The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  There is a point in the morning when the office machine begins to hum. Something, an adequate supply of caffeine, a sufficient amount of chat, a quota of procrastinations, of wool-gatherings having been filled, when the machine begins to work: the telephones are quiet, the interruptions easily recovered from, and for forty-five minutes to an hour things actually get done. Discovering how it begins and how it ends will make some theorist of these organisational machines a greater shaker of the world than Marx, Einstein or Ford, because it’s not the manifesto or the university or the factory that is the beating heart of the world: whatever the prophets of teleworking say, everything that matters now happens in the office.

  Anne had not heard from David Hendrix since Gary Epper had installed the voice-activated software. She suspected that Hendrix had taken her at her word when she reassured him that he was not expected to deliver anything if he wasn’t happy with NEMO. She decided it was time to give him a call. The guilty tone of his voice when she identified herself confirmed her suspicions.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Anne, but I’m afraid there have been a series of patient crises here. I’m working on getting the voice thing used to my speech but I just haven’t had the time to give it the attention it deserves.’ The apologies over with, he delivered a reminder: ‘I warned you it might be a while.’

  She considered taking it back while she had the chance, but there was no great loss in leaving it with him for a few weeks. ‘No, not at all. I’ll give you a ring in a few weeks and let’s see how it’s working out then.’ They exchanged a few social pleasantries and she rang off.

  When he put the phone down Hendrix was moderately relieved that Anne had left the computer with him. He had not been entirely straight with her. He was well advanced with the speech software and it had turned out to be extremely useful. Already it was about ninety per cent accurate, which meant that it was already twice as accurate as his own typing. He had started putting all his patient notes through the system and it was saving him a great deal of time. But as for doing anything that would be useful to Anne Levels, he hadn’t got round to it yet. His initial reluctance about confidentiality and a general suspicion that computers could store information all over the place where anyone who understood these occult devices could get at it had returned. He stared at it. It was damn useful, though. It was then that he had the idea. Hendrix sat in front of NEMO and contemplated the pointlessness, the childishness, of what he was thinking of doing. It was a pointless, childish act of fraud.

  ‘Nemo,’ he said at last.

  Yes, Mr Hendrix.

  ‘Can you solve crossword puzzles?’

  Anne, back at work and blind to the quiet business beyond PAs, typists, secretaries and clerks, sat behind her expensive desk, devising a bid and balancing the personalities to put it into operation: leaders, supporters, innovators, blockers; an attempt to get task A done with cost B. The phone rang. She picked it up. ‘Levels.’

  ‘It’s David Elwes here. That stupid girl in reception has sent a call for you down to us. It’s a Mrs Beatty from some relationship council or other. Nothing wrong between you and the significant other, I trust, but if you want to tell me all about it over dinner you know I’m here for you, Anne.’

  ‘In your dreams.’

  He laughed; there was a click and a short pause.

  ‘Hello, Anne Levels.’

  ‘Oh, Dr Levels, it’s Georgina Beatty here.’ She paused oddly, as if she had forgotten why she had telephoned.

  ‘Is there a problem, Mrs Beatty?’

  There was a sudden collapse in the woman’s voice. ‘Yes, it’s Mrs Nancarrow. She’s been murdered.’

  ‘Murdered!’

  ‘Yes. By her husband.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘The terrible man – he poisoned her.’

  For a moment it was as if the world had gone silent.

  ‘Oh God, how awful.’

  ‘The police would like a statement from you.’

  ‘What? Yes. Of course.’

  ‘I thought I should tell you what they were phoning about.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ She paused. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Well, I learnt about it this morning, but apparently it took place last night. He poisoned her and then he hanged himself from a tree at the bottom of their garden.’

  ‘Why? Why would he do that?’

  ‘I feel as if we let her down,’ said Mrs Beatty, and Anne could feel her begging for absolution.

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said dutifully. ‘How could you possibly have known?’

  ‘I suppose so, but I still feel we should have done something.’

  Anne ignored the attempt to ensnare her, ‘Do you know why he killed her?’

  ‘No. There was no note. One of his neighbours saw him hanging from an apple tree in the garden the next morning.’

  Again Mrs Beatty delicately tried to implicate Anne, but she quickly got off the phone and flicked on her office intercom. ‘Sonia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Get everyone involved in the NEMO project in here in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Mr Hewitt’s on a course.’

  ‘Then get him off it . . . please.’

  ‘Right.’

  Anne pushed the small of her back into the inbuilt lumbar support of her executive chair, a feature only allowed those in the officed classes. She sat still for about five minutes then swung out a workstation and was soon lost in another search for the origin of NEMO’s terrible prophecy.

  Returning late and tired from a long, unsatisfactory meeting spent trying to persuade Clavell and two of his partners to fund his research into stress, Steven opened the door and called out to Anne. There was no response. He headed for the dining room, then heard the slicing rasp of knife on wood. He turned to the kitchen and found her preparing a meal with her back to him, not having heard him come in.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she said, without expression. He walked up behind her and slid his hand under her arm, barely touching the side of her breast. It was not meant as a gesture of desire but one of unconscious intimacy and tenderness.

  ‘Stop it!’ she shouted, and pulled away.

  He stepped back as if she had struck him. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter. I just don’t like you mauling me all the time, that’s all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ The shock on his face was plain as she turned round, dark-faced, to look at him.

  ‘You’re always touching me, like I was . . . I don’t want you grabbing me, OK? How do you like it?’ Her hand shot out, reaching for his crotch. Whether she had intended to touch him or not he moved back involuntarily. She looked at him, eyes pin bright with anger.

  ‘I didn’t think I was . . . I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.’ He turned and started to walk away. Had he reacted as angrily as her bad temper deserved, she knew she would have become even more foul-tempered. But seeing the hurt on his face, the quiet words warmed by mortification, all her malice drained away. ‘Steven.’

  He stopped, waited then turned.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Then it’s a pity you said it.’ His voice was soft but there was a coldness in his voice she had never heard before.

  ‘I didn’t mean it, honestly. I shouldn’t have said it. I was taking something out on you. I’m sorry.’

  His expression did not change, nor did he move away.

  She sighed. ‘It’s been a bad day at work. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I’m very sorry.’

  She walked over to put her arms around him.

  He held back at first. He was disturbed by the virulence of the emotion that had assaulted him and was unsure what to do, and frightened. ‘That’s all right.’ He held the back of her head in the palm of his hand, then gently pulled away, going over to the kitchen table to pick up the Evening Standard. He sat down and began reading. She returned, subdued and thankful to have got awa
y so lightly with her exhibition. Underneath her shame she was, unconsciously, forming a new geography of his tolerance to her capacity for unpleasantness. He could not allow this.

  ‘Martin wants to go to dinner,’ she said, knowing that the silence must be neutrally filled to ease any remaining bruise.

  ‘Oh . . . I don’t think I can be sure of making it this week. Saturday I’ve got to have dinner with Tom Clavell and his wife. You as well, of course. I forgot to mention it. If you want to.’

  ‘Sure. Martin was angling for next week anyway. Friday.’

  ‘Fine . . . anywhere in . . .’ He stopped suddenly, sighing as if both angry and weary. ‘Actually, could we not do this?’

  She turned, alarmed. ‘What?’

  ‘Look, it’s an old fault of mine. I accept apologies when I’m still angry with someone. I can’t do it this quickly. I’m still annoyed. You can’t say a thing like that and then just say sorry. Do you see?’

  She did not say anything.

  ‘So I’m going to go and read the paper for half an hour . . . only I won’t be reading it, I’ll be thinking very unpleasant things about you broadly equivalent in offensiveness to what you’ve just said about me.’ He stood. ‘Then I’ll come back and we’ll see how it goes from there.’

  Forty minutes later the door to the bedroom opened and Anne came in contrite yet confident. ‘Hey, your thirty minutes are up.’

  He continued to read his paper. She waited.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said, still not looking at her, ‘whether I should make you suffer for another fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘I don’t need to suffer. I’m really sorry.’ She climbed over the bed, assuring herself by the look in his eyes that he was ready for this. She pulled the paper out of his hand, threw it on the floor and sat astride him. ‘Perhaps you should punish me,’ she said flirtatiously.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ he said, smiling despite himself.

  ‘Oh, I could write out fifty times, “I must not be such a poisonous bitch”.’

  They both laughed and she said softly, ‘I can be . . . poisonous sometimes.’

  ‘Well,’ he said slowly, and with a hint of malice in his voice, ‘I like a woman with a few character flaws.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said, poking him in the ribs. ‘And why’s that?’

  ‘It makes them less easy to disappoint.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ she replied. ‘And what are your serious character flaws?’

  ‘For one thing I’m generous to a fault.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Well, I’ve forgiven you, haven’t I?’

  She leant back on his knees laughing, allowing her skirt to ride up her legs. She started to undo the buttons on her white blouse but as he went to help, she pulled back. In one movement she pulled off the blouse and threw it on to the floor. She was wearing a coffee-coloured La Perla bodice, whose sexiness resided in its lack of transparency and its absurdly expensive cut. The cups supporting her breasts rejected the emancipated fashion of moulding themselves to her natural figure. The bodice described an hypothesis of a female shape that was in small but significant ways not possible at all: the tailored waist was too small for the exaggerated way it flattened the ribcage and forced the breasts into an unnatural curve, the cleavage so compressed and the upper breast so swollen. Objectively it was as decorous as a 1950s bathing suit: its expense lay in the skill by which it committed its act of erotic aggression on her body while remaining comfortable to wear. She stood up and undid her skirt, stepped out of it, went to the end of the bed and lay down on her side, elbow bent, resting her head on her hand. One leg, her left, lay flat on the bed, her right was bent. He watched. She stretched, then looking him straight in the eye, reached her right hand between her legs. One of the three poppers that fastened the bodice snapped open, distorting the complex engineering of forces that held her body in place, squeezing her labia to the centre, and pushing up the black hair and pink skin. She licked one of her fingers and gently rubbed the skin protruding through the hole she had made, then pulled at another popper. It came free reluctantly, the distortion pulling at the bodice, changing the dynamic of forces around buttocks, midriff, breasts, freeing one side of her labia and pulling painfully at the other. Lowering her eyes, she released the last one, slowly easing the flap towards her stomach, restoring an equilibrium to her body once again. Her hand, fingers splayed, pushed through her lips. He undid his trousers quickly, pulling out his erection painfully. He grimaced and though she might have smiled at another time, there was no warmth in the way she looked at him. He moved towards her face, meaning to kiss her, but she bent her head as he knelt clumsily on the bed and, despite the awkward angle, took his penis in her mouth. His back arched, one hand went between her legs, the other pulled at the carapace around her breasts so that he could feel the contrast of white skin, erect nipple, and the viscose, silk and elastin mix that held her in. She saw a rage of indecision sweep through him. She shifted her head back, her pupils dilated, and said, ‘You don’t know where to begin, do you?’

  An hour later they were lying in each other’s arms, neither having spoken for ten minutes. The intense animal release that had becalmed her for a while was receding and she was looking around the room idly, feeling like talking again.

  ‘What’s in the parcel over there?’ she said, nodding at a carefully wrapped package leaning against the mirror. ‘Is it a present for me?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Is it a present for somebody else?’

  ‘Serve you bloody well right if it was.’

  She got off the bed, walked over to the mirror and touched the package, then without ceremony she tore away the brown paper. There were three expensively framed copies of the Rembrandt etchings from the exhibition at the National Gallery where they had first met. She examined them carefully. ‘You’re very good,’ she said without turning her head. ‘These are wonderful copies.’ She looked back at him and smiled, meaning to be light-hearted. ‘I can see I’ll have to keep my chequebook away from you.’ She saw the barely perceptible look of disappointment on his face and felt a warm embarrassment begin along her neck and cheeks.

  He seemed to think better of his own reaction and smiled softly.

  ‘I really like them,’ she said, relieved that she had recovered herself.

  How clumsy people are . . . and how dangerous it makes them, thought Steven.

  They made love again and afterwards he lay next to her as she dozed, considering the strange rebound of intimacy from a row made up. Why was it that after a fight things sometimes seemed better between people? How was the air cleared, and of what? Or was it ever cleared at all? A few months before, he had come across a line by Thornton Wilder: ‘Wrapped in forgiveness and understanding it sinks into the heart like a stone’. He was astonished that someone he did not know could express what he was feeling so exactly, had crystallised it so that it was only when he read it that he realised precisely what he had been feeling for years. Why, he thought with bitter frustration, were people always so contrary? Carefully sliding her head from his arm to the pillow he got up and, as he dressed, looked at her sleeping face. The hidden life of lovers was constructed as much as anything of the fights you didn’t have, according to agenda printed on paper that had been devoured. It could be stored away, he knew, wherever such things are kept, comatose until revived by the presence of others of these hoarded resentments. There seemed to be a critical mass involved, he thought; given sufficient numbers they felt obliged to organise a great escape. After a while it was like a German prison camp in there: forged papers, searches, tunnels under the wire; and some ambitious madman attempting to make a break by building an aeroplane from bits of string and wood. In the past this had never been more than a minor problem because there wasn’t long enough. Now the relationships took more time and, as each increased in length, the greater the opportunity to store up these unacknowledged disaffections.

&nbs
p; He went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water and switched on the television in time to catch the news. It was coming to the end of an item on interest rates. House prices were rising and old fears of aerated money were resurfacing. There were calls for the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England to increase rates. But there were also calls from business for another cut. Increase the rate and stop inflation but run the risk of slowing growth. Cut the rate and aid recovery but watch recovery become a boom. Be prudent. Do nothing. Worse than either, perhaps. Or better. What you did or what you didn’t do. It all mattered, all of it, all of the time.

  He heard her clattering about between the bedroom and the bathroom for a few minutes and then the noise stopped. She was so quiet it attracted his attention. He turned around. She was standing in the doorway watching him. ‘I love you,’ she said. Her open gaze was impossible to meet. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ Her voice was low, and slightly mocking.

  He looked genuinely shaken.

  ‘I should have been at Martin’s two and a half hours ago.’ He looked at her but he didn’t say anything and she realised he was too deeply affected to speak. She was pleased.

  ‘Don’t bother to give him my regards,’ said Steven, not taking his eyes from hers. ‘I know it’s none of my business but what do you see in him?’

  ‘I like him. He’s quite funny, you have to admit. I suppose I feel . . .’ She frowned.

  ‘Sorry for him?’ suggested Steven.

  ‘Why should I feel sorry for him? He’s good-looking . . . lots of women fancy him. Why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘I see now,’ he said, teasing. ‘Lots of women like him and he dotes on you. How flattering.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  She laughed.

  That good-looking one, what’s her name?’

  ‘Karen, as if you don’t remember.’

  ‘What does Karen see in him?’

  ‘Maybe she feels sorry for him.’

  ‘I doubt it. She didn’t strike me as the merciful kind.’

  ‘I understand it’s a side effect of using sunbeds,’ she said. They weaken your pity. Scientists are concerned.’ She went back into the kitchen, calling out to him over her shoulder. To be honest I think she’s about to leave him. She was dropping hints the last time I talked to her.’