Days Page 6

  Fred’s morning papers are his lifeline to the outside world, a tube through which he can breathe air from outside and so avoid being suffocated by his circumstances. Undoubtedly he is happy with his life and would not swap being a co-owner of Days for anything, but without his newspapers and, in the evenings, his cable television, the cloistered existence he and his brothers lead would surely drive him nuts.

  Fred bids his three siblings good morning and takes his seat between Thurston and Sato, dumping the pile of newspapers on the table in front of him. His chair suggests a perhaps unconscious desire for freedom. It is a folding canvas chair of the type traditionally used by explorers and movie directors. Fred’s longish hair, stubbled chin, and gaudy Aztec-patterned shirt reflect the same desire. His breakfast, however, is pure childhood comfort food: pre-sugared corn flakes, hot chocolate, and toast with butter and strawberry jam.

  Fred opens one of his tabloids and is just starting to peruse the gossip columns when Wensley waddles in. Wensley has dressed hastily in his anxiety to reach his breakfast before it goes cold. One shirt-flap dangles beneath his voluminous belly, and he is walking on stockinged feet, clasping his shoes to his chest. He is breathing hard from mounting the spiral staircase.

  Barely acknowledging his brothers’ greetings, Wensley crosses to the table and plumps himself down in the wing-backed chair. Its vermilion-upholstered padding sighs beneath his weight. He plucks the lid off his slaver, snatches up his knife and fork, and starts urgently scooping mouthfuls of devilled kidney between his pillowy, liver-coloured lips, losing several morsels to the bushy goatee that surrounds them. In addition to the kidneys, Wensley’s meal consists of four soft-boiled eggs, kedgeree, a mound of fried potatoes drenched in ketchup and brown sauce, a pile of pancakes with maple syrup, and two hunks of white bread smeared with dripping, plus a jug of cream and twenty grammes of refined sugar for his coffee.

  Mungo can seldom resist ribbing his less health-conscious younger brother. “Enough cholesterol there for you, Wensley?”

  Wensley barely pauses from his eating to reply, “I’ll work it off.”

  “Work it off? How? You’ve never taken a stroke of exercise in your life.”

  “Nervous energy,” says Wensley, patting his mouth with a linen napkin.

  “No one’s that nervous,” says Mungo with a grin.

  “Are you genuinely worried about my well-being,” retorts Wensley, “or is the source of your concern the fact that, were I no longer here, we would no longer be Seven?”

  “A bit of both, to be honest.”

  “Ah, fraternal love and self-interest. For a son of Septimus Day the two are one and the same.” Wensley pops one of the soft-boiled eggs into his mouth whole, shell and all. His cheeks bulge, there is a muffled crunch, and then he swallows the egg in one go with a huge, unhealthy-sounding gulp. “Am I not correct?”

  Mungo has to laugh. “Point well made, Wensley. Point well made.”

  Sixth to arrive for breakfast is Chas, the second eldest and by far the best-looking of the brothers. In Chas the genes of Septimus Day and his wife, Hiroko, commingled to create the most aesthetically pleasing product they could, endowing him with lustrous eyes, a cleft chin, a square jaw, hair that no matter how it is brushed always seems to fall the right way, cheekbones a male model would kill for, an excellent physique that unlike Mungo’s does not require intensive maintenance, sharp dress sense, and a firm grasp of the social graces. Chas is generally thought of as the “face” of the Days administration. He it is who goes to meet wholesalers personally when meeting wholesalers personally is absolutely unavoidable, and he it is who is most often called upon to mollify a disgruntled distributor via video conference or telephone and head down to the shop floor when a problem need sorting out. What Chas lacks in business acumen he more than makes up for in charm. When the facts won’t swing an argument the Day brothers’ way, Chas’s silver tongue usually will.

  Chas offers his brothers a smile that displays twin rows of mint-white teeth so perfectly shaped and arranged they seem to have been plotted with a ruler and set square. He pats Mungo affectionately on the shoulder as he moves around the table to his place. He sits down in an antique desk-chair that looks like one half of a love-seat, its curved back fitted with hand-tooled spokes. His firm, shapely buttocks come to rest on a maroon velvet cushion trimmed with gold braid and gold corner tassels. His breakfast is half a cantaloupe melon, french toast with bacon, and tea.

  Fred slyly comments that Chas is looking a little peaky this morning. He is not. As usual, Chas is looking magnificent. But he fakes a yawn and remarks that he did have a somewhat “interrupted” night.

  “I’ll bet,” leers Fred. “And is this ‘interruption’ still with us?”

  “I sent her downstairs with a spree card.”

  Thurston is quick to enquire whether Chas put a spending cap on the spree card.

  “A grand,” is the nonchalant reply.

  “And I trust, Chas,” Thurston continues, “that that was not the only precaution you took.”

  “Give me some credit, Thurston,” says Chas, with a calculated measure of irritation.

  “Forgive my concern, but you know as well as I do that our rivals would not hesitate to cast aspersions on our reputation if the opportunity – in the form of a paternity suit, for example – presented itself.”

  “You think I want that any more than you?”

  “I’m merely saying that your behaviour does expose us to a certain level of risk. Honest competition we can contend with, rumour we can ignore, but the whiff of scandal tends to cling.”

  Mungo, seeing Chas bristle, intervenes. “Your women come from the Pleasure Department, don’t they, Chas?”

  Chas nods.

  “Well, there you are then. They’re under contract to us. If one of them were to get pregnant – and this is just a general statement, I’m not saying Chas would be responsible – but if she did get pregnant and she decided to sue us, she wouldn’t have a legal leg to stand on. She’d be in breach of Clause 6 of her contract, the one about ‘fitness to work’. We, in fact, could sue her, if we felt like it.”

  “See?” says Chas to Thurston.

  Thurston concedes gracefully. “My sincerest apologies.”

  “Accepted.”

  It’s a small squall, and the climate in the Boardroom quickly calms again. Fred helps lighten the atmosphere by reading aloud a gossip-column snippet about an opposition-party spokesman who was spotted yesterday shopping at Days with a woman who is neither his wife nor his secretary nor his official mistress. They were spied in the Lingerie Department making free with the politician’s Iridium card.

  “I said it was him, didn’t I?” Fred crows, gesturing in the direction of the monitors. “Didn’t I? I told you.”

  “Perhaps we should elevate him to Palladium,” says Sato. “He seems to be a very good customer.”

  “The more Palladium politicians we have in both camps, the better,” Wensley remarks through a mouthful of fried potato. “From a tax-break point of view.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” says Thurston, and turns to tap a short reminder into the terminal. “Although we really ought not to be discussing business outside opening hours.”

  “Well, excuse me,” says Fred, and immerses himself again in his newspaper, wiggling his eyebrows humorously for the benefit of anyone caring to look.

  The breakfast-time conversation continues in fits and starts, counterpointed by the click of cutlery on crockery and the tap of keyboard keys and the peel of newsprint pages. Meanwhile, Old Man Day glares balefully down at his sons from the portrait, his good eye glittering. All six brothers studiously avoid looking at or mentioning the empty seventh chair, the mock throne, in front of which sit an untouched salver and all the ingredients for a good gin and tonic.

  The ice cubes in the malachite bucket have started to melt.

  8.28 a.m.

  FOR FIVE MINUTES Frank has been watching the clearing which
the white tigress has now vacated, hoping she will re-emerge from the trees to look at him again, but at last he accepts that she has gone. And it is time he should be going, too. The quiet half-hour is almost over. Distant voices are coming faintly from all floors, drifting across the cathedral vastness of the atrium. Sales assistants are arriving, filtering in through the four main entrances and spreading out through the store to take up their posts by the counters and displays. He ought to be heading downstairs.

  But still he keeps gazing down into the clearing, a gibbous striped afterimage of the tigress hovering before his eyes. Not that he believes in such things, but he can’t help thinking she may have been an omen of some sort. An omen of his new life, perhaps. The tigress is soon going to be elsewhere, out of Days, as is he. Freed from captivity. But no. She is simply being transferred from one kind of captivity to another. He is not. So, not such a good omen after all. But then, since he doesn’t believe in such things, what does it matter?

  He stays by the parapet until the last possible moment. When a yawning restaurant chef saunters into the hoop, Frank silently turns and makes his way to the nearest staff lift.

  7

  Chapter 7: a provision of the U.S. federal Bankruptcy Act for the relief of insolvent debtors and their creditors.

  8.30 a.m.

  “TAXI’S HERE, GORDON!”

  Gordon Trivett comes trotting down the stairs, buttoning one shirt-cuff, and muttering, “Why’d it have to be on time?”

  Linda is holding his coat for him in the hallway. She herself is all set to go. She has on her best blouse and skirt, over which she is wearing a cheap plastic mackintosh which has been taped up in several places where the seams have split. These homespun repairs are symptomatic of the make-do-and-mend ethic that the Trivetts adhered to during the time they spent saving up for their Days Silver. Today, that long, arduous, and sometimes seemingly endless period of belt-tightening is over, and Gordon and Linda can at last reap the rewards of their patience and self-denial.

  Gordon, typically, has failed to grasp the wonder of the moment.

  “Where are my keys?” he says, fishing frantically around in his pockets.

  “Gordon, don’t worry, I have mine,” Linda says, holding up her set to prove it. “Now, are you ready?”

  “I’d be readier if the taxi hadn’t turned up on time. Whoever heard of a taxi turning up when it’s supposed to?”

  “The taxi turned up on time because the driver knows where we’re going and wants to impress us by being punctual. No doubt he thinks we’re big tippers.”

  “Now, have we got everything?” Gordon grabs his coat from his wife and whisks open the front door.

  “I have my keys, my handbag...”

  “What about the card? Where’s the card?”

  She blinks at him. “What card?”

  Gordon’s eyes bulge behind his spectacles. “The card, Linda! The Days card!”

  “I’m just winding you up, Gordon. Here it is.” Linda produces their Silver from her handbag and shows it to him. Satisfied, Gordon turns and sets off down the garden path to the street.

  “Someone’s Mr Grumpy this morning,” Linda says to herself under her breath, and she thinks she knows the reason. Gordon is anxious about taking the day off, scared that the branch manager will somehow, against all the odds, find out that he isn’t suffering from the ’flu, and consequently not just deny him the promotion he is hoping for but fire him. She understands his fear, although she has no sympathy with it. She knows that if it weren’t for his anxiety, he would never have dreamed of speaking to her the way he just did.

  He really should have more faith, though. Her performance on the phone to the branch manager’s secretary just now was a superb piece of dissembling. She played the concerned wife to the hilt, assuring the secretary that Gordon was mad keen to go to work but that she was refusing to let him leave the bedroom. She described his symptoms – the racking coughs, the streaming eyes, the dribbling nose – in avid detail. She even pretended to copy down some homespun cold remedy the secretary gave her involving whisky, honey, and fresh lemons. For that, Gordon shouldn’t be snapping at her; he should be grateful to her. But she forgives him anyway. Today being the day it is, the greatest day of her life, she cannot bring herself to hold a grudge.

  She closes the front door behind her, making sure the latch clicks to, then locks the two mortices and sets off after her husband down the straight strip of concrete that bisects the front lawn. She notes that the roses beside the path are withering and will have to be deadheaded soon, and that the privet hedge which separates their property from that of the Winslows, the family occupying the other half of the semi-detached, needs trimming again. It still hasn’t quite been established whether the hedge is the Winslows’ responsibility or hers and Gordon’s, but she has taken its upkeep upon herself because the Winslows, frankly, don’t have the first clue how to look after a home. Their half of the semi is a mess. They have let the garden grow wild and weed-strewn, the hulk of a broken-down car is rusting by the kerbside out front, and the house itself is a shambles: the brickwork needs repointing, the roof retiling, the curtains washing.

  The Winslows have been dogged by a run of bad luck recently. Mr Winslow lost his job on the assembly line at the washing machine factory, his daughter’s application to work in the Leisurewear Department at Days was rejected, and his wife has been forced to swap her full-time position at the local supermarket for a part-time one in order to care for her old and ailing mother. But Linda has only to look at her half of the house, with its neat front garden and sparkling white paintwork, and remember how little money she and Gordon have had to spare these past few years, to know that she is correct in her opinion that poverty is no excuse for untidiness. She feels sorry for the Winslows, but these are tough times and the only way to survive them is by being ruthless, both with yourself and with others. Often during her and Gordon’s five-year struggle to earn their Silver Linda came close to calling the whole scheme off, unable to foresee a time when their deprivations would be at an end, but since despair was just another luxury they couldn’t afford, she never succumbed to it. It was important, too, for her not to let her standards slip, so she taught herself the basics of home decoration, both internal and external, in order that the house would never look as though its occupants were in straitened circumstances. She also picked up the rudiments of plumbing and electrical wiring from books in the library, and thus saved on several hefty repair bills.

  As for her sideline in hairdressing, after leaving school Linda spent a year as a trainee at a beauty salon, working at slave wages in the anticipation of a full-time job that, in the event, never materialised. Realising that Gordon’s salary alone would not be enough to secure them a Silver, she put the skills she acquired at the salon to use, first on friends and then on friends’ friends, building a client base by word of mouth. Right from the start she was undercutting the prices of any professional coiffeur by at least a quarter, which certainly contributed to her success, and that and the fact that she could do housecalls made her particularly popular among shut-ins and the elderly. It wasn’t long before she had established a thriving, though not especially remunerative, little business that helped tide her and Gordon over through the five lean years and added to their growing Days nest-egg.

  All in all, Linda feels she has every right to be proud of herself and disappointed in her next-door neighbours, who have allowed life to get the better of them. If only they would try a little harder, if only they wouldn’t wear their defeat so openly, a Days card could be theirs as well – though not, she suspects, a Silver.

  Gordon is ensconced in the back seat of the idling taxi, drumming his fingers on his knee. Linda deliberately takes her time over swinging the garden gate shut and ambling across the pavement to climb in beside him. Not only does she not like to be hurried, but she wants as many of the neighbours as possible to see her leave. She knows for a fact that Bella, three houses away, is peeri
ng out from her kitchen window. Although Linda can’t actually see Bella pinching apart two slats of the venetian blind, she has an instinct for these things. Likewise, five doors down on the opposite side of the street, Margie is watching from behind the net curtains in her living room. Linda has glimpsed her silhouette through the curtains’ lacy folds. Others, she is convinced, have their eyes on her. Everyone in the street must know where she and Gordon are going today.

  The taxi’s interior reeks of an awful air-freshener, a pine scent so noxious that the first thing Linda does after closing the door is wind the window all the way down. The driver is a gaunt man with lank hair, sunken eyes, and a shaggy moustache. He glances at Linda in the rearview mirror, gives a tiny nod as if he has come to some sort of conclusion about her (although the gesture could simply be a hello), and indicates to pull out.

  The taxi grumbles down the street. Linda puts her face to the open window not only so that she can breathe air which hasn’t been “freshened” but so that people will be able to see her more clearly. She is so thrilled she can barely think straight. Days! They are on their way to Days! In all her thirty-one years Linda can’t recall feeling this excited before. Even on her wedding day, although she is sure she was happy, she was too nervous and plagued by doubts to enjoy the occasion to its fullest. Now, unlike then, she is filled with the blissful certainty that this is what she really wants.