THIS IS THE WAY IN WHICH A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MANAGER MUST LEARN TO THINK.
Martin swung his jacket off the back of the chair and was already heading towards his father and the exit.
Somewhere in Mr Phillips’s mind, when he decided to pop in on Martin, had been the notion that he might be able to confide in his elder son about what had happened. But as soon as he saw Martin he felt that it wouldn’t be possible, not so much because of the admission of weakness on his own part that would be involved, but because Martin in some hard to define but real way would not be strong enough to bear the news. (It’s a proverb: when the father helps the son, both smile; when the son helps the father, both cry.) He might laugh or weep or do some other inappropriate thing. Did some men have sons with whom that kind of exchange might be imaginable? Mr Phillips remembers the first time his mother had given him a jam jar to twist open and said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’
‘You’re going to be rich,’ says Mr Phillips, meaning it not as a compliment but as a fact.
‘Depends what you mean by rich.’
‘Richer than Mum and me, anyway.’
‘Well, yeah. Obviously.’
It takes Mr Phillips a second to realize that this is a joke. Their main courses have by now arrived. Mr Phillips finishes his G and T.
‘How’s Mum?’
‘Very well. Same as ever.’
‘Doesn’t sound as if much has been happening.’
‘Well, you know how it is.’
‘It’s a funny feeling, in some ways,’ says Martin. ‘The idea of being rich. Especially since it’ll only happen if someone comes in and buys up the company. I mean, that’s basically the only way you can suddenly get a ton of money dumped on you overnight. So you sell the company and then what? The main thing you’ve been doing for years is taken away. So what you do is start another company and start all over again. It’s like sex.’
‘Is it?’ asked Mr Phillips.
‘You know, love them and leave them. But that’s only an idea, a saying, it’s not like official.’
‘What sort of money?’
‘A bloke who was doing a fairly similar thing with retro compilations was bought up for half a million. Anything can happen. In three years’ time, I’ll either be going home from work to Notting Hill in a brand new Beamer, or taking the Northern Line back to Morden and trying to dodge the fare. It could go either way.’
Mr Phillips, who had taken the train in to Waterloo every working day for the last twenty-six years until this morning, digests that in silence.
‘This is very nice,’ he says, offering some fish cake on the end of his fork. The fish cake is not as good as Mrs Mitchinson’s, but it isn’t bad. Martin, who is chewing, shakes his head and nods down at his plate. Mr Phillips declines the offer to try his son’s expensive-looking piece of grilled fish.
‘Those are pretty girls you have working for you,’ he says.
‘You fugga da staff, you fugga da business. You must know that — it’s an old Italian saying. But yeah, they’re all right. Debbie, the blonde one, is the toughest. She can shave points like no one you’ve ever seen. Now she’s going to be rich one day, for sure.’
When the waitress comes back, Martin says, ‘I’m at a loss for words again, Sophie. Let me take you away from all this.’
‘Would you like any dessert or coffee at all?’ says Sophie.
They settle on two coffees and the bill. Mr Phillips feels the weight of things bearing down on him more heavily than he has at any point since his conversation with Mr Wilkins. The idea of having nothing to do, an empty diary, an empty life, stretching out in front of him until he dies. Luckily at that moment the bill arrives. Sums come to the rescue. Ravioli at £6.95, bacon and scallops at £6.75, fish cake at £8, sea bass at £12, large mineral water £2.50, gin and tonic £3.50, two filter coffees £4, service at 12.5 per cent is £5.46, equals £49.16. Six plus seven is thirteen, eight plus twelve is twenty, which makes thirty-three, two fifty plus three fifty is six, plus four is ten, plus thirty-three is forty-three, plus the fiver for service is forty-eight, which is close enough once you’ve added in the pennies. Mr Phillips fishes out his cheque book and begins to write. His son picks up the bill and looks at it.
‘Good value here,’ he says. ‘For this part of town. Do you mind if I love you and leave you? Only I know I’ve got a call coming in at quarter past on the dot.’
‘By all means,’ says Mr Phillips. They shake hands, Martin gets up and is gone with a final ‘Love to Mum’ over his shoulder.
So that was Martin. Mr Phillips waits for Sophie to come back and take the bill. Instead it is another waitress who comes and picks up the bill and cheque and cheque card, and a third who brings it back, pressing his plastic card back on to the table with a brisk click and equivalently brisk pro forma smile. Both these girls are good looking, the first a leggy, slightly ungainly dyed blonde, black hair visible at the roots of her parting, distracted, sexy; the other shorter, darker, slightly cross-looking, heavier around the middle and lower half, verging on the outright bottomy, but sexy too. Her bad temper made you wonder what her good temper would be like; what it would be like to be fucking her, see her expression and compare it with her normal cross face. That was probably what men who liked cross girls liked about them.
Taken with the lovely Sophie and with Martin’s colleagues that was a lot of pretty girls for one lunchtime. If you were a Martian walking around earth in disguise you would form an inaccurate impression of how many pretty girls there were if you went by how many of them you encountered in public places as waitresses, receptionists, front-of-house people, the people you dealt with when you went to offices or shops or pubs or restaurants. Anywhere, basically, where there was an opportunity to put a pretty girl in between you and a transaction. So pretty girls were a kind of consumable substance, used up like fuel, or used like WD40 to ease the mechanisms. And there’s always a fresh supply, that’s the beauty of it.
Mr Phillips decides to go for a pee, not so much because he needs one, more as a precaution. The fact of his not needing one, itself unusual, is a sign of how hot the day is, how much he must be sweating. He weaves through tables towards the back of the restaurant where the loos are. The place is thinning out now, and about half the tables are empty, people reluctantly dragging themselves back to work; of the lunchers who stay behind, a fair few of them look as if they are set for the long haul, with second or third bottles of wine being broached, brandies appearing, chairs being pushed back. Two of the tables have what look like courting couples sitting at them, holding hands and looking at each other. None of them seems at all married. Or not to each other, anyway. In the case of one couple, the man is at least twice his girlfriend’s age. Lucky devil! Well done! If he is married to someone else, he must be confident that this is the kind of place he can come to without any news of what’s going on getting back to anyone who knows him. Given that there must be a couple of hundred people passing through the restaurant at any one mealtime, that would seem to Mr Phillips to be a statistically significant risk.
The toilets are down a little white-walled corridor. Mr Phillips has a faint dread about whether or not he will be able to tell the Gents and the Ladies apart, but in the event it is straightforward: the Gents is demarcated by a cartoon dandy holding a monocle to his eye with his left hand and brandishing a cocked duelling pistol in his right. He wears a top hat and tails and a confident, supercilious expression. So that’s easy enough, even though anyone who looks less like Mr Phillips feels would be hard to imagine. The Ladies has a woman in a huge hooped ball gown that she is ever so slightly hitching up to reveal a glimpse of well-turned ankle.