‘I’m the only person here I don’t recognise.’
‘I still feel like that. Most of us do.’
The friendly face was sitting immediately to Mark’s left: it belonged to a gangly young American with a refined East Coast accent and an unrefined dress sense, who had lately become something of a regular fixture in the company’s in-house magazine. Mark knew that some of his fellow diners could be tight-lipped to a fault; he’d hoped for a chatterer nearby. The rest of the guests, waited on by a liveried staff with the near-invisibility common to the best of the profession, were settling to their food: deploying their napery, appraising their appetisers, listening. Mostly listening. Mark felt their interest, wondered what he should do with it, wondered what he’d said to excite so much of it. He looked to his left for guidance, but the friendly face’s attention was now fixed on the terrine in front of him, and he was clearly disinclined to say more. ‘I still feel like that. Most of us do.’ Hardly chatty, now Mark thought about it. Perhaps not even friendly. I’ve been here before, many times. These people who are unnerving you are friends of mine. Mark was aware he was over-thinking this. All East Coast had said was: ‘I still feel like that. Most of us do.’
‘SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, COLLEGE BOY. JESUS.’
The head of the company’s Russian office, sitting four seats down from Mark, would speak infrequently this evening – infrequently, but always at very high volume. He may have thought it necessary to shout so that the table could hear what he was saying through the greatcoat, muffler and ear-flapped headgear which, for reasons best known to himself, he had declined to leave in the cloakroom. (He didn’t stay long, and to judge from his behaviour he’d never intended to.)
No one seemed surprised by his rudeness or his decibel count, most seemed quietly amused. No one around the table spoke. Instead they all looked to Mark for a reaction. He tried to look unruffled, but after a pause whose length told a different story, he smiled faintly, let it go, and turned his attention to his food. East Coast, by now almost finished with his starter, also thought better of trying to exchange pleasantries with a grumpy Russian at this stage of the evening, and said nothing further. Mark’s ice-breaking attempt was over almost before it had started, and the attention of the table moved on.
It hadn’t always been like this. Before moving to his present employers – God, three years ago now – Mark had felt valued at work, valued and listened to. He was a big fish back then. He still felt like the big fish now, but at this bigger, hungrier company feeling like the big fish didn’t give him the same satisfaction somehow, and certainly didn’t translate into results. He’d become disheartened and enervated by his inability to cut through this company’s workforce, to rise through them, to shine. He knew he should work on reinvigorating himself, try to cultivate a more front-foot attitude to work, but never having felt that change was necessary before he was unsure how to begin. He felt his failure most acutely at the regular staff get-togethers. The conventions: part social, part professional events where colleagues would throw out ideas, exchange information, and talk long into the night about business projections and company strategy. Mark had never warmed to these hot-desking free-for-alls, and could never put his finger on why. It certainly wasn’t the fault of his colleagues. They were always delighted to see him, welcoming and talkative, and always genuinely sorry to see him go. But he rarely stayed long, even though he always regretted leaving these things the moment he was out on the street. It was strange behaviour in someone who was still so keen to impress, but he’d never examined it, and unexamined the behaviour had curdled into habit.
Mark worked quietly on his steak, listening to the table talk swirl around him. Two guests at the far end of the table were dominating proceedings at present: a bluff, friendly man of Middle Eastern origin, a respected stalwart of the company who was universally liked, and a very young-looking girl with an accent he couldn’t place, the outlandishness of whose views was in direct inverse ratio to the quiet politeness with which she expressed them. Others were occasionally offering up a point of view or raising a question, but for the most part the table was happy just to listen to a conversation which showed promising signs of escalating at any moment into an entertaining row. A few minutes ago the man known as one of the industry’s most original and far-sighted thinkers had begun to give the table an outline of his ideas for the company’s direction in the coming year. He had often done this, and was used to being given the floor when he did. But tonight he’d barely begun when the young-looking girl seated across from him started asking him questions. They were fairly basic questions at first, questions about figures and forecasts and bases for projections, and the man, decently and patiently, took pains to answer them fully, but this brought him no respite. The girl continued to fire questions, questions which were rapidly becoming (at least to Mark) more and more cryptic, questions about prototypes and paradigms, conjectures regarding (Mark thought he’d heard this right) the Trondheim Model. When the man asked the girl as politely as he could manage to save her questions for now, and to accept the underlying truth of what he was saying, it was quickly made clear to him that he had misread her.
‘“Truth is neither objectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.” Knut Hamsun.’
Having thought about this for some time, and having failed (quite understandably, thought the table) to come up with any cogent response, the man gave a tight smile, pushed back his fringe, plate and chair, in that order, and left the room. At first Mark assumed he’d gone to the bathroom, or maybe stepped outside in an attempt to calm down and avoid a scene. But twenty minutes passed, during which the girl helped herself to the food the man had left on his plate, apparently oblivious to the bemused bafflement she had brought to proceedings.
Now certain the man would not be returning that evening, Mark’s attention returned to his steak as he tried to piece together what had happened. The girl’s interjections had been grating, more like heckling than questioning. What she had said had certainly commanded attention, and yet seemed to have no basis in any accepted understanding of how the company worked, or how strategy was conceived and put into practice, or how you should talk to people. Excusing her on the grounds of her extreme youth merely made people wonder what she was doing there in the first place, and why she wasn’t getting on with her homework under a One Direction poster. But whatever it was she’d done, and why ever she’d done it, she now had the attention of the table. Those present with long, long company service seemed to see in her something of the Corporation’s future. What that something was was way beyond Mark’s field of vision. He had listened carefully, he’d understood every word the girl had said. Every word, but not a single sentence. And as for his own contributions, he realised he had barely spoken for the first two courses, and also realised that nothing now happening around him was making him feel any more talkative. He felt some time ago that he’d run out of things to say, and now he had the unnerving feeling that he was also running out of things to think. He was relapsing into his old ways, he could feel it. The change in him, the change which had got him invited here, was going to prove nothing more than a blip.
Senior management had never looked at him twice before tonight. They’d never looked at him once, not once in the three years he’d spent with the company. He’d shared a convention room with most of them often enough at company events, but then the entire workforce did that: the corporation’s open-plan, open-access ethos was designed precisely to give staff access to senior management. Access, but not acquaintance. With so many on its payroll, with so many ambitious and imaginative employees looking to shine, the halls in which these in-house bunfights were held were usually cavernous and packed. No matter how physically proximate people were at these brainstorming sessions, these ‘Festivals of Ideas’, the accustomed distance between executive and staff was never seriously compromised. Middle management made representations, canvassed opinion, gathered support. Innovation was appl
auded, the occasional promotion was bestowed. But the make-up of the boardroom never changed.
If he was honest with himself (and his breakthrough had, finally, encouraged him to be more honest with himself) he’d never completely settled to this job. He’d taken the position, had grabbed it with both hands, because it played so obviously to what he identified as his strengths: independent thought, understanding of people, radical thinking. He’d long been an ideas man. But in this changed, more challenging environment, though ideas came to him as freely as they ever did, most now seemed to shrivel under the scrutiny of his new and shrewder colleagues. The reason might have been flawed thinking, of course. It might have been that in this new, more pugnacious environment he lacked the necessary interpersonal skills to present ideas to their best advantage. He could never decide. But whatever the reason, at too many of these company get-togethers he’d see his strategy proposals, which he would table with his accustomed professionalism and quiet conviction, received with the scarcely concealed aversion – and occasionally the scorn – of his fellow workers. Mark would be subjected to a fusillade of questions – obvious questions, now they were put to him. His interrogators would be all smiles while cross-examining him as if sure they had missed something obvious that Mark would now point out to them. But they hadn’t missed anything. He had. The questions, asked by one, endorsed by all, and unconvincingly answered, would induce a perceptible shift in Mark’s demeanour. Chastened, he would contribute less and less to the business of the meeting, and later opinions or suggestions tabled by him would fail to resonate simply because of their source. Very occasionally he’d make a forceful point, an undeniable point. But it would be an obvious one, a point self-evident to the others, and would in no way rehabilitate him. Before long the discussion would be bypassing him entirely. He would listen for a while, looking on attentively and nodding in all the right places, but the sense of dislocation would grow and grow until, after a few further contributions which Mark knew were inane even before he’d made them, he would make some excuse and nip away early.
But at this last convention, things had been different. His growing doubt that this company was where his future lay seemed to fire in him the confidence and determination not to be so quickly undermined in the face of others’ lukewarm reception of his proposed corporate strategies. Faced with the usual querying this time he’d remained firm, realising that, just as he was, others around the table were looking to get their ideas heard and accepted ahead of all others – it was in their interest to disparage his own contributions, regardless of merit. So this time he’d remained firm, prompting an immediate change in the attitude of those around him. They listened, took note, reflected. Those not directly involved in any current conversation no longer gossiped idly with each other, but looked on and took note also. There was a change in the temperature of the meeting, and a change in Mark’s place in it. Heartened, he contributed more. Occasionally he would overreach himself, offering only half-formed opinion rather than a thoroughly considered view. But even then, his colleagues listened. And when once in a while someone found the nerve to suggest that what he was saying, though admirable in its aims, was perhaps not immediately achievable, Mark would concede the point with such good grace and humour that the meeting would be united not as before, in an unspoken but palpable conviction that Mark had been over-promoted, but in envious admiration of someone capable of such farsightedness, unafraid of the possibility of failure or ridicule.
Even his most gnomic theorising was listened to in respectful silence, and punctuated by solemn nods. Mark only had to speak for the meeting to turn to him as a body. He would make a joke; they would laugh. He would make a poor joke; they would laugh at that one too. Contributions from elsewhere became more tentative. Early contributors had melted away and were replaced by different voices, with different points of view. Mark had looked up, the first time for some time. He recognised one or two faces from meetings gone by, but was startled to see a member of the Executive sitting in, listening more than speaking, quietly bringing herself up to speed with the conversation she’d joined. Seeing a Director listening so intently to their deliberations seemed to unnerve most of Mark’s colleagues; one by one they began to lose their thread and clam up. Presently the floor was left almost entirely to Mark – still assured, still voluble – and the Director, who without becoming exactly chatty had now begun to make a little small talk with him. One by one others had said goodnight and made for home. At last, Mark had found himself in an all but empty hall, with an embossed invitation to supper in his pocket.
It was a blip. His assertiveness, inventiveness, his confidence in the face of naysayers. It was a blip. Mark saw that now as he sat alone at his end of the table, chasing a small piece of sorbet around his plate with the last shards of a wafer, apparently mute. All evening he’d felt like a ten-year-old who’d been invited to sit with the grownups: thrilled at first but quickly bored, unable to make sense of the conversation around him, uncomfortable when looked at, agonised by attempts to include him, feeling time stretch away while he waited and waited to be allowed down from the table. People had left before him, but they seemed to have achieved more. They’d made interesting, intelligent presentations, had had spirited exchanges with one another across the table, had told each other jokes. (One of Mark’s few contributions to the evening had been a joke. He’d bungled the set-up, realised too late that everyone had heard it, and never got as far as the punchline.) Mark had sat and watched while, one by one, other guests had followed the lead of the irascible Russian and the affronted Middle Easterner and departed early. With nothing occurring to him to say, and with nothing left to eat, Mark rose from the table and politely thanked his hosts for inviting him. There were cursory nods and tight smiles in acknowledgement, mostly from the serving staff, but the muted, earnest conversation at the far end of the table didn’t miss a beat. It was taking place between the young woman (who had scarcely paused for breath all night) and the company’s Shanghai Operations Manager, one of the only guests whose questions she’d seemed to find worthy of serious consideration all evening. They talked as both rivals and friends, and would continue to talk long into the night, finishing each other’s sentences, anticipating each other’s positions, disagreeing on almost everything, but mutually respectful. Both knew their conversation would continue for a long time to come, wherever they left it at the end of supper. Both seemed strangely glad of it, and both knew the other felt that way. Setting their course for what would prove a long association, both talked, but neither said.
Mark understood none of this. He left them talking, collected his things from the cloakroom, let himself out, and pedalled his way home on the long deserted road which tracked the shoreline of the fjord.
He Played For His Wife
by David Curtis
‘For my sins, I suppose it must have been, I lived once in Egypt,’ said the grey-haired young-looking man in the club smoking room.
And if Egypt on the other side of the world is anything like the southern part of Illinois, I can readily understand how the children of Israel found the wilderness preferable. As I remember the story, though, in Pharaoh’s realm they had only one plague at a time, whereas in southern Illinois . . . however, there may be a better condition of things there now, so there’s nothing to gain by recalling our experiences. I sincerely hope things are better, but I scarcely think I have curiosity enough to go back and find out. In our village, for I was a part of it, and a part of it was mine, about the same conditions obtained as in all the other small settlements within a hundred miles. We had a railroad station and two trains a day. We had a post office and one mail a day. We had a general store and a blacksmith’s shop and a tavern, and we had a few private residences. If there was anything else of importance, excepting the farmers’ wagons, that came in with loads that were too heavy for the horses, and too often went back with loads that burdened the farmers, the details have escaped my mind. It was a typical southern I
llinois village.
Small as it was, there were two social sets in town. The married men lived in their own houses, and their wives visited one another and had their small festivities from time to time in the most serene indifference to the fact that there were other human beings around. And these others, that is the unmarried men, lived at the tavern, or hotel, as we preferred to call it, equally indifferent to the occurrence of social functions to which we were not bidden. If, as occasionally happened, one of the married men broke loose for a night or two, and spent his spare time and money at the hotel, he was tolerated, but no more. We felt sorry for him when we thought of his return home, but we had no yearnings towards reciprocity in his effort to break down the barriers. In our set there was, it is true, one married woman, but she did not count. At least we thought so till the trouble came.
He Played for His Wife and Other Stories Page 16