The View from Mount Dog (18 page)

When you are ‘something in the City’ – and more especially when you are some
one –
you become sad as you get older. Very likely people everywhere become sadder, but I wouldn’t know about them; I can only speak for myself and for certain of my close contemporaries. We are a select few among that great army which used to be mocked as ‘the pinstripe brigade’ whose regular commutings were the butt of every
Punch
humourist who, because he worked from home in a polo-necked sweater and didn’t have to shave every morning, flattered himself that he was somehow less trammelled by the conventions of society. I should like to say,
en
passant,
that some of the most conventionally minded people I have ever met have been professional satirists.

I have often wondered why we become sad, but of course we never discuss it. Everything is conveyed by looks, by glances, by an eyebrow scrupulously raised across a table, by an acknowledged
coup
d’œil
from the other side of a railway carriage. I believe it has partly to do with the irony of our position. Here we are, the most conventional of social animals (if the humourists are to be believed), simultaneously being bulwarks, repositories of confidence, sustainers of traditional values as well as (if our company propaganda is to be believed) thrusting, innovative and forward-looking. I cannot think of a description in which I recognise less of myself and my few friends than in that piece of executive blarney; it alone would be grounds for
melancholy. But there are plenty of other grounds, too, most of which in combination form a thousandfold treason. Treason here, betrayal there. For how can any of us pretend that what we think of and love as England and English values are nowadays comprehended to the least degree either by the work we do or – to put it bluntly – by the new class we have to do it with? Something has been let slip for ever; some quality is irretrievably gone, and it has to do with the heart.

Ah, you think we’re grieving fuddy-duddies, we of the 7:42 from Sevenoaks? But, good heavens, we know about deficit financing and I don’t believe a single one of us cares a hoot despite having been brought up with that firm admonishment ringing in our ears:
Neither
a
borrower
nor
a
lender
be.
We also, believe it or not, know about computers. I myself use a desk-top micro every working day, and very boring it is, too, but I can
use
it perfectly fluently. The other morning one of the junior partners – a bright youngster, incidentally, an agreeable but to me uninteresting representative of the new breed – let on that when he went home at night he and all three of his children played computer games together. And this stopped me in my tracks because it suddenly crystallised what had changed. It was that for this young man life had become seamless. All day long in the City he sat at his desk and used a computer and then in the evening he returned to Beckenham or Petts Wood and went on using a computer.

Why not? you ask. Why ever not? No reason, of course; I and my friends can only fall silent. There is no
reason
why not, except that of desire. When we were younger one of the piquant pleasures of life was the great gulf fixed between work and play. Going to work in the City every day was absolutely unreal, for all that there were occasional episodes of pleasure and pain. (In this respect it was very much like school.) Eight hours of formal unreality earned you an immediate holiday in the shape of twelve hours of informal reality. Once back home and out of the suit and into some comfortable old cords or tweeds all lingering thoughts of the office and the recent swift passage through suburbia dissolved in the open fields and woods. A walk with the dog along the river-bank to watch I don’t know what, the black gyres of mayflies above the crinkling water, the moorhens come and go in the rushes, the cows switching their tassels in the evening light while from way beyond the woods the parish bells drone faintly in waves as if beneath the setting sun a great
door were being opened and closed. That was real, no doubt about it; that was the England of my childhood where one could still – if one listened very attentively – hear the piper at the gates of dawn.

But now? Well, not only has suburbia spread like a cancer across the face of southern England, making it almost impossible to see an honest field with an honest cow in it much inside an hour’s travelling time, but that blissful idea of the two lives – the
hidden
life – has gone as well. Nowadays I gather that most of my younger colleagues take work home with them for the evening and even for the weekends, and in consequence their faces look as featureless as the screens into which they gaze all their working lives: mere blank surfaces across which flit the endless columns of glowing figures, adding up and multiplying and adding up to nothing.

For when I described the work we do in the City as unreal I was being entirely accurate. All that rhetoric about harsh realities and fingers on the world’s commercial pulse betrays a communal fantasy of extraordinary proportions. What on earth are we to think when serious, clean-shaven young men in suits are described as ‘eager to meet fresh challenges’? Why, that they are figments trapped somewhere between Arthurian legend and Evensong, sharpening up their attacking slogans before spearheading an assault on traditional product strongholds while always striving for the highest prize. And now not even the money we deal in is real. How well I know the fictions of ‘creative accountancy’; how familiar the hypnosis of those flickering electronic figures. Not a banknote to be seen anywhere! How chimerical the wealth which translates into Rolls-Royces and military hardware! I am glad now to be nearing retirement. I shall not be sorry to leave this Disneyland which, for all that it is a filigree world of ever-dissolving castles and turrets, leaves on the air a taint which is solider far than itself.

This must be so, and it must be starting to contaminate me since the other night – I’m not sure if I should tell this because it may be yet another betrayal – I had a dream, an appalling dream as it happens although there were no monsters or anything conventional of that sort. Its dreadfulness resided entirely in an atmosphere which was of terror and melancholy. Not easy to imagine, I grant you; but easier perhaps if I say that the terror was more a panic not unlike those at school which kept one awake thinking of the imminence of an examination, incredulity
mixed with self-upbraiding for having let things get to this point, while the melancholy (which would not have been possible then) came from knowing that in a million years one could not have done any differently. Anyway, the dream was of an unidentifiable voice and what it said was: ‘Imagine that at the instant of death you were told,
Well,
Tom
old
boy,
that’s
it.
Very
short
and
never
again.
What
do
you
remember
of
it?
What’s
the
first
–
and
last
–
image
in
your
brain,
the
legacy
of
it
all?
So, what is it?’

Of course I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to offer up a memory of a special place by the river, or how the sun looks on a moving cornfield, or rooks roosting up in elms, one of those ordinary moments which leave one without thought or speech. I wanted to offer up my poor boy Adrian before he became ravaged by his last attack, bouncing round the paddock on Minefield in the sunlight, as lost in timeless pleasure as any other twelve-year-old on his new pony. But nothing would come. I could not form a single image. Everything gave way before a clear view and I was forced to speak the truth.

‘A corridor, that’s what I see. There’s a water-cooler halfway along. I … I don’t know where I am, an office, a hotel, a government department, a hospital. Everything’s beige. The floor’s beige, the walls are beige, I’m walking along behind three men in beige suits and with beige hair. Even their aftershave smells beige. And there are beige sorts of office sounds coming from behind the doors we pass. The corridor is without end.’

‘Is it like anywhere you recognise?’ the voice asked recedingly.

‘Yes, it is exactly like anywhere,’ I heard myself say. ‘It’s like everywhere in particular.’ And then I woke up weeping and weeping, although I know how silly it sounds especially after so banal and null a conversation. But, as I said, it was the atmosphere far more than the words; that and the blank enigmatic backs of the three men.

Well, it’s hardly news that we shall all be swept away. Yet the unspoken sadness I share with my friends in the City, what we read in each other’s eyes, is something more than that knowledge alone. It concerns, I think, a loss of more than mere self. Certainly the closer the great erasing broom approaches each of us the more it seems to me I should do my remaining year or two in the City with great good humour and an absent mind, for inside I am immortally nine or ten and buried in summer grass among orange tips and clouded yellows and red
admirals. I may say it is becoming easier all the time: not only do the years of practice help but so does sheer age itself. We senior partners do not spend much of each week in the office, and if one no longer has to commute daily one can afford to live in ever remoter shires.

*

Of course we live nowhere near Sevenoaks – that was a satirical example. As a matter of fact we live in another direction entirely and a good deal further from the City. An odd thing is how close-knit we are, geographically speaking, and this without our ever having planned it. Some mysterious gravity has drawn us together in this region – and draws us still, as I discovered this morning. I had woken in the river-bank and was watching the stately skid of water, its dimplings reflected on the low ceiling. I cannot tell you the happiness of eating toast and marmalade while watching a grebe, its feathers aflame in the early sunlight, pass the window on a level with your eyes, its feet working busily across the glass. I walked over to look at it more closely and the movement must have caught its eye, for it stopped abruptly and jerked its head round. What must it have thought, expecting to see muddy river-bank and finding instead a sheet of glass through which it could see into a large room with a man standing considerably below the river-bed and eating toast and marmalade? Off it sailed, not completely startled, into the morning brightness, and I went up the steps to join it. Despite the most ingenious (not to say costly) lighting, insulation and damp-proofing my river-bank den which is so cosy at night or in overcast weather becomes slightly gloomy and chill when the sun is shining outside. So up I went and emerged in the bushes which conceal the entrance.

In the distance across two fields I could see the kitchen corner of the house where Mrs Simmonds the housekeeper was no doubt eating her own breakfast, and nearby the paddock where so often over the years I have seen a boy on his pony in the long evening light, for he rides there still. But what took my attention was the sudden coming to life of a chainsaw from the corner of Rokesy Wood nearest my little estate, and I remembered having heard sounds of activity there for some days now, sounds which reminded me that I was reputed to have a new neighbour but which had not been enough to overcome my natural uninquisitiveness. But a chainsaw was a different matter: who knew what monstrous damage might be casually inflicted by a new
owner chastising his woods for becoming so overgrown? As it turned out, though, I need not have worried.

I crossed in the skiff and moored up under the great willow, conscious that I was now in enemy territory, then walked up the tufted meadow strung with webs still glittering with dew to the nearest corner of the wood. With schoolboy stealth I crept from tree to tree under cover of the saw’s awful howling and moaning which now had a muffled quality. From behind a stout beech I could watch the scene of operations from within a matter of yards. There was a massive oak I had often admired, not particularly tall but bulbous with age and, alas, with scarcely a sprig of green left as evidence of the thready seasonal beat of its thousand-year-old heart. At its base it could not have been much less than ten feet in diameter and there, almost at ground level, someone had cut a neat narrow hole. In this opening was visible a pair of legs as the sawyer inside carved away with his bellowing blade. After a bit the noise stopped abruptly; there came a muffled exclamation and the man emerged stoopingly, spitting, his hair sprinkled with white chips. By then I, too, had broken cover and he caught sight of me with a start as I stepped forward.

‘Forgive the intrusion,’ I said, ‘but I’m your neighbour, Tom. I heard you at work and thought I’d come over and introduce myself. Magnificent tree, that.’

‘Isn’t it? Name’s Colin. You must think me an appalling vandal, taking this stinking machine’ – he kicked the stopped saw, which was gurgling to itself like a kettle on a hob – ‘to a grand old oak. But I’m sure you’ve noticed the poor thing’s practically dead and I wanted to get at it before it rots. In fact the heartwood’s virtually dry already. Come and see.’

Inside was a freshly hewn cell still barely large enough for one man to crouch in. It smelled deliciously of autumn in there. A thousand years of England enfolded me in a redolent cocoon; I was incorporated into its heart.

‘It’s coming along,’ I said. ‘You’re Wol, of course.’

‘Of course.’

We had recognised each other instantly – the eyes as usual – and I could feel the surge of pleasure which comes from knowing one’s world is not after all going to be intruded upon by an outsider. Colin was one of us. ‘Who are you with? Or are you retired?’

‘Durrant Anderson. No, I’ve got a few more years in harness. You?’

‘Mence Gibb. But let’s not think about all that. When you’ve done your stint come over for a beer or something. Go straight down to the river and give me a shout from the willows. I’ll hear and fetch you across.’