People in Glass Houses

by Shirley Hazzard

  Swoboda’s normal work was disrupted by the report, but he was assured that this was a temporary inconvenience and he did not mind. Cheerfully he pieced together the scissored paragraphs (‘Two experts in metallurgy served in Tanzania during the year under review …’ ‘Four awards were made for the study of sanitary engineering abroad …’ ‘A fruit factory was erected in Kashmir …’). Swoboda was surprised to see how the very items that had been the subject of so much anxiety and dispute throughout the year appeared, when reported, to be part of some grand and faultless design to which no disharmony could ever conceivably have attached. He tried to reflect that this was perhaps, in some final and overwhelming sense, no more than the truth.

  In the days before Christmas, the long corridors of the Organization were gay with plastic wreaths, and in the main lobby the Organization Singers chanted carols interspersed with the Founding Constitution set to music. It was on the afternoon of the DALTO Christmas party that Mr Rodriguez-O’Hearn asked Swoboda to come into his office. Swoboda was, of course, in and out of Rodriguez’s office all through the working day; but there is an atmosphere, a closing of doors, a lowering of voices, a pushing away of papers, that unmistakably announces an interview of more personal character. (I am sorry to say that, although such interviews do occasionally bring good tidings, their general climate is one of foreboding.) Swoboda assumed of course, and rightly, that the discussion would have to do with the matter of his promotion, which he had been expecting Rodriguez to mention. It was known that the Board would soon meet — perhaps it had even met already, and Rodriguez was now authorized to give Swoboda the good news.

  ‘Swoboda, sit down,’ said Mr Rodriguez-O’Hearn. He performed a scale or two with the fingers of his right hand and said nothing more for some moments. Swoboda was oddly reminded of Mr Bekkus. But he put this out of his mind with a dismissing mental smile.

  ‘Swoboda,’ Mr Rodriguez said again, ‘I’m sure you know that I have the highest opinion of your work.’ He was looking not at Swoboda but at his own right hand, which was now executing more complicated fingering. ‘And, I may say, of your character.’ He then interpolated, ‘The two cannot, in any case, be separated.’

  Swoboda did not speak. He observed Rodriguez carefully. He was interested in human nature and his intuition told him that he was getting an important demonstration of it.

  ‘You must be aware,’ Rodriguez went on, now looking briefly at Swoboda out of his fine blue eyes, ‘that the question of your promotion was due to come before the present meeting of the Promotions and Probations Board. And that my endorsement was required.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Quite so. Well, Swoboda,’ here Rodriguez stopped. Swoboda, watching him, wondered what word should be used to describe his expression. He decided that the most fitting word was ‘desperate’. Rodriguez then continued. ‘I did in fact write the recommendation on your case. And I may say that it was unequivocal. It was, indeed, wholehearted. However—’

  ‘However?’ Swoboda inquired gently, since silence seemed likely to descend.

  ‘However — some questions were subsequently raised. I mean, after I had drafted the report on you. It was felt that, since you had joined this department so recently, others here might feel — ah — supplanted in the matter of your promotion. I do not say that I agree with this view, but it was presented to me as a possible source of grievance. … Miss — er — Graine did in fact raise the matter with Mr Pylos, or so I understand, and he felt. … Then, too, an official of Personnel — Mr Bekkus, in whose office you formerly worked — seems to have said …’ Rodriguez-O’Hearn’s voice trailed away. He summoned it back and added more firmly, even defiantly, ‘And so, taking all these things into account, I did not send my recommendation.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘Swoboda,’ said Mr Rodriguez-O’Hearn — and Swoboda now concluded that the word for his expression was ‘hopeless’ — ‘this doesn’t mean anything more than postponement. You realize that, of course.’

  ‘I see, sir,’ Swoboda repeated. He was still looking at Rodriguez-O’Hearn — at his expression, his rapidly heaving chest, his intricately moving fingers. A sensation was welling up within Swoboda as he looked, and this sensation, though he struggled against it, held him fast and threatened to overcome him.

  ‘In fact I think I can safely say that at the next meeting of the Board — that is, the one after the present one — the one that meets in June — this is confidential, of course. …’

  Mr Rodriguez’s voice halted, wandered on. Swoboda sat still. Soon he would rise and go. Was there not the Christmas party to attend, and had he not promised Abdul Karim of Fellowships to help him serve the drinks? There was nothing to stay for here, nothing more to be said, even though Mr Rodriguez was still talking, for Swoboda had now surrendered to the familiar feelings that had assailed him in the past few moments. He had fought against them, but to no avail. Try as he would, Swoboda could not change; he could not help himself. There was nothing to be done about it. The fact was that he pitied Mr Patricio Rodriguez-O’Hearn. He pitied him with all his heart.

  It was nothing short of tragic.

  5. The Story of Miss Sadie Graine

  The moment his new secretary was introduced to him, Pylos knew it would not do. He looked at Miss Sadie Graine and, even as he smiled and shook her hand, he knew that it would not do. It was his first day at the Organization and, although his appointment was a lofty one, he did not wish to begin with a complaint. But the next day, or the following one at latest, he would ask for a different secretary.

  Miss Sadie Graine was a tiny woman. She was barely five feet tall. Her features and bones were bird-like, her head tightly feathered in grey. She was an angular little creature, sharp of nose, eye and tongue; but her lips were her most singular characteristic, being in repose (though that is not the word) no more than a small straight line. People meeting Miss Graine for the first time were apt to exclaim afterwards, ‘But the mouth. My God, the mouth.’

  It had not always been so. There existed, in fact, a childhood photograph from which a tiny Sadie gazed forth with eyes large and luminous. These eyes — from taking in less and less, from peering ever harder into ever narrowing interstices — had contracted to their present dimensions. It is not the purpose here to study the causes for shrinkage. (Causes there were, for Sadie Graine’s story was, like everybody’s, a tale of truth and consequences.) Miss Graine’s tale will rather be told in the form — the outmoded and discredited form — of her effect on others.

  Achilles Pylos was a Greek, and it gave him a pang to see what had become of this woman of the Western world. Had the faces of certain male colleagues been pointed out to him as correspondingly ravaged, he would have replied that, in the case of a woman, a more aesthetically pleasing article had been despoiled. For Mr Pylos was well-disposed towards women. His own wife was beautiful. He was prepared to discover beauty in almost any woman, and it depressed him when, as in the case of Sadie Graine, he was utterly thwarted. It must not be thought, however, that Pylos recoiled from Miss Graine merely for her lack of looks: he was not a profound man but he was not entirely superficial and his glance penetrated at least as far as the upper substrata of Miss Graine’s configuration. His own nature, beneath its meridional pretentions, was an easy-going one, and he knew that he could not keep Miss Sadie Graine.

  Miss Graine returned his smile with one of her own so pointedly summoned just for him that it seemed to seal her off from the others in the room — his new administrative chief, a flannel-suited man called Choudhury, and his fiscal officer, a Mr Chai. Miss Graine was wearing a coat and skirt, and a blouse so unfrivolous that it at once suggested the absence of a tie. Mr Pylos fleetingly took in these details as he walked across his new office to the windows (of which, since the room was a rather grand one by Organization standards, there were three). His token gesture towards pulling up the venetian blinds brought the others quickly to his side, and in a moment he was looking
down some thirty storeys to the Organization gardens below. He was unused to great heights, and steeled himself to a vertiginous future.

  ‘This will be the West, I suppose?’

  ‘The East,’ corrected Chai. ‘Or so I believe.’

  ‘Ah — the East. Of course.’ Pylos bravely kept his eyes on the scene below. ‘And these are the gardens,’ he went on, not risking further conjecture.

  ‘The gardens,’ Choudhury agreed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that something being built down there? Or demolished, perhaps?’

  ‘Where, sir?’ They all leant forward to see.

  ‘There. Near that clump of trees.’

  ‘I don’t quite — Ah yes. Yes, of course. No, that’s a sculpture, sir. The gift of Denmark, I think. Or is it the Netherlands? I can easily find out if —’

  ‘No, no, just curiosity. Yes, I see now. Very modern, of course. Very — er — er.’ Pylos waved a well-kept hand.

  ‘Very free,’ Choudhury supplied.

  ‘Free, yes,’ Pylos echoed, taking the opportunity to liberate himself from the window. ‘Now where does this lead?’ He strode across the bright blue carpet and got a shock when he laid his hand on the metal knob of a door.

  ‘The carpet, you see, sir. That’s what does it,’ Miss Graine pointed out. ‘It’s the electricity in the carpet.’

  Chai hurriedly explained about the door. ‘That’s your conference-room, sir. There are three doors, as you see — the one to your outer office, this to the conference-room, and the other leads to — er — Miss Graine.’

  But not for long, Pylos added reassuringly to himself. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, going behind his desk and standing there with his fingertips resting on the blotter, ‘this all seems very satisfactory. It will take me a while, naturally, to. …’

  ‘Naturally’ and ‘Of course’ came readily from the lips of his two subordinates. ‘If in any way,’ they said, and ‘Any thing at all.’ Miss Graine all the while stood by, and Pylos had the impression that she was waiting for the others to leave. He therefore said, ‘And now, since I understand I have a busy afternoon of meetings, I’d like to get on with these’ — he laid his hand on a pile of documents with which he had been provided (the Founding Constitution of the Organization, the Basic Legislation Governing Extension of Aid, the Standard Conditions of Application) — ‘interesting papers.’ He smiled as if his thoughts were already elsewhere, and kept smiling like that until he had the room to himself.

  Pylos sat down at his desk and really looked at everything for the first time. There were more gadgets than in his previous office, in a ministry in Athens — two telephones, each with a battery of numbered buttons, a small transmitter for the relaying of debates from Organization auditoriums (an arrow on the dial of this device could be turned to any of the several languages into which discussions were interpreted), and an intercom freshly marked ‘Miss Graine’. Otherwise, the room did bear a certain bureaucratic resemblance to his former premises, and he really had to remind himself that beyond these walls lay no prospect of the Acropolis or Mount Lycabettus but a dizzy panorama of the peaks and ledges of immense office buildings.

  As he sat with his hands folded on the immaculate blue blotter, he could not help wondering again how he came to be there. The new department that Pylos had been asked to head — a body to aid impoverished areas of the world — had been formed as a result of recent Organizational deliberations. Barely two months had passed since Pylos had received in Athens the cable offering him the post of Chief Coordinator in this new department. The conditions seemed not unfavourable, the salary — when translated into drachmae and calculated together with allowances — not ungenerous. His Athenian post in foreign affairs was soon relinquished (with satisfactory arrangements made to perpetuate his pension rights); his furniture was soon crated, his bags soon packed, his colleagues envious, his wife overjoyed. On the ship he carefully studied the Organization papers that had been sent to him, and he and his wife read aloud to one another from the Reader’s Digest in order to improve their English. To no one, however, did Pylos express the surprise he felt: he was too much a Greek for that. He assumed it would eventually become clear to him how he, Achilles Pylos, a civil servant with no Organizational connexions, with the merest smattering of knowledge in economics, should have been chosen for this post. He did not worry unduly about his suitability: he had been a bureaucrat too long for that. But he determined to go quietly until he got the lay of the Organizational terrain.

  The matter was in fact a simple one. When the Organization’s Governing Body created a department to aid retarded nations, the question of a chief for that department instantly arose. He must be a national of a certain kind of country — a country not too contrastingly prosperous, yet not conspicuously delinquent; a country with an acceptable past, a decently uncomfortable present, and a reasonably predictable future. The man, likewise, must walk the middle path — a man of middle years and middle brow was wanted, a man not burdened with significant characteristics. Certain governments were asked to suggest candidates. Some sent the names of those they wished to be rid of, some proposed the ancient or the controversial. There were candidates who spoke no English, candidates who were chronically ill. One or two were over-qualified and would have made trouble by taking up positions. A committee deliberated. The field was narrowed. At last the word went round. ‘They’re trying to dig up a Greek.’

  Some weeks of archaeological jokes and official indecision were followed by the announcement of Pylos’s appointment. The staff of the new department — who had all been drawn from other areas of the Organization — at first rejoiced, without knowing why. In Organization circles, the devil you don’t know is always preferable, and it was readily believed that Pylos was a man of outstanding talents. Rumours circulated that he had been a hero of the Greek Resistance, that he possessed a famous collection of antiquities, that his wife owned a shipping line, that he had come to prominence from poverty-stricken origins, that his family was a princely and immensely rich one. At last, as his arrival drew near, the staff reconciled themselves to reality. Their reception of the real Pylos had nothing to do with the legends that preceded him, for in their hearts they had known all along how closely he would resemble his peers. So close, indeed, was this resemblance that the official sent by the Organization to meet Pylos at the dock picked him out at once from a throng of fellow-passengers.

  And now, alone in his new room, still wondering what particular quality of his had struck the Organizational hierarchy, Pylos could not know that it was precisely his lack of striking qualities that had brought him there.

  He got up and went over a second time to the closed door that led to his conference-room. Taking out his handkerchief, he turned the metal handle cautiously. At this moment a single knock was instantly followed by the opening of another door, and Miss Sadie Graine came into the room.

  Pylos smiled again at Sadie Graine. The sooner she goes the better, he thought, putting away his handkerchief. But he came — as it were, obediently — back to his desk where she stood, and sat down.

  ‘I’ve prepared a list of your meetings this afternoon,’ said Miss Graine, placing this on the corner of the desk.

  Pylos drew the paper towards him and saw that it was, in fact, a useful description not only of the meetings he was to attend and the officials who were to be at them, but even of the issues that might be raised and what the background of those issues was. He said, ‘Thank you, most helpful,’ in a minimizing way, but it was clear to him that the paper was invaluable, and he felt that this was also clear to Miss Graine. He laid it casually to one side.

  She now indicated the pile of documents which had been left for study, and which he had not touched. ‘Shall I go through these for you?’

  Pylos looked up. ‘But shouldn’t I —’ he began, and then began again, ‘It was felt by Mr Choudhury and Mr Chai …’

  Miss Graine dismissed Choudhury and Chai with a slight grimace which, whil
e improper, contrasted flatteringly with her deferential attitude to Pylos. ‘They mustn’t bother you with trivialities.’ She took away the Organization’s Founding Constitution. ‘I can mark passages for your attention, if you wish.’ She paused. ‘Of course, if you prefer …’

  ‘No, that will be quite all right.’ Pylos could not help being pleased to find his time was precious. ‘Most helpful,’ he said again, this time with irrepressible sincerity.

  Miss Graine gave him one of her brief, pin-pointing smiles. ‘I’ll do it immediately.’ She took the pile of documents and left the room.

  When the weighted door had given its ultimate sealing click, Pylos placed the list of meetings before him. The fact that Sadie Graine had proved efficient in no way lightened his spirits — on the contrary, it oppressed him with disproportionate foreboding. He felt that her derogatory reference to Choudhury and Chai should not have been allowed to pass. But then, she really had not made any remark about them — and were they not, in truth, a rather Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern pair? In any case, Pylos thought, pulling himself together, it’s all absurd. She won’t be here more than a few days. Appeased by this thought, he took up Miss Graine’s useful list, leant back in his Organization chair, and began to study it.

  Recounting the day to his wife that evening he mentioned Sadie Graine. ‘What a secretary they’ve given me,’ he said. ‘A real battle-axe. But I’m going to ask for a change tomorrow.’

  There followed some weeks of what Pylos was later to think of as the Phony War. As he made his first steps across the Organizational scene, Miss Graine was ever at his side and, although he could not relish the proximity, Pylos admitted to himself that she was worth her weight in gold. He now told himself that he would retain her merely for these weeks of settling-in. Disturbingly, he felt that Miss Graine herself sensed this callous intention — but perhaps this was imagination. Considering how much he had to cope with at this time, it was odd the way Sadie Graine preyed on his mind.