The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe Page B

the large party which had just arrived for dinner. Were they guests at the hotel? The receptionist checked her register and told him that they were members of something called the Association of British People, and they were holding a training conference and would be there for the whole weekend. Bill listened to this information impassively. He was silent for a few moments, then remembered to say thank you to the woman behind the desk. When he returned to Miriam, his face was transformed, marked by some grim new knowledge.
    ‘What is it?’ Miriam asked. ‘What’s the matter?’
    Bill took her arm and led her towards the stairs. ‘The bastard’s a fascist,’ he said.
    Post-coitally, they lay side by side in the centre of the bed, their bodies pressed tightly together, Bill’s hairy, white, thirty-nine-year-old legs bristling against the smoothness of Miriam’s newly waxed calf and thigh. They lay like this not for the sake of intimacy, but because their double mattress sagged heavily in the middle, and gave them no choice in the matter. For preference, they would have been lying with a foot or two of space between them. They had made love effortfully, mechanically, neither of them feeling like it, but both knowing that this whole disastrous excursion would seem even more of a fiasco if they didn’t at least go through the motions. And now, while they remained physically conjoined, their thoughts had already begun to run along separate paths.
    ‘You don’t understand what these people are about,’ Bill was saying. ‘At least with Enoch Powell you’ve got some thought behind it, something you can argue with. Christ, even the National Front’s got an ideology. Of sorts. But these people… It’s just an instinct with them. It’s just hatred. Hatred and violence.’
    ‘D’you think he saw us?’ Miriam raised herself on one elbow, her thick brown hair falling across one shoulder. Bill couldn’t help but run his finger along her skin, the immaculate softness of it. ‘D’you think Mr Slater saw us?’
    ‘I don’t know, love. I just don’t know.’ He laughed, contemptuously. ‘Did you ever see such a bunch of wimps, eh? Such a bunch of bloody runts. No wonder they have to get other people to do their dirty work for them. And as for that… harridan! Did you ever see anything like her?’
    ‘What would you do, though?’ Miriam persisted. ‘I mean, if he saw us, if he spread it all over the factory, if Irene found out about it – what would you do?’
    ‘He didn’t see us,’ said Bill. ‘I saw him – that’s more to the point. So now I know. Now I know who’s been spreading that stuff around. Those stupid bloody leaflets.’
    ‘It probably doesn’t matter, anyway,’ said Miriam, her voice far-off, dreamlike: until it suddenly acquired a sharper tone. ‘I think there’s someone who knows already.’
    Bill looked up. ‘Eh?’
    ‘In fact I know there is. Mr Gibbs, from the Charity Committee.’ She watched him, hoping, apparently, to see some sign of panic, or surprise. When there was none, she said: ‘Doesn’t that worry you?’
    ‘Oh, I know all about Gibbs. In fact, we had words about it this afternoon.’
    ‘Words? What sort of words?’
    Bill shook his head, skirting the question. ‘He’s a little sod, that one. An interfering little bastard. What’s it to him, anyway? Why can’t a bloke like that mind his own business?’
    ‘Because he’s got it in for me,’ said Miriam. She lay back against the pillow, her arms folded behind her head. The pose was languid, provocative. It was somehow as if she relished the subject, took an almost sensual pleasure in it. ‘He hates me, you know. He hates me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.’
    ‘What?’ said Bill, shaken this time. ‘When was this?’
    ‘Oh, months and months ago. He came up to me in the committee room one evening, after you’d all gone home, and he asked me out for a drink. I said, No thank you – politely, you