Fragment 25: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
Death of a heart surgeon. Life of a car rental employee. Oh, well, it takes all sorts.
Surgeon Nick was dead. He had, it transpired, collapsed on his mistress’s doorstep that morning as he was leaving for work. Heart attack. And him barely forty years old and a heart surgeon! The police telephoned Judith, his just-created widow, to inform her. Policeman Nick, her lover, was not around because he had been on duty the previous night. So, in the absence of any other adults in the immediate vicinity to talk to, Judith came downstairs and told me what had happened. I remember that I had absolutely no idea how to respond.
In the days that followed, there was much earnest conversation, as Judith tried to work out what to do for the best.
Policeman Nick was tasked by Judith with breaking open a wall safe in her bedroom. Well, if a cop can’t do that sort of thing, who can? He succeeded and liberated, he told me, eight thousand pounds in cash. That was a chunk of money back then - equivalent, if I remember right, to about four year’s of my salary. Plus there was some very beautiful silverware - gifts, I was told, from Middle Eastern clients whose tickers kept ticking thanks to Surgeon Nick’s interventions.
And Policeman Nick and I both got involved in sorting out Surgeon Nick’s ‘studio’ on the half-landing. That was an eye-opener. Surgeon Nick had been a keen photographer and had some extremely desirable camera equipment. He also had some extremely - ahem - desirable images. His favourite photographic subject, clearly, was the female form - every square millimeter of it!
Fairly quickly, Judith decided on her course of action. She wanted, she said, a complete change, and was going to emigrate … to New Zealand! I don’t recall what her previous connections, if any, were with the antipodes but that was her decision. It was, to say the least, a dramatic move - she and her kids going as far away as she could possibly get without leaving the planet.
She straight away set about finding a buyer for Surgeon Nick’s audio equipment and recordings. As I understand it, a record company made a generous offer for the whole lot, which she accepted.
The developments meant that both Policeman Nick and I needed to look for new places to lay our heads. In the short term, at least, Policeman Nick could lodge at a police house in Broadwick Street in Soho, but I had to go flat hunting.
A room was available in a house in Croftdown Road, Highgate. The two guys who were already tenants there worked for Barings Bank1 in the City of London and it was pretty obvious, going by their appearance and lifestyle, including the fact that one of them had a gleaming Chevrolet Corvette Coupe parked outside, that they did quite well out of it. Plus, after I’d moved in, they would sometimes invite me to join them for drinks at the Oriental Club in Stratford Place, in central London. It was my first exposure to such a lifestyle. I liked it. And, oh, each of the chaps had an elegant girlfriend who would sometimes stay over.
Which brings me back to my own ‘girlfriend’ issue. The end of the Colosseum Terrace arrangement meant the end of the “I’m going to see Judith” excuse that Libby had to visit me. Anyway, as it happens, things were getting tricky, to say the least. By this time Libby had announced that she was pregnant although she insisted that I was not the father of the unborn child.
Around the same time I received a letter from Rupert asking me to visit him. It was quite urgent, he said. So, the following weekend, I drove down to see him.
It was all about Libby. “I wouldn’t have agreed to conduct the wedding service had I known that Libby and you were in a relationship,” he said.
I remember that we talked a lot, but I don’t remember specifically what was said. I do remember that Rupert was kind and understanding about it all. No great drama or hoo-hah. But his goal was clear: “I’m asking you to back away and give their relationship a chance? Will you promise to do that?” And I answered, “Yes”.
Meanwhile, back in the world of work, I was gaining an ever greater understanding of the workings of the car rental business.
As previously mentioned, I initially spent some time working in the London, Victoria branch and then managed the Knightsbridge branch. In both of those roles I got involved in helping deliver cars to renters, particularly those ordered by hotel guests. One of the incidental benefits of this was the fact that I learned a great deal about the geography of London: there were no sat-navs in those days so this activity helped me learn how the ‘villages’ that make up London fit together, what some of the best routes are, and some short-cuts.
But, after the customer-facing experience, I was called back to the Head Office in Balham, South London. Here, I had particular contact with the Personnel Director (they weren’t called HR Directors back then) who had hired me and the Training & Development Manager.
I found the Personnel Director, Paul Burns, particularly fascinating. In his early thirties at the time, with prematurely white hair, he was not just an Irishman but a Republican Irishman. More than that, he was a Committed Republican Irishman. And, at this time, The Troubles were underway. Progressively, when I heard the political views of this intelligent, charming, urbane man, I began to realize what an insulated upbringing I had had and, although I disagreed with a lot of his opinions, I really couldn’t help admiring his intelligence and charm.
Then there was the Training & Development Manager, Mike Freedman. He reported to Paul and, again, was a good and very intelligent guy although I realized that I didn’t share his political views. Mike was prospective Labour party candidate for the constituency of Faversham in Kent. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that I was beginning to come to terms with my seemingly natural tendency towards social conservatism.
Mike has written a memoir2 so I think it appropriate to quote him directly:
My next job was my first one in management. I was appointed to the Training and Development Manager. Hertz Rent-A-Car was about to take off and grow in parallel with the airline and tourist industries. I learned a lot about management and leadership there. One incident remains with me, involving my only foray into trade union recruitment and potential negotiation. Hertz’s owners, RCA, embarked on a programme of cost cutting and widespread redundancy at all levels. I tried to recruit my management colleagues into ASTMS (the trade union run by Clive Jenkins and the precursor to Unite). I didn’t get many takers and the effort floundered. However, top management in the US got wind of my stance, and Tom Glynne, the HR head, flew over specially to talk to me. We met for dinner one Sunday night at the Inn on the Park Hotel where he accused me of subversion, disloyalty and worse. I explained I had done nothing illegal or wrong, and begged to differ with him about the appropriate and fair way to treat staff. Employment protection legislation did not exist in the UK although employee rights were better than the ‘dismiss at will’ credo of the USA. Nothing came of this episode, except that I felt it was time to move on.
In the previous fragment I made the point that when it came to - how shall I say? - intimate personnel relations, I found Hertz a polar opposite to Procter & Gamble. The difference was so striking that, around that time, I spontaneously started drafting a story about it - a spoof that I wrote in the evenings.
And because I had recently discovered and was in awe of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast3 trilogy, I tried to emulate it, to an extent, by placing my story in a world at a tangent to the one that we inhabit. I don’t think I succeeded terribly well but some of it isn’t bad.
The story is about a car rental company called Gnomic Enterprises and some of the characters are parodied versions of the colleagues that I met. Inevitably, parody versions of Paul Burns and Mike Freedman are in there. The Personnel Director in the story is Patrick (Paddy) Gannon. Indeed, the whole thing kicks off with him. So I thought it might be fun to offer up the opening words of Gnomic Enterprises - words actually drafted in the early 1970s. Don’t read it if you’re under 18 years of age. Here goes …
Gnomic Enterprises
AN OFFICE SAYS a lot about its occupant. Size, décor and furnishings all indicate position in the hierarchy. By any and all of these criteria, the office of Patrick Gannon, personnel director of Gnomic Enterprises, despite its ground floor location, left no room for doubt that he figured high in the organization. An expansive, mirror-polished rosewood desk, an imposing high-backed black leather chair with rosewood arms, a separate meeting table and chairs (matching rosewood and leather, naturally), an informal meeting area with two black hide settees with low-level table between, bookcases and a wardrobe combined to occupy many square yards of floor-space and yet an ample expanse of high quality grey carpet remained visible.
In fact, at this particular time, on a portion of the exposed carpet, Mr Gannon was attending to some very personal personnel relations. Not that there was any danger of prying eyes catching a glimpse of him as he slid his penis into the young woman who lay beneath him, because there were no windows to break the lines of the white walls, and the door was locked securely from the inside.
The only onlookers were mute: photographic images of Mrs Gannon and the two Gannon children arranged in happy-family pose, and a couple of hundred stick-people-in-a-hurry in a Lowry print on the wall.
Had these images been able to talk about Mr Gannon, whose rear end now pumped with metronomic precision, they would have described a slim, athletically-built man, five feet ten inches long, with a neat cloche-cut head of hair, prematurely white for his 32 years. His pubic hair, by contrast, they would also have noted, remained as black as when it had first sprouted in Mr Gannon’s adolescence in his native Galway. They would have said, too, that, whereas the young woman made pleasurable moan, Mr Gannon went about his fornication in absolute silence. And they would have recorded the fact that the personnel director’s face was an impassive mask: blue eyes, cold and unwavering; lips, thin and immobile. Which is not to say that these features were hard on the eye. Truth to tell, the current occupant of the carpet was by no means the first and would certainly not be the last to think and feel that she was being intimately served by a handsome devil. Mr Gannon managed effortlessly to pull off the trick of presenting a charming exterior, but with all thought, all emotion, all expression, retained deep within the hard-cased confines of his skull.
The telephone on the desk rang. There was no break in the rhythm of Gannon’s pumping. The only indicator that he had at least satisfied his own requirements when he got to his feet a few seconds later was the viscous drop of semen that dribbled from his now-descending member.
His progress across the office was swift and silent, almost a gliding motion that exhibited no self-consciousness, no awkwardness. And the incongruous image that he presented by answering his office telephone while stark naked did nothing to deprive him of the extraordinary aura of power that always accompanied him.
- Gannon, he announced. He listened, the hint of a smile on his face.
The young woman got up and, with rather greater concern for her modesty, pulled on her clothes, and combed her fingers through long auburn hair that framed a classically beautiful face.
- Okay, leave it to me, said Gannon and put the phone down.
He stood up and moved around the desk. Off you go, Chloe, he said, accompanying the imperative with a patronising pat on a bum whose curve and wiggle had been known to cause grown men to walk into lamp posts. She left.
With the door again securely locked, Gannon sank once more into his high-backed chair, his right forearm resting on the desk. His hand came into contact with a Georgian glass inkpot on an exquisite silver stand, against which he absent-mindedly tapped his index finger. He stared in the direction of the bookcase. It was packed with weighty-sounding volumes including a genuine 1911 first edition of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, alongside The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker, Le Défi américain by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Work and the Nature of Man by Fred Herzberg, The Managerial Grid by Blake and Mouton, and The Healthy Personality: Readings by Abraham Maslow and Hung-Min Chiang. Unlike most business managers, Gannon had actually read these books but, right now, his focus was not on them. Rather, it was on the middle distance, his mind engaged on a more immediate issue.
Then, swiftly, he got up and glided across to the wardrobe, opened the door and walked into it. A moment later, he emerged through the false back panel that slid aside to give access to his secret inner sanctum.
You may or may not recall that I actually got hired into Hertz to do Marketing. But, thus far in the telling of it, I have been involved only with operational tasks. So, does the Marketing come next? We’ll see.
Thanks for reading.
Barings Bank was a long-standing British merchant bank that, later, in 1995, was declared bankrupt after an employee committed it to unauthorized trading that resulted in close to a billion pounds of debt.
Freedman, Mike. You Couldn’t Make It Up (2015)
Peake, Mervyn. The Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan (1946); Gormenghast (1950); Titus Alone (1959)