Mr Phillips goes over to the searchers. In a gesture that feels vaguely sexual, he opens his briefcase and invites them to rummage in it. One of the guards looks and languidly moves a manila folder out of the way with a gloved hand. The folder contains a thick pad of the A4 graph paper ruled into 1 mm squares that Mr Phillips likes to use for taking notes and calculations. This particular pad contains the left-over sums for the Post-It Note memo, and a first draft of some sums he made about his and Mrs Phillips’s financial position when he had first heard that he had been made redundant. The other objects in the briefcase are: a calculator; a plastic ruler; a plastic box — a ‘pocket protector’ — with two HB pencils, a sharpener, a Rotring fine-nibbed technical drawing pen, and two black Bic biros; his Wilkins and Co. desk diary, which he has taken from his office and forgotten to remove from his briefcase; a spare tie with yellow and green horizontal stripes, a Christmas present from Thomas three years ago, ditto; a Wilkins and Co. pocket diary; an empty hip flask that Mrs Phillips gave him for emergencies, which he keeps in the briefcase for sentimental reasons only, since when it was full it leaked and made his papers smell of whisky; his office toothbrush, which has a useful little cap to stop it smearing paste everywhere; Bobby Moore’s autobiography; a silver-plated letter opener that he inherited from his father and which he, like his father, never uses; a small packet of tissues; his copy of the Daily Mail; two packets of Post-It notes.
The guard looks at all this without any sign of curiosity or recognition. He nods at Mr Phillips, who takes that as a sign to close the briefcase.
*
Mr Phillips walks into the first rotunda inside the gallery and takes a floor plan out of the plastic holder. Then he decides he would prefer to wander aimlessly around and puts the map back; it doesn’t seem right to take something for nothing, especially if he isn’t going to put the something to any use. Anyone who has any memory at all of the forties in Britain has a different attitude towards waste than anyone who doesn’t. Mr Phillips was nine when rationing ended and can still remember the atmosphere of straitenedness and not quite privation. It is odd to think that he has only moved about three miles from where he lived then, in a middle-of-terrace house with his parents and his two-years-older sister. Because films of the period were always in black and white it sometimes seems that his memories are black and white too, especially his only real war memory, which has to do with the bomb damage that took years to repair. They were far enough from the docks to have been spared a lot of it, but Mr Phillips feels as if he can still remember — it is on the cusp between a real memory and something he has been told about so often he can see it — the way some homes had been turned inside out, excavated or split open like dolls’ houses, so that you could see a mirror askew with its glass shattered but its gilt frame intact still hanging in an upstairs bedroom, with the rest of the floor melting downwards and outwards like a partially eaten gingerbread house; or the way the ruined kitchen was open to full view; or the beams and pipings which made it look as if the house were spilling its guts. All the inhabitants had died, some of the 30,000 Londoners who died in the bombing. This is a number about which he sometimes thinks, and compares with other numbers when they come in books or TV programmes or newspaper articles. It could be expressed mathematically: 30,000 (Londoners killed in the blitz) < 42,000 (Germans killed in Hamburg fire storm) > 32,000 (number of U-boat sailors who died) < 2,800,000 (Russian POWs who died in German prison camps) > 78,000 (Japanese killed in the bombing of Hiroshima) < 2,200,000 (Chinese who died during the Japanese invasion) > 90,000 (Americans who died in the war in the Pacific) < 395,000 (British and Commonwealth dead in the war) < 1,000,000 (British and Commonwealth dead in World War One) > 60,000 (British dead on first day of the Somme) > 26,000 (US dead in battle of Guadalcanal) < 30,000 (American airmen based in East Anglia killed in daylight bombing raids on Germany) = number killed in London in the Blitz. The thing was that about half-way through doing the sums you went sort of numb and the numbers ceased to be anything other than numbers, as also happened when dealing with sums of money not your own, even if you were a trained accountant.
Another memory of the forties was the taste of coffee. In 1949 his father had arrived home with a tiny sachet of real coffee twisted in a piece of brown wrapping paper. It was a gift from some bigwig who had been done a personal favour by his boss. That same evening Mr Phillips’s father carefully supervised his wife as she made a pot of coffee, standing fussily over the stove with something maternal in his solicitude for the ground brown beans. When the coffee was made his parents sat sipping it out of their best cups, not talking.
‘Would you like a taste?’ his father asked. Mr Phillips had been too shy to ask; except of course that standing by the kitchen table softly panting was in itself a way of asking. He nodded and his father passed to him the thin blue and white china cup. With both hands around it, Mr Phillips took a careful sip, and at the same time caught his first noseful of the acrid, hot aroma. Luckily he did not gasp or spit but handed the cup back to his father without mishap.
‘Well?’ his father asked. Mr Phillips was at a loss for words. He said:
‘Thank you, papa.’
His father smiled and returned to his communion with the cup.
‘It’s really for grown-ups,’ he said. There is still a certain coffee taste — the bottom of the mug in a colleague’s office, or a really nasty after-dinner cup in a friend’s house — which transports him as if physically back to their kitchen in Wandsworth in 1949, when the thin, acrid, bitter, watery taste had been the rarest and most precious thing in the world.
2.4
Mr Phillips moves past a couple who have positioned themselves almost blocking the entrance to the main gallery, each holding one end of a folded-out plan, like scheming generals. They are in comfortable, spreading middle age — the man’s shoulders, waist and hips slide downwards into each other as easily as Mr Phillips’s own — but are dressed like students in jeans and clumpy trainers.
‘I dunno,’ says the man. His accent is American but once had not been; he is from somewhere else, Ulster or Scotland perhaps. Hybridized accents are harder to unpick than neat ones, even for the English, every single one of whom has a top-of-the-range on-board computer calculating the exact geographical and social location of the speaker every time somebody opens his mouth. Grammar school-educated Mr Phillips’s accent is Received Pronunciation overlying a stratum of South London. Martin and Tom both speak with a mild South London rasp that they can, especially Martin, roughen up or tone down at will. Mrs Phillips speaks a beautifully neutral form of RP that Mr Phillips had once found sexy — it was part of the idea of having sex with someone posher than you were. Class makes sex more interesting for everybody. Karen’s accent, East London verging on Essex, is sexy too, but in a more straightforwardly sluttish way. And there is something about the limitless reserves of indifference she can express, the thrilling estuarine boredness of her ‘Yeah’.
The woman holding the map with the mystery-accent man is wearing jeans that reveal her waist size to be 36 and her inner leg to be 30. Truth in advertising.