His brothers break out into hoots of derision.
“I knew it!” Sonny’s face sags with dismay. “I knew you wouldn’t take the idea seriously. You’re nothing but a bunch of bare-faced fucking liars, the lot of you.”
“I’m sorry,” says Mungo, shaking his head, grinning. “If I’d known you were about to crack a joke, I wouldn’t have promised not to laugh.”
“It wasn’t a joke. I mean it. Let me go down and talk to the heads of the departments. All I have to do is let them know that we stand by our decision about the area of floorspace and that if they don’t like it, they can bugger off.”
“I doubt an approach like that would do much to resolve the situation,” says Chas. “The job calls for tact, diplomacy, subtlety, empathy, a certain delicacy of touch. Hardly your strong suits, Sonny.”
“Yeah,” says Fred, “sending you would be like sending an axe-murderer to perform brain surgery.”
But Sonny is determined to be heard out. “Look, how can I possibly screw up? They’ll listen to whatever I have to say to them, and they’ll do whatever I tell them to do. I’m a Day brother. I’m their boss.”
“Yeah, right,” snorts Fred.
“He does have a point there,” Mungo admits, nodding slowly.
“He does?”
“One of us going down to visit them in person will make it clear we’re serious. What difference will it make which one of us it is? As far as they’re concerned each of us carries the authority of all seven, and they’ll be too awed to do anything but go along with whatever Sonny says.”
“Don’t do this, Mungo.”
“Don’t do what, Thurston?”
“Don’t take his side. It’s not profitable.”
Mungo turns to face his youngest sibling, commanding his full attention. “Sonny, if we do confer this responsibility on you, and I’m not saying we’re going to, but if we do, you have to be prepared to give us something in return.”
“What sort of something?”
“An assurance.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“If, perhaps,” Mungo says, “you were to leave that drink in front of you unfinished, and we had Perch come in and take away the gin bottle...”
“You mean jump on the wagon?” Sonny says, in the same stilled, chilled tone of voice he might use to say, “You mean jump off a cliff?”
“For this morning, to begin with. At least until after you’ve been downstairs. I think the employees will respond more favourably if you’re not falling-down drunk when you address them, and more to the point your head will be clearer and so will your judgement.”
“Wouldn’t you say I was drunk now?” Sonny gestures at the level of gin in the bottle, which is several centimetres lower than it was when he arrived.
“For someone with your capacity, Sonny, it takes three and a half G and T’s just to reach minimum operating efficiency.”
Sonny nods. “True. That’s true.”
“And if you prove that you can stay sober, or as sober as you need to be, when we ask you to, then maybe we’ll give you other things to do,” says Thurston, tumbling to Mungo’s scheme and quietly impressed. “Work will be your incentive to clean up your act.”
“I see,” says Sonny. “You’re offering me a deal.”
“Correct,” says Mungo. “Which indicates that I respect you as a son of Septimus Day.”
“So let me get this straight. If I don’t drink the rest of this bottle, you’ll let me go down and deliver an arbitration.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“I can’t believe this. This is a practical joke, isn’t it? I’m going to go downstairs and find you’ve made this whole Books/Computers thing up.”
“I wish we had.”
“So you’ll really let me do it?”
“As long as you keep your side of the bargain.”
“No problem.”
“So that’s a promise?”
“It is.”
“Then you can go.”
Sonny lets out a whoop. “Wow! This is great! This is fantastic! What can I say? Thanks, brothers. Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome,” says Chas.
“If,” Mungo adds, “no one has any objections.”
He sees Sato bite his lip.
“Well?”
“I think we’re making a mistake,” says Sato after a moment.
“That’s a reservation, not an objection.”
“I’m aware of that, but given the mood currently prevailing around this table, to make any sort of protest will seem churlish and lacking in public spirit, so it’ll be better for all of us if I hold my peace.”
“And does anyone else have anything further to add on the subject?”
No one does.
“We have to vote on it,” says Thurston.
Sonny’s hand shoots up to the full extent of his arm. “And the rest of you,” he cajoles. “Come on.”
Five other hands are raised one after another. Sato’s comes last, slowly and reluctantly joining its fellows in the air.
“Carried unanimously,” says Mungo.
“Who’d have thought it?” says Fred with a whistle. “We just agreed to let Sonny do some work.”
“Wonders will never cease,” says Wensley.
“Right, I’m off down to my apartment to get ready,” says Sonny, excitedly shunting back his throne and rising to his feet. “Have to look my best for the staff, eh?”
Chas offers to come down with him and give him a few fashion pointers, but Sonny replies that he will be fine. “I can still remember a thing or two about turning myself out well, from back in the dim and distant past.”
“Thurston,” says Mungo, “send an e-memo down to both departments warning them Sonny’s coming.”
“Tell them to roll out the red carpet,” says Sonny as he skips away from the table.
“And contact Strategic Security and have four guards waiting for Sonny on the Yellow Floor at, oh, let’s say eleven thirty.”
“Very well.”
“Got that, Sonny? Eleven thirty.”
Sonny is at the door. “Yup, half eleven, no problem.”
A moment after he leaves the Boardroom, Sonny pops his head back through the doorway. The look of earnest gratitude on his face is touching to behold.
“You won’t regret this,” he tells his brothers, brow knotted in sincerity. “I swear you won’t.”
“You’d damn well better hope we don’t,” says Thurston, under his breath.
16
House of Marriage: in astrology, the seventh house.
10.16 a.m.
OH MUM, I wish you could be here to see this with me. It’s so much more wonderful than either of us could ever have imagined.
That was Linda’s first thought as she passed through the arch and emerged into Silks. The shiny drapes and swathes of material swooping down in all directions and hollowing into aisles brought to mind a vast, labyrinthine sheik’s tent, and as she stared around, Linda’s irritation with Gordon instantly abated, to be replaced by a serene, almost hypnotic sense of contentment.
An hour and eight departments later, she still feels as if she is floating rather than walking. Nothing is entirely real, everything brighter and more colourful than usual, yet at the same time vague and somehow insubstantial. Half convinced that the entire store and all the merchandise and people in it are concocted from smoke, she is scared to touch anything in case it shimmers and vanishes and the illusion is spoiled, and so she touches nothing, merely looks. And what her vision reports, her memory hoards.
Persian and Armenian rugs hanging in leaved rows like the pages of a gigantic illuminated manuscript. Bolts of curtain material and upholstery fabric stacked in ziggurats whose peaks brush the seven-metre-high ceiling. A seemingly unending chain of kitchen showrooms, each opening onto the next like the different-coloured chambers in the Edgar Allen Poe story. Wallpapers – chintz, flock, screenprinted, anaglypta, plain.
And the constant, courteous attention of the sales assistants and floor-walkers. “May I help you, madam?” “See something you like, madam?” “Would madam like to look at...?” “Would madam care to try...?”
Madam! In all her life Linda can’t recall being referred to as madam before, except by her father when he was in one of his moods and everything he said was laced with snarling sarcasm. These madams are sincere and deferential; likewise the sirs that come Gordon’s way. It seems that Days staff genuinely find it a pleasure to serve customers, and it doesn’t matter that she graciously turns down their offers of help, because they sound not one jot less polite as they apologise for troubling her and wish her a very pleasant day’s shopping.
She could spend the rest of her life here. The sheer abundance of worldly goods on display, the respect she is automatically accorded, and the sense of being on an (almost) equal footing with the wealthiest and most powerful people in the land, make the world outside the store seem cheap and hard and coarse by comparison. There is a refinement to Days and a feeling of order that is not to be found elsewhere in the city. Some part of Linda has understood all along that she belongs in here rather than out there, and she feels she has found her haven, and knows the exhilaration of a bird when it finally alights at the end of a long, arduous migration.
Even when the lightning sale was announced at ten, Linda was pleasantly surprised to discover that there was nothing mindless or aggressive about the way several of the shoppers in the immediate vicinity turned and bolted for the nearest lift or escalator. They didn’t, as she had been conditioned by rumour and hearsay to expect, behave like a rabble. Rather, they mobilised themselves with military efficiency, as if they existed in a state of perpetual readiness for moments like these. That impressed her, and she looked forward to a time when she, too, would be familiar enough with the layout of the store and confident enough of her place here to make such well-judged and well-informed decisions. That, surely, would be soon.
She is beginning to think that she was a fool to listen to the taxi driver and buy his pepper spray. Judging from her experiences so far, Days isn’t a dangerous place at all. She has seldom felt safer or more at home.
If there is a fly in the ointment, it is a small one, but an irksome one nonetheless: her husband.
It is nothing Gordon has said over the past hour that has annoyed her. Rather, it is the fact that he hasn’t said anything, in spite of her best attempts to engage him in conversation. She has asked for his opinion on various kinds of shelving, on a spice rack, on a tortoiseshell photograph frame, all things to do with the house, the living space he shares with her, all things he ought to be interested in, and what has she received in return? At best, monosyllables; at worst, grunts. He has been traipsing after her from department to department like an old, footsore dog on a leash. Any enthusiasm he might have had an hour ago has definitely waned, while she is as brisk and as eager as ever. Proof (as if she needed it) that men do not have the stamina for serious shopping.
Finally, when she can bear Gordon’s sullen, uncommunicative presence no longer, Linda comes to a halt at the entrance to the Lighting Department. Squinting against the blaze from several thousand lamps and lanterns, she can just make out sales assistants equipped with tinted goggles drifting to and fro within, ministering to the merchandise, replacing expended bulbs with spares from bandoliers strapped across their chests. Haloed by brightness, the sales assistants are etiolated, angelic figures.
She turns to her husband. “Gordon, what would you say to going our separate ways for a while?”
The question takes him aback.
“It only makes sense,” she goes on. “After all, you don’t want to be tagging along behind me all day. There must be departments you want to explore by yourself.”
“No, this is fine.”
“Your voice rises an octave when you lie, Gordon, did you know that?”
“It does not,” Gordon protests squeakily.
“Go on, I know you’re dying to head off on your own. It’s ten twenty now. Let’s meet up again at a quarter to one, here.” That should give her enough time to buy the tie she picked out for him from the catalogue, and then she can present it to him over lunch.
Gordon, with a great and not wholly convincing show of reluctance, gives in. “So which one of us gets to hang on to the card?”
“I do, of course.”
“Is that wise?”
Linda thinks he might be teasing her, but he isn’t teasing her. His eyes are narrow and serious behind his spectacles.
“Gordon, I’d hate to think that you don’t trust me with our Days Silver.”
“I do trust you,” he says, too quickly.
“But still you think it’ll be safer if you hold on to it instead of me.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s what you implied.”
“I’m sorry if that’s how it sounded. What I meant was, since the account is held jointly in both our names, every purchase made with the card ought to be agreed on by both of us. Don’t you think?”
“Whatever happened to man and wife being one body, one flesh?”
“Come on, that’s just a metaphor.”
“I don’t know about you, Gordon, but when I took my marriage vows, I meant every word of them sincerely.”
“You’re not being rational, Linda.”
“And you’re not being fair. This is just as much my card as yours.” She waves the Silver in front of his nose. “Either one of us on our own couldn’t have earned it. Together, we did. This card represents the fact that we are greater than the sum of our individual parts. It shows what two people can achieve if they pool their resources and work as one.”
“The majority of those resources coming from my salary.”
“I’m not just talking about the money, I’m talking about the sacrifices we made together, the hardships we endured together. And anyway, I’ve done my bit. What with the upkeep of the house and shopping thriftily and coming up with money-saving scheme after money-saving scheme, not to mention my hairdressing, I’m at least an equal partner in our Days account.”
“Well, let’s not get into that now,” says Gordon. “What concerns me, Linda, is that we don’t run up a debt we can’t pay off. I see people at the bank every day who’ve got themselves into all sorts of difficulties over credit cards or Days accounts.”
“And they’ve come to you for help, which you give them in the form of a loan, on which, of course, the bank charges interest.” Linda grins venomously. “Or have I got it wrong, Gordon? Have banks started giving money away free?”
“Better to owe money to a reputable bank than to some dodgy character who’ll break your legs if you don’t pay up,” Gordon replies, unflustered. “But that has no bearing on the point I’m making. The point I’m making is, people wouldn’t be tempted to borrow money if borrowing wasn’t looked on as an acceptable alternative – no, as preferable – to doing without what you can’t afford. It takes strength of character to say no and wait rather than say yes and have immediately, and it’s that lack of strength of character in all of us that gets exploited time and time again.”
“We did without for five years,” Linda asserts firmly. “We’ve earned the right to our Silver.”
“But let’s be careful with it, eh? That’s all I’m getting at. Let’s not go mad.”
“Have I gone mad yet, Gordon? Have I? So far I haven’t bought one item from this store. I’ve looked around, I’ve seen dozens of things I’d like to own, things that would look nice in our home, but what have I bought? Nothing. Not a thing.”
“And I admire your restraint. For most people the limit on a credit account is a goal rather than a boundary, something to race for rather than keep as far away as possible from.”
“You of all people, Gordon, should know that I have more self-control than ‘most people’.”
“Linda, please. I’m not criticising you. I’m just sounding a note of caut
ion.”
“But don’t you see, that’s all I’ve heard all morning!” She clutches the air in exasperation. “People warning me, people trying to sow doubts. It seems like no one except me believes I know what I’m doing. This is my day, Gordon. This is the day I’ve been dreaming about all my life. All my life!” She can feel her face growing hot as her voice rises, but she is unable to do anything about either. Shoppers are turning and looking in her direction. She strives to ignore their scrutiny. “I’ve suffered and struggled and compromised just to get to the place I’m in now, and I won’t have you, I won’t have anyone, ruining this for me. This is my moment of glory. Please have the good grace to let me savour it. You can caution me all you want when we get back home tonight.”
Gordon has more to say on this subject but deems it wise to save it for later. He simply nods. “All right, Linda. All right. Let’s have it your way. We’ll split up, and you can hang on to the card. I trust you.”
“Do you? Do you really?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Linda beams at him in vindication. “That’s more like it, Gordon.”
17
Seventh-Inning Stretch: a traditional pause during a baseball game, after the first half of the seventh inning.
10.30 a.m.
IT IS TIME for Frank’s mid-morning break and, on cue, his bladder starts to exert a mild, insistent pressure against his lower abdominal wall. Not painful, but not to be ignored either.
From years of repetition, Frank’s body has synchronised its urges with the dictates of his daily timetable. He wakes moments before his alarm clock tells him to wake, he starts to feel hungry just when his schedule permits him to eat, and his bladder has learned to regulate the incoming flow of liquid so that it reaches capacity just when it is convenient for him to drain it. Indeed, his physiological functions dovetail so immaculately with the pattern of his working days that on Sundays, when in theory he ought to be free to do as he pleases, he ingests and eliminates at the exact same times as during the rest of the week. Some might cite this as a demonstration of mankind’s evolutionary talent for adapting to circumstances, but Frank knows better. To him it implies that inside every human brain sits a mainspring regulating the turn of the cogs that govern the body’s rhythms. People run on clockwork, and if they are forced to go through the same routine day after day, their rhythms become rigidly attuned to the work-metronome – so much so that, sometimes, they find they literally cannot live without it. Frank knows of numerous retired or sacked employees who have gone mad or dropped dead shortly after their last day at Days, unable to cope with being liberated from the strict tick-tocking of a timetable. Time suddenly slackens its grip on them, and their mainsprings whirl and spool out.
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