And this had seemed, from the atmosphere of Martin’s office, to be true. At the top of a flight of stairs in what would once have been a small town house but was now commercial flats over a sex shop, M Enterprises turned out to be a single room with four people in it, all of them simultaneously on the telephone. When Mr Phillips, who had never been to Martin’s office before, walked in, he was slightly out of breath from the climb up the stairs. He stood there feeling embarrassed while the three people who were not Martin looked at him without recognition. Then his son, who had been standing and looking out the window while talking on the phone, turned around and saw him. He raised his eyebrows and smiled but kept talking.
Martin is an even six feet, taller than Mr Phillips himself, and the shuffling of his and Mrs Phillips’s genes has given Martin black hair (from Mr Phillips), cheekbones (Mrs Phillips), grey eyes from, apparently, Mrs Phillips’s father (dead before they met) and a deceptively athletic figure — ‘deceptively’ because Martin, unlike his younger brother, disliked all exercise. Having worn deliberately rebellious clothes all through his school days, as ripped and unkempt as possible, he is now wearing a single breasted grey suit, dark blue shirt and rather subtle maroon tie, all of which make him look older. If he were not Mr Phillips’s son, Mr Phillips realizes, there would not have been the slightest chance that he and Martin could ever have met. And perhaps an equally small chance that they would have had anything to say to each other.
When he finally got off the telephone Martin said:
‘Dad! To what do I owe the pleasure? Dad — this is everyone. Everyone — this is Dad.’
The other people in the office, all of whom were still holding phones, raised a hand and nodded or made some other gesture of recognition without stopping what they were doing. Two of them were unusually pretty girls. The effect was not so much of deliberate rudeness but of an attempt at politely suppressing their curiosity. It was one of those moments when Mr Phillips feels like an alien, like a spy, or like someone who has adopted a cover story so successfully that he is beginning to forget who he is or used to be. His uniform of class and profession seemed baggy, as if he could slip out of it at any moment with a single convulsive wriggle; while at the same time he could feel his stomach pressing against his belt buckle, asking that it be let out another notch. He has a memory of his father putting on blue overalls and contentedly going off to work with his bag of tools and pipe — he had loved his electrician’s costume, had taken great comfort from it. What would we do without uniforms?
Mr Phillips sometimes feels that other men have something he doesn’t have and — he has to conclude, as he gets stuck into his sixth decade — will never have. This is the carapace which grows or solidifies around them as they get older, and which involves an increasing lack of uncertainty about, or interest in, anything they don’t already know (‘know’ being defined as something like ‘feel that they have fully comprehended, to their own satisfaction’). Mr Mill, for instance, Mr Phillips’s former head of department, has a hardness to him, a rigidity, that is nothing to do with determination or resolve or strength of character or anything other than a philosophical impermeability, a thick skin. Nothing new is ever likely to reach him. Told about a development in corporate procedures that would affect hundreds of his colleagues but not him — a new way of calculating overtime rates, say, which would cost most of them £500 a year, but about which they were prevented from striking by fresh government legislation, crashed though Parliament in a specific attempt to alter practices at Wilkins and Co. — he would, once he had established that the change had no direct effect on him, stop paying any attention. He would react with the polite but obdurate impassivity of a Catholic cardinal temporarily trapped into sitting next to a UFO enthusiast at a wedding reception. To Mr Phillips this is not admirable, but it is enviable.
Mr Phillips’s father had that carapace. Something inside him had sunk and retreated. There was a wariness. His solitariness and holding back always made him alien, a stranger; and perhaps electricians as a profession have something reserved about them, the caution of men used to dealing with a far larger power which was always capable of administering nasty surprises. Any plan or intention of the young Mr Phillips — a plan to travel to watch Crystal Palace play away from home, go to a friend’s party or to the cinema, his initial announcement of wanting to stay on at school and do Alevels, the subsequent announcement that he wanted to be a chartered accountant, his first visit to the bank to borrow money to buy a car, even his heading into the kitchen to offer token help to his mother — was greeted with the words, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ — not so much a question as a disrecommendation or even a warning. The caution came across as a kind of hardness. Martin, at twenty-five, was already starting to grow his own more modern brand of the same thing.
‘Do you have any plans for lunch?’ Mr Phillips asked his son and then, suddenly quailing at the thought of being alone with him, said, ‘And of course if any of your colleagues …’
‘They’re all too busy,’ said Martin. ‘And so would I be if that prat from Aand J records hadn’t stood me up. Thanks. I’d love to. There’s a place I go to a lot, and might be able to score us a table even though we haven’t booked. I’ve just got a couple of calls to make. Have a sit down and I’ll be with you in two ticks.’ Although Martin would not have wanted his father to notice that he was trying to impress him, he noticed it nonetheless. One of the surprising things about Martin was that he was in many respects still rather young.
Mr Phillips picked up the book that was lying on his son’s desk. It was called Hitler Wins! Management Skills of Germany’s Greatest Leader (And Don’t Let Anybody Tell You Different). The page was turned down at the start of a chapter called ‘Don’t Think Different, Think Beyond.’
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘It’s the management book everybody’s reading at the moment,’ said Martin. ‘There’s always one — you know, lateral thinking, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Winning Through Intimidation, all that crap. They’re mainly bollocks but it gives you something to talk about. Go ahead and have a look, I’ll just be a minute.’
Mr Phillips opened the book in the middle.
Hitler envisaged a united Europe. He envisaged a world in which the motorist would be able to travel from Calais to Zagreb on motorways. He foresaw German hegemony, as the dominant power of the continent. He was a vegetarian at a time and in a milieu when that was a strange thing to be. (He pointed out that ‘Japanese wrestlers, who live off nothing but vegetables, are among the strongest men in the world.’ This also goes to prove that the Führer was willing to consider lessons and examples from other, far-away cultures — an important example for any leader in today’s globally competitive environment.)
All these are examples of what it takes to be a visionary thinker, one who sees beyond conventional patterns of thought and behaviour. They show you that you are often right by being wrong; by saying the opposite of what others say, confident in the validity of your own insights. They also show us that we must look to the broadest perspectives to see our ideas bear fruit. Like the Führer we must be confident that posterity will vindicate us. (See Chapter 10, for ‘How to Have Your Posterity Today’.) As we look at today’s Europe, united and dominated by a recrudescent Germany, in which we can travel on motorways from Calais to Seville, from Boulogne to Athens, which of us can look into our hearts and say that the Führer was in any meaningful sense wrong?