England, England

  Sir Jack enjoyed marching out across land belonging to others. He would raise his stick approvingly at the cut-out cows on the hillside, the shire horses in bell-bottoms, the rolls of hay like Shredded Wheat. But he never made the mistake of imagining that any of it was simple, or natural.

  He entered a wood, nodding to a couple of young hikers coming the other way. Did he hear a snicker pass between them? Perhaps they were surprised by his tweed deerstalker, hunter’s jacket, cavalry twills, gaiters, hand-crafted doe-skin boots, and fell-walker’s stave. All made in England, of course: Sir Jack was a patriot in his private moments too. The receding hikers were dressed in shell-suits of industrial colour, with rubber trainers below, baseball caps above and nylon day-packs behind; one wore earpieces and in all probability was not listening to the mighty Pastoral. But again, Sir Jack was not a snob. There had been a motion before the Ramblers’ Association a few years ago proposing that walkers be obliged to wear colours which blended with the landscape. Sir Jack had fought that motion tooth and nail, root and branch. He had described the proposal as fantastical, élitist, unworkable, and undemocratic. Besides, he was not without his interests in the leisurewear market.

  The path through the wood, several generations of springy beech leaves, was quilted underfelt. Layered fungi on a rotting log made a Corbusier maquette of workers’ dwellings. Genius was the ability to transform: thus the nightingale, the quail, and the cuckoo became the flute, the oboe, and the clarinet. And yet was not genius also the ability to see things as with the eyes of an innocent child?

  He left the wood and climbed a small hill: below him, an undulating field led down past a copse to a thin river. He leaned on his stick and brooded on his meeting with Jerry Batson. Not exactly a patriot, in Jack’s view. Something a bit evasive about him. Didn’t meet you man to man, didn’t look you in the eye, sat there in a trance like an haute-couture hippie. Still, if you crossed his palm with silver, Jerry would usually put his finger on it for you. Time. You are as old, and exactly as old, as you are. A statement so apparently obvious that it was almost mystical. So how old was Sir Jack? Older than it said on his passport, that was for sure. How much time did he have? There were moments when he felt strange misgivings. In his personal bathroom at Pitman House, athwart his porphyry toilet, a sense of frailty would sometimes come upon him. An ignoble end, to be caught with your trousers down.

  No, no! This was not the way to think. Not little Jacky Pitman, not Jolly Jack, not Sir Jack, not the future Lord Pitman of wherever he chose. No, he must keep moving, he must act, he must not wait for time, he must seize time by the throat. On, on! He swiped at a thicket with his stave and disturbed a pheasant, which rose heavily into the air, its fairisle sweater aflap, whirring off like a model aeroplane with a wonky propeller.

  The clean October breeze was sharpening as he followed the edge of an escarpment. A rusting wind-pump offered itself as a cheeky cockerel by Picasso. He could already see a few early lights in the distance: a village of commuters, a pub returned to authenticity by the brewers. His journey was ending too quickly. Not yet, thought Sir Jack, not yet! He felt at times such kinship with old Ludwig, and it was true that magazine profiles of Sir Jack frequently used the word genius. Not always embedded in flattering contexts, but then, as he said, there were only two kinds of journalist: those he employed, and those employed by envious rivals. And they could have chosen another word, after all. But where was his Ninth Symphony? Was this it, stirring within him at the moment? It was surely the case that if Beethoven had died after completing only eight, the world would still have recognized him as a mighty figure. But the Ninth, the Ninth!

  A jay flew past, advertising the new season’s car colours. A beech hedge flamed like anti-corrosion paint. If only we could dip ourselves in that … Muss es sein? Any Beethovenian – and Sir Jack counted himself among their number – knew the reply to that one. Es muss sein. But only after the Ninth.

  He cross-fastened his hunter’s collar against the rising wind, and set course for a gap in a distant hedge. A double brandy at The Dog and Badger, whose mutton-chopped host would patriotically waive the bill – ‘A pleasure and an honour as always, Sir Jack’ – then the limo back to London. Normally, he would fill the car with the Pastoral, but not today, perhaps. The Third? The Fifth? Dare he risk the Ninth? As he reached the hedge, a crow took silk and wing.

  ‘OTHERS MAY LIKE to surround themselves with yes-men,’ said Sir Jack, as he interviewed Martha Cochrane for the post of Special Consultant. ‘But I am known to value what I like to call no-people. The awkward squad, the nay-sayers. Isn’t that so, Mark?’ He beckoned to his Project Manager, a blond, puckish young man whose eyes followed his employer so quickly that at times they seemed to precede him.

  ‘No,’ said Mark.

  ‘Ho, ho, Marco. Touché. Or, on the other hand, thank you for proving my point.’ He leaned across his partners’ desk, treating Martha to some benign Führerkontakt. Martha waited. She was expecting attempts to wrong-foot her, and Sir Jack’s double-cube snuggery had already done so, with its wrenching stylistic change from the rest of Pitman House. Crossing the room, she had nearly turned an ankle in the tussocky shagpile.

  ‘You will note, Miss Cochrane, that I emphasize the word people. I employ more women than most in my position. I am a great admirer of women. And it is my belief that women, when they are not more idealistic than men, are more cynical. So I am looking for what might be called an Appointed Cynic. Not a court jester, like young Mark here, but someone unafraid to speak their mind, unafraid to oppose me, even if they should not expect their advice and their wisdom necessarily to be heeded. The world is my oyster, but I am seeking in this instance not a pearl but that vital piece of grit. Tell me, do you agree that women are more cynical than men?’

  Martha thought for a few seconds. ‘Well, women have traditionally accommodated themselves to men’s needs. Men’s needs being, of course, double. You put us on a pedestal in order to look up our skirts. When you wanted models of purity and spiritual value, something to idealize while you were away tilling the soil or killing the enemy, we accommodated ourselves. If you now want us to be cynical and disillusioned I dare say we can accommodate ourselves to that as well. Though of course we may not mean it, any more than we meant it before. We might just be being cynical about being cynical.’

  Sir Jack, who interviewed in democratic shirt-sleeves, plucked his Garrick braces in a rubbery pizzicato. ‘Now that is very cynical.’

  He looked at her application file again. Forty, divorced, no children; a degree in history, then graduate work on the legacy of the Sophists; five years in the City, two at the Department of Heritage and the Arts, eight as freelance consultant. When he switched from her file to her face, she was already eyeing him back steadily. Dark brown hair cut in a severe bob, a blue business suit, a single green stone on her left little finger. The desk kept her legs out of his view.

  ‘I must ask you some questions, in no particular order. Let’s see …’ Her fixed attention was oddly disconcerting. ‘Let’s see. You are forty. Correct?’

  ‘Thirty-nine.’ She waited for his lips to part before cutting him off. ‘But if I said I was thirty-nine you’d probably think I was forty-two or -three, whereas if I say I’m forty you’re more likely to believe it.’

  Sir Jack attempted a chortle. ‘And is the rest of your application as approximate to the truth as that?’

  ‘It’s as true as you want it to be. If it suits, it’s true. If not, I’ll change it.’

  ‘Why do you think this great nation of ours loves the Royal Family?’

  ‘Gun law. If we didn’t have it, you’d be asking the opposite question.’

  ‘Your marriage ended in divorce?’

  ‘I couldn’t stand the pace of happiness.’

  ‘We are a proud race, undefeated in war since 1066?’

  ‘With notable victories in the American Revolutionary War and the Afghan Wars.’

  ‘Still, we defeat
ed Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler.’

  ‘With a little help from our friends.’

  ‘What do you think of the view from my office window?’ He waved an arm. Martha’s eye was guided to a pair of floor-length curtains held back by gilded rope; between them was an evidently false window on whose glass was painted a prospect of golden cornfields.

  ‘It’s pretty,’ she said non-committally.

  ‘Ha!’ replied Sir Jack. He marched across to the window, seized its trompe-l’oeil handles, and, to Martha’s surprise, wrenched it upwards. The cornfields disappeared to reveal the atrium of Pitman House. ‘Ha!’

  He sat down again, with the complacency of one who has got the upper hand. ‘Would you sleep with me to get this job?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. It would give me too much power over you.’

  Sir Jack snorted. Watch your tongue, Martha said to herself. Don’t start playing to the audience – Pitman is already doing that for both of you. Not much of an audience anyway: the blond court jester; a hunky ‘Concept Developer’; a small, bespectacled fellow of indeterminate function crouched over a laptop; and a mute PA.

  ‘And what do you think of my mighty Project, such as it has been outlined?’

  Martha paused. ‘I think it will work,’ she replied, and lapsed into silence. Sir Jack, suspecting an advantage, came round from behind his desk and stood looking at Martha’s profile. He tugged at his left earlobe and examined her legs. ‘Why?’

  As he asked the question, he wondered whether the candidate would address one of his subordinates, or even his empty chair. Or would she half-turn and squint awkwardly up at him? To Sir Jack’s surprise, she did none of these. She stood up, faced him, crossed her arms easily over her chest, and said, ‘Because no-one lost money encouraging others to be lazy. Or rather, no-one lost money encouraging others to spend well on being lazy.’

  ‘Quality Leisure is full of activities.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Sir Jack moved slightly between each of his next questions, seeking to disconcert Martha. But she remained standing, and simply turned to face him wherever he was. The rest of the interview board was ignored. At times, Sir Jack almost felt as if he were the one moving round in order to keep up with her.

  ‘Tell me, did you have your hair cut in that way especially for this interview?’

  ‘No, for the next one.’

  ‘Sir Francis Drake?’

  ‘A pirate.’ (Thank you, Cristina.)

  ‘Well, well. How about Saint George, our patron?’

  ‘Patron saint also of Aragon and Portugal, I believe. And protector of Genoa and Venice. A five-dragon man, by the sound of it.’

  ‘What if I suggested to you that England’s function in the world was to act as an emblem of decline, a moral and economic scarecrow? For example, we taught the world the ingenious game of cricket, and now it’s our job, our historical duty, an expression of our lingering imperial guilt, to sit back and let everyone else beat us at it, what would you say to that?’

  ‘I’d say it doesn’t sound much like you. Naturally I’ve read most of your speeches.’

  Sir Jack smiled to himself, though such private gestures were always generously available for wider consumption. He had by now completed his circumambulation, and eased himself back into his presidential chair. Martha also sat down.

  ‘And why do you want this job?’

  ‘Because you’ll pay me more than I deserve.’

  Sir Jack laughed openly. ‘Any further questions?’ he asked his team.

  ‘No,’ said Mark pertly, but the reference back was lost on his employer.

  Martha was shown out. She paused in the Quote Room and pretended to cast her eye over the spotlit slab; there might be a furtive camera to be satisfied. In fact, she was trying to think what Sir Jack’s office reminded her of. Half gentleman’s club, half auction house, the product of imperious but erratic taste. It felt like the lounge of some country-house hotel where you met to commit half-hearted adultery, where the edge of nervousness in everyone else’s demeanour disguised your own.

  Meanwhile, Sir Jack Pitman pushed back his chair, stretched noisily, and beamed at his colleagues. ‘A piece of grit and a pearl. Gentlemen – I speak metaphorically, of course, since in my grammar the masculine always embraces the feminine – gentlemen, I think I’m in love.’

  A BRIEF HISTORY of sexuality in the case of Martha Cochrane:

  1. Innocent Discovery. A pillow clamped between the thighs, mind throbbing, and the crack of light still hot beneath her bedroom door. She called it Getting a Feeling.

  2. Technical Advance. The use of one finger, then two; first dry, then wetted.

  3. Socialization of the Impulse. The first boy who said he liked her: Simon. The first kiss, and wondering, where do the noses go? The first time, after a dance, against a wall, that she felt something bodge into the curve of her hip; the fleeting idea that it might be some deformity, at any rate a reason for not seeing more of the boy. Later, seeing more of the boy: visual display, causing moderate panic. It’ll never go in, she thought.

  4. Paradox of the Impulse. In the words of the old song: Never had the one that she wanted, Never wanted the one that she had. Intense and unadmitted desire for Nick Dearden, whose forearm she never even brushed. Complaisant submission to Gareth Dyce, who fucked her three times in a row on an un-Hoovered carpet, while she smiled and encouraged him, wondering if this was as good as it got and half-embarrassed by the oddness of male weight-distribution: how he could be light and floaty down there, while pressing the air out of her lungs with his heavy boniness up here. And she hadn’t even liked the name Gareth when she’d spoken it before and during.

  5. The Funfair. So many rides on offer while serpentine strings of lights flashed, and swirly music blared. You flew high, you were stuck to the walls of a revolving drum, you defied gravity, you tested the possibilities and limits of the flesh. And there were prizes, or there seemed to be, even if, more often than you expected, the thrown hoop skimmed off the wooden cylinder, the gimcrack fishing rod hooked nothing, and the coconut was glued to its cup.

  6. Pursuit of the Ideal. In various beds, and sometimes by renouncing or avoiding bed. The assumption that completeness was possible, desirable, essential – and attainable only in the presence and with the assistance of Another. The hope for that Possible in: (a) Thomas, who took her to Venice where she found his eyes glowed before a Giorgione more than they did when she stood before him in her specially-bought night-blue bra and knickers while the back canal went slap-slap outside their window; (b) Matthew, who really liked to shop, who could tell what clothes would suit her when they were still on the rail, who brought his risotto to a perfect pitch of sticky dampness but couldn’t do the same for her; (c) Ted, who showed her the advantages of money and the softening hypocrisies it encouraged, who said he loved her and wanted to marry her and have kids with her, but never told her that between leaving her flat every morning and reaching his office he always spent an intimate hour with his psychiatrist; (d) Russell, with whom she ran away light-headedly in order to fuck and love halfway up a Welsh mountain with hand-pumped cold water and udder-warm goat’s milk, who was idealistic, organized, community-minded and self-sacrificing, whom she admired to death until she began to suspect she couldn’t survive without the complacency, the distraction, the laziness and corruption of modern urban living. Her experience with Russell also caused her to doubt whether love was ever attained by striving or by active decision; whether individual worthiness was relevant. Further, where was it laid down that anything beyond a sweet companionable piggishness was possible? (In books, but she didn’t believe books.) A light, almost heady despair accompanied her life for several years after these realizations.

  6 (a). Appendix. Not to forget: several married men. It’s your choice, Martha, from the following: mobile phones, car phones, answering machines; feelings uncommitted to paper, credit-card-slip caution; sudden sex, and the door to your flat closing t
oo soon after sudden sex; intimate e-mail, empty Easters; the brio of light uninvolvedness, the request not to wear any scent; the joy of larceny, the lowered hopes, the uncauterisable jealousy. Also: friends you thought you could fuck. Also: fucks you thought could be friends. Also: (nearly) Jane (except for being too tired and falling asleep).

  7. The Pursuit of Separateness. The necessity of dreaming. The reality of that dream. Another might be there and helping, his own contingent presence adding to a supposedly shared reality. But you detached yourself from his reality, as you did from his ego, and in that separation lay your hope. Is that what you mean, Martha, she sometimes asked herself, or are you just dressing up a decision to fuck for yourself?

  7 (a). Not to forget: ten and a half months of celibacy. Better, worse, or merely different?

  8. The Current Situation. This one, for instance. A good provider, as they used to say. As he had been before. Nice whippy unproblematic cock; good torso, with rather female limpety nipples; short legs, but he wasn’t standing up now. And he busied himself, how he busied himself, sure that he knew exactly what he was up to, fitting her to some eternal female template of his previous devising. As if you were a cash-point – tap in the right code and the money gushes. The sleek confidence, the smug knowledge that what had worked before would work again.

  Where did such confidence come from? From not thinking too much; also, from her predecessors, who had approved his doings. And she too approved in her different way: it meant she could safely leave him busying away. And the smugness meant he wouldn’t notice as she separated herself from his reality. If he noticed any absence on her part, he would cockily presume it was his doing, that he was translating her to a further plane of pleasure, to seventh, eighth, ninth heaven.

  She slid a finger into her mouth, then into the top of her cunt. He paused, as if criticized, readjusted himself, growled to imply that such blatancy excited him, and resumed his busyness, his business once more. She left him below, alone down there with his fluids and hydraulics, his stop-watch timing and his victor’s place on the podium. She would pretend to applaud, when the time came.