John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

Mr Phillips picked up the book that was lying on his son’s desk. It was called Hitler Wins! Management Skills of Germany’s Greatest Leader (And Don’t Let Anybody Tell You Different). The page was turned down at the start of a chapter called ‘Don’t Think Different, Think Beyond.’

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘It’s the management book everybody’s reading at the moment,’ said Martin. ‘There’s always one — you know, lateral thinking, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Winning Through Intimidation, all that crap. They’re mainly bollocks but it gives you something to talk about. Go ahead and have a look, I’ll just be a minute.’

Mr Phillips opened the book in the middle.

Hitler envisaged a united Europe. He envisaged a world in which the motorist would be able to travel from Calais to Zagreb on motorways. He foresaw German hegemony, as the dominant power of the continent. He was a vegetarian at a time and in a milieu when that was a strange thing to be. (He pointed out that ‘Japanese wrestlers, who live off nothing but vegetables, are among the strongest men in the world.’ This also goes to prove that the Führer was willing to consider lessons and examples from other, far-away cultures — an important example for any leader in today’s globally competitive environment.)

All these are examples of what it takes to be a visionary thinker, one who sees beyond conventional patterns of thought and behaviour. They show you that you are often right by being wrong; by saying the opposite of what others say, confident in the validity of your own insights. They also show us that we must look to the broadest perspectives to see our ideas bear fruit. Like the Führer we must be confident that posterity will vindicate us. (See Chapter 10, for ‘How to Have Your Posterity Today’.) As we look at today’s Europe, united and dominated by a recrudescent Germany, in which we can travel on motorways from Calais to Seville, from Boulogne to Athens, which of us can look into our hearts and say that the Führer was in any meaningful sense wrong?

THIS IS THE WAY IN WHICH A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MANAGER MUST LEARN TO THINK.

Martin swung his jacket off the back of the chair and was already heading towards his father and the exit.

Somewhere in Mr Phillips’s mind, when he decided to pop in on Martin, had been the notion that he might be able to confide in his elder son about what had happened. But as soon as he saw Martin he felt that it wouldn’t be possible, not so much because of the admission of weakness on his own part that would be involved, but because Martin in some hard to define but real way would not be strong enough to bear the news. (It’s a proverb: when the father helps the son, both smile; when the son helps the father, both cry.) He might laugh or weep or do some other inappropriate thing. Did some men have sons with whom that kind of exchange might be imaginable? Mr Phillips remembers the first time his mother had given him a jam jar to twist open and said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’

‘You’re going to be rich,’ says Mr Phillips, meaning it not as a compliment but as a fact.

‘Depends what you mean by rich.’

‘Richer than Mum and me, anyway.’

‘Well, yeah. Obviously.’

It takes Mr Phillips a second to realize that this is a joke. Their main courses have by now arrived. Mr Phillips finishes his G and T.

‘How’s Mum?’

‘Very well. Same as ever.’

‘Doesn’t sound as if much has been happening.’

‘Well, you know how it is.’

‘It’s a funny feeling, in some ways,’ says Martin. ‘The idea of being rich. Especially since it’ll only happen if someone comes in and buys up the company. I mean, that’s basically the only way you can suddenly get a ton of money dumped on you overnight. So you sell the company and then what? The main thing you’ve been doing for years is taken away. So what you do is start another company and start all over again. It’s like sex.’

‘Is it?’ asked Mr Phillips.

‘You know, love them and leave them. But that’s only an idea, a saying, it’s not like official.’

‘What sort of money?’

‘A bloke who was doing a fairly similar thing with retro compilations was bought up for half a million. Anything can happen. In three years’ time, I’ll either be going home from work to Notting Hill in a brand new Beamer, or taking the Northern Line back to Morden and trying to dodge the fare. It could go either way.’

Mr Phillips, who had taken the train in to Waterloo every working day for the last twenty-six years until this morning, digests that in silence.

‘This is very nice,’ he says, offering some fish cake on the end of his fork. The fish cake is not as good as Mrs Mitchinson’s, but it isn’t bad. Martin, who is chewing, shakes his head and nods down at his plate. Mr Phillips declines the offer to try his son’s expensive-looking piece of grilled fish.

‘Those are pretty girls you have working for you,’ he says.

‘You fugga da staff, you fugga da business. You must know that — it’s an old Italian saying. But yeah, they’re all right. Debbie, the blonde one, is the toughest. She can shave points like no one you’ve ever seen. Now she’s going to be rich one day, for sure.’

When the waitress comes back, Martin says, ‘I’m at a loss for words again, Sophie. Let me take you away from all this.’

‘Would you like any dessert or coffee at all?’ says Sophie.

They settle on two coffees and the bill. Mr Phillips feels the weight of things bearing down on him more heavily than he has at any point since his conversation with Mr Wilkins. The idea of having nothing to do, an empty diary, an empty life, stretching out in front of him until he dies. Luckily at that moment the bill arrives. Sums come to the rescue. Ravioli at £6.95, bacon and scallops at £6.75, fish cake at £8, sea bass at £12, large mineral water £2.50, gin and tonic £3.50, two filter coffees £4, service at 12.5 per cent is £5.46, equals £49.16. Six plus seven is thirteen, eight plus twelve is twenty, which makes thirty-three, two fifty plus three fifty is six, plus four is ten, plus thirty-three is forty-three, plus the fiver for service is forty-eight, which is close enough once you’ve added in the pennies. Mr Phillips fishes out his cheque book and begins to write. His son picks up the bill and looks at it.

‘Good value here,’ he says. ‘For this part of town. Do you mind if I love you and leave you? Only I know I’ve got a call coming in at quarter past on the dot.’

‘By all means,’ says Mr Phillips. They shake hands, Martin gets up and is gone with a final ‘Love to Mum’ over his shoulder.

So that was Martin. Mr Phillips waits for Sophie to come back and take the bill. Instead it is another waitress who comes and picks up the bill and cheque and cheque card, and a third who brings it back, pressing his plastic card back on to the table with a brisk click and equivalently brisk pro forma smile. Both these girls are good looking, the first a leggy, slightly ungainly dyed blonde, black hair visible at the roots of her parting, distracted, sexy; the other shorter, darker, slightly cross-looking, heavier around the middle and lower half, verging on the outright bottomy, but sexy too. Her bad temper made you wonder what her good temper would be like; what it would be like to be fucking her, see her expression and compare it with her normal cross face. That was probably what men who liked cross girls liked about them.

Taken with the lovely Sophie and with Martin’s colleagues that was a lot of pretty girls for one lunchtime. If you were a Martian walking around earth in disguise you would form an inaccurate impression of how many pretty girls there were if you went by how many of them you encountered in public places as waitresses, receptionists, front-of-house people, the people you dealt with when you went to offices or shops or pubs or restaurants. Anywhere, basically, where there was an opportunity to put a pretty girl in between you and a transaction. So pretty girls were a kind of consumable substance, used up like fuel, or used like WD40 to ease the mechanisms. And there’s always a fresh supply, that’s the beauty of it.