by Simon Brett
‘Anyway, thing is, it puts me in a bit of a spot.’
‘Lack of gravitas, you mean?’
‘That’s it. You see, I want my set-up to look like a heavy-duty, solid company, so I can’t turn up to a big meeting on my own.’
‘I don’t quite see why.’
‘You take my word for it, I can’t. I know these people. Numbers count with them. So, Charles, reason I’m ringing is I wondered if you might be free to come along with me tomorrow . . .’
‘Oh. Well, Will, I’m very flattered that I’m the person you first thought of.’
‘Of course you’re not the person I first thought of! Nobody else was free.’
‘Oh.’
‘Come on, will you do it?’
‘I might not be free,’ said Charles loftily.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Charles. You’re always free. Come on, help me out of a spot.’ There was a silence. ‘If you do, I’ll see that there’s something for you at the sales conference in Brighton . . .’
The bribe of work had its usual, instantaneous effect. Charles agreed to go to the meeting.
‘But what will I have to do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No, just sit there holding a briefcase and look like you’re making a mental note of everything that’s being said.’
‘Why?’
‘It’ll intimidate them a bit. Always a good idea to have one person at a meeting who doesn’t say anything – it makes all the others terribly self-conscious about what they’re saying. And raises the gravitas quotient.’
‘Ah. Right. But isn’t Robin Pritchard going to think it’s odd, me being there? I mean, he last saw me as a forklift truck operator. I don’t think forklift truck operators have a particularly high gravitas quotient.’
‘Don’t worry. He’ll be seeing you in a different context. I’ll tell him you’re part of the Parton Parcel set-up and that that’s why you did the first job. It won’t be a problem.’
‘If you say so. What voice shall I use?’
Charles rather fancied using the one he’d developed for Thomas Cromwell for A Man For All Seasons at Worthing (‘This play is as well-made as a mahogany sideboard, and the acting was matchingly wooden’ – West Sussex Gazette). Or possibly his Sir Benjamin Backbite from that Cheltenham School for Scandal (‘The only scandal about this dire production was that Arts Council money helped to fund it’ – Gloucester Citizen).
But such speculation was quickly curbed by Will. ‘I told you, you don’t say anything.’
‘But –’
‘And if you do have to say anything, you use your own voice.’
‘Oh. OK.’ He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t a little disappointed.
‘And, again, no giggling.’
‘Promise.’
‘One other thing, Charles . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Suit.’
‘Ah.’ Then, hopefully, ‘You don’t think the suit I’ve got could be –’
‘Charles . . .’ The intonation said it all.
‘No. I see. Right.’
‘Point is, actually, if you’re going to be doing much more corporate work . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Which you do want to, don’t you . . .’
‘Oh, yes, yes, sure.’ The reply was instinctive. It wasn’t particularly corporate work he wanted to do, just work.
‘Well, it really is about time you started building up your wardrobe. I mean, for every time you’re asked to do a forklift truck operator, you’re going to be offered ten executives.’
‘Hm. So what you’re saying, Will, is that I’m going to have to buy a suit?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘And before this meeting?’
‘Right.’
Charles was torn. Buying a suit was unbelievably low on his list of priorities. On the other hand, if that investment was the necessary key to a whole new field of lucrative work . . . ‘OK, Will, I’ll buy one in the morning. Where is the meeting? Out at Stenley Curton?’
‘No, it’s in London. But, Charles, we must meet before the meeting.’
‘What, you need to brief me?’
‘Good heavens, no. But you don’t think I trust you to buy a suit on your own, do you?’
They met, as arranged, at Oxford Circus. Charles was a bit vague about where to go from there. ‘John Lewis pretty safe, isn’t it? Or Marks & Spencers sell suits these days, don’t they?’
He thought he was doing rather well, given how long it had been since he made a comparable purchase. Two ideas for where to go straight away – not bad. But the expression on Will Parton’s face told him that he was not doing well at all.
‘For heaven’s sake, Charles, we’re dressing an up-to-the-minute executive here, not a Leader of the Labour Party.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re after something with a bit of style.’
‘Oh, come on, a suit’s a suit, isn’t it?’
‘No, it isn’t.’ Will slid into his ‘affected artist’ voice. ‘A suit’s like a theatrical performance, love – it can look as if it’s been totally grafted on from the outside, or it can flow from within so that one cannot tell where the personality stops and the suit begins.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Charles was reminded of an occasion in the sixties. He had been in Stratford, wearing a former suit, an ancient voluminous garment in fuzzy charcoal tweed inherited from his father, and had met an actor wearing a collarless Beatle-style number in identical fabric.
‘Look,’ Charles had said, holding his sleeve against the other actor’s, ‘same material.’
‘Yes,’ the actor had responded waspishly, ‘but I had a suit made out of mine.’
Will hailed a cab and took Charles to Covent Garden. There he led him into a long narrow shop. The graphics over the door were so trendily minimalist that Charles couldn’t read what the place was called. Once inside, Will showed a determination to kit his friend out as a minor mafioso.
‘Surely this is too big,’ whispered Charles, as he shambled out of the changing booth in a slightly shiny striped ensemble, which hung off him like the skin of an elephant six weeks into a crash diet.
‘He thinks it’s too big,’ said Will, gleefully cruel.
‘It is the style,’ said the razor-thin shop assistant, with a waspishness which raised the possibility that his father might have worked at Stratford in the sixties.
‘Feels quite lightweight, too,’ Charles persisted. ‘I like a suit with a bit of bulk. You know, for the winter. Got to keep warm.’
‘It’s summer,’ said the young man, with a contemptuous flick of his pony-tail.
‘Yes, but got to think ahead.’
‘And since most offices these days are air-conditioned, today’s executive tends to favour the lighter fabric.’
‘Oh.’
‘And have a topcoat to wear outside when the weather’s cold.’
‘Ah.’
‘We do have an extensive range of topcoats if you –’
‘Ah, er, no, thank you,’ said Charles, who had just caught a glimpse of the price ticket on the suit. He looked across at Will and flapped his arms like an apologetic penguin. ‘What do you think?’
‘Hm. It’s a bit sober, isn’t it?’
‘Sober?’
The writer turned maliciously to a hanging suit in pale flecked tweed, whose effect was of home-made cream of mushroom soup with croutons in it. ‘This makes a bit more of a statement, doesn’t it?’
Charles scotched that idea very quickly. ‘Yes, but it’s a statement from which I would firmly wish to dissociate myself, thank you very much.’
They ummed and erred. The young man wondered whether the gentleman would look better in a light brown herringbone (but in a defeated tone which implied he didn’t really think the gentleman would look better in anything).
Charles took another look at himself in the mirror. He pulled the loose
ness of the double-breasted jacket away from his stomach. ‘At least this is quite flattering to the fuller figure,’ he chuckled.
‘No, actually, sir,’ said the young man, ‘the style does look rather better on someone with a proper figure.’
‘Oh well, perhaps I should be shopping for a new figure rather than a new suit,’ Charles suggested, with a grin.
‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea,’ the young man murmured, fingering one of his earrings.
‘That one’s a good fit,’ said Will. ‘Gives you a bit of edge, certainly.’
‘Is “edge” what we’re looking for?’ asked Charles cautiously.
Will glanced at his watch. ‘We haven’t got too long to piss about. I think we should go for it, Charles.’
‘Well, If you’re sure –’
‘Yes, we’ll have it.’
‘If that’s your decision,’ sighed the young man, in the manner of someone whose recommendation that Caesar stay at home on the Ides of March has just been overruled.
‘Right, you’d better keep it on, Charles. Oh no, first you need a shirt and tie.’
‘I’m wearing a shirt and tie.’
Protest was vain. He was dragged over to another display and kitted out with a soft cotton shirt whose sleeves were puffy enough to play Hamlet in, and a silk tie with a design that Braque might have knocked up and rejected while prostrated by flu. The tie, he noticed, cost as much as the last suit he had bought.
Paying was a problem. Charles had just achieved the unachievable and, following an ugly sequence of threatening letters, managed to pay off the debts on both his credit cards. At that unaccustomed moment of solvency, he had resolved to impose on himself a rigid regime of economy. That this intention was serious can be judged from the fact that he even – briefly – contemplated counting, and if necessary rationing, the number of bottles of Bell’s whisky he bought.
Still, the road to hell is paved with plastic. He drew out the card and once again plunged deep, deep into debt.
He tried to convince himself that the clothes were a valuable investment for his career, but natural cynicism made such casuistry impossible.
While he changed into the shirt and tie, the shop assistant bundled his old clothes into a plastic carrier, which he placed on the floor behind the counter.
‘Could I have those, please?’ asked Charles, as he was about to leave.
‘Good heavens,’ murmured the young man, lifting his eyes to heaven. ‘You mean you want to keep them?’
Chapter Eleven
CHARLES PARIS felt an absolute prune as he walked into the Delmoleen Knightsbridge offices. The shiny material of his new suit flapped irritatingly around him. Surely, not since the days of Demobilisation, had anyone walked around in clothes so patently the wrong size.
He was reassured, however, in the conference room where they met, to discover that Robin Pritchard and the agency man were dressed in almost identical garb, suits hanging in folds around them, bright silk ties progressing uneasily from Cubism to Surrealism. And when he actually came to look at Will, he saw that the writer was wearing much the same uniform. So, though Charles Paris still felt a prune, he was at least at a convention of prunes.
Certainly Robin Pritchard made no indication of their having met before, even though Charles was introduced by the same name. This was probably just professional discretion on the Product Manager’s part, though Charles couldn’t help wondering whether the suit transformed him so totally that it expunged all memory of his former forklift operator persona.
Robin Pritchard started by saying how very big the new product was going to be, how huge its launch campaign would be, how global its likely outreach, and how massively it was going to increase Delmoleen’s brand share in that particular market.
Charles Paris sat through all this looking properly executive, the neat briefcase Will had supplied beside him, trying to give the impression that its contents were something of more significance than his old clothes. But his mind was wandering.
He took in the expensive sparseness of the conference room, which was of a piece with the rest of the Delmoleen Head Office. The reception area and corridors were all light grey, with flecked grey carpets. Desks were of darker grey, while low sofas and armchairs were delicately pink, like the underside of a trout. A few discreetly expensive abstract paintings hung on the walls.
There was nothing about the place that obviously said Delmoleen. Compared to the Stenley Curton site with its huge logos, or Ken Colebourne’s office decorated with product pictures, the Knightsbridge premises were reticently anonymous. Only a small steel plate on their portico mentioned the Delmoleen name. They could have been the headquarters of an insurance company, an advertising agency, a merchant bank, a hotel chain, anything.
Presumably it was here that Brian Tressider had his office and spent most of his time. Charles wondered idly whether the Delmoleen video would include shooting at the London end. There wasn’t much chance of his being required if it did. The London-based executives were probably quite capable of speaking for themselves and, though he did now possess the right suit for a managerial role, his facial similarity to the speaking forklift operator might not pass undetected.
His mind came back to Dayna Richman’s murder – came back rather guiltily, it must be said. He had been trying not to think about it for the last few weeks. It wasn’t the memory of Trevor’s knee in his crutch that put him off, nor was he deferring in response to Ken Colebourne’s bribery – it was just that he didn’t know how to proceed on the case. Without any good reason to return to Stenley Curton, it was hard to continue the investigation.
And, in a way, the investigation was complete. Charles Paris was convinced that Trevor had killed Dayna, though he couldn’t precisely define the man’s motive. Presumably, sex was at the bottom of it somewhere. It usually was when a man and a woman were involved. A lovers’ tiff, something along those lines . . . Anyway, the prospect of finding any proof of what had actually happened seemed ever more remote.
‘And the really important, revolutionary, mould-breaking thing about the product is that it’s green.’
Robin Pritchard’s pronouncement brought Charles back to the present with a jolt. The Product Manager looked triumphant. The agency man, who already knew what the product was, shook his head in benign amazement at the boldness of its concept. Will Parton, who didn’t yet know what the product was, looked as impressed as only someone pitching for a lucrative contract can.
They all turned to Charles Paris for his reaction. He decided that an expression of awestruck reverence would be appropriate and, since they all looked away with satisfaction, presumably he had got it right.
‘Now when I say green,’ Robin Pritchard continued, ‘obviously I’m using the word in the environmental sense . . .’
‘Obviously,’ Will Parton agreed.
‘So all the ingredients will have been organically grown, and not only will they – the ingredients – be listed on the wrapper, but their provenance will also be detailed – you know, to show that they have been processed in a way that has done the minimum harm to the environment . . .’
Will, who Charles had heard on many occasions say that he didn’t give a damn about the environment so long as he had a fridge that worked, nodded enthusiastic endorsement of Robin Pritchard’s words.
‘What is more, the wrapper will be made from wholly recycled paper and be coloured by pigments that are totally biodegradable. Not only that, but, for every unit sold, a sum of money will be donated to an environmental charity – you know, to replace some of the rainforest, do something for the ozone layer, whatever . . .’
‘How much?’
‘How much?’
‘Yes, how much will be given to the environmental charity?’
Will’s question seemed to fluster the Product Manager. ‘Well, the precise, er . . . the precise details are yet to be worked out. I mean, we are talking a percentage here, and inevitably a fairly small percentage –’
‘But the purchasers needn’t know that,’ the agency man chipped in smugly. ‘The campaign will emphasise the fact of the donation rather than the precise amount.’
‘Exactly,’ said Robin, ‘but, nonetheless, given the number of product units we are hoping to shift, we are talking a very considerable sum of money.’
‘Certainly, certainly,’ the agency man conceded magnanimously. ‘And the environmental value of the product will obviously be stressed at every point of the campaign.’
‘And so,’ said Will, ‘every unit that’s sold, for the rest of time, will be raising money for the environment.’
‘Well, no, not for the rest of time,’ said Robin Pritchard cautiously. ‘I mean, we do obviously have to think of our profit margins. No, the donations will be made only over the initial three-month period of the launch.’
‘And then they’ll stop?’
‘Yes, in effect they will. I mean, you can’t go on doing that kind of thing for ever. Delmoleen’s not a charity, you know.’
‘Of course not.’
‘But again,’ the agency man chipped in, ‘while our campaign will stress the donation element over the launch period, it would not be of interest to anyone for us to make too much of a song and dance about the moment when that element is dropped.’
‘No, of course not,’ Will Parton concurred.
‘So, as you’ll have gathered, this thing is going to be really big. What do you say, Will?’
‘Certainly sounds big, Robin. And very exciting.’
‘Charles?’
He didn’t quite know the correct response. Will had told him to say nothing, but to do so to a direct question seemed downright rude. So he just shook his head in astonished disbelief and said, ‘Big.’
Robin Pritchard nodded, gratified, but Charles couldn’t help adding, ‘Sorry, you haven’t said what the product is yet . . .’
‘It’s the Delmoleen “Green”,’ the Product Manager announced momentously.
‘Ah.’ Charles nodded. ‘Green what?’
‘It’s just called the “Green”. That’s the beauty of the name, its sheer, minimalist simplicity.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. But what is it? Is it a breakfast cereal or a biscuit or a . . .?’