by Jim Powell
That had once been a good joke, and a useful one. When we were first married and I came home from work unexpectedly late, that was the excuse I gave. Since it was untrue, and Judy knew it was untrue, it was funny. When it became true, it was such an established joke that Judy still found it funny, and I was spared the inconvenience of lying. At some point Judy ceased to find it funny, and I never liked to enquire whether that was because the joke had become stale, or because she had started to suspect I might be telling the truth. To have stopped using the line would have drawn unwanted attention to the subject, so I continued to trot it out, and Judy continued to find it annoying. Her attitude changed again, a few years ago, and again I don’t know why. Either my claim had lost credibility with age, or Judy had become indifferent as to whether it was true or not. These days she usually ignored the remark, but not today.
‘Matthew, will you please stop saying that. It’s not funny.’
‘Oh all right. If you insist.’
‘Why do you have to go to Dorset?’
‘If you remember, we’re considering the sponsorship of a wind-farm project. Rupert wants me to run my eye over it.’
‘It seems a funny time for a business meeting. At the weekend.’
‘The people involved in the project have other jobs. I can’t see them together except at a weekend.’
‘I see. I think you might have told me sooner.’
‘It slipped my mind. Why don’t you go to Aunt Lucy on your own? It’s you she wants to see.’
‘I don’t think she wants to see anyone, except to find fault with them,’ said Judy. ‘Perhaps I’d better go, now I’ve said I will. We don’t want the old bat taking umbrage.’
The wind-farm meeting had taken place a couple of weeks earlier. I had gone down by train on a Tuesday and come back the same day. I hadn’t told Judy. I needed the pretext for my visit to Anna, and it needed to be for a weekend. It had been a month since the encounter at Tate Modern. An uneventful month. Lehman Brothers had gone bust. RBS and Lloyd’s had been bailed out. The world’s financial system had collapsed. Nothing much had happened.
I felt terrific about the brouhaha. Thank goodness I didn’t still have a job, I thought. I watched Rupert Loxley and the other directors run around like headless chickens, summoning emergency board meetings, cancelling them, rescheduling them, and decided I was well out of it. Because I was detached, my views were constantly sought. Even Rupert swallowed his pride and asked for my advice. I said I would need to charge a consultancy fee. It was meant as a joke. Bugger me, he agreed.
People like the occasional crisis. Crises create adrenalin. They relieve boredom. They make people think that something matters, that they matter. There’s always a sense of anticlimax when crises end. My advice may have been sought, but it was not taken. It insulted their egos. There was nothing any of them could do. They were bits of balsa wood in a hurricane. I advised locking the doors for a few weeks and going on holiday. That was not what they wanted to hear. They wanted to be told that their input would be of crucial importance, that they alone, by doing the right thing at the right time, could avert Armageddon. God, we’re all so stupid.
During that month, I made no attempt to contact Anna. I told myself that I was playing it cool, which was what I told myself as a teenager when I left it a good ten minutes before ringing the latest excitement. In truth, I was having second thoughts. I wanted Anna desperately, but desperation seemed an insufficient motive for action.
At the back of my mind was a small power tool, attempting to drill a simple and unwelcome thought into my skull: ‘You’re only doing this, knobhead, because Anna rejected you in ’67 and you want to show her she was wrong.’ I had, I thought, an impressive array of arguments to convince the power tool it was mistaken, but the drill was impervious to rational debate and persisted in boring me with its mantra. It didn’t succeed in dissuading me from my intentions, but it induced a paralysis when it came to implementing them.
Judy’s announcement of the proposed visit to Aunt Lucy offered an escape from this impasse and I seized it before I had time to think about it.
‘Yes, you go on your own,’ I said. ‘Excellent idea.’
‘Very well,’ said Judy. ‘Although she’ll be disappointed not to see you. Are you playing golf this afternoon?’
‘Yes. Unless you have other plans.’ This was a symbolic remark, symbolizing nothing.
‘I thought I’d go to the garden centre. It’s nearly winter, after all, and I really must get something for that bed under the ornamental cherry for next spring.’
‘Good idea,’ I said.
‘And don’t forget the Carsons are coming to lunch tomorrow.’
‘The Carsons?’
‘Oh, Matthew, do pay attention. I play tennis with Jezzy Carson. Her husband’s this year’s chairman of the Rotary. You met them at the fork supper for the Conservatives.’
‘I was under a general anaesthetic that night,’ I said. ‘Have you really got a friend called Jezzy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Amazing. Please say her husband’s called Ahab.’
‘He’s called Brian. And she’s Jessica really.’
My sixtieth was nearly five months ago now. I couldn’t honestly say it had been forgotten. I was reasonably sure, for example, that if I ever reached my seventieth, it would be celebrated differently. Life had returned to what passed for normal. Judy had granted a conditional pardon. My children were talking to me, although, now I come to think of it, I hadn’t seen either of their partners in the interim. However, Judy was still not issuing social invitations to the friends present that night, possibly because we weren’t receiving any from them. She was therefore reduced to entertaining people who were even more distant acquaintances than the acquaintances who passed for friends. Ahab and Jezebel were two of them.
‘Remind me what Ahab does when he’s not rotating,’ I said.
‘He’s senior partner at a firm of accountants in Potters Bar,’ said Judy. ‘Jezzy knows you work in the City. She says Brian’s itching to talk to someone who’s in the eye of the storm.’
If it was nearly five months since my birthday, it must have been more than four since I’d lost my job. Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself? I had more or less persuaded myself that I was still in work. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, I must have known that I was deceiving myself. Surely I knew that I was out of work and would never work again, didn’t I? I must have realized that I would have to tell Judy at some point, that the longer I left it the worse it would be, that those dread thoughts of a barren future would have to be confronted. Hadn’t I? I ask, not rhetorically, but because I don’t know the answers. I fear that I had believed my own delusion. I don’t know how long one has to live a lie before it starts to feel like the truth. Perhaps not for very long.
I had no idea what I was going to say to Ahab about life in the City during la-la time. When I used to tell people I worked there, they assumed I must be a banker of some sort, as Ahab probably did. I always bridled at the assumption. That had little to do with the present reputation of bankers; everything to do with how I imagined myself when I was growing up. Our generation was meant to be different. We invented sex and music, and freedom and peace, and all sorts of things that turned out to be unpatentable. We invented ourselves, in fact. And we didn’t invent ourselves in order to become bankers or accountants, to work in a nine-to-five job until we were sixty-five, collect a gold watch and a pension, and die shortly afterwards. We were not planning to die at all. We would be immortal.
I don’t think we considered who was to do the banking and the accounting that we were not proposing to do ourselves. I think we hoped that these careers would prove redundant in the future we were about to create. They had to do with the movement of money, which was deeply boring. Money existed. That was the secret we knew and our parents didn’t. They thought that money was illusory, that you had to slave all your life to make it real, and not spend it in
case it became illusory again. We knew that it simply existed, and that its purpose in life was to be spent. That was how it reproduced itself. That was why it existed in greater quantities every year.
Our life’s work was not to shuffle this stuff around. Our life’s work was to change the world and to reinvent human nature: modest ambitions that we felt to be well within our compass.
I’ve now spent most of a lifetime sitting in an office off Leadenhall Street, shuffling the stuff around. I consider myself a failure and a hypocrite. I have always told people, and more especially myself, that I work as a gambler, because that sounds more rakish, more subversive. Since it has been revealed that bankers are gamblers too, that the entire City is an offshore offshoot of Ladbroke’s, it is thought neither rakish nor subversive, but greedy and seedy. I note that our corporate brochure, which once portrayed the art of buying futures as the epitome of daredevilry and flair, now emphasizes prosaic research-based virtues.
This is bad enough. In fact it’s utterly damning. But it now turns out that we were wrong about the very nature of money itself, and that our parents were right. Money is indeed illusory. Sometimes it reproduces itself; at other times it wears a chastity belt. It doesn’t necessarily exist in greater quantities every year. At times it disappears altogether. So I’m not only a failure and a hypocrite, but an idiot to boot.
Most men like to feel proud of what they have achieved in their careers and are hurt when it is belittled by their wives. With Judy and me, it’s the reverse. I’m the one for belittlement, to myself anyhow. Judy is proud of me. I have provided safety and security, a regular flow of income, two children, a dog and a cat, and a house in Barnet with a large garden. My success is tangible – unlike fidelity, say, or love, which come with no written receipt. I can be lauded at social events in the neighbourhood, and as long as I attend some of them and fail to mention that I vote Labour, my peccadilloes are overlooked. This is one reason it is so hard to tell her that I am now officially a failure.
We seldom make love these days. Once a month perhaps. I do not count the days between. Judy has lost her libido, or I think she has. It’s only a guess because we don’t discuss it. I haven’t lost mine, but it has diminished to the point where I think I’ve lost it, until someone like Anna comes along and I realize I haven’t. I can’t remember when I last found Judy attractive. She probably can’t remember when she last found me attractive.
I don’t think either of us is attractive. To anyone, probably. I don’t think either of us is interesting. To anyone, probably. We all become clichés of something or other, don’t we? We shave off our eccentric appendages, reduce ourselves to a manageable essence, then make a cliché out of it. I’m a cliché of someone who does something in the City. Judy’s a cliché of the woman from the Oxo commercial. How depressing.
We seldom go to bed at the same time. She is usually asleep, or pretending to be, when I climb between the sheets. When we do retire together, when I’ve said goodnight and turned out the light, Judy will always say something, a few words to confirm that the cocoon is securely in place.
That night she said: ‘We have a very pleasant life, don’t we, Matthew?’
It took me a long time to get to sleep after that. I loathe the word ‘pleasant’. I would prefer any other adjective to define my life. It conjures an image of anaemia, of a medication devoid of active ingredients. A pleasant life stops at the second glass.
The bastard fact of the matter is that Judy and I really do have a pleasant life. And the other bastard fact is that Judy considers this a triumph, and I consider it a failure. As far as she is concerned, everything has to be safe and secure, firmly under some avuncular control and with no hint of risk. No one must be offended under any circumstances. The acme of achievement is to be honoured with the word boredom as the cause of death on your death certificate. I would rather die bungee jumping.
I spent much of that night itemizing the elements of my youth that had survived the bonfire of the decades. To be accurate, I spent a short time itemizing them, and a long time wondering why I couldn’t think of more.
I vote Labour. The party has no connection with the one I once supported. I still vote for it. That makes it sound as though I long for the resurrection of socialism. The reality is worse. I vote Labour out of sentiment. I vote Labour because I can’t abide people who vote Tory. I go to the polling station. I put a cross against the name of the Labour candidate. I come home, sit on the sofa and feel total indifference as to whether the Labour candidate wins or not, because it changes nothing either way. In Barnet, the Labour candidate never does win. This is not democracy, it’s Strictly Come Dancing.
I am permitted not to shave on a Sunday, unless we have guests or are going out. This allows me to look slovenly without acquiring the status of a man with designer stubble. Social archaeologists can observe the ruined foundations of a former beard.
I go to rock concerts. When they are held in warm arenas with comfortable seats. As long as they don’t feature anyone born after 1950. For preference, I would go in frayed denims. That is denied me. When my jeans approach maturity, Judy throws them in the bin and buys a new pair from Marks & Spencer. On the afternoon of the concert, she will iron them with neat creases. I have failed to stop her doing this. What the fuck are Marks & Spencer doing selling jeans anyway?
This is my personal residue of the ’60s. I don’t think anyone else’s is much different. The smart ones walked off with the brand name. Pseudo-hippies like Branson have made a fortune trading on the decade. It was when the Rolling Stones announced they were launching their own credit card that I gave up completely. What was the fucking point?
The next morning, I was unsettled. The lack of sleep, the angry, weakful thoughts that had filled my wakefulness, left me ill prepared for a ten-round contest with this year’s chairman of the Rotary and his tennis-playing wife.
The Carsons arrived on the dot of noon. Ahab was kitted out in grey flannel trousers, blazer, Viyella shirt and cravat – an item of clothing I had not seen in thirty years and which I didn’t know was still manufactured. Jezebel was in what my mother would have called a frock. She had a string of pearls around her neck – fake, I should think; we were not that important – and a demeanour that proclaimed that she shared Judy’s world view. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did. That was why she and Judy were friends. These people can recognize each other as Freemasons do. I expect Ahab is a Freemason.
I poured the drinks: a gin and tonic for Ahab; a dry sherry for Jezebel. Judy had a sherry too, to affirm the correctness of Jezebel’s choice. I poured myself a large whisky. Judy gave me the slightest frown, as if to caution me as to my future behaviour. She could smell the whiff of insurrection like the chief of police in a tin-pot dictatorship.
Judy was looking very pretty that day, I must say. I wouldn’t go so far as to say sexy, but certainly more attractive than for a long time. I wish I paid more attention to these things and could say what she’d done differently, but it was something. I wasn’t sure whom it was designed to impress.
I contained myself through the pre-lunch inanities, finding consolation in making an inventory of the luxuriant hair that sprouted from assorted orifices on Ahab’s head. Almost every part of it was fertile territory, except for his pate, which was bald. It had been generous of nature to compensate him so copiously on the adjacent plots.
‘Won’t be long till we have a Conservative government,’ he said, as Judy cleared away the remnants of the smoked mackerel pâté. ‘And thank God for that.’
‘Oh I do hope not,’ I said. ‘I vote Labour.’
It was a shame that H. M. Bateman was not present to record the scene: The Man Who said he Voted Labour. In Barnet. Jezebel looked as if something sharp and unpleasant had been inserted up her anus. Judy eyed me like an executioner, about to administer death by lethal glance. Ahab stared at me, his face blank, as if I was a species of mammal unknown even to David Attenborough, or at any rate one with no rec
orded sightings in Hertfordshire.
‘Matthew likes to be provocative,’ said Judy. She had hopes of rescuing the situation.
‘Does he? Do you?’ said Ahab. ‘Well, that’s all right.’ His wife relaxed with the face of a soft fart.
‘I do like to be provocative,’ I said. ‘On this occasion, I was being serious.’
‘You work in the City, don’t you?’ Ahab made it sound sordid. I can’t blame him. It is sordid.
‘I do.’
He snorted. ‘You City chappies have it pretty soft under Labour, don’t you? What with your fat salaries and your bonuses and your schemes for getting out of tax? A cushy number, I’d say. You don’t want to rock the boat, I expect. Don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you. I think you’ll find that millions of decent, hard-working people feel differently.’
It is generally assumed that the surrealist movement never reached Barnet. Wrongly so, in my opinion. In this argument, I appeared to be defending crooked capitalist practices on behalf of the Labour Party, while the brave Captain Ahab spoke for the downtrodden masses on behalf of the Tories. Something was wrong, but it was far too enjoyable to stop. So the Captain and I set to it and spent the rest of the meal trading insults and accusations.
At a table of eight, or even of six, it is possible to have two parallel conversations. At a table of four, it is not. Judy and Jezebel had the choice of partaking in this argument or of sitting dumb and listening to the men. Neither was practised in argument; neither had the taste for it. Jezebel would have been torn between supporting her husband and not wanting to offend her host; Judy between dissociating herself from her husband’s opinions and not wishing to be disloyal to him. I couldn’t help thinking that Anna would have advanced onto the battlefield with both barrels blazing.
It was no coincidence that, at the earliest polite moment, Judy should extract Jezebel from the table and lead her outside to inspect the outcome of the previous day’s foray to the garden centre.
‘Not really a woman’s conversation, is it, Matthew?’ said Ahab when they had departed. So we had an argument about that too, for good measure. At some point, I think I may have told him that both our children were gay. Sorry, Saz and Adam. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I didn’t want to run the risk of a return invitation.