Kept it in the top left-hand drawer of his desk, sneaking looks now and then, half the time not even aware he was doing it.
All in all, he was pretty proud of it.
*
Tinsel hung all about the assembly shop. There were shoe-whitener snowflakes on the bathroom mirrors and cartoons pinned up of sleighs with gull-wing doors. Anto told Liz there had been an agreement between all the union reps: they were to inform their members that only Christmas trees and Santas were permitted behind the dashboards and in the seat wells from now to Epiphany.
He and Liz were sharing the dayshift with another woman, Amanda, TC having booked a week’s leave for his latest City and Guilds exams.
She had moved from the north-west of England specially, had Amanda (a typical Amanda sentence structure was that), her and her husband and their three wee girls. Lasses, she called them. Gracie Fields, Anto called her, until she started calling him Bert Lynch, after the James Ellis character in Z Cars. ‘I don’t sound anything like him,’ Anto said. ‘And did you actually listen to Gracie Fields ever?’ asked Amanda.
There was no work to be had anywhere over there, at least no work to compare with this.
‘You may hope that the word doesn’t spread too far or there’ll be a whole lot more like me come the New Year.’
‘The more the merrier,’ said Liz.
Anto on that occasion said nothing.
*
DeLorean flew in via Prestwick in Scotland late on the afternoon of the day of the Christmas party, looking as he always did at the end of those transatlantic flights as though he had ridden a couple of blocks in a cab.
‘We have to go to Stormont Castle,’ was the first thing he said at arrivals. First thing to Randalclass="underline" he had already stopped to pose for a photograph with a woman and her baby daughter and had answered good-naturedly the inevitable shout of ‘Here, give us one of your cars’, from a man egged on by his friends, with the line that his particular car was getting the extra-special treatment and would be another few weeks yet.
‘Secretary of state?’ asked Randall.
‘Actually, I was hoping to speak to his boss: conference call.’ DeLorean had already in the time it took him to say this over his shoulder (Randall as ever was half a pace behind) strode two-thirds of the way down the Plexiglas corridor to the exit. He paused at the end to allow Randall to catch up. ‘A few loose ends I’d like to get tied up before the holidays.’
There was a point on the journey in from the airport where the motorway bent to the right and the city opened up like a child’s pop-up book, the commercial core on the right-hand page and on the left the docks and the shipyard, with low green hills on the far margin, the underused parliament building standing out against them, elephant white.
They crossed the river — the spine of the book — into a neighbourhood of cramped houses and single-window shop fronts, with here and there a derelict-looking factory to relieve the monotony. The Christmas decorations — green, red and gold — competed for space and attention with the year-round displays of the British flag and coordinating bunting. After the initial exchanges in the arrivals hall DeLorean had withdrawn into an almost meditative state, gathering his thoughts maybe for the conversation ahead. Randall had the Sounds of DeLoreland in his jacket pocket and once or twice reached inside to take it out, but, no, this wasn’t the moment.
They approached the Stormont grounds by the side gates. The driver wound down his window. ‘I have Mr John DeLorean here,’ he told the policeman on duty. (Mr John DeLorean dipped his head and smiled over the driver’s shoulder.)
‘Is that right?’ said the policeman and proceeded to sweep the outside of the car with a bomb detector, squatting to reach up into the wheel arches. He checked the trunk and under the hood, drumming his fingers on the latter when he had closed it again. Stopping suddenly. ‘OK.’
‘What was that about?’ DeLorean asked as the car pulled away.
The driver shrugged. ‘Some people, the wee bit of power goes to their head. Also’ — he changed from second gear to third — ‘it’s cold out there. He’s probably saying to himself why should I be the only one to suffer.’
They bypassed the parliament building entirely, following the road between the trees to the castle, which to Randall’s eyes more resembled the home of a Hollywood star of the Douglas Fairbanks era, and which for the ten years of what the British called Direct Rule was where the real power resided.
Randall turned as he got out of the car and slipped the cassette to the driver. ‘Maybe you could put this on when we come back.’ All the loose ends tied, the holidays about to begin.
More security awaited them at the top of the steps up to the front door — a chrome wand with a loop at the end, which traced the outline of their jackets and pants with profuse apologies from the policeman wielding it, who was obviously having a better, or at least warmer day than his friend at the gate.
‘Will you both be going in to see the secretary of state?’ asked the functionary who issued them with their passes.
‘Yes,’ said DeLorean before Randall could say no. DeLorean gripped him by the elbow and added out the corner of his mouth. ‘You don’t think I’d go in without my best man, do you? Besides, it always pays to have someone with you in these circumstances. You would be amazed how often a collective amnesia strikes them otherwise. “Did we really say that?”’
A door opened at the end of the corridor that the functionary directed them into and Jennings appeared, restored to his pinstriped suit and tie knotted just-so.
‘Jennings!’ DeLorean said. It sounded a lot like delight. Jennings merely nodded. Behind him the secretary of state emerged, broad face, hair swept back.
‘I believe you have already spoken,’ said Jennings.
‘A pleasure to meet you at last.’
Prior took the hand that DeLorean offered. ‘I was about to say the same thing.’
‘You know Edmund?’
Prior smiled blandly in Randall’s direction. ‘You are most welcome.’
They entered a room with tall windows at one end looking across a lawn to a rather fine-looking glasshouse and, at the room’s very centre, a table on which sat a telephone twice as large as any Randall had ever seen and around which they took their seats and waited. Five minutes. Ten.
Prior made a show of consulting his watch. ‘The cabinet meeting must have overrun.’
DeLorean held up both hands in a gesture of magnanimity. ‘Who are we to curtail the exercise of democracy?’
Jennings pursed his lips and went to the door, opening it and almost immediately closing it again. ‘I thought I heard the tea trolley,’ he said, a second before a light began to flash orange below the telephone’s dial and a voice — that voice — seemed to fill the entire room.
‘Gentlemen, I do apologise for keeping you waiting. I trust I haven’t missed anything.’
The gentlemen, one and all, jumped to, sitting up in their seats, squaring their shoulders in their suit jackets. (Randall could still not quite believe how quickly he had been admitted into this: the prime minister of the United Kingdom was virtually in the same room.)
DeLorean spoke before any of them. ‘I was just telling Jim, Prime Minister, that we have an order coming in from the United Arab Emirates.’
It was the first that anyone seated around the table had heard it, but it was said with such conviction that Prior actually looked to Jennings as though to make sure he had not suffered an actual bout of amnesia.