– he was, what was it, thirty seven now and the butter-coloured hair was speckling at the edges – Lucy realised that she had a lot to be grateful to Mark for. Even that joint mortgage on the new house they’d talked about – pretty pointless when you thought about it, Lucy decided, seeing that Mark earned five times what she made at the BBC – came dusted with a thin coating of principle.
Somewhere in the back of the house a mobile phone began to ring. Stepping out through the French windows – the end of the garden was bound up in shadow now – Lucy discovered a second salient difference between Wimbledon and Putney: silence. For some reason the inhabitants of SW19 didn’t spend their summer evenings blasting out hip-hop or skirmishing in the shrubbery. Decorum was all. Thinking about Clive and Henrietta (who ‘kept her hand in’ at the PR department at Laura Ashley, she had explained, with a bit more mock- enthusiasm than was called for) made her wonder about the whole question of admiring people, howoften you picked on what turned out to be the wrong quality or detected an element that turned out to be something else, something that said more about what you were looking for than about the thing found. She remembered at twenty one conceiving an intense, unfeigned respect for her college tutor, a middle-aged spinster who had written a famous book on the Gawain poet, coming back to visit her three years later and finding a dowdy little woman living in a tiny house in north Oxford and being neurotic about whether you’d wiped your feet.
They were sitting on a kind of patio now, lit by firefly lights suspended from an overhead trellis, next to an occasional table on which someone had left a fruit-juice carton and a copy of
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
. Catching sight of her face in the window, she was disagreeably surprised by its paleness, the odd point that her chin made against the inky surround. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she heard herself saying, rather startled to hear the sound of her voice breaking out above Henrietta’s murmurs about more coffee, and the faint commotion of a child at an upstairs window, ‘is why all this really has to happen. I mean, I know you can’t do anything about global pressures – at least I know everyone says you can’t – but if two banks, say, are making a profit and employing 20,000 people each, then what’s the point of welding them together so you can cut the workforce back to 30,000? I just don’t see it.’
As soon as the words came out of her mouth she knew – and she had meant this to happen – that it was the wrong thing to say. The mobile phone began to ring again. Henrietta wentoff in search of it. Clive picked up a teaspoon and banged it against the side of the coffee percolator.
‘It’s interesting you should say that, Lucy, because… let me put it another way, the people who were saying those things five years ago – and they were saying them, weren’t they Mark? Do you remember that proposal we did for Vickers where..? Anyway, the people who were saying that five years ago are mostly… I mean, there are insurance companies out in the Rim running their operations with a couple of hundred tele-execs… You can’t just not take economies of scale when they’re offered to you.’
Henrietta was standing in the gap between the French windows making what looked like quite complicated semaphore signals.
‘It’s Nick wanting a word.’
‘Oh God,’ Clive said, not altogether failing to disguise his pleasure at being rung at ten o’clock at night by the firm’s senior partner. ‘Well, if he wants it he’d better have it, hadn’t he?’ He strode off, a big man poised expertly on oddly tiny feet, and they watched the back of his striped pink shirt disappear into the house.
‘Sorry,’ Lucy said. ‘Not a particularly brilliant thing to say.’
‘Gracious,’ Mark said tolerantly. ‘You mustn’t mind about that. Clive’s a bit
Somewhere in the back of the house a mobile phone began to ring. Stepping out through the French windows – the end of the garden was bound up in shadow now – Lucy discovered a second salient difference between Wimbledon and Putney: silence. For some reason the inhabitants of SW19 didn’t spend their summer evenings blasting out hip-hop or skirmishing in the shrubbery. Decorum was all. Thinking about Clive and Henrietta (who ‘kept her hand in’ at the PR department at Laura Ashley, she had explained, with a bit more mock- enthusiasm than was called for) made her wonder about the whole question of admiring people, howoften you picked on what turned out to be the wrong quality or detected an element that turned out to be something else, something that said more about what you were looking for than about the thing found. She remembered at twenty one conceiving an intense, unfeigned respect for her college tutor, a middle-aged spinster who had written a famous book on the Gawain poet, coming back to visit her three years later and finding a dowdy little woman living in a tiny house in north Oxford and being neurotic about whether you’d wiped your feet.
They were sitting on a kind of patio now, lit by firefly lights suspended from an overhead trellis, next to an occasional table on which someone had left a fruit-juice carton and a copy of
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
. Catching sight of her face in the window, she was disagreeably surprised by its paleness, the odd point that her chin made against the inky surround. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she heard herself saying, rather startled to hear the sound of her voice breaking out above Henrietta’s murmurs about more coffee, and the faint commotion of a child at an upstairs window, ‘is why all this really has to happen. I mean, I know you can’t do anything about global pressures – at least I know everyone says you can’t – but if two banks, say, are making a profit and employing 20,000 people each, then what’s the point of welding them together so you can cut the workforce back to 30,000? I just don’t see it.’
As soon as the words came out of her mouth she knew – and she had meant this to happen – that it was the wrong thing to say. The mobile phone began to ring again. Henrietta wentoff in search of it. Clive picked up a teaspoon and banged it against the side of the coffee percolator.
‘It’s interesting you should say that, Lucy, because… let me put it another way, the people who were saying those things five years ago – and they were saying them, weren’t they Mark? Do you remember that proposal we did for Vickers where..? Anyway, the people who were saying that five years ago are mostly… I mean, there are insurance companies out in the Rim running their operations with a couple of hundred tele-execs… You can’t just not take economies of scale when they’re offered to you.’
Henrietta was standing in the gap between the French windows making what looked like quite complicated semaphore signals.
‘It’s Nick wanting a word.’
‘Oh God,’ Clive said, not altogether failing to disguise his pleasure at being rung at ten o’clock at night by the firm’s senior partner. ‘Well, if he wants it he’d better have it, hadn’t he?’ He strode off, a big man poised expertly on oddly tiny feet, and they watched the back of his striped pink shirt disappear into the house.
‘Sorry,’ Lucy said. ‘Not a particularly brilliant thing to say.’
‘Gracious,’ Mark said tolerantly. ‘You mustn’t mind about that. Clive’s a bit
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