People in Glass Houses

by Shirley Hazzard

  ‘Poor things,’ Lidia murmured, stoically finishing her meal.

  ‘It’s no use saying “poor things”, Lidia.’ Miss Bass often took it on herself to dictate the responses of others. ‘Sentiment doesn’t help. What’s needed is know-how.’

  Lidia was silent, believing that even drains cannot supplant human feeling.

  ‘The trouble with you, Lidia, is that you respond emotionally, not pragmatically. It’s a device to retain the sense of patronage. Unconscious, of course. You don’t think of people like these as your brothers.’ Miss Bass was one of those who find it easy and even gratifying to direct fraternal feelings towards large numbers of people living at great distances. Her own brother — who was shiftless and sometimes tried to borrow money from her — she had not seen for over a year. ‘You don’t relate to them as individuals.’ In Miss Bass’s mouth the very word ‘individuals’ denoted legions.

  Lidia, casting about for a diversion, was softened to see that Mr Bekkus had brought out photographs of what appeared to be a small child and was showing them to his companion.

  ‘Who is that man?’ Millicent asked. ‘I’ve seen him around for years.’

  ‘Bekkus, from Personnel.’ Lidia lowered her voice. ‘He’s on the Appointments and Terminations Board.’

  ‘My baby verbalizes,’ Bekkus was saying to his colleague. ‘Just learning to verbalize.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Millicent went on, ‘I hear you’re losing your friend.’

  Lidia hesitated, then dug her spoon into her crème caramel. ‘You mean Algie.’

  ‘Well, there’s a limit after all,’ Miss Bass said, sensing resistance.

  ‘I’ll miss him.’

  Miss Bass was not to be repulsed. ‘He is impossible.’

  Lidia laughed. ‘When people say that about Algie, it always reminds me of Bakunin.’

  ‘One of the new translators?’ asked Miss Bass, running through the names of the Russian Section in her mind.

  ‘No, no. I mean the Russian revolutionary.’

  ‘He’s a friend of Algie’s?’ Millicent inquired — sharply, for politics were forbidden to the Organization staff, and a direct affiliation with them was one of the few infallible means of obtaining summary dismissal.

  ‘He died a century ago.’

  ‘What’s he got to do with Algie?’ Miss Bass was still suspicious.

  ‘Oh — he was a big untidy man, and he once said — when someone told him he was impossible — “I shall continue to be impossible so long as those who are now possible remain possible.”’

  Millicent was not amused. ‘The Organization cannot afford Algie Wyatt.’

  ‘He’s a luxury,’ Lidia admitted.

  ‘Pleasure-loving,’ said Miss Bass, as if this were something unnatural.

  ‘Yes,’ Lidia agreed.

  ‘And always trying to be clever.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Lidia.

  ‘I’d prefer a more serious attitude,’ said Miss Bass. And it was true; she actually would.

  Lidia held her spoon poised for a moment and said seriously, ‘Millicent, please don’t go on about Algie. I don’t like it.’

  Millicent’s only idea of dignity was standing on it, and she did this for some minutes. Soon, however, she forgot what had been said and inquired about the terms of Algie’s retirement.

  ‘I really don’t know anything about it.’ Lidia dropped her crumpled napkin on her plate.

  ‘He has a choice, I believe — a reduced pension or a lump sum. That’s the arrangement for enforced resignation.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lidia. ‘Shall we go?’

  When they left the cafeteria, they walked along together to the elevators.

  ‘Now I hope you won’t think me hard,’ Miss Bass was beginning, when the elevator arrived — fortunately, perhaps, for her aspiration.

  Algie was sitting at his desk when Lidia entered the office. They smiled at each other, and when she was seated at her desk, Lidia asked, ‘Did you have a nice time with Jaspersen?’

  ‘Splendid,’ grunted Algie, going on with his work. He added, for once without looking up, ‘Wanted me to appeal my case. Shan’t do it, though.’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to think about it?’

  Algie shook his head, still writing. A little later he murmured aloud, ‘Never more, Miranda. Never more.’

  ‘Algie,’ Lidia said, putting down her pencil. ‘What do you think you’ll do, then? Take a reduced pension?’

  Now Algie did look up, but kept his pencil in his hand. ‘No. No. Take my lump sum and look for a small house somewhere along the Mediterranean. In the south of Spain, perhaps. Málaga, or Torremolinos. Good climate, some things still fairly cheap.’

  ‘Do you know anyone there?’

  ‘Someone sure to turn up.’ He went on with his work for a moment. ‘Only thing is — it’s very dangerous to die in Spain.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Law insists you be buried within twenty-four hours. Doctors not allowed to open your veins. If you should happen still to be alive, you wake up and find yourself in your coffin. When my time comes, I’m going down to Gibraltar and die in safety. Very dangerous to die in Spain.’

  ‘But what if one’s really dead?’

  Algie looked solemn. ‘That’s a risk you have to take.’

  Algie died the following year at Torremolinos. He died very suddenly, of a stroke, and had no time to reach safety in Gibraltar. An obituary paragraph of some length appeared in the London Times, and a brief notice in the Organization’s staff gazette, which misspelt his name. For so large a man, he left few material traces in the world. The slim remnants of his lump sum went to a sixteen-year-old nephew. His book on Roman remains in Libya is being reissued by an English publisher with private means.

  Just about the time of Algie’s death, Lidia became engaged to a handsome Scotsman in the Political Settlements Department. Although they have since been married, Lidia has kept her job and now shares her office with a Luxembourgeois who seldom looks up from his work and confesses to having no memory for verse. No one mourned the death of Algie more than Olaf Jaspersen, who remarked that he felt as if he had lost a part of himself. Jaspersen has recently attended important conferences abroad, and has taken to coming in to the office on Sundays. Millicent Bass is being sent to Africa, and regards this as a challenge; her arrival there is being accepted in the same spirit.

  Swoboda has been put forward for a promotion, but has been warned that there may be some delay. Mr Bekkus has received his promotion, though over some objections. He is still combing the Organization, with little success, for unutilized sources of ability and imagination. He continues to dictate letters in his characteristic style, and his baby is now verbalizing fluently along much the same lines.

  Algie’s last letter to Lidia was written only a few days before he died, but reached her some weeks later, as he had neglected to mark it ‘Correo Aéreo’. In this letter he reported the discovery of several new contradictions in terms and mentioned, among other things, that Piero della Francesca died on the same day that Columbus discovered America, and that there is in Mexico a rat poison called The Last Supper. Such information is hard to come by these days; now that Algie was gone, Lidia could not readily think of another source.

  2. The Flowers of Sorrow

  ‘In my country,’ the great man said, looking out over hundreds of uplifted faces, ‘we have a song that asks, “Will the flowers of joy ever equal the flowers of sorrow?”’

  The speech, up to then, had been the customary exhortation — to uphold the Organization, to apply oneself unsparingly to one’s work — and this made for an interesting change. Words like joy and, more especially, sorrow did not often find their way into that auditorium, and were particularly unlooked-for on Staff Day, when the Organization was at its most impersonal. The lifted faces — faces of a certain fatigued assiduity whose contours, dinted with the pressure of administrative detail, suggested habitual su
bmergence beneath a flow of speeches such as this — responded with a faint, corporate quiver. Members of the staff who had been half sleeping when the words reached them were startled into little delayed actions of surprise, and blew their noses or put on their glasses — to show they had been listening. In the galleries, throats were cleared and legs recrossed. The interpreters’ voices hesitated in the earphones, then accelerated to take in this departure from the Director-General’s prepared text. ‘Les fleurs du chagrin’, said the pretty girl in Booth No. 2; ‘Las flores del dolor’, said the Spanish interpreter, with a shrug towards his assistant.

  The man on the rostrum now repeated the words from the song, in his own language — and apparently for his own satisfaction, since throughout the hall only a few very blond heads nodded comprehendingly. He went on in English. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘perhaps the answer to that question is No.’ Now there was a long pause. ‘But we should remember that sorrow does produce flowers of its own. It is a misunderstanding always to look for joy. One’s aim, rather, should be to conduct oneself so that one need never compromise one’s secret integrity; so that even our sufferings may enrich us — enrich us, perhaps, most of all.’ He had laid his hand across his mimeographed text, which was open at the last page, and for a moment it seemed that he meant to end the speech there. The précis-writers were still scribbling ‘our sufferings may enrich us’. However, he looked down, shifted his hand, and went on. He thanked them all for continued devotion to their duties in the past year, and for the productivity illustrated by an increased flow of documentation in the five official languages. There would be no salary raise this year for the Subsidiary Category. The Pension Plan was under review by a newly appointed working group, and the proposed life-insurance scheme would be studied by an impartial committee. It was hoped to extend recreational facilities along the lines recommended by the staff representatives. … He greatly looked forward to another such meeting with the staff before long.

  The speaker stood a few moments with his speech in his hand, inclined his head politely to applause, and withdrew. In the eyes of the world he was a personality — fearless, virtuous, remote — and the ovation continued a little longer without reference to the content of the speech, although some staff members were already filing out and others had begun their complaints while still applauding.

  ‘Scarcely a mention of the proposed change in retirement age.’ A burly Belgian youth from Forms Control gave a last angry clap as he moved into the aisle. ‘And not a word about longevity increments.’ This he said quite fiercely to a Canadian woman, Clelia Kingslake, who had a modest but unique reputation for submitting reports in advance of dead lines.

  ‘That might come under the pension review,’ she suggested.

  ‘He would have said so. It’s just a move to hold the whole thing over for another year.’ He held the heavy glass exit door for her. The vast hallway into which they passed was brightly lit, and thickly carpeted in a golf-links green. ‘And what in God’s name was all that about flowers?’

  They were joined by Mr Matta from Economic Cooperation. ‘Yes, what was that?’ Mr Matta, from the Punjab, had a high lilting voice like a Welshman’s and often omitted the article. ‘Has D.-G. gone off his head, I wonder?’

  A group passed them heading for the elevators. Someone said violently, ‘… not even on the agenda!’

  When they arrived at the escaltor leading to the cafeteria, Miss Kingslake asked the two men, ‘Are you coming up for tea?’

  ‘Maybe later,’ said the Belgian boy. ‘Must go back to the office and see what’s come in with the afternoon distribution.’

  ‘Back to the shop, I’m afraid,’ said Mr Matta from Economic Cooperation. ‘Our workload has reached the point of boiling.’

  Clelia Kingslake, who had greying hair and a light-grey dress, got on the moving stair alone and went up to the cafeteria.

  The cafeteria was full. It usually was — and invariably after a staff meeting. Miss Kingslake joined the queue and when her turn came took a tray from the rack and a fork and spoon from the row of metal boxes. First there was a delay (someone ahead was buying containers of coffee for an entire office — a breach of good faith), and then the line moved along so quickly that she found herself at the cake before she had decided what to have. She would have preferred a single piece of bread with jam, but she had passed the butter and it would have been unthinkable to go back for it. So she took down from the glass shelf what seemed to be the largest piece of cake there. A sweet-faced Spanish woman at the tea counter fixed her up with a cup of boiling water and a tea-bag, and she paid.

  She wandered out into the centre of the room looking for an empty table. There did not seem to be one, and certainly not one by the windows on the river side. She moved along beside the tables with the unfocused, purposeful step of a sleep-walker. Hot water spilled over into the saucer of her cup.

  ‘Miss Kingslake. Miss Kingslake.’

  ‘Oh Mr Willoughby.’

  ‘I’ve got a table at the window, if someone hasn’t taken it.’

  ‘I thought you’d gone to the Field. I heard your assignment to mission went through.’

  ‘I leave tomorrow night. But not for Santiago after all. That was changed. Let me have your tray. They’re sending me to Kuala Lumpur.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’d better not let go. I hadn’t heard.’

  They made their way through to the windows. She balanced her tray on a corner of his table while he cleared it of the cups, plates and tea-bags discarded by the previous occupants. When he had stacked these on the heating equipment, they sat down.

  Claude Willoughby was a spare, fair-haired Anglo-Saxon who resembled nothing so much as a spar of bleached wood washed up on a beach. He was, for so industrious a man, remarkably able. He and Clelia Kingslake had been thrown together in Interim Reports, before her upgrading to Annual Reports and his lateral transfer to the World Commodity Index.

  ‘I might —’ he began.

  She said at the same moment, ‘I’m so glad —’

  They both said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You might?’ she inquired, squeezing her tea-bag and putting it in the ashtray.

  ‘I was going to say that I might have inquired whether you really wanted to join me. You seemed to be in a trance.’

  ‘I was afraid of seeing someone I didn’t want to sit with. Instead, what a nice surprise.’ She took two paper napkins from the metal dispenser on the table, and gave him one.

  ‘You were going to say?’ he asked. ‘Something about being glad?’

  ‘How glad I am, that’s all, to see you before you go. I thought you must have left without saying good-bye.’

  ‘I’ve been terribly busy. Forms, clearances, briefing — and of course my replacement hasn’t even been appointed. They’re holding the post for an African candidate — or so I’m told. And then, at home — you can imagine — all the packing and storing, added to which we’ve already taken the children out of school.’ Mr Willoughby, having four children of school age, was a substantial beneficiary of the Staff Education Grant. ‘But don’t let’s get into that. And of course I wouldn’t have gone without saying good-bye.’

  When he had said this, she stared out the window and he turned his head towards the next table, where two officials of the Department of Personnel were getting up from their coffee.

  ‘Shouldn’t have said that about the flowers,’ one of them remarked — a ginger-haired Dutchman in charge of Clerical Deployment. ‘Unnecessary.’

  ‘I should think,’ agreed his friend, Mr Andrada from Legal Aspects. ‘If I may say so, not good for morale.’

  ‘Particularly that part about the answer being No.’

  ‘Isn’t it curious,’ Mr Willoughby said to Miss Kingslake, ‘how uneasy people are made by any show of feeling in official quarters?’ He placed his paper napkin under his cup to absorb spilt tea. ‘I suppose they find it inconsistent. What did you think of those remarks today — I mean, about the fl
owers?’

  Miss Kingslake was still looking out at the broad river and the wasteland of factories on its opposite bank. She held the teacup in both hands, her elbows on the table. ‘I don’t quite know. I think I felt heartened to hear something said merely because it was felt. Something that — wasn’t even on the agenda. Still, I did find all that stuff about one’s integrity a bit Nordic. After all, it would hardly be possible for most people to get through a working day without compromising their idea of themselves.’

  ‘I think he said “secret integrity”.’ Mr Willoughby drank his tea. ‘We can check it tomorrow in the Provisional Verbatim Record.’

  ‘I suppose’, she conceded, ‘it would depend on how secret one was prepared to let it become.’

  The noise in the cafeteria, like that of a great storm, was beyond all possibility of complaint or remedy. It was a noise in some ways restful to staff members from quiet offices, and Clelia Kingslake was one of these. Eating her cake with a fork, resting her cheek on her left hand, she looked quite at ease — more at ease, in fact, than was appropriate to her type.

  ‘You busy at present?’ Mr Willoughby asked her.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. (It was a question which had never in the Organization’s history been known to meet with a negative reply.) ‘We’re finishing up the report on Methods of Enforcement.’

  ‘How is it this year?’

  ‘A much stronger preamble than the last issue. And some pretty tough recommendations in Appendix III.’

  Someone leant over their table. ‘You using this chair?’

  A group of the interpreters had come in. The interpreters were always objects of interest, their work implying an immediacy denied to the rest of the staff. They stacked their manila folders on the heaters and pushed up extra chairs to the table vacated by the officers of Personnel. Two of them went to fetch tea for the entire table. The rest sat down and began to talk loudly, like children let out of the examination room.