LITMIR.BIZ

      Before the war, after Oxford – where he’d managed to stay on a few years as a junior fellow, teaching and so forth, which had suited him very well – Peter had been steered into the family firm with a view to learning the business. It had not agreed with him, and the moment his father died in 1914 he had left. It was his shame and his mother’s good intentions that had steered him back there in January 1919. He had bowed his head and taken it on: part of his punishment. He had failed in so many ways, due to his own unworthiness as much as the idiocy of his leaders. Well, he determined, if he wasn’t good enough to die with his men, and since the Army couldn’t wait to be rid of him, he would at least make a go of being all that was marvellous at Locke & Locke.

      He started on a dull grey morning, late January 1919. There was a meeting to welcome him, and lunch. His father had left a very practical team: they had not on the whole had to fight; they were self-perpetuating; and they respected Peter, as major shareholder, scion of the family, officer. Nobody would tell him he could not have his corner office and the lunches they assumed he would want, once he had his balance back, which everyone thought they understood would take a little while.

      There was a young man there who had been instructed to update him on developments and practices, to type his letters, to, what, keep an eye on him? Peter sent him away, and settled in to catch up.

      He didn’t really like the look of his office. There was something oppressive about it, and the books seemed rather wrong on the shelves. The filing cabinets seemed very full, and he felt observed. He needed, he decided, to know exactly what was where. That would help him to feel at home, as it were. So he took every book and every file from the shelves and cabinets – that way he would know how far he’d got, and wouldn’t miss anything out – and he stacked them on the floor, and unpacked them, and began to read.

      Uncle Eric, wheezy, blinking, and old, who had been running the show, came in to see how Peter was getting along. He found him sitting on the floor like a grasshopper, his long legs folded, knees up by his ears.

      ‘Not sure you really need to go through everything in every file,’ Uncle Eric said, mildly. There were only a couple of other men in the office who had served. Uncle Eric had not, and he was wary.

      Peter looked up politely, and said, ‘Don’t you trust me, old man? Not allowed to read my own pa’s company papers, is that it?’

      ‘Not at all, not at all,’ his uncle responded, looking foolish and apologetic. ‘Just, well – you do as you think best, and come to me with any queries.’

      And Peter did not press him. His uncle’s concerns were transparent. I am not trusted, Peter thought. My judgement and my capacities are doubted. They know I lost men over there – do they know that those men and I were like fingers on a hand? That I held my men’s lives in trust, and they mine, and they are dead, and I am not? Do these civilians have the slightest understanding of what that means? They have been told that I drink; they probably know I was dragged out of a low club by a better man than me.

       I understand that.

       I will prove them wrong.

      In the month of his service he proved it by arriving earlier than everyone else each morning (which required the doorman to come in earlier to let him in, an extra three-and-a-half hours’ pay per week); staying later (requiring the doorman to stay late, at variable cost and annoyance to his wife, depending); and by refusing the lunches where he might, with the charm and intelligence they recalled from before the war, have been useful with potential customers. His main project was to refile everything in the recent archive according to a new system of his own. Putting the ledgers and legal notebooks and jute files of thin silverleaf paper into the right places seemed to him honourable work, and it made him feel safe – well, not safe. One is never safe in this world . . . But there was a small joy in it. Of course the oldest should be on the bottom and the newest on the top. It made sense! He had read about an ancient Chinese system where the position of items in a household or workplace had an effect on the fortune and spirits of the inhabitants and workers … he didn’t go so far as to believe in it, but of course the new must lie on top of the old! It’s how the planet is built, how history works, layer upon layer. It was morally and aesthetically wrong to put the new things at the back of the file. We are going forward towards Utopia after all, not harking back to Arcadia! Arcadia kills you, because it prevents you progressing into your own future. Odysseus knew that, when he made them tie him to the mast while the Sirens sang – you know what the Sirens sang of? The story of the Trojan War, of the fallen heroes whom Odysseus knew so well. Backwards looking. And the only way Odysseus and his men could get their boat to keep moving towards home was to block out those Siren songs of the past, of the war – which was its own kind of Arcadia, and love of which would keep a man from Ithaca for ever … and Odysseus had to listen to it all, all the corpses and the blood, and get past it.

       So my filing system is right.

      ‘Do you know what his name means?’ he asked his uncle.

      ‘Whose name?’

      ‘Odysseus,’ said Peter.

      ‘No,’ said his uncle.

      ‘Sower of discord, bringer of trouble. Same root as odium. And odious.’

      ‘Ah,’ said his uncle.

      ‘He was tremendously unpopular,’ Peter said. ‘After all, he lost all his men. He comes down as being wise and wily and so forth, but he lost eleven ships with all hands, and his own entire crew. Seven hundred men. Makes me seem a lightweight.’ He watched for some response.

      ‘Mmm,’ said his uncle.

       Uncle, I have just confessed to you that I let my men die – Uncle?

       Uncle?

       It’s just as well. If they knew what was going on in my mind, they’d put me away.

      Sometimes

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