Alexander knows there are other ways to read 90 D. He has sufficient imagination and intellect to recognise that there are better perspectives on the world, but he is nevertheless unable to rise above the dominant perspective of the day. He looks at himself through the eyes of the observer and finds himself wanting.
He has fully internalised the prevailing value system. Before he knew how to drive, he often dreamt of driving, of being in the back seat, which meant not being in control. In these dreams, the characteristics of the car itself were irrelevant. When he became a driver, when he passed the test, on his third attempt, those particular dreams ceased. Instead, his focus switched to the cars themselves, with the hitherto unnoticed details of make, model and year beginning to assume enormous importance. He began to distinguish very carefully, to watch and evaluate in a similar way to how he watches and evaluates women, obsessively. Of objects, only a car can turn his head the way a woman can.
The hotel is situated off the N11, the main road from Dublin to Wexford. Alexander enjoys the topography of the drive, how the road runs – must run – on the narrow strip of flatland between the Wicklow Mountains and the Irish Sea. He loves the bare shapely Sugar Loaf, the forested Glen of the Downs, and speeding through the ugly little villages along the way.
He arrives shortly after four. The drive from the city centre has taken him about an hour, which is pretty good. He turns smartly off the main road (left, toward the sea) onto the tree-lined avenue that leads to the house. There are only a half a dozen or so cars in the car park at the front (including two Mercedes, a BMW, and a long narrow Volvo), but he nevertheless drives around to the side to protect himself and the Honda from comparison. By the time all the Council members have arrived, the car park will be brimming like a box of chocolates with plush high-powered vehicles. In these conditions, the Honda likes to keep a low profile, tucked away beside the servants’ entrance and the fire escape.
Ashdale House is a medium-sized Georgian country residence. The decor is sumptuous, eclectic. The entrance hall, the finest space in the house, is dominated by a huge chandelier, incorporating hundreds of pieces of grimy yellow glass. There are numerous doors and passages off the hall, including a grand wooden staircase, which Alexander doesn’t usually ascend because it leads to the best bedrooms, which are reserved on these occasions for the Council bigwigs.
His favourite feature of the hall is the large fireplace (dormant in the summer season), with sofas and armchairs around it, where one can sit in an idle moment (for example between the end of the first session and dinner) and study the gilt-framed paintings on the papered walls.
There is an oil painting of an English hunting scene which he likes: men and women in red coats on well-groomed horses, waiting at their meeting point, a pack of eager hounds around their feet. Alexander has done a fair bit of horse-riding himself in the last few years. He and Helena go out to a riding school in the country most Thursday evenings. His passion for the sport has waned recently, but there was a while during which this session was by far the high point of his week, an exercise undertaken with religious fervour, leaving him afterwards physically exhausted but energetically high.
He reports to the small mahogany desk inside the door and falls in love with the French girl who checks him in – the reserved brown eyes of her and the sallow bony face.
She performs the formalities with economy. There is a trace of melancholy in her well-disciplined expression, something graceful in her professional manners. He wants to run away with her to Switzerland, to untie her hair in front of a dying log-fire, drinking Glühwein, intoxicated with Eros, requiring nothing further than each other for the rest of their lives.
But she doesn’t see him.
‘Would you like me to call the porter?’ she inquires kindly, her hand moving automatically to the antique silver bell-press.
He joins the Council Chairman, Stephen Banner, in the meeting room at the appointed time.
The room is already laid out with a U-shape of tables covered in green baize, each place set with several bottles of water, a crystal-glass tumbler, a pad of headed paper, sharpened pencils, and a dish of mints.
At the open end of the U stands a large portable projection screen, and in the middle of the space a projector to which will be connected Alexander’s laptop containing the agenda and all the presentations for this evening’s session and the one in the morning.
When Alexander enters, Banner is already seated in his chairman’s position at the bottom end of the U, going through his papers. He is alone in the room. His jacket is off and he is picking his nose with great concentration, tunnelling deeply, searching for purchase on a bogey that is apparently just evading the nail of his little finger.
‘Greetings, young man,’ Banner booms as Alexander makes his way across the room. The Chairman’s little finger has emerged, successful. As he continues speaking, he examines the fruit of his excavations. ‘I trust you are in energetic form. There’s a lot of work to do. . . . This is an excellent set of papers. Well done. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’
Banner is an impressive and likeable man. He is chief executive of the Irish subsidiary of a US pharmaceutical company that makes astonishing amounts of profit from a number of patented drugs. Like all the Council members, his position is a voluntary one: he receives no payment and claims no expenses. ‘I do this pro bono publico,’ he often remarks to Alexander, and Alexander believes this, up to a point.
By all accounts, including his own, Banner’s multinational career has brought him considerable personal riches, but Alexander suspects that the job is not much fun, and probably rather isolating. By contrast, the chairmanship of the Council gives him an opportunity to play on a broad stage. He concerns himself with the important economic issues of the day. He gets his picture in the paper, sometimes appears on television news, and is quoted saying wise things about the state of the nation, about what has to be done to keep the good times rolling. In appearance at least, he is a broker in social partnership deal-making, schmoozing with trade unionists and business leaders, ‘developing consensus’. And he gets to meet the big chief, the Taoiseach, which clearly excites him. He makes presentations to the cabinet, tells them what is required to facilitate business into the future. Alexander writes the words and Banner delivers them, to politicians and journalists, sounding remarkably authoritative, although his knowledge is superficial. Alexander waits always for someone to scratch the surface and find that there is nothing behind it, but this has never happened. Everyone who matters is playing the game. If the Council started saying things that caused any discomfort to anyone, the civil servants would kill it quietly through restructuring or amalgamation into some other forum. Its role is to utter pieties from a business perspective – sanded down as necessary by the trade union minders – as part of an orchestrated national debate, in which all the insiders get some of what they want. Within these constraints, the Council can attempt to make its mark. Alexander isn’t sure if Banner appreciates just how irrelevant he and his Council actually are. He suspects that Banner doesn’t calculate in this way. What matters is his picture in the paper.
Now, in his first moments of seeing Banner, based perhaps on nothing more than his noticing that the flesh around the man’s eyes is increasingly puffy, Alexander has a piercing insight that Banner is on an accelerating downward curve: in his early sixties, hurtling toward retirement and oblivion, desperately looking for something to hold on to, already practically a doddering fool.
They sit together to go through the agenda.
‘You said you wanted to deal with broadband first,’ Alexander reminds him. ‘The way we left it the last time, the Council asked for a survey to be conducted of availability for small businesses and private users around the country. We’ve done that. Black and Associates, the economic consultants, undertook it on our behalf. I’ll be making a short presentation on the findings. Basic
ally, availability is about the same as in Afghanistan. And the situation isn’t improving very quickly. The question now for the Council is what to do next. We can present the problem as a problem, or we could put forward some solutions. But—’
‘Grace Sharkey is the one who’s pushing this, isn’t she?’ Banner asks thoughtfully.
Alexander flushes, feeling found-out.
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me: does she have a personal financial interest in this?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Alexander responds unconvincingly, blushing more deeply, feeling an idiot, since this possibility has never occurred to him.
‘Don’t let your mickey do your thinking for you,’ Banner advises paternally. He punches Alexander on the shoulder, leans back in his chair and laughs.
‘I think she might have a point,’ Alexander continues tentatively. ‘Maybe this is an issue on which the Council can make an important contribution; you know, take a leading role.’ He is regaining his feet after the wobble and is able to eye Banner directly again. ‘But to come up with solutions, we would have to do further consultancy work, see what kinds of interventions might be made by the state, which state body would do it, how much it would cost, et cetera.’
‘There’ll be resistance to any idea suggesting that the government should splash out a load of money on broadband.’
‘Yes,’ Alexander agrees, entirely regretting his earlier internal flash of condescension.
‘You do your presentation. Don’t say anything about next steps. I’ll open it to the floor for discussion and see where it goes from there. But I may come back to you at the end. . . . OK, what’s next?’
Alexander’s presentation goes well. Though mentally calm, he is physically anxious to begin with, particularly in the seconds before he speaks; but by the end he is enjoying himself, showing off.
Relaxing then, once the Chairman has opened the matter for discussion, Alexander’s focus drifts. The Council has its high points, but usually the proceedings are tedious. George Lucey is supposed to do the minutes, but George doesn’t like to do any work, so he has long since delegated this task to Alexander. Alexander finds that he can do a good set of minutes on the basis of listening about ten per cent of the time. In the same way that he can now speed-read a hundred-page document in about half an hour, skimming over everything but the important bits, he has developed a facility for meetings which enables him to operate on automatic pilot, switching on only when somebody starts to say something with genuine content, which isn’t often.
He wonders what he should do with his life. As a teenager and in college he planned great adventures. He would travel the world, go to places like Mozambique and Nepal. Nothing concrete has ever stopped him from pursuing these dreams, but he never has pursued them. From London after college, he went back to Dublin and joined ConsultEcon, where he stayed too long, before moving to the Council. At the time he got the job offer from the Council, he had a week of sleep-poor nights when he shifted restlessly in bed, increasingly frustrated, wondering why his life was taking such a boring course. At two in the morning he would decide boldly to emigrate to Africa, but when the alarm went off at seven, he would realise immediately, in his exhaustion, that this was never going to happen. He was able to decide to go to Africa, but he wasn’t able to go to Africa.
‘I want to emigrate to Africa,’ he would say to Julia.
‘Off you pop,’ she would respond calmly from over the rim of her magazine.
‘But what would it mean for us?’
‘Don’t use me as an excuse for not going to Africa.’
‘Do you want to come?’
‘Where to?’
‘Africa.’
‘Africa is a big place. You’re asking me to travel to an unspecified location in Africa to live by unspecified means for an unspecified duration, and then presumably to return to Ireland to pick up the no-life we have now, except we’d be older and would have no money and no jobs and nowhere to live.’
‘Doesn’t that prospect fill you with excitement?’
‘You need to come up for air, honey.’
He realises now that the reason his life is taking such a boring course is because he is a deeply boring and mediocre human being. There is no other explanation for it. Even in his daydreams these days, he has chickened out of Africa and is planning instead to go to Argentina, where he reckons there is less random violence, less fatal disease, plus a large population of sallow-skinned, ample-breasted young women. But Danny is no doubt right. He is never going to go to Argentina. He should settle down with Julia and have a baby. That must be why people have babies, because they have given up on going to Africa.
But having a baby means buying a house and organising a wedding. He doesn’t mind marriage. They are as good as married already, but the idea of a wedding is hideous. Maybe they could do a spur-of-the-moment thing in Amsterdam? No way. Julia would want her parents and brothers, all her cousins and pals to come down from Belfast for the weekend (or maybe she would want to do it in Belfast, which might actually be a bit easier), and he would have to rummage together a plausible posse of friends and relations. There would have to be stag and hen nights. Vomit. There’d be a Brown Thomas wedding list of household appliances. Bridesmaids in peach dresses frolicking outside the church. Women in hats. Staged photographs. The hotel, the speeches, the crappy band. The afters (he’d have trouble enough getting people for the wedding itself). A honeymoon in some sort of half-decent location (Buenos Aires, maybe). And where on earth would they get a house? ‘Vigilantes’ View’ in Dolphin’s Barn. And what about carpets, fridges, cookers? A three-piece suite? He hates three-piece suites; but once you get into that territory, you have to have a good one or you’re a waste of space.
‘What we require here, Chairman, is some old-fashioned state intervention. The state should build or fund the building of broadband infrastructure to link up small towns around the country. We need to look . . . .’ This is Grace Sharkey speaking. Although there is nothing particularly remarkable in what she is saying, she has a captivating effect on the Council. She uses her hands expressively, like an actress rather than a businesswoman. Her nails are long and painted. She rubs her fingers together and purses her lips as she searches for the right word; and this pause, maintained with such confidence and with a slight edge of sensual pleasure, draws in the listeners. ‘We need to look for imaginative solutions.’
‘If I could interject here, Chairman,’ says Declan Dunne, a senior official from the Department of Finance. (Declan is not the first punter Alexander would call on for imaginative solutions. He is a plain-speaking, podgy-cheeked Northsider who always seems pleased with himself that he has landed so comfortably in such august company. Alexander thinks of him as a mammy’s boy. Not that he is effeminate; but that his mammy always fed him well, serving him while he sat at the kitchen table right into his thirties, up until his wedding night, thinking that there was nothing better than to be a civil servant, thrilled by her son’s rapid promotions. Would you like some more gravy with your mash, dear? I did you an extra pork chop. Would you like another glass of milk with your dinner?) ‘I think we should be careful about the Council’s role here. From my Department’s point of view, we certainly can’t agree to any recommendations that have financial implications—’
‘All recommendations have financial implications,’ says Grace, exasperated, appealing to the Chairman. ‘If we’re not going to have any recommendations with financial implications, we might as well close shop and start singing hymns on Grafton Street.’
‘Through the Chair,’ says Conor Burke, chief executive of Irish Paper plc, ‘I think Declan is right in saying we should be cautious. The state had a telecom company and decided to sell it. That means we took the view as a country that the market could meet the demands for telecom services. Having made that decision, we shouldn’t be so quick to leap back in agai
n with more money. It would make the decision to sell look stupid—’
‘Maybe it was stupid,’ says Joe Walsh, president of the largest trade union in the country, representing almost a quarter of a million public and private sector workers.
‘One at a time please,’ says the Chairman. ‘Joe, you’ll have the floor next.’
‘I think this is premature,’ continues Burke. ‘If there is economic demand for broadband, then the market will supply it. We shouldn’t be so quick to assume there’s a problem.’
‘I don’t believe the market will supply it,’ says Joe Walsh. Unlike most people on the Council, who speak in wealthy tones, Joe has a strong working-class Dublin accent, which Alexander enjoys because it is such a different idiom, blunt and expressive. ‘There’s great faith these days that the market can do this and that. I’ve never seen much evidence of it. There are a lot of things that the market won’t do. And I’ll tell you this: it was a grave Thatcherite mistake for this country to sell Irish Telecom. If we still had a national telecom provider, the government could simply instruct them to lay the cable, or whatever is required in this case.’
‘Let’s have some vision here,’ Grace begins, when it is her turn again to speak. ‘The market isn’t supplying and won’t supply because the telecom operators don’t want to invest. All across Europe, they’re already over-extended from the bidding contests for 3G licences. Now they’re looking to squeeze as much return as possible out of the existing assets. . . . Broadband is something new. It’s like laying railway track in the nineteenth century: maybe the first investors got screwed, to put it frankly; but look at the benefit to the economy. Think of the competitiveness we are already losing to the countries that are moving more quickly on this than we are, and everybody is moving more quickly on this than we are, as we saw from Alexander’s presentation.’
Being Alexander Page 5
