The place was, as she had predicted in her heat-reduction offensive, chock-a-block. The first of her section she found — a full quarter of an hour after arriving — was Amanda, braced in a corner of the bar, holding off all-comers with her elbows.
‘Explain white to me,’ she said beneath the general clamour.
‘As in…?’
‘Vodka and white.’
‘Oh, you mean lemonade?’
‘And a body wouldn’t just think to say that?’
‘No, because you might get brown.’
‘And how would that be different?’
‘Well, it would just be, I don’t know, brown.’
Amanda screwed her face up. ‘Right enough. But, here, while I’m getting, what you having yourself?’
‘Are you sure? Pernod and…’
‘White? Black?’
‘Water.’
Amanda smiled. ‘I like the hair, by the way. Do I know you well enough yet to tell you it takes years off you?’
‘As of this minute, yes.’
They found Anto standing, nursing a pint, on the edge of a group of men reminiscing about their retraining trip to the States — or so Liz deduced from the index fingers of one of the men, held level with his chest and twirling this way and that, like tassels.
‘Ladies!’ one of them said at their approach and Amanda made a show of looking over her shoulder.
‘No, you’re all clear. Carry on.’
So of course they didn’t.
‘No book with you the night?’ Liz asked Anto.
‘I was afraid it would spoil the line of my jacket.’
His jacket could have taken a couple of dictionaries without noticeable effect. All the same, Liz decided that the very fact of it, like the lack of a book, constituted a Serious Effort. As for the tie, though…
Anto flipped up the broad blade between two fingers. She must have been staring.
‘A bit of a horror show, isn’t it?’
There was tan in there, there was cream and royal blue, there were two shades of green, either side of something verging on crimson, all apparently alarmed to see one another. She returned his grimace. ‘Just a bit.’
A couple of minutes later TC arrived, looking, in his black bomber jacket and jeans, like he had made no effort at all.
‘I’m dead sorry, I came here straight from the Tech,’ he said before his smile got the better of him. ‘And guess what? I got my Level Three. No way they’re not going to make me a supervisor now.’
Amanda told him the first thing he had to do was supervise a round of drinks. Liz hugged him. Anto shook his hand. ‘Fair play to you, you worked hard for it. There’s not many your age would have the dedication.’
TC looked about him, a hundred and eighty degrees in this direction, a hundred and eighty in that. ‘I hope I didn’t miss the star turn.’
*
DeLorean had wanted to detour by Warren House, ‘get a proper look at those goddamn faucets’ — ‘what an ass,’ was all he could say afterwards — and make a couple calls, the shorter to Cristina and the kids, the longer, by several hundred per cent, to Chapman. From what Randall could not avoid hearing (DeLorean was clicking his fingers looking for something to write on) Chapman ought to have been in Dubai earlier in the month for an exhibition Grand Prix but failed to show in a fit of pique with the Formula 1 authorities who had banned his latest Lotus from two races earlier in the season. Randall had followed that part of the saga at any rate in the papers: technical violations, was the reason the authorities gave. ‘What we used to call innovation,’ Chapman was quoted as saying.
‘I am as frustrated as the next misunderstood engineering genius, but that was an opportunity missed for us,’ said DeLorean when he had put the phone down, his tongue as close to his cheek as was compatible with speech. (It was, wasn’t it?) ‘I had been talking up the Lotus link in my conversations with the sheikh. He’s a big, big fan.’
Their car, with the DeLoreland tape still playing, finally made it to the front door of the hotel only eighty minutes behind schedule.
A row of faces on the other side of the glass rearranged themselves into smiles.
‘Looks like they have laid on a welcoming committee,’ the driver said.
There were a lot of not-at-alls and of-course-of-courses as DeLorean’s hand did the rounds. The local society magazine wanted a few photos in the vestibule: the hotel manager and Mr DeLorean; the hotel manager and the hotel manager’s wife and Mr DeLorean; the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, the hotel manager and Mr DeLorean; the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, her husband, the hotel manager, the hotel manager’s wife… He left a trail of photos such as these wherever he went, a fact he had apparently alluded to in a conversation with Bill Haddad, when Bill — in his version of it, played out in the Grill Room of the Waldorf Astoria this time a year ago — had first raised concerns about some of his business dealings. ‘“Anyone wants to know where I’ve been and who I’ve been talking to any time in the last five years all he has to do is buy the papers, or find a computer that can read the papers for him.”’ It wasn’t a bad impersonation, it had to be said, and not, to Randall’s ears then, especially vindictive. ‘As though computers have nothing better to do with their brains,’ Bill said, himself again, and, yes, maybe Randall should have heard it, with a definite twist.
The hotel manager was extending an invitation to Mrs DeLorean too, next time she was in town. DeLorean by way of reply shook his hand all over again. Randall had his hand on the handle of the function room door when a voice called out. ‘Mr DeLorean!’
He, and Randall, turned. A young woman in the hotel’s livery was standing to one side of the reception desk, blushing at finding herself the object of everyone’s attention. ‘There’s a phone call for you,’ she said.
‘There’s a phone call for you, sir,’ the manager said, not entirely under his breath.
‘Sir,’ the young woman said and the blush grew fiercer. ‘He says it’s important.’
DeLorean strode off after her to an office just back of the desk.
There was a bit of half-hearted chanting from the far side of the function room door, audible in the quieter passages of the music and in the silence that had descended on the vestibule. ‘Why are we waiting, why-y are we waiting…’
Randall waited, trying to read the blank door that had closed behind DeLorean’s back.
Which opened in the end so suddenly it made him jump.
The frown, the set jaw. Oh shit.
Then the most enormous and unaffected smile. He drew Randall aside and spoke into his ear.
‘That was Prior. The prime minister has, for reasons that he says escape him, decided not to rule out the new loan. She wants to monitor sales ahead of a final decision in the new year… We’ll have Roy wire the dealers, put a little Christmas push on.’
He angled his head back. ‘December thirty-second,’ he said, and laughed, then followed Randall through the function room door.
The function room — there was only one word for it — erupted.
*
Liz had never heard or seen anything like it. One of the bar staff must have found him a footstool or something, because from one moment to the next after he had made his way to the middle of the room DeLorean went from head and shoulders above everyone else there to head, shoulders and entire upper body, but no sooner had he achieved this elevation than his expression clouded and in the next moment he had taken a step back, down, to just head and shoulders higher.
‘That’s better,’ he said and from the renewed cheering it was clear that everyone (except maybe the barman who had found the stool) agreed. He held up one finger. Kept it there long after the room had been brought to order. ‘Remember this year. Remember where we were at the beginning of it.’ Liz would never forget it: the crump of that first car as it hit the assembly shop wall. ‘And now look at us. Look at all of you. Look what you have done. Ask yourselves, are there any workers anywhere in the world who could have achieved what you have achieved in the past twelve months in the circumstances you have had to contend with? Seven thousand cars? You know what? I don’t think there are. And I’ll tell you another thing, I don’t think I could ever have done this anywhere in the world but here. I sometimes wish poor Preston Tucker could have had the good fortune I had.’ (‘Preston who?’ Liz heard TC asking Anto, a second before she could get the question out herself. ‘Tucker: do they teach you nothing at that Tech?’) ‘There’d be Belfast-built Torpedoes on the roads as well as DeLoreans. But it’s not just Tucker, hundreds more over the years weren’t able to defy the odds the way we have. You haven’t just made cars this year, you’ve made history.’