Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time
Page 19
But enough about work. Work, believe it or not, is not really the problem. It’s my home life, my own life, that’s got me in a spin. Beth is still in the weirdest of moods – and coming so soon after I made that resolution that work should not be as important as home, that all the excitement and madness of generating the news should not be as exciting or as mad as the goings-on of my wife and daughter – to take a step back like this just seems a terrible shame.
We are talking though. That’s good. We talked last night. The problem, Beth says, is not that I made friends with Train Girl. That’s fine, of course it is. The problem is that Train Girl wanted to be more than friends. Like that was something I could control. Like that was something I actually wanted to happen. Like that wasn’t something I nipped in the bud as soon as I realised what was happening because, actually, I love Beth and I didn’t (don’t) want anything to threaten that.
The thing is: Beth believes me, too. She believes nothing happened, she believes that I broke it off before anything could happen. She believes I wouldn’t cheat on her. And yet… she keeps on about it.
And I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense. And between you and me, I’m pretty pissed off about it. I’ve just about had enough.
So, you know what I did this morning? On the (very) delayed train of which I’m writing to complain as we speak? (I’m writing this letter at work, by the way: there’s nothing else to do, after all). This morning, as I boarded the 07.31 express service from Oxford to London Paddington, as I shuffled forward to my usual seat in Coach C… I shuffled on past my usual seat until I got to Train Girl’s seat. And then I sat down next to her.
‘All right?’ she said. ‘You took your time. You lasted far longer than I thought you would.’
And so, guess what? Train Girl and I are friends again. Well, why not? If I’m going to get all kinds of grief from my wife for being friends with her in the first place, I might as well be friends with her now, right? I mean – why not?
So. Anyway. Train Girl and I are friends again. And I asked her what she meant by ‘you took your time’. And do you know what she said? She said this: ‘I meant you held out for longer than most of the other boys ever do. All the ones who tell themselves they shouldn’t be friends with me, who start off all keen and then run away. They all come running back – and almost always quicker than you did. So well done. You managed to resist me for an impressively long time.’
And then she winked. Because she was joking, of course. About me resisting her: of course I’m still resisting her!
Although, as it turns out, not many do. She wasn’t joking about that. On our delayed train to London this morning, Train Girl passed the time by filling me in on her love life – not the full story, of course, we’d need a decade of delayed trains for that, but the edited highlights. I think I mentioned before how she doesn’t believe in ‘boyfriends’ as such… well, it seems her list of non-boyfriend conquests is impressive both for its length and its variety. She sees people she fancies, she has fun with them in whatever way they both fancy, and when she fancies something or someone else, she moves on. She’s had young and old, students and professors, city boys and dropouts, lawyers and barristers and benefits cheats and just about everything in between. She’s consorted with single men, bachelors, married men. Quite a lot of married men. It turns out that married men are quite her thing.
‘The thing about married men,’ she said this morning, smoothing out a wrinkle in her tights and adjusting the hem of her skirt. ‘The thing about married men,’ she continued, idly dangling a shoe from her toe, ‘is that they’re almost a better option than single men. Single men are an unknown quantity. And more often than not they’re single for a reason, if you know what I mean. When I meet a single man, the first thing I ask myself is: “why hasn’t he got a girlfriend?” Whereas a married man…’ She smiled and pointed at me. ‘A married man is married for a reason. Someone has decided she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. That’s amazing. I can’t imagine liking anyone so much I actually want to spend the rest of my life with him. Say what you like about married men – but they’ve all got that.’
I couldn’t deny it. I do have that. And I reminded her, despite myself, that it was kind of something I wanted to keep – no matter how much I moan about it. But I also told her I wanted to be friends. She’s cool, Train Girl, she’s not like anyone else I’ve ever met. The irony is I think Beth would really like her too.
Anyway, she was fine. ‘Of course you do,’ was all she said.
Of course I do. Right? Even if my wife wouldn’t approve. Of course I do. I still do.
Au revoir!
Dan
From: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
To: DantheMan020@gmail.com
Re: Out of Office Reply
Dear Sir/Madam
Thank you for your email dated December 2 this year. I can confirm that Mr Harbottle has received it and will endeavour to respond as soon as possible. Your concerns are of utmost importance to us.
Thank you again for writing to Premier Westward.
pp Martin Harbottle, Managing Director
*This is an automatically generated response. Please do not reply*
Letter 52
From: DantheMan020@gmail.com
To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
Re: 22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, December 6. Amount of my day wasted: 0 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Overkeen Estate Agent.
Jesus, are you still here? What have you done with Martin, you evil email program? Where have you buried the Managing Director, you cold-hearted computer? I need to speak to him! Not just about the ongoing delays, the general incompetence, the conspicuously poor service his company is providing, because, to be fair, I’ve not been delayed for a week (I’m not even delayed now). No: I need to speak to him about everything else.
Overkeen Estate Agent’s here and he’s talking turkey (choice phrases tonight: ‘Going forward, we need to nail our colours to the mast’; ‘Give me an idea bomb!’; ‘There’s no reason not to be a product evangelist about this’; ‘Let’s loop back and think offline’; ‘Let’s fire up the Flymo before the grass grows too long on this one’; ‘Think low-hanging fruit first, yeah?’). I’ve been listening to him since we left Paddington, I still have no idea what he’s on about and I don’t think I can bear another moment of his nonsense.
It’s just not the same, talking to an automatically generated email response. It just doesn’t have the same heart.
I’ll tell you what? Can you at least pass a message on? Can you tell him I wrote? Can you tell him I miss him?
Au revoir!
Dan
From: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
To: DantheMan020@gmail.com
Re: Out of Office Reply
Dear Sir/Madam
Thank you for your email dated December 6 this year. I can confirm that Mr Harbottle has received it and will endeavour to respond as soon as possible. Your concerns are of utmost importance to us.
Thank you again for writing to Premier Westward.
pp Martin Harbottle, Managing Director
*This is an automatically generated response. Please do not reply*
From: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
To: DantheMan020@gmail.com
Re: 22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, December 6.
Dear Dan
First of all, please accept my apologies for the recent lack of responses from me. It was in no way intended as a personal snub, or an indication that as Managing Director of Premier Westward I don’t take every single one of your concerns very seriously. I was merely away from the office, using up some annual leave with my family before Christmas. We like to go to Germany at this time every year. The markets there are wonderful!
I did set up an automatically generated email response system to deal with any correspondence while away. I se
e from your letters that you did receive those notifications. I hope you found them reassuring!
I’m afraid that it may take some time to find out exactly the cause of all your delays while I was out of the office. Please be reassured that I shall devote my time to it as soon as I am able to.
In the meantime, it seems like I did pick quite a time to be away! I’m not quite sure where to start. I do hope you haven’t been caught up in any of the shocking practices being uncovered at the Globe, although I’m sure you’re made of better stuff than that. And likewise, while I was initially pleased to hear that you and your wife had patched things up and made a new start, as it were, I am very sorry that you seem to be having difficulties again. I must confess that I feel perhaps renewing your friendship with ‘Train Girl’ (especially given her penchant for married men!) is not the best way to rebuild that particular bridge.
But as I say, your wife’s jealousy would seem to be a little extreme. I wonder if there are any other underlying issues influencing her anger?
Warmest regards
Martin
Letter 53
From: DantheMan020@gmail.com
To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
Re: 07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, December 14. Amount of my day wasted: 10 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Guilty New Mum, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa.
Martin! You’re back! Like a great fiery phoenix-train rising from the ashes of the engine sheds, you return! And everything is going to be OK again. The atrocities in North Africa, the horrors at work, the sadness at home… you’re here, to make it all better. Or to at least make the trains run on time.
Thank you for your most recent letter, Martin! Thank you a thousand times. And Germany, eh? The Fatherland! The Christmas Markets, the spiced wine and sauerkraut pastries. The lederhosen-clad girls and jolly fat Bürgermeisters. Ice skating on the old autobahns of Munich and Baden-Baden! It sounds wonderful. It sounds almost as wonderful as a winter weekend in Torquay. I hope you had a wonderful time.
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about what you said about Beth. It is weird, isn’t it? The more I consider it, the weirder it is. The way she’s gone so weird over the fact that someone may have fancied me. Over the fact I told her about it. It’s almost as if it’s the telling that has upset her so much. And that doesn’t make any sense.
Why should she get so upset that I share that? Surely, as man and wife, we’re not supposed to keep secrets from each other. Surely, as man and wife, we should be all about sharing. Everything. Even the things we may not want the other to hear. Why should the fact I’m doing that be so difficult for her?
Beth is not the jealous type. Never has been. She’s never once suspected me of playing away – even knowing what my colleagues are like, even having met Harry the Dog and listened to his tales of debauchery and casual infidelities. When I went on a stag do last year she demanded to know all the details – not because she was worried I might misbehave, but because she wanted a good laugh.
(The stag party was in Berlin, Martin, on the weekend of Guy Fawkes’ night. The Fatherland! You could have been there at the same time as us last year! We may have drunk in the same bars! Although predictably, of course, we ended up in a strip bar – unpredictably, the strip bar also turned out to be a brothel (who knew prostitution was legal in Germany?). I remember one stripper/prostitute taking a particular shine to me, even after I’d run out of money. I told her I couldn’t pay for any more drinks, let alone anything else; she just shrugged, adjusted her bra strap (she was at least wearing a bra) and told me ‘Hey, that’s OK, I like you anyways. We chat, ja?’ So we chatted. As Harry the Dog and the rest of the boys ogled and groped and a few of them slipped away with the girls, me and my fräulein sat and chatted. Which was fine, of course… except that after about an hour I couldn’t think of anything else to say. So I ended up trying to explain that back in Britain that night there would be fireworks, bonfires, parties. She didn’t understand why. Have you ever tried to explain to a German stripper why the British celebrate a plot to blow up Parliament every year? It’s tricky, even before the language issues. ‘But this man is bad, ja?’ she said, frowning. ‘Is not a good thing to put a bomb in the government? In Germany this is a very bad thing.’ (Well yes, I had to concede, and yet nevertheless…)
Anyway, when I told Beth she thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She thought it was brilliant. She told me I should pitch it as a TV show – how long can you engage foreign prostitutes in small talk about British cultural traditions before they get bored? It didn’t occur to her that I might have even thought about actually doing anything other than talking nonsense with the girl. She knew I wouldn’t.
So now… why is she suddenly being all jealous now?
I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking about Mr Blair. I don’t hear much about Mr Blair these days. Not since Halloween, not since that weekend away. Before then, he used to be all I ever heard about. His perfect house, his perfect opinions, his perfect child, his perfect parenting techniques. The way half the mums in the mums-and-babies groups used to go a little weak at the knees at his strong-yet-sensitive nappy-changing style.
But now… now Beth doesn’t mention him at all. Why do you think that is, Martin? Why would my wife suddenly stop talking about a man who she has previously been so keen to eulogise? Why would she then go so crazy when I mention I’d broken off a friendship because I suspected my friend had inappropriate feelings towards me? Are those two things connected? Am I missing something massive here? Am I not catching the real story, the real scoop?
I’ve been thinking. And I’m not sure I like the direction my thoughts are headed in. But then, perhaps I’m just being a journalist about it. Perhaps I’m being too tabloid. Looking for the scandal, searching for the conspiracy theory, paying too much attention to the whispers. It’s just that, well, recently, as we’ve seen, the whispers have tended to be right. The newsroom gossip, the outlandish theories, the hidden deceits – recently they’ve all turned out to be pretty well true.
You know what I’m going to do, Martin? I’m going to ask Train Girl about it. She knows her stuff where this kind of thing’s concerned. She’s clued up on the whole relationships thing. I’ll present it to her as a hypothetical, a friend at the office, a story I’m working on – and I’ll see what she makes of it.
Yes, that’s it. That’s the plan. Thanks, Martin! It’s so good to have you back – I feel like I can think properly again!
Au revoir!
Dan
Letter 54
From: DantheMan020@gmail.com
To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
Re: 22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, December 17. Amount of my day wasted: 17 minutes. Fellow sufferers: No regulars (Saturday, innit).
Martin! Old friend! Brace yourself, son, this is going to be a long one. It’s late at night on a stretch of track near Slough, we were late setting off, slow to get going, and now we’ve stopped altogether. We’ve got a lot to get through today, and (it seems) a lot of time to get through it together. So brace yourself. Hold tight.
We got a tip from the police today. A heads-up. Advance warning of a story that’s going to break around 11 tonight. Around about now, in fact. (The police do that just to annoy the papers, by the way. Make announcements so late, once the first editions have gone, once the night staff has settled down and is hoping for an uneventful shift. They save up their big ones until such a time as will inconvenience as many journalists as possible. I’ll tell you for nothing, Martin: there’s a few hacks are going to get unwanted, panicky calls tonight, just as they’re settling in for the evening; just as they’re contemplating bed, or last orders from the bar, or one more digestif before going home to relieve the babysitter. Though not us, obviously. Not anyone from the Globe. Not because we’ve got our heads-up, our courtesy call, but because it’s not a story we’re
going to be reporting. It’s not a story we’re keen on telling.)
And what is the story? What’s the scoop? Tomorrow’s news today, Martin, is that Her Majesty’s constabulary are going to formally prosecute the Globe over the illegal accessing of civilians’ private data – the civilians specifically being the family, friends and associates of poor little Barry Dunn, that most high-profile victim of the notorious Beast of Berkhamsted. The Crown Prosecution Service has concluded that the law has indeed been broken and that it will, for want of a better phrase, see our asses in court.
The CPS reckons it’s got us bang to rights. And that will mean two court cases in simultaneous synchronicity. A war on two fronts. A pincer movement. On one flank, the petulant millionaires and their whining about the right to consequence-free bad behaviour, and on the other, a nation righteously (and correctly) outraged by the looting of a dead boy’s most private information.
Tricky. In fact, a nightmare. If the case against us is as strong as everyone seems to think it is, we’re going to get annihilated. Destroyed. The country’s most popular newspaper recast as public enemy number one? There will be a feeding frenzy. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
But then, things could be worse. (Could they? Really? Well… yes. Let’s take a step back and look with a little clarity here. Let’s get a little perspective. Yes, things definitely could be worse.) We could be in North Africa right now. We could be caught up in the latest developments there. And that really is a nightmare. They really have been annihilated, destroyed.
Happy Christmas, as somebody once said, war is over. The invasion, so swift, so laser-like in its infancy… and then so slow and dogged and brutal in its denouement, is finally concluded. The third flag in as many months (give or take a week or two) flutters above the tattered remains of the Imperial Palace. Neighbouring Regime is a neighbouring regime no longer: now it’s simply the regime.