Is This the Way You Said? Read online

  That’s why they were talking so much, in there: it was called a moral dilemma. They were adjusting to this new universe in which a manager might have to be released early. Short of cardiac arrest, nothing justified it. The whole point was human contact – part of the group’s drive to remind employees that they and their colleagues were not numbers but feeling people whose armpits you had to love and understand. Also, they had some hired gun lined up for tomorrow morning, some expert in flat management who’d been sent from Seattle by the Great Gaffers Above at enormous cost to get them to crawl about the floor or hold hands and hum or whatever in the eternal search for improved personnel relations – which meant that the personnel manager’s presence was a total requisite. Really, of course, it was all about restructuring. Removing hierarchies was the accountancy boys’ latest wheeze to slim without too much squealing. Improving the bottom line. The corporation was overextended: the Northcott Jackson Group was just a speck in Antron’s wide American sky. There was even talk of demerging.

  If he were to scarper straight after the meeting tomorrow morning, you’d be talking about thirty hours, the big three 0 between now and the off. Thirty-one, to be precise.

  Not much more than a day.

  It was five hours max straight down the A68 and A19 to York and then that last little stretch to Hull. Piece of cake. Getting round Edinburgh would be a pain. He’d check it for size on the GPRS on his laptop. It might well have happened, this crisis, when he was abroad – in Moscow, for instance, when they were slugging it out with BAE Systems and Meggitt for the air force deal. On the other hand, Stirling did feel like bloody abroad. The air, for example. Full of sheep and pine trees. It was Phil the Tartan’s bloody fault they were up here in the first place; the pow-wow was usually in Stockport – that much nearer to Hull. But everyone decided they needed a change, this year. Stockport wasn’t enough. Fresh air. Hills. Clears the brain.

  Thirty-one hours. That was a helluva lot of hours when your daughter was entirely dependent on an incubator.

  He needed a mirror, his eyes felt ugly.

  The Harcourt had a lot of ferns and Greek busts and lampshades and heavy dark-red curtains and fancy artsy pictures but no mirrors. His room was on the third floor at the other end of the complex and he had no idea where the Gents were here; there were five doors along the corridor and they were all locked.

  He tried to see how he looked in the glass of a picture, but the embedded lights in the ceiling made a shadow of everything but his hooter. The picture was a drawing of a very scrummy female with her hands behind her hair, dressed in a sort of shift. One day, he thought, my daughter will grow up and look like that. He imagined her tiny form in the incubator, but could only picture a kind of shrivelled grape.

  Then the voices grew and the door opened and they all came out, finding him skulking about there in the corridor like a hoodie.

  Some of them gave him very tight little smiles and nods of either congratulation or sympathy, he wasn’t sure which. He nodded back, not sure how to look under his puffed-up eyes, then opting for anxious. Phil would have mentioned the incubator. Some of them – close colleagues like Brian Wallis or Simon Milner – knew the baby wasn’t due for another two months. Only one of them, Tony Malpas, was aware of the smelly history with Sophie and the current situation with Jill. That’s because Tony Malpas was Sophie’s half-brother and lived, like her, in a des res in Beverley (though not in the same street). He also drove a 1978 Porsche with leather fittings, the bastard. Now, coming out of the meeting, Tony Malpas didn’t even look at him. Malpas was nattering away to Brian Wallis, laughing like a pillock at the latest Wallis crack. Alan couldn’t believe it.

  And there was Jon S. Volkman, the spy who came in from Seattle: Antron’s man, keeping an eye on the Brit hoodlums. He thought it was English to wear white socks and carry an umbrella on his wrist and say ‘bloody’, but still asked for pork rinds or the AAA. To keep him brushed the right way, Alan played golf with Jon S. once a month and let him win. That way, Alan reckoned he still smelt sweet in Seattle. Now Jon S. didn’t even notice him, or pretended not to.

  Roger Unwin put his hand on Alan’s back; that was always a bad sign.

  They walked away from the others, who were filing down the stairs to the Harcourt Buttery for haggis and marmalade.

  Alan was all but being pushed along; the pressure on his back was infinitesimal, but it was there. He resisted it by moving faster than the hand, but the hand kept up.

  Roger Unwin was tall. He stooped as if the underlings had tiny voices. He had a headmaster’s metal-rimmed glasses and (in Brian Wallis’s words) ‘illogical’ hair. He waited until the others had gone before opening his mouth.

  ‘How are mother and child doing, Alan?’

  He didn’t want to tell.

  ‘She’s in an incubator.’

  This was a term he’d get to know very well, he thought.

  ‘In good hands, I imagine.’

  ‘In an incubator, Roger. In Kingston General.’

  ‘Not the Royal?’

  ‘No. Jill collapsed in the Prospect Centre, in front of Foot Locker. Her waters broke. A close-run thing. Extremely serious, obviously.’

  The managing director of Northcott Jackson studied the bust of Working Athena for a moment, his mouth pursing in thought.

  ‘You know you’re the kernel of that people-meeting tomorrow. Kernel as in nut, not military.’

  ‘Roger, you’ve got to let me go. Phil or Trevor Smith can do the necessaries, take notes—’

  ‘The snag is they can’t, Alan. I have to make a report for Seattle, never mind Volkman on the hotline every day.’

  ‘I play golf with Jon S. I let him beat me.’

  ‘They’ve sent this big shot expressly for the heads of personnel in all their UK subsidiaries.’

  ‘For the leadership team as a whole.’

  ‘It’s not one whit whole if you’re not there, Alan.’

  When Roger Unwin started using dated, headmasterly expressions, you needed cooked conkers for balls.

  ‘It’s two months premature,’ said Alan.

  ‘It?’

  He was being studied over the metal-rimmed glasses.

  ‘My daughter. Kirsten. Kristen, I mean.’

  ‘I expect she’s in very good hands at Kingston General. It almost met its targets last year. As I’m sure is the mother.’

  ‘It met its targets by calling trolleys “mobile beds” and shipping the worst cases off to Calais, Roger. Or Belgrade. Or maybe that’s where they get the nurses from. “The mother” is Jill, by the way.’

  Unwin nodded.

  ‘I didn’t doubt it.’

  Each year, at the company drinks, Jill and Roger Unwin talked about books; Jill would look forward to it. She’d joined a reading group and would read these fictional works in bed, by torchlight, long after Alan had nodded off over audit reports or Formula One Through the Lens. Sometimes she’d cry. He couldn’t understand the point of it.

  ‘Novels expand your horizons,’ she’d said, a few weeks ago, after he’d not been able to see the point of it again. ‘They’re about people’s dramas and tragedies and joys.’

  He’d pointed to the photograph showing Ronnie Peterson’s fatal crash.

  ‘That’s drama and tragedy, Jill.’

  Then he’d turned to one of Colin Chapman jumping about after a Lotus victory. ‘And that’s joy.’

  Now he pressed his shoulders back, trying to feel less of a limp-dick.

  ‘Seriously, and it’s nothing to do with skiving, Roger: I’m too bloody gutted to concentrate. I know it’s unheard of, but I’m going to have to beg compassionate leave. I’m a feeling human being.’

  ‘And what am I to say to Seattle? Or to Volkman if he asks me?’

  Go toss, Yanks.

  ‘My daughter’s in an incubator. She’s very tiny. Jill had to be rushed to A&E from outside Foot Locker. I don’t see the problem, Roger.’

  The man kept quiet.


  ‘I thought flat management was all about flexibility and being auto-responsible,’ Alan added, foolishly.

  Unwin crossed his arms and gave a little, headmasterly chuckle. Alan caught a whiff of expensive cologne. His own upper lip smelt of gone-off peach yoghurt from one of the hotel’s complimentary ‘Made on Iona’ natural shower gels.

  ‘The problem isn’t mine, Alan. The problem’s yours. They’re casting a cold eye over their UK operations.’

  ‘Is that a veiled threat? I thought I was Wonderboy.’

  ‘Nobody’s Wonderboy these days. Unless you speak Chinese.’

  ‘Chinese?’

  ‘Start taking a course in Chinese. That’s what I advise. As someone who keeps his ear to the future.’

  A girl in a black boob tube came down the corridor holding some files under her arm – probably a PA from the Kingfisher bash in the smarter, bigger conference room. Or maybe she was French – Kingfisher had just bought up Castorama, the bastards. Oo-la-la. Her high heels made hardly a sound on the soft red plush. Both men acknowledged her with a discreet nod, making room for her to pass. She was a knockout. Alan felt himself stirring, despite everything. Jill had been off sex for months.

  Until three nights ago. Three nights ago she’d put an arm across him while he was reading Simon Milner’s report on the Philips-Dell deal, which ended up getting very creased. She told him, wiping herself afterwards, that he’d been a bit rough. He reckoned that was unfair. She’d enjoyed being thrown about a bit. He wouldn’t have been rough if she hadn’t wanted it rough. (It was the roughest they’d ever been, in fact. It made all the previous times feel very timid. Even those times with Sophie, Alan had thought secretly, because Sofe liked to be in control and she was not sexually adventurous.) Whatever, it had got him dangerously out of breath, like that charity marathon for the lung machine last year, only the marathon was less enjoyable.

  Then Jill had rubbed her swollen belly and started worrying about the baby, as if he’d bashed it! She started crying quietly next to him. He craved a cigarette for the first time in months. He took her hand but she snatched it away, turning her back to him under the duvet and sobbing quietly while he bit his lip in the darkness, feeling unjustly treated as well as ashamed of what they’d done together – or of the way they’d done it. He wondered why they’d done it like that, why they couldn’t have behaved like responsible adults. Why Jill couldn’t have taken some of the responsibility on herself. Why it was always the bloke who carried the guilt.

  Roger Unwin sighed as the girl disappeared down the stairs. ‘Shirley lost hers moving a cupboard,’ he said.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘It was a boy. Thomas. As you know we have four delightful girls. She moved a cupboard on her own, while I was in the States for twenty-four hours. 1972, it was. He’d be thirty, now. Can’t remember why she felt she had to move a cupboard. Maybe to retrieve something behind. Or to vacuum. Women in pregnancy have odd quirks and desires, of course.’

  He quoted something old and literary about apricots. Roger Unwin liked to remind everybody that he’d read English at Oxford. It made him insurmountable, somehow, like his tailor-made pinstripes and MCC tie. (All Alan remembered of his psychology degree at Southampton was the ale. And he bought his suits at Harvey Nichols and hated cricket.)

  ‘Yeah, Jill liked to watch Falcon Crest re-runs,’ said Alan, pulling a face. ‘It wasn’t vacuuming behind cupboards, anyway. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

  He was absolutely certain that she’d not once told him to be careful; she’d oohed and aahed, oohed and aahed with pleasure as he’d thrown her about on the bed.

  Roger Unwin was looking at him, eyebrows raised.

  Alan blushed. Alan Hurst actually blushed. Among the chief executive’s many weapons was the ability to make you think he was telepathic.

  ‘She was out shopping,’ Alan said. ‘I think she must have carried some heavy shopping. I mean, that’s what strained it, obviously. You know our Jill,’ he added, too chummily.

  Of course Roger Unwin didn’t know Jill, beyond their annual book-shag over the company fizz.

  His boss nodded in slow motion. With each nod, Alan had the impression of being clobbered by a giant mallet.

  The truth was, Roger despised him. It was nothing personal: Roger Unwin despised all his colleagues and employees. He despised the job, that was the trouble. He should have been a don. Life had begun for Alan as a graduate management trainee with Unilever; life ended for Unwin the day he left Oxford, when he’d inherited James Northcott Ltd from his maternal uncle. That’s how Alan saw it. Roger Unwin lived for only two things: his koi fish and his 1934 Riley Roadster, into which he fitted with difficulty.

  This attitude made Roger Unwin very powerful, at any rate. It was the secret of his power. He’d only survived three mergers and the Antron takeover by despising it all. Even the Great Gaffers Above didn’t dare touch him.

  ‘I think,’ said Roger, lifting his chin slightly, ‘you should assume the consequences of your decision, Alan. I can’t protect you, and I won’t protect you. I’m not convinced you’ve altogether understood the recent changes, or will ever understand them. We’re no longer on the same field of play. They’ve shifted the ground-plan, while keeping the objectives. That’s why we’re all feeling a bit seasick, Alan. It’s a question of finding your sea legs and fixing your eye on the horizon. I’m not sure you’ll ever be willing to understand that.’

  Alan was looking down at his shoes. He moved his head up towards the horizon, feeling a surge of panic. His pulse and breathing started to accelerate. The horizon was some fancy writing in a gilt frame hung above the fire extinguisher: Every free man shall have the eyries of hawks, falcons, eagles and herons in his woods, and likewise honey found in his woods.

  ‘Furthermore,’ continued the boss, looking at him almost sorrowfully, ‘you have no intention whatsoever of learning Chinese.’

  Things were getting out of hand. Roger Unwin was threatening him. In one last salvaging effort, Alan suggested that he hire a car and drive back to Hull tonight, to return in the morning. The man pulled a face.

  ‘Alan, act sensible. You’ll fall asleep at the wheel. Either you sod off early, or you don’t.’

  ‘“Sodding off” isn’t my usual style, Roger.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Roger Unwin bent his head towards Alan in an awkward stab at intimacy. ‘We’re enslaved, Alan. All of us. We’re chasing the money merely to fill the debt hole. If we don’t fill that hole we’ll be swallowed up by it. It’s slavery. I never saw my girls from one damn week to the next.’

  ‘You played Monopoly with your grandson,’ Alan remarked, contentiously. ‘You told me that last week.’

  Unwin straightened up. ‘It was his birthday. Margaret put a gun to my head.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Alan pointed out, raising a finger. ‘The little cold O on the temple.’

  He fished out his mobile and twitched his thumb over it under one of those famous psychopathic stares. ‘Need to find the number of the hospital, if you’ll excuse me, Roger. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave straight after this hired gun’s told us how to change our own nappies from a win/win perspective. It’s called meeting the enemy halfway. Not that you’re my enemy, Roger, obviously. Not all the time.’

  Alan would often dream of meeting that famous stare. Roger Unwin didn’t stare at you, that was the trouble; he stared through you and out the other side as if your brain was perspex. Once, way back, when Roger Unwin was giving Brian Wallis the Stare during a management meeting, Brian stuck a bullet-holes windscreen decal on his own forehead. Brian Wallis would melt the corporate hearts in Seattle, he was that sort of bloke. Alan Hurst was not. He was Wonderboy past his sell-by date. There was always something in life to pay for. Sun and rain.

  His thumb went spastic under the Stare, it kept slipping off the pimple-size keys. He used both thumbs again and felt like a little kid with a PlayStation in front of h
is dad.

  Eventually, Roger Unwin peeled his ice-blue eyes away and nodded, saying, ‘I’ll run with that, Alan.’

  ‘Thank you. Most grateful.’

  The managing director tapped the glass over the fancy writing on the wall: ‘Magna Carta. Now what the hell’s that doing in Scotland?’

  The hotel and conference centre felt uncomfortably new, smelling of gloss paint, the faint burnt-rubber of sealants, the body odour of interior decorators. It was done up as a cross between something cool and Japanese and a country home for geriatrics, and was part of a large sleek ‘prestige’ development (with ‘heart-stopping views’, as the brochure rather unwisely put it) that included a multi-screen cinema, a bowling alley, a replica Paris brasserie (closed, or not yet open), a swimming pool called the Cascade Club with waves and slides, and a museum devoted to the History of Ice Cream, all interlaced with a labyrinth of toy roads (max speed 10 mph), gravel paths and wooden signs carefully placed to cause maximum bewilderment.

  Alan’s room, in old colonial style with an eTV Interactive and pay-view porn, looked out on a roof with heating stacks and chimneys; the others had the heart-stopping view (including Brian, who was on his second bypass). Although it was well into April, the wind was biting and the rain kept up in chronic spurts, flinging itself against the window glass of the unheated conference room as if telling them to shut up. Moody photographs of Tibetan villagers were hung, for some reason Alan was too preoccupied to fathom, against the bare concrete of the conference room’s walls. Since the raison d’être of these annual bashes was to remove the management team from all domestic ties for seventy-two hours, Alan had to get special permission to leave his Treo switched on during the head-banging sessions. Roger Unwin made it clear that he was being all soft and stupid, granting this.

  The speeded-up opening bars of Oh mio rimorso! from La Traviata (it was Owen Jenkins, the opera-buff retail manager, who’d identified it yesterday) chipped in with monotonous regularity, but it was never the hospital or Sophie. His mother rang five times from Aylesbury, Jill’s brother twice from a train calling at all stations between Barnet and Addis Ababa. Reception was terrible, anyway. Tense as hell, waiting for a possible call, he held the mobile in his hand with his thumb hovering as if he was changing channels on the on-screen flip-chart. Old Verdi rarely got beyond the fifth note. Yet everyone up and down the table turned and looked each time, and Roger Unwin (at the head of it) sighed – or would have sighed if he’d been human. Some years back the boss had come out of the office and found the silver-pearl body finish on his Lexus LS400 in the management car park looking as if it had been dragged through a rap concert backwards. Local yobbos or a personal vendetta; either way, his reaction was amazing: he sank to his knees and started blubbering. And it wasn’t even his Riley Roadster. That was the only proof they had, as Brian Wallis had pointed out, that Roger Unwin was not constructed from rubber, steel, plastic and the brain of a Great White floating in formaldehyde.