by David Lodge
“As long as one thing is understood,” said Wilcox. “Everything you see or hear while you’re shadowing me is confidential.”
“All right,” said Robyn.
“Don’t take your coat off yet—we may be going out.” He spoke to Shirley on his intercom: “Phone Foundrax and ask if Norman Cole can spare me a few minutes this morning, will you?”
…
For once, Wilcox himself put on an overcoat, an expensive-looking camelhair garment that, like most of his clothes, seemed designed for a man with longer arms and legs. In the lobby they ran into Brian Everthorpe, swaggering in from the car park, huffing and puffing and rubbing his pink hands together. Robyn hadn’t seen him since the previous Wednesday—mercifully he hadn’t been present at the meeting with the Asian workers, though he must have heard about it.
“Hallo, Vic, I see your beautiful shadow is back, she must be a glutton for punishment. How are you, my dear? Get home all right last week, did you?”
“I managed,” Robyn said coldly. Something knowing about his grin made her suspect that he had been responsible for tampering with her car.
“Bad on the motorway was it this morning, Brian?” said Wilcox, glancing at his watch.
“Terrible.”
“I thought so.”
“Always the same, Wednesday mornings.”
“See you,” said Wilcox, slicing through the swing doors.
Robyn followed him outside. After the weekend’s partial thaw, the weather had turned bitterly cold again. The remnants of last week’s blizzard had frozen into corrugated patches of ice on the car park, but Wilcox’s Jaguar was just outside the office block, in a bay that had been neatly scraped clean and dry. The car was long and low and luxuriously upholstered. When Wilcox turned the ignition key, a female vocalist sang out with startling clarity and resonance, as if she were concealed, complete with orchestra, in the back seat-well: “Maybe I’m a dreamer, maybe just a fool—” Wilcox, evidently embarrassed to have his musical tastes thus revealed, snapped off the stereo system with a quick movement of his hand. The car glided away, ice crackling under its tyres. As he drove, he explained the background to the morning’s business, an appointment with the Managing Director of a firm called Foundrax, situated not far away.
Pringle’s and Foundrax both supplied a manufacturer of diesel-powered pumps, Rawlinson’s, with components—Pringle’s with cylinder blocks, Foundrax with cylinder heads. Recently Rawlinson’s had asked Pringle’s to drop their prices by five per cent, claiming that they had had a quote from another firm at that level. “Of course, they may be bluffing. They’re almost certainly bluffing about the size of the discount. Prices ought to be going up, not down, what with the cost of pig-iron and scrap these days. But competition is so ferocious it’s possible another company is trying to get some of the action by offering a silly price. The question is, how silly? And who are they? That’s why I’m going to see Norman Cole. I want to find out if Rawlinson’s are asking for the same sort of reduction on his cylinder heads.”
The offices of the Foundrax factory had, like Pringle’s, an air of being embalmed in an earlier era, the late fifties or early sixties. There was the same dull reception foyer done out in light oak veneer and worn-looking splay-legged furniture, the same trade magazines spread on the low tables, the same (it seemed to Robyn’s inexpert eye) bits of polished machinery in dusty display cases, the same permanent waves on the heads of the secretaries, including the one who, casting curious glances at Robyn, escorted them to Norman Cole’s office. Like Wilcox’s, this was a large, colourless room, with an executive desk on one side, and on the other a long board table at which he invited them to sit.
Cole was a portly, bald-headed man who blinked a great deal behind his glasses, and smoked a pipe—or rather he poked, scraped, blew into, sucked on and frequently applied burning matches to a pipe. Not much smoke was produced by all this activity. He exuded instead a rather false air of bonhomie. “Ha, ha!” he exclaimed, when Wilcox explained Robyn’s presence. “I’ll believe you, Vic. Thousands wouldn’t.” He turned to Robyn: “And what is it you do at the University, Miss er…”
“Doctor,” said Wilcox, “she’s Dr. Penrose.”
“Oh, on the medical side, are you?”
“No, I teach English Literature,” said Robyn.
“And women’s studies,” said Wilcox, with a grimace.
“I don’t go in for women’s studies, ha, ha,” said Cole. “But I like a good book. I’m on The Thorn Birds at the moment.” He looked expectantly at Robyn.
“I’m afraid I haven’t read it,” said Robyn.
“So how’s business, Norman?” Wilcox said.
“Mustn’t grumble,” said Cole.
The conversation about trade continued desultorily for some minutes. The secretary brought in a tray with coffee and biscuits. Vic raised the topic of some charity fund-raising function the two men were involved in. Cole glanced at his watch. “Anything special I can do for you, Vic?”
“No, I’m just making a few calls to give this young lady an idea of the scope of our business,” said Vic. “We won’t take up any more of your time. Oh, while I’m here—you haven’t had a letter from Rawlinson’s buyer lately, by any chance?”
Cole lifted an eyebrow and blinked at Robyn.
“It’s all right,” said Wilcox. “Dr. Penrose understands that nothing we say goes beyond these four walls.”
Cole took out of his pocket an implement like a miniature Swiss Army knife, and began to poke at the bowl of his pipe. “No,” he said. “Not to my knowledge. What would it be about?”
“Asking for a reduction on your prices. In the order of five per cent.”
“I don’t recollect anything,” said Cole. He interrupted his excavations to flick a switch on his telephone console and ask his secretary to bring in the Rawlinson file. “Having some trouble with Rawlinson’s, then, Vic?”
“Someone’s trying to undercut us,” Wilcox said. “I’d like to know who it is.”
“A foreign firm, perhaps,” Cole suggested.
“I don’t believe a foreign firm could do it cheaper,” said Wilcox. “Why would they bother, anyway? The quantities are too small. What are you thinking of? Germany? Spain?”
Cole unscrewed the mouthpiece of his pipe and peered into the barrel. “I’m just guessing in the dark,” he said. “Far East, perhaps, Korea.”
“No,” said Wilcox, “by the time you added on the cost of shipping it wouldn’t make sense. It’s another British company, you can bet on that.”
The secretary brought in a thick manila file and laid it reverently on Norman Cole’s desk. He glanced inside. “No, nothing untoward there, Vic.”
“How much are you asking for your cylinder heads, as a matter of interest?”
Norman Cole exposed two rows of nicotine-stained teeth in a broad grin. “You wouldn’t expect me to answer that, Vic.”
Vic returned the smile with a visible effort. “I’ll be off, then,” he said, getting to his feet and holding out his hand.
“Taking your shadow with you?” said Cole, grinning and blinking.
“What? Oh. Yes, of course,” said Wilcox, who had clearly forgotten Robyn’s existence.
“You can leave her here if you like, ha, ha,” said Cole, shaking Wilcox’s hand. He shook Robyn’s hand as well. “The Fourth Protocol, that’s another good one,” he said. “Have you read it?”
“No,” said Robyn.
When they were outside in the car, Wilcox said, “Well, what did you make of Norman Cole?”
“I didn’t think much of his literary taste.”
“He’s an accountant,” said Wilcox. “Managing Directors in this business are either engineers or accountants. I don’t trust accountants.”
“He did seem a bit shifty,” said Robyn. “All that fiddling with his pipe is an excuse to avoid eye contact.”
“Shifty is the word,” said Wilcox. “I began to get suspicious when he started talking a
bout Korea. As if anyone in Korea would be interested in Rawlinson’s business.”
“You think he’s hiding something, then?”
“I think he may be the mysterious third party,” said Wilcox, as he swung the Jaguar out of the Foundrax car park and slotted into a gap in the traffic on the main road, between a yellow van conveying Riviera Sunbeds and a Dutch container truck.
“You mean the one offering a five per cent reduction?”
“Supposed to be offering five per cent. He might only be offering four.”
“But why would he do that? You said nobody could make a profit at that price.”
“There could be all kinds of motives,” said Wilcox. “Perhaps he’s desperate for orders, even loss-making orders, just to keep his factory turning over for the next few weeks, hoping things will improve. Perhaps he’s nursing some plot, like to get all the Rawlinson’s business for himself and then, next time they re-order, increase the prices without having to bother about competition from us.” He gave a dry bark of a laugh. “Or perhaps he knows he’s for the high jump and couldn’t care less what his figures look like.”
“How will you find out?”
Wilcox considered the question for a moment, then reached for a telephone receiver mounted under the dashboard. “Go and see Ted Stoker at Rawlinson’s,” he said, handing her the instrument. “Phone Shirley for me, will you? It’ll save me having to stop.”
Robyn, who had never even seen a car phone before, found it rather fun to use.
“I’m afraid Mr. Wilcox is out at the moment,” Shirley intoned in a secretarial sing-song.
“I know,” said Robyn, “I’m with him.”
“Oh,” said Shirley. “Who did you say you were?”
“Robyn Penrose. The shadow.” She could not suppress a smile as she identified herself—it sounded like the name of a comic-book character. Superman. Spiderwoman. The Shadow. She passed on Wilcox’s instruction to arrange a meeting with Ted Stoker, the Managing Director of Rawlinson’s, that afternoon if possible.
“You used me as a pretext to see Norman Cole, didn’t you?” Robyn said, as they cruised along the road, waiting for Shirley to call back.
“You came in useful,” he said with a quiet grin. “Don’t mind, do you? You owe me after last week.”
A few minutes later Shirley rang back to say she had fixed an appointment for three o’clock. “Have a nice trip,” she said with, Robyn thought, a slightly bitchy intonation. Wilcox made a U-turn through a gap in the road’s central reservation, and began driving briskly in the opposite direction.
“Where are we going?” Robyn asked.
“Leeds.”
“What—today? There and back?”
“Why not?
“It seems a long way.”
“I like driving,” said Wilcox.
Robyn could understand why, given the power and comfort of the big car. The wind of their passage was the loudest noise inside its upholstered shell as they sailed up the motorway in the fast lane. Outside, the frostbound fields and skeletal trees cowered under a steely shield of cloud. There was a kind of pleasure in being warm and mobile in a cold and lifeless landscape. Robyn asked if they could have some music, and Wilcox switched on the radio and invited her to tune it. She found some Mozart on Radio Three, and settled back in her seat.
“Like that sort of music, do you?” he said.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“I don’t mind it.”
“But you prefer Randy Crawford?” she said slyly, having spotted the empty cassette box in the dashboard recess.
Wilcox looked impressed, evidently supposing that she had identified by ear the snatch of song heard earlier that morning. “She’s all right,” he said guardedly.
“You don’t find her a little bland?”
“Bland?”
“Sentimental, then.”
“No,” he said.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Manchester he pulled off the motorway and drove to a pub he knew for lunch. It was an undistinguished modern building situated on a roundabout next to a petrol station, but it had a restaurant attached to it done out in mock-Tudor beams and stained imitation oak furniture and enough reproduction antique brassware to stock a gift shop in Stratford-upon-Avon. Each table bore an electric lamp fashioned in the shape of a carriage lantern, with coloured glass panels. The menus were huge laminated cards that garnished every dish with epithets designed to tickle the appetite: “succulent,” “sizzling,” “tender,” “farm-fresh,” etc. The clientèle were mostly businessmen in three-piece suits laughing boisterously and blowing cigarette smoke in each other’s faces, or talking earnestly and confidentially to well-dressed young women who were more probably their secretaries than their wives. In short, it was the kind of establishment that Robyn would normally have avoided like the plague.
“Nice place, this,” said Wilcox, looking around him with satisfaction. “What will you have?”
“I think I’ll have an omelette,” said Robyn.
Wilcox looked disappointed. “Don’t stint yourself,” he said. “Lunch is on the firm.”
“All right,” said Robyn. “I’ll have a half of luscious avocado pear with tangy French dressing to start, and then I’ll have golden-fried ocean-fresh scampi and a crisp farmhouse side salad. Oh, and a home-baked wholemeal roll coated with tasty sesame seeds.”
If Wilcox perceived any irony in her pedantic recitation of the menu, he did not betray it. “Some chips as well?” he enquired.
“No thanks.”
“Anything to drink?”
“What are you having?”
“I never drink in the middle of the day. But don’t let that stop you.”
Robyn accepted a glass of white wine. Wilcox ordered a mixture of Perrier water and orange juice to go with his succulent char-grilled rump steak and golden crisp french-fried potatotes. Few of the other diners were so abstemious—bottles of red wine cradled in wickerwork baskets, and bottles of white sticking up like missiles from enormous ice buckets, were much in evidence on or between the tables. Even without alcohol, though, Wilcox became relaxed, almost expansive over the meal.
“If you really want to understand how business works,” he said, “you shouldn’t be following me around, you should be shadowing somebody who runs his own small company, employing, say, fifty people. That’s how firms like Pringle’s begin. Somebody gets an idea of how to make something cheaper or better than anybody else, and sets up a factory with a small team of employees. Then if all goes well he takes on more labour and brings his sons into the business to take over when he retires. But either the sons aren’t interested, or they think to themselves: why risk all our capital in this business, when we could sell out to a bigger company and invest the money in something safer? So the firm gets sold to a conglomerate like Midland Amalgamated, and some poor sod like me is brought in to run it on a salary.”
“Late capitalism,” said Robyn, nodding.
“What’s late about it?”
“I mean, that’s the era we’re living in, the era of late capitalism.” This was a term much favoured in New Left Review; post-modernism was said to be symbiotically related to it. “Big multinational corporations rule the world,” she said.
“Don’t you believe it,” said Wilcox. “There’ll always be small companies.” He looked round the restaurant. “All the men in here are working for firms like Pringle’s, and I bet there’s not one of them who wouldn’t rather be running his own business. A few of them will do it, and then, after a few years, they’ll sell out, and the whole process starts again. It’s the cycle of commerce,” he said rather grandiloquently. “Like the cycle of the seasons.”
“Would you prefer to be running your own business, then?”
“Of course.”
When Robyn asked him what kind of business, he glanced around in a slightly conspiratorial fashion, and lowered his voice. “Tom Rigby—you remember, the general manager of the foundry—Tom and I have an id
ea for a little gadget, a kind of spectrometer, for giving instant readout of the chemical composition of the molten metal, straight onto the shop floor. If it worked, it would save having to take samples to the lab for analysis. Every foundry in the world would have to have one. Nice little business, that could be.”
“Why don’t you do it, then?”
“I have a mortgage, a wife and three idle children to support. Like most of these poor buggers.”
Following Wilcox’s sweeping glance at the other diners, Robyn observed how the deportment of the secretaries being entertained by their bosses had mutated under the influence of drink from a demure reserve over the starter to giggling irresponsibility by the time the dessert was served. She was less amused by their waiter’s evident assumption that she herself was Wilcox’s secretary, being set up for seduction. He referred to her throughout the meal as “the young lady,” winked and smirked when Wilcox suggested another glass of wine, and recommended something “sweet and lovely” for dessert.
“I wish you’d drop a hint to that young man that I’m not your dolly-bird,” Robyn said at last.
“What?” said Wilcox, so startled by the suggestion that he nearly choked on his portion of home-made orchard-fresh apple pie.
“Haven’t you noticed the way he’s carrying on?”
“I thought he was just queer. Waiters often are, you know.”
“I think he’s hoping for a big tip.”
“He’ll get a big surprise, then,” said Wilcox grimly, and nearly bit the unfortunate waiter’s head off when he urged them to round off their meal “with a relaxing liqueur.” “Just coffee, and bring the bill with it,” he growled. “I’ve got an appointment in Leeds at three.”
Robyn was rather sorry that she had raised the subject, not so much for the waiter’s sake as because Wilcox now relapsed into sulky silence, evidently feeling that he had somehow been compromised or made to look foolish. “Thanks for the meal,” she said conciliatorily, though in truth the scampi had tasted of nothing except the oil in which they had been fried, and the cheesecake had glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
“Don’t thank me,” Wilcox said ungraciously. “It’s all on expenses.”