The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  The Planters’ wardrobe light was on the blink; it flickered and died. I looked up and saw that its junction box was hanging loose, not from Susan’s attack on Jeremy’s garments. It had obviously been like that for some time, the plastic around the terminals had melted and browned. Shoddy work. I followed the badly stapled cable back to the skirting by the door. Whoever had done this loft conversion was a cowboy. I tried the bedside light and the main light switch. It was warm, even after the couple of minutes I’d been there. Dreadful job. The landing was no better. No doubt the electrician had overcharged as well because of Jeremy being on the telly.

  I have to be careful when it comes to wiring. No one, not even Liz, really knows about me and wiring. It’s something I had to walk away from, something about growing up, being a man if you like, getting away from my father, proving myself.

  You see, I actually have no qualifications to be in show-business at all, no right to be here. I wasn’t born into it, I didn’t do media studies, I didn’t even work my way up in it, I was a spark really, just a lonely little crappy spark. You can’t have people in this business getting to know that and continue to wear the Armani suit. Not that I go for Armani; Hugo Boss does for me. I did have a stint working in a rep theatre once, and even went on stage a couple of times. It’s OK to be a failed actor-agent, the biz is replete with them. It’s not so good to be a failed electrician-agent. It’s not lovely, it’s not stylish. The ‘teccies’ don’t come to our parties, they lead their own lives and have their own lunch, usually in the pub while we all scoff the location catering on the bus. The ‘teccies’ eat big breakfasts with black pudding and bacon while we have orange juice and script meetings. I have buried it, it’s gone.

  But the house was empty, so I traced the cable back to the consumer unit and checked the main fuse box. The wiring was a joke and probably dangerous. The under-sink cables in the bathroom had not been properly earthed and there was virtually no sheathing around any of the cabling where the plasterboard flushed against the joists in the cellar. It denigrated the whole place.

  There was a sadness in the quiet air. It came off the curtains like a dog kept indoors all day. There had obviously been crying here but no evidence of rows and tantrums like in Liz’s and my home. No taped-up windows or kicked-in cupboard doors. No dents from thrown objects on the wall plaster. No scuff marks, no scuffles. Just a kind of suffering peace. On the coffee table were the five packs of cards with which we had all played Racing Demons last time I was here, ten-year-old Dave going apoplectic at the concessions being made for his younger sister, Polly.

  Downstairs the fridge thermostat turned itself on with a gurgling noise like the low-key chant of a Japanese Noh play. Some hot-water pipes cracked into life. The house was readjusting to my presence, to the opening and closing of doors. If there were such a thing as an aural microscope it would reveal myriad undersounds in ordinary silence, as those who live alone must know. Maybe that’s why Liz used to keep the television on all day while I was at work.

  One handy thing about old Planter, despite his professionalism, was his complete lack of application when it came to matters financial, contractual or administrative. The escritoire, when I opened it, was bulging with disorganized correspondence, receipts, scraps and scribblings. There was an unpaid-in cheque from Granada TV, which should have gone through us. Naughty. But it was only for a guest appearance on a kids’ show, about £140, so I let it pass. Undealt-with fan mail and charity requests. Quite a few angry letters from Reg Simpson, the designer on the last series, whom Jeremy had had fired. Luckily no letters from other agents, but mixed in with the whole bundle were hundreds of paying-in slips from Mullin and Ketts, dating back to the previous tax year. Obviously Jeremy’s bookkeeper had not been for a while, or maybe taken one look at this mess and resigned. The payslips showed all sorts of different monies received: voiceovers, occasional overseas and video sales, one or two little repeat fees, a radio chat show. No very large sums but an adequate cash flow ticking over. I thought Jeremy was earning a lot more than this; I’d check with Tania on Monday. In the past I would have been aware of all these, minor transactions, would have recognized every ‘fee and commission. But that was before the agency grew and I had learned to delegate; also, of course, before the arrival of Grace. Nowadays it was impossible to check every single item, there just wasn’t the time, and to be honest, I couldn’t see the point in it any longer.

  I copied out some of El Planter’s figures and addresses into my spiral-bound notebook and reinstated the confusion in the escritoire as I had found it. I watered the plants and left.

  Dear Guy,

  I know it will most likely be you, Tony’s not really up to it, is he? I’m writing this just to help you deal with all the paperwork and everything when I’ve gone. You’ll find my will and all the information, solicitor’s addresses, etc. in my middle drawer. All my notes and everything are in the brown filing cabinet — key is on the smaller of the two rings in bottom right. Classes and text books, etc. I have put in the big cardboard box. You can throw them away, or hang on to them, it’s up to you. They might be useful for Grace one day if she ever shows an interest, although all will be probably out of date by then. Tools and components you can have, Guy, if you need them. You know where they are. Look after your mother for me. I’ve done my best. I know it’s not often been enough. You make sure she doesn’t want for anything. I didn’t get round to renewing the junction boxes in the kitchen. Make sure they’re properly earthed with fire-proof cable. There’s some 5ml in the utility room cupboard. I wouldn’t want her to start a fire inadvertently.

  And that was it. The sum total of wisdom passed from father to son. A whole generation’s worth of progress: ‘There’s some 5ml cable in the utility room cupboard.’ I refolded my dad’s last letter and put it in my jacket pocket. Not much of a symbolic chalice, but it was all there was.

  I like the flannelled sound of distant traffic you get in the back rooms of the terraced streets of suburban London. It is more calming to me than the quiet of the countryside. The muffled roar of a jumbo jet grew out of it and petered away again as it descended over Kew on its way to Heathrow. I could hear my watch ticking again.

  I remembered the day when I had been taken by my father with my younger brother, Tony, to visit a friend of Dad’s in Brighton — it was some seaside town — and when asked by his friend, ‘How’s your wife?’ he had replied in an apologetic sing-song voice, ‘Disappointed.’ They’d both laughed and at ten years old I hadn’t been able to understand why. I was clutching some comics that my father’s friend had given us to keep us amused while they talked. I decided to save my comics until I got home and so I read Tony’s to him instead. When we were leaving, my father’s friend asked for the comics back. They had been a loan, not a gift, so I never got to read them. That was a day of learning about disappointment. I must have been cross with Dad for not explaining to me about the comics. The thing that irritated me most of all now about his posthumous letter was that he’d assumed, correctly, that there would only be me there to sort out, and hence had only bothered to address his remarks to me. My mother wouldn’t touch it and Tony, he was right, was not really up to it, although there had been some improvement in his condition in the last couple of years. He was actually managing to hold down a job now, working for the Hammer-smith and Fulham parks department.

  Looking through my father’s drawers, cupboards and filing cabinet now was another disappointment. I could find no dark secrets which had been nursed by him over the years. No encoded secret agents’ telephone numbers, no hidden stash of porn. In fact, the only evidence of a sex life at all, whether shared with my mother or otherwise, was a packet of Durex which I found filed in a buff envelope folder neatly under ‘D’. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? They were some years past their sell-by date but that was fair enough, I suppose. He had had a prostate op in 1989. Going through his drawers and finding the Durex stirred a memory of myself and Tony — we must
have been eleven and nine at the time — first finding Durex in his bedside table and counting them, then returning a week later and counting them again and giggling. The game lasted several months, kept alive more by Tony, who has always had an over-fascination with sex. One problem was that occasionally my father bought a new packet and we couldn’t be sure whether he had put the remainder of the old into it or thrown them away. This mucked up our counting system. But even with this setback, we calculated that Mum and Dad must have been having sex about once or at most twice a month. ‘If you can call it sex with your father’, as my mother would say.

  I wondered now whether he had known about our boyish game and this is what had prompted him to keep his Durex in his filing cabinet in the study instead of his bedside table. This must have made spontaneous lovemaking impossible, since the study is a flight and a half of stairs away. Maybe he took to decanting the Durex singly or in twos from the study each month. Certainly Tony and I never found this squirrel’s store under ‘D’. We were never allowed in the study on our own.

  Feeling like an eleven-year-old again, I looked through the other entries in the ‘D’ section of his filing cabinet for some clue. There was ‘Dunstan’s’, the school at which he had taught for twenty years before my mother had encouraged him to be more ambitious and take on the headship of a posher school in Devon, where he had lasted one year before being made redundant, something from which neither he nor the rest of my family had ever fully recovered. There were various other names, friends, newspaper cuttings, none as full as the Dunstan’s file. The Durex nestled in their buff envelope folder all to themselves. There was, I suppose, one mystery, also in ‘D’: an empty file which had the unexplained title of Doris. Doris and the Durex. Sounded like an educational film about AIDS.

  I carried on checking through his bank statements. All seemed predictably in order. But as my eye went down the columns of figures, my mind ranged over the possible connections between the Durex and Doris. Had my father had a secret lover called Doris? Or was Doris an acronym for an undercover organization of ex-schoolteachers? ‘Dunstan’s Old Rascals Illicit Sex’? My grandmother’s name was Mabel, my father’s sister was called Auntie Rose, so it couldn’t be either of them. I know that my parents had been wanting a girl when my younger brother Tony had arrived, so he’d been a disappointment from day one. Could Doris be the name of the daughter they never had, and had my father put his contraceptives out of reach of the bedroom in the superstitious belief that their proximity to the empty Doris file would somehow enhance fertility?

  As I moved on to his insurance papers, I lingered in my mind on the word ‘disappointment’. There was no file under ‘D’ for this, but it seemed that my father’s’ life had been a series of disappointments. Not least of all me. Giving up stability and qualifications to go razzamatazzing with glitzy folk, sleeping with fly-by-night actresses. Whatever next? He’d had such hopes for me as a child. I had been the one to learn all his tedious skills. I was top in physics, his subject, at secondary school. But then, just when he thought he’d got me right, off I waltzed into the glamour.

  Plentax is a large electronic components company, mostly involved in armaments. At the time, I justified my leaving so abruptly with adolescent idealism, feeling rather noble that I was turning my back on that happy band of men — and it was almost exclusively men at Plentax — who design and make parts for the sonar devices used in the search mechanisms of various types of torpedo. My own personal contribution, long since computerized into redundancy, of course, was to weld the miniature DC4 resistors on to ceramic plates, which formed part of the microcircuit, which would cybernetically monitor the torpedo’s progress through the water to its target. But really, I just couldn’t take the numbness working somewhere like Plentax, where desensitization is as traditional as soldiers marching in a parade ground, as necessary as medals for bravery. But emotional numbing seems to be an essential part of earning a living, and I didn’t know that in 1976.

  I imagined, if it had been Liz that had died and not my father, what I would find among the chaos of her shoe box full of memorabilia. Billets doux from Bob Henderson? A diary splodged with tears and splattered with descriptive passages of stolen afternoons with him, wet gussets and hard members like in some magazine fiction? I couldn’t help but have the thought that Marc Linsey would like that steamy stuff to find its way into the pages of poor Neil James’s nov. I could feel a headache coming on. The neat left-right compartments of my brain were jumbling; I needed vortex reinforcement.

  My mother came in with a cup of tea for me. She put it on the desk. I thanked her, even though it had milk and sugar, neither of which I take. I long ago gave up connecting with her on dietary matters.

  ‘What do you want me to do with his cricket things?’ I asked. ‘Shall I give them away?’

  ‘Oh, you keep all that, Guy, you’re a boy.’

  ‘I don’t play cricket, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you? Was that Tony? Give it to Tony then.’

  ‘I’ll hang on to them for him. If I make a list of everything I find, then you can tell me if there’s anything you want.’

  ‘Oh, you’re just like your father, making lists. I don’t even want to come in here.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. You can just tell me, and I’ll deal with it.’ I was trying to make things easier for her.

  ‘Just leave me a pair of his socks.’

  She left the room. I was thankful my father hadn’t left a video message or anything embarrassing like that. Definitely not his style. A pair of socks would be easy and couldn’t give one any Californian-type messages of advice from the grave. After putting various insurance policies and bank letters into my bag to be photocopied, I closed up and went to the kitchen to pour away my cup of tea and go. I opened and closed the fridge door. I always do this in my parents’ kitchen, it’s a sort of reflex action. I was unaware of even looking at the contents. Some vestige of childhood insecurity.

  ‘All these years I’ve been having penetrative sex, or rather not having it because of your father, and now they tell me that I’ve been wrong all along and I should have been having clitoral stimulation,’ said my mother. She was sitting at the kitchen table looking through out-of-date colour supplements. My mum comes from that generation of women who never expected to find the right man, but rather to spend a life comfortably complaining about being stuck with a barely adequate one. As if her successes and shortcomings were his responsibility alone.

  ‘Who told you, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘That nice man with the silvery hair and the creases down his trousers.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too much daytime TV, Mum.’

  The Saturday papers were on the sideboard, unread.

  ‘Anyway, your father wouldn’t have been able to find my clitoris if it’d been the size of a tennis ball, you know what his sight was like.’ She sighed and poured herself more tea. ‘There’s something about one of yours in the papers today if you’re interested.’ She indicated the sideboard.

  ‘Mrs Planter’s Revenge!’ A fairly obvious shout line, which can’t have exercised the wit of the copywriters over—much. A picture of Jeremy in an open-neck shirt with a frocked-up tartlet under his arm on the front page, half a paragraph, and then: ‘Full story on pages 4 and 5.’ I resisted the temptation to feel intoxicated by the quantity of coverage. A double-page spread. Inside, a picture of Jeremy and Susan in happier days taken at some première do, two or three pictures of pretty girls who might once have been fondled by Jeremy, and a picture of Susan in dark glasses earlier in the week, leaving her front door with Dave and Polly in tow. Across page 5 was a recently posed reclining photo of an ageing bimbette in corsetry, and an interview with her. They’d dragged up Selina Barkworth —Jeremy’s four-year-old affair — and bunged her a few quid to say how Jeremy had been in bed. I scanned the piece. Evidently he’d been a five-times-a-night animal who was also tender, kind, gentle and, inaccurately, for those who know hi
m, generous. They’d also done a backsearch on the computer for embarrassing Planter quotes and found a couple of corkers: ‘My family means more to me than anything’ being one from 1993, and ‘Susan is not only my wife, she’s also my best friend’ the other, more recent, from a TV Quick Guide interview.

  From a glance through the main copy, it was clear that Susan must have talked to them. Most out of character, and possibly foolish. There are no winners when it comes to the press, or lawyers. She of all people should know that, being a solicitor herself Poor woman, she was losing it.

  It was turning into one of those weekends where everything seems to be conspiring against one, and try as I might, I couldn’t do what Barbara Stenner, my dearest, oldest client would have advised, and see it all as a spiritual manifestation, a karmic gift on my path to enlightenment. I felt bad about Jeremy and Susan’s son Dave. I know being a godfather doesn’t mean all that much these days, but what was the point of having one if he couldn’t keep the rats and repo-men away from the door?

  ‘What do you do?’ A woman was crammed up against me with a paper plate piled with bits of raw cauliflower and guacamole.

  ‘Well, actually, I’m an agent, sorry. Muffin and Ketts.’

  ‘Oh, God. I hate my agent. I joined her six months ago and she hasn’t done anything for me. Nothing. I mean, six months! I haven’t been up for anything! I think they have such an easy life they don’t bother with you unless you’re known or in a soap or something.’ Actresses are not renowned for their sensitivity and tact.