by Lodge, David
“It can be a girl’s. They spell it with a ‘y.’”
“Oh-ah. Wears her hair like a boy’s too. Not one of them… you know, is she?”
“I don’t think so, Dad. She’s got a boyfriend, but he couldn’t come today.”
“I just wondered, seein’ as how she’s one o’ them university dongs.”
“Dons.”
“Well, whatever. You get all kinds at them places.”
“What do you know about universities, Dad?” Vic said, amused.
“I seen films on the telly. All sorts of queer folk, carrying on with each other something chronic.”
“You don’t want to believe everything you see on television, Dad.”
“Aye, you’re right there, son,” said Mr. Wilcox.
…
When she got home, Robyn telephoned Charles. “How are you?” she said. He said he was fine. “What about your cold?” she said. It hadn’t materialised, he said. “Beast,” said Robyn, “I believe you made it up, just to get out of lunch at the Wilcoxes.” How had it been, Charles asked, not denying the accusation.
“All right. You would have been bored stiff.”
“But you weren’t?”
“It was quite interesting to me to see Wilcox in his domestic setting.”
“What was the house like?”
“Luxurious. Hideous taste. They actually have that reproduction of the black girl with the green complexion in the lounge. And the fireplace is unbelievable. It’s one of those multicoloured rustic stone affairs, stretching all the way up to the ceiling, with all sorts of nooks and crannies for ornaments. Just to look at it makes you want to coil a rope round your waist and start scaling it. Of course they’ve got one of those trompe l’oeil gas fires, logs that burn from everlasting to everlasting, plus, would you believe, a set of antique brass fire-irons. It’s like something by Magritte.” She felt slightly ashamed, hearing herself going on in this Cambridgey way, but something inhibited her from telling Charles about the rather interesting conversation she had had with Vic Wilcox on their walk. It was easier to entertain him with amusing domestic vignettes of the Rummidge bourgeoisie. “Oh, and they’ve got four loos,” she added.
“Did you have to go that often?” Charles giggled on the other end of the line.
“The old grandfather told me in a stage whisper. He was a bit of a racist, but otherwise rather sweet.”
“What about the rest of the family?”
“Well, I couldn’t get much out of Mrs. She seemed to be scared stiff of me.”
“Well, you are rather scaring, Robyn.”
“Nonsense.”
“I mean to women who aren’t intellectual. Did you talk a lot about literary theory?”
“Of course I didn’t, what d’you take me for? I talked to everybody about their interests, but I couldn’t discover what her interests were. Perhaps she hasn’t got any. She seemed to me the classic downtrodden housewife whose occupation’s gone once the children are grown up. The whole scene was like a Freudian sit-com, actually. The eldest son is still working through his Oedipus complex at the age of 22, by the look of it, and Wilcox has repressed incestuous feelings for his daughter which are displaced into constant nagging.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“Are you joking?”
“Teasing,” said Charles.
“Actually, I did tell him I thought he was oppressing his wife.”
“And how did he take that?”
“I thought he was going to lose his temper, but he didn’t.”
“Ah, Robyn,” Charles sighed along the line from Ipswich. “I wish I had your confidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a born teacher. You go around the world putting people straight, and instead of resenting it, they’re grateful.”
“I’m not sure Vic Wilcox was grateful,” said Robyn. She sneezed suddenly and violently. “Damn. You may not have a cold, but I think I have.”
…
When Robyn Penrose didn’t turn up at the appointed hour on the following Wednesday, Vic was surprised to find how much her absence disturbed him. He was unable to concentrate on chairing a meeting with the sales staff, and was corrected several times by his financial director over figures, much to the delight of Brian Everthorpe. At 10:30, after the meeting had broken up, he phoned Robyn’s Department at the University, and was informed that she didn’t normally come in on a Wednesday. He phoned her home number. It had rung about fifteen times, and he was just about to put the receiver down, when Robyn’s voice croaked, “Hallo?”
She had a cold, probably flu. She sounded extremely cross. She had been asleep, she said.
“Then I’m sorry I disturbed you. But as you didn’t send a message…”
“I don’t have a bedside phone,” she said. “I’ve come all the way downstairs to answer this call. You seem to make a habit of making inconvenient phone calls.”
“I’m sorry,” said Vic, mortified. “Go back to bed. Take some aspirin. Do you need anything?”
“Nothing except peace and quiet.” She rang off.
Later in the day Vic arranged for a basket of fruit to be delivered by Rummidge’s major department store, but phoned again almost immediately to cancel the order on reflecting that, to receive it, Robyn would have to get out of bed and go downstairs again.
The following Wednesday she returned, looking a little pale, a mite thinner perhaps, but recovered from the flu. Vic could not repress a grin of pleasure as she came through the door. Somehow, Robyn Penrose had changed, in the space of a few weeks, from being a nuisance and a pain in the neck, to being the person of all his acquaintance he was most glad to see. He counted the days between her visits to Pringle’s. His weeks pivoted on Wednesdays rather than weekends. When Robyn was shadowing him he was aware that he performed particularly well. When she was absent he played to her imagined presence and silent applause. She was someone to whom he could confide his plans and hopes for the company, work through his problems and refine the solutions. He couldn’t trust any of his staff with such speculative thoughts, and Marjorie wouldn’t have had a clue what he was on about. Robyn didn’t understand all the fine detail, but her quick wit soon grasped the general principles, and her detachment made her a useful judge. It was Robyn who had made him see the futility of a tit-for-tat policy towards Foundrax. He’d heard on the grapevine that Foundrax was having cash-flow problems—hardly surprising if they were supplying Rawlinson’s at a loss. He would just wait for Foundrax to pull out, or fold altogether, then resume negotiations with Ted Stoker for a reasonable price. Brian Everthorpe didn’t approve of this waiting game, but then he wouldn’t, would he?
Vic tried not to think too much about Brian Everthorpe rogering Shirley on the reception lobby sofa. Having Robyn Penrose around helped with that, too. Her youthful complexion and lissom figure made Shirley look raddled and overblown in comparison. Shirley was jealous of Robyn, that was plain to see, and Brian Everthorpe was piqued by his inability to decide whether Vic was taking advantage of the situation. He was forever throwing out innuendoes about the intimate relationship between a man and his shadow. When Robyn let slip that her temporary post at the University was called “Dean’s Relief,” he could hardly contain his glee. “What about an MD’s Relief, eh Vic?” he said. “No need to slip round to Susan’s Sauna, then, for a spot of executive’s tonal treatment, eh? Have it laid on.” If Robyn had shown any sign of being bothered by this, Vic would have taken Everthorpe aside and told him to leave it out; but she reponded with stony indifference, and Vic wasn’t averse to keeping Everthorpe guessing whether he and Robyn Penrose were having an affair, ridiculous as the idea was. Ridiculous, yet there was a kind of pleasure to be got from letting it float idly in the stream of one’s thoughts, driving to and from work. He played Jennifer Rush a lot on the car stereo these days: her voice—deep, vibrant, stern, backed by a throbbing, insistent rhythm accompaniment—moved him strangely, enclosing his daydr
eaming in a protective wall of sound. She sang:
There’s no need to run away
If you feel that this is for real,
’Cause when it’s warm and straight from the heart,
It’s time to start.
She sang:
Surrender! It’s your only chance, surrender!
Don’t wait too long to realize
That her eyes will say, “Forever.”
He played the cassette so often that he learned the lyrics by heart. The track he liked best was the last one of side two, “The Power of Love”:
’Cause I am your lady
And you are my man,
Whenever you reach for me,
I’ll do all that I can.
We’re heading for something,
Somewhere I’ve never been,
Sometimes I am frightened,
But I’m ready to learn
About the power of love.
One day, after sitting through a series of meetings with junior management about rationalising the company’s operations, Robyn asked him whether he intended to explain the grand strategy to the workers as well. It hadn’t occurred to Vic to do so, but the more he thought about the idea, the more he was taken with it. The men tended to see everything in terms of their own little bit of the factory’s operations, and automatically assumed that any change in their work-patterns was an attempt by management to screw more work out of them without giving them more pay. Of course, this was broadly true. Given the bad old work practises the industry had inherited from the nineteen-sixties, it had to be. But if he could explain that the changes related to an overall plan, which would mean greater security and prosperity for everybody in the long term, he would be more likely to get their co-operation.
Vic went to see his Personnel Director about it. George Prendergast was sitting crosslegged on the floor in the middle of his office, with his hands on his knees.
“What are you doing?” Vic demanded.
“Breathing,” said Prendergast, getting to his feet. “Yoga breathing exercises for my Irritable Bowel Syndrome.”
“You look daft, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“It helps, though,” said Prendergast. “Your Shadow suggested it.”
“Did she teach you herself?” Vic felt, absurdly, something like a stab of jealousy.
“No, I go to evening classes,” said Prendergast.
“Yes, well, I should keep it to evening classes, if I was you,” said Vic. “Don’t want you levitating in the middle of the factory, it might be distracting for the operatives. And speaking of them, I’ve got a suggestion.”
Prendergast was enthusiastic about the idea. “Worker education is very important these days,” he said. “Dialogue between management and shop-floor is the name of the game.” Prendergast was a graduate in Business Studies, and was fond of this sort of jargon.
“There won’t be much dialogue about it,” said Vic. “I’ll give a speech, and tell ’em what we’re going to do.”
“Won’t there be questions?”
“If there are, you can answer them.”
“Perhaps I could arrange small group discussions at work stations afterwards,” said Prendergast.
“Don’t overdo it, we’re not running an evening institute. Just set up a series of lunchtime meetings in the old transport shed, will you? Say three hundred at a time? Starting next Wednesday.” He specified Wednesday so that Robyn Penrose would be present at the inaugural meeting.
Brian Everthorpe was sceptical about the idea, naturally, claiming that it would only unsettle the men and make them suspicious. “They won’t thank you for taking up half their lunch hour, either.”
“Attendance will be voluntary,” said Vic, “except for directors.”
Everthorpe’s face fell. “You mean, we’ve got to be there at every meeting?”
“It’s no use my banging on to the men about all pulling together if they know my directors are down at the Man in the Moon knocking back pints while I’m talking.”
The following Wednesday, at one o’clock, Vic sat on a makeshift platform in the old transport shed, a gloomy hangar-like building, obsolete since the company started contracting out its transportation requirements, which was now used for large meetings on the factory site when the canteen was not available. He was flanked by his directors, sitting on moulded plastic chairs. A few rows of chairs and benches had been arranged on the floor, facing the platform, and he was surprised to see Shirley as well as Robyn sitting there. The mass of the audience stood in a great crowd behind these seats, beneath a haze of cigarette smoke and condensing breath. Though Vic had ordered the wall heaters to be turned on that morning, the atmosphere was still damp and chilly. His directors were sitting in their overcoats, but Vic was just in his suit, which he regarded as a kind of uniform that went with his job. He rubbed his hands together.
“I think I’ll start,” he muttered to Prendergast, who was sitting beside him.
“Do you want me to introduce you?”
“No, they all know who I am. Let’s get on with it. It’s perishing in here.”
He felt an unaccustomed spasm of nervousness as he stood up and stepped forward to the microphone that had been set up, with a couple of portable speakers, at the front of the platform. A hush fell over the assembly. He scanned their faces—expectant, sullen, quizzical—and wished he had prepared some joke to take the tension out of the moment. But he had never been one for jokes—he forgot funny stories five minutes after he’d been told them, perhaps because he seldom found them funny.
“You’re supposed to start speeches with a joke,” he began. “But I don’t have one. I’ll be honest with you: running this company is no joke.” They laughed a little at that, so it seemed that he had broken the ice after all. “You all know me. I’m the boss. You may think I’m like God in this place, that I can do what I like. I can’t. I can’t do anything at all on my own.”
He grew in confidence as he went on. The men listened to him attentively. There were only a few faces in the audience that looked thoroughly bored and mystified. Then, just as he was hitting his stride, all the faces broke into broad grins. There were cheers, hoots, shrill whistles and much laughter. Vic, who was not conscious of having said anything funny, faltered in his speech and stopped. He looked round and saw a young woman advancing towards him, obviously deranged because she was in her underwear. She was shivering from the cold, and her arms and shoulders were covered in goosepimples, but she smiled at him coyly.
“Mr. Wilcox?” she said.
“Go away,” he said. “This is a meeting.”
“I have a message for you,” she said, flexing a leg sheathed in a fishnet stocking, and taking a folded paper out of her garter.
The crowd cheered. “Show us yer tits!” someone shouted. Another yelled, “Tek yer knickers off!”
The girl smiled and waved nervously at the audience. Behind her head Brian Everthorpe’s grinning face bobbed like a red balloon.
“OFF, OFF, OFF!” roared the crowd.
“Get out of here!” Vic hissed.
“It won’t take long,” said the girl, unfolding the piece of paper. “Be a sport.”
Vic grabbed her by the arm, intending to bustle her off the stage, but such a whoop went up that he let go as if he had been burned. Inclining her head towards the mike, the girl began to sing:
“Pringle bells, Pringle bells, Pringle all the day,
Oh what fun it is to work the Victor Wilcox way!
Oh, Pringle bells—”
“Marion,” said Robyn Penrose, who had suddenly appeared just below the front of the platform. “Stop that at once.”
The girl looked down at her with blank astonishment. “Doctor Penrose!” she exclaimed. She thrust the message into Vic’s hands, turned on her high heels, and fled.
“Hey, let’s hear the rest of it!” Brian Everthorpe called after her. The audience hissed and groaned as the girl disappeared through a small door at the
back of the shed. Robyn Penrose said to Vic, “Why don’t you carry on?” and hastened after the girl before Vic could enquire into the magical power she seemed to have over her.
He tapped on the mike for attention. “As I was saying…” The men guffawed good-naturedly, and settled to hear him out.
…
After the meeting had dispersed, Vic found Robyn sitting in his office, reading a book.
“Thanks for getting rid of the girl,” he said. “Know her, do you?”
“She’s one of my students,” said Robyn. “She has no grant and her parents won’t pay for her maintenance, so she has to work.”
“You call that work?”
“I disapprove of its sexist aspects, naturally. But it’s quite well-paid, and it doesn’t take up too much of her time. It’s called a kisso-gram, apparently. She didn’t get as far as the kiss today, of course.”
“Thank Christ for that,” said Vic, throwing himself in his swivel chair and taking out his cigarettes. “Or rather, thank you.”
“It could have been worse. There’s also something called a gorilla-gram.”
“It was bad enough. Another minute, and the meeting would’ve collapsed.”
“I could see that,” said Robyn. “That’s why I intervened.”
“You saved my bacon,” said Vic. “Can I buy you a drink and a sandwich? Haven’t got time for a proper lunch, I’m afraid.”
“A sandwich will be fine. Thanks. Marion was worried that she wouldn’t get paid because she didn’t finish the job. I said you’d make it up to her if necessary.”
“Oh, you did, did you?”
“Yes.” Robyn Penrose held him with her cool, grey-green eyes.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll pay her double if she can find out who set me up.”
“I asked her that,” said Robyn. “She said the customer’s name is confidential. Only the boss of the agency knows. Have you no idea?”
“I have my suspicions,” he said.