The train got in to one of the outlying platforms and he had to walk — part of a huge unspeaking herd — through a network of wet, dingy tunnels to the main station. There, he took out his phone, and Eddy’s number.
‘Hello, Eddy, s’Paul,’ he says, leaning into the foul wall in front of him.
‘Paul. Morning.’ Eddy sounds businesslike, perhaps slightly surprised.
‘I’ve thought ’bout what you, we, were saying yesterday.’
‘And?’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Excellent,’ Eddy says, without excitement. ‘That’s good news, Paul.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Paul asks after a few moments. Eddy says they should meet again later in the week. He asks Paul how many people he thinks he’ll be bringing with him. Paul says he is not sure. Eddy says he’ll phone him to arrange a time to meet on Thursday or Friday.
Pocketing his phone — an old, heavy model — Paul lights a cigarette, his first of the day. He is shaking — he presumes with excitement, though it might, of course, be delirium tremens. It is not so much that his hangover has disappeared than that it has been pushed into the background. Feeling too energised to take the tube, he looks at his watch and then walks out, past the red rain-streaked logjam of buses, into the open air, towards the river. He is stopped, immediately, by the traffic of Tooley Street, and waits in the Scotch mist with a crowd of suits and umbrellas, sober raincoats and briefcases, for the lights to change. On the bridge the pavement is blustery. Spots of rain flick his face. The khaki river looks slow and old, but wherever it encounters an obstacle — the piers of bridges, the prows of moored vessels — its unsuspected momentum is visible in rushing vees of turbulent water. He walks with his head turned, looking downstream. The distant towers of Canary Wharf are little more than immense, pale silhouettes, illusive under their winking hazard lights in the poor visibility of the day.
He takes the tube from Bank, and arrives late at Park Lane Publications. It is very unusual for him to be late; everyone else is already there. Everyone, that is, except Murray, and seeing his empty seat, Paul experiences a short, unpleasant encore of the previous night’s paranoia, seriously fearing for a moment that the explanation for Murray’s lateness might lie in his having spent the night with Michaela. He feels relieved — and then immediately ridiculous — when in answer to his worried question, ‘Where’s Murray?’, Andy says, ‘In the smoking room.’ This sorted out, however, he is still tense. He is especially tense at the thought of Murray’s return to the sales floor, of the moment when they first see and speak to each other. Taking off his jacket, sitting down at his desk, he is desperate for a cigarette. Not wanting to meet Murray in the smoking room, though, he waits, purposelessly shuffling papers. Normally, he would have shouted ‘Get on the fucking phone’ more than once — only Nayal and Marlon are making calls — but the more time that passes without him having shouted it, the more he seems unable to do so; and the more, he feels sure, his team sense that something odd is happening. (In fact, they are used to his moodiness, and do not see much unusual in it today.) Sunk in this preoccupied lethargy, it suddenly occurs to him how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be even to pretend to care, for the next two weeks, about the fate of European Procurement Management. But he will have to pretend — and suddenly steeling himself, shunting Eddy’s proposal out of his still-hurting mind, he sits up and says, ‘Come on, you lot, get on the fucking phone.’ And as he says it, Murray walks onto the sales floor. There is, Paul thinks, picking him up in his peripheral vision, something shifty about him. He takes his seat without speaking. ‘All right, Murray?’
‘All right, Paul.’
‘Good night, was it?’
‘What?’
‘You look like you were out on the piss last night.’
‘No.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘No, not at all,’ Murray says.
‘Oh, I thought you were for some reason.’
‘No.’
Surreptitiously, Paul spends the long morning watching the members of his team, his eyes moving from one to the next. There are a few definite ‘yeses’ — he knew immediately who they would be. Wolé, large and shambling, with a slowness and patience unusual in the profession, but nevertheless a natural salesman, possessor of a weighty, charismatic pitch, his voice almost hypnotically deep and imposing. Nayal, the precise technician, with his headset and smoke-blue sports jacket, also patient, quiet, unflappable, not a high-pressure merchant. That’s more Marlon’s style. All that standing on the desk stuff. ‘Power selling’. Paul doesn’t like it much, but Marlon somehow makes it work. Those three, the definite yeses. (And incidentally, Paul makes a mental note, the three hardest-working members of the team. The harder I work, he thinks, the luckier I get.) Then there are the noes. Andy. Murray. Dave Shelley, an odd, morose young man with lank, greasy hair and a motheaten suit, who never speaks to anybody and spends most of his time in the smoking room. Sami, the affable, smiling Saudi Arabian, who only joined a week ago, and is obviously destined for failure. And Richard, a small man in his mid-fifties who always latches on to the new people — Sami is the latest — and follows them everywhere, telling them how wonderful it is to work for John Lewis. On the phone, it is obvious that he is speaking from a script; so obvious that it seems to be his intention to sound like he is. And indeed Paul has known this to happen, known people who are just unable to stop sending signals to the prospect dissociating themselves from the words they are saying.
Finally there are the maybes. The women on the team. Claire he sets to one side; she is a somewhat special case. Which leaves Elvezia, and Li, a youngish Chinese woman — it is difficult to estimate her age — with horrible yellow teeth and alarmingly thinning hair. To Paul she doesn’t seem clean somehow, like she hasn’t washed for weeks. In spite of this, she is being assiduously courted by a ruddy nerd from another team, who comes to eat his sandwich at her desk every day. She pitches in Chinese, calling the Far East, and because of this she works unusual hours, getting in at five in the morning and leaving at lunchtime, after the visit of her suitor. She makes sales, but Paul is suspicious of them, of the strange ideogrammic signatures and notes on the agreement forms — those flimsy, non-legally binding bits of fax paper — of deals closed when no one else is there. He does not entirely trust her. She could be telling these people anything, he thinks, listening to the weird gurgling sounds that emanate from her as she pitches, half turned to the wall. It could all be some kind of scam. (A few years earlier, two well-dressed, polite young Russians had joined the sales force, and they had done well, making sales to Russian and Ukrainian companies. They earned thousands of pounds of commission. Then, one morning, they were gone. And when the companies were invoiced for the dozens of ads they had bought, they turned out not to exist.) Paul supposes that he will not involve Li in the move to Delmar; her English seems so poor that he is not even sure he would be able to explain it to her.
Which leaves Elvezia. A stout, mannish Italian lady in early middle age, still known for the massive deal she made, over two years ago now, with Fiat (she sells in Italian), for a series of ads in a number of different publications. It was something of a sensation at the time, the talk of the smoking room, and Elvezia — to her flustered delight — became a company celebrity, an unlikely star salesman, like ‘Beer’ Matt Riley and Pax ‘the Fax’ Murdoch. Yvonne Jenkin, the managing director of PLP International Ltd, who the salespeople do not normally see, put in an appearance on the sales floor to present her with a magnum of champagne; it was the biggest single sale in the company’s history. Despite her denials, Elvezia had enjoyed all this, and was never entirely able to suppress an impish smile when people expressed wonder, as they often did, at her achievement. Her moment of fame did not last. Her successes since the Fiat deal have been numerous enough, though mostly very small — she is really a specialist of the micro-deal, the quarter-page ad, heavily discounted — and she has long since lapsed into the familiar, tetchy, plodding obscurity that was always her lot in the past. The photo of herself and Yvonne Jenkin and the magnum of champagne, still Blu-tacked up on the wall near her desk, is discoloured and starting to curl. Sic transit gloria mundi — it is the only Latin tag Paul knows. In his mind, he moves her halfway to the yeses. He is worried, though, what Eddy will make of her.