Rupert Thomson - Soft

It annoyed him, the way she seemed to expect disappointment, the way she carried that expectation around with her. It tired him. He wondered if he could catch it from her, like a disease. It didn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility. He thought that perhaps it would be best if he didn’t see her again.

‘You’re only interested in yourself,’ she was telling him now. ‘You don’t give a shit about what anybody else is doing.’

He was watching her carefully. Her face looked clammy. Like blancmange.

‘You’re dishonest and deceitful.’ She paused. ‘And underhand.’

Which might not be a bad thing, he thought. After all, they were qualities that would come in pretty useful during the next few months.

‘You’re incapable of a relationship.’

With you? he thought. Yes, you’re probably right.

Somehow, though — and this disconcerted him — he didn’t manage to go home. Somehow, he managed to stay out with her till one in the morning, by which time they were both drunk. Somehow, he found himself in the back of a taxi, her lipstick black and glistening as triangles of orange light spun through the car, her cigarette three sparks on the road behind them, her mouth suddenly on his …

During the night he woke up, a dream still real in his head. He had dreamed about the dark-haired secretary. She was sitting on his sofa in Mornington Crescent, her thin gold chain gleaming in the sunlight that slanted through the half-open picture-window. He had said something to upset her, though. He had said something he shouldn’t have, and she had turned away from him, her eyes damp and despairing, staring into the corner of the room, her lips drawn tight (strange how clearly he remembered her). He was trying to explain that he hadn’t meant it. What he’d said had come out wrong. He’d been joking. But she only shook her head. Tiny rapid movements — fractions of a movement, really. He couldn’t make her understand. She went on sitting there, the sunlight in the garden and a warm breeze streaming in, her face hard, yet wounded. And then, inexplicably, the roar of the tube, and the window black behind her …

He was finding it hard to breathe. Bridget had left the central heating on, and she had drawn the curtains, too. There was no light in the room, no air; he felt as if he had been sealed in a tomb. Her clock’s green numerals said 3:25. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he began to dress.

‘Don’t go.’

He looked round. ‘I’ve got to.’

‘Be nice to me,’ she murmured. ‘You could at least be nice to me.’

By the time the taxi pulled up outside his house, it was four-fifteen. On the main road the traffic had quietened down. He could hear the giant ventilation units in the building behind him. An eerie sound. Like someone breathing out, but never running out of breath. To his left he could see the shop in the Esso petrol station. A dark-skinned man sat behind the cash-till, his mouth stretched in a yawn. From a distance he appeared to be singing.

Once inside his flat, Jimmy emptied his pockets on to the bedside table and then, for the second time that night, took off all his clothes. Through the window he could see the gnomes arranged in small groups on the Astroturf. They looked wrong in the dark — ill-at-ease, almost embarrassed. They looked the way people at a cocktail party might look if, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the host turned off all the lights. Somehow it reassured him, though, to see them standing there, outside his window, in the gloom. He climbed between cold sheets and was asleep in minutes.

Halfway through December, Jimmy arranged to meet Richard Herring for a drink in Soho. It had been a crisp, bright winter’s day. If you breathed in deeply, you could smell knife-blades and the skin of apples. Towards the end of the afternoon, the sky browned along the horizon, like paper held over a fire; at any moment, you felt, it might burst into dramatic flames. Once the sun had gone, though, the temperature dropped, and people hurried through the streets with their heads bent, as if afraid of being recognised. Jimmy reached the pub first and sat in a corner booth with a pint of Guinness. A small crowd stood at the bar, the overflow from some office lunch or party. They had been drinking for hours, and now they were telling jokes. It seemed like a good place for what Jimmy had in mind. If Richard chose not to take his proposition seriously, then all that background laughter would come in useful. It’s all right, Richard. Just kidding. Ha ha . At that moment, with the clock showing ten-past six, Richard pushed through the door, his face tight and bruised with cold. Jimmy waved him over.

The timing of events can seem coincidental, but if you’re responsible for the timing, if you planned it, then you know it’s no such thing. Jimmy had chosen the moment carefully — partly because Christmas was close and everybody in the industry was beginning to relax, but also, and more importantly, perhaps, because of what had happened earlier in the week. On Tuesday the advertising agency had presented their campaign for Kwench! and ECSC had rejected it. It wasn’t the campaign that had been asked for. It didn’t fit the brief. An awkward meeting, then, with consternation, even bitterness, on one side, and disappointment on the other. But, sitting in the pub that evening, Jimmy elected not to mention it. He felt Richard had to bring the subject up himself — and, looking at Richard he suspected that he wouldn’t have too long to wait: a subtle tension showed under Richard’s eyes and around his mouth, almost a kind of guilt, which gave his usual aristocratic nonchalance a brittle edge. They had been talking for less than twenty minutes when Richard lifted his glass and began to swirl the Guinness round inside it.

‘About the presentation,’ he said.

Jimmy feigned a sombre look.

‘They’re having another crack at it.’ Richard put his drink back on the table and studied it with narrowed eyes, as if assessing the quality of the product. ‘They should come up with something before the holiday.’

‘Thing is,’ Jimmy said, ‘it’s Connor. He’s not happy.’

Richard stared even harder at his glass. Behind him, at the bar, two men and a woman were singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. The woman wore red high-heels and held a thin cigar in the air beside her ear. One of the men had put on a paper hat, but it was too small for his head, and it had split.

‘Connor,’ Jimmy said thoughtfully. ‘He’s not happy with the work. In general, I mean. He’s thinking of making you pitch.’ Jimmy mentioned the names of two other agencies, both famous for their creativity.

‘Jesus.’ Richard propped one elbow on the table and let his forehead drop into the palm of his hand. He stared at the table, his eyes unfocused. If the agency lost the account, his job would be on the line.

‘I don’t know,’ Jimmy said after a while. ‘I might be able to talk to him.’

‘What about Tony?’

‘Ruddle?’ Jimmy shook his head. ‘No real influence. Not any more.’ He couldn’t resist a smile. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, studying the end of his Silk Cut, ‘I seem to get on pretty well with Connor …’

‘If you could have a word with him,’ Richard said, without lifting his eyes from the table, ‘I’d really appreciate it.’

‘Yeah.’ Jimmy sighed. ‘Another drink?’

Up at the bar the woman with the cigar was still singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ — all by herself this time. She was making up her own words: it was no longer the ‘ground’, for instance, that was ‘hard as iron’, no longer the ‘frosty winds’ that ‘made moan’. Though drunk, the man in the paper hat was beginning to look daunted.

When Jimmy returned to the booth with the drinks, he made sure he sat down more heavily than usual. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re not the only one with problems …’