I looked from Trevor to Lindsay, and back again to Trevor. His eyes were eager and appealing, like a spaniel puppy begging to be taken for a walk. Lindsay’s eyes, cobalt blue, were trained on me more steadily; behind their unmoving lucidity I felt I could detect something else, something keener and more urgent; a real hunger – a desperate hunger, it seemed – for my agreement and cooperation. I could not unravel the complex of motives behind this gaze, but still, there was something fearsomely compelling about it.
‘I don’t have a very reliable car,’ I said.
Trevor laughed. A relaxed laugh, as if relieved that this was the only obstacle. ‘We’re hiring four cars, especially for the occasion. Four identical black Toyota Priuses. Have you ever driven one?’
I shook my head.
‘Beautiful cars, Max. Beautiful. A pleasure to drive.’
‘The Toyota Prius,’ Lindsay added, more earnestly, ‘sits perfectly with the ethos we’re trying to promote at Guest. It’s a hybrid vehicle, which means that it runs on a combination of unleaded petrol and electric power, and the two power sources are permanently kept in the most efficient relationship by an onboard computer. It’s sleek, modern and radically innovative. And fantastic for the environment, of course.’
‘Just like our toothbrushes,’ said Trevor. ‘In fact you could say that the Prius is almost a sort of … toothbrush on wheels. Don’t you think, Lindsay?’
Lindsay thought about this. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘No, you’re right. Scrub that idea.’ He laid his hand on my knee again. ‘So, Max, what do you think?’
‘I don’t know, Trev … It’s been so long since I went on the road. When were you thinking of?’
‘We kick off a week on Monday. And we’ll pay you a flat fee of 1K, which when you look at it
‘I haven’t been in for a few months, no.’
‘Well then! What’s to stop you?’
What, indeed, was to stop me? I told Trevor and Lindsay that I would sleep on it, but really there was no need to sleep on it. In any case, I hadn’t got over the jet lag yet, and I wasn’t sleeping much at night anyway. That night I lay awake and I thought about Poppy, and the fact that I would be seeing her again in a couple of days’ time, but I also found myself thinking about Lindsay Ashworth’s pale blue eyes and slender arms, and then I started thinking about random things like her description of the Toyota Prius as sleek, modern and radically innovative, and I wondered why that phrase seemed curiously familiar. I didn’t think too much about the proposal itself, though, because I had already made up my mind. The next morning I called Trevor from Starbucks on my mobile, and told him that I was in. The delight and relief in his voice were a pleasure to hear. And even I couldn’t suppress a little shiver of excitement at the thought that, two weeks from now, I would be on a ferry to the Shetland Isles.
10
Friday began on a note of high spirits and rare optimism. It ended in bitter disappointment.
I had arranged to meet the Occupational Health Officer at 10.30. I took the train from Watford Junction at 8.19 and arrived at London Euston seven minutes late, at 8.49. I took this train because Trevor was coming into central London today as well, and had suggested meeting for breakfast.
We met at a branch of Caffe Nero on Wigmore Street. I had a breakfast panini filled with eggs, bacon and mushroom. When I asked for this panini, the guy behind the counter, who was Italian, told me that ‘panini’ was a plural word and if I was only going to ask for one, I should ask for a ‘panino’. He seemed very insistent about this but I thought there was something slightly disturbed about him so I took no notice.
While we were eating our paninis, Trevor told me something interesting, which had a direct bearing on my meeting with the Occupational Health Officer.
There was something I should know, he said, about the current situation at Guest Toothbrushes. He had just learned that David Webster, the only full-time sales rep they employed at the moment, would shortly be handing in his notice. He had been headhunted by GlaxoSmithKline. This meant that they would soon be advertising for a new rep, and if I did a good job on the Shetland trip, Trevor couldn’t see why the post shouldn’t be mine for the taking. The final decision would be taken jointly by himself and Alan Guest, it seemed, so basically, as long as I made a favourable impression on Alan, it was in the bag.
Everything was just getting better and better.
I mulled over this news as I walked the few hundred yards towards the department store which had, until six months ago, been my regular place of work. The sun had finally put in an appearance and today it didn’t seem too fanciful to hope that spring might be around the corner. I could feel a new lightness in my step, which I did not associate with this part of the world at all. Not that I particularly minded seeing the Occupational Health Officer, a pleasant, mild-mannered lady who never treated me with anything other than sympathy and kindness. We’d had three meetings before this, the first one being some time in mid-August last year. A few weeks before that, Caroline had left home, taking Lucy with her. It had been coming for a long time, I suppose, but still – the shock of it, the awful knowledge that my worst fear – the one thing I’d been dreading most in all the world – had actually come to pass … Well, it flattened me completely, before very long. I struggled on for a week or two and then, one morning, I woke up and thought about getting out of bed and going into work and my body literally refused to move. It was that same feeling I described to you before: like that horror film I’d seen when I was a child, with the man trapped in a room and the ceiling bearing down on him relentlessly. I spent the whole of that day in bed, not getting out till about seven in the evening if I remember rightly, when I was desperate to have something to eat and relieve myself. And then I stayed home for most of that week, mainly in bed, sometimes slumped in front of the TV, and not dragging myself into work until Friday afternoon, when my supervisor called me into her office and asked what was going on and sent me straight down to see Helen, the Occupational Health Officer, for the first time. Not long after that I was seeing my GP and by the early autumn I was on all sorts of pills but none of it did anything to help. I couldn’t see the point any more, couldn’t see any way forward. Of course it was the departure of Caroline and Lucy that had triggered it but soon it had reached the stage where everything depressed me. Absolutely everything. The world seemed to be on the point of economic collapse and the newspapers were full of apocalyptic headlines saying that the banks were about to crumble, we would all lose our money and it would be the end of Western civilization as we knew it. I had no idea whether this was true or not, or what I should do about it. Like everybody else I knew, I had a big mortgage, massive credit card debts and no savings. Was this a good thing, or a bad thing? Nobody seemed able to tell me. So I just stared all day at the TV news, not understanding any of it except for the prevailing mood of anxiety and despair which everyone seemed to be trying to put across, and gradually fell prey to a sort of unfocused panic which fitted in all too easily with my general inertia. The prospect of returning to work receded further and further into the distance. Helen, the Occupational Health Officer, referred me to a psychiatrist, who interviewed me for a couple of
