by James Wood
“You’re not the only who has to go,” she said with quick annoyance. “Didn’t I say, two minutes ago, I couldn’t stay for long?”
“Okay,” he said, gently surrendering to her fiction. “Okay.”
* * *
Back in his room, he stood by the freezing window. Outside it was clear, dry, arctic—the over-salted main street was parched gray like desert bone, the packed walls of snow glowing blue in the streetlamps. He watched her leave the hotel, stop to light a cigarette, fumble the fag and pick it up, and then walk slowly, far too slowly for the frigid temperature, up Broadway.
On his way to the bathroom, he passed the closed white laptop on his desk. It had made its way out of the computer bag, but no further. Yes, he should log on and see if Eric Ball had written to him. Two other colleagues, also. Worst of all—the three-year migraine of the Dobson Arts Centre and Café; movement on that project was promised this week or next. He would not open the magic box and let all the evils fly around the room. It could wait till morning.
22
He woke to snow, continuous snowing. Broadway was utterly empty, the parched asphalt of last night resurfaced in fresh white. It was coming down fast, in the passive-aggressive way of snow, stealthy but relentless, insisting on its own white agenda, the soft monotony canceling all time, all resistance, all activity. Alan surrendered to the silent vacancy, the pure negative that was like some terrible ideal death. The Trask children, good God. His father died on a snowy day like this. Da went almost blind in his last week, so Alan had to put his face very close to his father’s as he lay in the hospital bed. “What do you see now, Da?” he asked, and his weary father replied, in a clotted voice, “I see a kind face.” They were his last coherent words, and more intense, more emotional certainly, than anything he had said when in his right mind and body … But Josh’s laugh—not kind, not kind at least to Alan. Leave it, leave it. There were important things to do, nothing would be achieved by fretting over the question of Josh and Vanessa. He had to be of practical help, to be of use in whatever way he could offer. And the best step was to get his own house in order—talk first of all to Candace, then open the damned laptop, communicate with Eric about the Dobson project, do some bill paying …
Bill paying: it had been a mistake to open an office in Manchester. There was nothing going on in Manchester, or nothing that he could afford. He’d arrived too late, was standing on a finished plateau. Like Alex Ferguson signing Rio Ferdinand for all that money—an absolute disaster really, pound for pound—only to discover that Ferdinand’s best football was largely behind him. The Manchester office was expensive, and diverted two employees from Newcastle just to man the place, where they sat twiddling their thumbs and attending to their e-mails and their late-night clubbing plans. The recent website design had been bizarrely pricey. Alan had assumed that near-invisible work would come with a near-invisible price tag, and tried not to reveal his astonishment when Eric told him what they finally owed the Mormon and his Salt Lake City design company.
More grievous than this small stuff was the collapse of property values in the four northern cities where Querry Holdings owned their biggest buildings. They badly needed to sell the Seddon, in Sunderland, a mixed residential-commercial building that had only ever been half-occupied anyway. They needed to do that in order to pay other bills, including the interest on the big Lloyds loan, taken out in order to grease the wheels of the Dobson project in Newcastle—a push-me-pull-you situation that Alan had sworn he would never get into. But nobody was interested in the Seddon, even when they dropped the price at the end of last year by a sick-making thirty percent. Dynamic pricing, ha … And it was the same with two properties for sale in York, a city that for years had been a solidly reliable market. The company was small—ten employees, counting him—and it never had enormous liquidity. It had thrived by going for shrewd opportunities and by keeping costs fairly low. The company was him, and was like him: an efficient frame, a lean strength, and a sensible ratio of energy in and energy out.
He had grown up in a time and place of corrupt city councilmen, illegalities and criminalities, viciously amoral landlords, with the threat of violence hanging over everything like a parental prohibition. Get Carter was a tame fantasy—the milky-skinned Michael Caine with his Cockney accent wouldn’t have lasted a day in the real Newcastle. He was branded on his tongue: an outsider. That Newcastle pub—Alan knew it well—at the start of the film: Caine would have had to wait a lot longer than five insultingly slow minutes to get a tall glass of beer. How about never? How’s never for you? Alan had no interest in that world, had no interest in doing business if it also meant doing harm, so he ignored it, doubtless another reason he was not in the top tier, probably not even the second or third tier, of property developers in the North East. Well, so be it: he was proud that his company had served only two eviction notices in thirty years. Two. He had had plenty of appetite, will, hunger to succeed … but not at any cost. I see a kind face. Could you be a kind, successful businessman? Too often these days, he could hear his late dad saying to him, “Look at any man who has amassed a great fortune, and you’re looking at a bloody crook.” He thought Da was right, basically, which perhaps explained why, at sixty-eight, he was neither a crook (or so he thought) nor (alas) the keeper of a great fortune. Still, it was one thing not to want great riches, and another to be squandering what reasonably comfortable reserves had been built up over the years. One thing not to be a ruthlessly successful capitalist, and another to be a failed capitalist, bleeding money from self-inflicted wounds. He’d done this to himself—that’s what caused pain. He had been seduced—no, he’d seduced himself with the idea of expansion: more employees, another office, more buildings, partly because everyone else was expanding, too, and you felt like a comparative failure if you didn’t secure your feeding place along with everyone else at the piggery.
Rather than open the box of tricks, he’d phone Eric Ball. It would be just after lunchtime on Sunday, back in Newcastle. Eric would be doing one of two things: biking (he was a fanatical cyclist, had all the gear: the bantamweight Chinese-made bike, the scarab-beetle helmet, the orange-and-yellow spandex membrane, whose trousers made a drama out of Eric’s punished genitals and always put Alan in mind of male ballet dancers and their mysterious, packeted groins) or watching sports on telly or preparing to watch sports on telly. Eric happily watched any televised sport, however dull it was, like a scholar content amid the most tedious footnotes.
He got Eric’s machine, and couldn’t help smiling as he heard the familiar Yorkshire accent, flat, nasal, pedantic—“You’ve nearly reached Eric Ball”—and began to leave a message when Eric picked up.
“I didn’t recognize the number. How are you?”
“So I’ve actually reached Eric Ball.” A tediously old joke.
“Right!… We were meant to be out on a ten-mile hill climb, but the weather … You didn’t get my e-mail, or even the message, then?”
“It’s snowing in Saratoga Springs. Snowing! I haven’t opened my laptop. No time. It’s all work here—different from real work, but still work, you know.”
“Yikes, you want the bad news first, or the really bad news?”
“Oh Christ.”
“The city’s pulling the plug on the Dobson project. They’re withdrawing all the subsidies. So it’s basically dead as far as I can see.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“Because the carpenters’ union has announced that they’re suing the city for the right to the contracts.”
“The carpenters? UCATT? Our problem was supposedly going to be with the cement guys.”
“It’s never the one you bloody expect, is it? Watch out for the nig … the weevil … in the woodpile. Worm in apple, whatever. Anyway, the carpenters are arguing that because of the way the project is structured it’s a government project, not a private deal, so that they have legal rights to a share of the job.”
“Which would basically doubl
e our costs,” said Alan, aware now that the hotel telephone receiver wasn’t very clean—the mouthpiece seemed a bit gluey.
“Right. Well, that, added to the atrocious cost projection that SGR did last week, seems to have turned the city bigwigs off the whole bloody thing.”
“But we’ve invested an effing boatload. And we got permission to knock down a whole warehouse for this!”
“We got the notification on Friday, and I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I’m worried, Alan.”
Friday was when he was on the train with Helen, talking about getting “involved” in her new company.
“The partners agree with this? David and Lee? They’re dropping it, too?”
“It’s because they’re dropping it that we have to. They told me. We can’t do this on our own, we just don’t have the cash.”
“Eric, we need to shift the bloody Seddon. I don’t care what it takes, we get that building off the books. The interest payments on the Lloyds loan, those alone, are crippling us.”
“Well, we’ve had no luck yet, have we? But I’ll get to it first thing tomorrow. I’m on it, okay? We’ll shift the Seddon.”
“This is bloody, bloody bad news.”
* * *
Some projects were cursed, like haunted houses or crap cars. And the ones that were cursed were always those whose completion you could most vividly imagine. The building rose up before him, finished, gleaming, functional—all that was needed was Harrison Ford and a hundred Amish men in breeches and the thing could be up in a day … The Dobson project was like that. He knew it could work, he knew how good it would look, but no one else agreed with him. That’s why he had invested so much in it.
When he stopped to think about it, a kind of vertigo or nausea made him sit down heavily on the side of the bed. So it was important not to think about it. Leave it, leave it.
Strangely, a minute or two later, he felt almost liberated. He remained on the bed. “Trying to get hold of you,” Eric had said. It was almost exciting to be off the grid. He would lose a fair bit of money, a lot of money, but it was just money, what Cathy, mimicking her headmaster father, used to call “filthy lucre”—in her poshest, non-northern accent. What if he didn’t talk again to Eric while he was over here in the States? Didn’t open the computer at all this week? What if he just turned away from it, turned away from the whole thing, toward something else? Helen’s new project, for instance—he could dedicate the, what, last ten or fifteen years of his life to that. He wasn’t handing on the Querry company to anyone, it wasn’t a family business—neither daughter was interested. Right enough, there: they had their own lives. But when he thought about handing the company on, or not handing it on, he felt that vertiginous nausea again … death; the Hadrian’s Wall experience … No. He wouldn’t think about that. He’d known, from early on, the company probably wouldn’t survive his death. But he was traditional enough to want to leave money and property for those who survived him. He must provide for Helen and Vanessa, now for Candace, too, and what was horrifying to him was the thought of letting them down, of leaving little or nothing—or worse, debts and mountainous complexities.
These days, he was always hearing about “reducing one’s footprint”—Vanessa had said it about Josh, and everyone in the news now talked about “minimizing the carbon footprint.” He disliked the phrase. Like any sane person, he didn’t want to reduce his footprint, he wanted to increase it. His last name wouldn’t survive, but at least there might be an old family house for them all to return to, and some cash in the bank for everyone. The terror that it might all collapse, that he might die unexpectedly, prematurely, before he’d sorted things out, before his own mother had died … that weighed heavily. One of his most precious possessions was the Festival of Britain brochure he brought back in 1951, from London. It sat in a drawer of his desk at home. Full of proud advertisements for old British companies that either no longer existed or had been bought up by larger foreign corporations, or broken apart by huge, mysterious private equity groups—Crompton Bulbs and Manfield Shoes and HMV Records. Dunlop Rubber. Pilkington Glass. (The windows of his Audi were made by Pilkington, which pleased him. But the company was now owned by the Japanese.) The cars: Triumph, Morris, MG, Riley, Rover, Jaguar. The advert for Bass and Worthington Ale announced, in words his whole class at school patriotically memorized, years before they could drink a pint of Bass: He who plants an avenue of trees cannot, in the nature of things, hope to enjoy them in their grandeur—he plants them for England … We, too, must keep this tradition of the thing well made, that our children’s children may be beholden to us.
He would never forget the moment when his father asked to borrow a hundred pounds from him. Alan was twenty-seven, and had just made his first bit of serious money. He felt the reversal of authority like a roaring original sin: wrong, wrong! Of course he lent his father the money, and would have lent him, surreptitiously, ten times as much, if he’d had it. But he was embarrassed that his father was embarrassed; he hated to see him ask.
23
An hour later, he had breakfast with Helen. It was still snowing; the hotel had the slightly excited, pumped-up atmosphere of unthreatening crisis: emergency relief for the pampered. Staff tramped in and out of the lobby, large boots squeaking on the wood floor. White lengths of snow, like fluorescent stripes, were caught in the folds of their nylon coats. The lights seemed to dim and flicker every so often; Alan thought he might be imagining it. Not so, said Helen. American infrastructure was “crap, relatively speaking.” It’s become, she said, a country of patching—everywhere you look there are crews patching roads, patching bridges, patching sewers, roofs, telephone wires. “Maybe that’ll change if a Democrat is elected president next year. Or maybe it won’t.”
Helen was strangely bright. With calm, controlling movements, she played mum. She poured Alan’s coffee from the heavy hotel pot, and then milk from the tiny stainless steel Hunca Munca jug. She asked the waiter to bring Alan orange juice. As usual, she sat very upright. She smiled freshly at him. Even by Helen’s standards, it was an unusual display of vigor.
“I have an idea, I’ve been thinking,” she said. He bent his head. The coffee in his pleasing white mug smelled of morning and bitter resolve. And discretion and keeping your bloody trap shut. “I’ve been thinking about how we should all get together this summer—maybe not in Northumberland, maybe somewhere in France or Italy? Have a family reunion that really includes Tom and the twins, and Josh and Van? There’s that lovely hotel on the Sorrento coast, lemon trees everywhere, the one Tom and I went to for our honeymoon? We could all spend some time together. Candace and Van would actually get to know the twins, and Josh would meet everyone and feel part of the family.”
“Not cheap,” said Alan, witnessing his inescapable parsimony with dislike.
“Well, reason not the need. No—reason not the deed, I guess,” said Helen, with brisk condescension. “If we start counting the pennies, we won’t do anything ever, I certainly wouldn’t be thinking about leaving Sony, for instance.”
“Ah, we should talk about that,” said Alan, preemptively, because he didn’t want to talk about it now.
“If a hotel doesn’t work, we can always do it in Northumberland, but we might be more festive somewhere that didn’t remind us so much of Mum.”
“No, no, it’s a good idea. We’ve actually never done anything like that as a whole family, since Cathy, since Mum … Assuming we’d all get on with each other.”
“Obviously, Van and Josh wouldn’t be able to afford it, so you and I would pick up their costs,” Helen said with certainty. She’d always been like this. She would run down the stairs from her bedroom and announce, eyes shining, that she had dreamed up a mail-order business so that she could resell her old shoes. Or: She and Vanessa would go house to house, mowing people’s lawns. She and Van would teach guitar (Helen) and piano (Van) to beginners. Cathy had rather decided, middle-class views about the impropriety of hawking oneself ar
ound the village for sale, but Alan was amused and supportive, partly because he knew each enterprise would collapse like the last.
“We’d all get on because we’d make an effort to get on. Maybe Van and Josh should spend the whole of this summer in England and get a feel for the place. Van’s been away so long it’s a different country now, and Josh has never been. And why couldn’t Van start looking for a job in the U.K.? I mean, she’s not condemned to spend the rest of her life in Saratoga Springs, is she? Why shouldn’t she teach philosophy back in Britain?”
“Well, I can think of one reason,” said Alan.
“Yes, Josh. But Van needs to think of herself first, and it’s mad that she should rusticate, vegetate, in upstate New York for Josh. See, I care so much about it I’m rhyming! If they’re devoting whole conferences to her work, then maybe she could teach at—I don’t know!—Oxford or Cambridge or London? She’s certainly good enough. Isn’t she?”
Helen was leaning forward on her chair, her broad, slightly thickened shoulders filling the space before him, as vigorous and palpable as her plans. A posture he knew, twice over—Cathy used to lean forward like this. Sometimes the similarities were like a shocking plagiarism, an outrageous laziness on the part of the family genes.
“And Josh?”
“Oh, Dad, I’m not sure—”
“Not sure about what?” he said. He carefully placed his coffee cup on the table.
“He has guilty eyes.”
“Come on, Helen. That’s not really good enough, is it?”
“I don’t know if … I wonder if Josh really intends to stick around, if you want my very honest opinion.”
