at him, he’s a fraud’, and the write-ups he’d get would be mocking instead of admiring.
Dennis Kinser groaned aloud.
Bill (Absalom Elvis etc.) Williams bought a copy of the Cotswold Voice the next day, Saturday, and winced his way from the headlines onwards.
On the racing page, his racing writer, now demoted to halfway down the space available, was happy to let readers know that their very own syndicate-forming trainer was sponsoring a race at Marlborough the following Saturday ‘Be there!’ encouraged the Voice. ‘Kinser can win.’
‘Race to Mainstream Mile!’ admonished the food column. ‘A brilliant Kinser double!’
As he had always done to dilute disappointment and make frustration bearable, Bill Williams stretched for a ball-point and paper and wrote the knots out of his system.
He wrote with vigour, and unforgiving fire. He wrote from the sharp memory of humiliation and from an unappeased lust for revenge. He ridiculed Pauline Kinser for the pretension of her kaftans and the snobbery of her no-boats ban. He savagely pulverised the multiple lies of the make-believe glamorous racing stable and he jeered at Dennis Kinser himself for being a conceited humbug, a fast-talking trickster, a self-deluding sham. It was a piece designed and calculated to trample and destroy. It would probably never see public print.
One of Dennis Kinser’s gaudy press releases ended up in the Lionheart News Group’s little-used office of F. Harold Field. F. Harold, his hand hovering over the shredder, caught a glimpse of the words ‘Mainstream Mile’ and briefly glanced at the come-hither.
‘Warm Welcome’, he read, and smiled grimly. Not his lasting impression of the head waiter.
‘Hurdle race sponsored by trainer Dennis Kinser, co-owner of Mainstream Mile. Buffet lunch. Restaurant chef. Chance to buy a share in a Syndicate!’
Hm... F. Harold Field, who liked a flutter, decided to go.
Bill Williams, Dennis Kinser and F. Harold Field collided at Marlborough racecourse.
During the past week the August days had been edged out by the chill of early September dawns.
During that week Bill Williams wrote five opinion and comment pieces and sent them all to the prestigious London broadsheets that had published him pre- Voice. They were enthusiastic on the telephone, but no one needed an editor.
During that week Dennis Kinser finally received from the syndicate fixer one half-paid for but talented hurdler complete with an entry in the Kinser Cup. Dennis the ex-stable lad did know how to train horses and turn them out looking good. When the syndicate horse paraded before the Cup, its coat shone in the sun.
Dennis Kinser spent the rest of his week borrowing money and sucking the restaurant dry.
During that week F. Harold Field visited the Lionheart Group’s managers one by one and left a pro-Williams consensus in his wake. Russell Maudsley nodded. Mrs Robin Dawkins, still believing her colleagues intended a thumbs down, said contrarily, ‘I think you’re wrong to ditch him, Harold.’
Waving his conspicuous invitation, F. Harold made his way from his (chauffeur-driven) Daimler up to the large private box where Dennis Kinser, though now running on an empty gas tank, was trying to buy himself a glittering future by the widespread indiscriminate application of champagne.
Dennis Kinser, not knowing by sight half the free-loaders guzzling his bubbles, gave F. Harold a wide hello and with an extravagant gesture put an arm familiarly round his guest’s shoulders. A hard-headed businessman impervious to soft soap, oil and honey, F. Harold Field intensely disliked the too intimate unwanted pressure of the arm, but without shaking himself free he turned his well-groomed head to look Dennis Kinser in the eye and asked him straightly what Williams, the sometime editor of the Cotswold Voice, could possibly have done to be treated so insufferably by the management and staff of Mainstream Mile.
To F. Harold Field this was no idle question: he needed to know what would stir A. E. de V. Williams to clenched fists, and, beyond that, what would stop him from using them. F. Harold regularly judged people by their rages: sought the cause and watched the performance. When not overruled by Mrs Robin Dawkins (as he had been the last time they’d chosen an editor) F. Harold Field seldom made mistakes.
Dennis Kinser removed his arm from his guest’s shoulders with sick speed. All week he’d been unable to sleep or eat with physical ease. Each day he’d expected to hear the rattlesnake and be pierced by the fangs. But this, he thought in bewilderment, this solid grey-suited taxpayer didn’t match the racing-writer’s verbal identikit. This couldn’t be the lean mean man in the punt.
F. Harold Field flatly said, ‘As Williams’ guest I was treated like dirt, and I don’t know why. Give me a reason why all the papers and periodicals I co-own in the Lionheart Group shouldn’t blow your house down.’
‘But... b-but,’ Dennis Kinser stuttered, aghast at this new abyss, ‘he came in a boat.’
‘He... what?’
Dennis Kinser abruptly left-wheeled and crashed into the gentlemen’s retreat. He had taken days of drugs to control the bacteria in his gut, but nothing it seemed could anaesthetise the cataclysm he saw ahead.
F. Harold Field, still unsatisfied, went down (on the non-reappearance of his host) to watch the horses as they plodded round the parade ring. Dennis Kinser’s extravagant Cup lay two races ahead. F. Harold Field filled in time by winning modest third-place money on the Tote.
Bill (Absalom etc.) Williams drove to Marlborough races having read far too much all week about the Kinser glories. Kinser this and Kinser that... Kinser’s horses, Kinser the trainer, Kinser on the Thames. Every racing page seemed to have paid in advance for a free lunch. The Cotswold Voice published a sunny encouragement, but the racing writer himself lounged at home to tele-watch with a couple of cans.
On the basis of ‘know thine enemy’, Bill Williams went to Marlborough races to learn what Dennis Kinser looked like. He saw the ballyhoo but not the man himself, who remained in pain in the gents. Instead he came unexpectedly face to face with the Lionheart decision maker who had shaken his head as a death-toll over any dreams of Troubadour days.
F. Harold Field had expected more than silence from his Absalom Williams host. He’d seen the clenched fists. He now sought the cause bluntly.
‘Why did you want to hit that restaurant’s head waiter? And why didn’t you?’
Bill Williams explained, ‘He was insulting me on the management’s say so. You don’t shoot the messenger because of the message.’
He dug into a pocket and handed F. Harold a copy of the raging axe he’d taken on paper to Dennis Kinser. F. Harold Field glanced at it and started reading, eyebrows slowly rising towards hairline.
‘Don’t give that paper to anyone but Kinser,’ Bill Williams said. ‘I didn’t write it for publication.’
Dennis Kinser, looking pale, came down to the parade ring before the Kinser Cup and put on a bravado performance as owner, sponsor and general king, all designed to grab media attention. Side by side, Bill Williams and F. Harold Field watched from afar and felt nauseated.
Twenty minutes later their nausea increased geometrically, as the syndicate horse, hooves flying, won the Kinser Cup.
Dennis Kinser’s exultation and expanding arrogance filled the television screens of the nation. He announced he was the top trainer of the future and, inside, he believed it. Winning the race meant the exit of at least half of his money troubles, and surely, now, the rich and famous would flock to his stable.
It was while he preened himself in front of countless camera lenses that F. Harold Field gave him Bill Williams’ lightning bolt.
The applauding crowds faded away towards the next race. Success on racecourses was ephemeral.
Dennis Kinser stood reading the explosive page in his hand and he faced his two ill-treated customers feeling that although he’d won the world he was going to lose it. Lose it over a bloody punt. It wasn’t fair. He’d worked so hard...
In aggressive despair, he said bitterly to Absalom Elvis da Vinci Williams, ‘What will you take not to publish this article?’
‘Blackmail?’ Bill Williams asked, surprised.
Dennis Kinser stuttered. ‘Take the horse? Will that do you?’
‘It’s not yours to give,’ Bill Williams said.
‘What then? Money? Not the restaurant...’ Panic rose in his voice. ‘You can’t... you can’t do that...’
Bill Williams watched the real fear rising and thought it revenge enough.
‘I’ll take,’ he said slowly, ‘I’ll take an apology, and my money back... and a notice in your bar and printed on your menu saying that people on boats are welcome, especially if they have booked a table in advance.’
Dennis Kinser blinked, swallowed, wavered, clenched his teeth and finally nodded. He didn’t like it — he hated to be defeated — but compromise was better than destruction.
F. Harold Field stretched a hand forward, plucked the sheet of paper out of Dennis Kinser’s hands and tore it up.
He said to Bill Williams, ‘Come and see me in my office at the Troubadour on Monday.’