My meeting with Helen lasted for twenty minutes.
She reminded me that I was coming up to the end of the six months’ fully paid leave that I was allowed on medical grounds, and asked me what I had decided to do next. Was I ready to come back to work? I told her that I didn’t want to come back to work. I didn’t tell her anything about the new life I was proposing for myself, as a toothbrush salesman. It seemed more prudent, somehow, to keep that to myself. Helen looked genuinely upset that I did not wish to return to the department store. She assured me that my supervisor had told her, in a written memo, that I had been widely regarded as a first-class After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer. I would be a great loss to the company, she said. I told her that my mind was made up, and my decision was final. We shook hands. She promised to set the necessary paperwork in motion. We said goodbye.
I thought about visiting my old department on the fourth floor, and saying goodbye to my former colleagues; but I decided, in the end, that if I did that there would be too many embarrassing moments to get through, and too many awkward explanations to make. It was better to make a clean break. So I took the escalator down to the ground floor, and left the department store by one of the main front doors, rather than the staff exit. To tell the truth, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place.
Poppy’s mother lived in a wealthy part of London. Her postcode was SW7. I had the whole afternoon ahead of me, so I took my time, and spent an hour or two wandering those rampantly posh, absurdly prosperous streets. I looked at the grand, aloof, imperturbable façades of those solid Georgian terraces, and could tell that it would be years – decades – before this recession had any impact round here. These people had built a solid wall of money around them, and it wasn’t about to fall down any time soon.
A mile away, in High Street Kensington, where I spent much of the afternoon, things were not so comfortable. I counted half a dozen shops which had closed for business and boarded up their windows. The ones that were left were usually part of big national or global chains. People didn’t seem to want to buy shoes or stationery any more, although they seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for mobile phones, and were happy to spend £3.50 on a cup of coffee. So was I, for that matter. I went to Starbucks and ordered a tall peppermint mocha and – by way of a late lunch – a toasted panini with tomato and mozarella. The barista who served me was from the Far East and didn’t correct me when I asked for the panini. While I ate the panini and drank my coffee, I thought about the decision I had made today. Was I doing something foolish? These were uncertain times. Trevor assured me that Guest Toothbrushes was on a secure footing, but small companies were going to the wall every day. The department store, on the other hand, was a long-established business, commanding huge customer loyalty, with a name that was recognized all over the UK. And here I was, giving all that up, on the basis of a potential offer (no more than that) of a permanent job with a company I knew almost nothing about. But I did trust Trevor. And the salary he had mentioned was better than the one I’d been getting. It was so hard to know what was the right thing to do. Too many unknown quantities.
Unable to resolve these difficulties, I thought instead about the journey I would be making in just over a week’s time. The retail outlet I would be visiting was a chemist’s shop in the village of Norwick, at the northernmost end of Unst. Trevor had already made contact with them so they were prepared for my visit. Apparently, getting them to buy some of the company’s products was more or less a formality. That had been prearranged over the telephone, so there would be very little actual selling involved. He told me that my main task was simply to relax, enjoy the journey, and make my video diary as interesting as possible. The ferry for Shetland left Aberdeen every day at five in the afternoon, so I had plenty of options. If I wanted to do it quickly, I should arrange only one overnight stop, on the Monday night, somewhere between Reading and Aberdeen. The obvious place, from my point of view, was Cumbria. It gave me the perfect excuse to call on Caroline, possibly even take Lucy out for a meal. (I doubted if Caroline herself would want to come.) I should start thinking about buying her a present, something nice to take up with me …
Thinking of presents made me realize that I really ought to buy a gift for my hosts tonight. I left Starbucks and went into a shop selling outrageously priced bars of chocolate, cut into elegant slimline blocks and wrapped up in minimalist packaging: as if the designers at Apple had started making confectionery. I bought one for Poppy – a sheet of milk chocolate, subtly marbled with whiter and darker blends – and then decided to get something similar for her mother as well. I emerged from the shop feeling well pleased with my purchases. It was only later, on my way back to SW7, that I started to feel a bit foolish. I had just exchanged twenty-five pounds for two bars of chocolate. Had I started to forget the value of things, like everybody else?
‘In any case,’ Clive said, ‘one of the things we’re all starting to realize is that the value of any object, be it a house or –’ (glancing in my direction) ‘– a toothbrush, for instance, is in fact … nothing! Just the amalgam of different valuations which different members of society put upon it at any one time. It’s entirely abstract, entirely immaterial. And yet these completely non-existent entities – we call them prices – are what we base our whole society upon. An entire civilization built on … well, on air, really. That’s all it is. Air.’
There was a short silence.
‘That’s hardly an original observation,’ Richard said, reaching for another olive.
‘Of course not,’ said Clive. ‘I never said it was. But until now, most people have never really appreciated it. Most people have gone about their daily business on the comfortable assumption that something real and solid underpins everything we do. Now, it’s no longer possible to assume that. And as that realization sinks in, we’re going to have to adjust our whole way of thinking.’ He smiled a combative smile at Richard. ‘Naturally, I realize that in your line of business this is old news. You’ve known for years what the rest of us have only just begun to work out. And done very nicely out of it into the bargain, I might say.’