Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  The lift, which has rocked and banged all the way up, stops at the so-called fourteenth floor. There is a terrible moment of absolute stillness and then the doors creak slowly open. The woman, taking charge, moves into the hallway outside, which has been painted in peeling grey-green and is lit by another flickering fluorescent strip-light. She turns left along the narrow corridor, walks past two doors, through one of which Mr Phillips can hear loud pop music being played on a low-fidelity radio. The third door along the corridor is hers. It has a brass knocker as well as a bell, a metal plate carrying the number 46 made out of the same brass, and an extra lock. She has already taken her key out of the bag as she arrives at the door, and she manipulates the locks in sequence with the ease of much practice. It is a thing people do in cities now, Mr Phillips knew, he had seen an item about it on Crimewatch. They get their keys ready in advance. That way you are less likely to have someone come up behind you and bop you on the head.

  But the inside of the flat is a surprise. When he comes through the door behind the woman he finds that he is looking across the room to a huge picture window, through which the blue evening sky looks like an abstract painting. At one end, occupying the whole wall, is a waist-height bookshelf, very tidy, with dozens of framed photographs resting on it. Many of them feature younger versions of this woman with a big man of about the same age. She is a pretty little thing in the early photos. The man is a bruiser, somehow familiar-looking, with lots of black then lots of white hair. He is a good bit taller than her, and is usually wearing a tie.

  Copying the woman’s good lifting technique, Mr Phillips bends at the knees and sets the bags and his briefcase down. The plastic handles have dug deeply into his hands and left livid red, white and purple marks that look as if they will never fade. Glancing around the room, Mr Phillips sees what is right beside him: a fish tank, the length of the whole side wall, full of the most highly coloured fish he could ever imagine. The tank is decorated with grey rocks and green moss and the fish look as bright as jewels. There is a small shoal of tiny black ones with red go-faster stripes, darting and flitting around the tank, and one big electric-blue fish floating motionless apart from a slow opening and closing of its mouth. Some other indeterminate-sized fish float and glint, and one, green and blue with a cheeky expression, hovers beside an updraught of bubbles in the middle of the tank, looking for all the world like a man undertaking a decadent pleasure such as sucking on a hookah.

  ‘Amazing fish,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘They were my husband’s,’ says the woman, from the kitchen, where she has gone with two of the bags that Mr Phillips set down. A few seconds later she comes back carrying a large box of fish food, which she carries over to the tank.

  ‘I wondered what was so heavy in there,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘You’d be surprised how much they get through.’ And then, as she begins tipping the food into the tank, moving from side to side to give all the fish a fair whack, and the fish start to feed, she adds, ‘I’m Martha.’

  ‘I’m Victor. Pleased to meet you,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘They were his passion,’ she says, nodding at the fish tank.

  ‘They’re quite something.’

  ‘He would have preferred dogs, but it’s not fair to them, is it? With the space.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not that those are all the same, his actual fish. They don’t live for ever.’

  ‘What’s this one?’ asked Mr Phillips, pointing at the motionless whopper in the middle of the tank.

  ‘That’s Boris. He’s a parrot fish. Brian named him after a man he knew.’

  ‘He’s very handsome.’

  ‘He eats more than all the others put together.’

  Mr Phillips has heard that goldfish, if they escaped into the wild, would grow to an unlimited size. But there seems to be no tactful way of asking about this.

  ‘They liven up the flat,’ says the woman on a concluding note. She picks up the other two bags and takes them into the kitchen, from where she calls out, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’d better not,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘I’ll be making one for myself anyway,’ says Martha.

  ‘Well, that’s very nice of you,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘Make yourself at home. I’ll only be a minute,’ she says. At some point, while he was not looking, she has managed to take off her coat.

  Mr Phillips goes across to the window. It is an amazing view; you can suddenly see why people want to live in these flats. He is looking north-eastwards across the middle of London, and can see the Post Office Tower, the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s, all three. Aresidue of his Catholic education is that high places always make him think of the Devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness, taking him up high into the air and offering him the world. In this light it looks like a pretty good deal. His own house, about five minutes’ walk away, is not visible from here: a small block of offices cuts off the line of sight. But he can see the railway line that eventually runs behind the houses across his road, and the single green field, grandly called Wilmington Park, where people take their dogs to crap.

  Martha comes back carrying a tray which has a teapot underneath a bulbous cosy, cups and saucers, a bowl of sugar cubes and a plate of biscuits. She puts the tray down on a low table beside a reclining armchair that faces a small, old television. A touch of bustle about her movements makes Mr Phillips see she is enjoying having company.

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘White without, please.’

  Mr Phillips tastes his tea.

  ‘Best drink of the day,’ says Martha, who then blushes. ‘Brian used always to say that.’

  ‘What did your husband do?’ asks Mr Phillips. There are no photographs of children so he does not feel that is a safe question.

  ‘He was a teacher,’ says Martha. ‘RE. At St Aloysius’s, for over thirty years.’

  ‘I was at St Aloysius’s,’ says Mr Phillips. ‘What was his surname?’

  ‘Erith.’

  ‘Mr Erith! He taught me! I remember him! I thought I recognized his picture! He was very …’

  Mr Phillips runs into trouble at this point. Mr Erith was the loony RE teacher who talked about St Augustine and sin all the time. ‘Mad’ was the word that would honestly come next.

  ‘… he was a very good teacher,’ Mr Phillips finishes.

  He gets up and goes across to the photographs. Sure enough, that is Mr Erith, looking more relaxed and casual than he had done at school, but the same man none the less. And now Mr Phillips notices the titles of the books. Gravity and Grace. Church Dogmatics. Mere Christianity. The Screwtape Letters. The Sickness Unto Death. Either/Or. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Mr Erith.

  ‘He … I never knew he kept fish.’

  ‘Tropical fish.’

  ‘He was a very memorable teacher,’ says Mr Phillips. ‘I often think of him still.’

  Martha, with great dignity, simply smiles. Then she reaches down under her chair and takes out a thick album which she shyly opens and hands across to Mr Phillips. For a second he thinks it is more photographs, but then he sees that it is a series of embroidered mottoes, obviously something Martha has made herself. The first of them, in pink against a purple background decorated with flowers, says: ‘The masses need something that will give them a thrill of power. Anew age of magical interpretation of the world is at hand, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence’. Below that, in smaller lettering but the same shade of pink, it says, ‘Adolph Hitler’.

  ‘I say,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘He kept a little notebook of sayings he liked,’ says Martha. ‘I started doing this after he died as …’

  Mr Phillips decides she means as something to do, or as a way of remembering him. There are several more embroidered pages in the album. The next one says: ‘Happiness is the maximum agreement of reality and desire. Joseph Stalin’. It is yellow on a blue background with an abstract
pattern. The one after that says: ‘The waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. William Empson.’ That one is all in different shades of green. ‘Nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only as a random act whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. Paul de Man.’

  ‘Golly,’ says Mr Phillips. He closes the book.

  ‘Do you mind my asking something?’ he says. ‘The boys at school always used to speculate about what Mr Erith had done before he became a teacher. I don’t know why, quite. He just didn’t seem the teacher type.’

  ‘I got so many letters when Brian died. Quite a few of his old pupils said that. Some of them still write.’

  ‘How, er, how long?’

  ‘Five years,’ says Martha. ‘Sometimes it seems like twenty years, and sometimes like ten minutes.’

  ‘Yes, it’s like that, isn’t it?’

  Martha seems to be remembering things. There is silence for a while, and then she says:

  ‘He trained to be a priest. He was in the seminary for two years as a young man, and then he left. He started to disagree with all sorts of specific points of doctrine. The main thing was that he became convinced that God didn’t create the world. He said that nothing about the world made sense if you thought it was made by God whereas if you thought it was made by the Devil, a lot of things were much more clear. Your duty was to leave it behind and get closer to God. So you were supposed to reject this world in favour of a higher one. But he kept all that to himself in later life.’ She smiles again. ‘Did he used to talk about sin a lot?’

  ‘He did, rather.’

  ‘He always did that. He used to say it was the only bit of religion schoolboys had any interest in.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but we thought he was a bit bonkers.’

  Martha makes a face.

  ‘He knew that most of the boys thought that. He said it was a good way of getting them to listen.’

  ‘I didn’t realize he lived here. I’d have come to see him.’ Even as he says it Mr Phillips wonders if it is true. He and Martha drink their tea.

  4.5

  Back down on the street, his knees trembling and stinging from the thirteen-storey descent down the dank stairwell, Mr Phillips set out on the last stretch home. He weaves down Kestrel Lane, past the Afro-Caribbean barber and the travel shop and the two small supermarkets, and then crosses into the residential quiet of Middleton Way. The cutting-through cars have disappeared for the evening. On the pavement in front of him, at what can only be a highly uncomfortable angle, are a pair of legs. They belong to a man who is lying on his back underneath a battered blue Ford Fiesta. Beside the legs are an open toolbox, a can of WD40 and an oily rag. This is no surprise to Mr Phillips, since this near-neighbour is very often to be found in exactly this position, especially at evenings and weekends. Leaving his toolbox there where anyone could steal it while he lies trapped under the car seems a trusting gesture, like a well-adjusted dog lying on its back to sleep.

  Rounding the corner from Middleton Way, Mr Phillips is nearly run over by a boy on roller-skates, dressed from head to toe in shiny cycling clothes – Lycra shorts, orange top, blue helmet. ‘Sorry,’ the boy calls out over his shoulder as he vooms past. Mr Phillips doesn’t recognize him.

  And then Mr Phillips turns into Wellesley Crescent. Most people have already got home and there is hardly anywhere left to park. Happily there is no sign of Mr Palmer, a.k.a. Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr and Mrs Wu from the Neighbourhood Watch meeting are standing on their doorstep, chatting to a man in overalls whom Mr Phillips hasn’t seen before. On the other side of the street, though, outside Mr Phillips’s house, is a much more surprising sight. Thomas is standing with his shirt off beside a bucket of soapy water, carrying a sponge which he dumps on top of Mr Phillips’s car windscreen, squeezes, and then wipes across the glass. Thomas, in short, is washing the car. This is such an unexpected vision that Mr Phillips stops short. But he doesn’t want Thomas to see him standing there just watching, so he gets moving again and comes up behind his son, who turns just as he arrives at the now gleaming Honda.

  ‘Thomas!’ says Mr Phillips. ‘You’re washing the car.’

  Thomas laughs and resumes his dunk-squeeze-wipe gesture over the windshield, whose wipers are folded back and pointed into the air like insect antennae.

  ‘Felt like it,’ says Thomas. ‘You’re late. Mum was starting to get worried,’ he added.

  ‘Forgot something,’ says Mr Phillips. He thinks about asking if Tom will be in this evening but decides against it on the grounds that his son might think he is pushing his luck. And the car really does look very clean.

  ‘I’ll, er, I’ll see you later,’ says Mr Phillips. ‘That’s really nice of you about the car.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  Mr Phillips pushes the front door but it is off the latch. He replaces a dustbin lid which has been blown or knocked off and fumbles for his keys, which he finds in his left-hand jacket pocket, and opens the door. He has no idea what will happen next.

  About the Author

  John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where his pieces still appear. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written three novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, a book about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E. M. Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. He is married, has two children and lives in London.

  by the same author

  THE DEBT TO PLEASURE

  Copyright

  First published in 2000

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © John Lanchester, 2000

  The right of John Lanchester to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26808–5