It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a man wishes to maintain a long and happy marriage he should refrain, as often as is possible, from arriving home from work early.
He was having a sod of a week. It wasn’t just a sod, it was a complete meadow of sods of a week. Like the one before it and all the ones before that since the government brought in the new legislation. He was Northern Area manager — “Uh!” he snorted at the thought of it — of Trans Global Finance, and he’d spent all week on the road, chasing clients when he should have been chasing sales staff.
TGF, as the company was known, was formed by the few directors of a Far Eastern bank who were still free to walk the streets undisguised after the bank crashed and left thousands, some say millions, of their customers penniless. As most of them were of Oriental extraction the collapse caused academic concern in the financial pages of the heavier papers but aroused no desire among the greater public to help out. The CEO and mastermind behind the bank received a derisory jail sentence but fled abroad while awaiting his appeal hearing, and two of his co-conspirators vanished without a trace. Not to be deterred by this small hiccup, and seeking a new venture in which to invest their ill-gotten millions, the remaining European directors created Trans Global Finance.
Thanks to aggressive sales techniques and a range of financial products that regularly invoked the comment “too good to be true,” which was an accurate description, TGF blossomed like a garden centre on Good Friday. Salesmen — sales executives — made money to match their mobile phone numbers, and spent it as quickly as they earned it, because, they were told, the good life was theirs for the taking and success breeds success. Nobody loves a loser. To them that have, it shall be given. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
Then came the pensions scandal, and they were in the thick of it. Thousands of working people with perfectly good company pension schemes were exhorted to change to TGF, with promises of higher, index-linked pensions when they retired. Promises that nobody, particularly a company that paid its directors and sales people like TGF did, could keep.
The government, in an uncharacteristic fit of guilt because it had led the exhortations to change, ordered the financial houses — and there were several of them — to pay heavy compensation. TGF was nearly crippled, but not quite. They pulled in their horns, downscaled, rationalised and regrouped. It was going to be a long slog, but for those who stayed the rewards could be immense. The days of Rolexes and Porsches, if not Ferraris, would be back.
But not just yet. It’s the manager’s prerogative to see the most promising clients. The riffraff are sent to talk to the ones that the tele-sales girls churn out: the ones who reluctantly agree to let a financial consultant call at their homes — without obligation — because the girl on the phone has a come-to-bed voice and there’s always the chance she will visit you herself. The manager calls during office hours on the small and medium-sized companies who are thinking of expanding and might be interested in a variety of packages that are on offer. And on the lottery winners whose only previous experience of investment has been via the little shop on the high street with the sporting prints on the blacked-out windows.
But even these were wise, nowadays. Three hundred and twenty miles of driving and four appointments had left him with two I’ll think about its, one I’ll have to ask my brother in law, who works for Barclays, and one Are you that lot who went bankrupt? The Sunday Times says you are. Cruel experience, fashioned in the crucible of double-glazing selling, had taught him that all of these were just variations of a straight forward No way, Jose.
“Closing,” he said to himself. That’s what it was all about. Closing a deal. Backing the punter into a corner by asking him what he liked about the product, what he was looking for, and then giving it to him in such a way that he couldn’t retract. Once he’d been the master. He’d sold double- glazing to people who lived in council flats and to people who lived in caravans. He’d sold double-glazing to people who already had double-glazing.
“Do you prefer the aluminium or the UPVC, Sir?”
“Oh, the UPVC, don’t we, Elsie?”
“That’s right, Joe. Easy to clean, eh?”
“Precisely my sentiments, Elsie. Life’s too short for cleaning window frames. And you won’t say no to the free patio door, will you?”
And they didn’t. And they signed the bottom of the complicated form that was hastily explained to them and slid across the table, pen laid invitingly across it. And when the windows and the “free” patio door were fitted they thought they were wonderful, because double-glazing in a climate like Britain’s is essential. And they never knew that they could have bought the same deal for a third of the price if they had shopped around, because they were lazy, and inexperienced, and kind, and he’d been such a nice man. And they didn’t discover until it was too late that the ten-year guarantee was worthless, because it was the company’s policy to go bankrupt every five years.
The Prince of Closing, someone had christened him at a conference, and he was regularly asked to lecture on the subject. But times change, and punters were becoming streetwise to the language of the salesman. Say one wrong word, a single misrepresentation, and they’d have you on some consumer programme, explaining that it was a simple oversight not to mention that the quoted interest rate was monthly, not annual. A change of tactics was required; the books needed re-writing. He burped and tasted bile. He’d grabbed a ham sandwich for lunch, gulped down with two pints of Tetley’s — beer, not tea — and his stomach and bladder were protesting. The big roundabout was approaching. Left for Heckley and home, right for the next appointment, another twenty miles away. He glanced at the clock: nearly half past three. The sixth form college would be letting out soon and he hadn’t seen her for three weeks. He turned left, reaching for the phone to cancel the appointment, and slowed to a crawl.
Schoolchildren were walking towards him, some purposefully, some in desultory groups; and others, the smaller ones, fooling around. The girls wore blue skirts and white blouses, the boys grey slacks, with a few of them carrying blazers. She’d be going in the opposite direction. He drove past the end of the street that led to the school and hoped he hadn’t missed her.
There she was. Her skirt was grey and short, a gesture of defiance against a school regime ill-equipped to deal with young women like her, and her blouse hung outside it. She was tall, about five eight, he guessed, and stacked like whoever made her enjoyed his work. Black tights held legs that would never have to do the chasing, and her skirt curled under her bum so that the afternoon sun’s shadows delineated its curves. He imagined his hands resting on those hips, holding her close, before sliding upwards on to the arch of her waist and her cool, young skin.
He squirmed in the driving seat, making himself more comfortable, and cast a sideways glance at her as he drove by. The expression on her puffy face was miserable or sultry, depending on your standpoint. As he watched her hand came up to her mouth and she took a puff of a cigarette, rocking her head back in pleasure as she drew upon it, her breasts rising as she inhaled. He swallowed and reluctantly looked back at the road. In ten years, perhaps less, she’d be over the hill, he thought, but right now she was perfect. Just perfect.
A hundred yards beyond her there was a small shopping precinct. He swung into it and jumped out of the car. As she reached the precinct he was coming from the newsagent’s shop, peeling the cellophane off a packet of Benson and Hedges. He walked out on to the pavement on a collision course.
“’Scuse me, love,” he said to her. “I seem to have lost my matches. Could you give me a light, please?”
“Mmm, ’course I can,” she replied, raising her stunted cig to the fresh one between his lips. Glowing tip met tobacco and transferred its fire as he inhaled, his eyes on her. Her lashes were short and brown, and there were whiteheads at the sides of her nose. She was wearing cheap perfume, lots of it, and he wondered what a classroom full of that would do to a man.
“Thanks,” he sighed, smoke streaming from his nose and mouth. “I was ready for that.”
“No problem,” she replied with a smile. She looked radiant when she smiled.
He turned, as if to leave, then said: “Sorry, love, can I give you one?” and held the packet towards her.
“No, I’m all right,” she told him, blushing ever so slightly.
He walked in the wrong direction, away from his car, for a few yards, then turned in time to see her cross the road and walk up a street on the right. Her feet were walking, but her arse was doing the samba. She vanished into a development of houses built at the height of the boom: all Elizabethan gables, Georgian windows and Thatcherite mortgages.
Back in the car he wound the window down and lit another B and H. They were shorter than they used to be, he thought. Once they were a luxury cigarette, the epitome of coolness, but now they were just a device for getting nicotine into your system as economically as possible. He held it outside in a half-hearted attempt to stop the car’s interior smelling like a public bar.
It had been a long time. He inhaled deeply, wrapping his tongue around the smoke like a grazing cow, and felt it fill his lungs, inflating every little bronchiole and alveolus, finding its way into corners where oxygen had never ventured. Distillations of nicotine were absorbed into his bloodstream and transported to the brain, where receptors, lying redundant for millions of years until Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco from the New World, eagerly latched on to them and converted them into an electro-chemical signal. A signal that said: “Ah! That’s good.”
Yes sir, it had been a long time. But the urge never left you. Once tasted, you were hooked. He remembered the date and did a quick calculation. Fifteen years and six months, almost to the day, since the last time. It hadn’t been easy, for the yearning, the hunger, was always there, waiting to catch you out. And lately it was stronger than ever. He’d allowed the genie out of its bottle, and once on the loose he knew it had to be obeyed. The thought scared and excited him. He flicked the smouldering stub on to the car-park and started the engine.
Home was a four-bedroomed detached house built with just six others on a spare patch of land between a farm and the canal. The service road was block-paved, with speed humps, and the gardens were open plan. There was a paddock to the rear, but his neighbour had jumped in first and bought that, much to his annoyance. Each house had a double garage but they all left their vehicles outside. It’s not conspicuous consumption if you hide it away. On a Sunday morning, when everyone was at home, the development resembled a four-wheel-drive regatta, just before the judging of the concourse d’elegance.
His wife’s Suzuki Vitara was on the drive, with a Citroen Xantia behind it. “What’s he doing here?” he wondered, parking in the street and swinging his legs wearily out. He collected his jacket from the Armani hanger behind the driving seat and his briefcase from the boot.
The wind chimes welcomed him as if he were entering a Buddhist monastery, but he broke the illusion by shouting: “I’m here. Cut it out, whatever you’re doing,” as he moved through the kitchen and hallway, towards the parlour.
His wife was sitting on the settee and the visitor in an easy chair, an empty cup and saucer perched demurely on his knees. A compilation CD of music from television adverts was playing in the background, very softly. The track was Bailero, from the Songs of the Auvergne, but he only knew it as the Kenco coffee tune.
“Hello, darling,” his wife said. “You’re home early.”
He stooped to give her a peck on the cheek and turned to the visitor. “So this is what you get up to while the boss is working his butt off, eh?”
“Oh, not every week,” the visitor replied with a grin.
He placed his briefcase on the floor and draped his jacket over it. “Will you excuse me,” he asked them, moving back towards the door he’d just entered through, “but I’m bursting for a piss.”
They listened to his footsteps climb the stairs, looking at each other. She with an expression of relief, he guiltily. The bathroom door closed and he opened his mouth to speak, but she silenced him by putting a finger to her lips. It was possible, she knew, that her husband had closed the door but remained outside it. It wasn’t until she heard the sound of flushing that she dared to whisper: “Phew! That was close.”
“What are we going to do?” he hissed.
“I’ll ring you,” she replied.
He placed the cup and saucer on a low table and rose to his feet as footfalls sounded on the stairs again. The husband went straight into the kitchen and was looking in the refrigerator as the visitor passed through. “I’m off,” he said.
“Why not stay and eat with us, Peter,” the husband offered.
“Thanks all the same, but no,” he replied. “I’ve things to do. I was in the vicinity so I thought I’d come and have a cuppa with the little woman.”
“OK. See you tomorrow, then.”
“God willing. Bye Margaret,” he called. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“You’re welcome,” she called back.
When he’d gone the husband poured himself an orange juice and rejoined his wife. “What did he want?” he asked.
“You’ve been smoking,” she accused, ignoring the question.
“Just the one,” he replied. “A client…you know how it is.”
“Good God, you’re pathetic,” she told him.
“I asked you what he wanted.”
“Nothing,” she replied. “Like he said, he was just passing.”
“Does he make a habit of just passing?”
“That’s about the second time this year, but Peter’s welcome any time. He’s a good friend.”
“He’s a bloody awful salesman. What time’s supper?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I wasn’t expecting you for another two hours.”
He resisted the temptation to say: “Evidently.” Scoring meaningless points wasn’t his style. “Let’s eat out, then,” he suggested.
“We can’t afford it.”
“It’s two for one at the Anglers before six.”
“The Anglers!” she sniffed.
“Well bloody-well cook something. I’m starving.”
“Oh, very well,” she said, standing up. “Let’s go to the Anglers.”