Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  “Important? Speak to the ghosts of the six people who died in yesterday’s fireball on the motorway; or of all those blacks hacked to pieces in last night’s township massacre; or of the latest policeman who’s just been shot in Northern Ireland. Then speak to his wife and three young children who saw it happen. And afterwards tell me how very important you still believe your own little problem can possibly be.”

  “I know. I know. Do you honestly suppose I’m not aware of all of that?”

  He turned his back in surly irritation; but—after he’d taken only three steps—returned. “Well, tell me how much they’d say it mattered, all those ghosts and people, even if I did arrive late tomorrow and it did happen to be raining.”

  “Oh, go away!” said Mr Cavendish.

  Roger went. Providentially, as he arrived at street level, several Americans came through the door and he was able to lead them to look at some of the more expensive merchandise and make a good sale. It took nearly an hour of encouragement and helpfulness—fairly ostentatious helpfulness, Roger knew—that had as much to do with recommending plays and places: even a good fish-and-chip restaurant: as it did with any discussion of walking sticks or umbrellas. When he finally showed these customers out, he was feeling a good deal more satisfied with his morning. Also, it was time for coffee.

  “Would you step up here again for a moment, please.”

  He sighed. “Oh, Lord—is it really necessary?”

  He truly hadn’t meant to respond in this way. Mr Cavendish could well be right about detecting arrogance. But he remembered his mother had once told him, “You’re like me: you can’t say boo to a goose!”, and if recently he had been learning to say boo to a few geese wasn’t that all to the good? Surely not arrogance. Yet answering back might indeed be a sign of arrogance.

  “Thank you, you don’t have to address me as Lord. I can see why many would want to but I don’t insist on it…not yet.”

  Clearly Mr Cavendish had recovered from his anger. Roger again went up the awkward staircase.

  “Following our little altercation of half an hour ago…”

  “More like an hour.”

  “I purposely offered you that opportunity. I realized that in your new persona you would want to contradict me. I thought we’d get it out of the way quickly and without its doing enormous damage.”

  Roger smiled—guardedly.

  “It’s lucky,” continued his boss, “that one of us always keeps a cool head and is never prone to moodiness in any shape or form. However…Earlier you were so full of why you wanted to see me that you forgot to ask why I wanted to see you.”

  “I thought it was about the same thing.”

  “I see: yet another of your mistakes…I take it nothing’s changed since yesterday? You’re not fixed up with any job yet?”

  “No.”

  “In that case if the business pays your travel expenses for the next two months would you consider staying on? You’d be doing us a favour. Christmas is obviously one of our busiest times and—believe it or not—I’m having difficulty in finding a replacement worthy of you. Also it’s not really the best period to be training anybody.”

  Roger said: “Yes—of course. I’d be happy to stay on.”

  “Good—and we’d be happy to have you. (Well, naturally I can’t speak for Rose, or Henry, or Norman, or Joe…) I only wish there were some way we could afford to pay your fare indefinitely. If we’d had a better couple of years and we didn’t have that accursed new business rate hanging over us…”

  Roger hastened to assure him that he understood. “But thank you, anyway. Thanks for the thought.” He felt convinced Mr Cavendish had meant it—if only because he had said it so many times before and because he was invariably so generous. When he’d heard it was the anniversary of Roger’s parents, for instance, he’d bought a bottle of champagne to be taken home to them. “Special instructions, however. None for you.” (That had made two bottles for them, that year, with Oscar’s.) He gave expensive Christmas presents—as well as an

  extra week’s wages. He had supplied more than one Mild with a free umbrella. On the occasion when Oscar had dropped in to see his brother and confessed that he’d never owned a brolly Mr Cavendish had told him to pick one out: “Anything that takes your eye, so long as it’s the cheapest we have and is irredeemably shopsoiled.” Oscar had replied: “That’s very sweet of you but I’ll tell you what’s really taken my eye—and in a week or two, when I’m a bit richer, I’m going to come back in and buy it…” The umbrella in question had originated in Milan, had a cover and case richly patterned in gold paisley and cost nearly fifty pounds. Oscar of course, who at the start had been pointed towards the twelve-pound range of plain black, by the finish had so charmed Mr Cavendish—and everyone else (except for Roger)—that he ended up in possession of the gold paisley. “Really? You don’t mean it. I can’t believe it. You’re an angel.” If anyone other than Oscar had addressed Alan Cavendish as an angel after an acquaintance of barely twenty minutes it would have sounded thoroughly over-the-top. It was over-the-top. But Oscar could get away with such effusiveness; even Rose had stated, “I wouldn’t mind marrying your brother, if it didn’t mean I’d find myself lumbered with you, as my brother-in-law!”; and it certainly hadn’t prevented Mr Cavendish from meting out the same generosity to Abby when she too came—umbrella-less on a rainy day—to visit her brother at his place of work. Admittedly she didn’t do quite so well, but admittedly her manner was more restrained than Oscar’s (her restraint still had a lot of charm) and her aspirations considerably less lofty. Even Jean had been sent home a smart umbrella—plus a bottle of wine—on Roger letting slip it was her birthday. The bottles of wine, indeed, were fairly frequent; their only motivation one of whim…Roger, without warning, would find a carrier bag in the cupboard where he kept his things. And when, during the train strike, he’d had to spend six nights at a B and B near the shop, he had been taken only to excellent restaurants for his dinner, as well as being supplied with an absurd allowance for his lunches (whilst being forbidden “even once more!” to speak of his giving back the change. Afterwards, Roger had bought him a box set of James Cagney films, in a bid to express his gratitude). So he now had no doubt at all that Mr Cavendish would have paid for his annual rail ticket if he could possibly have managed it.

  “Anyway, today’s the twenty-sixth. How neat, how fortuitous! Two monthly seasons will take us up to Christmas Eve.”

  Roger smiled. “And if I buy the first one next Monday, the second will take us almost to the end of December, and I can help out with the stocktaking.”

  “You’re incredibly stubborn—has anybody ever told you? I won’t deny, however, that maybe we could do with you at stocktaking. For the present, though, please go to have your coffee. I can’t think why you’re so determined this morning to run late in absolutely everything.”

  Sitting over his mug of Maxwell House, Roger—despite what he had said today, despite what he had said since Sunday—found himself thinking about being able to buy a new season ticket that very evening. No more hassle; no further fear of conductors or Revenue Protection Managers or police or anything. Sod all the bravado. It sounded very peaceful. He felt tired. And he felt tempted.

  That afternoon, Jenny came to see him. He thought the day, which had begun so badly, had really done a U-turn. He was glad he hadn’t sought her out. Great that she was the one who—even to this small extent—was demonstrating interest. She looked fantastic. He felt a glow of pride…warned himself he mustn’t grin like Goofy.

  “So this is the renowned emporium where Mr Gladstone and Sir Henry Irving came?” She glanced about with interest—smiling, he thought, a little nervously.

  “The one, certainly; the other, not so sure. Remember…poetic licence.”

  “And those are the blue tiles?”

  “Yes.” He took her over to inspect them. “Cows in the field. Milkmaids with pails, dropping curtsies, very prettily. Hey, nonny, no…and no
thing more than a branch of the United Dairies between here and the next little village—sparkling, gurgling stream running down beside its high street.” He found, as before, that he could talk to her so easily. She seemed to release in him a heady flow of articulacy.

  She laughed; still not, it appeared, quite comfortably. While he wondered how he could make her feel as much at home as he did she tentatively changed the subject.

  “I’m really enjoying Captain Blood. My parents thought it was so kind of you. And as soon as I’m finished my boyfriend wants to read it.”

  He managed to say: “That’s good. Is your boyfriend into Sabatini?”

  She stayed for just a short while. She mentioned her boyfriend three more times. Practically fiancé. Andrew. He wondered if they’d all rehearsed it with her: parents and Andrew. (“It was so embarrassing,” she might have said. “We’d only spoken for about ten minutes. What am I to do? And, no, Andy, not at all my type. Honest! You really ought to see him.” Whilst he himself…he had been feeling wonderful, right there on top of the world.)

  “Oy, oy, oy!” said Alan Cavendish as soon as she had gone. “What’s a pretty girl like that doing in conversation with a chap like you? Is there something you feel you ought to tell me?”

  “No.”

  He added, because this had sounded too abrupt: “She works in the card shop which opened Monday.”

  “Old Roger the Dodger!” said Rose. “You got in quick! Bit of an unknown quantity, I’d say, when you really decide on something. Far too good for you, though—isn’t she, Mr Cavendish? No, that’s only a joke! She looks real nice.”

  Yet Roger didn’t want to hear.

  He remembered that final stumbling sentence which he’d ascribed merely to appreciation. I don’t know what to say…I really don’t know what to say.

  “Though next time she comes,” advised Mr Cavendish, “try to speak up a bit if you can. Remember, you do have a certain obligation to the firm. Eh, Rose? Wouldn’t you agree?”

  But Rose—mindful perhaps of this morning—ventured no reply.

  15

  Whether it would have happened if he’d been feeling less embittered and more his normal singing, dancing self, he wasn’t sure; but he certainly hoped it would have. He thought it more than likely. It was all to do with the prize draw which was due to be held the following day. He suddenly noticed that one of his colleagues, Lucy, who was a gentle and pretty woman in her mid-twenties, one who came from a farming background in Norfolk and whose main goal at the moment was to possess her own horse and take part in gymkhanas, maybe teach riding for a part of every week…that Lucy was throwing into the bin a mass of questionnaires which people had filled in when the company had had that recent stand at Texas. Well, not the company exactly. Lucy and Ephraim and two others had paid for the stand themselves—and, of course, for the hamper—manned it the whole week, either individually or in pairs, standing in a very draughty position by the automatic exit doors, inviting everybody as they left the store to take part in a magnificent free prize draw and maybe win that smashing Christmas hamper which you can see displayed on the table there. “Hey, Lucy, what are they?” he asked, pointing to the cards in the green metal bin.

  “Oh, just my no’s, Eff: the ones I’ve phoned so far who’ve given me the brush-off.” It was the policy at Columbia that even if people ticked the ‘no’ box, indicating that they didn’t want information about the services Columbia had on offer, you still rang anyway and hoped to make them reconsider. Ephraim hated this kind of calling almost more than taking numbers at random out of the Yellow Pages. It seemed to him a violation of good faith and privacy and of the right to choose, even though he could also appreciate the argument that most people were under-insured and you might be violating these principles largely to promote their welfare.

  “But you can’t do that. They have to go into the draw.”

  “Eff, these are the no-hopers; the ones you just don’t stand a chance of getting any business from.” She explained it to him with characteristic good humour, as if it had been owing simply to a fault in her communication skills that Ephraim hadn’t understood.

  Ephraim answered with equal patience. “Lucy, people kept saying to us, ‘Oh, I suppose if I don’t tick the right box I haven’t any chance of winning that hamper?’, and we kept telling them, ‘No, it doesn’t make any difference; whichever box you tick, all the cards go into the draw.’”

  At this point the two others who had been involved with the stand joined in the discussion. All the ‘associates’—or ‘advisers’—or ‘consultants’—who were part of Barney’s unit had their desks in the same corner of the office, with Barney himself sitting in a position from which he could easily monitor the activities of each of them; make sure that they were sticking more or less to the requisite, company-approved scripts. Anyone who’d been recruited by the man responsible for the whole branch, a rubicund and hail-fellow-well-met kind of chap named Alf Preston, was then a member of Alf’s unit and sat in the part of the office where Alf, not Barney, was the immediate overseer.

  Sean, who was also in his mid-twenties and again, like Lucy, unfailingly friendly and helpful, said to Ephraim: “The thing is, matey, that unless one of us is going to get something out of whoever wins the draw it’s like cutting off our nose to spite our face…” Sean was a big fellow who often went weight-training with Barney and whose own ambition was one day to be the proprietor of a fitness centre himself. (Not that either his or Lucy’s aims was acceptable at Columbia as being real goals: ‘one day’ was far too vague; a proper goal needed to have a definite date set upon it: by the end of this month—by Christmas—by June 30th.) He also had a nose that was, in proportion, as large as the rest of him and in the normal way his use of the cliché he’d just employed would have drawn forth perhaps a minute’s worth of badinage. (Ephraim had once told him that Cyrano had one of the most generous and quixotic natures imaginable; but the allusion hadn’t been understood by anyone and even the word quixotic had had to be explained.) Today, however, it passed wholly without comment.

  “Good God,” said Jerzy, who, despite his Polish parents, sounded as British as any of them, had been a coalminer and a publican, and had joined the company at the same time as Ephraim. “I’ll be buggered if we’re going to include the no’s. That stand and hamper cost us about seventy quid each and I’m damned if we’ll see it just go down the drain!”

  Ephraim shrugged. “But the money won’t have just gone down the drain, whoever wins the draw. We all derived plenty of leads out of it; you can’t deny that.”

  “I do deny it.” Jerzy was balding and burly. He seemed naturally rebellious: ‘obstreperous’, Ephraim had called him, though again this wasn’t a word Jerzy would believe existed until he was shown it in a dictionary—by Barney, as it happened—after which he wrote it down, memorized it, then used it often. He was thirty-eight and had frequently moaned to Ephraim that he resented “being pushed around by these sodding kids; what bloody experience of anything do they think they’ve got, they know just fuck-all about life, I could tell them a thing or two!” Although this was a fixation which Ephraim by and large didn’t share—for instance, he was thirty years older than his younger son but knew which of them he considered to have the more experience, overall—he was always happy to listen to Jerzy indulging it…especially in relation to Barney. Ephraim felt there was a bond between himself and Jerzy that had something to do with their ages, as well as with their having been new boys together. Jerzy had made him the gift of an attractive coffee mug during their first week; given him several lifts since then; had on two occasions lent him a couple of pounds. But right now this bond wasn’t very much in evidence as Jerzy added angrily: “You may have got plenty out of it…with all your apelike antics. I’m not so sure about the rest of us.”

  In fact, Ephraim had obtained many more leads than the other three, since he was quite a showman and, especially when on his own, had been uninhibited about trying to awak
en the interest and goodwill of potential entrants…even to the extent of going down on one knee and wringing his hands like Al Jolson. His colleagues—not only at Columbia but in many of his previous jobs—had often told him that he’d missed his true vocation; and he wished—wished—wished—that he had indeed gone on the stage, been more determined when his grandmother and mother and father (his father had still been acting then as stockbroker to his former wife and mother-in-law, had still sometimes gone to Gran’s for dinner) had all highhandedly pooh-poohed any such absurdity. He supposed he simply hadn’t wanted it enough to defy so dogmatic a family council; but at seventeen—or at least when he was seventeen—you just had so little know-how; he’d been unaware of all those options which he now realized might have been open to him. Besides, when he looked back at himself at seventeen, he felt that he hadn’t had much character. (A year later it had been his grandmother who’d been chiefly instrumental in getting him out of the RAF, and two years after that it had been a woman working with him at Harrods, twenty-four to his own twenty, who had made a remark which had remained with him ever since: “I have never met anyone with so little personality!”…even though he’d suspected that this was at least partly because of her disappointment at his lack of advances when she’d taken him home one day at lunchtime while her husband was at his office in the City.) In any case he felt he would have loved the life of the acting profession and that he might well have made a success of it. “You’re right: I have missed my true vocation!” And he had frequently beaten his breast or torn at his hair—well, untidied it in simulated anguish—or covered his eyes and pretended to weep. But the simulation, the pretence, at heart, hadn’t at all been simulation and pretence.

  He said now: “I may have had more than you, but you got leads as well.”

  Jerzy countered: “Oh, yes, so we all got leads. It’s possible we’ll do three or four bits of business out of the leads we got—each of us, I mean, okay—but it’s also possible we’ll get no fucking business out of a single one of them. Except…you ring up some guy who’s shown he’s interested and you say to him, ‘Look, you’ve just won the £50 hamper; it’ll be easier if you come to the office to collect it but if not I’ll be happy to deliver it,’ and you really think he’s not going to do business with you? Like fuck he’s not. He wouldn’t have the nerve.”