lower half of his face and hide his high forehead and the inner coldness of his eyes. Long ago he had convinced himself that he liked and felt at ease with ordinary people, and the illusion had sustained him.
A brief cascade of sparks flared beyond the north stand of the stadium, a warehouse put to the torch, an insurance scam taking advantage of the night’s fires.
Cruise winced and turned towards his car. ‘Madhouse—looting, arson, broken windows . . . there was a bomb at the Metro-Centre. As if we haven’t got enough problems.’
‘I saw the damage. The police took me into the basement.’
‘You were there? Brave man. They planted the bomb in someone’s car.’
Cruise had reached the Lincoln, where the driver stood by the open passenger door. I decided to take a chance, and said: ‘My car, as it happens.’
‘Your car?’ Cruise paused before getting into his rear seat. He noticed me for the first time, a face in a studio crowd that the director had pinpointed through his earpiece. ‘They blew up your car? Poor man. You must have been shocked.’
‘I was. An old Jensen. Beautiful car: nothing worked, including the rear lock.’
‘Obliterated? Thank God the bomber was killed.’ Cruise pointed to the silent embankment. ‘And that’s why you came here, to the racing circuit. You wanted to hear those engines again. The authentic thing, like your Jensen.’
‘You might be right.’
‘I am right!’ Cruise held my shoulders in a pair of powerful hands, as if comforting a bereaved contestant. ‘I know—that’s why I came. It’s a ruin, but it’s the only part of Brooklands that’s real.’
‘The Metro-Centre is real.’
‘Please . . .’ He took my arm. Deep in thought, he walked me away from the Lincoln. ‘Listen, I’ve seen you before?’
‘Yesterday. Outside the Metro-Centre. You arrived for your afternoon show.’
‘No. Somewhere else. Years ago.’ He stared into my face with the cold eye of a pathologist recognizing a cadaver. ‘You were younger, tougher, more ambitious. Your voice was higher, you ordered me around. God, I needed that job. What business are you in?’
‘Advertising.’
‘That’s it! The crazy Skoda commercial. I played the dangerous driver. Everyone thought it was mad.’
‘It was mad. That was the idea.’
‘My agent warned me not to do it. Too weird, he said. I’d be typecast. Fat chance, I hadn’t worked for a year. It turned out I was too big for the car, they couldn’t see my eyes. But after that I never looked back. My agent was fighting them off. In a way, thanks to you . . . ?’
‘Richard Pearson. You were very good.’
‘No, I was still trying to act. A big mistake in this business. You have to be yourself. That takes a lot of working at. Every one of us is a cast of characters. I told myself I was a director putting on a new play. All these people turn up at the audition, and they’re all me. Some are more interesting than others, some are more real, some can reach your heart. This happens every morning when I wake up. I have to choose, and I have to be ruthless. You understand that.’
‘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 SITTING by 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.
