Wrote For Luck (5 page)

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess we can’t stay here all day.’

‘No,’ she said, although she knew there was no reason why they should not stay if they chose, ‘I don’t suppose we can.’

They were putting the old man on the stretcher now. She could not tell if he was alive or dead. For a moment his long, meaty, sunburned arm fell away from his body and hung there dangling until the lifeguard jammed it back into place. At the apartment Mrs Christie would have finished lunch and her father would be shuffling blearily around the kitchen drinking black coffee from a china mug. The sunlight was not so clear as it had been and the shop-girls and the milliners’
apprentices who had come here to eat their sandwiches were going back to work. The scent of petrol hung in the air and she thought again, with pleasure, of the college at Wheaton, which lay in sight of the cornfields and the buzzard-haunted prairie grass.

‘We could walk back and look into some of the stores,’ he said.

‘Yes, we could do that, I suppose.’

Back on the sidewalk at the margin of the beach, where grey sand mixed with the cigarette butts and the dropped newspapers, he tried to take her hand, but she did not want her hand to be held. An automobile had leaked oil in the middle of the street, which spread out across the tarmac in rainbow-tinted streaks. There were still gulls tacking back and forth in the thermals, and she remembered the shedding white rings of tumult. And so they set off again into the city’s heart, with the streetcars gliding alongside them like triremes, and Mr Dreiser, the college at Wheaton, the black stuff gown and the grey-haired man who would call her ‘Ruth’ and ‘My dear’ and the company who would call, who would certainly call, on Sunday nights hanging above their heads like the sailing white birds.

—2013

‘I
t’s still quite light outside,’ Clive said soberly. ‘We could go and have coffee in the garden.’

It was half-past nine in the drawing room of the Allardyces’ house in Wimbledon. Above her head Lucy could hear the rhythmical progress of someone – child? au pair? grandmother? – padding from bedroom to bedroom. Mark, either taking this as a subtly coded instruction, or simply wanting to be polite, got up and began stacking the bowls that had contained the kiwi-fruit mousse into a neat, unwavering pile.

‘What’s happening, in a sense,’ Clive went on seriously, gathering up the fragments of a conversation that Lucy assumed had perished a course and a half back, ‘in a very real sense, is that for the first time you’ve got a squeeze at both ends. In the centre as well. In the old days you had simple rules: cut costs, diversify, watch the margins. This time the top of the market’s getting smaller and the bottom’s splintering. Mega-mergers and fragmentation. Global saturation and niche players. And there’s no middle market any more. You either get larger or you get smaller or you die.’

‘You could draw a political parallel,’ Mark went on with, if anything, even greater seriousness. ‘Huge alliances all banding together – Europe, South-East Asia, wherever – but at the same time every half-dead barony out of the Holy
Roman Empire wants its own set of postage stamps and a seat at the UN.’

Not consciously bored with these exchanges, but feeling over-familiar with an argument that surfaced regularly at dinner parties of this kind, Lucy stood up and went to look out of the French windows. Above, the sky was blue-black, touched up at the corners with crimson streaks. Beyond, the garden stretched out for twenty or thirty yards into the gloaming. You could not afford a garden like that in south-west London on less than half a million a year, Lucy knew.

‘I got a call the other day,’ Clive went zestfully on, ‘from an insurance broker, financial intermediary, who wanted to know how e-commerce was going to affect his business. And I had to tell him – God, Lucy, I felt like a doctor with a cancer patient – the chances were that in eighteen months he wouldn’t have a business.’

Henrietta, Clive’s wife, yawned and put her hand guiltily over her mouth. Inspecting the three of them from her vantage point by the window as the blue light fell over her hands, Lucy was reminded of a tableau she had once seen in a medieval book of hours: the nobleman dispensing wisdom to his dutiful squire, the nobleman’s wife fatly asleep in the corner. Looking at Clive as he sat back in his chair, the candlesticks on either side of his plate framing him in a way that was faintly sinister – he looked like a portrait in a ghost story that might be about to leap down out of its frame – she wondered what it was about him that Mark, inherently sceptical when presented with a newspaper article or a balance of payments forecast, found to admire. Expertise? Panache?
Intellect? Having had several opportunities to observe Clive at close quarters, she didn’t think he was particularly bright or particularly astute. Perhaps, in the end, it was a kind of instinct for self-preservation, knowing how to play a game whose rules were being made up as you went along and where your opponent was liable to collapse out of sheer terror.

‘I thought those seminars,’ Mark said, accepting his coffee from Henrietta without looking up, ‘the ones where Gavin and Fred talked about the practical impact of that Far Eastern stuff, were really useful.’ Looking at him as he said this in what had started off as a spirit of moderate scepticism – 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, how
often 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 went
off 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 preoccupied by the proposal.’

‘The pipeline in Azerbaijan one?’

Clive and Mark had arrived at twenty to nine by taxi, grey with fatigue, clutching ring-bound files and what looked like the print-out from an old-fashioned computer but was actually the outpourings of a Russian telex machine.

‘Clive won’t be a moment.’ Henrietta came labouring back onto the patio, flapping vaguely at a midge cloud that hung in the doorway. Even on the low-key occasions, a category which surely included this entertainment of your husband’s understrapper and your husband’s understrapper’s girlfriend, being Clive’s wife must be rather a strain, Lucy deduced. Her eye fell again on the paperback of
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
.

‘It’s wonderful isn’t it?’ Henrietta said before she could be asked. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve read it. And the film. That was wonderful too, wasn’t it? Quite made you want to go and stay there. Wherever it was set, I mean.’

‘It didn’t make me want to go and stay there,’ Lucy said diplomatically, ‘but I think I know what you mean.’

‘And it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ Henrietta went on fiercely. Her white, plumpish face was oddly animated, Lucy thought, like one of those TV game show contestants suddenly enriched beyond expectation. ‘I mean, why it is that writers come to write things.’

‘Beckett wrote for luck.’

‘For what?’

‘I read it in some book of interviews. The
Paris Review
or somewhere. He said that whenever he sat down consciously to write, he was doing it for luck.’

Once again Lucy knew, instinctively, that she had said the wrong thing. Henrietta looked perplexed. More than perplexed, Lucy divined.

‘Do you know,’ she said – and years later Lucy would recall the look of injured innocence on her face – ‘I think you must
be making fun of me. He couldn’t possibly have done that. There must have been another reason.’

‘I suppose it was all to do with him being Irish.’

‘You
are
making fun of me,’ said Henrietta, not crossly, Lucy thought – which might just have been warranted by the circumstances – but with an almost plaintive dolefulness. ‘I never heard anything so silly.’

They watched her pad off again through the French windows. In the kitchen they could see Clive stalking back and forth, bellowing excitedly into the mobile.

‘Looks as though you got the job,’ Lucy said. ‘Do you know, what Clive gets paid a year is probably the entire budget of the series I’m working on at the moment. I figured it out.’

‘Honestly Lu, that’s not much of a comparison.’

‘All the same,’ Lucy said, smiling brightly at Henrietta as she wheeled back into view bearing a tray of champagne flutes, ‘I just felt like making it.’

Later, quite a bit later, they rolled home in a cab down Putney Hill, through tiny streets sunk in darkness. Curiously, this was the time Lucy liked best about her life with Mark: that companionable ten minutes or so of padding around the silent house, checking the answerphone and the fax, setting out briefcases for the dawn. The morning’s post and the stack of estate agents’ brochures lay where she had left them on the kitchen table. Looking at Mark as he lurked at the foot of the bed, his game and still slightly frantic face looming happily through the shadows, Lucy wondered – something she’d never got to the bottom of in the three years of their relationship – if this serenity, this pleased matter-of-factness
was genuine, whether it didn’t just denote some part of him held permanently in reserve.

‘I didn’t make it up,’ she said. ‘Beckett did say he wrote for luck.’

‘I’m sure he did.’ She could see him blinking thoughtfully at the pile of management magazines on the bedside table. ‘I think it was just a bit much for Henrietta.’

Something about the evening’s small talk came back to her. ‘This pipeline job. Will you have to go out there?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder. Clive will probably want me to project-manage it. Do you mind?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘It will probably mean waiting a bit on the house.’

Lucy had seen this coming. ‘How long?’

‘Well, two or three months. The spring, maybe. Prices may even have fallen a bit by then.’ He picked up one of the magazines. ‘You can do most things from Azerbaijan these days, but I don’t think buying a house is one of them.’

Lucy was surprised by the sense of loss that this brought, surreptitiously, into view. The Allardyces’ lawn; the child’s white face at the window; the thought that you shouldn’t be expected to put up with this degree of obtuseness from someone you loved; all these thoughts briefly but inconclusively contended in her head.

There was silence for a moment. Lucy fell asleep almost immediately, woke up for a second or two to see Mark brooding over a book called
Managing the Blur: Corporate Life in the Connected Economy
. She went back to sleep thinking of the little woman in the house in north Oxford whose book on
the Gawain poet, she reflected, might have sold five hundred copies, Henrietta’s placid face under the light, a feeling that could have been contempt, or envy, or some quite different emotion lost now amid the coffee cups and the darkling south London lawn.

—2001