Maybe the Horse Will Talk

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘“Yes, sire, if you can let me have your very best horse, by the end of the year I will have trained him to talk.”

  ‘The king was very taken with the prospect of his best horse being trained to talk and he happily agreed to the jester’s suggestion. The jester went home and told his wife all that had occurred. His wife, however, was terrified . . . and angry. His wife, as it happened, was called Eleanor, the same name as Mummy, and she was often angry with the jester and sometimes stupidly thought she’d be happier without him. She yelled at the jester. “You can’t make a horse talk!” she cried. “Are you out of your mind? You don’t know how to do that! Nobody knows how to do that!” said the jester’s distraught wife. “When you fail the king will have you killed.”

  ‘“Listen,” the jester said to his wife, “he would have had me killed soon anyway. I’ve just bought myself a whole year. In a year many things can happen. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die.”’

  By now, Beanie was fast asleep and breathing in a nice steady rhythm. Stephen Maserov looked over to his wife who had been listening intently to the whole story from the doorway of her son’s room.

  ‘Or, maybe the horse will talk,’ Maserov suggested softly.

  part two

  I

  Stephen Maserov had never got used to walking through the cavernous entry foyer of Freely Savage Carter Blanche, which swallowed him each morning and when he returned there at night in an attempt to make budget, after having visited his two young sons and estranged wife.

  The sound of his shoes on the marble floor as he walked to the bank of elevators would trigger an anticipatory visceral reaction to the frustration and humiliation that defined his work days. And, by arithmetic induction, his hatred of his job. He would either be starved of any files to work on, or he would be allotted more files needing immediate attention than he could handle in a week, let alone a day. Or he would be given mutually contradictory instructions on a matter by two different partners. Or he would have an allegedly urgent file he’d worked on till late the night before suddenly taken over by someone else the next day without any explanation. Or he would be summoned to report on a matter to a meeting of partners but in the event not given an opportunity to say anything. Or he would be given a menial task like collecting a partner’s dry-cleaning.

  All this, including being continually on call, continually contactable, was to be accompanied by the need to feign exuberant fealty to a firm where downsizing was a regular event.

  As he came into the building that morning he wondered what had changed since Hamilton received the email written by Maserov himself and sent by Malcolm Torrent. As far as he could tell, nothing seemed different. He rode the elevator up to his floor and was making his way to his workstation, which he was heartened to see still existed, when he saw a flicker of something – concern, understanding, warning, perhaps a recognition of bravery – something in the eyes of another Second Year, a well and softly spoken young lawyer named Emery. Emery was the only other Second Year who Maserov felt possessed an undercover agitator’s sense of irony. As far as Maserov could tell, Emery hadn’t yet adopted the Stockholm syndrome mindset of the other Second Year quislings.

  He’d already passed Emery’s workstation and was about to sit down at his own, just long enough to breathe in his new circumstances, when he realised that the slight widening of Emery’s eyes meant that Emery must know something of what had happened. Maserov and Emery had never openly discussed with each other their utter disenchantment with the firm and their working conditions but Maserov knew from subtle tells in Emery’s demeanour over the last two years that he was mentally recording the whole thing. While each of them was powerless to help the other, they recognised that the other was the closest he had to an ally. Other than the support of tiny facial gestures, in reality all Emery could really offer Maserov was a capacity to bear witness, at least as long as he, Emery, lasted, which, statistically, was going to be another few months. But that morning Emery’s flicker told Maserov he hadn’t dreamed the email from Malcolm Torrent to Hamilton. The slight adjustment of Emery’s facial muscles as Maserov passed by confirmed to Maserov that indeed the world had changed.

  Maserov sat down at his workspace and took in a breath. Malcolm Torrent’s personal assistant had forwarded a return email from Hamilton acceding to Torrent’s request, subject to Maserov’s continued observance of the Freely Savage HR department’s requirements. He looked all around him. There were muted voices, the quiet competitive clacking of keyboards (always fast, since slow typing suggested uncertainty or thinking) and of course the occasional loud conversation from a partner’s office. Nothing was out of the ordinary and yet everything had changed. Maserov reached into the one drawer provided by his desk and took out his red tartan glasses case. His mother had given it to him before a high school exam he’d dreaded but which he’d done well in. She was dead now but she was often with him, as was that glasses case. He had taken it into every exam he’d ever had and, armed with it, he had done well enough each time to ultimately gain admission to legal practice, a vitamin D deficiency, and a recurring chilli-red skin condition. Then he’d smuggled the glasses case into the drawer of his collapsible office desk. Some of the more senior lawyers had seen it but rather than considering it juvenile they had just assumed it was where he was keeping his stimulants and anxiolytics. They made a mental note of it.

  The twelve months Maserov had bought himself to solve Malcolm Torrent’s company’s sexual harassment problems, secure some kind of employment beyond the twelve months and save his marriage had begun. He was leaving his workstation when he noticed a small piece of white paper that had fallen from the seat of his chair to the floor. He picked it up. It read, ‘Stephen, please call Human Resources.’ It was signed with the initials HR. Either it was from someone working in HR with the same initials as the department or it was from someone who could sign a memo with the full imprimatur of the department they worked for.

  Maserov looked at the note for a moment and, putting it in his pocket, decided he would call HR from the offices of Torrent Industries. He would feel safer there and, anyway, he wondered, how urgent could it be? After all, he had Malcolm Torrent in his corner. Emery coughed as Maserov reached his workstation which Maserov took as a signal to stop, crouch and pretend to do up his shoe.

  ‘Hamilton’s out to get you,’ Emery whispered.

  ‘All of us,’ Maserov answered without deviating his gaze from his shoe.

  ‘“All of us”? What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s going to be a cull of Second Years.’

  ‘When?’ asked Emery in an alarmed whisper.

  ‘When everyone assumes they’re a Third Year.’

  ‘But I thought they only cull —’

  ‘New policy,’ Maserov interrupted.

  ‘Have they fired you already?’

  ‘No,’ Maserov answered. ‘I’ve been seconded to Torrent Industries.’

  ‘That could be good,’ Emery said, before adding, ‘Is that good?’

  ‘I hope so,’ whispered Maserov. Then he stood up, patted Emery gently on the back and walked towards the elevator and the unknown. It occurred to him that someone watching might think him brave. It was a novel thought and it dissolved like a yawn as the bell rang for the elevator doors to open.

  II

  As the cab pulled up outside Torrent Industries headquarters, Maserov realised that he had forgotten to get a Cabcharge voucher to pay for the ride. But he didn’t care. He felt both employed and free. This must have been how people with jobs felt in the sixties when, his parents had told him, you could quit your job in the morning and have an equal or better one in the afternoon. He even tipped the cab driver the whole cost of the ride, so pleased was he by his changed circumstances. He had no idea how he was going to solve Malcolm Torrent’s problems but he had a year with a salary to do it and nobody on his back. He could, if he chose, spend half his time looking for other jobs.

&nbs
p; As the cab pulled away, Maserov, having first wished the cab driver Eid Mubarak, several months too early, affected the sort of corporate facial set he felt was the sine qua non of a lawyer who could solve Torrent Industries’ sexual harassment problems. As he rode the elevator to Malcolm Torrent’s office it occurred to him that Torrent might have had second thoughts about paying him for a year. Or he might have forgotten all about their arrangement, one that while life changing for Maserov touched Malcolm Torrent’s world like the wings of a butterfly, no, a moth, a second-year moth.

  Not likely, Maserov thought. He had a folded printout of the email to Hamilton. But what if Hamilton had persuaded him to renege? Then he, Maserov, would be in the same position he had been in before the conversation with Malcolm Torrent. No, he wouldn’t be. He’d be fired. But there was no intimation back at his workstation that he’d been fired. The door opened and Maserov walked towards Malcolm Torrent’s private office. There was the note from Human Resources asking him to call. Was that what it was about? Was he to be quietly fired?

  ‘Good morning, I’m Stephen Maserov,’ he said to Malcolm Torrent’s private secretary, Mrs Joan Henshaw, a woman with a pleasant but not easy to read face. Nearing retirement, she gave nothing away. Would she remember him? It was only yesterday that he wrote an email from her desk. Email! If Human Resources at Freely Savage wanted to fire him with urgency they would probably also send him an email, not merely leave a handwritten – scrawled, really – note on his chair. There had been no email when last he’d checked. Maybe he should check his email from his phone now. Didn’t want to. Talking to saviour’s private secretary. Can’t be rude. Better do it for peace of mind. Soon as possible. No. Don’t want to.

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Maserov,’ Malcolm Torrent’s private secretary said and internally Maserov celebrated wildly her remembering him. He thought of his sons. ‘Mr Torrent has asked me to direct you to Human Resources.’

  ‘What?!’ screamed a raucous voice inside the cavity of his mind.

  ‘Your Human Resources, right?’ Maserov asked her involuntarily in the low voice one uses when there’s no oxygen to be found on the planet you’ve been seconded to.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she replied with slight hesitation, unsure who else he thought she could have meant. ‘They’re on the fiftieth floor. Ask for Jessica Annand. I’ll write it down.’

  As he got out of the elevator he checked his email. There was a message from Freely Savage Human Resources. Was this it? Was he going to have to tell Malcolm Torrent that Hamilton had already broken his word? Don’t open it. You have to. Suddenly Jessica Annand was standing before him.

  ‘You’re from Freely Savage?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said in a tone that couldn’t hide his own surprise. It was unusual to consider himself in this light, as the representative of his own oppressor.

  Of Indian heritage, she was beautiful, frighteningly, with dark, soft eyes and the sort of bouncy black hair one only sees in advertisements for hair conditioners, lustrous yet manageable. It was not simply that he could imagine how he looked to her, with his pale, creased face, in need of a shave though he had shaved not two hours before, and his small exhausted red eyes, portals into a world of anxiety not quite hidden by something like a cross between conjunctivitis and strabismus. No, worse than this vision of himself through her eyes was the sudden panic which assaulted his sentience. Would this beautiful woman in her elegant corporate bodycon dress realise that he was there to, in effect, defend certain men in the company she worked in against accusations of sexual harassment by women, her former colleagues?

  No doubt some of these men had looked at her in a way that intimidated or at least nauseated her. And here was he, Maserov from Freely Savage, with a brief to frustrate the litigation these women had launched. He heard his wife Eleanor’s voice, ‘You want life to go on for these executives as though nothing ever happened. It takes guts for a woman to bring an action like this, especially against her boss. Sexual harassment needs to be taken seriously. It’s not a chip to be bargained with for your career advancement.’ Maserov didn’t need Eleanor’s take on what he was doing. He had enough qualms of his own.

  ‘I’m Jessica Annand,’ she said, extending her hand. He took it to shake. Do it quickly, he thought. Don’t patronise her with a weak grip but nothing so firm it could be misconstrued as misogyny or neocolonialism. Her tone was friendly and relaxed. This was going to be terrible, asking this beautiful woman for help and waiting for her to realise what he was there for.

  She said there was a vacant office waiting for him with a phone and a computer. He wondered if it was a real office, a room with a door, or if ‘office’ was, like at Freely Savage, a euphemism for a collapsible workstation. She led him down the hallway and, as he sneaked glances at the executives in those offices with the door open and tried to avoid looking at Jessica’s moving three-dimensional form lest he fix on it and get caught staring, she turned for a moment and gave him a gentle smile.

  She gestured for him to enter an empty, pristine office with a door and a window view of the universe. ‘Here’s my card with my extension on it. Call me if you need anything.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Maserov said, looking at her card.

  ‘I should get you a security pass if you’re going to be here for a while.

  If you have a card it’ll stop them getting your name wrong. Happens quite a lot around here.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, pulling out his wallet and taking out a business card to give her. Now there was perhaps the hint of an intimacy between them; him and her against the unthinking automatons who make security passes and get names wrong.

  ‘How long do you expect to be here?’

  ‘Oh, I’d say, give or take, in the vicinity of about . . . a year.’

  ‘A year!’

  ‘Unless they fire me . . . then it will be less than a year.’

  ‘Why would they fire you?’

  Maserov looked up at Jessica from his new desk as she stood in the doorway of his new office. ‘You work in Human Resources, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Then you should have access to a list of reasons.’

  ‘Reasons why you should be fired?’ she asked.

  ‘Not me in particular. I don’t work here.’

  ‘Other than for perhaps the next year,’ Jessica added, intrigued.

  Maserov looked at Jessica’s business card in his hand then up at her before continuing earnestly, ‘Ms Annand, may I call you Jessica?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Maserov.’ She smiled.

  ‘You look puzzled. Okay, well I work for Freely Savage.’

  ‘So your business card says,’ she added.

  ‘Which makes you my client,’ Maserov finished.

  ‘You mean it makes Torrent Industries your client, not me.’

  ‘For the purposes of this conversation I’m treating you as the representative of Torrent Industries.’

  ‘Okay, as long as it’s only for the purposes of this conversation.’ She smiled again.

  ‘Well, you’re in HR, so . . . At Freely Savage we have a certain . . . well . . . There is a common view of the human resources department.’

  ‘What view is that?’

  ‘You won’t be offended?’

  ‘Why should I be? You’re not talking about our HR department, you’re talking about yours. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So I can’t be offended, can I?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘But don’t let that stop you coming to the point.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not used to coming to the point first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I can show you where to get coffee if you think it will help.’

  ‘Oh God yes, please!’ Maserov said, rubbing his eyes with the palm of one hand.

  ‘Okay but first, what’s this common view of the Freely Savage HR department and who holds it?’

  ‘Everyone below partner level at Freely Savage con
siders the firm’s HR department to be . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘To be the equivalent of the Stasi.’

  ‘The Stasi?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘The East German secret police?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the Stasi we have in mind. Similar methods, similar goals, similar staff.’

  ‘Don’t be afraid. You’re here now,’ said Jessica Annand, amused.

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘For a whole year, possibly?’

  ‘Yes, for a whole year . . . unless they fire me.’

  III

  Maserov, alone in his new short- to medium-term office at Torrent Industries headquarters, took out the slip of paper that read, ‘Stephen, please call Human Resources’ and was signed ‘HR’. It had, he thought, certain characteristics that would have been at home on a comparable note from the Stasi. There was the comma after his name, the use of only his first name (the feigned intimacy being ultimately more frightening than some impersonal document) and then the sign-off being the initials of the department itself, rather than someone working in the department. Should he call them? He didn’t know who he was meant to call but he realised it wouldn’t take long to find out and so he delayed calling. He didn’t open the email from HR either. Maserov decided that he would feel better, less fraudulent, if he first made at least some headway and came up with a plan, a road map, for tackling the problems he’d talked Malcolm Torrent into assigning to him.

  To begin with, he had to read the Freely Savage files on the allegations of sexual harassment at Torrent Industries. His difficulty lay in not having the files, or access to the files, or even access to the name of the Freely Savage lawyer who was handling the cases. But somewhere in the offices of Torrent Industries, in a database on a hard drive, there had to be the name of the lawyer. The simplest thing was to ask someone at Torrent Industries. He knew only three people there, the CEO, Malcolm Torrent himself, Torrent’s stony-faced private secretary, Joan Henshaw, and Jessica Annand from their HR department. He would start with Jessica.