Maybe the Horse Will Talk

by Elliot Perlman

‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that. So that tomorrow, when the time is right, you can just get up and leave and show the guys below you in the department just how idiosyncratic you are. Show them you can do it, that you’re not afraid to do it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not afraid.’

  ‘Go on then, walk out. Go to the elevator, press the button.’

  ‘This is great, Jessica. I’m feeling really fired up about this whole “leaving at four” thing.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘You want to have a drink with me?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be scientific.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I won’t be having a drink with you when you walk out at four tomorrow. Or the next day. I will never have a drink with you . . . out of commitment to the project.’

  ‘So if I don’t go ahead with this project?’

  ‘You’ve just got cold feet. But a real leader . . . See if you can do it, Frank. Get up now. Go. Walk away.’

  Maserov heard Jessica leave first. A minute or two later, he saw Frank Cardigan walk with purpose past the partly open door. Then he heard the elevator bell ring, and some seconds after that, its doors opening and closing. Frank Cardigan had left.

  VII

  ‘Brilliant, absolutely brilliant!’

  Maserov was praising Jessica for having escaped the further attentions signalled by Frank Cardigan using only her wits.

  ‘What else was I meant to use?’

  They were sitting next to each other on a mahogany leather settee in a sparely lit bar in the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, affectionately called the Espy by its devotees, where Jessica knew some of the bar staff and felt sure that no one from Torrent Industries would run into them. She had ordered them each a cocktail known as the Celibate Screwdriver, which was served in a glass that had been coated with absinthe.

  ‘I told you, Frank Cardigan’s vanity competes with his stupidity to be the first thing you think of when you hear his name. It was the marriage of these two of Frank’s attributes that I put my money on. Here, take a sip of this. You earned it,’ Jessica said, handing him his drink. ‘I must say though,’ she said, taking a sip herself, ‘the degree to which you seem impressed by my wiles suggests that you really have no idea what it’s like for a woman to work at a place like Torrent Industries, to work nearly anywhere, actually.’

  ‘You have to do this kind of thing often?’

  ‘To plan my interaction with fellow staff members, to have an exit strategy up my sleeve? Yes, I have to do this pretty much every day. This has been building with Frank Cardigan for a while. It’s probably worse at Torrent Industries than most places because of the high ratio of men to women. It’s even worse if you’re a waitress. You’re working for tips. You have to constantly calculate what every little innuendo, leer, sleazy remark, outrageous request, touch or grope is worth.

  ‘And you’re making this calculation with your hands full, arms juggling a stack of dishes or a tray of glasses. Then someone tries to touch you and it throws you off balance physically as well as psychologically. I used to waitress when I was a student so I know. I’ve got it good now. I’m only trying to juggle the politics of the situation. That’s what a woman buys when she graduates with a Masters. You get to fight back with your hands free. You don’t have to balance a stack of dishes when the hands come. Worth every penny. But there is no question my longevity in the job and progress up the pay scale depends to no small extent on my being attractive to men. My boss might be a woman – sort of – but she’s got her ear out herself for the panting heartbeat of all the men she needs to keep happy.

  ‘Anyway . . . Listen, I don’t want to hit you over the head with anything, not even the way things really are. You’re one of the good ones. Stephen, I’m really grateful you were there tonight.’

  ‘It turned out you didn’t need me.’

  ‘Well, neither of us could have known that in advance.’

  ‘But you had a strategy ready to go and you carried it off with such great . . .’ Exhausted as usual, Maserov tried to find the right word.

  ‘Aplomb?’

  ‘Yes, aplomb. You don’t hear that word very often these days; aplomb.’

  ‘That came from knowing that I was safe, I had you in the next room ready to pounce. Were you ready to pounce?’

  ‘I was ready . . . as ready as I can be these days . . . to pounce. I’m kind of . . . I’ve been sort of ground down a little . . . recently . . . by a few things, and I’ve done very little . . . very little pouncing. Is that absinthe?’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not meant to lick the glass. You pounced on the opportunity to save your job, didn’t you? You’ve got to tell me what you’re doing for Mr Torrent.’

  ‘Do you think they’ve got any more of that absinthe?’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re driving. Why don’t you just suck on the rim for a bit longer?’

  ‘Jessica, you’re not going to like me anymore . . . any moment now.’

  ‘Why, what are you going to do?’

  Maserov leaned back, raised his arms above his head and stretched, looking for more relief than stretching ordinarily provides.

  ‘I told you my wife and I are separated.’

  ‘Yeah? What happened . . . if I can ask?’

  ‘I was a teacher, an English teacher. She’s a teacher as well. That’s how we met, we were teaching at the same school. All went well at first. But after we’d put a deposit on a house we found ourselves on the verge of drowning, bobbing up and down beneath waves of financial insecurity, periodically swallowing water. Then the intervals between mouthfuls of water got shorter and we decided at least one of us needed to earn more.’

  ‘As a drug dealer?’ Jessica offered.

  ‘No, drug dealers are nowhere near as stressed as we were. If I were a drug dealer I might still be living with my children.’

  ‘You’re just a lawyer.’

  ‘Yeah, just a lawyer. We decided that I should study law and we’d live off my wife’s income until I could start earning the kind of money the parents of children at private schools are rumoured to earn. But, to cut a long story short, between the hours I spent studying and then the hours I spent at Freely Savage trying to accumulate sufficient six-minute billable units to make budget, my wife said we had begun to drift apart. But by then we had two small kids and with work and the demands of the children, we never found the time to talk, not as a couple. She said all our conversations were merely transactional; who pays which bill, who picks up which child, that kind of thing. She was right.’

  ‘And that’s when you met someone else?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘That’s when your wife met someone else?’

  ‘No, at least she says she hasn’t.’

  ‘So why would she ask you to move out?’

  ‘I don’t really know, to be honest. I think she’s just angry at the way her life has turned out, and in a fit of pique that she hasn’t quite got over, she’s sort of thrashing around trying to make some big change that will lead to . . . some big change. I go there pretty much every night to see my sons but after we’ve put them to bed she expects me to leave. Then I go back to work. But I miss my sons incredibly. When I’m finished at work for the night I go back to the apartment, get into bed and look at photos of my sons on my phone.’

  ‘So why am I not going to like you anymore, any moment now?’

  Maserov put his hands to his face and began the story of the meeting with Hamilton and Malcolm Torrent, of how he bumped into Malcolm Torrent alone at the elevator and of the reprieve he’d negotiated with him by promising to rid his firm of a serious legal problem. She already knew this.

  ‘His problem,’ Maserov finally admitted, ‘the problem I offered to help with that Hamilton seemed intent on ignoring, was the spate of sexual harassment claims, allegations made by four women, clerical staff. I told him that if he gave me a year I could free him of the problem.’

  ‘What sexual harassment
claims?’

  ‘You don’t know about them? I thought Torrent’s HR department would be all over this.’

  ‘No, certainly I’ve never heard anything about any of this. I doubt anyone in HR has.’

  ‘I can’t believe the Torrent Industries HR department didn’t know about this. That doesn’t make any sense to me.’

  ‘No, it makes perfect sense. The women would have known, instinctively perhaps, of the HR department’s policy, unofficial policy.’

  ‘What’s the unofficial policy?’

  ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell. The women would have been hesitant, even reluctant to come to HR with the allegations because they’d know their allegations would be buried, ignored, and they might possibly even suffer on account of having made them. It wouldn’t do the women any good or the perpetrators any harm. So they don’t come to us with their sexual harassment claims, almost never, and this assists the company in maintaining that it doesn’t know about any problems with its culture, not in this area. Ever since the sexual harassment legislation was first enacted, that’s the way it’s always been handled. Don’t ask, don’t tell.’

  ‘Well, I guess that isn’t really that surprising if you think about it, which I must admit I never had. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been avoiding telling you, that I’m the guy acting for the defence, that is, for Torrent Industries and the alleged harassers, in the sexual harassment claims cases being brought by these former female employees.’

  Jessica swallowed what remained of her drink. ‘So that’s what you’re doing at Torrent Industries, saving these . . . these animals . . .?’

  ‘Well, I’m not actually saving them. These are civil cases. They’re not facing any criminal sanction and it’s the company that will have to pay out, not them, so —’

  ‘So what?’ Jessica was getting angry.

  ‘Well, nothing, it’s just that I’m not actually protecting them.’

  ‘No, you’re defending the company that employs them from liability for what is unequivocally assault. And you’re doing this to save your own skin.’

  ‘Well, um, I guess . . . you could put it that way.’

  ‘Is there any other way to put it?’

  ‘I’d been hoping like hell to find one because I was dreading the time when you —’

  ‘When I what?’

  ‘When you thought as little of me as I’m imagining you do now.’

  Jessica was clearly upset. There was a battle going on inside her between sadness and anger.

  ‘Fuck you, Stephen!’ Anger won, as it so often does. ‘You’re as bad as them.’

  ‘As bad as the perpetrators? No, I’m not!’

  ‘Okay, you’re not as bad as them but . . . You have no idea. It’s a jungle out there and every day is . . . is jungle warfare. You’re either with us or you’re against us.’

  ‘Jessica, you’ve got to believe me, I’m with you. I’m not one of those guys. I’m not like them. I just found myself —’

  ‘Collaborating. You’re a collaborator.’ She grabbed her bag and stood up. ‘I guess as long as there’s money in covering up spasms of toxic masculinity, there’ll always be weak men lining up to do it.’

  ‘Jessica!’

  She started walking towards the door and turned just to say loudly enough for anyone interested to hear, ‘And I really fucking liked you!’

  Maserov thought of trying to stop her from leaving but she walked too quickly towards the door and he was, in any event, hampered by the sudden realisation that people were looking at him. He wondered if they were trying to figure out exactly what he had done. He wondered if he should tell them, maybe canvass opinion. Would other women see him the same way? Would anyone, any other woman, think it was acceptable to save his house, to save his marriage, in the way that he was trying to do? And if his marriage was so important to him, what was he doing in a bar with a woman he was attracted to? Perhaps he really was a collaborator.

  He walked to the men’s room trying not to look at the faces of any of the people lest he trip over their condemnation. When he had relieved himself he washed his hands and then splashed water on a face the mirror confirmed was exhausted. Well, what did he expect, he asked the face. He had predicted she would no longer want to have anything to do with him when she found out what he was really doing at Torrent Industries. Wasn’t it good to be right about something?

  And anyway, was it really acceptable to say that if it wasn’t him, someone else would be acting in these cases for the company? It was a defence that hadn’t worked at Nuremberg. As he was making his way back to his table in the bar before realising there was no point to going back other than perhaps to finish his drink, which he hoped someone might have been kind enough to spike, it occurred to him that he wasn’t really a collaborator.

  He sat down to rehearse how he would make the point to Jessica the next day at work when he was startled to look up and see her looking at him from the doorway of the bar. Perhaps she was going to hit him.

  Jessica walked over to him and said, ‘I think I might have been too hard on you.’

  ‘Jessica, I’m not a collaborator. It’s true I talked my way into this position but I only ever wanted to try to get each of them, Carla, Pauline, Lilly, and Monika, the best deal I was able to get for them. All the more so after I read their affidavits.’

  ‘Aren’t you professionally obligated to try to shaft them?’

  ‘I think I’m morally obligated not to. What I’m hoping to do, if I can, is marry my professional and my moral obligations here, at least to the very best of my ability.’

  ‘Not everyone would do that.’

  ‘I’m so glad you said that.’

  ‘Yeah, I got into the street, cooled down a little and figured, based on what I know of you, that you might well be the best thing that’s happened to these women since they quit. And if so, I owed you an apology.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Then I realised that if my first impressions of you were right —’

  ‘Well, you really liked me . . .’

  ‘If I was right about you,’ she continued, ignoring his interruption, ‘this could well be fantastic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This could be fantastic!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Listen, this is how,’ Jessica said, raising two fingers to signify a request for two more of the same to the bartender who’d been watching the whole thing. ‘You’re at Torrent Industries to fight against sexual harassment. This could be the start of something really important, a fundamental cultural shift.’

  ‘No, you’re not getting it. I’m meant to make these claims go away.’

  ‘Okay, tell me if I’m getting this right,’ Jessica said. ‘There are three possibilities, the victims —’

  ‘Alleged victims.’

  ‘The alleged victims can drop the case, they can take their case to court or they can settle with Torrent Industries. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, the women clearly aren’t going to drop them or you wouldn’t be needed by Malcolm Torrent.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So either you’re going to defend them in court where the culture of rampant sexism will be ventilated for the public and the media . . .’

  ‘The rampantly sexist public and salacious media, yes.’

  ‘Or you’ll settle the cases and the women will be compensated. Either way, you’ll have the opportunity to make recommendations to Torrent that could turn the place around.’

  ‘Jessica, I’m a second-year commercial lawyer. We mostly preserve the status quo. I’m not a royal commissioner. I’m not a civil rights lawyer or a poverty lawyer. There’s no grand jury. I’m hanging on just to be any kind of lawyer. He’s got me in to put out spot fires before they become raging infernos. Someone in my position doesn’t get to make recommendations.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I do. This is how you get me in on it. We can work together on this. This is a chance t
o do something that matters. You tell Torrent that the firm urgently needs a completely new policy to deal with sexual harassment in the company or these cases are going to keep coming.’

  The bartender arrived with two more of the cocktails. Jessica picked up both of them, one in each hand, and clinked them together. She was ebullient.

  ‘To cultural change!’

  It was very late and Maserov went searching for the absinthe with his tongue.

  part five

  I

  Sometime in the mid to late nineties Malcolm Torrent had ordered a huge watercolour artwork for the wall of his office opposite the floor-to-ceiling glass window. By his own admission, he didn’t know much about contemporary art, but he did understand competition very well and was tired of being repeatedly outbid for large watercolours painted by the contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, most recently by UBS, the Swiss multinational investment bank. Malcolm Torrent had made his money creating things that were not previously there and so he gave his art dealer a simple instruction. ‘I want something that takes up 90 per cent of that wall that looks like a cross between an Olafur Eliasson piece and something my granddaughter could have done if she was taller and had a bigger arm span. Make sure the artist is ethnically interesting with a name that makes people feel good about themselves once they’ve mastered it. When it’s done, get it featured in all the appropriate journals and magazines and have the artist reticent to give interviews. I’m happy to pay extra for the reticence.’

  Maserov was looking side-on at the result. He was seated in Malcolm Torrent’s palatial office in a chair that was far too comfortable to accommodate his apprehension that the head of Torrent Industries would not remember who he was. He was distracted only by a disconjugated gaze that took him out the window and into a sunny sky, waiting for the older man on the other side of the desk to look up from the documents he was reading.

  About three minutes earlier Maserov had felt confident he had Torrent’s attention – some of it, not all of it – but for the previous two minutes he’d had none of it. Maserov was now in great danger of falling asleep. He’d experienced the same kind of intoxicating narcoleptic yearning in the face of anxiety previously when waiting to begin some particularly important task. He hoped that this was the sort of sleep that was waiting for you when you died, only without the need to perform or the burden of being assessed. Finally, Malcolm Torrent shifted the last piece of paper in his hand from one side of his desk to another and looked up at Maserov.