Mr. Phillips

1.5

On mornings when he leaves the house to go to work, Mr Phillips comes out of the front door and stops for a moment while he runs his eye over the trellis beside the bay window. Mrs Phillips’s climbers are struggling again. While he does this he surreptitiously checks the street for the presence of neighbours. Even though he basically gets on with most of them, thanks in no small part to the Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch Association, Mr Phillips nonetheless feels a small but vivid dislike of bumping into them at this point in the day, as they head off to work with closed, practical faces. The worst of them is the extraordinarily nosy Mr Palmer at number 42, known to the Phillips family as Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr Phillips’s mood lifts slightly whenever he sees that the coast is clear. Today there is no Norman but he does have to walk past Mr Morris at number 32, five doors down, as he stands in a track suit beside the open door of his big car.

‘Morning,’ says Mr Phillips.

‘Morning,’ says, or rather grunts, Mr Morris — evidently this isn’t his favourite ritual either. And it is a nice enough morning, for London anyway, already warm, the blue sky reasonably visible between chunky but fast moving, whiter-than-usual clouds.

The houses in the Crescent are low-squatting semi-detached Edwardian villas — a word which always gives Mr Phillips a mental glimpse of people in togas on the set of Up Pompeii. They look more cramped than they are, with decent space at the back and sometimes an attic too, as well as three upstairs bedrooms. If houses were faces the street would be a row of well-fed Tories, golfers, Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts. Now that Martin has left home their house has gone from near population overload to being eerily roomy, and Mr Phillips has taken over the loft (formerly Martin’s lair) as a study or den. From it he looks out over neighbours’ gardens and the roofscape towards the tower block about half a mile away. In his den he mostly studies second-hand car prices or reads one of his autobiographies.

At the end of the road Mr Phillips turns left again and heads down Middleton Way, today as on every work day. This street is used as a cut-through by cars trying to defeat the one-way system, even though so many drivers know the route that it’s just as clogged and congested as the official route — a typical London event, in a city where knowing the wrinkles and shortcuts only helps as long as not enough others know them too. Today the cars in the cut-through sit fuming and revving in the July warmth, the air already close and polluted. Mr Phillips watches the inhabitant of a dark blue L-reg Vauxhall Astra, a thirtyish man with a suit jacket hung in his offside rear window, pick his nose, consider the product of his excavation and then, with a decisive gourmandly air, eat it. Three cars in front, a woman in a VW Passat is leaning over and using the rear-view mirror to check between her front teeth.

Mr Phillips turns into Kestrel Lane opposite the chemist, whose window displays are one of the most reliable indicators of the changing seasons. Today it’s hay fever medicine, which is advertised by a huge, transparent three-dimensional model of a head with the nose and the sinuses blocked with red tubular fillings to indicate mucus. Bye bye hay fever, bye bye drowsiness, says the poster. When Mr Phillips took his A-levels — 1963, a decade after the end of rationing, an event he can still remember — the invigilator, a supply teacher he had never set eyes on before, had been suffering from the worst case of hay fever he had ever seen, his eyes bloodshot and liquid, nose running, breathing heavily through his mouth. They had all thought that was hilarious. Hay fever was rarer then than now; the whole city has allergies, it’s the nitric oxide. It beats up your immune system so the other stuff gets through to you more easily. Even Mr Phillips’s doctor came down with asthma, at the age of forty-five.

A white man with dreadlocks comes out of the chemists and is greeted by his eager dog, who is wearing a collar made out of a red ribbon.

Pedestrians stream past in every direction, most of them dressed for the working day, most of them in a hurry.

Mr Phillips stops in front of the travel agent, two doors down. There are posters in the window of happy people in places with good weather. A woman of about twenty-five watches her husband batting a large beach ball into the air while two small sandy children tug at his legs. In the middle distance of another photograph, a man learns to windsurf. Child-free couples walk on beaches in front of a cinema sunset. Standing and looking at the pictures, Mr Phillips has a vision of himself beside a swimming pool somewhere hot. At his right side, a cold drink beaded with sweat and icy to the touch. At his left, Karen the secretary, face down, in a leopard print bikini, tiny volcanic irregularities of smoochable cellulite crawling under her bikini bottoms, a stray brown pubic hair visible to the truly attentive eye, her back also beaded with sweat, shiny with suntan oil, hot to the touch. On his stomach, which is flatter than in real life, Mr Phillips balances a copy of the Daily Mail, where he is reading about Europe’s triumph over America in the Ryder Cup, or England’s over Australia in the Ashes, or studying a business story about how some company in which he just happens to have bought lots of shares has surged 1000 per cent upwards in a week, or looking at the fashion pages and picking out a pink frock with a slashed shoulder whose scooped ovoid neckline would suit Karen only too well. A list of prices for flights hangs beside one for all-in holiday packages:

Malaga £179 for 2 weeks Morocco £219 return San Francisco £239 return Costa Rica £299 return Faro £85 return New York £190 return Alicante £84 return Paris city break from £109 room Atlanta £229 return £15 p.p.p.n Ask us about Vietnam!

Everything seems implausibly cheap, given the distances involved.

It wasn’t always like that. The Phillips family holidays were gruelling but are now a false happy memory, and when the Phillipses were gathered together they often spoke of them — the time Martin’s canoe sank off the beach in Majorca, the time Tom was sick over a waiter in Corfu. Mr Phillips’s favourite holiday had been on honeymoon in a cottage in Cornwall, hired via an old friend of Mr Phillips’s father who ran a rental agency. The newly married Mr and Mrs Phillips had made love twenty-seven times in the week. Even then he had liked to count.

At the moment there is, or was, a plan to save enough to spend some time in the sunshine over the winter, a vision which appears to Mr Phillips as a girl’s bottom, golden, with an almost invisible strip of cloth plunging vertiginously between her buttocks, an image all too familiar from TV but never seen in real life. It was a sight he felt he deserved to see at least once. This holiday is the first glimpse of a promised prosperity which in theory looms now that there is only one more year of payment left to go on the mortgage, thank God, and Martin has left home and Tom has only two years to go to official adulthood and the possibility of his leaving for college — though Mr Phillips somehow can’t see that, since his younger son’s pantomime defiance and self-sufficiency has within it, he feels, an unappeasable core of neediness. Tom isn’t the moving-out type. Still, the Phillipses are, or should be, coming up to that stage in life where prosperity looms in front of middle-aged, middle-class couples like a plush, well-appointed antechamber to the grave, or a luxuriously fitted waiting room outside the offices of a doctor whose prognoses are exclusively fatal.

‘What do you think you’re doing, Phillips?’

Mr Phillips experiences momentarily and unpleasantly the sensation that his thoughts are legible to any passer-by. But no, this is simply Mr Tomkins, the bumptious co-founder of the local Neighbourhood Watch scheme, whose daughter Mrs Phillips coached to scraping a pass in Grade Four piano before she fell in love with her former gym teacher and emigrated to New Zealand. Tomkins’s approach to the world had not changed. You had to give him credit for that. Or not, or something.

‘A man can dream,’ says Mr Phillips. Tomkins is wearing a suit that has at least three pieces and would perhaps turn out to have more under closer inspection. He works in a bank, turning down applicants for loans and overdrafts. Mr Phillips can imagine having a worse bank manager than Mr Tomkins, but only with difficulty.

‘Off to work?’

‘Men must work’, says Tomkins, heading down the road towards the railway station, his furled umbrella swinging in his right hand on this dry day, ‘and women must shop.’ He has spoken over his shoulder and now he’s gone.

Once Tomkins has cleared his own blast area, Mr Phillips sets off after him. Acrowd of people are getting on to a double-decker bus as he squeezes past. The street is blocked in both directions, as a fuming K-reg Mondeo has tried to squeeze past the bus, only to realize that the oncoming unloading laundry van doesn’t offer enough room, and so the road is now officially chocka, at a standstill. The quickest moving things are pedestrians and a mad cyclist, dressed like a parody of a civil servant with bowler hat and cycle clips, dodging impatiently between the growling stationary vehicles. When he drives and gets stuck like that Mr Phillips has a vision of the whole city being locked in by immobile traffic, a pattern of stalled and blocked-in vehicles ramifying and spreading like a pattern of crystals growing under a microscope, so that the jam — a totally solid gridlock, not just slow-moving but fixed — gradually spreads all over the capital, junctions clogging, back flows building up, a cancer of stasis blocking every traffic light, intersection, box junction, mini-roundabout, square and one-way system, the whole city gradually and permanently shutting down like a dying brain.