The Right Man (8 page)

The
Planters’ wardrobe light was on the blink; it flickered and died. I looked up
and saw that its junction box was hanging loose, not from Susan’s attack on
Jeremy’s garments. It had obviously been like that for some time, the plastic
around the terminals had melted and browned. Shoddy work. I followed the badly
stapled cable back to the skirting by the door. Whoever had done this loft
conversion was a cowboy. I tried the bedside light and the main light switch.
It was warm, even after the couple of minutes I’d been there. Dreadful job. The
landing was no better. No doubt the electrician had overcharged as well because
of Jeremy being on the telly.

I have
to be careful when it comes to wiring. No one, not even Liz, really knows about
me and wiring. It’s something I had to walk away from, something about growing
up, being a man if you like, getting away from my father, proving myself.

You
see, I actually have no qualifications to be in show-business at all, no right
to be here. I wasn’t born into it, I didn’t do media studies, I didn’t even
work my way up in it, I was a spark really, just a lonely little crappy spark.
You can’t have people in this business getting to know that and continue to
wear the Armani suit. Not that I go for Armani; Hugo Boss does for me. I did
have a stint working in a rep theatre once, and even went on stage a couple of
times. It’s OK to be a failed actor-agent, the biz is replete with them. It’s
not so good to be a failed electrician-agent. It’s not lovely, it’s not stylish.
The ‘teccies’ don’t come to our parties, they lead their own lives and have
their own lunch, usually in the pub while we all scoff the location catering on
the bus. The ‘teccies’ eat big breakfasts with black pudding and bacon while we
have orange juice and script meetings. I have buried it, it’s gone.

But the
house was empty, so I traced the cable back to the consumer unit and checked
the main fuse box. The wiring was a joke and probably dangerous. The under-sink
cables in the bathroom had not been properly earthed and there was virtually no
sheathing around any of the cabling where the plasterboard flushed against the
joists in the cellar. It denigrated the whole place.

There
was a sadness in the quiet air. It came off the curtains like a dog kept indoors
all day. There had obviously been crying here but no evidence of rows and
tantrums like in Liz’s and my home. No taped-up windows or kicked-in cupboard
doors. No dents from thrown objects on the wall plaster. No scuff marks, no
scuffles. Just a kind of suffering peace. On the coffee table were the five
packs of cards with which we had all played Racing Demons last time I was here,
ten-year-old Dave going apoplectic at the concessions being made for his
younger sister, Polly.

Downstairs
the fridge thermostat turned itself on with a gurgling noise like the low-key
chant of a Japanese Noh play. Some hot-water pipes cracked into life. The house
was readjusting to my presence, to the opening and closing of doors. If there
were such a thing as an aural microscope it would reveal myriad undersounds in
ordinary silence, as those who live alone must know. Maybe that’s why Liz used
to keep the television on all day while I was at work.

One
handy thing about old Planter, despite his professionalism, was his complete
lack of application when it came to matters financial, contractual or
administrative. The escritoire, when I opened it, was bulging with disorganized
correspondence, receipts, scraps and scribblings. There was an unpaid-in
cheque from Granada TV, which should have gone through us. Naughty. But it was
only for a guest appearance on a kids’ show, about £140, so I let it pass. Undealt-with
fan mail and charity requests. Quite a few angry letters from Reg Simpson, the
designer on the last series, whom Jeremy had had fired. Luckily no letters from
other agents, but mixed in with the whole bundle were hundreds of paying-in
slips from Mullin and Ketts, dating back to the previous tax year. Obviously
Jeremy’s bookkeeper had not been for a while, or maybe taken one look at this
mess and resigned. The payslips showed all sorts of different monies received:
voiceovers, occasional overseas and video sales, one or two little repeat fees,
a radio chat show. No very large sums but an adequate cash flow ticking over. I
thought Jeremy was earning a lot more than this; I’d check with Tania on
Monday. In the past I would have been aware of all these, minor transactions,
would have recognized every ‘fee and commission. But that was before the agency
grew and I had learned to delegate; also, of course, before the arrival of
Grace. Nowadays it was impossible to check every single item, there just wasn’t
the time, and to be honest, I couldn’t see the point in it any longer.

I
copied out some of El Planter’s figures and addresses into my spiral-bound
notebook and reinstated the confusion in the escritoire as I had found it. I
watered the plants and left.

Dear Guy,

I know it will most likely be you, Tony’s not really up to it, is
he? I’m writing this just to help you deal with all the paperwork and
everything when I’ve gone. You’ll find my will and all the information,
solicitor’s addresses, etc. in my middle drawer. All my notes and everything
are in the brown filing cabinet — key is on the smaller of the two rings in
bottom right. Classes and text books, etc. I have put in the big cardboard box.
You can throw them away, or hang on to them, it’s up to you. They might be
useful for Grace one day if she ever shows an interest, although all will be
probably out of date by then. Tools and components you can have, Guy, if you
need them. You know where they are. Look after your mother for me. I’ve done my
best. I know it’s not often been enough. You make sure she doesn’t want for
anything. I didn’t get round to renewing the junction boxes in the kitchen.
Make sure they’re properly earthed with fire-proof cable. There’s some 5ml in
the utility room cupboard. I wouldn’t want her to start a fire inadvertently.

And
that was it. The sum total of wisdom passed from father to son. A whole generation’s
worth of progress: ‘There’s some 5ml cable in the utility room cupboard.’ I
refolded my dad’s last letter and put it in my jacket pocket. Not much of a
symbolic chalice, but it was all there was.

I like
the flannelled sound of distant traffic you get in the back rooms of the
terraced streets of suburban London. It is more calming to me than the quiet of
the countryside. The muffled roar of a jumbo jet grew out of it and petered
away again as it descended over Kew on its way to Heathrow. I could hear my
watch ticking again.

I
remembered the day when I had been taken by my father with my younger brother,
Tony, to visit a friend of Dad’s in Brighton — it was some seaside town — and
when asked by his friend, ‘How’s your wife?’ he had replied in an apologetic
sing-song voice, ‘Disappointed.’ They’d both laughed and at ten years old I
hadn’t been able to understand why. I was clutching some comics that my father’s
friend had given us to keep us amused while they talked. I decided to save my
comics until I got home and so I read Tony’s to him instead. When we were
leaving, my father’s friend asked for the comics back. They had been a loan,
not a gift, so I never got to read them. That was a day of learning about
disappointment. I must have been cross with Dad for not explaining to me about
the comics. The thing that irritated me most of all now about his posthumous
letter was that he’d assumed, correctly, that there would only be me there to
sort out, and hence had only bothered to address his remarks to me. My mother
wouldn’t touch it and Tony, he was right, was not really up to it, although
there had been some improvement in his condition in the last couple of years.
He was actually managing to hold down a job now, working for the Hammer-smith
and Fulham parks department.

Looking
through my father’s drawers, cupboards and filing cabinet now was another
disappointment. I could find no dark secrets which had been nursed by him over
the years. No encoded secret agents’ telephone numbers, no hidden stash of
porn. In fact, the only evidence of a sex life at all, whether shared with my
mother or otherwise, was a packet of Durex which I found filed in a buff
envelope folder neatly under ‘D’. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? They were
some years past their sell-by date but that was fair enough, I suppose. He had
had a prostate op in 1989. Going through his drawers and finding the Durex
stirred a memory of myself and Tony — we must have been eleven and nine at the
time — first finding Durex in his bedside table and counting them, then
returning a week later and counting them again and giggling. The game lasted
several months, kept alive more by Tony, who has always had an over-fascination
with sex. One problem was that occasionally my father bought a new packet and we
couldn’t be sure whether he had put the remainder of the old into it or thrown
them away. This mucked up our counting system. But even with this setback, we
calculated that Mum and Dad must have been having sex about once or at most
twice a month. ‘If you can call it sex with your father’, as my mother would
say.

I
wondered now whether he had known about our boyish game and this is what had
prompted him to keep his Durex in his filing cabinet in the study instead of
his bedside table. This must have made spontaneous lovemaking impossible, since
the study is a flight and a half of stairs away. Maybe he took to decanting the
Durex singly or in twos from the study each month. Certainly Tony and I never
found this squirrel’s store under ‘D’. We were never allowed in the study on
our own.

Feeling
like an eleven-year-old again, I looked through the other entries in the ‘D’
section of his filing cabinet for some clue. There was ‘Dunstan’s’, the school
at which he had taught for twenty years before my mother had encouraged him to
be more ambitious and take on the headship of a posher school in Devon, where
he had lasted one year before being made redundant, something from which
neither he nor the rest of my family had ever fully recovered. There were
various other names, friends, newspaper cuttings, none as full as the Dunstan’s
file. The Durex nestled in their buff envelope folder all to themselves. There
was, I suppose, one mystery, also in ‘D’: an empty file which had the
unexplained title of Doris. Doris and the Durex. Sounded like an educational
film about AIDS.

I
carried on checking through his bank statements. All seemed predictably in
order. But as my eye went down the columns of figures, my mind ranged over the
possible connections between the Durex and Doris. Had my father had a secret
lover called Doris? Or was Doris an acronym for an undercover organization of
ex-schoolteachers? ‘Dunstan’s Old Rascals Illicit Sex’? My grandmother’s name
was Mabel, my father’s sister was called Auntie Rose, so it couldn’t be either
of them. I know that my parents had been wanting a girl when my younger brother
Tony had arrived, so he’d been a disappointment from day one. Could Doris be
the name of the daughter they never had, and had my father put his
contraceptives out of reach of the bedroom in the superstitious belief that
their proximity to the empty Doris file would somehow enhance fertility?

As I
moved on to his insurance papers, I lingered in my mind on the word ‘disappointment’.
There was no file under ‘D’ for this, but it seemed that my father’s’ life had
been a series of disappointments. Not least of all me. Giving up stability and
qualifications to go razzamatazzing with glitzy folk, sleeping with
fly-by-night actresses. Whatever next? He’d had such hopes for me as a child. I
had been the one to learn all his tedious skills. I was top in physics, his
subject, at secondary school. But then, just when he thought he’d got me right,
off I waltzed into the glamour.

Plentax
is a large electronic components company, mostly involved in armaments. At the
time, I justified my leaving so abruptly with adolescent idealism, feeling
rather noble that I was turning my back on that happy band of men — and it was
almost exclusively men at Plentax — who design and make parts for the sonar
devices used in the search mechanisms of various types of torpedo. My own
personal contribution, long since computerized into redundancy, of course, was
to weld the miniature DC4 resistors on to ceramic plates, which formed part of
the microcircuit, which would cybernetically monitor the torpedo’s progress
through the water to its target. But really, I just couldn’t take the numbness
working somewhere like Plentax, where desensitization is as traditional as
soldiers marching in a parade ground, as necessary as medals for bravery. But
emotional numbing seems to be an essential part of earning a living, and I didn’t
know that in 1976.

I
imagined, if it had been Liz that had died and not my father, what I would find
among the chaos of her shoe box full of memorabilia. Billets doux from Bob
Henderson? A diary splodged with tears and splattered with descriptive passages
of stolen afternoons with him, wet gussets and hard members like in some
magazine fiction? I couldn’t help but have the thought that Marc Linsey would
like that steamy stuff to find its way into the pages of poor Neil James’s nov.
I could feel a headache coming on. The neat left-right compartments of my brain
were jumbling; I needed vortex reinforcement.

My
mother came in with a cup of tea for me. She put it on the desk. I thanked her,
even though it had milk and sugar, neither of which I take. I long ago gave up
connecting with her on dietary matters.