A Shock to the System (2 page)

Graham, for his part, had on a see-through patterned shirt beneath a gold-frogged guardsman's jacket and, around his neck, a small brass temple bell.

They made a fine couple – Graham nearly six foot, darkhaired and handsome to those who did not look too closely at the narrowness of his eyes, Merrily a blonde wisp of thistledown on his arm. So they figured in the wedding photographs, kept framed and fading through the years ahead.

Graham's parents, stiff respectively in three-piece and two-piece suits of the sort people they knew wore to weddings, gaped throughout the proceedings. The presence at the reception of Lilian Hinchcliffe, informally famous in a turquoise kaftan, and Charmian, in a totally transparent blouse, urging a tame pop group to yet another chorus of ‘All You Need Is Love', left them in no doubt that their son had arrived socially. They talked a little to some of his (also three-piece-suited) Crasoco colleagues, such as his immediate boss, George Brewer, but generally found the occasion bewildering. When Graham and Merrily set off in his latest car, a Mini-Moke, for what they called ‘four weeks of love and freedom on the Continent', Mr. and Mrs. Marshall returned to Mitcham, doubting whether they would ever see their son again.

Graham and Merrily, after a wedding which was a hymn against materialism, had their month of ‘dropping out', mostly on the Greek island of Mykonos (which had yet to go completely gay), and returned, she to the expensive flat in Chelsea and he to his well-paid job at Crasoco.

A year later they sold the flat at a handsome profit and moved to a three-bedroomed house in Barnes. Within another year they had a son, Henry, and in 1970 Merrily gave birth to a daughter, Emma. By that time they had also accumulated a colour television, a hi-fi, a washing-machine and a dishwasher, and changed the Mini-Moke (whose unworldly zip-on top leaked rather badly in the rain) for a Citroen DS.

Through the 'Seventies, which coincided exactly with his thirties, Graham Marshall's main concern was work. Deploying his old skills with a new toughness born of experience, he continued to climb up the Crasoco management ladder from his unchallenged outpost in Personnel. Promotions and increments rippled along in a predictable sequence. He kept his finger on the company's pulse, noting whose opinions carried weight and whose were ignored. He went on management training courses, where he demonstrated great aptitude for the sterile exercises which were then fashionable. He was offered the chance of going on computer courses, but turned them down on the grounds that ‘some gnome could always be summoned from the computer room to produce the figures'.

In this opinion he echoed George Brewer. Indeed, he kept very close to George Brewer and made himself an indispensable assistant when his mentor was elevated to the post of Head of Personnel. It meant rather more sessions than Graham might have wished of drinking in the company bar, lighting his boss's nasty little cigarettes, helping out with
The Times
crossword and agreeing with George's plans for Crasoco's future, but Graham knew it was worth it. The occasional insincerity could only strengthen his position in the system.

He did not agree with all of George Brewer's opinions, but usually kept his own counsel. George was a businessman of the old school, who constantly bemoaned the dearth of ‘gentlemen' in the oil industry. He liked to conduct his affairs over lavish lunches and to spend the minimum of time in the office. Though always ready with an ‘Old boy' and bonhomous arm clapped around the shoulders, he was less good at the minutiae of grading systems, budgeting and job evaluation. Increasingly he was grateful to Graham for taking the burden of some of these tedious details off his shoulders.

George's antipathy to computers was almost Luddite in its intensity. They represented to him the threat of the unknown, and he was constantly heard to remark, ‘I'm glad I'll have retired before the bloody things take over completely.' The whole Operations Research Department (or O R.), computers and those who tended them alike, he dismissed under the derisive sobriquet of ‘Space Invaders'.

In the early 'Seventies, under George's predecessor, most of the Personnel Records had been put on to computer, a proceeding which George regarded as ‘more trouble than it was worth'. There was a feeling in certain areas of the company that the system was now outdated and should be replaced with something more modern, but George resisted the change. ‘Over my dead body,' he would splutter after a few whiskies in the bar. ‘Not while I'm in charge. I don't care what they do after I've gone.'

And Graham Marshall, the Head of Personnel's customary companion, would nod agreement while he made his plans for what
would
happen after George had gone. The system would be modernised. Though he knew nothing of their technicalities, Graham recognised the power that computers could bestow. And it was a power he intended to harness when he was in a position to do so.

Because there was little doubt by the end of the 'Seventies in the Department, or elsewhere in the company, that Graham Marshall was poised to take over George Brewer's job (and the five-thousand-pound increase in salary it entailed), when the incumbent reached retirement age in 1982.

That prospect paid for the years of nodding and curbing his true opinions, for the long and, since George's wife had died, increasingly difficult business of getting away from his boss in the evenings. It would all have been worthwhile when Graham was appointed Head of Personnel.

Since George had not reached this eminence until the age of fifty-three, and Graham would be only forty-two when he achieved it, there seemed little doubt that he was destined for even higher reaches of management.

On the strength of these expectations, early in 1980, Graham and Merrily Marshall took out a thirty-thousand-pound endowment mortgage on a much grander, though rather dilapidated, house in Boileau Avenue, Barnes. It would mean a couple of years of economy, but when he got the new job, things would ease considerably.

There was no doubt that Graham Marshall would continue to be, in his parents' oft-repeated words, ‘a success'.

It was after the move into the Boileau Avenue house that things began to change. Whether the change was for good or for bad was not at first clear – certainly there was no sense of things ‘going wrong', but events of the ensuing six months produced a marked difference in Graham's attitude to his life and circumstances.

First, there was money. He had, needless to say, done his sums carefully and knew that the house was a good long-term investment. But the property market was sluggish. There seemed to be no immediate sign that prices would rise, as they had done so gratifyingly over the previous decade.

And the outgoings on the new house were considerable. The Marshalls had dispensed with a private pre-purchase survey. Graham, in unconscious echo of his father's manner, had announced that, since the building society was prepared to lend so much money on the property, there couldn't be much wrong with it. This economy was rewarded by a sudden bill for woodworm treatment, which ate up what was left of their savings after the expenses of the move.

Graham and Merrily had prepared theoretically for certain retrenchments after they moved, but they found their reality unpalatable. Ten years of living above their income had nourished habits of extravagance which they found hard to break. The spectre of worrying about money, which had loomed over Graham's childhood but been exorcised in his early twenties by success at Crasoco, threatened to rise again.

Their altered circumstances were reflected in that year's holiday. Instead of the customary fortnight in Cyprus, they decided to economise by renting a cottage in South Wales. Appalling weather ensured that the holiday was a disaster and necessitated long drives to find diversions for the children, which made the whole exercise almost as expensive as going abroad.

The children did not enjoy it and were not of an age to disguise their disappointment. Graham found he spent much of the holiday shouting at them. They had lost the charm which smallness had imparted, and their physical development presaged worse problems ahead. Henry already had the downy lip, swelling nose and moody secrets of adolescence. Emma, though only eleven, had lost her spontaneity of affection and replaced it with a kind of mannered coquettishness, which augured badly for the future.

Also, they were getting expensive. Both went to private schools and, apart from the inevitable cost of replacing the clothes they outgrew with such rapidity, they were getting to the age of costly entertainments. Graham found himself sounding more and more like his father as he grudgingly paid out for school trips or cinema seats or the hire of tennis courts. They seemed incapable of doing anything that didn't cost money.

And, as they grew more expensive, so he seemed to get less out of them. They were just two young people who happened to be growing up in his house, and at his expense. When he looked at them objectively he realised they held no interest for him whatever.

The habit of objectivity, or even remoteness, increasingly coloured his view of his wife, too. Having not thought about her much for some years, he now found he was looking at her as an outsider might.

And what did the outsider see? A thin, materialistic, rather silly woman of nearly forty.

The waiflike beauty which had been crowned with flowers at their wedding had hardened into angularity. Childbearing had deflated the breasts and spread the hips. And the waiflike charm which went with the appearance had degenerated into empty mannerism.

There was no split in the marriage. They were faithful to each other, and still made love at least once a week, murmuring apposite endearments as they did so. But love-making had become routine for both of them, almost a chore, better than stacking the dishwasher, but less exciting than having a gin and tonic.

As he had with his children, Graham now looked increasingly at his wife with detachment. He realised, with only the mildest of shocks, that she meant nothing to him.

And she did bring with her positive disadvantages, mostly in the form of her mother. Initially, Graham had got on well with Lilian Hinchcliffe. He enjoyed the reflection of her fame as an actress, and the studied bohemianism of her lifestyle contrasted favourably with his own parents' mouselike reticence. Visits to Lilian's cottage near Abingdon ensured varied – sometimes eminent – company, plentiful alcohol and occasional cannabis. Her extravagant personality and his limited connection, through her, with the unconventional world of show business gave him an extra dimension to his colleagues. He could still hold attention in the Crasoco canteen with accounts of her outrageousness, of her much-vaunted affairs, of the fifteen-year marriage to Charmian and Merrily's playwright father (long vanished into alcoholism and death), and, more significantly, of the supposed early liaison with the internationally known and fabulously wealthy film actor, William Essex. All these details gave Graham's mother-in-law very positive advantages.

But Lilian changed as she grew older. Her youthful looks, skilfully maintained into her sixties, suddenly gave way, and cosmetic attempts to repair them made her grotesque. Round the same period, acting work seemed to dry up, and her longterm live-in lover, a costume designer, suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. The extravagance of her character, so charming in company, curdled, with loneliness, into resentment and contrivance. She made increasing emotional demands on her two daughters, particularly Merrily. Charmian, having broken off an unsatisfactory marriage, lived a career girl existence on the fringes of journalism. Lilian blamed her for not producing a nice set of grandchildren like Merrily, who, as a result, had the dubious privilege of being the favoured daughter.

The climax of Lilian's emotional demands came in September 1980, with a suicide attempt. It was hopelessly inept. She left a blackmailing note and she tried to kill herself by swallowing paint stripper, of all things, though the small amount she took exposed the true nature of the gesture.

As a cry for help, however, it worked; it was agreed that she was too isolated out in Abingdon, and she was moved into a flat in Barnes to be nearer her daughters (or, more strictly, her younger daughter, since Charmian lived in Islington).

This made Lilian a semi-permanent fixture round the Boileau Avenue house. Graham didn't mind that, so much as the fact that he seemed to have to keep subsidising her. She had had money in her time, but spent it all with a ready prodigality. Now she always seemed to be hard-up, and Merrily was constantly asking Graham for small sums to help her mother out.

He resented it. But more than the fact that she was poor, he resented the fact that she was not rich. Though appreciating the advantages his parents had given him by education, he could not help noticing, as he felt his financial circumstances straiten, the even greater advantages enjoyed by contemporaries who had inherited, or stood to inherit, money.

The biggest blow of a bad six months came at the end of November when Graham's father and mother were both killed in a car crash.

Though he had not of latter years seen them that often, and though his relationship with them was not a particularly affectionate one, he felt the shock profoundly.

First, there was just the shock of a disaster, an intensified form of that experienced on passing a road accident or hearing news of a plane crash.

This was followed by a feeling of anger, almost contempt, towards his father. For Eric Marshall and his wife's deaths seemed to cast doubt on the principles of economy by which they had run their entire lives. The accident, Graham discovered from the police, need not have happened. His father, for whom saving money became an obsession as he grew older, had insisted on doing his own car maintenance. It was his inefficiency, in failing to tighten the wheel nuts adequately after a tyre-change, which had led to the fatal crash. For Graham, this knowledge diminished his father's memory.