by John Burke
‘I don’t approve of this benevolent despot stuff.’
‘As long as it’s benevolent.’
‘Ah, but is it?’
‘Well, I’m not one to quarrel with free lunches, a pension, a grant for educating my two boys … ’
It was the official line, handed out when you joined the Company, set out for your delectation in a glossy handbook. They gave you so many things, and all they asked in return was devout work and loyalty. University graduates received the book cloth-bound; others had card covers.
Andrew moved away as Dampier approached, then hesitated. Better to be there, looking attentive, smiling appreciation of Dampier’s smooth sallies. But he felt hostile.
‘Flint, isn’t it?’
He was confronted by a large man whose name he did not know. Beside him was a younger man whom he remembered as an unsteady, nervous speaker in class — David Marsh.
‘I’m Flint,’ he agreed. ‘Andrew Flint.’
‘Bill Crowther. Have a drink?’
‘I’m taking it slowly.’ Andrew lifted his glass to show that it was half full.
‘Aye. Very sensible. I wonder what the Intersyn norm is? It’s bad not to drink at all, and bad to drink too much. There wasn’t a space for that on the card we had to fill in.’
David Marsh said eagerly: ‘Do you suppose the drinks here are supplied by the refinery? Top distillation — that sort of thing.’
Nobody laughed.
‘Intersyn,’ said Crowther. ‘Intestines, my oldest girl calls it. Daddy works for Intestines. Not bad, eh? I always say it’s not appropriate: the place is all brains and no guts. Eh … mm?’
Andrew had vowed he would be drawn into no careless talk. This was just the sort of meaningless banter that led you into giving yourself away. It was just what they were looking for, in fact. But unless they had planted someone among the Course members to report back, who would know what was being said at this moment in this corner? Dampier was out of earshot. Maybe they had got the place wired. No: even Intersyn would surely not go that far.
‘Computers,’ Crowther proceeded. ‘How can you make decisions about men with computers? Time and motion study, and all the rest of it — no heart to it.’
‘Time and motion study,’ said Andrew stiffly, ‘is carried out with every regard to the individual human being.’ Dampier moved closer, his eyes wandering, his smile fixed and reflective.
Crowther said: ‘But the individual gets lost once the figures are fed into a machine. All the welfare schemes and the personnel development schemes and the rest of it — all worked out in little squiggles and holes in cards from data fed into a mess of metal, glass and wire.’
‘Not forgetting Intersyn plastics,’ added young Marsh.
‘Fed in,’ said Andrew, ‘by expert personnel men.’
‘Experts,’ said Crowther, ‘with the minds of computers.’
Dampier was not so much listening to them as waiting to be asked to do so. He stood with his head slightly back, certainly hearing every word but politely waiting for one of them to catch his eye and include him in the conversation.
Andrew said: ‘The advantage of computers is that they work objectively, uninfluenced by emotion or fallible personal judgments. There’s no old-boy network built into them.’ He stopped, aware that this could sound aggressive. He must not give the impression of having a chip on his shoulder. Theoretically there was equal opportunity for all in the Company. He changed his approach. ‘They can deal more swiftly with staff problems than the most conscientious personnel officer could hope to do. They have no prejudices.’
‘And no heart,’ said Crowther.
‘Irrational emotions, you mean?’
‘Heart is what I mean,’ said Crowther bluntly. ‘When I joined this Company we all knew one another. Even when it started to grow, we all kept in touch and felt we belonged to the same family. When there were marriages we had parties, and when we went to associated companies overseas we could drop in on old pals and chat, and swap stories, and pass on the news.’
‘Taking up hours of valuable working time,’ Andrew jibed.
‘We got the job done. Better than anyone does now, if you ask me. And when someone was in trouble, the Company helped. I’m not saying it doesn’t now.’
‘I should hope not. Consideration shown towards employees undoubtedly improves work output.’
‘Ahhh!’ Crowther produced a twisted, rasping sound from deep in his throat. ‘That’s just the trouble. That’s the way it is now. That’s the whole modern attitude. But it wasn’t like that in the old days. I could tell you a dozen stories to prove it wasn’t. I remember when we flew four kids out to Bombay — not because it was in a contract or because it would affect the output one tiny little bit, but just because it made the wife of one of our lads happy. And there was old Johnson’s illness: you couldn’t have worked out a plan for that just by feeding job breakdowns into a machine. And that young chap, whatever his name was — lad whose father had an accident while he was up at the plant. All his own fault, they said. Proved it, in fact. But the Company didn’t just make a quiet settlement and forget it all. They gave the youngster a good education, looked after his mother, and then took him on and did everything they could for him.’
Despite himself Andrew said: ‘One of those vague goodwill tales. Probably put out by Public Relations Section.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Dampier, taking the two steps that made him part of the group. ‘No, it’s true enough. Isn’t it, Mr Marsh?’
David Marsh flushed. ‘Yes. Quite true.’
Andrew felt himself flushing too: a deeper, angrier red than young Marsh. Why the hell hadn’t the young fool stopped him — why had he let him go on?
Crowther guffawed. ‘Put both your big feet right in it, Flint! Never mind — always doing it myself. Makes a change to see someone else in up to the knees.’
Andrew forced a laugh. There was an awkward silence.
A shrill voice from a group nearby floated into their oasis of stillness. ‘Holidays? Good heavens, I haven’t an idea. I just haven’t been able to fix anything — I’ve been far too busy to look at the list.’
‘What time is dinner?’ said someone else, doggedly overriding a buzz of conversation. ‘I’ve been having nothing but sandwich lunches just lately. I find it better when I’m hard pressed … ’
Crowther said: ‘Well, we’d better stop chipping away at the Company. There’ll be no salary increases for us this year if we get too nasty.’
‘If employees were marked down for disloyal remarks,’ said Dampier amiably, ‘we would have a cheap year this year. Or,’ he added with a twinkle, ‘any other year.’ His long arm curled out slowly but purposefully, and without effort was drawing Jessica into the circle. ‘Jessica, my dear. You’ll join us for a drink?’
She glanced fleetingly at Andrew with that shy, long-lashed, unhappy look of hers. Nobody else would know it, but she was asking his permission. He did not respond.
She said: ‘Thank you, but I was on my way out. I think I’ll have a stroll before dinner.’
‘In the wicked streets of the City?’ said Dampier archly.
‘The deserted streets of the City,’ said Jessica.
As she went she passed close to Andrew. At least she had the sense this time not to look at him, but she was appealing to him to follow her. And she knew he wasn’t going to.
David Marsh said: ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea. Short constitutional after a tough day. Give one an appetite.’
He waited until Jessica had left the bar and then went off in the same direction. Dampier watched him go and chuckled.
‘Aha! It seems that the fair Jessica has made another conquest.’
‘Pretty girl,’ said Crowther. ‘A nice lass.’
‘Most efficient. And, as you say, pretty. A few hearts always have to be swept up at the end of each course. But’ — there might have been a warning note in his voice, though it was now too late to reach young Marsh
— ‘I think Miss Rogers is too sensible to become involved in any emotional entanglements arising from the somewhat unnatural conditions in which you gentlemen have to work for the next few weeks.’
Andrew hoped that he was not showing his anger. It burned away inside him with an added, unexpected intensity. Young Marsh had no business to be on this Course and no business to be sniffing after Jess so quickly and blatantly. He was too young for the course and too young for Jess. A charity case, pushed forward beyond his capabilities by the benevolent Company … and still adolescent in his petty little itch for a woman who was far beyond his understanding.
Alcohol was slackening the tongues all around him. Loquacious boasts began to seethe up, splintered by loud, self-congratulatory laughter.
‘Yes, I had three or four offers of much higher salary, but I accepted Intersyn as a challenge … ’
‘I always find that if I take a tape recorder home for the weekend it’s so much easier for me to get a few thoughts put down … ’
Andrew looked resolutely into his empty glass, waiting for the tight knot of rage inside him to slacken. He heard Crowther’s voice booming beside him. It was not until the question was asked for the third time that he realised Crowther was offering to refill his glass.
*
There were still a few late workers leaving their offices, and there were heads against the frosted glass of pub windows — the heads of commuters who had missed their trains or who were simply reluctant to go and catch the trains. Apart from them, the City was slowing down into its nightly tranquillity. The streets were already almost deserted. Within another hour the buses would weave between the tail banks and insurance offices and sooty churches with only a few passengers aboard.
Jessica slowly crossed a street that in the daytime would be jammed with traffic. She stopped to look idly in the window of a bookshop. After a moment or two she saw a hazy reflection drifting towards her, distorted by the bright jackets of the books beyond the glass.
David Marsh said: ‘I do hope you don’t mind … that is, if you’d sooner be on your own … I just felt rather like a saunter, and there you were, and … well … ’
Her immediate impression of him was that of a boy in his Sunday best. He was a boy who had suddenly shot up, outgrown his clothes, and been bought more clothes of which he was inordinately careful. She had noticed earlier today how he frequently adjusted his tie so that it hung straight instead of twisting under his jacket, and how he checked that his pocket flaps were not tucked in or creased. He was neat and nervous and on his best behaviour. She thought that he had been sent on this course before he was ready for it.
‘It’ll be nice to have someone to talk to,’ she said.
They fell into step and walked at a leisurely pace towards the Monument. She took him down a narrow alley into a square impregnated with the cooking smells from an ancient chop-house, and he was delighted. He knew little of the by-ways of the City.
‘But it’s all so quiet,’ he marvelled. ‘By tonight we’ll be the only people alive round here, won’t we?’
‘There’s certainly not much going on after half past six or seven o’clock,’ Jessica agreed. ‘That’s why we had to take over the hotel. When the new building went up, the L.C.C. made recommendations about social club facilities and living accommodation — they’re beginning to insist that business houses can’t just pull employees in during the day and then leave the place desolate at night. The same with the South Bank, I believe: they want some sort of community life in the area during the evenings. So Intersyn is gallantly trying to bring back song, dance and jollity to the City.’
‘I never knew that before. About the regulations, I mean.’
A burglar alarm went off somewhere above their heads, clanked for a minute or so as they passed, and was then abruptly cut off. No policeman appeared. No whistles sounded, no shouts of alarm. A newspaper delivery van and a bus hooted spitefully at each other and then moved apart. A torn page of The Financial Times, trapped in the grid of a drain, twitched slowly and turned pulpy as water trickled along the gutter into it.
Jessica said: ‘You haven’t been in Central Office for long?’
‘Only a few months. They’ve shunted me about in the backwoods for most of my time.’
‘Building up practical experience, we call it,’ she smiled.
‘That’s the story.’ He took her arm to halt her on a corner as a heavy lorry rattled round. His touch was unsure yet commanding. ‘A complete education, fitting me for high responsibility. My father used to say … ’ He bit off the last word. His grip tightened, although the lorry had gone.
‘Your father … ?’ she prompted.
He urged her across the road and his hand fell away as they reached the opposite pavement. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Then he said: ‘You know about my father, of course.’ Before she could reply, he went on: ‘You must know everything about everybody on this Course.’
Jessica had experienced many attempts to get her to talk. On every Course there was at least one man who tried to pump her. She was not sure whether David Marsh was clumsily attempting this or whether he was really as innocent as he looked.
Innocent … She realised with a shock that he was not quite the gauche young man he had at first appeared to be. Since the moment when he mentioned his father, his eyes had clouded and there were little puckered lines of pain at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
Uneasily she turned their footsteps back in the direction of the hotel.
At the entrance he said: ‘Oh, heavens. I forgot to hand in that card — the one with the personal particulars.’
‘That’s all right. It’ll do first thing in ‘
‘I’ve filled it in,’ he hastened to assure her, ‘but I left it on my dressing table. I’ll dash up straight away and get it. I’ll bring it to your office before we go down to dinner.’
‘I pass your room on my way along,’ said Jessica. ‘I can pick it up on the way.’
They reached the desk. Harry was already holding Jessica’s key out to her, dangling from his little finger. He looked enquiringly at David Marsh.
David said: ‘Er — Room 205.’
Harry scanned the hooks, then shook his head. ‘Not here, sir.’
David blinked, and put his hand in his pocket.
‘A bit bulky to carry about, sir,’ said Harry.
‘I can’t have dropped it. Must have left it in the door.’ He patted both pockets again and stared past Harry at the board as though hoping to conjure the key back into its rightful place. ‘That’s a bad beginning!’
Jessica went upstairs and along the landing with him. The key was indeed where he had left it, in the door.
Tomorrow, thought Jessica abstractedly, he would probably find as he started to take notes in the classroom that he had omitted to refill his fountain pen. And he would lose some of the papers from his folder; perhaps even the folder itself, either here or on the way to the Belby plant. Left to his own devices, he might miss the train or get the wrong one. There was always one candidate like David — one man who got flustered and lost things, did things wrong, lost his grip.
He opened the door and went in.
‘Just a tick. Let you have the card.’
She was outside the door but she saw him jolt to a stop. He stood quite still in the middle of his room, staring. Through the crack of the door she could catch the glint of his dressing table mirror.
She said: ‘Anything wrong?’
There was a pause. Then he said, ‘No,’ very slowly.
He turned to look at the chest of drawers immediately inside the door. From it he picked up the card and studied it for a moment.
‘I could have sworn … ’
Then he shook his head and handed the card to Jessica.
The dinner gong throbbed from the hall below. Jessica took the card and went on to her room.
Stopping in the middle of his room as he had done, David Marsh had looked like a startled animal — a
n animal suddenly alerted to danger, sensing something in the wind. It was as though he had at once reacted to a change in the place. Someone was in the room … or had been in the room.
The card that ought to have been on the dressing table had been on the chest of drawers. Unless, of course, he had got it all wrong. He had forgotten, just as he had forgotten about his key.
Jessica thoughtfully consulted her list once more, half knowing what she would find. David’s room was on the far side of Philip Western’s from Dampier. Western was between the two of them. Western could have searched David’s room in mistake for Dampier’s.
Unless it was all a silly fancy, a lurid twist of her imagination …
David Marsh had left his key in the door. He was nervous, flustered by the solemnity of the Executive Course, unsure of himself and his surroundings. It was much more likely that, forgetting his key, he was also liable to forget where he had put the personal particulars card.
But in her mind’s eye she still saw the rigidity of his back, the tense alertness of him.
Four
‘And now,’ said Dampier on the eighth day of the Course, ‘we come to our brainstorming session.’ He smirked like a benevolent torturer about to demonstrate the therapeutic qualities of a thumbscrew. ‘We call it Operation Cammanplan — Campaign and Management Planning.’
He went on to explain. It was an explanation that invariably produced a wide range of expressions on the faces of his class. Some looked baffled, some apprehensive, others faintly derisive. They would all go into it with the feeling that they were playing a game; but it was remarkable how quickly the game gripped them and how worked up they could get about it.
Dampier said: ‘You will be divided into four teams of five, each with a leader. Each team will be shut away in one of our smaller rooms and left to work out a problem which I will set. This is an exercise in group dynamics. As you probably know, “war games” have always been a feature of the training in military staff colleges, and for a long time now we have found it useful to play a “management game”. I want you to suppose that you are planning a major expansion in some African country which has recently achieved independence. I will give each of you a list of snags which have to be overcome, and from those snags you will have to deduce what other difficulties there may be. You will have the whole day in which to work out a campaign — that is, a sales campaign preceded by a Public Relations drive and by supply planning. I may say that I shall be much more interested in the way you tackle the Public Relations aspect than in the mere shifting of material from one country to another.’