Adam had been hired by Hardy and feared Laurel. As a team the two of them were like the improbable couples you sometimes saw at weddings, the type with no obvious compatibility or resemblance, who nevertheless synchronised perfectly on the dancefloor. They fit. Adam struggled to decipher where the power lay between them.
The private sector, a realm so denigrated and envied by his Civil Service colleagues, turned out to be essentially the same. The same needs, grudges and laziness, distributed in roughly the same proportions across the office, interacting according to what was probably a scientifically predictable algorithm. The same atavistic subtexts to every disagreement in meetings. Only the vocabulary was different. In consultancy you sought alignment before a meeting by syndicating your findings to your team. Faced with scepticism or incomprehension, you would walk them through the deck. You talked about value and performance and delivery, and, as often as possible, strategy. The key phrase, the trump phrase, the term that dominated their spreadsheets and appraisals and reveries, was billable days.
It was known in the office that one of the investors had sponsored Adam, and to begin with his colleagues had cold-shouldered him, as if he were part intern (unlikely to stay long enough to be worth schmoozing), part informer; he ate his lunch at his desk, pretending to be busy. He had thought to be respected for his decade of public service, to leap across to this new ladder halfway up, the higher rungs immediately in prospect. He was mistaken. Most of his peers had joined from mainstream consultancies, with the odd, exotic accountant sprinkled among them. The minority who, like Adam, had defected from the public sector, came from the big-ticket, contract-rich departments, health and local government and welfare. Adam had irrelevant expertise, unremunerative contacts.
‘Going forward,’ Hardy advised him, Adam struggling to repress the image of him leathered and strapped into the orgy cage, ‘you’ll need some expert leverage,’ meaning research assistants who knew what they were doing.
They were certain to fire him, he warned Claire. It was only a matter of time. Even with the smaller mortgage, they would be screwed. He regretted his rash, greedy career switch. He dwelled on the cost of the children’s sports camp. The shame.
‘Don’t worry,’ she told him in their bed in High Wycombe, dawn breaking outside the dormer window. She applied for part-time jobs and took one as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery.
He worried.
He brought in a smallish contract to find savings at a private prison, and he proved to be a good picker-upper, adept at knowing precisely enough to seem plausible. Half the time, Adam quickly saw, it wasn’t substantive expertise that the clients were buying. The arrangement reminded him of that song of a decade before, in which the lyrics deny the singer is the man his girlfriend has caught in flagrante. It wasn’t me — who decided you should be fired. It was Adam Tayler. It wasn’t me — who recommended that you be privatised. It was Mr Tayler.
His true expertise was in taking the blame.
It wasn’t me.
It isn’t what you think.
It was a misunderstanding.
Adam often worked alone, sleeping in deathly identikit hotels while he terrorised some unfortunate regional hospital or council. He would take a book to dinner, less to read than as a prop to ward off garrulous travellers — a precaution he adopted after an evening in Hartlepool with a packaging salesman, a man with the hairiest ears he had ever seen, who, when Adam’s interest lagged, had pleaded, ‘It’s not just paper, it’s corrugated cardboard too!’ Occasionally he thought of Neil, driving round and round the M25, Neil before he flew out to America, with only the radio and his shampoo samples and his ruthless customers for company. He became a connoisseur of the spoiling techniques deployed by doctors and bureaucrats. Outright rudeness and noncooperation were easier to handle, he learned, than oily hypocrisy. ‘Wonderful idea’ and ‘fascinating insight’ generally translated, in Adam’s experience, as ‘You cunt’ and ‘I will crush you’.
He went back to the Home Office to pitch for a contract at Croydon. Chatting awkwardly to old comrades, he wasn’t sure whether to think of them as victors or as inmates: whether, in careers as in a battle, the people who survived were the strongest and the bravest or, on the contrary, the most cowardly. Whether he had escaped or failed. He saw Heidi in the lift, but other people crowded around them. She blushed, fixedly watched the numbers ticking down to G, and strode off when the doors opened, with only a curt, eye-contact-less ‘Bye’.
After a year he was summoned to Hardy’s office, and when he arrived found Laurel in there too. He glanced rapidly between them, looking for the driving-examiner smile.
‘This is perfectly normal —’ Laurel said.
‘This is absolutely routine,’ Hardy cut in, Laurel switching on a Zen grin to smooth over the interruption. They explained that Adam’s temporary contract would be rolled over for another year. The same thing happened the following year. In his more sanguine moments he would still glance up the ladder, at job titles with the prefix Senior or even Director of, but at others he peered downwards to the abyss, and was grateful to have his lowly rung to cling to.
They had lunch at the café by the lake, cold meats that the children wouldn’t eat and Coke they weren’t supposed to drink. Afterwards they played babyfoot, like a family in an advert, Adam’s eyes meeting Claire’s as they registered the idyllic tableau. This is us. He whispered to Harry to let Ruby win, as he wished he had let Harriet win, once or twice, at table tennis or Risk. His son tried to comply, for a goal or two, but in the end he couldn’t manage the self-effacement.
After the game Harry announced that he wasn’t tired and fell asleep in the shade. Claire sat on a lounger to brush Ruby’s beautiful hair.
Adam put on his Crocs, and the sunglasses that were the marker of sexual self-respect among young parents, and absconded for a walk along the shore. He hummed to himself, then sang aloud: ‘Well I’m runnin’ down the road tryin’ to loosen my load / I’ve got seven women on my mind.’ His happiness anthem. Away from the road and the café the lakeshore became wilder, rockier, unkempt, bottles and plastic bags and a lone flip-flop nestling in the crevices. But further along the rock gave way to a flat, curated stretch of sand, possibly attached to a hotel, though Adam couldn’t see one among the trees.
Two young boys were playing bat and ball. An elderly couple dozed under a parasol like effigies of themselves. A young woman in a white bikini, sunbathing alone on a towel, sat up to remove her top. She was a pretty brunette, painted toenails, firm, catwalk breasts. Nineteen, Adam estimated, or thereabouts. The fidgeting of her hands behind her back drew his eyes but he forced them away.
Adam watched as two men walked towards her, whispering. She was lying on her back, topless, and didn’t see them approaching. One produced a camera from a pouch around his neck; the other arced around the girl, using that studiedly casual, faintly comic, half-jog, half-stride gait that some people employ if the lights change while they are crossing a road.