by Colm Toibin
She knew what was coming in the film; she had not remembered it until now—the three characters leaving, walking over the high mountains in the hope of being rescued and taken back to England. And then the woman’s face wizened as soon as they moved out of the sacred space of Shangri-La. And then her death, and the hero’s brother jumping to his own death in horror, followed by the rescue and the return to England.
It was the last part of the film that caused Donal to become restless on his chair. The hero wanted to go back, wanted to leave the world and everything familiar and walk until he found it again, the place away from the world where no one could ever locate him and where he would not miss his home but experience instead the paradise where he would not grow old. The message in this was so obvious that Nora did not have to wonder what the boys were thinking about, they were thinking that this was what their father had done. She was thinking it too, and it registered the same for all of them, she thought, so that when it was over, there was no need to mention it. They turned the television off and she set about preparing dinner for the next day while the boys went to bed.
The following morning, as she walked across the town to go to work for the first time, she felt that she was being closely observed. She had been up early and had spent some time choosing the clothes that she would wear. She had to make sure that they were not too glamorous, but not shabby or dowdy either. It was not cold enough to wear one of her two woollen coats, so she found a red raincoat that she had bought before Maurice became sick and that she had never worn. It was too bright and might have looked better on a younger woman but it was the only coat she had that was not too heavy on a morning like this.
Now, as she reached Court Street, she knew it was a mistake. She passed women on their way to work in St. John’s Hospital and men on their way to work in Roche’s Maltings. All of them looked at her with her dyed hair and her red coat. She hoped to meet no one she knew well, no one who would stop and talk and ask her questions. She slipped down Friary Hill and along Friary Place to avoid meeting anyone. She crossed Slaney Place and got to the bridge with relief. She was almost there now. Once she arrived at the office building, she was to ask the receptionist for Miss Kavanagh. There was no point, she thought, in trying to be warm and friendly with Francie Kavanagh. They had never liked each other, and they would not like each other now. All she could hope for was that the news that she had been offered the job by William Gibney himself in the presence of his wife, Peggy, and that Maurice had taught the Gibney boys in school might make Francie Kavanagh have some manners.
When the receptionist asked for her name, she found herself speaking too grandly, causing the woman to glance up at her. That tone, she thought, would be no use here. She concentrated now on becoming quiet and mild, but also efficient and in full control of herself. She had no idea what work she would be doing. Thomas Gibney had said that that would be something for Miss Kavanagh to decide, but no matter what she was given to do, it would be new for her and take time to learn. She waited at the reception as some office workers passed her in the narrow corridor. Most of them were women and much younger than she was. A few of them looked like schoolgirls.
Eventually, Miss Kavanagh was alerted by the receptionist to Nora’s presence.
“Oh, you picked the worst morning of the whole year,” she shouted through the half-open window between the receptionist’s office and the corridor. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Who said you were to come today?”
“Mr. Thomas Gibney said that I was to begin this morning,” Nora said.
“Oh, Mr. Thomas Gibney, wait until I get him!” Miss Kavanagh said and rummaged through the drawers of a filing cabinet.
After a while Miss Kavanagh disappeared and when she did not appear again Nora tried to catch the receptionist’s attention, but the receptionist did not look up. Nora wondered if she should raise her voice and demand that someone attend to her, but she did not think so.
As she stood waiting, the door was pushed open by a young woman who seemed different from all of the others who had come in before her. Her hair was beautifully cut and her clothes looked expensive. Even her glasses were special.
“Are you Mrs. Webster?” she asked.
“Oh, I know who you are,” Nora said. “You don’t look like any of the others coming to work. You’re Elizabeth.”
“Lord above, I hope I don’t look like any of the others!”
“You’re a Gibney, I would know that,” Nora said.
“Well, I would do anything I could not to look like one, but here I am. No one else would have me, so I’m back in Enniscorthy living at home and working in the office. The two things I said I would never do.”
“I knew your grandmother, on your father’s side,” Nora said, “and you are the image of her.”
“I remember her all right,” Elizabeth said. “She took to the bed in the house over there and never got up. She might well be still there for all I know.”
Nora hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should ask Elizabeth to help her locate Miss Kavanagh.
“Are you waiting for somebody?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes, Miss Kavanagh.”
“Can she not be found? She’s normally buzzing about.”
“She appeared and then disappeared.”
“Yes, she often goes into the accounts department around now and shouts for a while. The best thing is if you come in with me and then we’ll steal by her.”
Nora followed Elizabeth through a door into a large and busy office and then into a smaller room that had a window with views of the mountains in the distance and the yard below, where many lorries and cars were parked. There were two desks in the room and some filing cabinets.
“The only thing I have managed to achieve since my return,” Elizabeth said, “is the removal of Elsa Doyle from this office to the office next door, complete with her pinafore and her squint. She started listening to my phone conversations and discussing them with me.”
“Elsa Doyle?” Nora asked. “Is that Davy Doyle’s daughter?”
“That’s who she is,” Elizabeth said. “As nosey as her father, but without his cunning. I told them at home that I was going to go back to Dublin and make my living on the streets if she was not removed from my office. Mind you, it was her office before I arrived. Would you like her desk?”
“Which desk?”
Elizabeth pointed at the desk nearer the door.
“Why don’t you claim it before anyone can stop you? I’ll say my father said, and no one will contradict me.”
Nora sat down at the desk while Elizabeth went outside and came back carrying a tray with tea and biscuits.
“I keep my own biscuits. I have a secret hiding place for them. And be careful, Francie-Pants Kavanagh is looking for you. She’s on the warpath. She asked if I saw you. I neither confirmed nor denied.”
“Should I not go and find her?”
“Have your tea first.”
Soon, someone came to say that Miss Kavanagh was waiting in her office for Mrs. Webster and that she had instructions to accompany Mrs. Webster there immediately. Miss Kavanagh’s office was at the very end of the larger office; from a window she had a full view of everything that happened.
“Did Mr. William Senior or Mr. Thomas tell you what you are to do here?” Miss Kavanagh asked, looking up for one moment and then flicking through some papers on her desk.
“No, they didn’t.”
“Well, they didn’t tell me either and they have both gone to Dublin so we will have to work it out ourselves.”
Nora did not respond.
“That Elizabeth Gibney is the laziest girl in Ireland,” Miss Kavanagh said, “and the most unpleasant. Boss’s daughter or no boss’s daughter, it’s all the same to me. I treat everyone the same. And she put poor Elsa Doyle out of her office. Elsa is very obliging.”
Suddenly, she looked up.
“Now, there’s something I always do with everyone who starts here.”
She took out a folder.
“It’s a long tot,” she said, as she handed Nora a grubby sheet of paper with six figures on each line going down one side of the page and half one side of the overleaf.
“If you could tot that up for me, like a good woman,” she said and then sat up straight looking at Nora directly and handing her a pen.
Nora began to tot. It was one of the things she had been good at when she worked at Gibney’s before, one of the things that old Mr. Gibney, who could not add himself without making mistakes, used to always ask her to do. She ignored Miss Kavanagh, who continued to stare at her while she worked at adding the figures. When she had added up the figures in the first column of numbers, she wrote down the result.
“Don’t write the figures down on that piece of paper! I want to use it again. Use this!”
Miss Kavanagh handed her a scrap of paper, thus causing her to lose her concentration. She decided it was better to start again, to make sure that she had everything right. When she had done the first two columns and was halfway through the third, Miss Kavanagh interrupted her again.
“Did Mr. William Senior or Mr. Thomas say that you were to share the office with that Elizabeth?”
Nora looked up at Miss Kavanagh and held her stare for a moment.
“Well?” Miss Kavanagh asked.
Nora looked down and began to tot up the third column of figures from the beginning. She tried not to think of Miss Kavanagh sitting opposite her and instead directed all her concentration at adding the figures. It was almost a battle between them now and she was ready, if Miss Kavanagh spoke once more, to ask her as politely as she could not to interrupt her. But, in thinking about this, she lost where she had been and was not sure now how much she had carried over from the third column to the fourth. She stopped for a second, and in stopping, lost her concentration completely.
“Hurry now,” Miss Kavanagh said. “I haven’t got all day.”
Nora decided that she would, once more, have to start from the beginning. She added the figures in the first column again as quickly as she could, but the result was not the same as the figure she had written down after her first attempt. She would have one more try, and this time would go very slowly and deliberately. If, a year ago, this scene had appeared before her, it would have been in a bad dream. The idea of totting numbers, being overseen by Francie Kavanagh, would have been unimaginable. It belonged to no future she had ever envisaged for herself. Once more, these thoughts interfered with her concentration and she had to stop. She looked out into the larger office.
“There’s no one out there of any interest to you now,” Miss Kavanagh said. “Head down and look at the figures.”
There was nothing else she could do. She wondered for a second if all the years of being away from work, the years spent cooking and cleaning the house and looking after the children and then being with Maurice when he was sick had affected her ability to keep her mind on the same single thing. If that was the case she would have to try harder, just add the numbers up and think of nothing else. It could not be impossible. No matter what came into her mind, she was to stop it. Just these figures. She started again at the beginning and moved with confidence and efficiency, letting nothing interfere with getting the correct result at the bottom and carrying the right number into the next column, and then presenting the final figure to Francie Kavanagh silently, with only a small hint of arrogance and contempt.
Miss Kavanagh looked at the final figure and then opened the top drawer of her desk and removed an adding machine. She walked out into the outer office and shouted.
“Someone come quickly. You! Miss Lambert. In here now!”
A girl came into the office without looking directly at either Miss Kavanagh or Nora.
“Now, I want you to check these figures on the adding machine. Oh, and don’t let Mrs. Webster see the result until I do. Bring it straight to me. I’ll be down in accounts. And hurry now! Mrs. Webster has already taken all day.”
The girl took the piece of paper from Miss Kavanagh and walked out of the room.
When it came to dinner-time, Nora had wasted the whole morning waiting for Miss Kavanagh or being taunted by her. Once she was out of the office and crossing the bridge, it could have been twenty-five years earlier; the feeling of pure freedom was the same. When she left Gibney’s at dinner-time or in the evening, she had always tried to pretend that she was never going back, that her time there had come to an end. Now, as she crossed the bottom of Castle Hill on her way home, it was not hard to have that feeling again; it was almost necessary. She would feel it again at half past five when she had finished for the day.
CHAPTER SIX
After much negotiation it was agreed that she would spend the mornings in Elizabeth’s office working on orders and invoices and then after dinner she would sit in the larger office and deal with the salaries, bonuses and expenses of all the commercial travellers in the company. Miss Kavanagh explained to her that this was the most difficult job of all, as every traveller was paid at a different rate, but she could check back through the records to find the details. They had all been negotiated, Miss Kavanagh said, many years ago with the older travellers, and then more recently with the younger ones by Mr. Thomas Gibney. None of them knew what the others were paid, and none of them needed to know this, Miss Kavanagh said, but each of them was filled with suspicion and resentment.
“If it was me,” she said, “I would give them only their bonuses with no pay at all, and then we’d see results, and then their manners would improve. And if any of them come to you personally when they find out that you are the one in charge of their salaries, don’t even look up at them. Say a small prayer and then send them to me. And if they waylay you and find you when I am not here, tell them that you are under instructions from Miss Kavanagh not to speak to them under any circumstances.”
Nora was distracted for a moment by the brown coat hanging from a hook in Miss Kavanagh’s office. She wondered if it was the same one that Una had told her about.
“Mrs. Webster,” Miss Kavanagh asked, “am I to take it that you have understood me?”
“I have understood you perfectly,” Nora said coldly.
Of the dozen commercial travellers, some had company cars; some did not. Some had a mileage allowance that was higher than others, and some of them also had an agreement that if they sold over a certain figure in a given year then their mileage allowance or their bonus, or in some cases both, would increase. There was a full drawer of a filing cabinet with invoices from the commercial travellers, a few of which contained detailed agreements about rates of pay. There was also a drawer with letters of complaint or claim from the commercial travellers and these, when Nora looked at them, gave her the clearest indication of the agreements between the company and the travellers.
When she told Elizabeth about the complexities of dealing with the money to be paid to these men, she laughed.
“My father, Old William, says it’s the only way to keep the travellers on their toes.”
Slowly, Nora realised that Miss Kavanagh, despite her claims to the contrary, did not understand the system. A girl called Marian Brickley had dealt with the matter for many years and had left to get married. Since then, there had been chaos. All Miss Kavanagh did was threaten anyone who complained with expulsion from her office. As each new girl had been assigned the task of sorting out the mess, the mess had become even worse, until a number of the travellers had gone to see Mr. William Gibney Senior who had instructed his son Thomas to deal with the matter. Thomas had decided that Nora would be the best person to handle the commercial travellers and the payments due to them and also handle Miss Kavanagh herself, who suffered from a great personal antipathy to the commercial travellers and seemed to feel that a day wi
thout a noisy confrontation with at least one of them was a day misspent.
Nora found a pile of folders in the stationery cupboard at the end of the long office. Without consulting anyone, she took them to her desk and wrote the name of each traveller on the outside of a folder and began to compile notes on the agreement each one had with Gibney’s. When she encountered any of the travellers themselves, with Miss Kavanagh not paying attention, she asked them for a detailed account of the arrangement they had made with the company as well as a sheet of paper outlining how much money they thought they were owed and for what. Most of the travellers had been waiting a long time to be paid bonuses or allowances. Since she was new, they began to watch her, some anxious, others more determined and ready to wait for her near the door as she arrived in the morning, or as she left.
One of them told her that she had to write the amount each was owed on a single sheet of paper, just the amount, and then write “Urgent Payment” and pass this to Miss Kavanagh. When she looked at the files she found copies of these single sheets, so she believed that this was true. But she was also told that payments would be made only once a month on a day that had never been fixed, and that the person who decided the date of payment was Miss Kavanagh.
If travellers approached Miss Kavanagh while Nora was close by, she always began in the same way, as she came to the door of her office to greet them.
“Mrs. Webster and I myself are up to our eyes in work as you can see.” She would then retreat, shouting, “You’ll have to come back another time, like a good man,” before closing the door on them.
Nora, as she prepared the folders, developed a shorthand for the travellers. VB meant very bald; SB was skin-and-bone; SM stood for smiler; J stood for jockey. BT meant bad teeth; DF meant dandruff. Soon, she had names for all of them, names she shared only with Donal and Conor, who remembered each name as she invented them. She swore them to secrecy.