by Tim Parks
‘Ground control to moody Tom!’
Cathy was laughing at him.
‘Wake up, spaceman!’
The music was over. The band were unplugging their guitars. People were dispersing.
‘I’m sorry,’ Thomas said.
‘Don’t say sorry,’ she told him. ‘Say I want to fuck you.’
Routinely, they made love in Thomas’s car before he drove her on to her boyfriend’s. Cathy was a wonderful lover.
‘I can never figure out,’ Thomas said, driving now, ‘why they don’t simply admit that they’re together, since neither of them have partners.’
‘She really has got under your skin, hasn’t she?’ Cathy said. ‘I’m getting jealous. You never worried this much about me.’
‘Because you don’t make me worry, Cathy. That’s why I like you.’
‘Perhaps I should,’ Cathy laughed. She frowned. ‘Maybe they like to be secret. They like to be a conspiracy.’
‘Fun for a while,’ Thomas agreed. ‘But hardly for years and years.’
Cathy sighed. ‘What if Cava’s actually a transvestite? There is something pretty odd about her, isn’t there?’
Thomas tried to smile. ‘Maybe they feel they can’t have a regular relationship because of their home situations. I’ve heard her nutty brother can be violent. Perhaps I should feel sorry for her.’
‘Fuck that,’ Cathy said. ‘Why do you always want to feel sorry for people?’
Cathy was smoking in the car, which he knew would be a problem.
‘Why don’t you feel sorry for me?’ she demanded.
‘Maybe I chose you,’ Thomas laughed, ‘because you’re the kind of person I never need to feel sorry for. You’re so full of life.’
‘You wait,’ she warned. ‘The rate we’re going.’
Driving home with freezing air pouring in from open windows, Thomas wondered how it would feel when his complicated life finally became too much and he cracked.
Monday lunchtime, before the department meeting, Thomas met Ms Cavanaugh in the corridor and found her in cheerful mood. She greeted him as though they were friendly colleagues and asked about a presentation he was planning with young Quentin. Replying, Thomas explained the essentials of the strategy and the part their new recruit would play in it. Everything in his manner suggested that he was eager for her approval while everything in Ms Cavanaugh’s manner suggested she was granting that approval. It was a promising start, Thomas thought. At the same time he hated it.
The meeting of department heads went on longer than he’d expected. Presiding over a long oval table, Ms Cavanaugh was embarrassingly disorganised. She constantly had to bend towards her secretary for prompts. She seemed to have forgotten the day’s agenda. She read out progress reports that could have been emailed to people, enthused over small successes, skated over major problems. When Barker objected that the decision to pass two accounts from his department to Thomas’s was ill-judged, she came down on him with icy coldness. The MD had decided this, she said. If Barker wanted to protest directly to the MD he was welcome to do so, though it might be worth remembering that the great man was already overstretched.
‘I thought we had these meetings in order to discuss the appropriate allocation of the accounts,’ Barker suggested.
‘These meetings are to discuss how best to put the MD’s decisions into practice,’ Ms Cavanaugh replied.
Keeping his head down, Thomas watched the woman. She had that slightly sinewy look of the forty-year-old who hasn’t had children and is frequently in the gym. There was something at once measured yet tense about her; the wrists in their smart cuffs seemed taut. Her hair was a black helmet, her bosom flattened in a double-breasted jacket, her trousers smoothly cylindrical. Throughout the meeting she tapped a sharp pencil on the notepad in front of her, and after every contribution from the department heads around the table she leaned down to tell her secretary whether this or that comment needed to go in the minutes. He had been absolutely right when he had spoken ill of her, Thomas thought. Which did not mean it was not a mistake.
Then this meeting was over and the other smaller, more dangerous meeting could begin. Now whatever was to happen would happen. Thomas began to feel calmer, but at the same time extremely vulnerable, like a canoeist accelerating on the flat steady water that precedes a rapid. Leaving his colleagues, without staying on for the customary coffee together, he took the lift to the fourth floor and waited outside Ms Cavanaugh’s office. There was a window here that gave on to a quiet courtyard and Thomas stood at the sill, looking out. He would pretend not to hear her arrive and so she would have to call his name. In the courtyard was a tree in fresh leaf, a flowerbed, and a bench where a young woman wrapped in an overcoat was forking a late lunch into her mouth from blue Tupperware. It was hard to tell from here, but she seemed an attractive young woman, at ease with herself. Why am I never at ease with myself? Thomas wondered.
‘Tom,’ Ms Cavanaugh said. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Hello, Linda,’ Thomas responded. ‘I thought Sue was supposed to be here too.’
‘That’s right,’ Ms Cavanaugh said. ‘It’s not like her to be late.’
‘Very unusual,’ Thomas agreed.
Ms Cavanaugh’s office was more generous than his own. The desk, the carpet, the window, the chair all spoke of comfort and corporate authority. Yet there was something impersonal about the room too, as if the woman hadn’t quite dared to inhabit it fully, or had feared that if she did so it might lose some of its power to intimidate. The only personal touch was a large box of chocolates on the desk. In affable mood Ms Cavanaugh would immediately offer these, then take one herself and make some twee remark about her sweet tooth. Today she did not. She began to fire up her computer, presumably waiting for Sue Peers’s arrival. Thomas decided to go first.
‘So what is all this about? I’m afraid we have two people coming in from Courtney’s shortly. I’m a little pushed for time.’
Ms Cavanaugh looked at her watch. They were running forty minutes late.
‘She couldn’t have waited a while then left, do you think?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘She would have put her head round the door,’ he said. ‘Can’t we proceed without her?’
Ms Cavanaugh looked up and her manner changed. Her features rearranged themselves in a concerned, even pained look. She put her hands together below her sharp chin.
‘I wanted you two to confront each other so that I could get to the truth of the matter.’
Sweating though he was, Thomas raised a wry eyebrow. He was on the brink of the rapid. From here on, it would all be instinct.
‘That serious?’ he said.
‘The fact is that someone has told me something that, if true, would leave me enormously disappointed.’
Thomas waited. Evidently ‘disappointed’ meant ‘disappointed with you’.
Ms Cavanaugh picked up the phone and called her secretary. Could she contact Sue Peers and find out why on earth she wasn’t here as she was supposed to be?
Of course, Thomas thought, they both had Sue’s mobile number, but a secretary had to be brought in to avoid any notion that they were communicating as equals. He felt weary with all this.
Covering the mouthpiece of her phone, Ms Cavanaugh said, ‘Apparently her mobile isn’t answering.’
Madly, it occurred to Thomas that Sue might have killed herself. She cared that much about the Bullard account. She wanted to make them feel that bad. Simultaneously, he was aware that this was a stupid idea and the merest projection of his own anxiety. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘perhaps we had better leave it till after Easter.’ In reality the last thing he wanted was to have this nonsense hanging over him during the Easter break.
Ms Cavanaugh put the phone down, frowned. ‘No. This needs saying now. Tom, the fact is, I have it on good authority that you gave a completely false and unpleasant account to Sue of the reasons for her removal from the Bullard account.’
Thomas
sighed and seemed to cast about for a proper response.
‘Good authority from whom, Linda?’ he eventually asked.
‘Let’s say someone was in the vicinity when you had this conversation.’
‘Someone?’
‘Someone I trust.’
He shook his head. ‘I really don’t recall anything very special being said.’
‘It seemed special and ugly enough for someone to warn me.’
Thomas drew a deep breath; he felt perfectly poised between the two approaches that had been hammering away in his head for the past six days and nights. He opened his mouth to speak, wondering which would come out, which decision he would take. Then hesitated. He was lost. He simply didn’t know which way to jump. I don’t know who I am, he thought.
Finally he said: ‘Honestly, Linda, I can’t remember anything out of order being said. Sue was very angry and, not having been warned that she had in fact been taken off the account, I was a little at a loss. I think I told her that there had always been doubts surrounding her appointment and that anyway these were decisions taken at the highest level. After all, authority lies with the MD.’
‘I’m very disappointed,’ Ms Cavanaugh said. She removed her glasses and rubbed the tips of her fingers into her eyes. The massage went on for some time. Eventually she came to herself. ‘Tom, I can’t understand why you didn’t tell her that you brought up the issue yourself with the MD. It was you who insisted on replacing her.’
‘It’s hardly my part to relay confidential conversations with the Managing Director,’ Thomas said. ‘And, of course, I have to go on working with Sue.’ He added: ‘Did you actually have a meeting with her to explain the decision?’
Thomas imagined the answer to this was going to be no. Cavanaugh was famous for simply announcing major changes through her secretary with no explanation. And otherwise why would Sue have come at him so angrily after that department meeting?
‘Of course I did. What kind of manager do you think I am?’ Ms Cavanaugh looked genuinely shocked. ‘I brought her in to tell her what we’d decided and explained that it was part of a general strategy we had worked out for your department with the MD, at your specific request. And that these changes would include Frank’s being moved at some point too.’
Thomas was startled. ‘You told her that?’
‘Of course I did. You can’t just go changing people’s lives without giving them some explanation. It has always been my policy to be entirely transparent.’
All Thomas’s preparation was now swept away. How incompetent could one be? Ms Cavanaugh had not only put all the blame on him, the man who had to manage her, but had given Sue the chance to alert Frank that he would be next in the firing line. With the result that Frank would have had an even greater interest than before in telling tales to Ms Cavanaugh. Above all, it was clear that, while needing total power to feel safe, Ms Cavanaugh also expected to be loved, so she passed the buck.
‘The fact is, Tom, I have to be able to trust you to back me up and give a fair representation of how we go about things here. I can’t have you giving entirely different and disparaging accounts of events.’
Thomas sighed. He wanted out of his job and out of his marriage. He wanted to sit in the courtyard wrapped in a thick coat eating vegetarian fare out of Tupperware.
Rather boldly, he got to his feet. ‘Linda,’ he began, ‘I’m truly sorry if anything I said to Sue was inappropriate …’ but at this point the telephone rang.
Ms Cavanaugh now spoke in a lower voice. All the same, it was immediately clear it was the MD calling her directly to ask when she would be ready to leave. They must have some appointment together. ‘I’m afraid that idiot Barker dragged things out,’ Ms Cavanaugh explained, ‘complaining about your moving those accounts out of his department.’
That idiot Barker! Did the MD appreciate, Thomas wondered, that his lover was speaking in his, Thomas’s, presence? What if Thomas now told Barker that Ms Cavanaugh had referred to him as an idiot in conversation with the MD?
‘Oh, he seemed ready to back down at the end,’ she was saying, ‘but it made the meeting longer than it needed to be. Just give me five minutes.’
She put the phone down. On his feet, Thomas said, ‘You look tired, Linda.’
‘Can you believe that conversation with Barker?’ Ms Cavanaugh asked, as if the phone call had reminded her, as if despite what she had said immediately before the call she was still looking for solidarity from Thomas. She shook her head and again removed her glasses to rub her eyes. ‘This place is such a snakepit. I really need a break.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Thomas said carefully. ‘Strange that Sue hasn’t come.’
With suddenly renewed severity, Ms Cavanaugh said, ‘I’ll write you both an email to clarify once and for all how this situation came about. After which we shall hear no more about it.’
Leaving her office, Thomas thought: I worried all week over this. I lost sleep. I upset the people around me. For nothing.
On the train home he was surprised to find that an email had already arrived. The woman must have written it, he thought, while actually in the MD’s company, since the two had clearly been planning to leave work together. Perhaps in a taxi. He clicked it open: the gist, in her usual absurd formalese, was that the planned meeting had been held despite Sue’s absence, an absence Ms Cavanaugh hoped could be explained and justified as soon as possible, that Tom had admitted he had spoken unwisely and in circumstances ill suited to a delicate discussion of this kind and had apologised for it; that the real explanation of the change in company strategy re Bullard was as previously described in the earlier meeting with Sue, and that it was now time for them all to put the past behind them and make a success of these decisions that had been taken for the good of the company.
Thomas shook his head.
Soon after this, another mail arrived, this one from Sue Peers. She apologised profusely for her absence but pointed out that the original email from Ms Cavanaugh had mentioned the meeting of department heads as being in April, not March. Since she was not a department head herself and hence not invited to the meeting, she had had no way of supposing that it was really this Monday. In the event, she had been away from work, visiting her dying father.
After reading this Thomas went back and checked the original email to both of them from Ms Cavanaugh and saw that she had indeed spoken of April, not March. Knowing perfectly well when the meeting of department heads would be, he had barely noticed the actual date. On the other hand, how could Sue have imagined that Ms Cavanaugh would fix a meeting like that five weeks hence in an environment where the people involved saw each other at least weekly, if not daily? Either she was even more scatterbrained than he imagined or she had decided to exploit this loophole so as not to have to confront Thomas, of whom, quite possibly, she was afraid.
What am I doing working for this bunch of losers? Thomas thought.
An SMS arrived. Cathy would be playing drums in Berlin at the weekend and wanted him to join her. ‘Do it do it do it!’ she wrote. ‘Let’s get wasted! Let’s live!’
Thomas texted to say he would move heaven and earth to be there. Picking up the car at the station after his train journey, he at once found himself stuck in heavy traffic. His wife would complain, he thought, that he hadn’t come early enough to pick up the groceries they had ordered from the supermarket. Should he bother to explain about the overly long meeting? Perhaps mention Barker’s irritation over the reallocation of two accounts. In the event, however, his spouse was in a cheerful mood and when Thomas invited her to a restaurant she, rather unusually, agreed.
‘So how was the meeting with the MD’s lay?’ she asked.
Thomas recounted.
‘So you’re relieved, Goat,’ she smiled, ‘after making our lives miserable for a week?’
Thomas reflected. He looked at his wife eating her salad and waited. At last, with the growing silence she looked up. For a rare moment there was eye contac
t.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not relieved. I wish it had been conclusive. I wish we had shouted at each other and all the filth had come out and she had chucked me out of the company. It’s the paralysis that’s driving me crazy.’
Mary looked down at her food. ‘Filth?’ she enquired softly.
ZONING
Thomas stands accused of not closing the fridge door properly. The kitchen is not his territory. Apparently the appliances do not belong to him, even if they were bought with money he earned. Thomas has committed other crimes in the kitchen. He has dropped sticky marmalade on the floor. Cleaning the top of the oven once, he used an abrasive product that blemished its brushed-steel surface for ever. His kitchen duties involve rinsing off the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher; also, freeing the blocked sink from time to time. Sitting at his place, back to the French window, with the cat standing sentinel outside, he waits for his plate to arrive. He was not involved in its preparation. Beside and opposite him, his children are also passive presences. Mary presides. ‘What a great cook you are,’ Thomas says appreciatively. She eats on her feet while the others sit. The dog pads from one to another with beseeching eyes and bushy tail.
The downstairs toilet is also Mary’s.
The upstairs toilet and bathroom are shared by Thomas and his son, Mark.
There is a toilet en suite in their daughter Sally’s room, though she is rarely home these days and the toilet rarely flushed.
Thomas would like the garage to be his, but can’t persuade Mary to park her car where he thinks it should go. He has to squeeze his against the wall.
Each child has his or her own room and of course Thomas and Mary have their bedroom, though this is divided up, as it were, down the middle of the bed: the window side is Mary’s, the stairs side is Thomas’s. He cannot remember the last time he visited her bedside table and presumes the same holds for her. It has been some years since anyone sat on the armchairs at the foot of the bed. They are used for draping clothes: Thomas’s clothes on the chair nearer the wall, and Mary’s clothes on the chair nearer the windows. The cleaning is done by a cleaning lady. Polished and tidied, it is a beautiful, rather empty room. The bright light from the window mills with dust.
