The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “No,” I said. “I get to seduce you.”

  He laughed.

  We went to bed.

  VIII

  Afterwards as I lay in his arms I felt faint with relief. The crisis had finally been surmounted and the marriage was now in apple-pie order again . . .

  Or was it?

  FIVE

  It is probable that in practice the religion of many in our society could be described as a form of polytheism: there are many shifting objects of esteem and desire, many beliefs, many “gods” demanding “worship” in explicit or implicit forms, and time and energy are divided among these “cults”. . . Even a claim to impartiality, neutralityor flexibility in the face of religious options is itself a definite and controversial option. The great questions about life-shaping truth, beauty and practice do not allow for neutral treatments. Everybody stands somewhere!

  DAVID F. FORD

  The Shape of Living

  I

  “I trust it’s permissible for me to express the hope, Ms. Graham,” said Tucker on Monday morning, “that the dinner-party was a success?”

  “Tucker, you’re beginning to sound exactly like Bunter the Valet in those televised Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries!”

  “Thank you, ma’am. May I reassure you that you sound nothing like Lord Peter?”

  “How sweet of you to think I need reassuring—but what I really need is the chance to thank you for producing that white rabbit out of your hat. The party was a big success.”

  “Good food?”

  “To swoon for. By the way, what’s the story on that slimline number called Darrow who picked Alice up afterwards?”

  “He’s the Rector of St. Benet’s-by-the-Wall in Egg Street.”

  “Ah, one of those City churches! I thought English Heritage just kept them open for their architecture . . . Hey, how did you and Alice meet?”

  “Through mutual acquaintances. My brother knows Nick Darrow.”

  “How original to know a clergyman! You don’t see many of them around these days, do you?”

  “That’s because most of them choose not to wear their dog-collars outside their churches.”

  “But that’s cheating!”

  “Do doctors wear white coats outside their hospitals?”

  “But are you saying there’s a whole secret army of clergymen out there and no one knows who they are?”

  “Maybe you should write to The Times, ma’am, and suggest that they should be electronically tagged. It might make you feel the situation was less alarming.”

  “Why can’t they just wear their dog-collars? Oh, and talking of alarming situations, what’s the latest news from Beijing?”

  With sighs we abandoned our now well-established routine of swapping quips while remaining poker-faced, and settled down to yet another day of routine legal mayhem.

  II

  The week wore on in unremarkable fashion, by which I mean there were no more crises, panics, balls-ups and melt-downs than usual at the office while at home I found that Kim and I had slipped back into our former ease with each other. On Monday and Tuesday night he had to work late but I did not mind that as I felt I needed a touch of solitude to complete my recovery. On Wednesday and Thursday we were very cosy and watched videos of old Hitchcock movies. Kim liked Hitchcock’s work almost as much as I did. We debated whether James Stewart was a better leading man than Cary Grant and which one of them should have replaced Sean Connery in Marnie.

  Tucker bought an answerphone for me but Sophie never called and the supermarket remained a Sophie-free zone. There was no further word from Mandy Simmons. I began to feel very much better.

  On Friday morning I said to Kim as he ate his Special K: “I’ll be back late tonight. The time’s come to make Tucker a permanent fixture at Curtis, Towers so I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

  “Lucky man!” commented Kim drily, setting aside his empty cereal bowl. “But I’m not sure I approve of you having a heterosexual PA.”

  “I’m not sure I approve of you having one either.”

  “Well, if you’re quite sure he’s not going to be trouble—”

  “I can handle Tucker. He respects the boundaries.”

  “Just make sure Jacqui doesn’t sue you for wrongful dismissal!”

  “Relax—another partner wants her! I plan to have her moved sideways with a pay increase.”

  “Fixer!”

  We kissed and he departed for his office in Moorgate, five minutes’ walk away.

  I hurried away shortly afterwards. I was much looking forward to propositioning Tucker.

  III

  “Tucker,” I said half an hour later at the office, “as this is the last day of your assignment I intend to take you out for a drink tonight. Please don’t even think of refusing.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. You’ll be relieved to hear that the idea of refusing a drink is one which never normally crosses my mind.”

  Tucker was wearing a navy-blue suit, the one which fitted better than his charcoal-grey or black outfits, and yet another of his office-serf ties which looked as if they had been designed by a dozy robot. His black shoes were shining. His socks were dark and sedate. His forearms, which had given rise to such animated speculation in the ladies’ loo, were as usual chastely swathed in virgin white. I wondered if I was beginning to resemble one of those fabled Victorian gentlemen who vibrated with lust at the thought of an exposed feminine ankle.

  I took Tucker to the Lord Mayor’s Cat, a wine bar which specialised in champagne. Folded into one of those alleys between Cornhill and Lombard Street east of Bank, it was a dark, antiquated establishment, only partially modernised, which had somehow survived the German bombs. Its recent metamorphosis from a pub to a wine bar had been marked by a change of name and a new signboard which hung low over the entrance. The picture on the board showed that famous medieval Lord Mayor of London, Dick Whittington, with his equally famous feline friend; the cat, firmly in the foreground of the painting, was standing on his booted hind legs and clasping a bottle of champagne to his furry bosom.

  Inside I elbowed my way through the yuppies at the bar and found the booth which the landlord had reserved for me in the back room. The landlord himself quickly appeared, giving us the red-carpet treatment and enquiring what we wanted to drink.

  “Bring us two tankards of the Widow, maximum bubbles, minimum froth, and cold enough to chill hell,” I said. That took care of the order, and if Tucker disliked Veuve Clicquot that was just too bad.

  As soon as our drinks arrived I terminated the chitchat and got down to business.

  “Let me be quite frank with you,” I said, “and say that you’re the best PA I’ve ever had. Now that we’re out of the office and your assignment is finished I feel free to apologise for all the feminist chill, but the truth is a woman in my position can’t be too careful and I always had to bear in mind the possibility that you might be a tiger-thumper.”

  “How thrilling! What’s that?”

  “A woman-hater who likes to sabotage female executives, and it’s not a thrill, it’s a bore. Now Tucker, because you’ve proved you’re not a tiger-thumper, I want to make you an offer. In fact I want to play you the financial music of the spheres, I want to make you a proposition that’ll blow your socks off, I want—”

  I told him what I wanted. He looked at me with his bright dark eyes and an expression of deep concentration, as if he were memorising every word I said in order to record it later for posterity. I began to feel like Dr. Johnson in the presence of Boswell. Then I began to feel like Queen Victoria in the presence of Disraeli, that charming and cunning political operator who knew exactly how to deal with powerful women. But finally I began to feel like a leopard advancing on a tourist who breathed: “What a pretty pussy-cat!” before running a mile in the opposite direction.

  Breaking off in the middle of outlining the bonus scheme for employees I said abruptly: “Okay, your socks are still glued to your feet and you’re wait
ing for me to shut up so that you can kick my proposal in the teeth. But before you boot it over the Bank of England, just tell me this: have you secretly hated every minute of the last two weeks?”

  “Absolutely not!” He looked shocked.

  “Is the problem in any way connected with gender?”

  “In no way at all!” He cleared his throat. “It’s been most interesting to observe you at close quarters. I don’t often meet someone of your particular talents, so I’ve regarded this assignment as a valuable learning curve.”

  The odd part was that although these words sounded as if he might be mocking me he spoke so earnestly that I had no trouble believing he was sincere. But what did this mean? What kind of oddball liked to observe people at close quarters and classify the experience as a valuable learning curve? I wondered in alarm if he was about to be unmasked as a kinky voyeur.

  “Okay,” I said tersely, “it’s cards-on-the-table time. Just who are you, Tucker, and how did you come to wind up in my office?”

  “May I respond first of all to your extremely kind, flattering and generous offer of a permanent job?”

  “You’ve already done so by not rolling over in ecstasy, waving all four paws in the air and waiting for me to tickle your chest.”

  “On second thoughts maybe I’ll accept the offer after all. I rather like the idea of—”

  “Oh no, you don’t!”

  “Okay, forget the chest-tickling. The truth is, Ms. G, that I’m not in the market for a permanent job. I just use my office skills to boost my income when my real work doesn’t bring in enough money.”

  “What’s your real work?”

  “I’m a novelist.”

  “A novelist?” I could hardly have sounded more horrified if he had confessed to being an undertaker.

  “You must have heard of novelists! They’re the nutters who shut themselves up in solitary confinement for pleasure!”

  “But are you published?”

  “Yes, I’ve had a couple of WWII novels accepted.”

  “Double-you double-you—”

  “That’s what the Americans call the Second World War. WWII novels are a subdivision of the Adventure Genre, and all novelists who don’t earn millions have to submit work which can be placed in an accepted category for marketing purposes.”

  “What name do you write under?”

  He told me.

  “I don’t recall seeing—”

  “No, you wouldn’t have come across my books. They have a short shelf-life because I’m not in the big time.”

  “But of course you’ll make it big eventually!”

  “All I hope for,” said Tucker, “is to improve. Very few novelists write anything worthwhile before they’re forty. I’m thirty-five. I’m learning all the time and working whenever I can and one day, I hope, I’ll be able to write something worthwhile, but in the meantime—”

  “—in the meantime you have to wait for the megabucks, yes, I see. But later there’ll be the Aston Martin and the trophy wife and the manor house in the Cotswolds and the villa in Chiantishire and—”

  “I’m not interested in all that.”

  “Don’t be funny, of course you are! You must be!”

  “No, I assure you that my idea of success has nothing to do with wealth and status symbols.”

  I stared at him. “I don’t get it. Why not?”

  “I don’t think they have much to do with reality.”

  I boggled. “But Tucker, you can’t just sit here in the heart of the City of London, where wealth and status symbols are worshipped as gods, and voice those kinds of sentiments! I mean, this is very subversive propaganda you’re spouting, it’s quite contrary to mainstream thinking, it’s in total defiance of the Zeitgeist!”

  “Ah, I’m a real fifth columnist, aren’t I, Ms. G!” said Tucker amused. “Little did you think, when you invited me out for a drink tonight, that you’d be socialising with an anarchist—or as they used to say in the war, flirting with the enemy!”

  I knocked my tankard clean off the table.

  IV

  “God, I can’t believe I did that!”

  “Hang on, let’s grab a waiter—”

  “Jesus, my new suit!”

  “Hey, could we have help here, please?”

  A cloth arrived. So did Mine Host, tut-tutting and wringing his hands sympathetically as he supervised the mopping-up operation.

  “More fizz for the lady, please,” said Tucker, suddenly becoming an assertive male instead of a docile faux-eunuch, and added to me as Mine Host zipped off and the waiter withdrew with the cloth: “Do you usually jump as if electrocuted after half a tankard of Veuve Clicquot?”

  “Not normally, no, I just felt skittish. Where were we?”

  “We’d just established that we worshipped different gods.”

  “I don’t worship anything,” I said, patting a stray strand of hair back into place and smoothing my sodden skirt. “I’m ideologically neutral.”

  “I doubt if that’s either ontologically or epistemologically possible.”

  I forgot my ruined suit. “Huh?”

  “I doubt if it’s possible to have a mode of being which is ideologically neutral, and I doubt too if such a concept is recognised as valid by any modern theory of knowledge. No judgement is value-free.”

  I blinked. “I’m sorry, but could you just run all that past me again?”

  He repeated the sentences before explaining: “It’s impossible to step completely outside the influences of one’s culture, environment, genes and upbringing to adopt a stance which could accurately be described as neutral. In other words we all subscribe, either consciously or unconsciously, to ideologies and religions, even though we may not always recognise them as such.”

  “But I’m not religious! I not only don’t believe but I just don’t care— I can get along fine without any kind of god or religion!”

  Mine Host arrived with another foaming tankard of Veuve Clicquot.

  “Let’s keep our consumption equal,” I said to Tucker as I poured him a share.

  “Thanks. Ms. G, may I make a few observations based on my time spent working with you?”

  “If I feature in your next novel I’ll sue you.”

  “If you feature in my next novel you probably wouldn’t recognise yourself. Look, you do have a religion, and I think you’re deeply religious. Shall I tell you what your religion is?”

  “The law.”

  “No, no, that’s just the means you’ve chosen to achieve your ends. Your religion, Ms. G, is Order.”

  “Order?”

  “Yes, that’s the god you worship. That’s what your life’s about. You live in a chaotic jungle, the financial killing-fields of the City of London, but your whole life is dedicated to bringing Order out of chaos. You’re like one of those nuns who fearlessly, day after day, brings Christ to the teeming hordes of Calcutta.”

  I started to laugh. “I’ve never heard such—”

  “Wait, I haven’t finished yet! Your devotion to Order was the first thing I noticed about you. Your appearance is immaculate. No hair is ever out of place. No skirt is ever creased. Your filing systems are things of rational, logical beauty. Your reports, your memoranda, your letters all shine with the most well-ordered intelligence. Your clients find you indestructibly well-organised and utterly in control—and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? If you reduce chaos to order, you’re in control. And how do you reduce chaos to order? You exercise your reason, your logic and your intelligence to make an enormous success of your profession. And what does this success generate? Money, power and status—but you don’t want these things for the usual greedy, self-indulgent reasons, Ms. G, and that’s what’s so endearing about you; I think that deep down you’re not a natural free-spender dedicated to conspicuous consumption—that’s not your game at all. But money, power and status combine to give you a lot of control over your life, and the more control you have the easier it is for you to luxuriate
in Order—to commune regularly with your god. Ah yes, Ms. G, never doubt that you’re deeply religious! You go to worship every day for hours on end at your office, your Holy Trinity is money, power and status, and over and above your trinity is the godhead, Order, the ground of your being, the fount of all goodness, your raison d’être, your love, your life.”

  I swallowed some champagne. The bubbles danced in my throat. Finally I was able to remark coolly: “You’re saying I’m fruity-loops.”

  “Not at all! I’m just saying that you’re not ideologically neutral, and that far from having no need of a god you need Order as much as the very air you breathe. The really interesting question, of course, is why. Just what is it about this god of yours that has your soul enslaved?”

  “But surely everyone likes order and having control over their lives?”

  “On the contrary, a lot of people love a bit of chaos—they find it stimulating. And how far do we ever really have control over our lives, particularly when we get booted around by forces over which we have no power at all?”

  I drank some more champagne. Or rather, I took several large gulps. “But some degree of organisation is always possible. If one draws up a life-plan—”

  “A life-plan!”

  “Provided one draws up a highly organised life-plan dictated by reason and logic,” I insisted hotly as he started to laugh, “there’s no reason why the future shouldn’t be brought satisfactorily under control!”

  “I concede we all need goals to aim for, but ‘a highly organised life-plan dictated by reason and logic’ is bound to get derailed eventually! The future’s too unpredictable!”

  “Not my future!”

  “Ms. G, what are you so afraid of here? Why is your idea of hell a future open to change and chance and the unexpected—to innovation and creativity? By locking the door against any future you can’t foresee you’re restricting yourself intolerably, can’t you see that? How on earth can God use you to play an exciting part in his creation if you just see creation as a big mess and refuse to come out of your immaculately well-ordered shell?”