As Johnny said, after sitting out there on the highway waiting for the repairman, the damn thing was getting more looks than he was.
It was not only more expensive than originally intended but, thanks to the Lotus makeover, heavier too, slower off the mark (they had had to down tune the engine to 130 horsepower to meet emissions standards), and when it did get going it was able to deliver just nineteen miles a gallon, ten short of projections and not far above federal minimum standards. The doors now and then, and despite the offices of the Quality Assurance Centres, had an alarming habit of jamming open, or (more alarming still) shut. Randall’s erstwhile colleagues in the auto pages and the specialist trade press — the same people who had fallen over themselves to praise the ’73 Vega — reported all this with an amount of malicious glee, adding for good measure that the bodywork showed up the pawprints of every one of those ‘slack-jawed gawpers’.
Yet withal it was thing of beauty. (A thing of beauty — critics note — with anti-pawprint shampoo in the glove box.) No one but no one could fault it on that.
DeLorean telephoned at four in the morning, forgetting for once in his urgency the hours between them. For the first half a minute, during which DeLorean could get no further than ‘Edmund’ — ten, maybe fifteen times — Randall thought he might be high, but that wasn’t what it was at all. He had driven — he got the words out at last — driven his own DMC-12 out from the ranch that afternoon, deep into the desert beyond Palm Springs. He must have sat for two hours with just the driver-side door open watching the sun’s declension, from ragged white hole to blood red disc, played out on the hood.
‘I’m not a man for hearing voices, Edmund, but I swear something spoke to me out there: “Don’t rest on this. Keep going… Keep going.” Does that sound crazy?’
Randall told him he had had enough testimony from good and perfectly sane army buddies — one who had turned to answer a question (there was no one behind him who could have asked it) a split second before a bullet passed by right where his head would have been — not to discount anything.
Later there would be stories — most of them put about by DeLorean himself — that he was in fact no stranger to supernatural interventions of this kind, that the palm-reader who had conjured up 21 January as the day when the first car would come off the line had been guiding his every decision since he turned his back on Puerto Rico, that much of what he was still to do — doubling production, floating on the stock market — was at her prompting too, or at the prompting of whoever spoke through her, palms being the least of her psychic talents.
Randall never bought it, any more than he bought the conversion to Christianity that caused DeLorean to confess it. Every time the subject came up he thought back to that early-morning call, DeLorean’s embarrassment almost at what he thought he had heard out there in the Californian desert.
Anyone who had been receiving messages from a 55th Street medium for the previous however many years could have taken something like that, you would have thought, in his long-legged stride.
12
Up to now the money had all been flowing in one direction: out. From here on, though, it would start to flow back in again. The overheads too, now that they were in full production, would come down dramatically. The Hethel presence, for a start, could be scaled back. No need, with the initial research and development phase over, for a separate DMCL office onsite. Randall travelled across to Norfolk to oversee the winding-up of operations. Chapman apologised that the helicopter was otherwise engaged, and sent a car instead to meet him off the train up from London at Wymondham, a place that took half as long again to spell as it did to pronounce, lodging him in a wing of the hall (my God, the hall) with a view from his lead-paned window of a nine-hundred-year-old church.
DeLorean was not wrong about the Brits.
Chapman himself could only spare a few minutes the afternoon of Randall’s arrival. It was the Grand Prix season, he had just got back from Buenos Aires, where Elio de Angelis had — to Chapman’s evident disgust — finished ‘only’ sixth, and had another three races coming up in quick succession (three opportunities for de Angelis to make amends): San Marino, Belgium and Monaco.
Randall had got the feeling on the previous occasions he had met him that Chapman always had at least one eye out for someone more important approaching. Meeting him here, however, on his home ground, with no one else around, Randall realised that importance was not relative to situation: even for a few minutes he was never going to command Chapman’s full attention. Even as he was saying hello, shaking hands, Chapman was already looking beyond.
Indeed, though he thought at first it was just another facet of that famous English reserve, the longer Randall was there, the more polite hands that were extended, the greater was his sense that there was a distinct coolness towards him, or rather the car that he represented, as though it and he were eating up time that could be better spent handcrafting Esprits and Elans.
As for the office equipment whose repatriation he was here to effect, Randall had no idea where it was all going to go. The Dunmurry offices were full to overflowing as it was: Portakabin for now was all he could think. There were still a couple behind the body shop, left over from plant’s construction.
He had toyed with the notion of driving across to Norwich by himself to finalise the arrangements with the shipping company, take a detour through a few of those villages in which the countryside abounded. At least in this part of English-speaking Europe he was unlikely to encounter soldiers in hedges or discover on arrival at his destination that one entire sector (the one, wouldn’t you know, where he had been intending to park) had been evacuated because of a telephoned coded warning. When the time came, though, he found a car waiting for him at the door, a driver already at the wheel.
It had since his earliest DeLorean days been part of the package, but it had got to the point here where he half expected a Lotus man to be waiting to walk down the corridor with him when he stepped out of his room at night to go to the bathroom. He had heard of things like that happening to people on trips behind the Iron Curtain, only it wasn’t service they called it, it was surveillance. Not that he was complaining by the end of that day, quite the reverse: without the driver to call on for help he doubted he would have understood a word that the guy in the shipping office was saying. As accents went it was at the atonal end of the sing-song spectrum.
Still, when he had returned to Ketteringham Hall later that afternoon and packed his bag and nodded one last time to the driver holding the car door for him (no sign at all of Chapman), he was not exactly heartbroken to be leaving.
The following Sunday was as beautiful a spring day — as beautiful a day period — as Randall had seen in all his time in Belfast. When he arrived in the Botanic Gardens mid-morning, the grass between the paths was already colonised by students from the university next door, books open before them, some of which were even being read.
A quarter of an hour after he sat down, Liz dropped into the seat beside him, the briefest of smiles to acknowledge that she had seen him, hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she scanned the student faces, or perhaps, it only occurred to him afterwards, shielding her face from any return gaze.