Glenn Patterson - Gull

The man’s expression changed. He tossed his copy of her application (the second one she had sent away for) on to the table and locked his hands behind his head. Maybe he thought he was a film director. Maybe he thought this was a couch she was sitting on.

‘That’s as good a reason as I have heard all day, all week in fact.’

‘Then there is the engine, of course,’ she said.

‘The engine makes you smile too?’

‘It intrigues me. The position of it, behind the rear wheels, same as the Corvair and the Porsche 356.’

The man unlocked his hands and sat forward again, picking up the application. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get the impression reading this that you were interested in cars.’

‘I’m not, or at least I didn’t used to be. I’m interested in getting a job.’

‘You had it for me on the “smile”.’

‘I know.’ She gave him one in real time, but not for long. ‘But I didn’t want it on the “smile” alone.’

The other American, the younger one, who had stared at her almost as though he knew her when she came in, made a noise, a snort, she was almost sure, that he tried to pass off as a sneeze. ‘Pardon me.’ He reached forward for his water glass.

The older man cleared his throat. ‘Yes, well, thank you, Elizabeth.’

‘Liz,’ she said.

‘Of course: Liz.’

*

Randall watched her go. He wanted to say something, he didn’t know what. (‘I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable, staring, you remind me of a woman I wish I had slept with’? ‘I’m sorry if I nearly laughed, you remind me of myself , many years ago, going for an interview’?) Instead as soon as the door was shut Bennington beside him covered his eyes with his hands. ‘I must have looked an ass there, but that line of hers, it completely threw me, and then when she started talking about the engine…’

The engine. That totally unforeseen thing that DeLorean had said in the wake of the election was all that could knock the production schedule off course.

Bill Collins had designed the car with a Wankel rotary in mind — no piston engine came close in terms of simplicity and reliability. DeLorean had seemed to concur, even though as things stood there was no realistic prospect of its running on lead-free gas, an ambition carried over from the Safety Vehicle days. As the months passed, though, and the trials progressed, he began to have concerns too about the Wankel’s poor fuel economy. It was bad enough not delivering on one of their promises, a car that was kinder to the planet, but not delivering on a second of them by producing a car that hit owners in the pocket as well…?

An engine like the V6, on the other hand, would not only be adaptable down the line to lead-free, but would have the double advantage in the present of being cheaper for the consumer and for the company, which could buy them ready-made from Peugeot. Collins was quick to point out the obvious disadvantage, present and future: weight. The V6 was heavier by far than the Wankel, on which all the calculations up to now had been based. He had put it through its paces at the workshop DeLorean had established in Coventry, England, while the Dunmurry factory was being built and reported back: it wasn’t going to work, their Elastic Reservoir Moulded frame wouldn’t be able to carry the V6. They were going to have to revert to the Wankel or find another alternative.

Well, something was going to have to be rethought, DeLorean said, that was for certain sure.

The words ‘Lotus’ and ‘Colin Chapman’, which had already been in the air for some time — since the days of Geneva and GPD — began to crop up now with ever greater frequency in meetings and memos.

His name might not have been so obviously displayed — a tangle of initials on the company crest was all — but Lotus was as much Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman (to account for those initials in full) as DMC was John DeLorean. He had built his first car single-handedly in a garage in London at the tail end of the forties — while DeLorean was still playing clarinet in the Lawrence Tech band — and graduated from there, a class of one, to selling kits to other enthusiasts, and from there in a handful of years to managing his own Formula 1 racing team. Lotus was not just a company, it was a lifestyle. There were Lotus umbrellas, Lotus jackets and hats, and who knew what else. James Bond had driven a Lotus in his most recent movie — a fact that DeLorean had repeated several times to Randall. ‘That’s what you would want: your car in a movie. Can you imagine the sales from that? You couldn’t build enough of them.’

Randall had met Chapman not long after the announcement of the Dunmurry factory, by chance, or so it had seemed at the time, just coming into a first-class lounge at Heathrow as Randall and DeLorean left the side room they had booked for a meeting, DeLorean’s schedule on that occasion not allowing him to come as far as Belfast.

The man could not have been more English if he had come in kit form himself (albeit a little scaled down — DeLorean was a good ten inches taller): Michael Caine hair, David Niven moustache, BBC-newsreader accent, an air, if not quite of entitlement then at least of expectation that all things in time could be bent to his will. He had a big house — a ‘Hall’, Ketteringham — in Norfolk: five hundred years old, by all accounts. There were workshops in the stables and outbuildings, a superstitious nod perhaps to his kit-car origins, although the main assembly these days was done a couple of miles away at Hethel, on the site of a decommissioned American airbase (something of a theme it seemed with start-up auto manufacturers).

All this Randall learned from DeLorean who visited Ketteringham, and Hethel, with Bill Collins, a few weeks after that Heathrow encounter, Chapman himself piloting the helicopter that picked them up from central London.

‘You have to hand it to the Brits,’ he told Randall on his stopover in Belfast the following afternoon. ‘They know how to do these things properly.’

Lotuses were the cars DeLorean would have built if he had been born in Richmond, Surrey, instead of Detroit, Michigan.

Collins had said little then, even less when the Geneva company was set up with a view to funding a joint research and development unit, housed ‘for the time being’ in Hethel. It was from that quarter that the suggestion came to abandon the Elastic Reservoir Moulded frame in favour of a solid steel chassis strong enough to cope with the V6 engine. Something like the Lotus Esprit’s chassis, say.

DeLorean said they were bound to give the matter proper consideration. Modifications would have to be made, of course, a new prototype built, which would inevitably lead to delays in the production schedule, but if it meant savings in the long term then to dismiss it out of hand would be beyond foolish, it would be ‘asinine’. (The word was a new favourite.) Collins remained silent.

When, however, a short time after that Chapman again floated the idea of ditching the remaining ERM elements and using instead a body moulding system that he had patented — Vacuum Assisted Resin Injection — Collins finally flipped. At the rate things were going all that would be left soon of their original concept was the stainless steel panels and the gull-wing doors. ‘I love the Esprit,’ was the line that fed back to Randall from the showdown in the offices on Park Lane, ‘but I didn’t join DeLorean Motor Cars to build Lotuses in drag.’

And with that ended the relationship that had started the whole ball rolling. But on the ball rolled anyway.

More and more the focus shifted to Norfolk. Chuck was serving four days of his seven-day-a-week sentence there. If he could have figured out a way to conjure up an eighth day, Randall didn’t doubt he would have spent it there too.