The Planner (26 page)

‘It’s nice to do other stuff. It’s been good for me. I needed to develop a bit, to live in London instead of write strategies about it.’

Rachel rolled her eyes. It was one of the things she sometimes did in planning meetings.

‘Anyway, never mind me. You’ve cut your hair,’ said James.

‘No, men never get that right. I’ve just had it redone and tidied up a bit.’

‘Well, whatever you’ve done. It looks very nice.’

‘Thanks. It won’t last. It never does. I’ve got Midlands hair. Just like the working class, it can’t be oppressed for ever.’

James and Rachel looked at one another for two seconds, each assessing the other. She did look different this evening, and it wasn’t just the hair. She had done other things – a brighter lipstick, possibly something cynical with eyeliner. She looked slimmer too, in a black blouse and bright green skirt. She didn’t look like she did on a Friday night, elbows at the crowded table, the pints of Guinness, bowls of chips and warm air reddening her skin and thickening her face.

‘So, the Nottingham job. When did they speak to you?’

‘Not very long ago. Just a few weeks,’ said James.

‘So no one else knows about it?’

‘No, I didn’t want to tell anyone at work.’

‘But you told Felix?’

‘Yes, I told Felix. I thought it would be good to talk about it with someone who, you know, wasn’t on the inside.’

‘You couldn’t trust me to keep quiet?’

‘Well, I just didn’t want to tell anyone at work. You know what it’s like. I didn’t want Lionel to get worried. You know how he takes these things, and I didn’t want it all coming out in the pub one night.’

‘Is that what you thought? I wouldn’t have told anyone.’

‘No, I know. Sorry. I should have told you.’

Should he have told her? Probably not. He had done the wrong thing for the right reasons. It was hardly the first time.

‘In any case,’ said Rachel, ‘I don’t think Lionel would be as bothered as you think. No one is indispensable.’

‘No, I know that. Of course I know that. But I just didn’t want it to wind him up.’

‘All I’m saying is that people threatening to leave isn’t a big preoccupation at the moment. Lionel’s got other things to worry about.’

Felix returned with the drinks.

‘Rachel, James – you’re two of this city’s most able planners. I know James has explained this to me, but this pub – can’t we do anything about it? It needs a radical overhaul.’

He had kissed Alice in this pub, ten years ago. He had kissed her in many parts of Bloomsbury, but this one had been different. It hadn’t been their first kiss, but it had been their most significant because it had been in front of so many other people. It had been public, and with Alice that was always what mattered most.

Without mobile phones to help them, everyone had gathered there on a sunny afternoon in early June, straight after their degree results had been announced. James had just discovered, to his enormous relief, that he had got an upper second and Alice, to her enduring disappointment, had got exactly the same. Carl had got a lower second, but that didn’t matter because it was in maths, he hadn’t done any work, and he had already been offered a job at a bank. Adam was less concerned than any of them – he had a place at law school and was already talking about work experience and graduate trainee schemes. It would take James and the others many years to understand what Adam had already realised that afternoon: that they weren’t students any more.

So there they all were – all of them together, with their second-class degrees and first-class futures. People were bound to start kissing one another. Of course, Alice had already kissed Carl and probably done a bit more with Adam, not to mention with her activist friends from Yemen and Pakistan. But this was different. It was a public declaration. And while exam results and white wine may have generated her heightened emotional state, James was to understand that there was more to it than this, that it was something that Alice had given some thought to, and decided would happen, something that James would now need to go along with. And so she had kissed him standing up, slowly and in front of everyone, with mock ceremony and deadly seriousness.

There had been a round of applause and cheers. Adam had immediately ordered a bottle of champagne. And James had felt a surge of relief and thanks at having been chosen. She wasn’t so very pretty, not back then, and there had been plenty of girls who might have been more suitable, who he would have preferred to go out with. But from that moment James accepted that he would have to be Alice’s boyfriend, and that it was something he would do without hesitation or doubt. It was, he now saw, an important life lesson: you had to be very careful not to go out with someone you didn’t love, for there was every chance that you would fall in love with them.

‘That’s the East Midlands,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m from Wolverhampton, the West Midlands. It’s completely different.’

‘Yes, sorry. I’ve never really totally grasped the whole Midlands thing.’

‘You know,’ said James, ‘his geography might not be very good, but Felix is actually a kind of planner, like us – you know, an advertising planner.’

‘Oh yes, I know. Such a creepy profession – the way they try to manipulate people into wanting things they don’t need.’

‘Well, someone has to. Just imagine what would happen if people weren’t being manipulated by us advertisers?’

‘Wouldn’t they just make their own choices?’

‘That’s exactly the problem. If you just leave it to the people, they make terrible choices. They go around murdering philosophers, electing tyrants and drinking the wrong brand of coffee.’

‘God, I think you’re being serious. In fact, I’m starting to worry that you’ve been serious all evening. You’re a total disaster.’

Rachel’s new red lips were smiling. James wasn’t sure what he had wanted from the evening. Had he wanted Felix and Rachel to like each other, to become friends? Well, that had never seemed very likely but at least, now that they weren’t talking about his future any more, they seemed to be getting on.

‘I’ll get some more drinks,’ said James.

James went to the bar. It hadn’t changed in the slightest. What with being located in the heart of a conservation area, the pub had thrived on the lack of competition. Planning controls had meant there had been no new market entrants, and no need to innovate or improve. As a result, the pub was as well preserved as Bloomsbury itself, and dated from a time when all that English pubs ever did was serve two types of beer, terrible white wine and roasted peanuts. The service was slow and cumbersome, for the barman was not an alert young East European or a highly competent New Zealander, but a well-fed, middle-aged Englishman. He had a red beard and wore a burgundy sweatshirt with the pub name in yellow italic letters. James was sure that he’d been there when he was a student ten years ago, possibly becoming promoted to bar manager at some point.

When he got back, Rachel and Felix were arguing, but in a good way. They weren’t discussing macroeconomic policy or the European Union, they were having what seemed to be a highly entertaining disagreement and Rachel was laughing – a nice gentle laugh, not like the one she used in the Red Lion.

‘So I’ve been trying to explain town planning to Felix,’ said Rachel. ‘But without much success. I’m starting to wonder if he’s as clever as he thinks he is.’

‘Oh I know,’ said James. ‘He thinks our profession is worthless because we don’t own things.’

‘That’s right. Ownership is everything. It’s the basis of all political economy.

‘That’s not how it’s done. It’s much more about regulation and use than ownership.’

‘Well, regulate this pub then. Turn it into a Moroccan restaurant or a vodka bar or something.’

‘Planners shouldn’t really be intervening in the market in that way,’ said Rachel. ‘We can’t go around telling people how pubs and shops should be run.’

‘Oh, that’s just an ideology, a spell cast by the ruling class to mask historical contingencies. The state can do as much as the people want it to.’

It was easy to forget, but Felix was actually a Marxist. It was one of the first things he’d told James. It was actually essential to his worldview – a deep understanding and unwavering position on the structural underpinnings of economic relations that enabled him to say and do all sorts of extremely right-wing things.

‘Well, it’s a Thursday night. I think we should make the most of it,’ said Felix.

‘What were you thinking?’

‘Let’s go to my club. Erica will be there and after her last outing I’m sure she’ll want to explain herself.’

‘That sounds exciting,’ said Rachel. ‘Do you know I’ve never actually been to a private club.’

‘Oh my God, Rachel – you’ll absolutely hate it!’ said James. ‘I can’t wait to see the faces you pull.’

‘Can you dance there? James – you’ve never taken me dancing before.’

‘Actually, this might be tricky,’ said Felix. ‘On busy evenings, I’m only able to take one guest along.’

‘Oh,’ said James. ‘Couldn’t we all go? I’m sure you can get us both in.’

‘Well, we could try. But I wouldn’t want to risk it. I’ve slightly blotted my copybook with the very pretty doorwoman, and I suspect she isn’t in the mood to grant me any favours.’

‘We don’t have to go there,’ said James. ‘We could always just have another drink here.’

Felix didn’t say anything, but as if by way of reply turned his head to look across the room. The barman was doing a newspaper crossword and drinking a pint of bitter. There was a burst of noise and clapping of hands, for the students had got excited about something that was happening on one of their computers.

‘No, don’t worry,’ said Rachel. ‘I’d hate to make you stay here on my account.’

‘I don’t think we can stay here much longer,’ said Felix. ‘It’s becoming intolerable.’

James would have to make an ethical decision. He could see that. And like most ethical decisions, it was actually quite easy. He had accepted someone else’s decision in this very pub all those years ago, but he didn’t have to do it now.

‘Felix, you go to the club. I’ll go with Rachel to the station.’

‘Really? Are you sure that’s what you want to do?’

‘You don’t have to,’ said Rachel.

‘I’d like to,’ said James. ‘We can walk together.’

They all stood up to go. James picked up Rachel’s coat and handed it to her.

‘I guarantee that the club will be highly entertaining tonight,’ said Felix.

‘Well, let me know what’s going on there and I can always come and join you.’

‘Very well. I’ll call you.’

Outside, Felix vanished immediately into a taxi. James and Rachel crossed the road and headed northwards. The original cast-iron streetlights glowed softly as they walked past the bookshops and tearooms that had closed for the day, past the tennis courts and private parks, and out of the conservation area, into the noise and dirt of London.

The two planners walked side by side, through the southern borders of Islington. Much of it was ruined and there was little that could be done, but still they tried to understand. The text was huge and unreadable, but they poured over it. They studied bus timetables, revolving advertising boards, late-night traffic flows, estate agents’ windows and franchised coffee shops. Like code breakers, they looked not for meaning but for structures: repetitions and synchronicities, patterns and frequencies. They noted the oversupply of B1 office space and under-provision of C3 residential, and they speculated about regeneration strategies, the size of retail units and affordable housing targets.

They came on to Euston Road, the city’s first bypass, the east-to-west carriageway built to run through the villages and fields on the edge of London, stretching from Marylebone to Essex. Like all bypasses, it had been controversial and ultimately unsuccessful, destroying farmlands and doomed by everything that came afterwards.

‘Shall we have another drink?’ said James.

‘Yes, there’s a pub just here.’

Rachel led them along the road, taking his hand as she did so, until they came to a pub just across the road from King’s Cross Station.

‘This place is awful,’ said James.

‘You’ve been hanging out with Felix too much. It’s fine. I sometimes come here if I’m waiting for a train.’

But the pub wasn’t fine at all – you didn’t need to have studied much economic geography to know that. It was a railway pub, with transient and uninformed customers who didn’t return often enough to be valued. During the week it was used by salesmen and at weekends by football fans from the north of England. Its only competitive advantage was its proximity to three major railway stations and, other than television screens, the owner had never made a significant investment in anything likely to improve the consumer experience. The lighting was primitive, the female toilets unadvisable and the chairs made from aluminium. The barman had a red nose and looked a bit like Lionel and in the corner were two alcoholic Scotsmen who had got off the train from Edinburgh ten years before but never managed to get any further. Above their heads was a large sign reminding patrons of the unlawfulness of drug use and violent behaviour.