The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘Call the demon out and see if she can back it up. This I’ve got to hear.’

  ‘I would like to speak to the woman who talked to you.’

  There was a pause of about thirty seconds during which Winnicott’s breathing grew deeper and deeper. Hendrix was about to ask the question again when Winnicott spoke. Except that the voice was not Winnicott’s. It had a strange, slightly blurred quality to it, like a recorded voice slowed down in the replaying. But it was clearly the voice of a woman.

  ‘Yes, Mr Hendrix, how can I help you?’

  The analysts said nothing, not only because they were surprised but also because they were afraid.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Hendrix? Cat got your tongue?’

  Hendrix looked at Haynes for help, but he was equally startled. He whispered to Hendrix, ‘Ask for a name.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is . . . Jean Smith,’ said the voice. There was a long pause, then Winnicott smiled. It was a pleasant, friendly smile, but it unnerved Hendrix because it was nothing like any expression he had ever seen on Winnicott’s face. ‘And so we can get to the point, why don’t you ask me where I come from.’ She laughed.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  There was another laugh. It was a delightful sound – teasing, yet full of warmth and generosity. ‘I come from Mars.’

  With that Winnicott pulled himself upright and stared at the two astonished men, alarmed at the expression on their faces. ‘What’s happened? What’s going on?’ The voice was querulous and fearful. It was Winnicott’s own.

  Trevor Hat was a grotesque chauvinist – as he had demonstrated during Jane Healey’s first minute as one of his employees – but he gave no sign of this when talking to Jane. It was not that he declined to condescend to her, but that when he did so it was because he thought she was middle-class or didn’t have enough experience of life – a quality he set great store by, especially his own – and not because she was a woman. She had the feeling that along with his curiosity about her intelligence there was a complete lack of curiosity about her as a woman. Unlike Neil, who was always trying to look up her skirt, Trevor Hat clearly didn’t think of her as someone it would make sense to think of as a sexual object – either with a nice bum or a nose like a cormorant. It was not that she wanted him to look down her blouse, but an acknowledgement of the fact of her physical existence as an object of desire would have been – but it was hard to say what it would have been.

  Neil was a mild nuisance, but without his clumsy ogling she would have felt even more threatened by the pictures in the album. She had begun to feel rebuked by them. She hated feeling this because it didn’t seem fair that it should be so.

  Without Neil to look at her she would, she knew, have believed that Geoff coveted those women with their cheerful smiles and open legs because their desire was so direct. They must have been sexy or he would not have collected them so carefully, and they would not have gone to the trouble of sending in their photographs. Magazines would not have been created for them, and many thousands of men would not have bought them. Without Neil’s compulsive glare it would have been easy to have become demoralised, to think that they were a substitute for something she lacked. That was what she felt at times: an asexual accountant in young middle age with an estranged husband who collected pornographic pictures of women who were certainly no better looking than her. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t add up.

  Dressing in the morning became a tricky business. On the one hand she had decided before going to Hat’s that she would lose weight and exercise more, but on the other the relentless nature of Neil’s ogling was not something she wanted to encourage.

  Nevertheless, she had found this interest in her of rather deeper importance than she liked to acknowledge, although acknowledge it she did. And though she did not in any way want to encourage him to see her as a possible target for his sexual interest, she had to admit that she resented Hat’s refusal to see her as in any way desirable. She did not find him especially attractive but there was an incongruous dignity to the stern face that was enhanced, if anything, by the beak-like broken nose. The choice of blouse, the length of skirt, the height of heels, the colour of nails became bound up with these paradoxical demands. She had always been reasonably careful with clothes, but now sometimes found herself changing them in the morning after she had dressed, something she had never done before. A sudden impulse to frustrate Neil’s eyes or ignore her irritation about Trevor Hat’s inability to look at her at all would lead to wearing a brown, pleated, lengthy A-line skirt, followed by a refusal to let the way she looked be dictated by either of them. Then she’d change into a straight skirt ending just above the knee but feel that this had not readily solved the problem; whatever choice you made it was dictated by the eyes of men, what they did, what they did not do. It was an illusion to think you could please yourself.

  At first the realisation that however she dressed was a reaction one way or the other came as a shock, and this feeling pursued her the following Friday. She had been working late in town on the previous day because there had been a minor emergency at her real place of work. Both her children were staying with friends and because she had finished so late she decided to stay the night in town. She needed a couple of new bras and took the next morning to get this chore over with. But what had previously been merely an effort because she was so hard to fit was now fraught with a complexity made worse by an article she had read in the Independent magazine the previous week which outlined the emergence of the new Gossard Superbra. The journalist had described it in breathless terms as a reinvention of the Wonderbra, as if it were one of those technologies that cause a sudden leap in our grasp of what is attainable. It had achieved sell-out status in a few weeks in the way normally associated with the latest toy just before Christmas.

  She stood in the lingerie department in Selfridges and saw it with new eyes. No longer was it merely a random collection of underwear: now it seemed like an avant-garde exhibition of desire behind which lay a reckless individual inventiveness. It was a retrospective of an artistic life racked with changes, loss of form, sudden resurgences; the classical, the abstract and the surreal hounded each other in a riotous and inconsistent clash of styles. Like some brilliant work of abstract art these garments seemed to describe nothing you could relate to anything in particular, but yet were rooted in something that was everywhere. But those who had mounted this astonishing sight had made one mistake, she thought. To give the exhibition a shape, a unifying theme, it needed a naked woman suspended, untouchable, above it all.

  ‘Can I help you?’ The voice was friendly.

  ‘I’m looking for a bra – well, more than one, actually.’

  ‘Let me show you over here.’ The assistant, about the same age as Jane, led the way towards what she could only think of as a column hung with the beautifully preserved skins of exotic, endangered species. ‘These new French ones are very pretty.’ She gestured at a collection of gauzy constructions in a delicate powder blue. ‘Call me if you need any help.’

  Jane spent five minutes choosing a few to try on and went over to the woman who was standing at a discreet distance. As she did so she noticed a half-mannequin display of the Superbra. With its overtly complex construction, its solidity, it seemed to belong to a species only distantly related to some of the moth-like designs she had just been looking at. A before-and-after picture of a woman in a black dress testified, however, to its efficacy. Jane pointed. ‘Could I try one of those?’

  The assistant grimaced. ‘Actually,’ she said apologetically, ‘I don’t know if you can. The demand for them has been incredible, hasn’t it, Suzy?’ She gestured to the assistant next to her who nodded in concerned agreement. ‘It was worse after a big article in one of the magazines last week. Did you see it?’

  ‘No,’ lied Jane.

  ‘You’d think we were giving them away.’

  ‘We’ve only got a few sizes left and not many of
those,’ said Suzy, ‘and we aren’t getting any more for two months. They’re completely overwhelmed, the factory. What size are you, madam?’

  ‘34B.’

  Suzy sighed, as if to prepare Jane for disappointment, and vanished into a store room.

  ‘Why is it so popular?’ asked Jane, making conversation while they waited. The assistant laughed. It was an unexpectedly deep sound, a rich noise that made you like her immediately. ‘It can make a new woman out of you. Really.’ Then she laughed again, this time Jane with her.

  ‘I could do with being made a new woman of,’ said Jane. ‘Especially for sixteen ninety-nine.’

  Suzy emerged clutching a small box. ‘The last one,’ she said conspiratorially, as if it were a wartime treat beyond the grasp of ration books.

  Jane tried on the other two first. One fitted well enough but when she tried on the second she wondered if she’d put it on incorrectly. It seemed to have been constructed for a different purpose, the inner lining, perhaps, of a jacket designed for someone with a severe disability. Then she tried on the Superbra. Turning to look in the mirror, she laughed. My God! she thought. She was an entirely different shape. Pushed up and in, it was as if a skilled surgeon with a pornographic mind had performed an operation on her. She pulled back the curtain and stepped out into the corridor to look at it in the full-length mirror. The assistant was taking clothes from a rack. She smiled and her pleasure was clearly genuine. ‘Amazing,’ she said chattily, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘I look like Jane Russell.’

  ‘It does that with some people,’ said the assistant. ‘I don’t know why. It must depend on the shape you are as well as the cup size.’

  ‘I can’t go out like this. The people at work will think I’ve had an operation.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that dramatic,’ said the assistant, sensing a lost sale. ‘It just takes a bit of time to get used to it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to.’

  ‘It looks really nice . . . and it’s going to be weeks before we get any new ones in. Look on it as an investment – you could probably sell it on the black market.’

  Jane gave in and bought it. As she wandered through the other departments in the store she wondered why she had. The difference in her appearance would be so obvious that people who knew her would certainly notice and someone would be bound to comment, or think it if they didn’t say it. There would be presumptions. At Hat’s it was impossible to say what the reaction might be. She was on the top floor when she went to the ladies’ room and did something she had never done before: she put on an item of clothing conscious of the desire it might provoke. As she came out of the cubicle and looked in the mirror she very nearly went back and changed again. She told herself that while she noticed the difference no one else would, at least in town. This was not so, however. The combination of the bra and a previously innocuous sweater resulted in a sight that was blatantly erotic. She was about to cross a line that previously she had barely approached.

  Because the Powder Room, as it was archly called, was on the top floor, she had to make her way down to the exit via numerous escalators. They were arranged in a criss-cross fashion so that those going down could be viewed by customers going up. In the couple of minutes it took, Jane entered a world where she was not only visible in an entirely different way, but where others were newly visible to her. It became apparent not only in the way men stared at her, but also in the way they tried not to. On the escalator the pattern was pretty much the same: the bored distraction of shopping husbands, the sudden look at Jane’s chest, her face, the shameful lowering of eyes, and then, as they came parallel, a sideways furtive glance. Some men, the cocky ones, simply stared. In the street and in the various shops the strategies were different, depending on how close she was to them. Some would pretend to look across her at the other side of the street, but gave themselves away by the sudden dip of eyes as they swivelled across her breasts like headlights to an advancing car at night. She became profoundly aware of the ubiquitous gaze of men. Jane and the men were locked in an endlessly repeated game, like tennis players beating out an infinite variety of moves with just a bat, a ball, a net, a bit of grass.

  After a couple of hours of being panned and scanned she’d had enough, but it was then she realised that she had missed something. Ogled by a man in his late twenties in a shoe shop she stared straight back at him. He immediately became furtive and ashamed. It was the look of the men who’d been driven out of Hat’s basement by Gordon’s sneers. Outside she continued doing this. Some brazened it out but most were cowed. Made bolder by her success, the tube ride home was another lesson in the numerous ways that men had developed to look without being seen to do so. Even the ones she stared down kept on trying different tacks: over their papers as they turned the page, scratching the back of their heads while glancing in her direction, interested looks around at scenery they must have seen a thousand times before. And all for sixteen ninety-nine.

  When she got home she went upstairs and looked at herself in the full-length mirror, trying to grasp what they’d all been looking at. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said to herself, and taking off the bra placed it in a bottom drawer under a pile of clothes she seldom wore. She heard her mobile ring and rushed downstairs to get it out of her bag. It was Scott Wexler, the company solicitor, an unlikeable man she had been forced to consult about the problems with TLC. Michael McCarthy, the Deputy Director of the Fraud Secretariat, wanted to meet her at the end of the month.

  McCarthy and Winnicott were sitting in Sally Brett’s office on the top floor along with four of the other senior managers: Elmwood, the chief accountant; Trish Maxwell, the legal director, whose waist-length hair, parted in the centre, gave her the appearance of a middle-aged hippie who had been forced to dress up in a navy blue jacket for a family wedding; and McKinnon, Maxwell’s deputy. Finally there was Boyd Gribben. The meeting had got off to a bad start after Brett had announced the news, with all the heartiness of a games mistress announcing the winning of a hockey cup, that the Attorney General was about to back the Fraud Secretariat publicly and reject any idea of allowing the CPS to take them over. McKinnon had been unwise enough to compare this to the kind of support traditionally shown to football managers by their chairman immediately before they were sacked. Brett was Victorian in her lack of amusement, staring balefully at the now pale McKinnon. There was a long silence. ‘You’ve all had an agenda sent to you,’ said Brett finally. Taking her eyes off the hapless McKinnon, she looked around the room. Gribben, who had thrown his agenda into the bin as soon as it had arrived, looked at her with vacant interest: there was only the absence of a view concerning the question of not possessing an agenda. Agendalessness, his expression said, was an experience utterly unknown to him. McCarthy was thinking about Winnicott. He looks so ill, so grey.

  The meeting launched into a long and bad-tempered exchange about their conviction rate. Winnicott’s attention began to wander: E13 . . . Enlightenment is a word beginning with E and which has thirteen letters. So what? What district is E13 in London? Plaistow? Look it up in the A–Z. He tried to pay attention to what the others were saying. They were arguing about the jury system now.

  ‘. . . Come on, John. It’s not that simple. Abandoning the jury system on the grounds that the world of crime is too complicated for ordinary people to understand is a big step. The implication . . .’

  ‘. . . The world is too complicated for ordinary people . . . I mean, I’m sorry . . . that’s just a fact. Me too. I’m not being a snob here. I still don’t understand the difference between the Bosnian Serbs and Croatian Bosnians or whatever in God’s name is going on over there. Until two years ago I thought Montenegro was somewhere in South America . . .’

  ‘I really disagree most emphatically. The whole principle of our judicial system is that a defendant should be judged by his peers . . . if justice can’t be understood by non-specialists then it’s a pretty frighten—’

  ‘Peers! Exactl
y – exactly that. Louis Bris doesn’t have any peers among TV repairmen or personal assistants or teachers or journalists. His peers are financial people. My dad used to do all his own car repairs until ten years ago. Now, what with fuel injection and chips instead of simple old carburettors, he hasn’t got a clue. Pretty well everyone is going to be an expert in whatever it is they earn their living at, and they’re going to know bugger all about anything else. We know more and more collectively and less and less individually – these days outside of their speciality, everyone’s a couch potato. I know highly intelligent, literate people who’ve never heard of Alan Greenspan. The most powerful economist . . . no, pretty much one of the most powerful men on earth, and they don’t give a toss who he is and that he runs the economy of the world. Welcome to the new Dark Ages.’

  ‘Please,’ said Brett irritably, looking down at the piece of paper on her lap.

  ‘Next on the agenda . . . shouldn’t take long,’ she added with emphasis, ‘Allan Nancarrow’s appeal against our use of DTI evidence in the TLC case.’ She looked up at Trish Maxwell. ‘This is yours obviously . . . a quick summary.’

  Trish searched for a moment in her briefcase and brought out a black plastic folder. ‘The defence submission to the judge basically accuses us of deliberately allowing the DTI to question him first, make him answer self-incriminating questions which can be used in court, and then taking over the prosecution to get round his legal rights.’

  There was a pause. Winnicott coughed apologetically. ‘And are we?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Is that . . . what we’re doing?’

  Trish looked over at Brett. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘your predecessor was . . . um . . . enthusiastic about improving the conviction rate, and he was anxious to pursue this as a general strategy. I think the view of the rest of us . . .’ she looked around the room with a collegiate expression on her face, ‘. . . was that this was perhaps cynical and likely to backfire. I think that’s fair.’