Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  “I have no choice,” said Robyn. “There’s no future for me in this country.”

  “Not at the moment, it seems,” Swallow sighed. “And the devil of it is, once you go, you won’t come back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “People don’t. Even if they can face returning to the English salary scale, we can’t afford to fly them over here for interview. But I don’t blame you for seizing the opportunity.”

  “You’ll write me a reference, then?”

  “I’ll write you a glowing reference,” said Philip Swallow. “Which is no more than you deserve.”

  …

  Robyn went back to her room with a spring in her step and a confused swirl of thoughts, mostly agreeable, in her head. Philip Swallow had taken some of the shine off Morris Zapp’s proposition, but it was a pleasant change to be courted by a potential employer under any conditions. She had forgotten all about Vic, and was, for an instant, surprised to find him hunched in a chair by the window, reading Culture and Anarchy by the grey rainy light. When she told him her news, he looked less than delighted.

  “When did you say this job starts?” he said.

  “The fall. I suppose that means September.”

  “I haven’t got much time, then.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time to, you know, get you to change your mind…”

  “Oh Vic,” she said. “I thought you’d given up that foolishness.”

  “I can’t give up loving you.”

  “Don’t go soppy on me,” she said. “This is my lucky day. Don’t spoil it.”

  “Sorry,” he said, looking at his shoes. He flicked a speck of dried mud from a toecap.

  “Vic,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “how many times do I have to tell you: I don’t believe in that individualistic sort of love.”

  “So you say,” he said.

  She bridled a little at that. “Are you suggesting that I don’t mean it?”

  “I thought it was impossible to mean what we say or say what we mean,” he said. “I thought there was always a slippage between the I that speaks and the I that is spoken of.”

  “Oh, ho!” said Robyn, planting her hands on her hips. “We are learning fast, aren’t we?”

  “The point is,” he said. “If you don’t believe in love, why do you take such care over your students? Why do you care about Danny Ram?”

  Robyn blushed. “That’s quite different.”

  “No, it’s not. You care about them because they’re individuals.”

  “I care about them because I care about knowledge and freedom.”

  “Words. Knowledge and freedom are just words.”

  “That’s all there is in the last analysis. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”

  “What?”

  “‘There is nothing outside the text.’”

  “I don’t accept that,” he said, lifting his chin and locking his gaze on hers. “It would mean we have no free will.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Robyn. “Once you realize there is nothing outside the text, you can begin to write it yourself.”

  There was a knock on the door and Pamela’s head appeared round it again.

  “My mother?” said Robyn.

  “No, it’s for Mr. Wilcox,” said Pamela.

  …

  “Sit down, Vic. Thanks for coming in so quickly,” said Stuart Baxter, from behind the sparsely covered expanse of his desk, which was elegantly veneered, like his wall units, in black ash, the latest executive fashion. The higher up the ladder people went in the conglomerate, Vic had observed, the bigger their desks became and the less paper and other impedimenta they had on them. The curved rosewood desk of the Chairman of the Board, Sir Richard Littlego, had been, on the one occasion when Vic met him in his penthouse suite, completely bare except for a leather-bound blotter and a silver-mounted quill pen. Stuart Baxter hadn’t achieved that conspicuous simplicity yet, but his In-tray was virtuously empty and only a single sheet of paper reposed in his Out-tray. Baxter’s office was on the eighteenth floor of Midland Amalgamated’s twenty-storey tower block in the centre of Rummidge. The plateglass window behind his head faced south-east and overlooked a drab and treeless segment of the city. The grey, rain-wet roofs of factories, warehouses and terraces stretched to the horizon like the waves and troughs of a sullen, oily sea.

  “I wasn’t far away,” said Vic. He sat down in an easy chair which was more of an uneasy chair, since it was low-slung and forced the occupant to look up at Stuart Baxter. Looking at Baxter was not something Vic particularly enjoyed doing from any angle. He was a handsome man, complacently aware of the fact. His shave was perfect, his haircut immaculate, his teeth white and even. He affected boldly coloured shirts with white collars, above which his plump, smooth face glowed healthily pink.

  “The University, wasn’t it?” he said. “I gather you’ve been spending a lot of time there lately.”

  “I’m following up that shadow scheme,” said Vic. “In reverse. I sent you a memo about it.”

  “Yes, I passed it to the Chairman. Haven’t had a reply yet. I thought it was just a suggestion.”

  “I mentioned it to Littlego myself, at the CRUM dinner dance. He seemed to think it was a good idea, so I went ahead.”

  “I wish you’d told me, Vic. I like to know what my MDs are up to.”

  “It’s in my own time.”

  Baxter smiled. “I gather she’s quite a dish, this shadow of yours.”

  “I’m the shadow now,” said Vic.

  “You seem to be inseparable. I hear you took her with you to Frankfurt.”

  Vic stood up. “If you’ve brought me in here to discuss office gossip—”

  “No, I’ve brought you in for a much more important reason. Sit down, Vic. Coffee?”

  “No thanks,” said Vic, sitting down on the edge of the seat. “What is it?” He felt a cold qualm of fear in his guts.

  “We’re selling Pringle’s.”

  “You can’t,” Vic said.

  “The deed is done, Vic. The announcement will be made tomorrow. It’s confidential till then, of course.”

  “But we made a profit last month!”

  “A small profit. A very small profit, given the turnover.”

  “But it will improve! The foundry is coming on a treat. What about the new core blower?”

  “Foundrax regard it as a good investment. You got a good price on it.”

  “Foundrax?” Vic said, hardly able to draw the breath into his lungs to speak.

  “Yes, we’re selling to the EFE Group, they own Foundrax, as you know.”

  “You mean, they’re going to merge the two companies?”

  “I gather that’s the idea. There’ll be some rationalisation, of course. Let’s face it, Vic, there are too many companies in your field, all chasing the same business.”

  “Pringle’s is rationalised already,” said Vic. “I rationalised it. I was hired to turn the company round. I said it might take eighteen months. I’ve done it in under a year. Now you tell me you’ve sold out to a competitor that was on its fucking knees.”

  “We all think you’ve done a fantastic job, Vic,” said Baxter. “But the Board just didn’t see Pringle’s fitting into our long-term strategy.”

  “What you mean,” said Vic bitterly, “is that by selling off Pringle’s now, you can show a profit on this year’s accounts at the next AGM.”

  Stuart Baxter examined his nails, and said nothing.

  “I won’t work under Norman Cole,” said Vic.

  “Nobody is asking you to, Vic,” said Baxter.

  “So it’s goodbye and thankyou and here’s a year’s salary and don’t spend it all at once.”

  “We’ll let you keep the car,” said Baxter.

  “Oh, that’s all right then.”

  “I’m sorry, Vic, I really am. I said to the EFE people, if you had any sense you’d keep Vic Wilcox on to run the new company. But I understand it will be Cole.”
>
  “I wish them joy of the double-dealing bastard.”

  “To be honest with you, Vic, I think they were put off by some of the stories that have been flying around about you.”

  “What stories?”

  “Like having all the pin-ups taken down at the factory.”

  “The unions backed it.”

  “I know they did, but it seems a bit… eccentric. And then spending one day a week at the University.”

  “In my own time.”

  “That’s eccentric too. Somebody asked me the other day if you were a born-again Christian. You’re not, are you?”

  “No, not a Christian,” Vic said, getting up to leave.

  Baxter stood up too. “You might find it convenient to move your stuff out this afternoon. I don’t suppose you want to be around when Cole takes over tomorrow.” He extended his hand across the desk. Vic left it there, turned on his heel, and walked out.

  …

  Vic drove slowly back to Pringle’s—or rather the car took him there, like a horse under slack reins, following the route it knew best. His mind was too choked with anger and anxiety to concentrate on driving. He didn’t know what was worst—the thought of all that hard slog over the past year being wasted, or the irony that Norman Cole would profit by it, or the prospect of having to break the news to Marjorie. He settled for that one. A yellow Bedford van he was following along the inside lane of the motorway, with “RIVIERA SUNBEDS” blazoned on it in orange lettering, evoked a poignant image of his wife vainly beautifying herself at home, unaware of the thunderbolt that had already struck her life. They would have to cancel the summer holiday in Tenerife for starters. If he didn’t get another job within the year, they might have to sell the house and move to something more modest, without an en suite bathroom.

  Vic followed the yellow van off the motorway at the West Wallsbury intersection and tailed it through the drab deserted streets that only filled when the shifts changed over, past silent factories with forlorn For Lease notices on their gates, past blind-walled workshops like oversized lock-up garages on the new industrial estate, past Susan’s Sauna and down Coney Lane. The van seemed to be following a route that would take it past Pringle’s, but to his surprise it turned into the firm’s car park and stopped just outside the administration block. Brian Everthorpe climbed down from the passenger seat and waved a thankyou to the driver as the van moved away. He did a double-take on seeing Vic getting out of his car, and came over.

  “Hallo, Vic. I thought this was one of your adult-education days.”

  “Something cropped up. What happened to your car, then?”

  “Broke down on the other side of the city. Alternator, I think. I left it with a garage and hitched a lift over here. Serious, is it?”

  “What?”

  “The something that cropped up.”

  “You could say so.”

  “You look a bit shook up, Vic, if you don’t mind my saying so. Like somebody that’s just had a shunt.”

  Vic hesitated, tempted to confide in Brian Everthorpe—not because of any charitable impulse to forewarn him about the takeover, but simply to relieve his own feelings, to pass on his own sense of shock to another, and observe its impact. And if Everthorpe should leak the information to others—so what? Why should he worry about the possible embarrassment to Stuart Baxter and Midland Amalgamated? “Come into my office for a minute,” he said recklessly.

  The reception lobby was full of furniture and cardboard packing-cases. In the middle of the confusion, Shirley, Doreen and Lesley were tearing sheets of protective plastic off a long beige sofa, squealing with excitement. On catching sight of Vic, the two receptionists scuttled back to their posts. Shirley, who was on her knees, struggled to her feet and tugged down her skirt.

  “Oh, hallo Vic. I didn’t think you were coming in today.”

  “I changed my mind,” he said, looking round. “The new furniture arrived, then?”

  “We thought we’d unpack it. We wanted to give you a surprise sort of thing.”

  “It’s ever so nice, Mr. Wilcox,” said Doreen.

  “Lovely material,” said Lesley.

  “Not bad,” he said, prodding the upholstery, thinking: another little bonus for Norman Cole. “Get rid of the old stuff, will you, Shirley?” As he led the way to his office he wondered whether the three women would survive the merger. Probably they would—there always seemed to be a need for secretaries and telephonists. Brian Everthorpe, however, almost certainly wouldn’t.

  Vic closed the door of his office, swore Brian Everthorpe to secrecy, and told him the news.

  Brian Everthorpe said, “Hmm,” and stroked his sideboards.

  “You don’t seem very surprised.”

  “I saw this coming.”

  “I’m buggered if I did,” said Vic. Already he regretted telling Everthorpe. “I shan’t be staying on. I don’t know about you, of course.”

  “Oh, they won’t keep me on, I know that.”

  “You seem remarkably cheerful about it.”

  “I’ve been here a long time. I qualify for redundancy.”

  “Even so.”

  “And I’ve made contingency plans.”

  “What contingency plans?”

  “Some time ago, I put some money in a little business,” said Brian Everthorpe. “It’s not so little any more.” He took a card from his wallet and presented it.

  Vic looked at the card. “Riviera Sunbeds? That was the van that dropped you just now.”

  “Yes, I was over there when the motor packed up.”

  “Doing all right, is it?”

  “Marvellous. Especially at this time of year. There are all these women, see, all over Rummidge, getting ready for their annual fortnights on Majorca or Corfu. They don’t want to go down to the beach on their first day looking white as lard, so they rent one of our sunbeds, to give themselves a pre-holiday tan at home. Then when they come back, they rent again to keep the tan. We’re expanding all the time. Bought another fifty beds last week. Made in Taiwan, amazing value.”

  “You’re involved in the day-to-day running, then?”

  “I keep an eye on things. Give them the benefit of my experience, you know,” said Brian Everthorpe, preening his whiskers. “And I use my contacts to drum up trade. A card here, a card there.”

  Vic struggled to control his anger, so as to coax a full confession out of Everthorpe. “What you mean is, you’ve been looking after the interests of Riviera Sunbeds when you should be giving all your attention to Pringle’s. Is that ethical?”

  “Ethical?” Brian Everthorpe guffawed. “Do me a favour, Vic. Is it ethical, what Midland Amalgamated are doing to us?”

  “It’s cynical, it’s shortsighted, in my opinion. But I don’t see anything unethical about it. Whereas you’ve been working for yourself on the company’s time. Jesus, no wonder we could never find you when we wanted you!” he burst out. “I suppose you were delivering sunbeds.”

  “Well, I have dropped off the odd bed at peak times—anything to make a sale, you know. It’s different when it’s your own money, Vic. But no, my role is a bit higher-level than that. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t end up running the business. I’ll be able to buy a bigger share with my golden handshake.”

  “You don’t deserve a golden handshake,” said Vic. “You deserve a golden kick up the arse. I’ve a good mind to report you to Stuart Baxter.”

  “I shouldn’t bother,” said Brian Everthorpe. “He’s one of the chief shareholders in Riviera Sunbeds.”

  …

  Vic found he had very few personal belongings to move from his office. A desk diary, a framed photograph of Marjorie and the kids taken ten years ago on the beach at Torquay, a table lighter given to him when he left Rumcol, a couple of reference books, an old sweater and a broken-winged folding umbrella in a cupboard—that was about it. It all fitted into a plastic supermarket bag. Nevertheless, Shirley stared curiously when he passed through her office on
his way out. Perhaps Brian Everthorpe had already told her he was leaving.

  “Going out again?” she said.

  “I’m going home.”

  “I phoned an auctioneers, they’re coming to collect the old furniture tomorrow.”

  “I hope the new stuff is just as strong,” said Vic, looking her in the eye. “That sofa gets a lot of wear and tear.”

  Shirley went white, and then very red.

  Vic felt slightly ashamed of himself. “’Bye Shirley, thanks for seeing to it,” he said, and hurried out of the office.

  …

  He drove home fast, straight down the outside lane of the motorway, overtaking everything, wanting to get it over with. Marjorie sensed something was wrong as soon as she saw him in the kitchen doorway. She was standing at the sink, wearing an apron, scraping new potatoes. “You’re early,” she said, letting a potato fall into the water with a splash. “What’s the matter?”

  “Make us a cup of tea, and I’ll tell you.”

  She stared at him, knitting her wet, podgy fingers together to stop herself from trembling. “Tell me now, Vic.”

  “All right. Pringle’s has been sold to the EFE Group, and merged with Foundrax. I’ve got the push. As from tomorrow.”

  Marjorie came over and put her arms round him. “Oh Vic,” she said, “I’m so sorry for you. All that work.”

  He had steeled himself for tears, perhaps hysterics. But Marjorie was strangely calm, and he himself felt strangely moved by the unselfishness of her response. He looked over her shoulder at the smooth surfaces of the fitted kitchen and all the shining gadgetry arrayed upon them. “I’ll get another job,” he said. “But it may take time.”

  “Of course you will, love.” Marjorie sounded almost cheerful. “You knew, didn’t you? You’ve known for some time this was going to happen. That’s why you’ve been so strange.”

  Vic hesitated. He had been deceived so comprehensively himself, he was so sick with the sense of betrayal, that he was tempted to tell her the truth. But the least her loyalty deserved, he decided, was a merciful lie. “Yes,” he said, “I knew it was on the cards.”