Mr Phillips pushes the door, goes in, unzips his trousers, releases his penis from his Y-fronts, and begins to pee. It is a surprisingly unmodern urinal given the rest of the restaurant décor, a long marble stand-alongside. After half a century of visiting urinals, Mr Phillips is still uncertain whether the little built-up ledge is supposed to be used for standing on and peeing downwards, or for standing behind and peeing over, which is more protective of the pee-er’s feet but also messier since drops inevitably splosh on the ledge. In Mr Phillips’s experience other men don’t know what to do either, or at least there is no consistent pattern, or (at the very least) two schools of thought.
The bright blue medicinal balls in the bottom of the urinal give off a sharp chemical smell as they come into contact with Mr Phillips’ unusually dark, almost ochre, urine. When he does his trousers up Mr Phillips notices their increased after-lunch tightness. His stomach presses against the waistband with a friendly pressure, like a man laying a respectful rather than a lascivious hand on his wife’s bottom.
3.2
The street outside the restaurant is very busy. It can’t get any hotter. This is the kind of weather Mr Phillips’s father had loved — ‘It’s good to sweat,’ he would say cheerfully, striding away up a hill on an August expedition to the country with his shirt soaked through in the small of his back.
Not far from where Mr Phillips is standing there is, he knows, the White Hart, the pub where, going out for a drink with some colleagues from Grimshaw’s, he met the future Mrs Phillips for the first time. She was part of a group of girls at the bar to whom he and his friends got talking when one of them spilt a Pernod and blackcurrant on somebody’s trousers. Not that it was love at first sight: tall and brown haired with a high, wide forehead, pretty but not overwhelmingly so, brainy-looking, she wasn’t precisely Mr Phillips’s type, since in those days he liked, or thought he liked, obviously tarty-looking girls, ideally blonde or, failing that, black-haired, shorter than him, with the emphasis more on the bum than the tits though not dogmatically so. He had a tendency to fall for girls to whom he could explain things. But for some reason, girls to whom he could explain things did a very good job of not falling for him.
Mrs Phillips, on the other hand, not only seemed to be better informed than him on most artistic and political subjects, she also knew London better, or knew more parts of it, and she also knew what she wanted to do — which was play, teach, and listen to music. It was not something she went on about or showed off about but it was there, and Mr Phillips to his great surprise found this a turn-on. The first time he saw her playing the clarinet, her subsidiary instrument after the piano, at a concert in a church in Islington, he got an enormous erection — it was in that moment that she became, for him, fully charged sexually. At the same time, she seemed actually to like him, which, he realized, quite a few of his other girlfriends hadn’t. He hadn’t liked them much either. Meeting the future Mrs Phillips made him realize that this was not necessarily how things were supposed to be.
‘You seemed so lost,’ she said, years later, explaining why she had taken to him. The first time they made love, at her shared flat on a Saturday night when her Scottish flatmate had gone home for the weekend to celebrate her parents’ wedding anniversary, she had insisted on keeping her socks on, which Mr Phillips had found more intimate and revealing than if she had been starkers.
‘But what if I had wanted to keep mine on?’ he asked afterwards.
‘I would have kicked you out.’
‘There’s a double standard at work,’ said Mr Phillips.
*
The shop Mr Phillips is standing in front of sells leather clothes, and advertises itself as a ‘clone zone’. It takes him a second or two to realize that it is aiming at a clientele of homosexual men. Once he does realize, he becomes self-conscious and begins to move away, though not without wishing he didn’t feel self-conscious, so he could settle down for a proper look. It would not do to give people the wrong impression: but what were ‘poppers’? And why would anyone want to have his nipples pierced?
The shop next door has a grotto-like entrance, painted a luscious dark vaginal red. Abored-looking girl — pretty girl again — with short dark bobbed hair sits behind a sort of counter, painting her nails pink and looking up occasionally to address encouraging remarks to potential customers. Live Sex Shows XXXX says a sign above her head. Behind her and to one side is a plastic curtain.
‘Your heart’s desire is inside,’ says the girl to Mr Phillips, so matter-of-factly that it gives him a strange jolting thrill; by being so uninterested in what she is saying she makes him feel as if it might be true. If a woman’s business was sex there could be something sexy about her not being all that interested or bothered about it. Part of Mr Phillips, quite a large part, wants to push past that plastic curtain and go into the grotto. But he feels too shy, and as if he would somehow be exposing himself. So he sidles past trying to look casual.
It is hard to walk down this street without being made to think about sex. The number of gay businesses is striking, once Mr Phillips realizes that that is what they are — the bar called Spartacus, for instance, and the coffee shop, spilling out into the fumes and dirt of the pavement, none-too-subtly called Gay Paree. There are also plenty of straightforward sex shops or ‘Adult Shops’, not as explicit in their window displays as they would have been a few years ago, but now in a way worse because they have words like ‘xxx’ and ‘Sex Toys’ and ‘Videos’ and ‘Adults Only’ and ‘Explicit Material Inside’ and ‘DO NOT ENTER Unless You Are Not Shocked By Sexually Explicit Material’ and all the other enticements. Mr Fortesque was right. Sex is a good steady business to be in, Mr Phillips can see that.
When his father had died in 1981, of a stroke, Mr Phillips had helped his mother clear out his parents’ small house — not the one Mr Phillips had grown up in in Wandsworth but a newer, bigger semi in Sutton. It was a bad time. Mr Phillips disliked sorting through old things anyway, because his overwhelmingly strong instinct never to throw anything away made it difficult for him to take rational decisions; he ended up lingering over and fingering old calendars, old rail tickets, car magazines, bank statements. In the course of the Phillips’s periodic blitzes on Martin’s and Tom’s rooms, he would be more reluctant to chuck out old clothes and old posters than they were themselves. Mr Phillips liked to think this was linked to the trained accountant’s fear of mislaying an important piece of paper. At the same time, he felt a powerful impulse to cling on to everything, to keep the past alive by maintaining a physical grip on objects whose meaning belonged there.
‘You’re a squirrel,’ was what his mother had said. It struck him as a startling metaphor.
‘Am I?’
‘It’s just an expression.’
‘They’re vermin, aren’t they? Squirrels.’
‘It’s just an expression.’
His father too had been a squirrel; his mother on the other hand was a … whatever the opposite of a squirrel was. It was hard to think of an animal that took active pleasure in throwing things out. Something small and clever and quick, which didn’t keep things stashed in its burrow.
The result was that the house, when they went through it in the aftermath of his father’s death, had been full of his things but had almost nothing of his mother’s. It was as if she had died a while before. There didn’t seem to be any distinctions or discrimination in his father’s hoarding. One trunk had carried both his own father’s birth certificate, which by any standards was an important piece of paper, along with ten years of Mr Phillips’s and his sister’s school reports, carried in a Manila envelope that was itself stained with age.