DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 25

The Client Comes First, Even When Mensa Calls

Warringah Road was doing what Warringah Road does best, moving just quickly enough to suggest progress and then slowing before optimism became a habit. Crutch was beside me as we headed towards the city, and somewhere beyond the windscreen was the client matter that had already taken possession of my mind for the day. There was a property involved, a purchase that needed to be considered properly, and the usual collection of questions that gather whenever someone is about to commit a substantial amount of money to bricks, land and hope. I was not thinking about what the day might offer me, or whether there was anything along the way that might deserve my attention for reasons of my own. I was thinking about what the client needed, what could go wrong and whether I had seen enough of the wall ahead to stop him driving into it.

That sort of focus had become automatic by then, although I doubt I would have described it as focus if anyone had asked, because it was simply what happened when a client placed a problem in front of me and trusted me to do something useful with it. A property was never only a property, because the answer sat inside finance, tax, ownership, cashflow, timing, risk, family intentions and the possibility that everyone involved was being slightly more optimistic than the evidence justified. My mind was already moving through those layers, pulling them apart and putting them back together in a form the client might be able to use. A large part of me had reached the meeting before the car had reached the city, while the remainder kept pace with traffic on Warringah Road, which is less a form of driving than an extended lesson in controlled disappointment.

The phone rang while we were on that road. I answered expecting it to be connected to the client, the property, the office or one of the other matters that had attached itself to the day before I had even reached my destination. Instead, the caller introduced herself as being from Mensa and spoke about a discussion group they thought I might be interested in joining. I listened, understood what she was saying and treated the invitation with the same polite efficiency I might have applied to someone offering a different brand of office printer. There was nothing hostile or dismissive in my response, but there was no great pause either, because I was busy and the client matter remained at the front of my mind. The call had arrived from outside the narrow corridor through which the day was already travelling, and I dealt with it before returning to the thing I had decided mattered.

When the call ended, Crutch looked at me with the expression of someone who had just watched a man step over a gold bar because he was worried about being late for work. “That was Mensa,” he said, giving the words a weight I had apparently failed to recognise. I knew it was Mensa, of course, because the caller had been quite clear and I was not so preoccupied that I had mistaken it for a local bowls club. What Crutch meant was that I should have understood the significance of the moment, or at least allowed myself to be curious about it before closing the door. My response, in effect, was that we had a client to look after, as though invitations from international societies devoted to intellectual discussion were common interruptions on the way to property meetings and could safely be left for another day.

I have returned to that moment more than once, not because I believe Mensa may have been the great road I failed to take, but because it exposed something I did not recognise at the time. The interesting part was not the call itself, nor whether I would have enjoyed the group, fitted into it or found myself irritated by everyone before the first plate of biscuits arrived. The interesting part was the speed with which I placed curiosity behind responsibility without even considering that a choice had been made. Once there was a client in front of me, or even a client waiting at the other end of the drive, my focus narrowed until almost everything outside the immediate task disappeared. It was not deliberate tunnel vision so much as an instinctive closing of the shutters, leaving only the problem, the evidence and the next thing that needed to be done.

It was much the same as the way I approached a batting innings in cricket, because once I had taken guard, the innings became a private contract between me and the next ball, and very little outside that contract was entitled to interfere. The bowler might have been faster than I wanted, the pitch might have been doing more than it had any right to do, and the fielders might have been offering their opinions on my technique, courage, parentage or prospects of survival. None of it mattered once the bowler turned at the top of his mark and began the run towards me. The sledging became white noise, heard somewhere at the edge of consciousness but discarded because it had no bearing on whether I survived the delivery about to leave his hand.

That concentration was not elegant and it was rarely relaxed. I was not standing there admiring the field or considering the afternoon. I was not wondering what might be available at tea, because none of those things could help once the bowler released the ball. I watched the approach, tried to pick up the ball as early as I could and committed myself to dealing with what came next. Whatever had happened on the previous delivery was finished, whether I had played it well, missed it completely or worn it on the body. The next ball did not care, and neither could I, because survival depended on remaining inside that narrow moment and refusing to allow discomfort, commentary or consequence to interfere with the task.

My professional life worked in much the same way, although there was no umpire to call an end to the over and send everyone away for a drink, and once a client’s problem had presented itself, the surrounding noise lost its authority. There might have been other opportunities, personal plans, family expectations, fatigue, financial uncertainty or the quiet suggestion from my own body that enough had already been done for one day. They became the professional equivalent of sledging from behind the wicket, audible and occasionally irritating, but irrelevant to the immediate requirement. My attention remained fixed on the problem approaching me because that was the ball I had to survive before there was any point thinking about the next over.

There was also an element of defiance in it, although I did not always recognise that at the time. The more difficult the matter became, the more completely I committed myself to staying with it. Walking away felt too much like being dismissed after doing the hard work of getting set. A problem that refused to yield was not an invitation to step back; it was a challenge to concentrate harder, look earlier and remove anything from my thinking that did not assist the outcome. Personal cost became secondary because acknowledging it risked breaking the concentration. You did not start calculating bruises while the bowler was running in, and I rarely stopped to calculate what the job was taking from me while the client still needed an answer.

That was the almost blinkered approach to service I carried for most of my professional life. It was not enough to give the job reasonable attention or to remain involved while it was convenient, because once I had accepted responsibility I believed I had also accepted the obligation to stay until the immediate danger had passed. I would remain at the crease until the client had an answer, the problem had been carried as far as I could take it or circumstances removed the bat from my hands. I absorbed the pressure, ignored the noise and treated discomfort as part of the innings rather than evidence that the innings might be costing too much, because there was no sensible halfway position where I gave the task most of my attention while preserving enough of myself for whatever came later.

The Mensa call entered that concentration in the same way a voice from the boundary might have entered an innings, heard and understood before being placed outside the line of sight that mattered. It was interesting, perhaps even significant, but it was not the bowler. The client was the bowler, the property decision was the next ball, and everything else had to wait until I had dealt with what was already coming towards me. Curiosity had no urgency attached to it, while responsibility had already begun its run-up.

The client required attention, and therefore everything else became background noise, including opportunities that might have fed a different part of me. It was not sacrifice in the heroic sense. Sacrifice usually involves knowing you have given something up, weighing the cost and deciding to proceed anyway. I rarely reached that stage of calculation, and I certainly did not reach it on Warringah Road. The blinkers went on, the fielders could say what they liked, and I watched the bowler’s hand because survival depended on the next ball. By the time the over ended, I barely remembered there had been anything outside the innings to surrender.

That pattern had been established long before Mensa found my number. I had learned that usefulness was one of the safest ways to enter a room, remain in it and perhaps earn some standing once I was there. Intelligence on its own could make people wary, particularly when it came from someone younger than expected, without the right degree hanging behind him and with an unfortunate habit of reaching the end of the discussion while others were still arranging the chairs. Usefulness was different because it could be measured in problems solved, deadlines met, money saved and disasters avoided. A room might resent the person who saw the wall, but it was generally grateful if he arrived with a ladder after everyone else had hit it.

In those early years, I saw right and wrong in fairly solid colours, and the lines seemed clearer to me than they apparently did to some of the people around me, because there were facts, obligations and outcomes and I did not have much patience for the comfortable grey that people often introduced when the black-and-white answer became inconvenient. If a client had trusted me, then I owed that client my best work. If a bill belonged to me, it had to be paid, and if someone had supplied a service, the money was theirs even when I had several more attractive uses for it. This approach made life simpler in theory and considerably more exhausting in practice, because the world has never shown much enthusiasm for arranging itself according to the clean lines inside my head.

The difficulty was that my best was not a fixed point that could be reached, recognised and left alone. It was always being compared with an internal version of what I thought should have been possible, and that version had no interest in fatigue, family commitments, limited hours or the ordinary need to stop. Achievement was not enough because it had to equal the expected me, the person I believed I should be if I used every ability properly and failed no one along the way. I never quite met him, although I spent decades trying to catch up. The closer I came, the further he seemed to move, carrying the next obligation under one arm and a fresh list of shortcomings under the other.

Becoming a partner at twenty-five should have provided some evidence that I was doing all right. By any reasonable measure, it did. I was the youngest in rooms where age was treated as a qualification in itself, and I learned to keep my own age quiet because some clients preferred an older head even when the younger one was doing the thinking. I played cricket for the bosses’ team, worked the hours, learned the systems and made myself useful enough that the lack of a conventional pathway became harder to use against me. Those achievements mattered, but I did not experience them as arrival because arrival suggested there might be time to stop and look around, and they felt more like permission to attempt the next level while proving all over again that I had not been admitted by mistake.

The client became central to that proof because the work produced outcomes other people could see. When I could take a confused set of figures, an uncertain business owner and a problem that seemed to have no beginning, I could create a form of order that was visible beyond my own mind. The numbers were rarely the real story, because numbers were where the evidence landed after someone had made a decision, avoided one, forgotten one or convinced themselves that optimism was a business strategy. My work was to trace the marks back to the decision, explain what had happened and, where possible, stop it happening again. A neatly prepared tax return might satisfy the system, but it was the rescue, prevention and interpretation behind it that satisfied the expected me.

That was why the client came first, although the phrase sounds more attractive on a brochure than it does inside a marriage. Bob Benjamin once described me as a “man’s man,” and he meant it as a compliment. He saw loyalty, dependability and a willingness to turn up for clients and mates without requiring a formal invitation or a written scope of work. My then-wife was less taken with the description because she heard the other side of it, and she had more evidence available to her than Bob did. To her, it meant clients and mates seemed to receive the man while the family at home received whatever energy remained after the man had finished being dependable elsewhere.

She was not entirely wrong, and age has made it easier to admit that without immediately preparing a defence. At the time, I would have pointed to the reasons, the bills, the responsibility, the clients who genuinely needed help and the work that would not complete itself simply because dinner was ready. All of those things were true, but truth can still be incomplete when it is used to protect the person speaking it. Beneath the practical explanations was another pressure I understood less clearly, which was the need to fulfil the potential people kept telling me they could see, particularly my then-wife’s parents. They spoke of that potential with confidence, sometimes with greater confidence than I felt myself, and their belief became another standard I believed I had to meet.

Their view of me was encouraging. Encouragement, however, can acquire weight when it lands on someone already inclined to treat possibility as obligation. They seemed to see a man capable of more, and once that idea had been repeated often enough, an ordinary result could begin to look like evidence that I had wasted what had been entrusted to me. I was grateful for their faith, and I do not remember it as cruel or manipulative, because I suspect they believed they were giving me confidence. The difficulty was that I did not know how to receive confidence without converting it into another task. Their belief did not merely tell me I could succeed; it suggested that I should, and that the proper response was to keep proving them right.

I was not simply trying to earn a living or establish a career. I was trying to become the man other people had already decided was somewhere inside me, waiting to be proved through enough work, achievement and endurance. Every promotion, every client won, every difficult problem solved and every hour worked became part of the evidence that their faith had not been misplaced. I carried their view of my potential alongside my own, and the combined weight left little room for settling, resting or accepting that a good effort might sometimes be enough. The expected me was not allowed an ordinary day. Ordinary days did not appear to fulfil potential.

That pressure also gave me a convenient moral defence, and at the time I would have presented it with considerable conviction. I could tell myself I was working for the family, building security and becoming the person everyone believed I could become. The long hours therefore appeared not merely necessary but almost virtuous because they were attached to advancement, responsibility and the promise of a better future. It was easier to explain an absence when it could be presented as part of a larger purpose, and I assumed the purpose should make the cost easier for everyone else to bear. The larger purpose, however, was always somewhere ahead, while the absences were occurring at the table, on the sideline and in the evenings already passing.

I possibly did give too much of myself to the wider circle, and the word “possibly” remains there because part of me still reaches for the defence before the admission has finished. I often expected those closest to me to understand because they knew why I was doing it, as though knowledge of the motive should soften every consequence. In my mind, I was not choosing the client over dinner, the file over the school event or someone else’s emergency over the evening at home. I was fulfilling responsibility, proving potential and building towards the life I believed was expected of me. Understanding, however, does not put you at the table, attend the school event or return the part of the evening that has already been given to someone else’s crisis.

There was always a moral explanation available to me, and that made it difficult to recognise how often the same pattern was repeating, because someone needed help and I could help them. A client was frightened, a mate was cornered, a family member was struggling or a staff member had made a mess that could not simply be left for morning. Once the need had been identified, the response felt less like a decision than an instruction, and any personal reluctance appeared selfish beside the problem itself. I did not ask whether I wanted to become involved because wanting seemed an unreliable measurement when the task had already established what was required.

My mother’s final request that I “look after them” gave words to something that was already embedded in me. She meant the family, and there was no ambiguity in the room when she said it, but somewhere along the years I widened the instruction beyond any reasonable boundary. “Them” came to include siblings, clients, friends, acquaintances, business partners, community organisations and occasionally people who had merely made the mistake of explaining their problem within hearing distance. I became the man who would find a way, or at least keep working until everyone else had gone home and the problem had lost the will to resist. It looked like generosity from the outside, and often it was, but it was also a form of compulsion that wore the respectable clothing of character.

The black-and-white part of me approved of that arrangement because it offered a clear answer before uncertainty could enter the discussion. There was a right thing to do. Once it had been identified, the personal cost seemed irrelevant, or at least secondary. The client had engaged me, so I owed an answer that was considered rather than convenient. The friend had called, so I should listen, and the organisation had a gap, so I should fill it even if everyone else had developed the sensible habit of stepping around gaps and continuing with their day. A person who believed strongly in duty could remain very busy without ever asking whether duty had become an excuse for not knowing how to stop.

This was not sainthood, and I would be suspicious of any account that presented it that way. I could be impatient, sharp and privately furious when people ignored advice, repeated mistakes or arrived with an emergency assembled from decisions I had warned them against months earlier. Sometimes my help carried an unspoken expectation that the recipient should at least have the decency to follow it, particularly when I had already spent the time thinking through consequences they had not wanted to consider. When they did not, I could feel not only frustrated but offended, as though their right to make their own mistake was somehow an insult to the hours I had spent preventing it. Service and control can sit uncomfortably close together, and I did not always recognise which one had the stronger grip.

There were clients who needed a simple answer, but my mind did not naturally produce simple answers because it saw branches before other people had accepted there was a tree. It produced consequences, exceptions and the next three questions that had not yet been asked, often while the client was still explaining the first one. The professional skill was not merely reaching the conclusion; it was cutting away enough of the thought so the conclusion could enter the room without frightening everyone. I learned to slow the explanation, soften the warning and present the practical next step before showing how many other steps might be waiting behind it. The fuller thought remained inside me, still moving, while I gave the client the amount they could use before their eyes drifted towards the door.

That was another form of dumbing it down, although it was often necessary and sometimes kind, because there is little virtue in delivering an answer so comprehensively that the person who needs it cannot understand what to do next. Translation mattered, and over time it became one of the things I did best, because clients generally needed movement more than they needed a demonstration of how many possibilities I could hold at once. The humiliation was not in simplifying complexity for someone else; it came when the room required me to pretend the complexity had never existed. I could tolerate reducing the explanation, but I struggled when others then assumed the reduced version represented the limit of the thinking behind it.

The client rarely saw that internal editing because the finished advice concealed the amount removed before it reached them. They saw the phone call returned, the objection prepared, the structure explained, the lender challenged, the tax position corrected or the property risk placed in language that did not require a second dictionary. They did not see the lines of thought discarded because there was no time, the alternative scenarios checked and abandoned, or the quiet anger involved in making a preventable problem manageable. They saw an answer, and in many cases that was exactly what they were paying for, so there was no reason for them to admire the machinery behind it. The difficulty was that I began measuring my worth by how reliably the answer appeared, regardless of what producing it took from me.

That measurement followed me home because the office did not contain the work once my mind had accepted responsibility for it. A day could contain ten things done properly and one left unfinished. The unfinished item would sit louder in my mind than everything completed around it. I could lie awake reconstructing a conversation, checking whether a warning had been clear enough or wondering whether a client would misunderstand the part I had deliberately simplified. The brain did not clock off because the office had, and it did not seem interested in ordinary arrangements such as sleep or tomorrow morning. It continued working through the file in the dark, unpaid and uninvited, like an employee with no respect for industrial relations.

Depression fitted neatly behind that kind of competence because competence gave it somewhere to hide. It did not always arrive as collapse, tears or an obvious inability to function, because functioning was the camouflage I had practised for most of my life. It sat underneath the work as a dull roar, feeding on the distance between what I had achieved and what the expected me still demanded. The more useful I became, the easier it was for everyone, including me, to overlook the cost. A man solving other people’s problems does not appear to be in trouble, particularly when he keeps sending the invoices, remembering the deadlines and arriving with the answer.

The invoices, of course, introduced another moral problem because my sense of obligation was not always shared by the person receiving the bill. I believed the client came first, but the client did not always believe the accountant’s invoice deserved the same priority. I could spend hours preventing a loss, resolving an issue or making sense of a decision, only to have the value reduced to the number at the bottom of the page and a request to explain why it was so high. The client saw the document or the meeting, while I saw the years of judgement that made the answer possible and the alternatives quietly eliminated along the way. Even then, I usually returned to the same position: do the work properly first, argue about its value later, and hope there was enough cash in the bank to pay everyone else while the client considered whether my time had really been necessary.

That approach reinforced the role Bob Benjamin had identified because a man’s man did not complain about the load; he shifted it. He did not explain that he was tired, overlooked or carrying too many people, because that would make the act look less generous and perhaps expose how much of his identity depended on being the one who could cope. The people around him learned that he would take the call, finish the file, make the drive and step into the gap. He learned the same lesson and began arranging his life around it, which made it difficult to know whether he was being relied upon or simply repeating the behaviour until reliance became inevitable. By then the distinction may not have mattered, because the next problem was already arriving.

Some of that was pride, and pretending otherwise would make this chapter too comfortable, because being needed proved something that qualifications, titles and partnerships never fully settled. It told me I belonged in the room because the room worked better when I was in it, and there was considerable satisfaction in being the person others turned towards when the explanation became difficult. It also allowed me to avoid asking whether I enjoyed the room, whether it deserved me or whether there might have been another room where curiosity did not need to justify its existence through usefulness. Responsibility gave me status, but it also kept me too occupied to examine the terms on which that status had been granted.

That is what makes the Mensa call more interesting now, because the caller was not asking me to rescue anyone, lodge anything, interpret a set of accounts or stop a client making an expensive mistake. She was asking whether I wanted to join a group because of the way my mind worked, and there was no obvious obligation attached to the invitation. No person was depending on me, no deadline was approaching and no measurable outcome waited at the end to prove that the time had been worthwhile. It was curiosity without a client code, and I had almost no practice in treating curiosity as sufficient reason to spend time.

I also suspect I would have felt self-conscious about going because the idea of announcing an association with Mensa sat awkwardly beside the way I had learned to survive other rooms. I had spent years disguising intelligence so it would not be mistaken for arrogance, and I knew how quickly people could become suspicious of someone who appeared to think he was cleverer than everyone else. I had no desire to become the bloke who mentioned his IQ before the biscuits arrived, particularly when the number itself had never solved the more practical question of how to belong. There was also every chance I would have found the discussions fascinating, frustrating or both, because intelligence does not automatically make people less convinced of nonsense. A high score can sharpen an argument without improving the judgement behind it.

None of that occurred to me on Warringah Road because I did not pause long enough for the questions to form. I did not weigh the possibilities and decide that Mensa was not for me after a mature assessment of priorities, personality and available evenings. I simply placed the invitation below the client matter because that was where anything personal went when responsibility entered the room. Curiosity could wait, although no one had explained when the waiting would end or who would eventually give it permission to return. The client’s deadline was visible; curiosity’s was not, and invisible deadlines are easily postponed until they become memories.

The property purchase continued to occupy us after the call, and we drove on, talked through what needed to be done and gave the client matter the attention I believed it deserved. I cannot say the day would have unfolded better if I had stopped everything, joined the discussion group and begun a second life among people who enjoyed puzzles and lengthy disagreement. It probably would not have, and there is no need to turn a telephone call into a lost destiny merely because it now makes a useful symbol. What matters is that Crutch noticed the call while I noticed the task, and between those two reactions sits much of the story of my working life.

Crutch saw recognition, while I saw an interruption that had arrived during an innings already under way. He heard that someone was interested in the machinery of my mind, whereas I remained focused on using that machinery for someone else. Neither response was entirely right or wrong, which is inconvenient for a man who preferred those categories to remain tidy and clearly labelled. The moment contained both a compliment and a responsibility, but only one of them knew how to command me. I returned to the client because the client’s need had a shape I understood.

Over the years, that command became harder to separate from the work itself because clients learned that I would think beyond the immediate question. I encouraged that expectation because it was the service I wanted to provide, and because a narrow answer often left the real problem untouched. Accounting was never just compliance to me, and I had little interest in becoming a production line for tax returns that recorded the consequences after the useful moment had passed. I wanted to see the wall early, point to it and help the client change direction before the accounts recorded the impact. When clients listened, the work felt worthwhile; when they did not, I still felt responsible for standing near the rubble.

The difficulty with seeing the pattern is that it can encourage the belief that every outcome should have been prevented. A client may ignore the warning, a business partner may avoid the detail and an organisation may continue towards the same wall with impressive democratic support, but some part of me still asks what else I could have said. Perhaps I should have softened the message, sharpened it, repeated it, written it down or found a better analogy that would have entered the room without creating resistance. The decision remained theirs, and logically I knew that, but logic did not always remove the bruise. I could walk away from the rubble while still carrying the private sense that seeing the wall had somehow made me responsible for the collision.

Retirement was meant to loosen that arrangement by reducing the number of people entitled to bring their next ball to my crease. The client list would shrink. The phone would ring less often, and the machinery of obligation would gradually lose power as someone else took over the controls. Instead, the work changed shape while the internal instruction remained almost untouched. A smaller practice did not necessarily create a smaller sense of responsibility because each remaining client still arrived as a whole person with a whole problem. Without staff and scale, there was sometimes more room to think, which improved the advice and made stepping away even harder.

I became technically retired in the way many accountants become technically retired, which is to say I stopped doing some things, continued doing many others and gave the arrangement a title that sounded more decisive than the evidence. The phone still functioned mainly as a business tool, and emails still arrived with the implied belief that my day had been waiting for them. I continued attending to a client matter before something I had planned for myself, often without recognising that the old order had re-established itself. Mensa no longer needed to call because I had become perfectly capable of interrupting my own curiosity. Retirement removed some appointments, but it did not remove the habit of placing myself last.

Writing has complicated that pattern because it began as something I wanted to do and therefore became vulnerable to everything I believed I had to do. A client email could displace a chapter, an unpaid invoice could cloud a morning and a business problem could occupy the mental space where a memory had begun to open. Yet writing has also become the first place where I have allowed the full thought to remain in the room long enough to see what it contains. There is no client waiting for the shortened version, and no meeting chair looking towards the clock while I cut off the branches. The page can tolerate the longer explanation, although I still sometimes find myself reducing it out of habit.

Even here, obligation follows because I write about stories that now feel as though they need to be completed. Books begin to exist, memories gather around them and truths that once survived as scattered notes start demanding a more permanent form. The same drive that served the client attaches itself to the chapter, turning curiosity into another task that must be done properly before I can rest. Perhaps that is why writing suits me, because it offers freedom while allowing me to disguise that freedom as responsibility. I can explore the mind, provided I first convince myself that the exploration has a deadline and someone, somewhere, is waiting for the finished result.

I do not regret putting clients first in the broad sense because people trusted me at vulnerable moments. The numbers had often ceased to be numbers by the time they reached my desk. They had become houses, marriages, businesses, retirements, children and fear. Those clients deserved more than a formula or a rushed answer shaped around the recovery rate of the firm. Many of the best parts of my professional life came from being able to stand beside someone, see further into the problem than they could and translate what I saw into a way forward. The cost does not cancel the value, but neither should the value be used to deny the cost or make everyone else grateful for paying it.

The harder admission is that I sometimes put clients first because I did not know where to place myself when there was no urgent problem to solve, while their needs were concrete and mine were harder to define and therefore easier to postpone. Their problems offered a beginning, a process and an outcome, while curiosity opened doors without guaranteeing where they led or whether anything useful waited behind them. The client file could be completed, even if another replaced it immediately, and completion gave the day a shape I understood. The question of what I might have done with more room for my own mind had no such neat finishing point.

That may be why the expected me remained so powerful. He was never the man relaxing after having done enough because enough could not be measured while someone somewhere still needed help. He was the equal of every demand placed upon him, the person who never arrived late to a crisis, missed a warning, disappointed a client or chose himself at the wrong time. He was impossible, but impossibility did not stop me using him as the standard by which an ordinary day was judged. It merely guaranteed that achievement and inadequacy could live together without either one having to move out. Even success could be made to feel temporary when the next ball was already on its way.

On Warringah Road, I did not know any of that, and I knew only that there was traffic ahead, a client matter in progress and a property decision that required more thought than the people involved might initially have realised. I knew a woman from Mensa had called and that Crutch seemed far more impressed by it than I was. Then the traffic moved, the conversation returned to the client and the day continued in the direction already chosen. Obligation had interrupted curiosity so cleanly that it looked like concentration, and concentration was something I had always been willing to defend.

I can see the scene differently now without pretending I would necessarily change the practical decision I made. The client still deserved my attention, and the property still carried consequences that mattered more immediately than whether I attended a discussion group. What I might change is the assumption that only one of those things was allowed to matter, because curiosity did not have to defeat responsibility in order to deserve a place beside it. I could have returned the call, asked another question or allowed the invitation to remain alive beyond that stretch of road. At the time, however, I knew how to serve a client and had very little practice in serving the parts of myself that did not produce an invoice.

The lesson has arrived late, as most useful lessons seem to do, and it has not arrived with enough authority to change the habit completely. I have spent a lifetime treating the unfinished task as a moral summons, and retirement has not removed the voice that issues it. There is always another client, another organisation, another family concern, another book, another loose end and another wall forming in the distance. I still feel the pull to move towards it, not because anyone has formally appointed me and not because I believe I am the only person capable of helping, but because the task is there and I have seen it. Once seen, it enters the line of sight and becomes difficult to leave alone.

That is the drive that stops me fully retiring, although retirement remains the word I use when someone asks what I am doing now. It comes from a force I cannot properly name. Part of it is responsibility, part pride, part fear, part love and perhaps part of that old need to equal the person I believed was expected of me. Mensa may call, the road may open and curiosity may tap patiently from the passenger seat, but the unfinished task still has the louder voice. I may understand the pattern better than I did on Warringah Road, yet understanding has not removed the instinct to take guard. I know only that the task needs to be done, and it is not done yet.