The Ice Age Read online

  Anthony was flown out to Chicago, to see the festival. He flew with Giles: the rest of the company had gone ahead, to rehearse. Side by side they sat, conspirators, drinking whisky, for now Giles was host. They discussed what they would do at the end of the year. Giles said: I think there are some interesting possibilities in commercial television.

  So Anthony got a job with the BBC. They were looking for bright undergraduates: in those days, there were more jobs than people.

  It was not at first a very well paid job, and in order to keep Babs and the (then) two children in London, which was even at that time expensive, he used to do other things on the side: sketches, reviews, a little journalism. He was quite successful.

  Giles, meanwhile, like his father before him, diversified. Commercial television, a small publishing company, a radio station, a bookshop, a PR company. He was very successful. But also restless.

  They met from time to time: Giles would call round for a drink and stay all evening, or they would meet by chance in town. Giles brought his wives round, one after the other: in return, Anthony would occasionally introduce Giles to the women friends with whom he would defend himself from Babs, her babies, and her infidelities; for Babs had proved to be the unfaithful type, a maternally spirited woman who could not resist a vulnerable face. Anthony did not like to reflect on how vulnerable he must once have looked himself. He put up with Babs’s boys with a varying grace; Babs was the kind of person it was hard to dislike, impossible to be angry with for long, so desperate was her own need for affection. She knew her children loved her, which was why she wanted more and more children, to multiply and ensure the love: she was never sure of anyone else. Anthony felt guilty about his own infidelities, so he continued to be as kind to her as possible, but the whole life-style proved very expensive: he had to pay for wife and children, for his wife’s lovers (who were usually non-self-supporting), and for his own lovers. His own women were usually girls from the BBC—research workers, actresses, editors; they could well have paid more for themselves, but this, in the early sixties, was not yet the vogue, and Anthony felt obliged to provide dinners, drinks, theater tickets (though luckily he could often get those free).

  It was exhausting; there was little time to think, and when there was any time, he did not like his thoughts. After seven years at the BBC—producing, writing, editing—he too began to get restless. But what did he want? His work was interesting, he supposed: he was, by now, well paid, and it was certainly not the BBC’s fault if he still had to worry about the mortgage. But it occurred to him more and more often that television, although not as dead-end a spot as a mortuary or a launderette, was not endlessly interesting: there was a limit to what could be done in it, and he himself seemed to have reached that limit, rather early in life, being quickwitted and hard-working. He did not want to move through the hierarchy to an administrative grade, for administration bored him, and there was nowhere else to go. Friends of his who had entered the parallel trade of journalism reported similar dissatisfaction: they had reached the top too early, some had even managed to earn startlingly high salaries too early, and from the age of thirty, what remained but a slow or rapid decline into hard drinking and ill health? Slight thoughts of envy were expressed, occasionally, for those who had entered professions with a proper career structure of proper incentives; but it was too late for those.

  It had always been too late.

  So Anthony Keating expressed his dissatisfaction with himself and his life in a predictable manner: he changed his job. He moved from the BBC to ITV, from arts to current affairs, accepting a similar job for marginally better pay. The change stimulated him for a while: new colleagues to impress, new offices, a new canteen, all these had the desired effect of raising morale and enthusiasm, and he had some good new ideas, and launched a successful new current affairs program. He set up some interesting investigations into current swindles and scandals, and was instrumental in the trial by television of some notorious crooks. This gave him a fleeting and superficial feeling that he was being useful to society, but he remained in some way unconvinced by himself, and decreasingly interested by the social evils he was engaged to expose. He would wake up in the middle of the night and think: Is this it? Is what what? In short, he was underemployed, bored, and not at all happy in his relation to his work, his country, or the society he lived in: ripe for conversion, to some new creed. A political creed, but there wasn’t one; a religious creed, but he had had God, along with his father and life in the cathedral close. So what would happen to the vacant space in Anthony Keating? What would occupy it?

  The vacant space was occupied by Len Wincobank; the conversion took place in 1968, while Anthony was watching unedited film of an interview with Len the property whiz kid. He had arranged the interview, had sent one of his own bright young men, Austin Jones, off to Northam to ask Len what he thought he was up to, raping the city centers of Britain and making millions. Austin, an aggressive enough interviewer, had asked all the right questions, and made all the right liberal noises about conservation, planning acts, small tenants, home ownership, and Len had made what seemed at first incriminating and predictable replies: as the film unwound, Anthony mechanically noted which phrases, which shots to cut, which to join together. But when the film had finished, he felt curiously uneasy. He walked up and down the corridor for a while, then went back into the studio and played the rushes again. And it struck him, suddenly, with a dazzling flash: how could he not have noticed it before? The truth was that Len Wincobank was a genius, about ten times as intelligent, ten times as perceptive, ten times as alive as Austin Jones. Austin Jones, in comparison, was a boring somnambulist, a ventriloquist’s dummy, mouthing without conviction or information or even any intelligence the obligatory provocative questions—questions which were based on an utterly false premise, the premise that he and the viewers lived in a society which disapproved of the profit motive and which condemned private enterprise. No wonder, thought Anthony, no wonder I have been so bored and so half-hearted, for so long.

  Elated, illuminated, he played the reels for a third time. Yes, there it all was. If you read the film correctly, with Wincobank as hero and Jones as villain, everything fell into place. He could not, of course, edit it that way: that was not his job. But he went home, thinking seriously for the first time for months. For three weeks, he thought hard, about money and incentive and private and public ownership: then he rang up Len Wincobank and invited him to lunch. Len, understandably a little huffy about the subtle way in which Anthony had contrived to make him look a greedy dishonest monster on the screen, refused.

  Anthony waited another week, then rang again. “Look, I’ve got to talk to you,” he said. “I’m thinking of doing a whole series, on the property boom, a serious series, not just a one-off job like that interview with you. I’m sorry about that, I know you didn’t like it. But I must do the subject justice. I want you to tell me what I ought to do, who I should talk to. Please.”

  Len Wincobank consented. They had lunch. They talked. To Anthony, it was a revelation. Whole vistas opened before him. In fact, the property business had interested him for some time, ever since he had read a gripping account of it in a book called The Property Boom, by Oliver Marriot, a book which had described the excitement and romance of the business in stirring terms, if not in wholly approving ones, and Anthony had noted in himself, while reading it, a certain envy for those who had the wit to prosper so spectacularly and so speculatively. He had not at the time taken his own envy very seriously, not connecting it in any way with himself, but with Len in front of him—Len, in his thirties, Len, with a new idea a minute and a vision of concrete millions, Len, who had not the slightest suspicion that it might be wicked to make money—his knowledge took on a new meaning. Len had borrowed his first thousand from the bank. Len had, like Anthony, lived off his wits, entirely: the difference was that Anthony had never even dreamed of the flights Len Wincobank had achieved. It had never occurred to him to ask h
imself, why not? On the way home, he asked himself, why not? There were some good solid sociological answers to the question, but none so solid that they could not be dissolved in the new sharp solvent spirit of free enterprise.

  That night, he rang Giles Peters with a proposition. Hello, Giles, he said, rather drunkenly (for his new plans had gone to his head), I want to stop being a gentleman and become a businessman.

  What a very sensible plan, said Giles Peters. How are you going to set about it?

  With your help and your finance, said Anthony Keating.

  And that was how Anthony Keating left a reasonably safe salaried job with a pension in television and became a property developer.

  He and Giles and Rory Leggett, an estate agent friend of Giles’s, started quite modestly. They bought a site in South London, conveniently near a projected new tube line. It cost them £70,000, of which they borrowed £65,000. Giles’s name was good for credit, he had excellent contacts in the banking world, and anyway money was easy in those days. On the site stood a small sweets factory, a warehouse (disused), and a small publishing company which had printed travel books (bankrupt). The only going concern was the sweets company, and that was not going very well: it was a small, old-fashioned family firm, the old man wanted to retire, and neither of his sons was interested in the business—Giles, Rory, and Anthony did not have to feel pangs of guilt at removing them, though the old man did wax somewhat sentimental on his last tour of the place before signing the contract. “Confectionery’s not what it was,” he said, predictably. “We’re the biggest sweet-eating nation in the world, did you know that? But people don’t want hand-made sweets, these days. They want everything packaged. Everything American. They only want what they see on the television. They don’t appreciate the individual sweet.”

  Anthony, following him, peered into bins and vats of sugar and treacle, gazed at weird antiquated pieces of machinery that cut slabs of jelly into fishes and stars, stared at trays of toffee, and watched a woman twisting strands of white and brown mint sugar into a long rope of humbug. It was not a highly automated factory. Nobody would want the equipment. “It’s all out of date,” said the old man. “They’re museum pieces, some of these pieces. The end of an age, isn’t it?”

  He seemed surprised that they wanted the site, and accepted their offer without much trouble.

  Anthony found the site inexpressibly romantic and exciting. When the last of the sweetmakers had gone, and all work had stopped forever, he walked around the eminently serious commercial property with immense pride. This, he said to himself, this is ours, this bit of the real world. He had felt only the slightest flicker of excitement at the purchase of his first house, in Shepherd’s Bush, partly because the house itself was so shabby and undesirable, so remote from one’s dream house, partly because the mortgage was so high, partly because he had had to borrow the down payment from his father and Babs’s father, which removed any sense of independent achievement. How much better to owe a Merchant Bank than one’s father-in-law.

  The site was, in fact, very shabby and run-down, but the buildings (which would of course have to come down to make way for offices) were interesting, imposing, curious. The small publisher’s still contained heaps of travel books lying on the floor: guides to Lapland, the Netherlands, the Pennine way. (It was while he was reading an unbound book on the Pennine way that Anthony, in the grip of powerful fantasy, said to himself that he would, when he had made his fortune, buy himself a house in Yorkshire.) The sweets manufacturer had left them his equipment, which had been included, at low cost, in the deal: he also left them various little heaps of sugar fishes and boiled sweets and pear drops. But it was in the warehouse that Anthony made his most interesting discovery. In one corner, in a crate, he found an enormous quantity of pots of anchovy paste, in perfectly good condition, anchovy paste being a more or less everlasting commodity, and a cardboard box full of large balls of string. All in all, these were the most desirable of the acquired assets, though the fishes went down well with the Leggett and Keating children at home.

  There was a large, open, cobbled space in the center of the site, which had a strange look of the countryside about it. Weeds grew up between the stones. There were horseshoes, nailed on the warehouse wall. Once there must have been a stable: no doubt the sweetmaker’s had distributed its sweets a hundred years ago by horsedrawn van. There was even a small tree: an elderberry had managed to root itself between the cobbles. It would be a pity, in a way, to remove this space, though nobody had seen it for decades, except for the handful of people who worked there, but it too would have to go. Anthony was quite relieved when Rory suggested that the local council might find their redevelopment plans more acceptable if they incorporated in them an open area for public use. “We could point out,” said Rory, who knew many developers’ architects and their ways with zoning boards, “that this present area hasn’t been seen or used for years, and we’re going to return to the community a nice patch of open space. With trees.”

  On the architect’s model, the trees eventually appeared as neat little toy trees from toytown. They stood on a green patch. Anthony somehow felt that they would lack the charm of the cobbled yard and the secret elderberry, that the grass would be covered in dog shit, that the trees would be vandalized and killed off even inside their chicken wire protection. But that would not after all be his fault, or the fault of his property company. It would be the fault of the people.

  The council liked Rory’s architect’s plans, granted them a variance, and the old buildings came down. Soon all that was left of the sweets factory was its name, which Anthony, Giles, and Rory inherited along with the empty sugar bins: they became the Imperial Delight Company. It was a satisfactory new identity. And the company prospered. They were easy days. Anthony picked up the business fast. It seemed that they could not fail, could not go wrong: as the site got under way, and the builders succeeded the demolition workers, Anthony scouted tirelessly around, looking for new suitable properties, revisiting Imperial Delight from time to time to reassure himself that the whole enterprise was real, not a mere fantasy. At times it did not seem possible that a mere idea could have become so concrete, that it could be employing so many men, so many cement mixers and bulldozers, so much cement, so many bricks. But there they all were, as evidence.

  London became a changed place to Anthony. Before, he had seen it as a system of roads linking the houses of friends and the places of his employment, with a few restaurants and shops included in his personal map: now he began to see it as a dense and lively forest of possibilities. Whole areas, hitherto neglected, acquired significance. At first Anthony went around dazed by achievements that he had once taken for granted: what genius had assembled the land for Bowater House, for Eastbourne Terrace in Paddington, for soaring Millbank Tower and elegant Castrol House? And who could regret the forgotten buildings these giants had replaced? Even the much-maligned Centre Point of Harry Hyams revealed itself to him in a new light: indeed, he began to remark casually to friends, he had always thought it rather a fine building. But what impressed him most about it was that it was there at all.

  The I.D. Company did not think at once in terms of central properties of huge glamour: their success in Wandsworth led them to look at fringe areas, with potential. Anthony found himself doing most of the looking, for he enjoyed it. The activity made him immensely happy. He had never in his life been so fully committed, so deeply engaged, so deeply interested in what he was doing. He felt at times that he must have spent the rest of his life with a head in a bag, a bag which was taken off only when he got into some nice safe familiar middle-class intellectual interior.

  His finest achievement was the purchase of a gas holding tank—a gasometer. It was not a very expensive gasometer, for the Gas Board had abandoned it some years earlier, on the advent of North Sea Gas, but it was a useful site, which would join very neatly onto a brewer’s yard and an old bomb site, and possibly a whole stretch of river frontage. (Ther
e were still bomb sites to be found, amazingly, in Outer London.) It gave Anthony the most profound joy, to find himself in possession of a gasometer. He had always admired their delicate, airy, elaborately simple structures, and he would drive down to look at his own, for the pleasure of looking at it. It was painted a steely gray-blue, and it rose up against the sky like a part of the sky itself; iron air, a cloud, a mirage, a paradox, defining a space of sky, changing subtly in color as the color of the sky changed. It stood dark and cold, it would catch the pink wash of sunset, it would turn white like a sea gull, it would take upon itself the delicate palest blue against a slate-dark background. It was a work of art. It would have to come down, of course, for who wants an obsolete gasometer? But while it stood, while the I.D. Property Company negotiated for the other parts of the jigsaw, Anthony would gaze upon it with more pride and more wonder than he had ever, in childhood, regarded the cathedral outside his bedroom window, though that cathedral was thought by some to be the finest building in Britain. It thrilled him more to own it than it would have thrilled him to have a Velazquez, a Titian on his wall. A derelict gasometer, radiant with significance. One could see it from miles away, right across the Thames, from some directions. It lifted the heart. Up soared the heart like a bird in the chest, up through its light and airy metal shell, to the changing, so much before unnoticed sky.

  Anthony was better at spotting things than he was at the financial details of transactions. But he trusted Giles and Rory to keep the accounts properly, and his financial grasp improved. It is so much easier to understand one’s own debts than those of the Post Office, or Chrysler’s, or the nation’s. One has so much more reason for trying to understand. Motivation is all, as many a schoolteacher has remarked. In no time Anthony had picked up an impressive store of knowledge about rents and reversions and interest rates and debentures and mortgages. In his previous life, he had never quite grasped why the fluctuation of a quarter of a percent in the bank rate should cause such excitement, and merit such space in the press. Now, he wondered how he could have been so ignorant.