by MARY HOCKING
When she stopped Norris was surprised to find the computer had been doing its job; he accepted the information it offered and said brickly, ‘Supplies Department, Visual Aids Centre, Boarding school awards, selection procedure, and advice on stating preferences. Anything else?’
‘No, I think that’s your lot for one morning. Sorry we have to plague you like this, but we’ll never get an answer on anything from the Chief until he’s got his golden handshake lined up, and Bertie is in such a twitch in case they find him a job where he has to work, no one dare go near him. You’re the only person who still passes for normal.’
Norris murmured, ‘ “Drowning, not waving. . . .” ’
She glanced down at his desk. ‘If you could just skip lightly through the incoming post. . . . Now! Was that nice?’
He looked at her in surprise.
‘You’ve drawn a wolf on dear Norma’s Working Party report.’
‘I didn’t realise. . . .’
‘Straight out of your subconscious, was it?’ She gave him a reproving leer and went out; in a few moments there was laughter from the other side of the partition which separated his room from the room she shared with two of the committee clerks.
Norris spread his hands out on the desk, fingers stretched wide; he was surprised to see that the flesh in the v between the fingers was a pale, pearly pink, just as it must have been when he was a baby. This moved him so much that tears came to his eyes. It was embarrassing, this tendency to tears which caught him at unexpected moments. Only last week, he had heard that an aunt who had looked after him when his mother died, and of whom he was very fond, had died suddenly. Her loss hadn’t touched him. Yet now he was rent by overwhelming grief at the sight of a part of his skin that wasn’t exposed to sunlight. The internal telephone buzzed peremptorily.
‘You are coming, I take it, Norris?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. One or two things cropped up, but I’ll be with you in a few moments.’ He had no idea where he was supposed to be, but this was a situation with which he had been coping most of his life, so he said, ‘We’re meeting in room. . . .?’
‘In the sub-committee room.’
‘I’m as good as there.’
He put the receiver down and flicked through some of the reports on his desk. While he did this he whistled the Habanera from Carmen: it was so much a part of his life to be in a quandary that he felt restored rather than dismayed. Failing to find inspiration among the papers on his desk, he went to Madge Conroy.
‘What am I supposed to be doing in the sub-committee room?’
‘How am I to know if you never put appointments in your diary?’
‘Don’t quibble, woman, my staff are expected to do the impossible. I’ll give you a clue, since you’re so slow this morning. Marsden is there, he’s just telephoned.’
She picked up the internal telephone and dialled a number. ‘Sybil? What meeting is Bertie at? . . . I’m not going to interrupt him, I just like to know these things. . . .’ She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘He wasn’t speaking to her this morning. So it must be about reorganisation.’
Norris took a scribbling pad and pencil from her desk and made his way to the sub-committee room which was on the first floor. It was twenty to eleven, which meant he would have missed coffee on the first floor; the trolley would be on its way to the second floor by now. This depressed him. He didn’t think he could get through a discussion on reorganisation without the stimulation of coffee. He went back to Madge Conroy. ‘Get someone to bring coffee down to me, will you?’
‘They’re waiting for you down there. You want to get your priorities right.’
‘Yes. So make sure to send coffee. Black.’
As soon as he opened the door of the sub-committee room, Norma Rossiter said, ‘For God’s sake, Tom! Now we’ve got to go back over everything we’ve agreed so far.’ She accompanied this remark by an exaggerated wink which contorted her face as though she had had a stroke.
‘We haven’t agreed anything,’ Marsden said sharply. His wizened face was set in lines of sour distaste and a brilliant spot of colour on each cheek indicated that he was in a particularly disagreeable mood.
Norma Rossiter eased back the empty chair beside her and smiled up at Tom; her lips were heavily smeared with carmine lipstick which had also found its way on to her front teeth. Tom wondered if he had had her in mind when he whistled the Habanera, in which case his subconscious must have been trying to transmit a message about the meeting. . . . Or perhaps it wasn’t the meeting, perhaps. . . .
‘Well, sit down now you are here,’ Mather said.
‘You haven’t missed much.’ Norma flicked ash off the edge of the table. She had green nail varnish on today, and three enormous rings which looked as though they could do duty as knuckle-dusters. The smell of her perfume was strong and the Chief had a cigar going. Ellis Phillimore, the dapper little head of the Further Education Section, had his nostrils pinched so tight he was almost sniffing his finely trimmed moustache up his nose. Phillimore had been a squadron leader during the war and this seemed to have unfitted him for work with less illustrious beings. Edgar Holmes, the head of General Purposes Section, was so undistinguished a person that Phillimore seemed unaware of his presence although they were sitting next to each other. Holmes, one of those ponderous, slow-speaking men with a great gift for making the simple sound complicated, was too sunk in gloom to notice that Phillimore was ignoring him. He sat with hands folded over his fat paunch, an expression of glazed incomprehension on his face which he adopted whenever anyone spoke of the impending break-up of South Sussex County Council. Members of his staff predicted that, years after it was all over, someone would discover that Edgar Holmes was still working at the office. Tom, who accepted this as a serious possibility, wondered how Holmes would occupy himself. He supposed he would devise forms. Holmes was very good at devising forms.
Austin Mather, the Chief Education Officer, gave an involuntary smile as he read through the memorandum in front of him; he made a mark in the margin, but gave no indication as to what it was that had caused him such bitter satisfaction. There was an uneasy silence while the people round the table watched his face. Albert Marsden, Mather’s Deputy, probed his ear with the point of a pencil and Tom wondered whether he might not do himself an injury.
‘Well, there we have it. . . .’ Mather dropped the memorandum on the table and braced his shoulders, rubbing his hands up and down the small of his back. He yawned and looked out of the window, as though by that one half-finished statement he had revealed all to the other occupants of the room. Ellis Phillimore was the first to act. ‘May I?’ He picked up the memorandum.
‘First round of interviews at the beginning of next month.’ Mather deprived Phillimore of the satisfaction of discovering this for himself. ‘Leaving it late, aren’t they? At this rate only the more senior posts will be filled by Christmas.’ He located a sensitive spot between the shoulder blades and scratched energetically.
Norma Rossiter rocked on one leg of her chair to look over Phillimore’s shoulder; her coarse, coppery hair brushed his cheek and he moved away fastidiously, thrusting the memorandum at her.
‘I understand that the staff have had forms to fill in that are worrying them,’ Tom said.
‘Really?’ Marsden’s face screwed up in acid disapproval. ‘I can’t see that they have much to be worried about. They’ll be fitted in somewhere.’
‘I think it’s where that is worrying them.’
‘They’ll have to go where the jobs are!’ Norma Rossiter prided herself that she had a positive and robust attitude to work, and believed that this could best be demonstrated by speaking on all occasions in a loud, contentious voice. ‘Why should local government officers expect to be spoonfed? If they were in industry they’d be a damn sight worse off. I think it’s all rather challenging. A shake-up is good for all of us. I can’t understand people getting themselves in such a state about where they work. I actu
ally found one damsel in tears this morning because she was afraid they might send her to Lewes and she wouldn’t be able to go home at lunchtime to feed her puss cat! Now, we’re not going to get ourselves bogged down by that kind of thing, are we?’
‘The cat probably means a great deal to her.’ Edgar Holmes drew his pad towards him. ‘Could I have her name?’ It was the first sign of interest he had given.
‘The woman or the cat? You’re not serious!’
‘I assure you, I am very serious.’ He spoke in a low, tense voice.
None of the others took any notice. The appointment of Norma Rossiter as head of the Special Schools Section had been one of the stranger things which had happened to the Education Department in recent years. Since her appointment she had been ignored by most of her fellow senior officers who were not impressed by a positive, robust attitude to work, and were embarrassed by her flamboyant but rather immature sexuality. Edgar Holmes was not in a position to ignore her, however, since he was the establishment officer and Norma had constant problems with staff. She treated him in a cavalier fashion, never failing to make the point that she was professionally qualified whereas he was not even a graduate. Holmes hated her.
‘I suppose we don’t stand a chance.’ Phillimore, who had been busy making notes, now pushed the memorandum across the table to Tom. Phillimore had adopted the attitude that he entertained no hope of becoming head of Further Education in one of the new, enlarged authorities, not in order to prepare himself for failure but to propitiate the gods who take a poor view of hubris. In fact, he was so sure of success that he had already prepared a management scheme which would revolutionise the work methods in the section. His mind was working so far ahead that it was sometimes difficult for him to remember that he was still with South Sussex County Council.
This, however, was something which Marsden never forgot. ‘Of course we don’t stand a chance!’ he said. ‘It’s been five years! Five years almost to the day since the Southern Counties Commission recommended the abolition of South Sussex. How can an officer convince an appointing body that he is energetic and go ahead’ (Marsden spoke the words with extreme disdain) ‘when he has spent the last five years mouldering away in a moribund authority?’
‘Have you been mouldering away?’ Mather looked at the Deputy in amusement as though to say, ‘so that is what you have been doing!’
Marsden was the self-appointed custodian of records. He saw himself as undertaking for the County Council of South Sussex the same function as great libraries, such as the Bodleian, perform for the realm of England, and no letter or memorandum, however insignificant, could be sent out without a copy being provided for Marsden’s records. Thanks to him historians would be provided with the minutiae of local government, enabled to study such matters as complaints that the toilet rolls supplied by Supplies Department were no better than blotting paper, and that plugs had been provided which did not fit the holes in the washbasins at Squires Bay Infants’ School. Immersed as he was in this great task, it was hardly surprising that he had little time to attend to the day-to-day running of the office, or to keep himself up to date with changes in educational thinking. This put him at a disadvantage in applying for a job with another authority.
‘But we mustn’t talk about ourselves. . . .’ Mather was beginning to enjoy himself. ‘I think we must now arrange staff consultations and I wondered what form you thought these should take.’
Norris said, ‘The teachers are worried about the future of the Supplies Department and the use of the Visual Aids Centre. . . .’
‘A little late for them to scream, I would have thought.’ Mather was bitter: if the teachers had protested more vigorously earlier on South Sussex might have stood a better chance of survival.
‘And then there is the selection procedure. . . .’
‘My dear chap! We can’t go into all these details now,’ Mather said.
‘But the selection procedure is going to need a lot of thought. . . .’
‘Let the new authorities do the thinking,’ Marsden sneered. ‘The letters to parents will be sent out after they take over.’
‘But there is so much work to be done. . . .’
‘Let them do it!’ Marsden snapped. ‘Empire builders must be prepared for hard work.’
‘Nevertheless, we shall all want to make sure the takeover is carried out smoothly.’ Phillimore spoke judiciously. But he saw no gain to himself in supporting Norris with regard to the question of the selection procedure, so he said to him, ‘I’m sure you’ve got things tied up pretty well. I know I’ve done a lot of thinking about the future myself.’
‘It’s the present I’m concerned about,’ Tom retorted.
‘Balls!’ Norma exclaimed. ‘You’re just thinking ahead to the time when you are the divisional Education Officer for the South Sussex area, and you’re trying to get us to help you sort your future problems out.’
Marsden, who had resigned himself to accepting the post of divisional Education Officer for the South Sussex area, looked startled. Mather, who had not thought of Tom as a candidate for this job, studied him quizzically.
At this point the door opened and a junior sidled in with a cup of coffee which she handed to Tom. When she had gone, Mather said, ‘Well, you seem to know how to look after yourself, Norris. Would anyone else like coffee? I’m afraid I quite forgot about it.’ There was a lump of sugar in the saucer. Tom picked it up and held it in the coffee, watching the liquid slowly eating into it. Mather watched, too. Tom, aware of the silence, looked up and met Mather’s amused blue eyes. How cold those eyes were, and how cruel! But they were not the eyes of a predator, predators kill to live: Mather was a sadist. He had been indulging himself at their expense for years. Didn’t anyone realise this? Tom had only realised it himself at the moment when he saw Mather watching the lump of sugar, but it amazed him that the others seemed so unaware. And the room. . . . Didn’t they notice how cold the room was becoming, as though something had taken possession of it? Tom felt his ribs contract so that it was difficult to draw breath. He would have to get out of the room. . . . He sipped the coffee to try to calm himself. It was so hot that it scalded his tongue, but at least this checked the panic. Mather and the others began to discuss staff consultations. Tom thought, ‘I must get out of the office this afternoon.’
When he got back to his room after lunch, he telephoned his mistress and said that he had to see her at once. It was a mistake to express his need so urgently. They were still arguing when Edgar Holmes came into the room. Tom put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘Is this urgent?’ Holmes immediately began to talk in the low, eminently reasonable voice which always meant that something had gone badly wrong. ‘. . . on the verge of a breakdown; we shall have real trouble unless something is done. . . .’
Tom noticed that the door of the room was ajar; he caught a glimpse of a figure outside, someone waiting in the wings to make an entrance. Holmes said, ‘You are always so good about this sort of thing.’
‘I’ll be there at three o’clock,’ Tom said to Beth.
‘You talk as though I was one of your possessions.’
‘And you did lose Miss Price,’ Holmes reminded him. ‘And as you know, there isn’t much chance of a replacement.’
‘Three o’clock,’ Tom said to Beth.
‘I thought we didn’t make demands on each other, I thought. . . .’
Tom said to Holmes, ‘I can manage without a replacement for Miss Price.’
Holmes said, ‘This poor woman can’t possibly continue to work in Norma Rossiter’s section.’
‘. . . highly civilised, independent people who happen to enjoy making love. . . .’
Tom said softly to Holmes, ‘Is this the woman with the cat?’
‘She has been in the Education Department for fifteen years and is extremely efficient.’
‘. . . as far removed from the ritual dance of the middle class as. . . .’
Through the slit of the door To
m could still see the figure waiting, unmoving. He put the receiver back on the rest and said firmly to Holmes, ‘I don’t want her.’
In answer, Holmes turned towards the door and said gently, ‘Come in, Miss Huber.’
Tom looked at him angrily, knowing that the woman would think that some ground had been gained. He did not look at Miss Huber, although he could see the vague blur of her form just inside the door. Holmes said in a quiet, soothing voice, ‘We are considering whether it might be possible to fit you in somewhere in Schools Section.’
She didn’t have the spirit to answer.
‘Miss Huber used to work in Sites and Buildings Section before she went to Special Services,’ Holmes told Tom. ‘Hillier thought a great deal of her work.’ Hillier had left the office three months ago. ‘And, of course, she realises that she would have to fit in wherever you would find her most useful.’
The telephone rang. Tom snatched at the receiver.
Beth said, ‘You come to me for one thing only.’
‘I thought we found that arrangement mutually attractive.’
While Beth responded to this, Holmes said, ‘Miss Huber has a very good all-round picture of the office.’ Tom glanced briefly at Miss Huber. He saw a dark, bowed head, long hair drawn severely back on either side of a dead-straight parting; what he could see of the face was ashen except for the bruises under the eyes. He did not think Miss Huber had an all-round picture of anything.