by John Burke
‘That’s a nice picture,’ he said tentatively.
It was a water colour of the Malverns, bought because she and Andrew had spent a weekend there early on in their relationship when everything was flawless.
‘My favourite,’ she said, ‘is the one behind you.’
He dutifully slewed round in his chair and studied scarlet fruit and black shadows of the picture she had found three months ago and loved at first sight. He sat in that twisted position for quite a time, obviously trying to find something to say.
‘Coffee … ?’
He turned thankfully back to her. ‘Oh, thanks. Yes. Lovely.’
‘Black or white?’
‘Er, white. No. Black.’ Then he nodded towards the far wall and said brusquely: ‘That’s the divan.’
‘That’s it.’ She poured coffee into his cup and passed it along the low, oiled teak table to him.
The room overawed him. It was not much larger than the sitting room of his home but Jessica had aimed at airiness and achieved it, and its whole atmosphere was so different that he was lost. She didn’t want him to feel lost: she wanted them both to be at ease, discovering each other without strain and enjoying the discovery as they had done earlier today.
David said: ‘When did you join Intersyn?’
This wouldn’t do at all. Before they knew where they were they would be halfway back into the Course, with the implicit chalking up of marks. She was not ready to slip into her role of an Intersyn employee this evening. She didn’t want to talk about her career, and she had no intention of asking him about his. She knew about his.
That was the trouble. Caught up in Intersyn, she knew too much about most of the men she met. Few of them came from outside the Company. It was too easy to check the records of those she met inside. One of her girl-friends in Staff Records had once said: ‘Any time a man asks me out to dinner I dash off to see if he has a wife and six kids and if his salary is high enough for him to buy me the sort of food I want to eat.’ Even if you didn’t work it out in terms of progeny and restaurants, it was difficult not to know too much about the men you met inside Intersyn. And men outside were just that: men outside. After a while you found that the Company had engulfed you. You derided its standards yet implicitly accepted them. People outside just didn’t understand. You found that you had few topics of mutual interest.
But not now. Not tonight.
She said: ‘You don’t have to sit so far away.’
There was nothing accomplished or calculated in his movements. He came towards her in a hurry as though scared that if his first impetus failed he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. When he bent over her to kiss her he lost his balance and fell on top of her; and then they were laughing and couldn’t stop, and Jessica put her arms round him and held him down so that he couldn’t get up, and bit his ear. His foot kicked the edge of the table. The coffee cups rattled. His hands were unskilled.
‘No,’ she gasped. ‘No … not here.’
When they reached the bedroom she was afraid he was going to make an inventory of its contents. She caught his arm and pulled him close to her more vigorously than she had intended. He fumbled with her blouse; it was funny and sweet and they began to laugh again, but his laughter was breathless and uncertain. He was not used to this. He was afraid that it might all go wrong.
Jessica unfastened her blouse quickly and slipped it off. Her fingers were on the zip of her skirt when the telephone at her bedside rang.
David, about to take off his tie with slightly trembling hands, froze.
The telephone went insistently on.
Jessica fell back on the bed and reached for the receiver.
Andrew said: ‘I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon.’
‘I’ve been away for the weekend,’ she said lightly, smiling up at David so that he should see this was not an important call.
‘Oh. So you went.’
‘Yes. Had a nice time?’
‘Jess … ’ He could not suppress the annoyance but was trying hard. ‘I could get away. I could start out now.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t if I were you.’
David was slowly taking off his tie, ready to put it back on again if the alarm was given.
‘A lot of them will be getting back to the hotel tonight,’ said Andrew. ‘I could come back. I’ve already told Muriel that it’s really the best policy. It’s convincing enough.’
She smiled. He could not see her smile, and he would not have understood. Really, Andrew was too consistently Andrew. It meant a lot to him that there should be a rational excuse — one which fitted the circumstances, which could indeed be as near true as made no difference. He could just as well have used it if it had been untrue, but he would not have been easy in his mind.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said casually.
‘Are you alone?’
Her mind raced. But there was only one possible answer. She said simply: ‘No.’
Andrew rang off.
‘Anything important?’ said David.
‘No.’
She drew him down upon her. When she saw the anxiety in his face, she reached for the light switch and snapped it off. Then it was better; better for him, better for both of them.
He was awkward and unsatisfying and did not know that he was not satisfying her. But she felt a rush of tenderness towards him and when it was ended she ran her hand rhythmically, contentedly down his back.
It was only when he was asleep and she lay still awake that the echoes of Andrew’s voice began to throb through the room. She could half pretend that it was Andrew who lay beside her, his head burrowed into her shoulder — but only half pretend, for Andrew liked to move away to the edge of the bed, and there was a different feeling, a different smell about him. She was suddenly frightened — not of Andrew melodramatically appearing here now and making a scene, but of Andrew never appearing here again.
At the same time she wanted to be free of him. Her hand moved over David’s shoulder and down his smooth arm to the elbow.
He murmured in his sleep and instinctively moved away from her.
It happened too often. The movement away — in bed, in the street, in her whole relationship with Andrew there had been this moving away. She held on to David, and he groaned and was awake. Like Andrew he came awake quickly.
She didn’t want another Andrew. Whatever she wanted, it was not that.
They lay there for some minutes. Her hand caressed his arm until he twitched beneath her and she knew that he wanted her to stop. He was staring up at the ceiling. She could see only the faint outline of his head, but there was a glimmer of light on his eyes. She lay back beside him. We’re like two noble corpses, she thought waywardly, on a marble tomb: two of us, flat on our backs, staring sightlessly at the sky or the ceiling or whatever.
He said: ‘Jessica.’
‘Mm?’
‘Who’s watching me? Who’s been told off to watch me on the Course?’
Seven
The trip to the North had an aura of adventure about it. Although the name of Belby was frequently on the lips of Head Office staff and visitors from overseas marketing companies, few of the Course members had ever been there. It was remote and rather frightening, almost mythical. They felt as though they were heading for the Siberian salt mines as privileged spectators — spectators about to be faced by some of the unpleasant realities behind their daily food and warmth.
For some the journey itself was not too remarkable. Those who lived in the North or Midlands had the advantage of a longer Monday morning tacked on to their weekend: they made their own way from their homes to Belby and the Company hostel on the edge of the plant, meeting the London contingent in the late afternoon.
Andrew, making his way along the train in search of a vacant seat, found himself at the door of a first-class compartment which so far contained Dampier, Hornbrook and Western. He hesitated. It would surely seem rather ostentatious to join Dampier. He didn’t want it
to look as though he were trying to steal a march or ingratiate himself. Then it occurred to him that neither Hornbrook nor Western had hesitated or would ever hesitate in such circumstances. They took it as their due that they should sit with Dampier.
Andrew went in and joined them.
Just before the train drew out two other Course members arrived. Startled by their own temerity, they sat down and remained silent for the larger part of the journey.
Hornbrook talked affably to Dampier about various aspects of Company operations. What he said bore little relation to the techniques they were studying on the Course yet casually a picture was built up of Hornbrook as a man steeped in all the workings of the Company and its associates here and abroad. He even achieved an air of condescension towards Dampier. The lecturer might be the man of power during these few weeks but Hornbrook would go far beyond him in the future. Hornbrook was like a junior officer in training: he had to defer to the regimental sergeant major for the time being but the time was not far distant when he would be in a position of authority to which the sergeant major could never attain.
Andrew answered when politely drawn into the conversation by Dampier but felt churlishly reluctant to contribute anything of his own. He thought mainly about Jessica and about his weekend at home.
Muriel had been pettish. He hadn’t done much to overcome her mood. He hadn’t wanted to. It was almost a satisfaction that she should be so spiteful. She was not even in the house when he got home. He had put the key in the door and tensed, waiting for the imminent meeting, already braced against the offhandedly contemptuous welcome at which she was so adept; and then there had been the deflation when he found the place empty. Typical that she should be out. She knew what time he was due back so there was no likelihood of a misunderstanding. It was deliberate.
It was an hour before she appeared. When she came in, tossing her coat across the back of a chair, all she said was:
‘Oh, hello.’
‘Hello. I wondered where you were.’
‘Playing bridge. You know I always go to Dulcie’s on a Friday afternoon.’
‘You’re not usually as late as this.’
‘I didn’t know you ever noticed whether I was late or not.’
It was not worth his while to say that he had expected her to be here to meet him. After all, she was the one who had made the fuss about his going away and about his coming home for only one weekend after leaving her on her own all that time, so she was the one who ought to have been eager for their reunion. But logic had nothing to do with Muriel’s actions. If he asked her now why she hadn’t been here to greet him she would ask with sour delight if he had really missed her, and say between her teeth that she was touched, really touched. There was really nothing to be said. But since they could hardly sit or stand in silence he would have to speak, and he sensed already that whatever he said would trigger off some prepared sneer. She was primed, ready to react to whatever line he took.
Andrew opened his brief-case and said: ‘I brought you this.’
It was a bottle of scent. He had been driven to buy it by some obscure feeling that he was coming back from holiday and that he ought to buy a present for the neglected little woman back home. On this at any rate Muriel was in agreement with him.
‘Anyone would think you’d been to France,’ she said.
He held out the bottle. She took it. Then she said:
‘I gave up using this scent ages ago.’
‘You’ve been using it recently. That’s why I — ’
‘You wouldn’t notice, of course. Ages ago.’
‘You can always go back to it,’ said Andrew. ‘You used to be fond enough of it.’
Muriel shrugged and put the bottle down on the coffee table. Indifferently she said:
‘Smuggle anything else through the Customs?’
He took out a half-bottle of Tia Maria. It had always been her favourite drink.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve gone off this as well?’ He tried to make his tone of voice as much a peace offering as the two bottles had been. She at once felt that she had got him on the run, and said:
‘You must have a guilty conscience about something, Andrew.’
He was a stranger in his own home. He couldn’t imagine why he was here or what pleasure there would ever be here. He stuck it out until the middle of Sunday afternoon — the greater part of two purposeless, graceless days — and then said that he thought he would go back into town late that afternoon instead of getting up for the early train in the morning. ‘Mustn’t let any of them steal a march on me’ — it was too contrived a remark and was received sceptically. It gave Muriel an excuse to shut herself away in a hurt, defeated silence. He suggested they should go out for a walk. She said that he could go for a walk on his own. He went, and from a telephone box tried to ring Jessica. There was no answer. Later, back in the house, he tried again, having first made sure that Muriel was settled for a spell in the bathroom. Still there was no reply. He fretted until the pub down the road opened and he could plausibly say he was going out for a quick pint. He asked Muriel to come with him but did so in just such a way that he could guarantee her refusing. This time he spoke to Jessica and she made it clear that she had somebody with her.
He remembered all too clearly the telephone beside her bed. She had answered it quickly. She must have been in the bedroom. That did not necessarily mean that David Marsh was in the bedroom with her …
The train rattled across points and set up a frenzy of echoes in a small station as it screamed through. There was nothing to do in the train but think. Impossible to read and impossible to join in the complacent conversation. He was a stranger in his home, a stranger in Jess’s flat, a stranger here in this compartment with these strangers and enemies. He was on his own. All right, let it be that way.
Even as he made this silent proclamation he found himself nevertheless saying to Western, ‘Is there a buffet car on this train?’
‘Thirsty?’ said Western as though inviting Dampier to make a note in the records that Andrew Flint was an incipient alcoholic.
Andrew went out of the compartment and along the corridor. In the noisy, unstable space between two carriages he rubbed shoulders with David Marsh. The train swayed and they were jostled together. Andrew caught Marsh’s arm, and instinctively his grip tightened. He found himself reaching out with his free hand, gripping Marsh with that, too.
‘Hey, careful … ’
There was a smell of dust and grease, and from under their feet the noise was a physical battering. David Marsh, twisting away towards the brighter daylight of the corridor, looked scared. Andrew couldn’t let go. He wanted to shake the kid, frighten him, yell some sense into him and then toss him aside and never see him again.
Suddenly Western edged into the constricted space.
‘Thought I might join you.’
Andrew let go of Marsh, and the young man moved apprehensively away. Western watched him go.
‘Bad marks against candidates who try to throttle their rivals, old boy,’ he said as he followed Andrew towards the buffet car. ‘Sign of insecurity.’
When they reached the car and settled at a small white-topped table it was Western who did most of the talking. He was quite at ease. He discussed their fellow Course members, made a joke about Dampier that was shrewd yet inoffensive if it should ever get back to Dampier, and implicitly invited Andrew to contribute an opinion of his own.
Then, after they had ordered coffee, he brought Jessica’s name into the conversation.
‘Very ornamental. But functional also. She could probably assess us just as efficiently as Dampier’s likely to. Even before the Course started she probably knew as much about us as anyone possibly could. Don’t you think so?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Andrew stiffly.
He wondered if Western was part of the whole complex Company espionage system. Industrial career development, like the operation of a spy ring, fed on itself and put
forth shoots that tangled inextricably with one another.
Only cowards were afraid of this monster and its tentacles. Andrew felt a resurgence of energy and determination, provoked by Western’s slyness. You could always cut your way through that sort of thing. If the weak went down, that was their lookout. You could always win a duel with the psychological aptitude tests, defy the concealed microphones and the studiously casual listener; and while the management selection boys were thinking up new trials and oppressions you could be thinking up ways of circumventing them. It was a matter of being constantly alert, flexible in manoeuvre. And wasn’t that what business had always demanded? The only difference was that in the old days you had had to out-think your competitors, while today the first essential was to out-think your colleagues.
Suddenly he felt so sure of himself that when he was ready to go back to his compartment he did not even bother to wait for Western to finish his coffee. He got up confidently and went back on his own, seeing Western’s head jerk back in mild surprise.
On the way back he looked down through the glass pane into a compartment where Jessica was sitting. All the seats were occupied. She looked up, caught his eye, and looked away.
The bitch. He wanted her. He couldn’t have lost her to a kid like Marsh. It would be all right later when this was all over.
Later. But he wanted her now.
Jessica turned back in time to see Andrew swaying along the corridor, letting his shoulders take the impact on each side. A few minutes later Western went past.
In her mind grew a larger and larger question mark after Western’s name. For him the results of the Course were a foregone conclusion. He was already established. He was already a management man. His only task was to establish the unworthiness of another man.
Another man — Dampier or David Marsh?
Jessica could not resolve this. As the train thrummed on its way she put her head back against the creased linen rest attached to the seat and closed her eyes. Beside her two men muttered a conversation. Beyond them, far away but clear, the remembered voice of David asked her the utterly unexpected question.