elegates are reminded that their duty is to follow debates and cast votes on behalf of their members. However appealing the bars, caf¨¦s, fringe meetings, gossip sessions and members of your gender of choice, the conference hall is where you should be. We know it can be boring; we even know of delegates who prefer hanging around at Standing Orders Sub-Committee rather than staying in the hall. In the interests of preserving your SOS members' sanity, please do not attend our sessions unless you are entitled to a voice [see SO5(b)(ii) and Footnote xiv]. Flattered though we are to be the centre of delegates' attention, this does not help the smooth flow of conference order papers!"

from "Advice for New Delegates,"

a Standing Orders Sub-Committee booklet.

Lindsay sighed. In spite of sitting up past midnight ploughing through the final conference agenda, with all its proposed amendments, she still hadn't a clue what this discussion was about. She was sitting on the margin of a group of a dozen delegates arguing with Brian Robinson, the Standing Orders Subcommittee member responsible for preparing the industrial relations order-paper.

As Brian wiped his perspiring pink face with a flamboyant silk handkerchief, Ian leaned over and said quietly to Lindsay, "With it so far?"

"Not really," she admitted. "What exactly are they arguing about?"

"Manchester Branch and Darlington Branch have both submitted motions on the same broad topic, and Brian wants to amalgamate them into one composite motion. Now they're each arguing about what they think their motion really said. Brian has to make sure they end up with something that includes all of the key points in the two original motions, without incorporating anything that wasn't there to start with."

Lindsay shook her head. "I can't believe grownups think this is a reasonable way to spend their time," she muttered. "It's like an Oxford tutorial without the relevance to real life." She tried to concentrate on the obscure negotiation that continued like some quaint ritual dance whose meaning was lost in the sands of time. But it was no use. There wasn't enough meat in the argument to occupy her mind, and her grief kept butting in like an anarchist at the trooping of the colour. After another half hour, she leaned toward Ian and muttered, "I'm going to get some air."

She emerged into the foyer of the Winter Gardens with a sense of relief. The large committee room had begun to feel unreasonably oppressive. Oblivious to her surroundings, she wandered down toward the stands of the assorted pressure groups who had rented space for the conference. She didn't notice the chipped tiling on the walls, the scruffy paintwork, or the garish posters for the forthcoming summer attractions. She paused long enough to buy an enamelled metal badge proclaiming "Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners" before walking back into the stuffy hall to rejoin her colleagues.

No one glanced at her as she slipped into her seat. Only five others of the twelve-strong delegation from her branch were at the table. One of them was fast asleep, head pillowed on his arms. Another two were reading the morning papers. That left two who actually seemed to be following the debate. Lindsay shook her head. For weeks, every chapel meeting had been dominated by the impending annual conference. They had discussed their attitudes to motions, the importance of driving through certain policies, the crucial impact of decisions taken here in Blackpool. She'd spent the first morning taking notes on the debates and the results of the votes, until she had realised that she couldn't see another soul in the hall doing anything with a pen except the Telegraph crossword. She could only assume that the real politicking was going on elsewhere, perhaps in those tight huddles that seemed to spring up all over the place every quarter of an hour or so. As she looked around, Lindsay spotted one of her own delegation coming away from a group clustered around the platform.

Lindsay watched Siobhan Carter, a feature writer on the Sunday Trumpet, weave through the delegation tables and wondered how long it would be before she understood what the hell was going on around her. Siobhan seemed to fit in perfectly, yet it was only her second time at conference. She flopped into the seat next to Lindsay and fanned herself with an order-paper.

"Whew! It might only be the second day of conference, but there's already enough scandal going the rounds to keep a clutch of gossip columnists going for a month."

"Is that what you've been doing? Gossiping?" Lindsay asked.

Ignoring the note of censure in her voice, Siobhan giggled. "What else? You surely don't expect me to listen to this boring load of crap?"

"I thought that's what we were here for," Lindsay said.

"What? To die of boredom listening to some obscure, incomprehensible motion that's only relevant to television journalists in the Republic of Ireland? No way! Listen, Linds, you stick with me. I'll keep you on track. I'll tell you when you need to be listening, okay? Trust me. I once screwed a doctor!"

Lindsay looked dubious. "I don't know, I feel guilty if I don't get involved."

"Fine. Get involved. But stick to the stuff that's got something to do with you. I mean, tell me the truth. Did you enjoy SOS?"

Lindsay pulled a face. "Enjoy. Now, there's a word. You'd need to have a mind more twisted than a corkscrew to get off on Standing Orders. I had to get out before my brain blew a fuse."

"Exactly. You're getting the idea. And you missed a wonderful bit of goss while you were gone," Siobhan said eagerly, completely ignoring the passionate debate on the platform about whether the union's perennially troubled finances could stretch to a major publicity campaign in Eire. Siobhan wasn't the only one, Lindsay realised, glancing round the hall. She reckoned that less than ten percent of the delegates even knew which motion was under discussion. Why should she join yet another minority group?

"Tell me," she asked, putting Siobhan out of her obvious misery. "What have I missed?"

"You know Jess, don't you? Jess Nimmo, from Magazine Branch?"

"How could I not?" Lindsay said with feeling, recalling the braying upper-class voice that had dominated every meeting of the JU Women's Caucus that she'd ever attended. "She thinks consensus is a head count the government takes every ten years."

"And you know Rory Finlayson, the Glasgow Broadcasting Branch heart-throb?" Lindsay nodded. Everyone knew ITN's Scottish correspondent, who gazed lovingly out of their TV screens several times a week on News At Ten. It was obvious to anyone who had ever encountered Rory in the flesh that his biggest fan was himself.

"Well, Jess has been trying to get into Rory's knickers for a million years now, just like half the other women in the country. And in spite of throwing herself under his feet at every available opportunity, she'd never managed to get him to pay her the slightest bit of attention."

"I suppose she's no competition if there's a mirror around."

Siobhan giggled. "Nice one. Anyway, last night she finally cracked it. They left the bar together about one, and they were last seen canoodling in the lift. End of scene one. Scene two. About half an hour later, Paul wakes up to the sound of someone banging on his door." Siobhan gestured with her head in the direction of their delegation leader, branch chairman Paul Home, the thirty-something social policy editor of The Watchman, who was one of the handful absorbed in the debate.

"So he gets up and opens the door," Siobhan paused for effect.

"Yeah?" Lindsay urged her.

"And there, wearing nothing but a parka, is Jess. 'I went for a pee, and now I can't remember what room Rory's in,' she wails and marches past Paul into his room. He's completely bewildered by this apparition, and by the time he gets his head together and follows her into the room, she's helped herself to his bed, the parka's on the floor, and she's telling him he's got the choice of climbing in beside her or finding Rory."

Lindsay's mouth fell open. "You're kidding!"

"It gets better, believe me. It turns out she's not even had a legover with the man of her dreams, so she's in an absolutely filthy mood. Poor Paul ends up getting dressed, going down to reception, finding out what room Rory's in, trekking back up there and knocking on Rory's door. Rory, of course, is spark out in a drunken stupor by this time, so he doesn't answer his door. And by the time Paul gets back to his room, Jess is comatose in his bed. He can't even go and take over Jess's room because, of course, her keys are in her handbag in Rory's room. So poor old Paul ends up spending the night in his armchair while Jess snores in his bed."

"She doesn't snore, does she?" Lindsay asked, glancing over at the Magazine Branch table where Jess sat, immaculate in a sweater so baggy and shapeless it had to have a designer label, black leggings, and ankle boots. "I bet she's even more pissed off about people knowing that than she is about missing a legover with the fabulous Finlayson."

Siobhan giggled again. Lindsay had a feeling she was going to become very fed up of that giggle by the end of the week. "You're not kidding. By the way, how's Ian? Has he recovered from discovering the new love of Laura's life?"

While she enjoyed the sharp savour of gossip about people she either disliked or knew only by reputation, Lindsay was less keen to dissect the private life of a friend as close as Ian. "He seems fine," she said stiffly.

Either Siobhan didn't notice, or else she was in investigative journalist mode. "He must have been pretty demoralised to find he'd been replaced by a golden retriever. I thought at first it must be a guide dog. I mean, there must have been something wrong with her eyesight, fancying Ian enough to have lived with him all these years."

"That's the trouble with you feature writers," Lindsay said. "You're all so superficial. Image, image, image, that's all that excites you. It takes a news reporter to penetrate below the surface and discover the truth." It was an old argument, but none the less attractive. It had the advantage of shifting the conversation away from Ian, and it kept the two women occupied until the end of the order paper.

"Coming for a drink?" Siobhan asked as they shuffled their papers together.

"Tom Jack's speaking at a fringe meeting," Lindsay replied, thinking that answered the question.

Siobhan looked horrified, then her face relaxed into a grin. "I keep forgetting it's your first time," she said patronisingly. "I bet you still think fringe meetings are a vital part of conference business."

"They aren't?"

"They're a distraction from the serious business of drinking and socialising," Siobhan told her. "Come on, let's go and have a hair of the dog. Whoops, remind me not to say that to Ian!" She giggled.

"Thanks, but no thanks. He's talking about how workforces cope when they get bought up by media buccaneers. Since we're still reeling from being taken over by Carnegie Wilson, I feel obliged to go and see what Union Jack's got to say for himself. God knows, he's said little enough at the meetings in the office."

Siobhan winked. "Say no more. I can read between the lines. You want to find out what he's not been telling you guys, then you can slip a banana skin under the sexist pig at your next meeting."

Before Lindsay could deny it, Siobhan had slipped away. With a sigh, Lindsay headed for the committee room. She still felt she had a duty to the colleagues she was supposed to represent. Like the rest of them, Lindsay was worried about her future following their recent invasion by the New Zealand media tycoon. As well as being the senior JU official at Nation Newspapers, Union Jack headed the loose federation of the seven different unions represented there. If anyone could speak from experience about the implications of take-overs, it was him.

The meeting had attracted a large crowd, unlike the previous lunchtime's meeting where six women had gathered to hear a talk on "Media Language and Gender Bias." Not surprisingly, more journalists were concerned about potential damage to their pay packets than about the pursuit of equality. By the time Lindsay arrived, all the seats in the small committee room were taken. She slipped down the side of the room and leaned against the wall near the front. Union Jack leaned against the edge of a table facing the room. Shanti Gupta, one of the two candidates running for JU vice-president, was already introducing the meeting, her strong voice rising above the desultory chatter of the audience.

"Brothers and sisters, I don't need to remind you of the dangers we face at the hands of asset strippers and fast-buck merchants who pin their dreams of profit to the rise of new technology at the expense of the health and welfare of their workers," she said, scarcely pausing for breath.

"Tom Jack, the National Executive member for national newspapers, has recently had firsthand experience of negotiating with one of the new breed of newspaper proprietors, the profit pirates, the men who care more about the bottom line on their balance sheets than they do about their readers. We can all learn from the experiences of Nation Newspapers, and there's no one better equipped to teach us than Tom." Shanti stepped back and gestured towards Union Jack. "Over to you, Tom," she said, sitting down behind the table.

Tom Jack pushed himself upright and fixed the audience with his burning brown eyes. His thick brown hair was brushed back from his high forehead, and his full beard almost obscured the collar of his Tattersall-check shirt and the knot of his tweed tie. He looked slowly round the room, as if committing every face to memory, slotting them into his mental filing cabinet till he was ready to take them out, scrutinise them, temper them in the fire, and lead them to glory like some irresistible nineteenth-century zealot. He thrust one hand into the pocket of his moleskin trousers and started to speak. His voice was deep, intense, and unmistakably Yorkshire.

"Colleagues," he intoned. "We're facing the biggest threat to our journalistic livelihoods that I can remember. I know you've heard that before and probably from me, but nevertheless, I'm not a man given to crying wolf. Shanti here has raised the spectre of new technology, and I'm here to tell you that the combination of Tory government policies, new technology, and proprietors who understand nothing of the proud traditions of British newspapers could mean the end of our working world as we have known it. All the benefits we have struggled to bring our members could be lost like that"-he snapped his fingers like the crack of ice hitting gin-"unless we pick our ground carefully and fight to win."

The speech continued in predictable vein. The audience was exhorted to hold firm to its hardwon agreements on pay, conditions, and redundancy; to stand up to their new proprietors and show them who really ran the newspapers; and not to concede so much as a matchstick of dead wood to new technology. The rounds of spontaneous applause that greeted Union Jack's cries to arms astonished Lindsay. It was a long way away from the stony silence that he'd had to face when he returned to office meetings with news of yet more concessions that Carnegie Wilson's henchmen had wrung out of him. It was easy to see there weren't many Daily Nation staff members at the meeting.

With an unobtrusive glance at his watch, Tom Jack wound up. "At the end of the day, we're the ones with the ink in our veins. We know how newspapers work. Carnegie Wilson made his millions out of butchering sheep, and he's found out the hard way that we're no lambs to the slaughter. Carnegie Wilson and his like have to bow the knee to us, because without us, newspapers can't exist. We have to remember, colleagues. They'll never invent a machine that can knock on doors or comfort a grieving widow. They'll never invent a machine that can persuade governments to change the law. Whatever the Carnegie Wilsons of this world would like to think their fancy computers can do, we have to remind them again and again, day in and day out, that without us, they have nothing to show for their millions of pounds of investments."

It was a rousing finish, and some people even stood as they applauded Union Jack. Lindsay looked around and noticed with interest that Ian Ross and a handful of other Daily Nation journalists had not joined in the frenzy of applause. Tom held his hands up in the air, accepting the plaudits. As the applause continued, she remembered a rumour Ian had mentioned in the car. The JU's long-serving National Newspaper Officer had suffered his second major heart attack the day before conference began. The word was he would be offered early retirement and the obvious man to step into his shoes was Tom Jack. He'd filled every significant post open to part-time lay officials. There was nowhere left for his ambition to go unless he moved into a full-time paid official's job that could lead one day to the top job of them all-general secretary. Lindsay wondered if she'd just heard the first speech in an election campaign.

Tom sat down next to Shanti, who patted him on the shoulder as the applause finally died away. "I know some of you may have questions for Tom," she said. "We have ten minutes left..."

A couple of the audience had clearly been primed with questions that managed to make Tom look even more statesmanlike than his speech already had. Disgruntled, Lindsay pushed herself away from the wall and stuck her hand up. Shanti nodded to her, after a quick glance at Tom, whose eyebrows lifted in acquiescence. Clearly he expected no trouble from one of his own flock.

"What advice can Tom offer to other chapel officials to help them avoid losing the ground we at Nation Newspapers have already lost? I refer specifically to the fifty percent reduction in maternity leave, the cut in holidays from eight weeks to seven, the ending of time off in lieu for overnight stays away from base, and the freezing of expense allowances at 1982 levels." She could see Tom's eyes narrow and his thick eyebrows descend, but she carried on. "As far as I'm concerned, that is a lot more than the thin end of the wedge."

Tom was on his feet, all traces of his momentary anger gone. His voice was conciliatory, aimed at the expressions of uncertainty that had appeared on the faces of some of his audience. "Colleagues, Lindsay's making a point here that none of you can afford to ignore. And that point is that even with a strong chapel and experienced negotiators, you have to give a little ground. But against that, we have to weigh the fact that I personally sat across the table from Carnegie Wilson and persuaded him to drop his plans for ten percent redundancies across the board at Nation Newspapers. We also now have a deal that no element of new technology will be introduced without a fully negotiated agreement between management and workforce." He was blustering now, desperately trying to make it look as if he hadn't rolled over like the lap-dog Lindsay suspected he was. She could imagine only too well the "good old boys" atmosphere of the negotiations, and the amount of alcohol that had flowed to ensure good working relationships.

As he carried on trying to win his audience back, Lindsay pushed herself away from the wall and walked out in disgust. Her departure made her point more forcefully than her words, but she was past caring about the effect. She wandered back toward the main concourse, desperately wishing Frances was only a phone call away.

She had reached the door of the conference hall when she was stopped by a member of the JU Women's Caucus, canvassing support for some motion or other. Absently, Lindsay listened to the familiar litany, nodding non-committally when some response seemed to be called for. She was shocked back to full attention by a heavy hand clamped on her shoulder and Tom Jack's voice in her ear. "Just whose side are you on, Lindsay Gordon?" he asked menacingly.

Lindsay looked over her shoulder. Tom was flanked by a handful of his sidekicks. Ian was hovering on the edges of the bunch, trying to work his way round to her. She spoke softly, so her words wouldn't carry farther than their small group. "Keeping the truth from people doesn't solve anything, Tom," she said wearily. "It tends to filter through in the end. Then what people will remember is that you bullshitted them over your deal with Wilson." She would have said more, but Ian put a warning hand on her arm.

"You're too bloody smart by half. You should remember whose side you're on. Leave playing devil's advocate to that fancy lawyer you're shacked up with. You've been spending too much time listening to Miss Frances Collier."

Lindsay felt suddenly light-headed. Tom Jack's mouth carried on moving, but she could hear nothing. It was as if a glass bubble had enclosed her, cutting her off from the world around her. Without a word, she pulled away from his restraining grip and pushed through the group of men behind him.

As she began to run down the hall, the wall of silence shattered, and she heard Ian Ross shout at Tom Jack, "You stupid, insensitive bastard. You're about as out of touch as you're out of order. Don't you know anything about your chapel members? Frances Collier died six weeks ago. How could you not know that?"