Authors: David Nobbs
‘Of course. So what are your eight pages about?’
‘Well … you know … setting the scene. Mum. Dad. Wendy Wombat.’
‘Or Wendy the Wombat.’
‘Quite.’
Oh, dear. It’s hardly JK. Rowling.
‘It’s hardly JK. Rowling, is it?’ she said.
He felt impelled to phone Jane. He didn’t know what he would say, but he must say something.
‘Hello, Jane. I’ve seen the paper,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Well, at least you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘They suspect foul play?’
‘That’s all bollocks. Everything they say is bollocks. They don’t
suspect
foul play. They
know
it’s foul play.’
‘Not suicide?’
‘Not unless he plonked a carving knife into the bed of the river – which wasn’t the Ouse, incidentally, just about everything’s inaccurate – at a very shallow point in the river, and then jumped off the bank onto the knife with such precision that it plunged right into the centre of his heart.’
‘Good God.’
‘Yes. I bet the journalist from the news agency who’s spread that story about Braemar and Kettlewell being in trouble is hoping the shares will plummet and he’ll buy lots of them at the bottom and make a fortune.’
‘What a suspicious mind you have, Jane.’
‘I work in that sort of world. I must say I’m relieved it wasn’t suicide. I don’t think I’ve been a very good wife to him, and I certainly haven’t liked him much for a decade or two, but I wouldn’t want to think I helped to drive him to that.’
James noticed that he had begun to stroke his right nipple with his free left hand. He removed the hand. He didn’t know what was going on this morning. First, Marcia’s knees. Now, Jane’s nipple. Because that’s what his nipple had become, in his mind, as he stroked it. He didn’t usually have sudden sexual feelings of this sort.
‘So … how are you?’ he asked. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m disturbingly calm, James. I … the awful thing is … well, I suppose it’s not that surprising really … I just don’t seem to be able to cry.’
‘Jane, I was wondering …’
Marcia lumbered in with bad timing and his ten o’clock coffee. She always made the coffee herself, proudly, saying that the coffee from the machine was terrible. It was, but so was the coffee she made. He had failed to tell her right at the beginning, out of his natural kindness and good manners, and then it had been too late, and he had drunk an unpleasant cup of coffee almost every weekday morning for eight and a half years. He often wondered whether any other Managing Directors behaved like that, and what was wrong with him. He didn’t wonder this now, because he was more concerned that, with a talent worthy of a professional waiter, Marcia had arrived at the very worst moment.
‘Are you still there, James?’
‘Yes, I’m still here. Marcia – she’s my PA – she’s just arrived with my coffee. Thank you, Marcia. Lovely.’
‘There’s a—’ began Marcia.
‘Later, Marcia. Thank you.’
‘Sorry.’
Marcia walked out, inelegantly, and flustered.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said to Jane.
‘You didn’t mention my name.’
‘What?’
‘You said your PA had arrived with your coffee. You didn’t mention my name. You didn’t want Marion to know you were talking to a woman.’
‘Marcia. What a lot you read into things. You always did, I remember.’
‘Anyway, before you were so rudely interrupted, you were wondering.’
‘Yes. Yes. I was wondering, Jane …’ He’d had time, during the interruption, to wonder if he should have been wondering what he’d been wondering. The thought had surprised him very much, but, also somewhat to his surprise, he had decided to go through with it. ‘I was wondering …’ He felt as if he was nineteen again, plucking up courage. ‘… I mean, here we are … you were, you know, my first real girlfriend … OK, very briefly …’
‘Yes, sorry about that.’
‘Here we are, both losing our partner violently in the same week … odd, really.’
‘Not particularly. I did a paper on probability at Cambridge. I had a theory which I called Event Batch Syndrome. I explored the phenomenon whereby similar types of happening tend to occur in clutches.’
‘You always were clever. You’d have been too clever for me. Anyway, here we are, in the same boat …’ Neither of us able to cry, though I’m not going to admit to that. ‘I … I just wondered … I’m taking the rest of the week off … and the family hordes aren’t beginning to muster until Wednesday, the funeral’s Thursday, I wondered if you … fancied lunch tomorrow.’
‘That sounds like an extraordinarily good idea, James.’
The moment he’d put the phone down, he thought that perhaps it wasn’t. He thought that perhaps it was a very bad idea indeed. He’d had no intention of suggesting any such thing. It had come out of left field … and right nipple. He was seeing Helen in the evening. What on earth was he doing arranging lunch with Jane?
He picked up the phone, to ring her and cancel.
He put the phone down again.
The man who had decided never to wear his white linen suit again picked up the phone and rang the number he had been told to ring by the person at the number he’d been told to ring by the person whom he had first rung. God, you needed patience.
‘Oh, hello, this is a little awkward, and I don’t know if I’m ringing the right place, but I’ve been told that you’re the person to ring.’
‘How can I help you, sir?’
The voice sounded polite and not impatient. Promising.
‘Yes. It’s a little embarrassing. My name’s … well, no, it isn’t, that’s the problem.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Impatience creeping in.
‘I lost a wedding ring at a hotel. My wedding ring. They found it and sent it on to my address. But I’d given the wrong address … in their guest book, because …’
He hesitated. He didn’t know this man, the man didn’t know him, they would never meet, why on earth was he hesitating?
‘… because, to be honest, I was meeting a married woman and I … I know her husband pretty well … and just to be on the safe side I gave a false name and address, and so this ring, which has some fantastic diamonds in it and was a gift from my beloved wife so it is extremely valuable both financially and sentimentally, as you can imagine, has gone off to a man who doesn’t exist, living in a house that doesn’t exist, in a street that doesn’t exist, in Poole, which does exist, which is why I am ringing you.’
‘I see. What was the address, sir?’
‘Does it matter, since it doesn’t exist?’
‘Well, it might be similar to an address that does exist, and the postman might have used his initiative.’
‘I see. Yes. All right. It was addressed to Mr J. Rivers, that’s me, or rather it isn’t, of Lake View, 69 Pond Street, Poole.’
‘I see, sir.’
Not a flicker of amusement, making the joke address seem even more childish than ever.
‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m just checking in the book, sir.’ A distinct note of rebuke. ‘Yes, sir, there is no Pond Street in Poole.’
‘So what will happen to it?’
‘It will be sent, maybe has already been sent, to Belfast.’
‘Belfast?’
‘We have an office in Belfast, sir, to which all letters and packages with untraceable addresses are sent.’
‘Why Belfast, of all places?’
‘I have no idea, sir. It was not my idea.’
‘No, I realise that. Pretty silly idea, though. It’ll probably get blown up.’
‘I understand that there is no great security crisis in Belfast as of this moment in time, sir.’
‘No, I was only being … I’m just irritated. Maybe the Post Office has an agreement with an airline so that everybody has to fly to Belfast to get their letters back.’
‘I couldn’t possibly comment on that, sir.’
‘Anyway, the bottom line is, to get this ring back, I’ll have to go to Belfast.’
‘I’m afraid so, sir.’
‘Bloody hell!’
‘Precisely, sir.’
At 11.30 in the Small Conference Room of the Head Offices of Globpack UK, in a dark place hidden from yet another sunny summer morning by the Hammersmith Flyover, with double glazing so efficient that the perpetual roar of traffic on the flyover was but a distant faint rumble, James Hollinghurst, just five days after the death of his wife, looked surprisingly happy. He looked like a man on top of his game. Lindsay Gibb, Lindsey Wellingborough, Duncan Bailey, Tim Campagnetto, Boris Eckhart and Jean Forrester looked at him with barely hidden amazement. Was he a man of stone, with no feelings? Yes, for an hour and a half. That was why he was so surprisingly happy. Cocooned in the conference room, he was safe from all emotion. And he realised that Dwight Schenkman the Third had handed him not a poisoned chalice but a great opportunity. There was something almost magnificent about James that morning. Duncan Bailey and Tim Campagnetto often went for a quick pint after work, and very occasionally James would join them. This evening he would not, so one cannot know what Duncan said to Tim, but it could well have been something on the lines of ‘Who did he think he was? Winston Churchill?’ Yes, absurd though it might seem in the context of packaging, on the subject of saving two factories on industrial estates, this was James’s ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ moment.
He explained the facts briskly and pithily. Bridgend and Kilmarnock would go to Taiwan, unless huge savings could be made at Bridgend and Kilmarnock.
‘Anyone fancy a coffee?’ he asked.
Five of the six fancied a coffee.
‘Well, we can’t afford any. HQ is not immune. None of us are immune. We will all be pulling together, to save our manufacturing base. Think coffee, drink water, save.’
Much of the meeting was taken up with the minutiae of organisation. It took quite a while to decide which three of the six would take specific responsibility for Bridgend (Tim Campagnetto, Jean Forrester and Lindsay Gibb, as it happened), and which three would take on Kilmarnock (no need to tell you, unless you’re not following this closely, that it was Boris Eckhart, Lindsey Wellingborough and Duncan Bailey).
James actually spoke … oh, perhaps you should be told, in case it becomes a worry to any of you, that it was actually Lindsey Wellingborough who hadn’t wanted the coffee that none of them had … James actually spoke, without embarrassment, about responsibility. ‘Not a fashionable word, but I have chosen the six of you because I believe you have a sense of responsibility. At the end of the day we may have to decide that there is no alternative to relocating to Taiwan, but it’s our responsibility to explore every possibility of maintaining production in Bridgend and Kilmarnock, and of keeping as many of the workforce there in work as is humanly possible. We must try to remember at all times that every compulsory redundancy could be a family torn apart.’
James’s concentration faltered for the first time. An image had crept uninvited into his head, an image not of sex, but of a river, the Ouse, a body being dragged out, Ed, dead, dripping with water. Strange that he had been talking about the Ouse with Mike. Strange that … he shook his head, tossing the image away. Where was he? He was lost. They were looking at him with sympathy, with understanding. It almost amused him to think how little understanding they could have about what he was thinking.
‘Where was I?’
For a nasty moment he thought that none of them would remember either.
‘Compulsory redundancy,’ said Boris Eckhart.
‘Families torn apart,’ said Jean Forrester.
‘Ah. Yes. I’ve also chosen the six of you because I believe that you will be able to work well with the good people of Bridgend and Kilmarnock. We must take the local people with us on this. If we can’t inspire them to play their part, we can’t save them. I think there’s a chance that in the years to come rising transport costs, rising wages in the Third World and quality issues can begin to create a revival in British manufacturing. Slow and not very glamorous, perhaps, but I hope that we can all get satisfaction from doing our bit in this long battle.’
If they did go to the pub that evening, and if Duncan Bailey did say, ‘Who did he think he was? Winston Churchill?’ let’s hope that Tim Campagnetto replied, ‘It’s easy to mock, but I thought he was rather magnificent.’
After a lot of discussion of dates and meetings and programmes of visits to Bridgend and Kilmarnock and lists of people in those places who would need to be consulted, James explained to them that he was taking a week off, although he would fulfil his engagement to speak at the fiftieth anniversary lunch in the Mauretania Room of the Park View Hotel on Wednesday. He would return to the office tomorrow week, and they would have a further meeting then. He hoped to see them at the lunch, and also at the funeral the following day.
The funeral. The world outside packaging beckoned. After he’d shaken hands with all six of them, and accepted their sympathy, he gathered his papers up slowly, took a long drink of water, and walked out of the cool oasis of the beige conference room into the sweltering desert of his blood-red heart.
He heard the pub before he saw it. The roar of two hundred conversations, the laughter at the latest jokes about Irishmen and Muslims and sex and Cameron and Clegg. It was elbow to elbow on the wide pavement outside the pub. It was a fight to get to the bar in the vast, marbled, mirrored interior. When you got to the bar, it was a fight to get served. When you had been served, it was a fight to get away from the bar. In a corner, unheard, unwatched, two men, both six foot six tall, served tennis balls at each other like bullets. It was London in summertime.
Four men who had once punted with girls along the calm, exquisite waters of the Cam, stood on the pavement with their pints, huddled and squashed together in the steaming crowd like four umbrellas in a stand. Roger Dodds, about whom little was known. Derek Hammond, about whom everything was known and in much too great detail. Seb Meikle, whom James hardly knew. And James himself, whose afternoon had been an anticlimax. He had phoned Dwight Schenkman the Third, to report on the progress of the morning’s committee meeting, and had been told, ‘Your devotion to your duties, your acceptance of your responsibilities, your energy and stamina and discipline in the face of a personal trauma that would have destroyed a lesser mortal are awesome, James. You know what you are? You’re the role model that the world of packaging needs.’