Being sacked had at least solved that dilemma for him.
This restaurant is really something. Mr Phillips has never seen anything like it. Every single customer in the place seems to be talking or shouting as loudly as possible, except for the waiters who are rushing about at dangerous speed, and who seem especially to enjoy the bit where they swivel and bang backwards through the kitchen doors holding their trays stylishly high.
The drinks arrive, Sophie the waitress moving out of flirtation range with polite rapidity.
‘Is this what it’s normally like here?’ Mr Phillips asks.
‘Noisier on Fridays, but basically,’ says Martin. ‘You’re going to ask how many of them are paying for themselves, aren’t you?’
‘I hadn’t been, but now that you’ve brought it up.’
‘Next to none.’
‘This is my treat, by the way,’ says Mr Phillips, who until that very moment has not thought of the question.
‘You sure? I could deduct you as a business adviser.’
‘I won’t hear of it.’
Their first courses arrive. Mr Phillips’s portion of bacon and scallops is on the small side but despite, or perhaps for some psychological reason because of that, is delicious. His son, always a very methodical eater, is dividing each of his ravioli in half before chewing and swallowing it.
‘How’s Tom?’
Martin always asks about Tom and always sounds both patronizing and friendly when he does so. To Mr Phillips, whose relationship with his sister is nothing like what it was when they were both children, it looks as if Martin and Tom will never entirely stop being older and younger brother. Odd to imagine them in their seventies or eighties, with Martin still having this edge over his kid sibling.
‘Asleep most of the time. The rest he divides between staying in his room playing horrible music and going out with his friends.’
‘Acne any better?’
‘No, not much.’
‘I was lucky mine was all on my back,’ says Martin meditatively, as if this were a very large question to which he belatedly realizes he hadn’t given sufficient thought. ‘So to what do I owe the pleasure? What brings you to this part of town?’
Mr Phillips, who has a mouthful of bacon and scallop, gestures with his fork while he swallows his mouthful.
‘… ing much, just happened to be passing by.’
‘At the risk of boasting, you’re lucky I can spare the time. Things are manic at the moment. We’re on the point of releasing two different dance compilations, negotiating a seventies revival album, and another one of cover versions. It’s mental.’
And this had seemed, from the atmosphere of Martin’s office, to be true. At the top of a flight of stairs in what would once have been a small town house but was now commercial flats over a sex shop, M Enterprises turned out to be a single room with four people in it, all of them simultaneously on the telephone. When Mr Phillips, who had never been to Martin’s office before, walked in, he was slightly out of breath from the climb up the stairs. He stood there feeling embarrassed while the three people who were not Martin looked at him without recognition. Then his son, who had been standing and looking out the window while talking on the phone, turned around and saw him. He raised his eyebrows and smiled but kept talking.
Martin is an even six feet, taller than Mr Phillips himself, and the shuffling of his and Mrs Phillips’s genes has given Martin black hair (from Mr Phillips), cheekbones (Mrs Phillips), grey eyes from, apparently, Mrs Phillips’s father (dead before they met) and a deceptively athletic figure – ‘deceptively’ because Martin, unlike his younger brother, disliked all exercise. Having worn deliberately rebellious clothes all through his school days, as ripped and unkempt as possible, he is now wearing a single breasted grey suit, dark blue shirt and rather subtle maroon tie, all of which make him look older. If he were not Mr Phillips’s son, Mr Phillips realizes, there would not have been the slightest chance that he and Martin could ever have met. And perhaps an equally small chance that they would have had anything to say to each other.
When he finally got off the telephone Martin said:
‘Dad! To what do I owe the pleasure? Dad – this is everyone. Everyone – this is Dad.’
The other people in the office, all of whom were still holding phones, raised a hand and nodded or made some other gesture of recognition without stopping what they were doing. Two of them were unusually pretty girls. The effect was not so much of deliberate rudeness but of an attempt at politely suppressing their curiosity. It was one of those moments when Mr Phillips feels like an alien, like a spy, or like someone who has adopted a cover story so successfully that he is beginning to forget who he is or used to be. His uniform of class and profession seemed baggy, as if he could slip out of it at any moment with a single convulsive wriggle; while at the same time he could feel his stomach pressing against his belt buckle, asking that it be let out another notch. He has a memory of his father putting on blue overalls and contentedly going off to work with his bag of tools and pipe – he had loved his electrician’s costume, had taken great comfort from it. What would we do without uniforms?
Mr Phillips sometimes feels that other men have something he doesn’t have and – he has to conclude, as he gets stuck into his sixth decade – will never have. This is the carapace which grows or solidifies around them as they get older, and which involves an increasing lack of uncertainty about, or interest in, anything they don’t already know (‘know’ being defined as something like ‘feel that they have fully comprehended, to their own satisfaction’). Mr Mill, for instance, Mr Phillips’s former head of department, has a hardness to him, a rigidity, that is nothing to do with determination or resolve or strength of character or anything other than a philosophical impermeability, a thick skin. Nothing new is ever likely to reach him. Told about a development in corporate procedures that would affect hundreds of his colleagues but not him – a new way of calculating overtime rates, say, which would cost most of them £500 a year, but about which they were prevented from striking by fresh government legislation, crashed though Parliament in a specific attempt to alter practices at Wilkins and Co. – he would, once he had established that the change had no direct effect on him, stop paying any attention. He would react with the polite but obdurate impassivity of a Catholic cardinal temporarily trapped into sitting next to a UFO enthusiast at a wedding reception. To Mr Phillips this is not admirable, but it is enviable.
Mr Phillips’s father had that carapace. Something inside him had sunk and retreated. There was a wariness. His solitariness and holding back always made him alien, a stranger; and perhaps electricians as a profession have something reserved about them, the caution of men used to dealing with a far larger power which was always capable of administering nasty surprises. Any plan or intention of the young Mr Phillips – a plan to travel to watch Crystal Palace play away from home, go to a friend’s party or to the cinema, his initial announcement of wanting to stay on at school and do Alevels, the subsequent announcement that he wanted to be a chartered accountant, his first visit to the bank to borrow money to buy a car, even his heading into the kitchen to offer token help to his mother – was greeted with the words, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ – not so much a question as a disrecommendation or even a warning. The caution came across as a kind of hardness. Martin, at twenty-five, was already starting to grow his own more modern brand of the same thing.
‘Do you have any plans for lunch?’ Mr Phillips asked his son and then, suddenly quailing at the thought of being alone with him, said, ‘And of course if any of your colleagues …’
‘They’re all too busy,’ said Martin. ‘And so would I be if that prat from Aand J records hadn’t stood me up. Thanks. I’d love to. There’s a place I go to a lot, and might be able to score us a table even though we haven’t booked. I’ve just got a couple of calls to make. Have a sit down and I’ll be with you in two ticks.’ Although Martin would not have wanted his father to notic
e that he was trying to impress him, he noticed it nonetheless. One of the surprising things about Martin was that he was in many respects still rather young.
Mr Phillips picked up the book that was lying on his son’s desk. It was called Hitler Wins! Management Skills of Germany’s Greatest Leader (And Don’t Let Anybody Tell You Different). The page was turned down at the start of a chapter called ‘Don’t Think Different, Think Beyond.’
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘It’s the management book everybody’s reading at the moment,’ said Martin. ‘There’s always one – you know, lateral thinking, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Winning Through Intimidation, all that crap. They’re mainly bollocks but it gives you something to talk about. Go ahead and have a look, I’ll just be a minute.’
Mr Phillips opened the book in the middle.
Hitler envisaged a united Europe. He envisaged a world in which the motorist would be able to travel from Calais to Zagreb on motorways. He foresaw German hegemony, as the dominant power of the continent. He was a vegetarian at a time and in a milieu when that was a strange thing to be. (He pointed out that ‘Japanese wrestlers, who live off nothing but vegetables, are among the strongest men in the world.’ This also goes to prove that the Führer was willing to consider lessons and examples from other, far-away cultures – an important example for any leader in today’s globally competitive environment.)
All these are examples of what it takes to be a visionary thinker, one who sees beyond conventional patterns of thought and behaviour. They show you that you are often right by being wrong; by saying the opposite of what others say, confident in the validity of your own insights. They also show us that we must look to the broadest perspectives to see our ideas bear fruit. Like the Führer we must be confident that posterity will vindicate us. (See Chapter 10, for ‘How to Have Your Posterity Today’.) As we look at today’s Europe, united and dominated by a recrudescent Germany, in which we can travel on motorways from Calais to Seville, from Boulogne to Athens, which of us can look into our hearts and say that the Führer was in any meaningful sense wrong?
THIS IS THE WAY IN WHICH A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MANAGER MUST LEARN TO THINK.
Martin swung his jacket off the back of the chair and was already heading towards his father and the exit.
Somewhere in Mr Phillips’s mind, when he decided to pop in on Martin, had been the notion that he might be able to confide in his elder son about what had happened. But as soon as he saw Martin he felt that it wouldn’t be possible, not so much because of the admission of weakness on his own part that would be involved, but because Martin in some hard to define but real way would not be strong enough to bear the news. (It’s a proverb: when the father helps the son, both smile; when the son helps the father, both cry.) He might laugh or weep or do some other inappropriate thing. Did some men have sons with whom that kind of exchange might be imaginable? Mr Phillips remembers the first time his mother had given him a jam jar to twist open and said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’
‘You’re going to be rich,’ says Mr Phillips, meaning it not as a compliment but as a fact.
‘Depends what you mean by rich.’
‘Richer than Mum and me, anyway.’
‘Well, yeah. Obviously.’
It takes Mr Phillips a second to realize that this is a joke. Their main courses have by now arrived. Mr Phillips finishes his G and T.
‘How’s Mum?’
‘Very well. Same as ever.’
‘Doesn’t sound as if much has been happening.’
‘Well, you know how it is.’
‘It’s a funny feeling, in some ways,’ says Martin. ‘The idea of being rich. Especially since it’ll only happen if someone comes in and buys up the company. I mean, that’s basically the only way you can suddenly get a ton of money dumped on you overnight. So you sell the company and then what? The main thing you’ve been doing for years is taken away. So what you do is start another company and start all over again. It’s like sex.’
‘Is it?’ asked Mr Phillips.
‘You know, love them and leave them. But that’s only an idea, a saying, it’s not like official.’
‘What sort of money?’
‘A bloke who was doing a fairly similar thing with retro compilations was bought up for half a million. Anything can happen. In three years’ time, I’ll either be going home from work to Notting Hill in a brand new Beamer, or taking the Northern Line back to Morden and trying to dodge the fare. It could go either way.’
Mr Phillips, who had taken the train in to Waterloo every working day for the last twenty-six years until this morning, digests that in silence.
‘This is very nice,’ he says, offering some fish cake on the end of his fork. The fish cake is not as good as Mrs Mitchinson’s, but it isn’t bad. Martin, who is chewing, shakes his head and nods down at his plate. Mr Phillips declines the offer to try his son’s expensive-looking piece of grilled fish.
‘Those are pretty girls you have working for you,’ he says.
‘You fugga da staff, you fugga da business. You must know that – it’s an old Italian saying. But yeah, they’re all right. Debbie, the blonde one, is the toughest. She can shave points like no one you’ve ever seen. Now she’s going to be rich one day, for sure.’
When the waitress comes back, Martin says, ‘I’m at a loss for words again, Sophie. Let me take you away from all this.’
‘Would you like any dessert or coffee at all?’ says Sophie.
They settle on two coffees and the bill. Mr Phillips feels the weight of things bearing down on him more heavily than he has at any point since his conversation with Mr Wilkins. The idea of having nothing to do, an empty diary, an empty life, stretching out in front of him until he dies. Luckily at that moment the bill arrives. Sums come to the rescue. Ravioli at £6.95, bacon and scallops at £6.75, fish cake at £8, sea bass at £12, large mineral water £2.50, gin and tonic £3.50, two filter coffees £4, service at 12.5 per cent is £5.46, equals £49.16. Six plus seven is thirteen, eight plus twelve is twenty, which makes thirty-three, two fifty plus three fifty is six, plus four is ten, plus thirty-three is forty-three, plus the fiver for service is forty-eight, which is close enough once you’ve added in the pennies. Mr Phillips fishes out his cheque book and begins to write. His son picks up the bill and looks at it.
‘Good value here,’ he says. ‘For this part of town. Do you mind if I love you and leave you? Only I know I’ve got a call coming in at quarter past on the dot.’
‘By all means,’ says Mr Phillips. They shake hands, Martin gets up and is gone with a final ‘Love to Mum’ over his shoulder.
So that was Martin. Mr Phillips waits for Sophie to come back and take the bill. Instead it is another waitress who comes and picks up the bill and cheque and cheque card, and a third who brings it back, pressing his plastic card back on to the table with a brisk click and equivalently brisk pro forma smile. Both these girls are good looking, the first a leggy, slightly ungainly dyed blonde, black hair visible at the roots of her parting, distracted, sexy; the other shorter, darker, slightly cross-looking, heavier around the middle and lower half, verging on the outright bottomy, but sexy too. Her bad temper made you wonder what her good temper would be like; what it would be like to be fucking her, see her expression and compare it with her normal cross face. That was probably what men who liked cross girls liked about them.
Taken with the lovely Sophie and with Martin’s colleagues that was a lot of pretty girls for one lunchtime. If you were a Martian walking around earth in disguise you would form an inaccurate impression of how many pretty girls there were if you went by how many of them you encountered in public places as waitresses, receptionists, front-of-house people, the people you dealt with when you went to offices or shops or pubs or restaurants. Anywhere, basically, where there was an opportunity to put a pretty girl in between you and a transaction. So pretty girls were a kind of consumable substance, used up like fuel, or used like WD40 t
o ease the mechanisms. And there’s always a fresh supply, that’s the beauty of it.
Mr Phillips decides to go for a pee, not so much because he needs one, more as a precaution. The fact of his not needing one, itself unusual, is a sign of how hot the day is, how much he must be sweating. He weaves through tables towards the back of the restaurant where the loos are. The place is thinning out now, and about half the tables are empty, people reluctantly dragging themselves back to work; of the lunchers who stay behind, a fair few of them look as if they are set for the long haul, with second or third bottles of wine being broached, brandies appearing, chairs being pushed back. Two of the tables have what look like courting couples sitting at them, holding hands and looking at each other. None of them seems at all married. Or not to each other, anyway. In the case of one couple, the man is at least twice his girlfriend’s age. Lucky devil! Well done! If he is married to someone else, he must be confident that this is the kind of place he can come to without any news of what’s going on getting back to anyone who knows him. Given that there must be a couple of hundred people passing through the restaurant at any one mealtime, that would seem to Mr Phillips to be a statistically significant risk.
The toilets are down a little white-walled corridor. Mr Phillips has a faint dread about whether or not he will be able to tell the Gents and the Ladies apart, but in the event it is straightforward: the Gents is demarcated by a cartoon dandy holding a monocle to his eye with his left hand and brandishing a cocked duelling pistol in his right. He wears a top hat and tails and a confident, supercilious expression. So that’s easy enough, even though anyone who looks less like Mr Phillips feels would be hard to imagine. The Ladies has a woman in a huge hooped ball gown that she is ever so slightly hitching up to reveal a glimpse of well-turned ankle.
Mr. Phillips Page 11
