The Rotters' Club Read Free Page B

Truce. Armistice.’ He clasped his pint of Brew and raised it solemnly. ‘Equality of opportunity.’
    Colin murmured a shy echo of these words, and drank from his glass. Bill said nothing: as far as he was concerned, the class war was alive and well and being waged with some ferocity at British Leyland, even in Ted Heath’s egalitarian 1970s, but he couldn’t rouse himself to argue the point. His mind was on other things that evening. He put his hand inside his jacket pocket and fingered the cheque and wondered once again if he was going mad.
    *
    Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite Roy Slater along. The thing about Slater was that everybody hated him, including Bill Anderton, who might have been expected to show some solidarity with his putative comrade-in-arms. But Slater was the worst kind of shop steward, as far as Bill was concerned. He had no talent for negotiation, no imaginative sympathy with the men he was supposed to represent, no grasp of the wider political issues. He was just a loudmouth and a troublemaker, always looking for confrontation, and always coming out of it badly. In union terms he was a nobody, way down the hierarchy of the TGWU’s junior stewards at Longbridge. It was all Bill could do to be civil to him, most of the time, and tonight he was expected to do more than that: honour demanded that the two of them put up some sort of united front against these alluring management overtures. It was enough to make him suspect calculation on Jack’s part. What, after all, could be more effective than to divide the opposition by pairing up two shop stewards who famously couldn’t stand each other?
    ‘Bit of all right, this, isn’t it?’ said Roy, nudging Bill fiercely in the ribs as they studied the menus in their red leather wallets. They had adjourned, by now, to a Berni Inn on the Stratford Road.
    ‘Don’t wet yourself, Slater,’ said Bill, taking out his reading glasses. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch in this business, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
    ‘On this occasion,’ said Jack, ‘that’s exactly where you’re wrong. You’re all here as my guests, and you can order anything you like. The tab for this is being picked up by the British Leyland Motor Corporation, so expense is no object. Go for it, chaps. Let your imaginations run wild.’
    Roy ordered fillet steak and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others. As they waited for the food to arrive, Jack tried to instigate a discussion about the marital prospects of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, but it failed to catch fire. Roy seemed to have no strong views on the subject, Bill wasn’t interested (‘Bread and circuses, Jack, bread and circuses’) and Colin’s attention was beginning to wander. He stared out at the night, beyond the car park, into the charcoal distance, the cars winking past on the Stratford Road, and it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Worrying about Ben, and his school nickname? Missing Sheila, and the hiss of the coal-effect fire? Or perhaps longing to go back to those days in the design room, before he had taken this job, this stupid job that had looked like a step up the ladder but turned out to be a nightmare of human complication.
    ‘You know, this won’t work, Jack,’ Bill was saying, his tone friendly but combative, his fifth pint of Brew now having a decidedly mellowing influence. ‘You can’t wipe out social injustice by taking the enemy out for steak and chips every so often.’
    ‘Oh, this is nothing, Bill. This is just the beginning. In a couple of years’ time, employee participation is going to be codified. It’s going to be government policy.’
    ‘Which government?’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t make a blind bit of