‘I’ve not seen you here before,’ she says as they stand in front of a John Craxton painting which features multicoloured cubist goats. ‘You’re not one of the regulars.’
‘Would you expect to know me if I was a regular?’ asks Mr Phillips.
‘Heavens yes,’ says the woman. ‘I come here every day. Mainly I come to heckle the tour guides. They talk the most fearful tripe and need much correcting. I used to pick them up on more or less everything they said but now I wait for errors of fact before I pounce. I think it helps them keep on their toes. Then once I’ve established a bridgehead I broaden out into more general interpretative points. I like to think that my perspective is broadly feminist though also unmistakably personal. And then sometimes, not often but every now and then, I like to spout any old mad rubbish just to see if they notice the difference and you know the shocking thing is they never seem to.’
‘Yes, that is disturbing’, says Mr Phillips.
‘This building used to be a prison, you know,’ the woman goes on as they walk further into the Surrealism room. ‘That’s why there are so few doors. You want to stop people getting in and out too easily. Just as you can’t walk in and out of a prison so you can’t walk in and out of an art gallery. Do you ever wonder why, of all the epochs of the world, now should be the most populous? Why so many souls should have chosen now of all times to be born?’
‘No.’
‘Nor do I. It seems perfectly obvious to me.’
They stopped as if by mutual consent in front of a painting of a man eating something, like a Dalí only even worse. Four out of ten.
‘It ought really to be like it was in the war,’ says the woman. ‘The National Gallery was sent into hiding and only one picture was taken out and put on show at any one time. The longing for art! The concentration, the hunger, with which people yearned for it! A great city should have no more than one picture on display. Let it change once a week, once a month. We would recapture our seriousness! The jewel in our crown!’
‘Does it matter?’ asks Mr Phillips.
‘Heavens yes. Why do you think all these people are here? What sort of behaviour do you think you are observing?’
Mr Phillips is thinking about that in a desultory way when with a surge of horror he sees, coming into the room from the opposite end, Mrs Palmer, wife to Mr Palmer, a.k.a. Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr Phillips can vaguely remember hearing something about an Open University course – it must be to do with that. At the moment she is looking down at a gallery plan but she is only about fifteen feet away and can’t fail to notice Mr Phillips when she looks up. That will lead her to start talking to him, which will make him have to explain what he is doing in the Tate Gallery at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning. She will then go home and ask her husband to guess who she bumped into and Mr Phillips’s quality of life at Wellesley Crescent will take a significant turn for the worse. He abruptly turns and heads back the way he came.
‘Aren’t we a wriggly one!’ says the woman, still at his heels. ‘But I’m not so easily left behind as all that!’
Mr Phillips feels a wave of tremendous fatigue, of a sort he doesn’t remember experiencing since the last time he was in the same building five years before. What is it about looking at pictures that makes you feel so knackered?
‘I think I’ve had enough,’ he says. ‘I don’t have much stamina for this sort of thing.’
‘Quite so. You’re very sensible. It is the emanations of spirit coming off the paintings which is so exhausting. The vibrations they might once have been called. If one thinks of it as spiritual exercise which drains and refreshes in the same way that physical exercise drains and refreshes, does that make it feel any better? No. Of course not.’ Another sweet, sane smile.
A tour party comes out of the next gallery at the end of the room, the man at the head of the party looking shifty as he walks past Mr Phillips and his new chum. Mr Phillips wonders if it is the same man with the posh voice who thought that the signs of dementia spoke for themselves. A light enters the woman’s eyes and she peels off to follow the group, squeezing Mr Phillips’s arm in abrupt farewell as she leaves.
2.5
Outside the gallery Mr Phillips takes a couple of lungfuls of London air at the top of the steps. The sky is now clear and blue, and it is hot. Beside him stands a girl with black sandals and red feet.
‘You have time?’ she says in a Spanish or Portuguese accent. A voice in Mr Phillips’s head says If you’ve got the inclination and If you’ve got the money and You interest me strangely and But this is so sudden. The voice that comes out of his mouth says:
‘Five past eleven.’ The girl nods and bites her lip.
Mr Phillips goes down to the Embankment and turns left towards Westminster. Across the Thames the sun is bright on the huge colourful building, all trees and ziggurats and pyramids and long glass windows, that houses the Secret Service. As always when he passes the building Mr Phillips stops for a look. You never see anyone moving about inside it, or going into it from the street in Vauxhall, so clever things have obviously been done with the doors and windows. At the same time there is something odd about spies going to work in a brand-new office building that is one of the most conspicuous and extrovert and obviously expensive in the whole of London.
It would be good fun to be a spy, and never to be allowed to tell anyone what you did. Not even Mrs Phillips, except in the most general terms. Certainly not Martin or Thomas. As for the neighbours, they would only know that you were something in the civil service, probably to do with fish quotas or harmonising EU policy in relation to tractor parts. And all the time you were standing at a barbecue while the man on your right boasted about his new Rover 816 and the man on your left talked about the council’s inability to empty the bins without leaving more mess strewn all over the road behind them than there was before they started, you would be thinking about whatever it was that spies thought about, and the main thing would be that nobody would have the faintest idea what was on your mind. And when Mrs Phillips says something like ‘What are you thinking?’ or ‘A penny for them?’ you wouldn’t be able to tell her, by law. You wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I’m worried about the quality of information we’re getting back from our network in Tripoli via his dead letter microdot burst transmission’ – you would have to say instead, ‘I was wondering whether after all we should have pushed Tom to keep up with his piano lessons’ or ‘Just trying to remember where I left the remote control, darling.’
The traffic has improved very slightly and Mr Phillips doesn’t feel as if the air is quite so edible with impurities. He heads along the Embankment towards Westminster. A walk: that is the idea. It has been years since he travelled around central London on foot – literally years, not since his bachelor days when he had lived in Shepherd’s Bush and would often travel into the West End to meet friends and go to the pub or whatever. It goes without saying that not walking is one reason he is now so fat; driving, like marriage, makes men fat.
The only pedestrians in this part of town at this time of day are occasional stray tourists. All the office workers have arrived at the office and are happily or unhappily immersed in their days. At about this point on a normal day Mr Phillips would be in a meeting, since eleven o’clock conferences were a regular feature at Wilkins and Co. Today being the last Monday in the month he would normally expect to be in a budget meeting with the planning department, which essentially involved sitting there listening to them drone on before he and his colleagues could take away the figures and shoot lots of holes in them. This could be done at the meeting, but Mr Phillips preferred to do it by memo since he didn’t have much appetite for the confrontation involved – which would often be considerable, since the planning department was strikingly, remarkably, bad at sums. Their projected cost for insulating the offices at the company’s main plant in Banbury had once been wrong by 173 per cent.
When he was younger Mr Phillips had hated meetings. Or at least he ha
d once he had got over the grown-up feeling, the warm glow of inclusion, of being invited to his first meeting with his first employers, Grimshaw’s. Children and students didn’t have meetings; only adults, serious employed people had them. So at the start there was the sense of being a big boy now. But Mr Phillips soon came to dread the whole business of sitting around a table with colleagues pretending to decide things. He hated the rooms in which meetings took place, with their horrible large tables and nasty chairs, with arms for the important people at the ends of the room, and the dank smell of the company coffee on the hotplate, and people’s briefcases, calculators, pencils, notebooks, agendas, personal organizers, beepers, copies of last meeting’s minutes, all of it. Most of all he hated the feeling that they were all impostors or impersonators, and with it the feeling that they were conspiring together to kill time, so that every second in the meeting was being wilfully murdered, bludgeoned to death. At other times he felt that it was more casual, as if the time was just being pissed away, the way you might piss away hours in the pub or by watching bad TV, or Martin and Tom would by playing a computer game.
It would be possible to calculate how much time in the course of a life was spent not doing anything. Obviously sleep was controversial in this context, since you could count that as either doing something or not. For Mr Phillips it is very much an activity, and an important one. So excluding that, Mr Phillips reckoned that he had spent, not doing anything:
– as a child before school age: six hours a day, conservatively, excluding time spent being fed, taught to read etc., time playing with other children, fending off his sister. This figure would have gone up once his sister went to school, but still.
– school years: about an hour a day, not much, but then they kept you pretty busy; when they were at school Martin and Tom seemed to have much more free time than he ever did.
– at college: four hours a day, if this included pub, watching TV, what the boys now called ‘hanging out’.
– first years at work and doing his articles: about an hour a day. Mr Phillips had been so tired he often would make no plans for evenings or weekends, except when he was actively involved in looking for a girlfriend.
Then, once Martin was born and for the next fourteen years while he and Tom were growing up to, say, generously, fifteen minutes a day when at home. (Mrs Phillips even less – indeed she feels the whole time issue much more keenly than Mr Phillips. ‘With small children you spend so much time just with them,’ she says. ‘You’re not doing anything, you’re just with them. I love them, but it’s still a bit much sometimes.’) During these years most of the free time Mr Phillips had – time spent without someone making an active demand on him or without doing something he was supposed to be doing – was at work. So the emphasis of free time shifted from home to work. Say he spent one and a half to two hours a day at work not doing anything – pretending to work, looking out of the window, sitting in meetings not listening etc. And once Tom was in full-time school, say four hours a day of nothing time, allowing for the same amount of time at work and considerably more at home. Obviously these are rough figures. So then the calculation would be:
first 5 years 6 hrs 37.5% of waking time
next 12 years 1 hr 6.25%
next 3 years 4 hrs 25%
next 5 years 1 hr 6.25%
next 14 years 15 min at home + 1.45 hrs at work = 2 hrs = 12.5%
next 11 years 4 hrs 25%
This works out as a weighted average of 16.375 per cent, or 2.62 hours, or 2 hours and 37 minutes of, broadly speaking, free or nothing time. It is a lot of blank space to account for in one life span. Now that he is redundant he is going to have even more of it; in fact, he can have all day every day, unless and until he finds something else to do. The thought of this is an immense strain. It must be why so many men died after their retirement.
Two of the many foreign coach drivers parked across the road from the Tate are having an argument in a language Mr Phillips does not recognize. They are standing on the road-ward side of their huge two-decker vehicles. The shorter and by a fine margin angrier of the two is pointing repeatedly at the other’s coach, then at himself, then downwards at the road, while the other man energetically shakes his head and keeps loudly repeating the same word.
Mr Phillips presses on up the road, past the nasty modern building where the Labour Party has its headquarters, into which a dispatch rider has just stridden, past the dwarfing, monolithic government buildings along the Embankment. Further along the road he can see the beginnings of Westminster, all grand and Gothic and trying to look a million years old. If banks try to look all secure and posh and safe and stable and big and respectable and stuffy and built to last for all time, for the simple reason that at heart they are just casinos, what is it that these government buildings were concealing? Probably that they tried to make people feel small, so that the actions of the people in these buildings will seem far beyond their understanding, impersonal and authoritative and independent of anything so trivial as the consent of the governed. It is like Peter Pan only backwards: if we all clapped our hands then the whole edifice of government could be made to go away, to fade like night terrors remembered in sunshine.
As Mr Phillips nears the Houses of Parliament he sees a nice little park across the road. For a moment he wonders if this is where politicians are always being interviewed for the telly, then he realizes it isn’t.
3.1
‘Girl your booty is so round, let me look you up and down,’ sings Martin.
He and Mr Phillips are sitting in a very big and noisy restaurant just around the corner from Martin’s office in Soho. They are both holding menus which they have not yet opened. The room has bare white walls and one entire window is open to the street, so that the diners’ conversation has to compete with the traffic as well as with the coming and going of waiters and the general restaurant hullabaloo. Martin is holding a lit cigarette in his left hand.
‘What’s that one called?’ asks Mr Phillips.
‘That’s the one that gave me the idea,’ explains Martin. ‘It’s called Boom Boom Boom by the Outhere Brothers.’
‘Is a booty the same thing as a bottom?’ asks Mr Phillips. But his son does not dignify the question with a reply.
‘You’d better look at the menu,’ says Martin. ‘I’ve got to be back in the office by a quarter past two.’
Mr Phillips has not heard of many of the things on the printed and dated list in front of him. What is lomu and why does it cost £6.95? What is or are couscous, teriyaki, carciofini and bok choy? He could ask Martin, but Martin – although he had seemed pleased enough at his father’s unannounced and entirely unexpected lunchtime drop-in – does not now seem in all that good a mood. Mr Phillips settles for grilled scallops with bacon followed by a fish cake.
A waitress wearing black Doc Marten boots, a very short black skirt and a white shirt with two buttons undone comes to their table. Martin says:
‘Is it my imagination, Sophie, or are you looking even more beautiful than usual today?’
‘What’ll it be, Mr Phillips?’ says Sophie, blushing only very faintly.
‘Martin,’ says Martin. ‘This is the real Mr Phillips. Sophie – meet my father. Dad – meet Sophie.’
‘Hello,’ they both say.
‘What would you like to eat, Mr Phillips?’ Sophie says, this time to Mr Phillips. He gives her his order. She turns swiftly, without speaking, to Martin.
‘Well, you know what I want, Sophie,’ he says, ‘but what I’ll eat is the pumpkin ravioli followed by the sea bass. I’ll have fizzy water and Dad’ll have – gin and tonic?’
‘Yes please,’ says Mr Phillips. Sophie goes away after volunteering to put ice and lemon in both drinks. Martin sits back happily.
‘Tell me about the new record you’re doing,’ says Mr Phillips. Martin runs his own company. They buy up rights to songs and assemble compilation records based on themes and periods in pop music.
‘We have
n’t decided on the title yet. Something like Boys on Girls, only probably not quite that. The idea is men’s songs about women from a politically incorrect point of view. No love songs, just tracks about being randy and fancying girls. “Titties and Beer” – that’s a Frank Zappa song – only it’s too complicated musically. I mean, musically, it’s the sort of thing Mum would approve of.’
‘Well, we can’t have that,’ says Mr Phillips.
‘“Get out of my dream and into my car”,’ says Martin. ‘“Smack my bitch up”.’ Then, seeing his father’s expression, he explains, ‘It’s ironic.’
‘Ah,’ says Mr Phillips.
The restaurant is by now completely full. At Wilkins and Co., Mr Phillips normally ate lunch either in the staff canteen or at his desk, dividing his custom between the two most closely adjacent sandwich bars, both of them run by friendly Italians. This had however become a source of ethical friction, since the nearer (and humanly nicer, by a narrow margin) shop had recently begun to fall away in the quality of its sandwich making – a slightly pongy prawn cocktail sauce one day, a soggy ham bap on a subsequent visit. It was a problem. Should Mr Phillips a. say something, b. switch his custom to the other shop, c. give up eating sandwiches altogether, d. carry on spending money there as usual for old times’ sake and out of embarrassment and an inability to walk past the shop to its neighbour and competitor on every single sandwich-eating day? He was too shy for a., not ruthless enough for b., already fat enough for the c. option of eating only canteen food to be a bad idea. But if he did opt for d. out of weakness and sympathy, perhaps he was undermining the efficiency of the free market and damaging the sandwich shop even further, causing them to end up losing more customers because they hadn’t been alerted sufficiently early to their budding quality control problems? He would be gumming up the works, making things worse by trying to be nice, like those people who won’t take their change from prices which end in 99p, and so unwittingly and well-meaningly contribute to inflation, the cancer of modern economic life, the eroder of savings, destroyer of industry, scourge of the middle class, the force that brought Hitler to power. Or at least that was what he had been taught by the most right-wing of his economics lecturers.
Mr. Phillips Page 10