5. Michael
— ? —
Michael
Prentice sat on my father’s board for a long time before I got there, and he has never once called me Michael in a meeting.
“Mr. Folger’s position,” he said, to the room, about me, while I was in it, “is that we take the western route on a handshake.”
“My position is that we take it on a signed annex, which is in front of you, at tab four.”
“Your father would have wanted a longer look.”
“My father would have wanted the tonnage.”
“He’d have wanted both.”
“He’d have wanted both and taken the tonnage. You sat next to him for twenty years, Prentice, you know exactly what he’d have taken.”
“I sat next to him,” Prentice said, “which is why I’d be careful about telling the room what he’d have done.”
“Then let’s not do him at all. Let’s do tab four.”
Prentice smiled at the table. That is his whole technique. He says my father’s name and then waits, because he has worked out that it lands on me every time, and he cannot be told off for saying a dead man’s name. It is the cleanest move in the building and I have never found a counter to it.
I got the vote. I get the vote. I have got the vote every time since they put me in that chair, and none of it has ever felt like winning.
Afterwards Prentice put a hand on my shoulder in the corridor, which he does.
“Good meeting.”
“Thank you.”
“He’d be pleased with you.”
“Would he?”
“He’d be pleased,” Prentice said, “that you’re still here.”
Then he went off to his car, having got in one more, and I stood in a corridor in my own building working out whether I had been complimented or warned.
None of them have ever stopped waiting. For years, and I can still feel them measuring the distance between me and that chair, calculating how long until I prove them right.
There is a thing that happens to a man who builds a company. He gets to finish. He gets an afternoon where he looks at it and goes, that is the thing, I made that, and then he can put it down and take his wife to lunch and mean it.
A man who inherits one never gets that afternoon.
Nine days after we buried my father, with the flowers still dying in the hall, seven men sat me at the top of a table and waited to see how long I could hold it.
I have been holding it ever since and there is no gesture available to me that means finished.
There is no moment where I get to put it down and have it stay down.
I know how this sounds. I am aware I have a penthouse with an elevator in it and a three-sixty view of NYC. But the elevator goes up to a room where the phone never stops, and the view is just something that happens behind my head while I’m not looking at it.
***
Levi rang while I was still in the parking lot.
“Are you swearing on the boat or not?”
“Hello, Levi.”
“I don’t want hello. Pia says you’ve been saying yes and then not coming, and Pia is not wrong about people, she’s just insufferable about being right. It’s her worst quality.”
“I’m coming.”
“Say the words.”
“I swear on the boat.”
“On which boat.”
“On the boat.”
“See, that’s the loophole. That’s exactly the loophole you’d use. Say it properly or I’m telling Mother you’ve gone corporate.”
“I swear on your terrible rusty old boat that I am coming out this summer.”
“My boat is fine.”
“Your boat is held together by duct tape and is one raindrop away from disintegrating.”
“My boat is held together by craftsmanship and you have never understood the difference because you’ve never worked with your hands in your life.
” A gull went off behind him, loud, close.
“Bring the child. Pia wants the child. Nobody wants you, but you’re attached to the child, so we’re stuck with you. ”
“Understood.”
“And don’t do the thing where you arrive and then leave on the Sunday. That’s not coming out. That’s visiting.”
“I know what it is.”
“You don’t, though. You genuinely don’t. You think you’ve been out here loads because you’ve set foot on the island four times in two years.”
“I have been out there loads.”
“Name one proper visit. One where you stayed more than forty-eight hours.”
“Easter.”
“That was two Easters ago and you were on the phone in the boat shed for six hours and Pia photographed you doing it. She’s still got it. She shows people.”
“She shows people.”
“She showed the vicar. The vicar now thinks you’re a cautionary tale. I’ve had to explain you to a man of God, Michael. That’s where we are.”
“Give my love to Pia. Obviously. She’s the only one of us worth talking to and I’ve said so publicly.”
“Everyone has. It’s not even controversial anymore.”
“Because it’s true.”
Then he hung up, because Levi has never in his life ended a phone call with a proper sentence. He just stops talking and the line goes dead, and you’re left holding the phone wondering if you’ve been cut off or dismissed.
***
Rotterdam signed on a Thursday.
I have closed a lot of things and I have never once felt what people say you feel. There is supposed to be a moment with champagne, handshakes, the sense of a thing completed. Then you’re done, nothing on your mind.
Wrong. What actually happens is the pen moves, and then somebody asks about the next thing, and the second moment gets there so fast you can walk from the first to the second without changing your face.
Krystal was in my doorway, which is where she lives.
“Don’t celebrate,” she said. “You’ll pull a muscle.”
“I had no plans to.”
“You were about to lean back in the chair. I’ve seen you do it. It’s practically dancing, for you.”
“Is there a reason you’re in my door?”
“There is a reason I’m in your door.” She came in and did not sit down. “Have you eaten?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“You haven’t eaten. There’s a thing in the fridge with your name on a sticker and it has sat there since yesterday, which means somebody wrote your name on a sticker for nothing, and that somebody was me, and I’m choosing to take it personally.”
“Was there a second reason?”
“The Rotterdam integration is going to be calls. Weeks of calls, at times that will ruin your life, with people in three time zones who all think they’re the important one.
You’d be busier than before the signing.
” She leaned against the doorframe. “And I can’t do it from that room out there, because that room out there is a corridor with a door missing and a man who whistles. ”
“So take a room.”
“I don’t want a room. I want somewhere quiet with a door on it and no commute, and I want you reachable while I do it, because half of these calls will stop dead until you say a word and then start again.”
“Where are you thinking?”
“I was going to ask you.”
And I said, “Come to the island.”
It was out before I had a thought behind it. The sentence just appeared in the room, fully formed, and I heard myself say it and thought, yes, actually. That’s right and brilliant. I can handle both work and vacation.
I can defend this, because I can. The house is enormous and half the doors in it have never been opened.
My family is out there for the season, so I would be in a place where my brother could physically see me not working, which is the entire point of the exercise.
Willow gets the summer she has been asking for.
Archie gets a boat. And the integration gets run properly instead of being run badly from a hotel lobby.
The best decisions I make are the ones I do not have time to talk myself out of. Ask anyone in that building.
Krystal put her head on one side.
“You’re sure.”
“There’s a cottage at the top of the property nobody’s opened in years. It’s got a kettle and a phone line and no view whatsoever. You’d hate it. It’s perfect.”
“How far from the main house?”
“Far enough that Levi doesn’t know it exists.”
“That’s the most romantic offer I’ve had in years.”
“It’s got mice.”
“Now you’re just showing off.” She was already writing in that notebook she carries everywhere. “I’ll clear it with Willow.”
“You don’t have to clear it with Willow. It’s my mother’s house and it isn’t a hotel. Nobody clears anything with anybody. Levi turns up with people he met on a ferry. Last summer there was a man in the kitchen for three days and nobody knew his name.”
“All right.” She shut the notebook. “Then it’s your job to tell her, not mine.”
“It’s not a job. It’s a cottage.”
“Right,” she said, in a voice that meant she was letting me be wrong.
“You’ve got a face on.”
“I’ve got the face of a woman who has been told not to send an email. It’s a very restful face. I’m going to go and enjoy it at my desk.”
“Krystal.”
“It’s a cottage,” she said. “You’ve said. Congratulations on Rotterdam, by the way. Nobody’s said that to you today and somebody should.”
Nobody had.
***
I got home before eight.
Willow was on the floor of the living room with Archie and the book about the dog.
That bloody wandering dog, the one we have read four hundred times, the one I could recite in my sleep, and my son saw me and went completely rigid with joy, which is the best thing that has ever happened to me and which I have never once earned.
“Dada!”
“Hello, mate.”
“Dog!”
“That’s the dog.”
“Bad dog!”
“That is a terrible dog,” Willow said, without looking up. “That dog has learned nothing and his owner enables him.”
I got down on the floor with them, which put my knee in a piece of toast.
“So,” I said. “How would you feel about the whole summer out there?”
She stopped.
“It’s hot out on the streets of Manhattan.”
“Wait - what? No, on the island. The whole thing. Not a weekend. Levi’s made me swear on the boat, my mother’s opening the house, and I’ll go back and forth for the bits I have to and be there for the rest.”
“You’ll be there.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Say it in a way I can hold you to.”
“I’ll be there, and if I’m not, you can say this sentence back to me in front of my brother, and he can make that face he makes, and I will have to sit there and take it.”
“That’s a real offer. What’s changed?”
“Rotterdam’s signed. The integration is calls, and calls can happen anywhere with a phone line. I told Levi I’d be there and I meant it. And-” I looked at Archie, who was trying to feed the book to Duck. “I want him to have a summer there. A real one. The way we did.”
I was good on this. If you had put me in front of the board with that material I would have had them in ten minutes.
Archie stood up in the middle of it, put both hands on my face, and shouted BOAT directly into my ear from a range of two inches.
“BOAT!”
“Yes. Boat.”
“BOAT!”
“He’s got the idea,” Willow said.
“BOAT, Dada! BOAT BOAT BOAT!”
“Mate, I’m agreeing with you. There’s nothing to fight about. We’re on the same side here.”
She laughed. She laughed properly, the one where she has to put her hand flat on the floor, and I sat there on a piece of toast with my son yelling into my ear and thought, I have done a good thing tonight and I can feel it.
“When?” she said.
“Saturday.”
“Saturday. As in this Saturday.”
“Boxes are already in the hall. They’ve been in the hall since the spring. Don’t pretend you’re surprised.”
“I taped those boxes in the spring, Michael. In March. Alone.”
“And they’ve held up brilliantly.”
“That’s what you’re going with.”
“That’s what I’m going with. Look at them. Structurally, those are excellent boxes. You should be proud.”
“BOX,” said Archie.
“Thank you. Somebody in this house has standards.”
She got up and put her hand around the back of my neck on the way past, which she has done since we were seventeen, and I turned my head into it without deciding to. It is the thing my body does when she touches me. It has never learned not to.
Then she said, “Is anyone else going to be out there?”
“Everyone’s out there. Levi, Pia, the cousins. My mother’s got the house full.”
“And you’ll just… abandon work?”
And there it was, the question underneath the question.
I should have heard it. I should have stopped and answered the thing she was actually asking.
But I was still in the good feeling, still holding the shape of her laugh in my head, and I said, “Krystal’s going to be in the cottage.
For the integration. It’s just calls, she won’t be in the house. ”
“Riiiight.”
“The cottage hasn’t been opened in years. She’ll be working. You won’t even see her.”
“Yeaaah, right,” she said again, and something in her voice closed like a door.
She went into the bathroom and I heard the faucet go on and stay on.
She does that. She has always done that. I have never worked out what it is for and I have asked twice and got a shrug both times, and by the time she came back out my phone had gone and I was standing in the hall reading a message about a customs schedule, and I never asked again.