Field of Thirteen Read online

  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 opin
ion 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 bet
ter 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.’