David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘Fine.’

‘Any deals?’

‘I think so.’

‘Who?’

Unnervingly, her initial answer is a laugh. Paul is not sure why, or what this means. He smiles uneasily. ‘Who?’ he says again, with more emphasis, raising his eyebrows.

‘Chinese company.’

An obviously inadequate answer, vague to the point of deliberate evasiveness, and simply to accept it would surely make him look like a fool. Seeing that he is in need of it, she hands him her ash-saucer, and for a minute he stands there, smoking in silence. He is surprised that she has not asked him why he is in so early. ‘I wanted to have a chat with you, Li,’ he says. She maintains her smile, but it becomes worried, even panic-stricken. Which disturbs him — why should she be so terrified? What does she think he has discovered? If he takes her to Delmar Morgan and she perpetrates some kind of scam there … ‘Are you okay?’ he asks. ‘Is something wrong?’ She laughs and shakes her head. ‘Nothing wrong.’

‘You sure?’

She nods.

‘Okay,’ Paul says, uncertain whether to proceed. ‘Yeah, I wanted to have a chat with you,’ he says slowly. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but, um, I’m leaving.’ She nods again, as if there were nothing surprising about this. ‘Going to another company,’ he adds, waving his cigarette. ‘Another sales company.’ Another earnest, respectful nod. ‘A better one. Better than this one. It’s called Delmar Morgan.’ This time the nod is eager, as if she recognises the name and is impressed. ‘You’ve heard of it?’

She shakes her head.

‘It’s a good company.’ An emphatic nod. ‘And,’ he goes on, ‘yeah — I’m asking some people if they want to join me there.’ He stubs out his cigarette on the filthy porcelain of the saucer, and sets it on the edge of her desk. ‘Would you be interested in doing that?’ She nods, but he wonders whether she has really understood. ‘You would?’

‘Would I be interested?’ she says.

‘Yes.’

She nods again.

‘Yes, you would be interested?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, you would be interested?’

‘I would be interested.’

He is still not entirely sure that she knows what he is talking about. With a look at the dark entrance, and in a low voice, he says, ‘You would be interested in coming to work at Delmar Morgan? Leaving this company and going to the other company, Delmar Morgan.’

‘Yes,’ she says.

Paul smiles insincerely. ‘Okay. We’re planning the move in a few weeks, if that’s okay.’ Why am I asking her if it’s okay? he thinks. He feels uneasy — the uneasiness that often follows an apparently effortless sale, the sense that something has not been properly understood. In these situations, in his efforts to establish the situation as sound, the salesman often finds himself seemingly trying to talk the prospect out of it. Paul says, ‘We’ll start work at the other company, Delmar Morgan, after Christmas.’

She nods, smiles. ‘Okay.’

‘That’s okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Fine. And don’t tell anyone, okay? No one.’

‘I won’t tell.’

Paul smiles, more warmly this time. ‘Not even what’s-his-name — you know, your beau.’ She is not familiar with the word ‘beau’, but she guesses — perhaps from the way Paul is smiling — who he is referring to, and laughs. ‘No, I won’t tell,’ she says.

The Kingsway Benjys is jammed with the bleary-eyed, the grimfaced, the harassed, the hurried. This is its peak time, eight thirty, and behind the long counter a line of pallid, green-T-shirted East Europeans hustle frantically with hot drinks and money. It takes Paul ten minutes to get his coffee, and when he re-emerges onto the loud grey pavement, he is surprised to see Li there, waiting, wearing her round-shouldered coat, which resembles a soft, mousy dressing gown. ‘All right?’ he says. She throws away her cigarette. ‘Paul, I just wanted to ask you — can Justin come too?’

‘Justin?’

‘My beau.’

‘Oh.’ He smiles at her use of the word. ‘Um … Yeah, maybe. I’ll think about it.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ she says, and together they walk round the corner to PLP’s tinted-glass door.

Adding more than an hour to its front end makes the day difficult. Paul’s head is not working properly, and coffee — he has had five — has no effect, except to stir up a faceless potent fear, and percolate nauseously through his innards. Cigarettes seem poisonous. The windows seem too light. And the January 2005 edition of European Procurement Management is terminal — there is no hope for it — only ten more selling days until Christmas, and it is not even halfway to its target. Lawrence, however, still stalks the sales floor like a fatally wounded animal with no understanding of death. And, struggling with lassitude and indifference, Paul must promise this animal, with spittle-foam in the corners of its mouth, with a messy, voluminous crown of hair, that everything is all right, that there is ‘a lot out there’, that the target will, in the end, be met, or only slightly undershot — the first time that even that has been admitted, though the target has never — not once — been met before. ‘Insane,’ Paul thinks, sloping off to the smoking room for the umpteenth time. ‘Insane.’

Justin Fellowes, Li’s beau, is on the Pig’s team, and on his way to the smoking room, Paul stops off, as he sometimes does, to say hello to Dave Mortished — the Pig. Filling his executive seat, he looks like a ginger Buddha with a fake tan, his mild eyes on the working salespeople of his team. They are not doing quite as badly as Paul’s people, but International Finance and Financial Policy Review will not make target either — though unlike EPM , selling extends into the new year. Perched on the edge of the Pig’s desk, Paul tunes his ear to Justin Fellowes’ pitching voice. (He has already found his name on the whiteboard, and seen with satisfaction that he is someone who actually sells — a salesman, not one of the transient desperadoes who make up at least half the workforce at any one time.) The voice is nasal and dully earnest, but he is able to project enough authority over the phone for this to be, if anything, an asset. He sounds trustworthy, simple — someone who, with unimaginative persistence, sticks to the pitch. A plodder, but apparently an effective one, and Paul is pleased. And wondering whether to jettison Dave Shelley in favour of Justin Fellowes, he experiences an enjoyable frisson of power — of deciding the fates of others’ lives as if hesitating between two products in a supermarket aisle.

The Pig is not a talker. He nods a lot, and occasionally mutters a few words, his eyes fixed elsewhere. Today, Paul finds him particularly unforthcoming. He wonders, has often wondered this past week, whether Eddy has an arrangement with the Pig similar to the one that he has with him. And why wouldn’t he? He and Mortished know each other well from the Northwood days, and the Pig’s team — Paul has to admit it — is stronger than his own. When he asked Eddy if he was talking to anyone else from PLP, he was knowingly evasive — ‘You don’t need to worry about that, Paul,’ he had said, with a smile, as he swigged his Bacardi Breezer. Paul had, of course, taken this as a ‘yes’. And the Pig’s more than usually taciturn mode, and distracted lack of interest in verbally eviscerating Lawrence, suggest that he, too, has something momentous on his mind.

‘S’my birthday on Friday,’ he says. ‘We’re having drinks and a meal, if you want to come along.’

‘Sure,’ Paul says. ‘Sure. That’d be nice. How old are you going to be, Dave?’

Of the same generation as Murray Dundee, Mortished has been in sales-based publishing longer than any of them except Lawrence himself. He ignores Paul’s question. They go to the smoking room. One of the buttons of the Pig’s white polyester shirt has come undone and, as he sits, a shape of colourless, hairless flab pours heavily through the gap. The fake tan, Paul realises, must be restricted to his hands and head, with its soft wispy copper hair. The cigarette, as he brings it to his mouth, looks puny in his fat hand. After the failure of Northwood and the subsequent diaspora, he spent some time in Thailand and the Philippines, living cheap off his savings, sweating a lot. And when the money ran out, he returned to the UK, and sales. He and Paul joined PLP at about the same time, the Pig first by a month or two. And then Murray showed up …