‘So’ — Mrs Thatcher’s voice did not waver — ‘we can expect to see you start to pay back… how much is it exactly we have advanced you?’
Prior — trying to get back on the front foot, or at least return the discomfiture — leaned in towards the phone. ‘Sixty-five million pounds, not counting the ten million compensation claim.’ (Which was never paid in full, Randall wanted to remind him, but missed his moment.) ‘About eleven thousand pounds for every car that has been built to date.’
He sat back, folding his arms. DeLorean carried on as though he had not spoken at all.
‘The thing is, Prime Minister, we are on the point here of a major — and I mean major — breakthrough. The market is primed.’
‘The market, I’ve heard, is stagnant,’ Prior said and could not have sounded more the sulky English public schoolboy.
‘Well if you don’t mind me saying, you maybe need to get your hearing checked. We are on course to post a profit for the first five quarters of operation.’ Randall had seen the projections just the day before: it was true. ‘If your own Member — is that the word you use? — had not put about those rumours in the fall we would have floated the company weeks ago and taken things on to the next stage.’ All this was directed at the suddenly not-so-very-Old Carthusian to his right. The next line, however, was delivered straight to the phone in a tone so intimate that Prior — and Jennings, and Randall come to that — might as well not have been in the room. ‘You have my word, Prime Minister, every penny owing will have been repaid by this time next year.’
‘Your word?’ Thatcher, from her tone, was somewhat disarmed.
‘Absolutely.’ His hand as he said this was pressed, hard, against his heart. ‘In the short term, though’ — the hand that had been on his heart was now flat on the table — ‘we are going to need one final cash injection.’
Prior’s eyebrows rose, his jaw dropped. Next to him Jennings’s face was a frozen mask of horror. Randall had angled himself towards DeLorean, poised to speak, but he was not about to be interrupted or deflected. It was him and the prime minister, to use the old telephone operator’s phrase, person to person.
‘Another one?’
‘A final one.’
‘And you were thinking of…?’
‘What the flotation would have raised: forty-seven million pounds.’
Jennings’s eyes closed, Prior’s eyebrows practically disappeared into his high hairline. The phone on the table, despite its bulk, actually vibrated.
Randall, meanwhile, had pulled a notebook towards him and scribbled down what he had been trying a moment before to say. He tore off the page and pushed it in front of DeLorean who read what was written there verbatim and as though he had all along intended to say it.
‘If you could show the same flexibility that you showed to Lear Fan here last December thirty-second.’
Up went Jennings’s eyelids. Down came Prior’s brows. The phone’s vibrating (if Randall had not seen it with his own eyes he would not have believed it) stopped.
‘I’ll leave it with you then,’ DeLorean said, and stood. ‘Prime Minister… Secretary of State… Jennings.’
He and Randall were on the steps down to the car before he spoke again. ‘Are you going to explain that one to me?’
Only partly was the answer. ‘A friend of a friend who I fell into conversation with last week,’ Randall said. It was, June assured him, a momentary premarital lapse, occasioned by the cassette tape inlay and the couple of drinks they had had when he called at her place to talk it over. She sat up at one point in bed (hers and her fiancé’s, he supposed). ‘I never told you Aaron’s story,’ she said. ‘That last time he was back and went for the interview.’
‘This friend’s friend knows someone pretty senior in the engineering side of things,’ Randall told DeLorean. ‘According to him it was an open secret among all the managers. The deadline for the first test flight was the end of December, their funding was supposed to be dependent on it, then someone in the Northern Ireland Office came up with the helpful idea of adding a day on to the year, and hey presto, they got a plane up on the thirty-second, they got the money.’
DeLorean was shaking his head as they got into the car. The driver started the engine, which automatically started the cassette player. Drums, drums, clarinet. Randall had forgotten he had given him it. He leaned forward to tell the driver to shut it off after all. ‘No,’ DeLorean said. ‘Leave it.’ He listened appreciatively. ‘Well, what do you know?’
*
Liz did have some sympathy for Robert. The last time she had gone to a works Christmas party she had performed oral sex in a stationery cupboard — on Robert, mind you, although the fact that knowing that he had submitted to a stationery-cupboard blowjob (to take the passive view of his role in the escapade) she had allowed him to go on his own to eighteen more dos since — all those silly wee clerk-typists tipsy on QC-wine punch — was evidently lost on him.
She could sense, throughout the week leading up to it, him struggling not to object. She would nearly rather he had got it out and over with. (She actually wondered for the first time whether she ought to have been more suspicious in the past of those clerk-typists, whether it was not just inconsistency he was battling but hypocrisy.) Instead it was left to her to take a bit of heat out of the situation. (She never pretended to be above a bit of hypocrisy of her own.)
‘I doubt I’ll stay that long… the place will be so noisy and packed, it’ll be worse than the factory when it’s going full pelt…’ And so on.
Of course she was hoping to see Randall. Not with any stationery-cupboard thoughts in mind, God, no, but they had not left things in a good way. She had to be able to work with him long term without tension or without worrying that he felt she had led him on or let him down.
And there was a bit of her too that hoped maybe, down the line, they could sit somewhere every now and again and… no more than that, really. Just sit.
She bought a blouse from Marks and Spencer and tried it on at home for Robert’s approval.
‘Is it cut a bit too low at the front, do you think?’ she asked.
‘Maybe. A fraction. I don’t know.’
‘No’ — she plucked at the neckline — ‘definitely, it is. I’ll have to return it.’
‘But what will you wear?’
‘I have that black one.’
‘The black one?’
‘I got last year. Remember?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
So she took the new blouse back and wore the black one, as she had all along intended, not cut so low, but neater fitting in all the places that neater mattered.
‘Look at you!’ one of the boys said when she walked into the living room. She had been experimenting a bit with her hair, back-combing it to give it volume. A touch too much volume maybe. ‘Siouxsie Sioux!’
Robert’s brow furrowed. ‘Who’s Siouxsie Sioux?’
Both boys laughed.
‘Who? You mean what…’
‘She’s a dog’s dinner.’
‘Thank you, and thank you.’ Liz nodded to them each in turn. ‘Lovely to be appreciated.’
Robert patted her shoulder. ‘Never mind them. I think you look all right.’
He dropped her at the security gate in front of the hotel. ‘Pick you up again here at ten?’
‘Are you sure now? I could always call a taxi, there’s bound to be somebody else going the same way.’
‘You never know the taxis round here,’ he said. ‘It’s no trouble anyway.’
‘I kind of didn’t think it would be,’ she said under her breath as he drove away. Stilclass="underline" ten — she had more than three hours.