‘Absolutely. It’s a matter of finding the right roles. The kind of roles where you don’t need to act.’
‘That’s it. I remember, last year you won an industry award. At the Savoy, I saw you collect it . . .’
Cruise straightened up, leaving his thoughts to float away across the embankment. I assumed that I would soon be forgotten, the creator of his career left here like the Ben Gunn of this concrete beach.
Then I noticed that the driver had walked around the Lincoln to the offside. Both passenger doors were now open.
‘Richard . . .’ Cruise’s sunburnt hand took my elbow, steering me towards the car as if moving a lucky contestant to his prize. ‘Let’s have some breakfast at my house. There are one or two things we need to talk over. You can give me your advice. Already I feel we can work together . . .’
21
A NEW POLITICS
‘BROOKLANDS? THE WHOLE PLACE is off its rocker. I just don’t get it.’ David Cruise screwed up his paper tissue and threw it at the camera mounted on a tripod beside the swimming pool. ‘What on earth was happening last night?’
‘I think you know.’ I watched the surface of the water, as calm and eventless as plate glass. ‘An attempted putsch.’
‘Putsch?’
‘A palace revolution.’
Cruise grimaced into his make-up mirror. ‘Where’s the palace?’
‘We live in it. The Metro-Centre and all the retail parks between here and Heathrow. You and me and the people who watch your TV shows.’
‘Not enough of them—that’s the problem. Who was meant to lead this revolution?’
‘You know that as well. You were.’
‘Me? I’ll remember, the next time I need a dressing room and a courtesy car. Some revolution, some palace . . .’
WE WERE SITTINGby the indoor pool attached to Cruise’s house on the Seven Hills estate, an exclusive Weybridge community once home to the Beatles, Tom Jones and other pop celebrities. The domed glass roof—a deliberate echo, I assumed, of the Metro-Centre—resembled an observatory open to the heavens, but the only star ever watched by David Cruise was himself.
The house was a substantial Tudorbethan pile, its rooms large enough to serve as squash courts, furnished like an out-of-season hotel. In an office next to the cloakrooms the day staff negotiated the fees for Cruise’s charity engagements and dealt with his fan mail. As soon as we arrived, Cruise scanned his faxes and emails, then led me through the empty rooms to the swimming pool, where we lay back in sun loungers beside the bar. Two docile Filipina girls served us breakfast—pawpaw, coffee and lamb cutlets—but Cruise was more interested in his large vodka.
I watched him settle his fleshy body in the lounger, white tuxedo and ruffed shirt well displayed. As we walked through the rooms of this mansion he had seemed bored by it, and vaguely suspicious of what was supposed to be his own home, aware that it was little more than a stage set.
Despite myself, I rather liked him. He discounted his own success, and was searching for some kind of certainty in his life, though his entire career was built on illusion and a set of emotional three-card tricks. His manner was overbearing, but he was deeply insecure and forever manipulating me into flattering him.
Meanwhile I decided to carry out an experiment, my last attempt to spring loose from the web of conspiracies that was responsible for killing my father. So far I had achieved almost nothing, playing the amateur detective who blundered into danger, perpetually dazed by the doors slammed in his face.
But in one area I was a complete professional, in that electric realm where advertising and popular taste met and fused. Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career. At Brooklands there were no ethics committees to keep an eye on me, no strategy meetings forever urging caution, and no ambitious wife waiting for me to make a mistake. If I could change the mental ecology of this uneasy Surrey town, and release the wayward energies of its people, I might penetrate the polite conspiracies that held them down, and find why my father had died so pointlessly.
For the moment, at least, I had made my first valuable ally. David Cruise was the most important person I had met in Brooklands, and one of the few who was ready to talk. He seemed vulnerable, eyeing me cannily over his vodka, as if he felt that the Metro-Centre bomb was aimed at him. This cable presenter, housewives’ pin-up and local ombudsman probably lacked a single friend.
I remembered leaving the Brooklands circuit with him. As we sat in the rear seat of the Lincoln, I had told him that my father had visited the racetrack as a boy. Almost without thinking, Cruise reached out and gripped my hand, sealing a comradeship fused in the fire of terrorism. And for all his blandness, a personality as soft and depthless as a TV commercial, he had stood up to Tony Maxted and Sangster, refusing to play their game.
‘I ADMIRE YOUfor turning them down,’ I told him as the Filipina girls drifted silently between us, taking away the breakfast trays. ‘They were offering you the keys to the kingdom.’
‘Or Guildford Prison.’ Cruise lightly touched the tiny bottom of the older Filipina. ‘They had everything set up, the crowd going wild, the follow-up bomb, a complete circus. They wanted me screaming from a balcony. A suburban dictator based at the Metro-Centre—can you imagine it?’
‘I can. Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating—too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’
‘That was the idea.’ Cruise studied his empty glass, as if in mourning for the first drink of the day. ‘Kill a few people and everyone thinks they’ve had a good time. Not for me—it’s always safer to stick to what you know nothing about. In my case, sport and home improvements. Forget about right-wing cliques hiding behind their family crests.’
‘I have. But the groundswell was still there. I could feel it in the crowd. They wanted you to lead them. You’re the figurehead who stands in everyone’s mind for the Metro-Centre. You keep the supporters’ clubs on their toes, you can say what everyone secretly feels about immigrants and asylum seekers. You’re the star in every housewife’s dreams . . .’
‘Too much me . . . that’s the problem. I have to carry the whole Metro-Centre.’ Cruise lay back, eyes lowered, lips forming and reforming a series of half-smiles, the signal that he was about to be sincere. ‘Listen, Richard—you have to understand. I’m a fake.’
‘Come on . . .’
‘No. I play a role. I’m still an actor, I act being a sports commentator. Do I know anything about sports? Between you and me, almost nothing. I’ve never sliced a tee shot, never potted a black, never scored a try or missed a penalty.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘No. In fact, it’s a help. The best commentators know nothing about sport. Their commentaries are the kind that viewers would give. “He’s playing a straight bat, she’s concentrating on winning . . .” Bloody silly. I’m in the looking-glass business, I give the public the kind of face they want to see in the bathroom mirror when they get up. Someone who shares their boredom and tells them a visit to the Metro-Centre is the answer to all their problems.’