Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  “Leastways”—and this was Barney making his long-delayed entrance into the debate—“if he doesn’t do business with you, you sure as hell don’t possess a grain of talent for this job and should be looking round for something else.”

  Ephraim swivelled his chair a few degrees to include Barney now (peripherally) as well as the others. “Anyhow, all this is irrelevant. We said that it made no difference what people put on the questionnaires.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have. That was your first mistake. Next time you’ll know better. Did you all say that?”

  “Yes, of course we did,” said Ephraim.

  “I wasn’t asking you,” said Barney. It seemed fitting that the first time he’d addressed him directly since Monday it should be to say he hadn’t been addressing him.

  Sean and Jerzy both denied having said it. Lucy admitted that she might have done. Ephraim looked at her a little sadly. She had been with the company for nine months now and was Barney’s star pupil. She was doing much better than Sean, who had been there the same length of time—even though he stuck rigidly to the scripts and brushed up his selling technique just as often as he could find somebody to practice it upon. He was the only one of them who had scored a distinction in the multiple-choice examination at the end of the initial, week-long training course (residential, in a four-star hotel; intensive, interesting, luxurious and free). No one received a licence until he had passed this test in every one of its ten sections.

  Ephraim said: “I don’t believe either Sean or Jerzy; but what difference does it make? The placard announced a free prize draw and mentioned nothing about it being obligatory to tick the right box.”

  “Oh, bollocks,” said Barney. “That’s just splitting hairs and you know it. Do you imagine Norwich Union or Allied Dunbar or any of the large insurance companies would give away a valuable prize to somebody who wasn’t going to be a client?”

  “Yes,” said Ephraim. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Then you live in cloud-cuckoo-land and it’s no surprise you’ve got to be past fifty and are broke, that you’re behind on the mortgage, owe money to the bank—and heaven knows who else—and have practically no insurance. You, a consultant on insurance! An adviser on finances! My God! It would be quite hilarious, if it weren’t so damned pathetic.”

  Ephraim ignored this; it was true and he couldn’t think of any satisfactory response. He’d been a fool, of course, to reveal so much of his situation to Barney, but that had been in happier days—last week, maybe—when the two of them had sometimes gossiped together like brothers and he had still believed in his essential ability to pull through; to make something of a life for himself and Jean (or, rather, Jean and himself). “In any case,” he said, “I don’t care about Norwich Union. I don’t care about Allied Dunbar or any of those larger companies. This is the one I’m supposed to be working for and up to now I thought it had integrity. Well, does it have integrity or doesn’t it?”

  “I can see what Eff means,” said Lucy. “I imagine we can all see what he means but—”

  “Can we?” asked Jerzy. “No way! Not me!”

  “Oh, look, matey,” said Sean—and he was talking to Ephraim, not to Jerzy. “In an ideal world…,” he began; which was one of Barney’s own favourite phrases. Much as he was fond of Sean, Ephraim sometimes thought he was like a sheet of blotting paper. (Much as he was fond of Lucy, come to that, he sometimes thought of her as Little Miss Goody-Goody, always agreeing with everything that Barney said, although both she and Sean had advised him only the day previously, while Barney was at lunch, that there was no law against thinking whatever you liked in this office but it was usually a lot wiser to keep most of it to yourself…And Lucy had also said—not for the first time—“Eff, I can’t believe you’re fifty-two. My father’s a year younger. He’d never have the courage to take on a whole new career like you’ve done. I really do admire you for it.”) Sean was constantly seeking to inspire him with the platitudes he’d absorbed from the American paperbacks in circulation round the office: “Listen, matey,” he would say, “you never have a second chance to make a first impression,” or “You know, if there’s one thing that failure can’t stand, it’s persistence,” or—a little more surprising, this—“There’s nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so…,” though he always seemed reluctant to acknowledge plagiarism (which was equally endearing-stroke-infuriating); he produced these aphorisms as if they’d never been heard until this very moment, a vaguely puzzled expression in his eyes which appeared to say: My goodness, I hadn’t thought of that before! But it’s true, isn’t it? And he went on now: “In an ideal world, matey, of course everyone would like people to act in the way you’re describing. But unfortunately this is far from being an ideal world.”

  “Crap!” said Ephraim.

  “Well, well,” said Barney, “so you think this is an ideal world, do you?”

  He didn’t bother to answer.

  “And speaking of integrity,” continued Barney, “I don’t see how you’ve any right to hold a single view on this whole tedious time-wasting topic. You haven’t even paid for the bloody stand yet. Remember? It seems to me it’s all very fine to go shooting your mouth off…”

  But Lucy was waving her arm at him and Barney had to stop. This was really quite satisfying. Lucy had lent Ephraim the money for his share of the stand, and Jerzy had done the same thing as regards the hamper. “Eff paid me back,” she said.

  Barney, disconcerted, looked at Jerzy.

  “Yes, me, too.” (Reluctant admission.) As Ephraim had told Nathan on the phone, his first month had been reasonably productive, thank God—thank God—although there’d been a longish wait for payment and you received only seventy-five percent of your commission to begin with; didn’t see the remainder for a further fifteen months. (And, anyway, twelve percent of what you earned went automatically to Barney, twelve percent to Alf Preston, and six percent to the area manager.) But still…thank God. “Though I’m with you about the rest of it,” Jerzy said. “Shooting his bloody mouth off…I really don’t know how his wife puts up with it, I don’t.” Jerzy’s good humour was now, just possibly, beginning to reassert itself but this jocular expression of it, incipiently jocular, unwittingly assured that Ephraim’s satisfaction was short-lived. “And besides, all this airy-fairy stuff about telling them this and telling them that…When it boils down to it, how is anybody ever going to know?”

  “There you have it in a nutshell, matey! There’s no way anybody is ever going to know.”

  “Dear God!” said Ephraim. “How does one even begin to communicate with you lot? Whether anybody is ever going to know isn’t—just isn’t—what I’m talking about here.”

  Can’t you see? What I’m talking about here are the Wendy Coopers of this world. The inadequate mothers of Amber Jade Coopers.

  No, not so. What he was really talking about was the Wendy Cooper of this town: the Wendy Cooper who lived in one of a row of council maisonettes with rotting planks nailed across their back entrances, in Radford…Excepting she, of course, happened to have put her tick in the right box—suddenly he felt confused—did that in any way invalidate his argument? Even she had had the spirit to realize that if you weren’t sufficiently clued up to express at least a polite interest in what a company had on offer, then why indeed should you suppose you were deserving of a £50 handout? Oh, hell.

  “Mr Sodding Holier-Than-Thou! Can anyone believe this?” Jerzy appealed directly to Barney. “Jesus Christ, why did we ever have to land ourselves with him? ‘Ephraim’? You should have known that anyone who had a name like Ephraim was going to be a stuck-up and pretentious little prick!”

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Barney—who was perhaps exercising considerable restraint in not picking up on this. “Let’s get some outside opinion. Vic! Gillian!” He called across the office. Outside opinion, thought Ephraim, and was faintly surprised they hadn’t come across earlier, the two who’d now been hailed, to f
ind out what was going on; even if they hadn’t heard Jerzy’s raised voice (and although the office was large it wasn’t that large) they must surely have been aware of the intensity of the emotions being expressed. They were the only other two around at the moment, apart from Pauline, the secretary. Gillian was slim, middle-aged, with a clipped manner of speech—she came from South Africa—and a practical, kindly approach to things, except that her political views were so rightwing they could sometimes sound almost fascist, which led to confrontations with Jerzy that were now, luckily, becoming increasingly rare, since on both sides the arguments frequently grew very heated…Jerzy’s socialistic principles were aired earnestly and often; far more so than Ephraim’s. Vic was a Pakistani who spoke with a trace of Liverpudlian: shortish, athletic, neat, always immensely well-groomed, generally very friendly but—in some way that Ephraim couldn’t quite pinpoint—occasionally conveying an impression of shiftiness; Ephraim only knew that he wouldn’t trust him to handle any of his own investments…supposing he should ever have any.

  Barney gave them a précis of the situation; it was stated fairly and he brought in no personalities.

  Gillian said succinctly: “It’s illegal. Every single entry has to go into that draw.”

  Vic said: “Barney, you just can’t be serious. You must have known it was illegal.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with me,” said Barney. “I’m simply sitting on the sidelines. It’s up to this lot to decide.”

  “Well, it should have something to do with you,” observed Gillian. For the first time Ephraim wondered how much she really liked Barney.

  “All I’ve said is, if we’re living in the real world and want to do ourselves a bit of good—without doing anybody else a bit of harm—no one is ever going to be a jot the wiser if we…if we…” He gave a shrug.

  “…merely act in a thoroughly dishonest way.” It was Ephraim who finished the sentence.

  “He’s right, you know, Barney. No getting away from it.” Vic rubbed his hands and stood there looking smug.

  “And not doing anyone a bit of harm,” said Ephraim, “might just mean stealing fifty pounds from somebody who could well do with it.” It occurred to him he felt no sympathy for the underdog; he was prepared to crow and gang up and go in for the kill in a way that was decidedly unchristian.

  “Oh, don’t give me that shit,” said Barney. “All right, I wash my hands of it. We took it to arbitration and you lot have heard what’s been said. Settle it as you like; but for fuck’s sake let’s get down to some proper work and start making a few phone calls that might bring us in a spot of business for a change.”

  “Well, I’m fed up to here with the whole thing. Why wait till tomorrow for the draw? Let’s get shot of it right now.” (Jerzy.)

  Lucy retrieved her no-hopers from the bin but these apparently represented just a small percentage of all the cards that had already been jettisoned by Sean and Jerzy and herself. The system was for each of them to number his own cards, write the corresponding number on a tiny piece of paper which was then screwed up and put into an empty biscuit tin, and then ask Pauline to draw the winning pellet. The three others were ready within twenty minutes; it took Ephraim an hour and a quarter to see to all of his.

  “Oh, what’s the use?” said Jerzy. “We might just as well give him the hamper now and hope whoever gets it chokes to death on the first mouthful. Uninsured.”

  “No, don’t be like that,” said Sean. “While there’s life there’s hope. You never quite know what could be round the corner.”

  But Jerzy was right, of course. The others each had fewer than seventy contenders; Ephraim had two-hundred-and-fifty-three. (And, oh, how Barney had congratulated him on that Monday morning after their week at Texas! “Nobody has ever done as well as this. My God, Eff, you’ve certainly got the most fantastic future! Was I right—or was I right—to decide on following my instincts and on giving you a chance?” This had been said publicly, in the training room, and endorsed by Alf Preston, with the hands-above-the-head boasting of the boxing champ: the week always started with plaudits or reprimands, with insistence on the necessity of goal-setting, with firm resolves to compete against your own finest performance. Everyone had clapped good-naturedly; and Jerzy, unasked, had even gone back into the outer office and loudly rung the bell.) The winner of the prize was an R. Harrison from West Bridgford, who, on the questionnaire, had signified that he/she had little interest in saving, would react negatively to any suggestion that there were ways in which he/she could be financially much better off, and had given his/her date of birth (12.5.68) and address, but no telephone number, either for work or home.

  “Fuck him,” said Jerzy.

  “Or her,” said Sean, “which, you’ve got to admit, matey, could at least make it a bit more interesting.”

  “Please,” said Lucy, smiling and holding up one hand. “I don’t wish to hear about this.”

  “So what do you propose to do?” asked Barney, gazing ironically at Ephraim. “Have you looked through the phone book? Have you checked with Directory Inquiries? He, she or it—one supposes—could still quite easily be living with its parents, right?”

  “I haven’t had much of a chance yet, although I realize it must be all of a minute, or even two, since Pauline drew this name out of the tin.”

  “I’d have said you’d had weeks in which to try to trace this sexless loser.”

  “You know how I feel about pestering the ones who didn’t want to be pestered.”

  “And you know how I feel about you doing your job in the manner you’ve been asked to do it.” Barney paused; looked darkly handsome, Ephraim thought, in a sleek and threatening, Cosa Nostra way. “If there isn’t any phone number—and can you believe it that anyone in these modern times can be without a telephone?”—this was a piece of philosophical inquiry, mystification, not aimed specifically at Ephraim—“you’ll have to send off a letter telling them to get in touch with us by Monday; Monday without fail. (And if we haven’t heard, everybody, we hold a new draw first thing Tuesday morning.) And oh, by the way, in the letter you say nothing about their having won the prize.”

  “What, then?”

  “You’ll ask them to get in touch with us. Nothing more.”

  “Oh, sure, that’s going to fire them up! They’ll think it’s just another sales pitch. We have to tell them why.”

  “No. I forbid you to mention it.”

  It wasn’t worth arguing about; and for once Ephraim managed to refrain. He turned away with a look of disbelief which he hoped was as cutting as anything he could have said. He would simply have to go to West Bridgford himself. Tonight. Something of a nuisance, but since it was the obvious way of getting the better of Barney, totally justified. If no one was at home he could put a note through the letterbox and hope to heaven that R. Harrison and all the members of R. Harrison’s household, if any, hadn’t gone off on a late-October break. In one way indeed—having no appointments for this evening, because he’d telephoned Kentucky Fried Chicken and heard that Shane wouldn’t now be back until the weekend—Ephraim almost welcomed this as a valid excuse for being away from home. (Another valid excuse would have been two or three extra hours of cold calling; but even Jean’s present form of politeness was—all things considered—preferable to that.)

  “And I should like to see your letter before you get Pauline to type it.”

  Ephraim didn’t answer. He pretended to be sifting through some papers on his desk.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Lucy said: “Eff. Barney’s talking to you.”

  “Oh?” Ephraim swivelled in his chair. “Great! I didn’t think he was going in for that these days.” There was a pause. “I’m sorry. I simply wasn’t listening, had something more important on my mind. What did he want?”

  Barney picked up his phone receiver. Scowled. (Oh, you sexy brute! Ephraim felt inclined to say.) Lucy was keen to keep the peace.

  “He says he’d like to see your l
etter before you give it to Pauline,” she told Ephraim, gently.

  “Why? Doesn’t he trust me, then?”

  Lucy smiled and returned her attention to her work.

  A short time afterwards, Barney went into the training room with a client, slapping the fellow on the back and calling out to Pauline a minute later to bring them in two cups of coffee. The others went on with their telephoning; or, in the case of Sean, with his use of a computer to work out which plan or combination of plans would best suit somebody whom he was going to see that afternoon. Ephraim wished more than ever that he and Jean could have been on good terms. Normally, when they were, he rang her at least once a day, whether she was at home or at the shop. She would have sympathized about the draw; told him he was right; boosted his morale. She would have sympathized about the row on Monday—though that wouldn’t have occurred if they had been in harmony, and, even if it had, she might have wished he had been a lot less confrontational. (“Why do you always have to meet these things head-on? Why do you always decline to show a little tact?”) But instead he had to keep all of it to himself; and by the time he would be able to tell her—if such a time, he thought dismally, were ever to return—the support she could have given him would no longer seem nearly so important. He felt quite sick with betrayal.

  Perhaps he’d have a chance to tell Roger. Roger would certainly be on his side in the matter of the draw, although probably less so with regard to the slanging match: he had learned discretion at his mother’s knee, and imbibed her antipathy to making waves. But, in any case, Roger always arrived home so late and had to be in bed so early; it would be difficult to get him on his own. Ephraim had even wondered about ringing the shop but Mr Cavendish apparently frowned upon his staff receiving any personal call unless it was some sort of an emergency (“Help! Help! This is an emergency!”) since they had just the one telephone. And besides, it would make the whole thing seem too important, because—although it scarcely could seem too important—it still needed to be brought up casually, as though it were merely apropos of some other topic that you’d even remembered to mention it. Oh, damn! And next week Roger would be around all day. My times are certainly in thy hands, O Lord…although, bloody hell, I’m almost beginning to wish they weren’t.