by Jonathan Coe
My meeting with Helen lasted for twenty minutes.
She reminded me that I was coming up to the end of the six months’ fully paid leave that I was allowed on medical grounds, and asked me what I had decided to do next. Was I ready to come back to work? I told her that I didn’t want to come back to work. I didn’t tell her anything about the new life I was proposing for myself, as a toothbrush salesman. It seemed more prudent, somehow, to keep that to myself. Helen looked genuinely upset that I did not wish to return to the department store. She assured me that my supervisor had told her, in a written memo, that I had been widely regarded as a first-class After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer. I would be a great loss to the company, she said. I told her that my mind was made up, and my decision was final. We shook hands. She promised to set the necessary paperwork in motion. We said goodbye.
I thought about visiting my old department on the fourth floor, and saying goodbye to my former colleagues; but I decided, in the end, that if I did that there would be too many embarrassing moments to get through, and too many awkward explanations to make. It was better to make a clean break. So I took the escalator down to the ground floor, and left the department store by one of the main front doors, rather than the staff exit. To tell the truth, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place.
Poppy’s mother lived in a wealthy part of London. Her postcode was SW7. I had the whole afternoon ahead of me, so I took my time, and spent an hour or two wandering those rampantly posh, absurdly prosperous streets. I looked at the grand, aloof, imperturbable façades of those solid Georgian terraces, and could tell that it would be years – decades – before this recession had any impact round here. These people had built a solid wall of money around them, and it wasn’t about to fall down any time soon.
A mile away, in High Street Kensington, where I spent much of the afternoon, things were not so comfortable. I counted half a dozen shops which had closed for business and boarded up their windows. The ones that were left were usually part of big national or global chains. People didn’t seem to want to buy shoes or stationery any more, although they seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for mobile phones, and were happy to spend £3.50 on a cup of coffee. So was I, for that matter. I went to Starbucks and ordered a tall peppermint mocha and – by way of a late lunch – a toasted panini with tomato and mozarella. The barista who served me was from the Far East and didn’t correct me when I asked for the panini. While I ate the panini and drank my coffee, I thought about the decision I had made today. Was I doing something foolish? These were uncertain times. Trevor assured me that Guest Toothbrushes was on a secure footing, but small companies were going to the wall every day. The department store, on the other hand, was a long-established business, commanding huge customer loyalty, with a name that was recognized all over the UK. And here I was, giving all that up, on the basis of a potential offer (no more than that) of a permanent job with a company I knew almost nothing about. But I did trust Trevor. And the salary he had mentioned was better than the one I’d been getting. It was so hard to know what was the right thing to do. Too many unknown quantities.
Unable to resolve these difficulties, I thought instead about the journey I would be making in just over a week’s time. The retail outlet I would be visiting was a chemist’s shop in the village of Norwick, at the northernmost end of Unst. Trevor had already made contact with them so they were prepared for my visit. Apparently, getting them to buy some of the company’s products was more or less a formality. That had been prearranged over the telephone, so there would be very little actual selling involved. He told me that my main task was simply to relax, enjoy the journey, and make my video diary as interesting as possible. The ferry for Shetland left Aberdeen every day at five in the afternoon, so I had plenty of options. If I wanted to do it quickly, I should arrange only one overnight stop, on the Monday night, somewhere between Reading and Aberdeen. The obvious place, from my point of view, was Cumbria. It gave me the perfect excuse to call on Caroline, possibly even take Lucy out for a meal. (I doubted if Caroline herself would want to come.) I should start thinking about buying her a present, something nice to take up with me …
Thinking of presents made me realize that I really ought to buy a gift for my hosts tonight. I left Starbucks and went into a shop selling outrageously priced bars of chocolate, cut into elegant slimline blocks and wrapped up in minimalist packaging: as if the designers at Apple had started making confectionery. I bought one for Poppy – a sheet of milk chocolate, subtly marbled with whiter and darker blends – and then decided to get something similar for her mother as well. I emerged from the shop feeling well pleased with my purchases. It was only later, on my way back to SW7, that I started to feel a bit foolish. I had just exchanged twenty-five pounds for two bars of chocolate. Had I started to forget the value of things, like everybody else?
‘In any case,’ Clive said, ‘one of the things we’re all starting to realize is that the value of any object, be it a house or –’ (glancing in my direction) ‘– a toothbrush, for instance, is in fact … nothing! Just the amalgam of different valuations which different members of society put upon it at any one time. It’s entirely abstract, entirely immaterial. And yet these completely non-existent entities – we call them prices – are what we base our whole society upon. An entire civilization built on … well, on air, really. That’s all it is. Air.’
There was a short silence.
‘That’s hardly an original observation,’ Richard said, reaching for another olive.
‘Of course not,’ said Clive. ‘I never said it was. But until now, most people have never really appreciated it. Most people have gone about their daily business on the comfortable assumption that something real and solid underpins everything we do. Now, it’s no longer possible to assume that. And as that realization sinks in, we’re going to have to adjust our whole way of thinking.’ He smiled a combative smile at Richard. ‘Naturally, I realize that in your line of business this is old news. You’ve known for years what the rest of us have only just begun to work out. And done very nicely out of it into the bargain, I might say.’
Richard’s line of business was investment banking, of one sort or another. I hadn’t really been concentrating when it was explained to me. I had taken an instinctive dislike to him, the moment we were introduced, and suspected that the feeling was mutual. He was there, it seemed, because his girlfriend, Jocasta, was Poppy’s oldest friend from university. Jocasta seemed perfectly nice but it was clear that she intended to monopolize Poppy for most of the evening. Name-cards had been laid out on the dinner table, and we had been split up, I realized, along generational lines. I had been stuck at one end of the table, with the oldies – Poppy’s mother, Charlotte, and her Uncle Clive – with this obnoxious bloke Richard sitting next to me, Jocasta opposite him, and Poppy at the far end, almost as far away from me as it was possible to be. I was sitting opposite Clive, who I must say seemed every bit as friendly and engaging as Poppy had made him out to be. Her mother struck me as being inscrutable. She was what I suppose proper writers describe as a ‘handsome’ woman, meaning that she might well have been quite a beauty, ten or fifteen years ago. It didn’t sound as though she had a job, but clearly subsisted on independent means of some sort; but it was hard to find out any more than that, because she didn’t talk about herself much, just pumped me for information about how I had met her daughter and (without asking me this directly) what my intentions towards her were. It was hard going, sitting next to Charlotte. I noticed that she was hitting the red wine fairly heavily even before the first course was served, and I must say that I felt like joining her. The evening wasn’t going to be as much fun as I’d hoped.
‘Come on, Clive,’ said Jocasta, bridling at his last comment. ‘That’s well below the belt. You shouldn’t kick a man when he’s down, you know.’
‘Down?’
‘Richard lost his job a couple of weeks ago,’ said Poppy. ‘Didn’t anybody tell you?’
/> ‘Oh,’ said Clive. ‘No, I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’
‘Unceremoniously booted out of the office,’ said Richard. ‘Cardboard box full of belongings and all that. No surprise, really. It’s been coming for weeks. I was one of the last to go in my department, in fact.’
‘Which department was that?’ Charlotte asked.
‘Research.’
‘Really? How odd to think that banks need a research department.’
‘Not at all. This particular bank has one of the largest of its kind.’
‘And what sort of people work there?’ Clive asked. ‘Mainly economics graduates, I suppose?’
‘No, not economics usually. Quite a number of pure mathematicians. Some of them had a background in physics, usually at the more theoretical end. There were quite a few engineers, like me. A PhD was the minimum requirement.’
I was struggling to make a contribution to this discussion, and trying to think how a department of physicists and engineers could ever be of much use to a bank.
‘So they were getting you to do … what, exactly? I suppose you were designing new ATM machines, and that sort of thing.’
Jocasta laughed wildly when she heard this. Richard just said, ‘Hardly,’ and gave me one of the most condescending smiles I had ever seen. I felt suitably crushed, but Clive rather gallantly tried to back me up.
‘Well what were you doing, then? We’re not all banking specialists, you know.’
Richard took a sip of wine, and seemed to deliberate for a moment as to whether it was worth his while answering this question. Eventually he said: ‘We were being paid to devise new financial instruments. Extremely complex and elaborate financial instruments. Have you heard of Crispin Lambert?’
‘Of course,’ said Clive. (I hadn’t.) ‘Sir Crispin, I believe he’s become, since retiring. I was reading an article just the other day where his opinion was quoted.’
‘Oh, what was he saying?’
‘Well, as far as I can remember he was saying that the good times were obviously over but it wasn’t really anybody’s fault – least of all his fault or the fault of people like him – and everybody was just going to have to get used to tightening their belts and forgetting about this year’s plasma TV or holiday in Ibiza. I believe he was speaking from the drawing room of one of his many country properties at the time.’
‘Make fun of him if you like,’ said Richard, ‘but anybody who knows anything about the history of investment banking in this country knows that Crispin was a genius.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Clive, ‘but isn’t it geniuses like him who’ve got us into the current mess?’
‘What’s your connection with him, Richard?’ Charlotte asked.
‘Our bank bought up his jobbing firm back in the 1980s,’ Richard explained, ‘and from then on you can see his influence on more or less everything we did. Of course, he’d been gone some time before I arrived, but he was still a legendary figure. He basically set up the research department. Built it up from scratch.’
‘And these financial instruments that you were devising,’ said Clive. ‘They form the basis of most of our mortgages and investments, is that right?’
‘Putting it crudely, yes.’
‘So would we mere mortals understand anything about them if you were to explain them to us?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Well, give it a try anyway.’
‘There’s no point. It’s a very specialized area. I mean, would you be any the wiser if I told you that a Logic Note is a hybrid note paying a coupon rate that’s the lower of the geared annual inflation rates and the geared spread between two CMS rates?’ There was a stupefied silence around the table. ‘Or that an MtM Capped Dual Power Discount Swap combines an inverse floater fixed rate range accrual swap with a ratchet feature?’ Richard allowed himself a terse, triumphant smile. ‘There you are, you see. These things are best left to the people who understand them.’
‘And does that include the people whose job it was to sell these products?’
‘The sales team? Well, they were supposed to understand them, obviously, but I suspect they rarely did. But still, that was never really our problem.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t your problem,’ I said, ‘but surely anybody could see it was going to be a recipe for disaster. A salesman can’t possibly sell something that he doesn’t understand. And not just understand, but believe in.’
There was a slightly shocked pause after I’d said this; in order to break it – and perhaps to justify my intervention – Poppy explained: ‘Max has worked in sales quite extensively in the past.’
‘In the financial sector?’ asked Jocasta.
‘That’s odd,’ said Richard. ‘I thought I heard you telling Clive that you were involved in toothbrushes.’
‘No, not the financial sector,’ I admitted – wishing, at that moment, that I was far, far away from that dinner table. ‘I used to sell … leisure products, for children. And now, yes, I am … moving into toothbrushes. That’s true.’ From the look on her face I thought that Jocasta was going to burst out laughing again. Richard said nothing, although the disdain around the corners of his mouth was clear. Clear enough, at any rate, for me to add: ‘I’m really excited about it, actually. You know, it’s not going to earn me three hundred K a year and a five hundred thousand pound bonus, but at least I know that I’m selling a bloody good product. Well designed, not just churned out, made with a bit of care, and a bit of thought for the future …’ I tailed off, conscious that everybody was looking at me. ‘After all,’ I concluded, a bit lamely, ‘we all need toothbrushes, don’t we?’
Clive rose to his feet and started clearing away the plates. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘And arguably, we need them more than we need Dual Power Discount Swaps.’
After he had left the room, Charlotte asked Richard: ‘So, are you looking for something else now?’
‘Not just at the moment. Need to find my feet again first. We should be all right for a year or two anyway. If push comes to shove, we can always sell the Porsche.’
Jocasta looked across at him sharply, as if he had just casually raised the possibility that she might prostitute herself. Poppy laughed: ‘But you never drive it anyway. That car hasn’t moved from outside your flat for three months.’
‘We’re afraid we’ll lose our parking space,’ hissed Jocasta, without a trace of self-mockery. She got up to go to the toilet.
After that, Richard quite obviously turned his back on me, and began a long and animated conversation with Poppy. In fact, from what I could overhear of their conversation, he was openly flirting with her. I’d noticed that he and Jocasta hadn’t had much to say to each other all evening, and it now began to occur to me that, with his loss of job and status, their relationship was probably under strain. But what on earth could Poppy find to like about this self-satisfied oaf? I strained to hear as much as I could, but it was difficult, with Clive trying to engage me in a dialogue about Donald Crowhurst (‘Poppy tells me that his story has captured your imagination’) and her mother making ferocious small talk about a family friend who had just bought a cottage on one of the Shetland Isles. For the next hour and a half, Poppy and I did not get the chance to exchange a single word. Finally I looked at my watch and realized that I would have to leave if I was going to catch the 11.34 to Watford. There were other trains leaving later than that, but I didn’t want to travel home in the middle of the night; and let’s face it, this evening had been a write-off.
‘Come next door for a minute,’ said Clive. ‘There were some things I wanted to give you before you go.’
We went into the next room, a sort of sitting room cum study. Charlotte’s flat was on the third floor of a mansion block overlooking a serene and leafy garden square. Perhaps this used to be one of the bedrooms: it struck me that it was a large flat for a woman to be living in all by herself.