Days (19 page)

“How predictable, how absolutely fucking predictable.” Sonny looks imperiously from his gilded throne at each of his brothers in turn. “And how absolutely fucking hypocritical, too. I can think of at least two conditions Dad laid down when he handed the store over to us that you’ve overridden since he died.”

“Introducing the Aluminium was a sound commercial move,” Fred asserts. “And a necessary one. Dad would have approved.”

“But he said there should never be more than seven grades of account.”

“And as for taking over this floor for ourselves, we needed to,” Wensley says. “We couldn’t go on living out
there
.” The sweep of his arm indicates the unseen city beyond the Boardroom’s walls. “Out among the
customers
, for heaven’s sake.”

“But he said the store should always occupy all seven floors of the building.”

“If you count the Basement as part of the shop floor, then it still does,” says Sato.

“I see,” says Sonny. “So it’s all right to bend Dad’s rules when it suits us but not when it doesn’t. Not, for instance, if it means that
Sonny
might actually have some responsibility.”

The hush that falls around the table – each brother expecting another to respond – implicitly acknowledges the truth of what Sonny has just said.

“We realise that Dad’s conditions were unfair,” says Mungo, aware that he is arriving a little too late with this piece of conciliation, “and we fully intend to give you some responsibility, Sonny, but only when you prove you’re worthy of it.”

“I
am
worthy of it.”

“Maybe, but you haven’t yet
shown
us that you are.”

“It’s a vicious circle. How can I show you if you won’t give me the opportunity?”

“If you turned up for work in the mornings on time, smartly dressed and sober,” says Thurston, “that would be a start.”

“What difference would it make?” The words are prettified with a laugh, but not enough to disguise the despair in them. “You’d still ignore anything I had to say.”

“We might not,” says Mungo. “Didn’t you say you had a suggestion about the dispute?”

“You’ll only laugh when you hear it,” says Sonny sullenly.

“We won’t.”

“You will.”

“We won’t. I swear. We all swear.” Spoken so solemnly by Mungo that no one else at the table dares demur.

“All right then. You asked for it. Hang on a second.” Sonny takes a courage-instilling sip of gin and tonic, gulps it down, and says, “Send me instead of Chas.”

His brothers break out into hoots of derision.

“I knew it!” Sonny’s face sags with dismay. “I knew you wouldn’t take the idea seriously. You’re nothing but a bunch of bare-faced fucking liars, the lot of you.”

“I’m sorry,” says Mungo, shaking his head, grinning. “If I’d known you were about to crack a joke, I wouldn’t have promised not to laugh.”

“It
wasn’t
a joke. I mean it. Let me go down and talk to the heads of the departments. All I have to do is let them know that we stand by our decision about the area of floorspace and that if they don’t like it, they can bugger off.”

“I doubt an approach like that would do much to resolve the situation,” says Chas. “The job calls for tact, diplomacy, subtlety, empathy, a certain delicacy of touch. Hardly your strong suits, Sonny.”

“Yeah,” says Fred, “sending
you
would be like sending an axe-murderer to perform brain surgery.”

But Sonny is determined to be heard out. “Look, how can I possibly screw up? They’ll listen to whatever I have to say to them, and they’ll do whatever I tell them to do. I’m a Day brother. I’m their boss.”

“Yeah, right,” snorts Fred.

“He does have a point there,” Mungo admits, nodding slowly.

“He does?”

“One of us going down to visit them in person will make it clear we’re serious. What difference will it make which one of us it is? As far as they’re concerned each of us carries the authority of all seven, and they’ll be too awed to do anything but go along with whatever Sonny says.”

“Don’t do this, Mungo.”

“Don’t do what, Thurston?”

“Don’t take his side. It’s not profitable.”

Mungo turns to face his youngest sibling, commanding his full attention. “Sonny, if we do confer this responsibility on you, and I’m not saying we’re going to, but if we do, you have to be prepared to give us something in return.”

“What sort of something?”

“An assurance.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“If, perhaps,” Mungo says, “you were to leave that drink in front of you unfinished, and we had Perch come in and take away the gin bottle...”

“You mean jump on the wagon?” Sonny says, in the same stilled, chilled tone of voice he might use to say, “You mean jump off a cliff?”

“For this morning, to begin with. At least until after you’ve been downstairs. I think the employees will respond more favourably if you’re not falling-down drunk when you address them, and more to the point your head will be clearer and so will your judgement.”

“Wouldn’t you say I was drunk now?” Sonny gestures at the level of gin in the bottle, which is several centimetres lower than it was when he arrived.

“For someone with your capacity, Sonny, it takes three and a half G and T’s just to reach minimum operating efficiency.”

Sonny nods. “True. That’s true.”

“And if you prove that you can stay sober, or as sober as you need to be, when we ask you to, then maybe we’ll give you other things to do,” says Thurston, tumbling to Mungo’s scheme and quietly impressed. “Work will be your incentive to clean up your act.”

“I see,” says Sonny. “You’re offering me a deal.”

“Correct,” says Mungo. “Which indicates that I respect you as a son of Septimus Day.”

“So let me get this straight. If I don’t drink the rest of this bottle, you’ll let me go down and deliver an arbitration.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“I can’t believe this. This is a practical joke, isn’t it? I’m going to go downstairs and find you’ve made this whole Books/Computers thing up.”

“I wish we had.”

“So you’ll really let me do it?”

“As long as you keep your side of the bargain.”

“No problem.”

“So that’s a promise?”

“It is.”

“Then you can go.”

Sonny lets out a whoop. “Wow! This is great! This is fantastic! What can I say? Thanks, brothers. Thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome,” says Chas.

“If,” Mungo adds, “no one has any objections.”

He sees Sato bite his lip.

“Well?”

“I think we’re making a mistake,” says Sato after a moment.

“That’s a reservation, not an objection.”

“I’m aware of that, but given the mood currently prevailing around this table, to make any sort of protest will seem churlish and lacking in public spirit, so it’ll be better for all of us if I hold my peace.”

“And does anyone else have anything further to add on the subject?”

No one does.

“We have to vote on it,” says Thurston.

Sonny’s hand shoots up to the full extent of his arm. “And the rest of you,” he cajoles. “Come on.”

Five other hands are raised one after another. Sato’s comes last, slowly and reluctantly joining its fellows in the air.

“Carried unanimously,” says Mungo.

“Who’d have thought it?” says Fred with a whistle. “We just agreed to let Sonny do some work.”

“Wonders will never cease,” says Wensley.

“Right, I’m off down to my apartment to get ready,” says Sonny, excitedly shunting back his throne and rising to his feet. “Have to look my best for the staff, eh?”

Chas offers to come down with him and give him a few fashion pointers, but Sonny replies that he will be fine. “I can still remember a thing or two about turning myself out well, from back in the dim and distant past.”

“Thurston,” says Mungo, “send an e-memo down to both departments warning them Sonny’s coming.”

“Tell them to roll out the red carpet,” says Sonny as he skips away from the table.

“And contact Strategic Security and have four guards waiting for Sonny on the Yellow Floor at, oh, let’s say eleven thirty.”

“Very well.”

“Got that, Sonny? Eleven thirty.”

Sonny is at the door. “Yup, half eleven, no problem.”

A moment after he leaves the Boardroom, Sonny pops his head back through the doorway. The look of earnest gratitude on his face is touching to behold.

“You won’t regret this,” he tells his brothers, brow knotted in sincerity. “I swear you won’t.”

“You’d damn well better hope we don’t,” says Thurston, under his breath.

16

House of Marriage
: in astrology, the seventh house.

10.16 a.m.

O
H
M
UM,
I wish you could be here to see this with me. It’s so much more wonderful than either of us could ever have imagined.

That was Linda’s first thought as she passed through the arch and emerged into Silks. The shiny drapes and swathes of material swooping down in all directions and hollowing into aisles brought to mind a vast, labyrinthine sheik’s tent, and as she stared around, Linda’s irritation with Gordon instantly abated, to be replaced by a serene, almost hypnotic sense of contentment.

An hour and eight departments later, she still feels as if she is floating rather than walking. Nothing is entirely real, everything brighter and more colourful than usual, yet at the same time vague and somehow insubstantial. Half convinced that the entire store and all the merchandise and people in it are concocted from smoke, she is scared to touch anything in case it shimmers and vanishes and the illusion is spoiled, and so she touches nothing, merely looks. And what her vision reports, her memory hoards.

Persian and Armenian rugs hanging in leaved rows like the pages of a gigantic illuminated manuscript. Bolts of curtain material and upholstery fabric stacked in ziggurats whose peaks brush the seven-metre-high ceiling. A seemingly unending chain of kitchen showrooms, each opening onto the next like the different-coloured chambers in the Edgar Allen Poe story. Wallpapers – chintz, flock, screenprinted, anaglypta, plain. And the constant, courteous attention of the sales assistants and floor-walkers. “May I help you, madam?” “See something you like, madam?” “Would madam like to look at...?” “Would madam care to try...?”

Madam! In all her life Linda can’t recall being referred to as madam before, except by her father when he was in one of his moods and everything he said was laced with snarling sarcasm.
These
madams are sincere and deferential; likewise the sirs that come Gordon’s way. It seems that Days staff genuinely find it a pleasure to serve customers, and it doesn’t matter that she graciously turns down their offers of help, because they sound not one jot less polite as they apologise for troubling her and wish her a very pleasant day’s shopping.

She could spend the rest of her life here. The sheer abundance of worldly goods on display, the respect she is automatically accorded, and the sense of being on an (almost) equal footing with the wealthiest and most powerful people in the land, make the world outside the store seem cheap and hard and coarse by comparison. There is a refinement to Days and a feeling of order that is not to be found elsewhere in the city. Some part of Linda has understood all along that she belongs in here rather than out there, and she feels she has found her haven, and knows the exhilaration of a bird when it finally alights at the end of a long, arduous migration.

Even when the lightning sale was announced at ten, Linda was pleasantly surprised to discover that there was nothing mindless or aggressive about the way several of the shoppers in the immediate vicinity turned and bolted for the nearest lift or escalator. They didn’t, as she had been conditioned by rumour and hearsay to expect, behave like a rabble. Rather, they mobilised themselves with military efficiency, as if they existed in a state of perpetual readiness for moments like these. That impressed her, and she looked forward to a time when she, too, would be familiar enough with the layout of the store and confident enough of her place here to make such well-judged and well-informed decisions. That, surely, would be soon.

She is beginning to think that she was a fool to listen to the taxi driver and buy his pepper spray. Judging from her experiences so far, Days isn’t a dangerous place at all. She has seldom felt safer or more at home.

If there is a fly in the ointment, it is a small one, but an irksome one nonetheless: her husband.

It is nothing Gordon has said over the past hour that has annoyed her. Rather, it is the fact that he hasn’t said
anything
, in spite of her best attempts to engage him in conversation. She has asked for his opinion on various kinds of shelving, on a spice rack, on a tortoiseshell photograph frame, all things to do with the house, the living space he shares with her, all things he ought to be interested in, and what has she received in return? At best, monosyllables; at worst, grunts. He has been traipsing after her from department to department like an old, footsore dog on a leash. Any enthusiasm he might have had an hour ago has definitely waned, while she is as brisk and as eager as ever. Proof (as if she needed it) that men do not have the stamina for serious shopping.

Finally, when she can bear Gordon’s sullen, uncommunicative presence no longer, Linda comes to a halt at the entrance to the Lighting Department. Squinting against the blaze from several thousand lamps and lanterns, she can just make out sales assistants equipped with tinted goggles drifting to and fro within, ministering to the merchandise, replacing expended bulbs with spares from bandoliers strapped across their chests. Haloed by brightness, the sales assistants are etiolated, angelic figures.

She turns to her husband. “Gordon, what would you say to going our separate ways for a while?”

The question takes him aback.

“It only makes sense,” she goes on. “After all, you don’t want to be tagging along behind me all day. There must be departments you want to explore by yourself.”