but classy on the wall. Part of it was in view in the camera on the laptop – he had checked carefully. On the other side you could see an orchid. The orchid looked real, but it was a fake. The office was a fake. Anderson Price Associates was a fake, Mark Price was a fake. Only his Rolex was real.
He wasn’t in an office in London, he was in a static caravan in a field on the East Coast. His ‘other office’, as he thought of it. It was only half a mile inland and sometimes the screaming gulls threatened to spoil the illusion that he was in London.
He turned off the recording of Office Ambience Sounds, switched off the lights, locked up the caravan and climbed into his Land Rover Discovery. Time to go home. He could almost taste the Talisker that his wife would have waiting for him.
The Battle of the River Plate
And there’s the Ark Royal, keeping a good distance from the enemy …
There were a couple of quiet explosions – pop-pop-pop. The noise of tinny gunfire competing unsuccessfully with the gulls wheeling and screeching overhead.
Oh, and the Achilles has taken a hit, but luckily she has been able to contact the Ark Royal, who is racing to her aid …
‘Racing’ wasn’t quite the word that Jackson would have used for the rather laboured progress the Ark Royal was making across the boating lake in the park.
And here come the RAF bombers! Excellent shooting, boys! Let’s hear it for the RAF and the escorts …
A rather weak cheer went up from the audience as two very small wooden planes jerked across the boating lake on zip wires.
‘Jesus,’ Nathan muttered. ‘This is pathetic.’
‘Don’t swear,’ Jackson said automatically. It was pathetic in some ways (the smallest manned navy in the world!), but that was the charm of it, surely? The boats were replicas, the longest twenty foot at most, the others considerably less. There were park employees concealed inside the boats, steering them. The audience was sitting on wooden benches on raked concrete steps. For an hour beforehand an old-fashioned kind of man had played old-fashioned kind of music on an organ in a bandstand and now the same old-fashioned man was commentating on the battle. In an old-fashioned kind of way. (‘Is this ever going to end?’ Nathan asked.)
Jackson had come here as a kid once himself, not with his own family (when he had a family) – they never did anything together, never went anywhere, not even a day-trip. That was the working class for you, too busy working to have time for pleasure, and too poor to pay for it if they managed to find the time. (‘Didn’t you hear, Jackson?’ Julia said. ‘The class war’s over. Everyone lost.’) He couldn’t remember the circumstances – perhaps he had come here on a Scouts outing, or with the Boys’ Brigade, or even the Salvation Army – the young Jackson had clung to any organization going in the hope of getting something for free. He didn’t let the fact that he was brought up as a Catholic interfere with his beliefs. He had even signed the Pledge at the age of ten, promising the local Salvation Army Temperance Society his lifelong sobriety in exchange for a lemonade and a plate of cakes. (‘And how did that work out for you?’ Julia asked.) It was a relief when he eventually discovered the real Army, where everything was free. At a price.
‘The Battle of the River Plate,’ Jackson told Nathan, ‘was the first naval battle of the Second World War.’ One of his jobs as a father was to educate, especially on his specialist subjects – cars, wars, women. (‘Jackson, you know nothing about women,’ Julia said. ‘Exactly,’ Jackson said.) Nathan met any information conveyed to him by either rolling his eyes or appearing to be deaf. Jackson hoped that, somehow or other, his son was unconsciously absorbing the continual bombardment of advice and warnings that his behaviour necessitated – ‘Don’t walk so close to the edge of the cliff. Use your knife and fork, not your fingers. Give up your seat on the bus.’ Although when did Nathan ever go anywhere on a bus? He was ferried around like a lord. Jackson’s son was thirteen and his ego was big enough to swallow planets whole.
‘What do they mean – “manned”?’ Nathan said.
‘There are people inside the boats, steering them.’