An hour and a half later he has finished a rough plan and elevation. It’s exactly as he conceived it, except that instead of twisting it he has knocked the top slightly cock-eyed, like the cow with the crumpled horn.
He goes into Harry’s office, and without a word puts the drawings on the desk in front of him. For some moments Harry gazes at them in silence, slowly plucking the left-hand strap of his braces away from the shoulder, and letting it snap back against the shirt. Howard can feel the muscles of his face trembling slightly, as they tense for a self-deprecating smile at Harry’s appreciation. His head makes little involuntary movements, the first beginnings of the small pleasurable movements which his whole body will make as a kind of modest disclaimer in the face of Harry’s approval.
Harry’s appreciation is even more wholehearted than he expects. He begins to laugh. He laughs violently, excitedly, hammering his hand up and down on the desk. People come drifting into the room to see what’s up. They look over Harry’s shoulder, and slowly begin to smile. They glance up at Howard, looking at him in a new way. “This your idea?” they ask curiously.
Howard twitches. He runs a hand across his mouth, as if to keep wiping off his smile. He leans against the wall, and pushes himself off, and leans against it once more. His whole body is full of a genial electric warmth.
In just six and a half hours he has produced the Matterhorn.
It’s a real young man’s mountain, of course. He never does anything quite so bold again, or quite so fast.
But people in the office regard him differently now. They still mock the slow way he speaks. “Urm,” they all boom ponderously, on varying notes, when he fails to answer a question at once. They still mock his eagerness, and mimic the keen forward inclination with which he walks, as if he can’t wait to get where he is going. But he can see from their eyes that they look upon him now as someone who will transcend the collective and desert it. So he is able to become even more modest than before. He speaks more slowly, leans more eagerly, so as to offer more opportunity to the mimics; smiles more disarmingly at the result. He knows he is behaving well, that his behaviour slots precisely, with a well-oiled click, into the space in the universe that’s waiting for it.
Meanwhile the Matterhorn begins to grow famous. Projections of it are reproduced in the papers. It catches people’s imagination, and becomes, as Harry wanted, a kind of pictogram to represent the whole range. A newspaper refers to Harry in a headline as “Mr. Matterhorn.”
“I should get your lawyers onto that,” says Jimmy Jessop.
“Not at all,” says Howard. “He’s the head of the department. It was his idea, really.”
They all instantly mimic him, pressing their hands together and casting their eyes soulfully upwards.
“Manifest unto us thy holy arse, O Saint Harry, that this thy humble servant Howard may lick it,” chants Jimmy.
But they are very fond of him, underneath it all.
One day Harry comes into the office silently holding up an advance copy of one of the professional journals. It contains the first detailed plans for the Himalayas, which all the big names in the business have been working on for years. Everyone in the office comes crowding round, anxious to see the strength of the opposition. Silently they gaze. Silently Harry turns the pages over.
“Well?” demands Harry.
“Well,” says Brian McDermott cautiously, “they’re very big….”
They all let their breath out in an explosion of laughter. It’s true. They’re very big, and they’re very expensive, and that’s about all you can say for them. A prestige job, with not a suggestion of the wit and sinew and quirky humanity that informs the stuff they are turning out in Harry’s office. Which means that, unless the Andes group produces any surprises, Harry Fischer’s little bunch of boozers are the best bloody mountain-builders in the world!
Howard would like to put his arms about the whole team, as they crowd round the journal, smelling of shirts, and squeeze them all, and fuse them into one perfect corporate human being.
“You know what the trouble is with these bloody monstrosities?” asks Neil Strachan, turning back the pages of the journal with his disapproving Presbyterian fingers. “In three bloody words?”
They wait.
“No bloody Matterhorn,” says Neil.
~ ~ ~
All his friends know that it was Howard who did the Matterhorn, in spite of his modesty, because Prue Chase makes a point of telling everyone.
“You know Howard, don’t you?” she says, as she levers him into conversations at parties. “He did the design for the Matterhorn, though he modestly lets Harry Fischer take all the credit for it.”
Or else she turns to him in the middle of dinner and asks, “What’s happening about the Matterhorn, Howard? They are going ahead with it, aren’t they? It won’t be affected by the credit squeeze …? Shirley, you know it was really Howard who designed it, don’t you?”
Prue handles the public relations for all her friends in this way. It’s her assiduity which enables them all to be so modest about their success — and they all are pretty successful, one way or another.
Charles Aught is doing terribly well in inspiration, for example.
“The last time we saw you,” Prue says to him, as she ladles the haricots around his gigot, “you were just desperately trying to find a second line to put after ‘Goe, and catch a falling starre.’ Did you have any luck?”
“Prue, love!” cries Charles Aught, pleased. “How clever of you to remember! Yes, as a matter of fact I did. ‘Goe, and catch a falling starre/Get with child a mandrake roote.’”
“Charles, that’s brilliant!” cries Prue.
“Brilliant!” says Roy, her husband, from the other end of the table.
“I thought that would really zonk him,” says Charles.
“They’ve put Charles onto inspiring Donne,” explains Prue to the people around the middle of the table, “because he did so fantastically well with Yeats.”
“Well, either you get on with someone or you don’t,” says Charles. “And with John I do. He’s really rather a honey. As a matter of fact I usually just give him the first line or two and leave him to get on with it. He’s quite literate. Unlike some I’ve worked with.”
Bill Goody is trying to stop the laws of logic being passed.
“How’s your truly heroic battle against the Law of Excluded Middle going?” asks Prue. “You know, Charles, don’t you, that the Government’s trying to steamroller a law through to say that everything either is the case or isn’t the case?”
“Oh, we’ve done a deal on Excluded Middle,” says Bill. “We’ve called our campaign off as a quid pro quo for their accepting the need for legislation to control the conservation of energy.”
Simon Winter has raised two people from the dead.
“Are they both all right still?” asks Prue. “Bill, you know it was Simon who brought those two people back to life.”
“One’s popped off again, I’m afraid,” says Simon. “The other’s jogging along all right. Bit brain-damaged, that’s all.”
Roy Chase himself is very big in counselling, though Prue out of conjugal modesty always makes his efforts sound ridiculous. “Poor Roy!” she says. “The only people who seem to get put through to him are little girls who want ponies for Christmas and wives who want their husbands dead.”