The traffic has improved very slightly and Mr Phillips doesn’t feel as if the air is quite so edible with impurities. He heads along the Embankment towards Westminster. A walk: that is the idea. It has been years since he travelled around central London on foot — literally years, not since his bachelor days when he had lived in Shepherd’s Bush and would often travel into the West End to meet friends and go to the pub or whatever. It goes without saying that not walking is one reason he is now so fat; driving, like marriage, makes men fat.
The only pedestrians in this part of town at this time of day are occasional stray tourists. All the office workers have arrived at the office and are happily or unhappily immersed in their days. At about this point on a normal day Mr Phillips would be in a meeting, since eleven o’clock conferences were a regular feature at Wilkins and Co. Today being the last Monday in the month he would normally expect to be in a budget meeting with the planning department, which essentially involved sitting there listening to them drone on before he and his colleagues could take away the figures and shoot lots of holes in them. This could be done at the meeting, but Mr Phillips preferred to do it by memo since he didn’t have much appetite for the confrontation involved — which would often be considerable, since the planning department was strikingly, remarkably, bad at sums. Their projected cost for insulating the offices at the company’s main plant in Banbury had once been wrong by 173 per cent.
When he was younger Mr Phillips had hated meetings. Or at least he had once he had got over the grown-up feeling, the warm glow of inclusion, of being invited to his first meeting with his first employers, Grimshaw’s. Children and students didn’t have meetings; only adults, serious employed people had them. So at the start there was the sense of being a big boy now. But Mr Phillips soon came to dread the whole business of sitting around a table with colleagues pretending to decide things. He hated the rooms in which meetings took place, with their horrible large tables and nasty chairs, with arms for the important people at the ends of the room, and the dank smell of the company coffee on the hotplate, and people’s briefcases, calculators, pencils, notebooks, agendas, personal organizers, beepers, copies of last meeting’s minutes, all of it. Most of all he hated the feeling that they were all impostors or impersonators, and with it the feeling that they were conspiring together to kill time, so that every second in the meeting was being wilfully murdered, bludgeoned to death. At other times he felt that it was more casual, as if the time was just being pissed away, the way you might piss away hours in the pub or by watching bad TV, or Martin and Tom would by playing a computer game.
It would be possible to calculate how much time in the course of a life was spent not doing anything. Obviously sleep was controversial in this context, since you could count that as either doing something or not. For Mr Phillips it is very much an activity, and an important one. So excluding that, Mr Phillips reckoned that he had spent, not doing anything:
— as a child before school age: six hours a day, conservatively, excluding time spent being fed, taught to read etc., time playing with other children, fending off his sister. This figure would have gone up once his sister went to school, but still.
— school years: about an hour a day, not much, but then they kept you pretty busy; when they were at school Martin and Tom seemed to have much more free time than he ever did.
— at college: four hours a day, if this included pub, watching TV, what the boys now called ‘hanging out’.
— first years at work and doing his articles: about an hour a day. Mr Phillips had been so tired he often would make no plans for evenings or weekends, except when he was actively involved in looking for a girlfriend.
Then, once Martin was born and for the next fourteen years while he and Tom were growing up to, say, generously, fifteen minutes a day when at home. (Mrs Phillips even less — indeed she feels the whole time issue much more keenly than Mr Phillips. ‘With small children you spend so much time just with them,’ she says. ‘You’re not doing anything, you’re just with them. I love them, but it’s still a bit much sometimes.’) During these years most of the free time Mr Phillips had — time spent without someone making an active demand on him or without doing something he was supposed to be doing — was at work. So the emphasis of free time shifted from home to work. Say he spent one and a half to two hours a day at work not doing anything — pretending to work, looking out of the window, sitting in meetings not listening etc. And once Tom was in full-time school, say four hours a day of nothing time, allowing for the same amount of time at work and considerably more at home. Obviously these are rough figures. So then the calculation would be:
first 5 years 6 hrs 37.5 % of waking time next 12 years 1 hr 6.25 % next 3 years 4 hrs 25 % next 5 years 1 hr 6.25 % next 14 years 15 min at home + 1.45 hrs at work = 2 hrs = 12.5 % next 11 years 4 hrs 25 %
This works out as a weighted average of 16.375 per cent, or 2.62 hours, or 2 hours and 37 minutes of, broadly speaking, free or nothing time. It is a lot of blank space to account for in one life span. Now that he is redundant he is going to have even more of it; in fact, he can have all day every day, unless and until he finds something else to do. The thought of this is an immense strain. It must be why so many men died after their retirement.
Two of the many foreign coach drivers parked across the road from the Tate are having an argument in a language Mr Phillips does not recognize. They are standing on the road-ward side of their huge two-decker vehicles. The shorter and by a fine margin angrier of the two is pointing repeatedly at the other’s coach, then at himself, then downwards at the road, while the other man energetically shakes his head and keeps loudly repeating the same word.
Mr Phillips presses on up the road, past the nasty modern building where the Labour Party has its headquarters, into which a dispatch rider has just stridden, past the dwarfing, monolithic government buildings along the Embankment. Further along the road he can see the beginnings of Westminster, all grand and Gothic and trying to look a million years old. If banks try to look all secure and posh and safe and stable and big and respectable and stuffy and built to last for all time, for the simple reason that at heart they are just casinos, what is it that these government buildings were concealing? Probably that they tried to make people feel small, so that the actions of the people in these buildings will seem far beyond their understanding, impersonal and authoritative and independent of anything so trivial as the consent of the governed. It is like Peter Pan only backwards: if we all clapped our hands then the whole edifice of government could be made to go away, to fade like night terrors remembered in sunshine.