• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Who’s your absent friend?’

‘Along any minute. Relax. Still smoking?’

‘Back on them, I’m afraid.’ Thanks to you, I didn’t say.

He passed me a cigarette.

‘How’s Annette?’

‘Fine. Sends her love.’ He didn’t blink.

‘And Eleanor?’

I couldn’t help grinning all over my face. ‘Oh, she’s great. Sulks in her room listening to CDs and reading trash, most of the time, but basically she’s a fine young lass.’

‘Didn’t she want to go to the convention?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘She sort of shrugged when I asked her. Annette wanted to save up holiday time for later in the year, and I think in the end Eleanor preferred to stay with her Mum. I didn’t want to risk taking her along and finding she didn’t really want to go and put her off for life.’

‘Like those demos, eh?’ Reid indulged a reminiscent smile.

I grimaced. ‘Tell me about it…Annette and her “peace-fighting”! When Eleanor was thirteen she tried to join the friggin’ Air Cadets!’

‘What stopped her?’

‘Not us,’ I assured him. ‘Defence cuts.’

The chair to our left was suddenly occupied by a slim middle-aged man, dressed similarly to Reid, with thinning black hair combed back. He briskly picked up the menu and nodded to us both. The contact-lenses in his brown eyes made him blink a lot, as if the air were smoky. I stubbed out my cigarette.

‘Evening, gentlemen.’ He raised his pint and sipped.

‘This is Ian Cochrane,’ Reid said. ‘Works in our legal department. Ian, this is Jonathan Wilde.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Wilde.’ His grip was clammy, perhaps from the condensation on the glass, but his thumb pressure was firm.

‘Jon,’ I said, nodding and wondering abstractedly if the handshake I’d just received was Masonic.

‘I’ve heard a good deal about you, Jon,’ said Cochrane. ‘Most impressed by your article on Brent Spar.’ He caught a waiter’s eye. ‘Shall we order?’

His accent and manner had that Scottish upper-middle-class tone which sounds more British than the English. He ate selectively and talked trivially while Reid and I satisfied our hunger. His second drink was mineral water. At that point his talk ceased to be trivial.

‘“It’s time somebody hammered home to people the difference between the bottom of the North Sea and the bottom of the North Atlantic,”’ he began, quoting my article – a short column in a Sunday paper’s ‘Dissenting Voices’ corner – from memory. ‘“One’s the floor of a seriously polluted larder, which should be cleaned up. The other’s Davy Jones’ Locker…” But nobody’s hammering it home, that’s your point, eh?’

‘Yup,’ I said, scooping up guacamole with a taco fragment. ‘So Greenpeace gets away with murder.’

‘Murder indeed,’ said Cochrane. ‘But who’s going to take the word of an oil company against a bunch of selfless idealists?’

‘Me,’ Reid said.

‘Ah, but you’re not typical, you see,’ Cochrane reminded him. He turned and blinked thoughtfully at me. ‘David, as you probably know, is our IT manager.’ I nodded; I hadn’t known. ‘He attended a meeting of a policy committee where these matters were addressed. We weren’t involved in this Shell fiasco, thank God, but as an insurance company we’re potentially rather exposed to similar situations. One of our senior managers remarked, in passing, that it would be very…conducive to a balanced public debate, if there were a grassroots organisation campaigning for industrial development, instead of against – “A Greenpeace for the good guys”, I think he called it. And the possibility was raised of, ah, materially encouraging an initiative in this direction.’

Reid leaned forward. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Jon, but I said I knew just the man for the job.’ He leaned back. ‘You.’

‘To start an anti-environmentalist organisation?’ I shook my head. ‘They have ’em in the States. “Wise use” and all that. They’re seen as mouthpieces for big business. Sorry, chaps. Not interested.’

Reid’s face showed nothing but polite curiosity.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Ruin my street-cred.’

‘We wouldn’t want you to say anything different from what you’ve said already,’ Cochrane interjected.

‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘You could get all the