Starritt

He found that forty hours was hardly enough to master the basics.

most bemusing were those who seemed to intentionally trip themselves up – because it showed that they were a free spirit, or glamorously troubled, or too popular for secondary reading. They seemed to think it was interesting to be bad at things. They didn’t seem to understand that being bad at things was the default. Almost everyone since the dawn of time had been bad at almost everything. It was simply the world operating as expected. It was like if you let go of an object and all it did was drop inertly to the ground. Far more remarkable if, when you let go, it began to fly.

James said he couldn’t spare the time from working. But surely – surely – that was a lie. Meanwhile, James lived in fear. Because the only students he knew were the handful that the timetable paired him with, it was entirely possible that in other tutorials there would be dozens of people far better than him.

Society needed administrators far more than what his tutor had called “a rare original response” to Spinoza.

“Okay. But as a baseline, that’s about a hundred thousand hours’ work before you retire. Imagine what you could accomplish if you put it all into one thing. And what are you putting it into? A flat in Shoreditch?”

“No, um, he’s gone to McKinsey.” Eddie raised his eyebrows. “Management consultant.”

“No, not usually. Oh, well. A rare mind harnessed to making the rich marginally richer. All in a life’s work, eh?”

the crux is to keep always in mind that the reason you fill up a car with petrol is not so that you can get a high score on the fuel gauge. Your degree has, I hope, tanked you up with what you need to roar out of the garage and off into the wide world. Exams are only a measure of the thing; they are not the thing itself. In themselves they are fairly meaningless.

The answer didn’t need to be imagined, only assembled.

He couldn’t see how it made any difference to Tesco’s grand plans if he gave his presentation on Friday instead of tomorrow. But his manager insisted. It was irritating to be subject to someone else’s arbitrariness. It was just a culture of performative zeal. McKinseyites were supposed to be the shock troops of capitalism, sacrificing themselves to smash through problems. James was supposed to be eagerly hurling himself into the fray. But he couldn’t quite get himself geed up.

For James, there was no sense that expanding Tesco’s sales onto the web was what the human race urgently needed. It didn’t have to be. This was a ladder. And yet: he’d come first in the most prestigious course at the most famous university in the world, and he was sitting here in his boxers copying and pasting the item code for ironing boards. It didn’t feel as if he were ascending to greatness.

With the operatic despair of a twenty-one-year-old, he suddenly felt that everything was for nought; that all striving and talent ended up in the grave; that no matter how strong and true you hit a ball, it still eventually dropped into the mud.

Every evening, night poured into the streets as if from a jug, filling them up with rich, warm blackness.

A comfortable sense that things were less orderly than in England. On windy days, the sky thickened into turbid orange as sand blew in off the desert.

his pride had suffered. His weariness was still outmatched by fury. He did not pause to consider whether the HR people were right, or whether McKinsey was still the right path upwards. He refused to lose.

He paid out those fifty-five minutes from his pinched little purse of time because his brain performed better if he let it go soft before changing track.

When James said he was joining McKinsey, his parents frowned and worried and tried to be understanding. His dad solemnly told him, “I’ll support you in whatever you do.” Despite his explanations, they ultimately believed the only possible motive was some misguided and servile interest in the activities of the rich, the career equivalent of Forbes magazine.

James, ensconced in solitary concentration, in a room dedicated to the life of the mind, felt his hulking fears shrink back to their rightful size. What intelligent person could seriously get wound up by the diktats of some corporate HR team?

“Business is the biggest thing no one talks about. People don’t even want to call it business. They want to call it economics because it sounds more abstract. Britain still has this very old-fashioned snobbish disdain for what used to be called trade. “But where do they think aeroplanes come from? Or penicillin? Or the internet? This stuff doesn’t just appear. And unless you live in the countryside, it’s businesses that create the material reality we live in. The shoes you’re wearing. This table. This salt shaker. The salt in the shaker.” He picked it up and waggled it for emphasis. “Business and technology create the facts of our lives; culture is just the commentary on how people feel about it. Business is the last taboo.”

He’d never experienced imposter syndrome. As a boy, when his school didn’t offer calculus, he taught himself. A formative experience. Usually he was more able than required. But for the first time he did not feel equal to the task. He had only a human mind, limited, fallible, trained on the flawed theories of the day. His only tools were a few flimsy degrees, some things he’d read, some hunches and convictions that over the years had solidified into fixed beliefs.

the high, windowless, wainscoted room, under a chandelier, two dozen heads swivelled to look at Ben. Jamie Dimon was there. Lloyd Blankfein, who’d succeeded Hank as head of Goldman. The Johns: John Mack from Morgan Stanley and John Thain from Merrill Lynch. It was like a meeting of the five families in the New York mob. A predators’ convention. Lehman hadn’t been invited.

When things were in flux, when the social order’s rigidity slackened, a bold individual could jink through the gaps to greatness. Napoleon would never have made it from Corsica to Versailles without the revolution. It was when the established way of things went soft that an individual could press his own imprint into the times. You just had to be able to read the seeming chaos.

James saw Eleni, who’d stayed in oil and gas and was beginning to be considered a star in the industry. Some of the rich-girl swishiness had gone. The waterfall of black Greek hair had been cut short. She’d become sharper-edged. He got the sense she was doing a lot of exercise.

Beside the single-storey concrete terminal was an industrial airport with helicopters lifting off like wasps for the oil rigs. Behind that was a field where black-and-white cows huddled together in one corner. They felt a long way from Pret a Manger.

“Tolstoy says this thing in War and Peace that the higher up an organisation you go, the less freedom you really have. At the bottom, you can do whatever you feel like because it doesn’t make much difference, but at the top, if you’re Napoleon or the Tsar, the responsibility is so big you just have to do what the logic of the situation dictates.”

In the abstract, economic theory held: swift redundancies would lead to quicker recovery and hence new, better jobs. But he stopped believing in it. Or rather, he gradually became convinced that the axe wasn’t falling in the places that theory called for. The bosses weren’t losing their jobs or homes. They weren’t leading from the front and sacrificing themselves for the greater good. How many ordinary jobs could you save with the CEO’s salary? It was simple arithmetic. McKinsey, too, was making a healthy surplus that could have kept most of these people employed, at least for another year. There had to be a better way to fit this puzzle together.

Sometimes a fear came to him: that the Firm was secretly a ladder to nowhere. That at the top there was just more of the same. Yes, it functioned well and employed intelligent people. But what was it for?

When they were deciding whose place to go back to, he said they could go to his, but she should know he lived with his parents. She was amused again, said “very unusual” and kissed him, lightly holding his face between cool, pale hands. At her flat, which was decorated like an adult’s, with paintings and wooden furniture, he felt like a mortal who’d climbed Mount Olympus and with one outstretched, trembling hand, touched the breast of a god. It became one of his favourite memories, making him smile whenever he thought of it. But it never occurred to him to ask her out again. In later years, he couldn’t understand why. He suspected that this was a chance of happiness blithely overlooked.

James was twenty-seven and never had a boss again. Until that moment, he and Roland had lived as employees, as if in the warm, dark, cosy-fetid hold of a ship. What happened up at the helm was not their concern. Their preoccupations were how to get a better position, and the whims and characters of their superiors and colleagues. Even James had never cared about what was best for McKinsey. Now, however, they were up and exposed. The wind blew away the comfy indoor reek; the horizon was a wide blue empty circle around them, as if the ship were the fluttering needle on a gigantic compass. And they had to choose the direction.

Out of sudden fear, he spoke. “What I would say about him, though, is that he’s totally… like, on his gravestone it would say ‘He actually did it.’ As in, loads of people say, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start an energy company?’ But his thing is that he really does it.

“On the downside, he doesn’t see himself sometimes. When something he does is shit – you know, he does sometimes actually just make a mistake – he can’t see it and thinks it’s gone wrong for some complicated reason to do with him being so brilliant.

Every day, he thought of Clausewitz’s wry maxim: “In war everything is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Put simply: his savings were enough to keep Alan paid and his kids at Robert Gordon’s for one year and four months.

science. Really, this was a lesson in humility. You couldn’t blame the outside world for not conforming to your ideas. It wasn’t the world that was wrong, it was you. Either you could be humiliated and angry and hurt, or you could let that go and start building a better model. He began to search where he always had: within himself. In some ways, it wasn’t complicated: if tidal energy wasn’t going to beat gas and coal on price, and you still needed tidal to win, you had to assume that gas and coal were finished.

It was not the time for Roland to start playing up. But James was realising that this was the nature of adult life. There were no breakthroughs into clear open space. Every time you were just getting into your stride, something tripped you. It was like trying to construct a functioning car out of pasta shapes: every time you, with supreme care and delicacy, got this improbable object moving forward, something snapped again.

Javier might make a better head of engineering than Alan. Maybe. It was premature. James needed to watch him for a while. Javier was not a follower; he would try to impose himself on the company. That would cost stress and effort to restrain. But better a strong beast you had to fight to keep in harness than an obstinate little mule with no imagination who only ever said that it couldn’t be done.

And he insisted with every tool of his personality that they see the situation as he saw it, that they feel as he felt or as he convinced himself he did. As he worked on them, they began to tentatively sense – not as with James, that they were led by a man of admirable vision and ability – but that they were in this together, and that they wanted themselves to succeed.

Roland grimaced. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” And then, “You know, I appreciate it. Million quid… yeah, great. Always useful. And I know Scotland’s a small country. But really, this stuff isn’t cheap. Oil and gas in Aberdeen is turning over billions. They probably spend a million quid a year on taxis. I think you really want to be thinking more like ten million, to make it worthwhile. It’s not a pizza-delivery app we’re building here.” The advisers were taken aback, as if they’d taken a chipolata to a dick-waving contest. Roland was delighted with himself.

It was something new to apply this degree of attention to his material self. His sense of where he was migrated from his head to his body, from perception to proprioception. There was a daily round of meals, exercises and readings to work on. The perfectibility of habit, and the habit of perfection.

The rectangle of white fabric boinged him up, and up, and up. Through the netting he could see the snowboarders executing backflips. Safe from ambition, he just bounced up and up, grinning into the high space around him, with his feet landing again and again on the cross in the trampoline’s centre. Perhaps, in all his striving towards satisfaction, he’d overlooked the pursuit of joy.

James didn’t worry. What greater purpose could these people find? And with so many minds applied, the pace of improvements to the machine was accelerating into another order of magnitude. He wasn’t having to shove things forward any more; the company was moving of its own accord.

“Mmmm Alice, I want you to arouse my interest in index investing. I want to dock my turbine in your industrial port.” Roland was amusing himself. “Text me a schematic of your erogenous zones.”

The sunrise itself wasn’t visible, but it was as if God slowly turned up the dimmer switch. The total black turned to very dark grey. Objects detached themselves from the background: the low island of Eday, the cluster of buildings at their hydrogen station. A border formed between the ocean and the land, as in the first days of creation.

Alice’s attitude, which he was comprehending piecemeal by observing her, was that your job was merely one element in a well-lived life. To be doing it right, you also had to go on great holidays, wear clothes that suited you, have fun at parties and many things more. Maybe she was right: maybe there were levels of sophistication higher than single-mindedness. Maybe you could rise above your own ambitions. It was an idea that had never occurred to him.

If they hadn’t happened to meet in the two months, out of a lifetime, when he was idling, they’d never have got together. It was practically false pretences. She didn’t know why he even wanted it. Just for shags and someone to have around when Roland was busy? That unfair thought brought out its own contradiction: she knew why he wanted this. It was the same reason he was so attentive to what she thought of him. They’d never spoken about it, but every page of his personality was watermarked with the memory of loneliness. That made her feel for him. And he was good. There was no doubt he was good. And maybe, in fact, when you thought about it like a grown-up, that need in him, and that goodness, were forces powerful enough to keep a relationship impregnable for decades. It was like when you were hiring: drive was more important than qualifications. You wanted them hungry. They would become what you needed.

James was suddenly, utterly, exhausted. He should have foreseen this. Everyone loved Roland. James loved him. For the first time since their trip to Lochnagar in the purple Lamborghini, he felt himself to be alone in the world. Nothing had changed since he was a teenager. He hadn’t, after all, left himself behind. Slowly, he reasoned his way through the matter at hand. Perhaps if he’d been less reasonable, he’d still have her. “Well, if Alice and me didn’t match up, that doesn’t mean you and her shouldn’t try. It’s a question of compatibility not… possession. It’s not like I’ve got any claims on her.”

The mistake must have been to work on the problems that happened to be in front of him, and not to seek other, more promising ones. He’d been sucked in by the work itself, by his capacity for it.

It was as if something in him cracked open. In his mind’s eye, he saw the same scene another generation back: his mum as pink smudge, being held by a nana far younger than he was now. And then the baby nana being held by great-grandma, and so on, back and back through the millennia. It was like the regular ticking of a clock and each tick a human generation. He understood, so abruptly it hurt, that he was not, as he’d always assumed, an individual. He was like one of Mendel’s peas in GCSE biology, just one of a row of seedlings in which the inherited traits – a nose, a talent, a sense of humour – were recombined and passed forward again. He was like a fish who’d always believed he moved for his own reasons but now realised he was just one iridescent shimmer in the shoal.

But he could see Roland was still thinking about muslins. He gave up and said, “Did you see about McKinsey?” Roland was glancing at Alice. “Um, no. I don’t think so?” “They’ve been caught consulting on how to maximise opioid sales in the US. How to push higher doses and make doctors prescribe more.”

And there was wonder, too: he learned to see the wind by watching patches of ruffles on the water’s surface. To be on the sea at dawn, with the clouds blazing pink and gold, the sky all kinds of blue, the ocean reflecting everything above, as that ball of fire rose above the horizon, was like being inside a painting.