The Planner (13 page)

Sorry, can’t make it either. I’ve already something got on this evening (though not a film gala, whatever that is) and too much work to do to get away early.Have a greatt time.

Almost immediately there was another email from Alice and, for the first time in months, this one was sent exclusively to him.

Well, it’s nice to see that at least someone from our generation is using his talents for the common good rather than personal gain. Hope you’re not working too hard, and still getting to book launches xx

Alice was headed for great things. You could tell that by the way she dressed, the savageness of her fringe and the style and speed of her emails. And James? Where was he headed? To do things for the common good, to be a
good
guy
? That sounded an awful lot like middle-management.

In need of a distraction, he opened up some files and started to do some work. It was, after all, what he was meant to be doing. But it didn’t provide any comfort, it just heightened his sense of responsibility and anxiety. The idea was to make Sunbury Square look like his poster, but at the moment it looked like it did in his spreadsheet. Row after row of failure: statistical outliers, dismaying trends, figures that were high when they should be low, and low when they should be high. On the multiple deprivation index, it was the poorest ward in one of London’s poorest boroughs. The violent crime rate had doubled in the last five years. It had the highest number of teenage pregnancies in the south of England, and fewer than one in ten residents had any A levels. And the fact that the people here were so much poorer than him was no consolation – after all, he hadn’t gone to university with any of them.

James worked through it slowly, calculating averages and variance and extracting headline figures. His ancient desktop computer whirred unhappily as he opened up multiple files and programs and carefully constructed the briefing paper, marshalling evidence and putting forward rationales for intervention that had been used many times before. He wondered what Laura would have made of them. And then he had to write a long email explaining to Lionel what the briefing actually meant, and the things he should and shouldn’t say in his meeting.

He closed down the programs and opened up a news website. The government was promising to make more cuts to local authorities and an opinion poll showed that 70 per cent of people thought this was a good idea. It had gone five o’clock, it was dark outside and the building was starting to empty. Rachel had left without saying goodbye.

If this was it, if this was what he was going to do for a living, then shouldn’t he do it somewhere else, somewhere where he was more senior and better paid? Of course, even then it wouldn’t be enough. What he needed was not to earn money but to
make
money, like Carl. But that was going to be difficult for, as he well knew, there was no such thing as a rich town planner. You could no more make money from town planning than you could from being a tax inspector or a football referee. True, you could take a certain satisfaction in stopping other people from making money, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. No, the only way to make any money from planning was to be crooked. You could take bribes, pass on intelligence, help property developers make large amounts of money and take a portion along the way. But who on earth was ever going to bribe James? The only person he had any influence over was Lionel.

James put on his coat and, for the last time that day, checked his email before he turned off the computer. There was a note from Rachel, saying she was sorry she had to run off, and that it would be nice to go for a drink soon. There was also a message from Felix:

Okay, you’re going on a date this Friday. Her name is Harriet. More details to follow. Be brave and you’ll enjoy it, be afraid and you won’t. She’s a lot of fun.

8

22 February

The physical character of a place can help reinforce a sense of meaning and civility.

–
The London Plan
, Section 7.14

It was Friday night, exactly a week after his date with Laura. But this time it was very different. For one thing, James wasn’t in a pub. London was full of pubs, they were one of its distinctive characteristics, and they were mainly disgusting. They were, as he knew all too well, places where the city’s administrators went to drink beer, eat packets of crisps and talk about all the people they worked with who weren’t with them. No, instead of a pub in Whitehall he was in a theme bar in Soho, which in a crowded marketplace had had to compete through specialisation and stocked two hundred types of vodka. And it wasn’t small and atmospheric and two hundred years old – it had only been open for six months, and would very likely be a Japanese noodle restaurant in a year’s time.

More importantly, the girl he was with was different as well. Harriet was twenty-eight years old, put undue emphasis on star signs and worked at a commercials production company that did things on behalf of Felix’s advertising agency. James had only vaguely understood, but whatever – it was enough to know that he had some kind of hold over her, and that it was in the interests of her career that James didn’t have a completely miserable evening.

Although it had soon become apparent that Harriet didn’t worry very much about her career. Nor did she seem to have any interest in his. This was obviously a good thing – there would be no need to justify town planning to her on the grounds of market failure. Instead, and helpfully, they had talked almost exclusively about her. And what they had talked about was not what she did for a living, but all the things she liked doing. So they had talked about bars, cocktails, India, dance music and famous people she fancied. They had also talked quite a bit about Felix – after all, he was the only person they both knew – and they agreed how peculiar he was. James was sure that he wouldn’t mind. And after no more than an hour or so of this, she had started to share confidences, reveal endearing vulnerabilities and to become mildly amorous. Already, her feet were gently but purposefully knocking against his.

Was dating girls really this easy? James was sure it never used to be this straightforward. But now it seemed all you had to do was turn up in a dark suit, speak pleasantly and with good manners, listen attentively and get them drunk. It was a big help that they were in a bar that only sold spirits. They didn’t have to sit there sipping drinks thoughtfully and maintain structured conversations for any length of time. Whenever James didn’t know what to say next, which happened quite often to begin with, all he had to do was swallow his drink and go to the bar to buy them something else. And, of course, the drinks were a good talking point themselves. Already they had drunk a Vodka Pistachio, Vodka Chilli, Vodka Snickers and Vodka Seroxat. They had also had a Vodka Oxygen, which had been a bit disappointing, and a Vodka Vodka, which was a great deal more expensive than just a double vodka, but neither of them had been able to work out why. He couldn’t remember ever going to a bar like this in Nottingham.

Another good thing was that Harriet was at approximately the right level of attractiveness. She didn’t, for instance, look anything like Laura. She wasn’t tall and blond, and she didn’t have the kind of aristocratic good looks that made you feel conscious of the fact that you had an A level in Business Studies. Her hair was a reassuring, nothing-special dark brown and her eyes weren’t a calculating blue but an unreliable green, with a cluster of small freckles naively arranged around her nose. But her most important feature, the thing that had probably always, and only slightly inaccurately, defined her, was her mouth. A wide, entertaining mouth that was too big to be pretty, too big for her small, disorderly teeth, and which was often getting her into trouble – not for the things it said, but for the things it did.

And thankfully, of course, she wasn’t an economist. She had about two-thirds of a degree in Art History from a higher education institution that he had never heard of, and which she was meaning to get back to one day but for the moment had too much else going on. She took pride in her rudimentary arithmetic and limited powers of logical reasoning. She read widely, however, and dressed with an erotic crudeness and primary-colour stupidity that could only mean one thing: she was highly intelligent. So James would have to be a little bit careful.

‘Do you know what your problem is? You’ve got square glasses,’ said Harriet.

‘Is that a big problem?’

‘Oh, it’s a
massive
problem. Because you’ve got a long face. I’ve got a lovely round face, and so I should wear square glasses to give me some gravitas, but you need to wear round glasses to stop yourself looking like a grumpy horse.’

‘So I should get new glasses?’

‘Yes, or maybe just take those ones off,’ and with that she reached over and snatched them from him. This was, without question, a flirtatious act. An aggressive one as well, but the two usually went together – James knew that much.

‘There – now we both look better,’ she said, placing the glasses in the folds of her blouse and essentially making it impossible for him to retrieve them.

There was, he could appreciate, a certain irony here. After all, he had gone on a blind date and as a consequence he had effectively been blinded. And there was a reason why James wore glasses instead of contact lenses and for once it wasn’t just the expense – he actually looked much better with them on. Without glasses, he didn’t look fresh and handsome, but exposed and vulnerable, as if his face had fallen off. But this was no time to get distracted by what he looked like. His main concern, and now that he had drunk all those vodkas he could see what it was with great clarity, was that he badly needed to sleep with Harriet. It was really important. In the medium-term, at least, his well-being and self-respect largely depended on it.

How many girls had he ever slept with? Not enough, obviously, but also, and this was the point –
not enough
. Fewer than ten, which he understood to be a standard benchmark, but also, more troublingly, fewer than six. And how many girls had he slept with just the once, on a first meeting, and then never seen again? How many – and he was aware how quaint the expression was in twenty-first-century London – how many
one-night stands
had he had? The answer was zero. He’d never done it before. Every one of the girls he had ever slept with he had known for some time and it had been achieved through the geographic processes he was so comfortable with, through attrition and erosion, the wearing down of surfaces and defences. Well, none of those techniques were going to work here. Instead, he would need to be quick-witted and possibly a bit duplicitous. Plus, as was so often the case, he would almost certainly have to throw money at it.

Harriet returned from the bar with two more glasses. This time they were twice the size, brightly coloured and ominously thick-looking, like little portions of pumpkin soup.

‘I got combinations this time. Vodka Aniseed and Vodka Custard. Apparently if you mix them, then they
really
fuck you up.’

They held the drinks together and leaning across the table looked closely at one another before swiftly and courageously drinking them. James spluttered for a bit, and she affectionately put his glasses back over his face. He smiled at her amateurishly, she stared into his eyes expertly, and with an impressive lack of ambiguity. He carefully extended his leg forward, so that it brushed against the inside of one of hers. She brought her legs together, cheerfully squeezing his knee. She reached out her hands and he good-humouredly held them – surprisingly, they were almost exactly the same size. There was no doubt it was going really well. He was doing all of the right things, perhaps not all that skilfully, but they were definitely the right ones.

‘I’m going to the bathroom for a bit,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve drunk too much vodka.’

It was pretty clear that Harriet was someone who didn’t believe in planning. It wasn’t as if she had ideological objections like Laura, it just wasn’t what she did. How then
did
she function? She was probably upper class, that always helped, but it was more than that. There was something else there: she had a worldview. It was difficult to be sure what it was, but she had one – a set of values and personal beliefs that existed outside of Western religion or the free market. Maybe she was a Zen Buddhist, or more likely it was just hedonism – the increasingly uncontroversial belief that the pursuit of personal pleasure should be the underlying rationale for all actions and ethical choices. It also partly explained why she was so attractive.

All of this was instructive and worth discussing with Felix at some point, but for the moment James had more logistical concerns. The principal one was that he lived in Crystal Palace. This was something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, who in their right mind would agree to go there for the night? Even if you lived there, you’d think twice about it, but to travel all the way out there with someone you’d just met that evening? Surely no sensible girl would consider that – although good sense wasn’t Harriet’s most obvious quality. On the other hand, if he did manage to get her there, she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere else, except possibly Kent. It also occurred to him that taking her home via two night buses wasn’t really going to work either.

He was still considering his strategy when Harriet returned from the bathroom. It was entirely possible that she’d been sick, but she didn’t appear to be in the least bit wounded or weakened.