by P. D. James
“Well, with you gone I could go to the DHSS, couldn’t I? They could send their snoopers round and it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t be able to say I was having sex with you then, not if you weren’t here. Anyway, I’ve got a bit in my post-office account.”
The casual cruelty of the suggestion struck at his heart. He heard with heavy disgust the note of self-pity which he was unable to suppress. He said: “Is that what you really want, Amy, for me not to be here?”
“Don’t be daft, I was only teasing. Honestly, Neil, you should see yourself. Talk about misery. Anyway, it might not happen—the libel action, I mean.”
“It’s bound to happen unless she withdraws it. They’ve set a date for the hearing.”
“She might withdraw it, or else she might die. She might drown on one of those night swims she takes after the headlines on the nine o’clock news, regular as clockwork, right up to December.”
“Who told you that? How do you know that she swims at night?”
“You did.”
“I can’t remember telling you.”
“Then someone else did, one of the regulars in the Local Hero, maybe. I mean, it’s no secret, is it?”
He said: “She won’t drown. She’s a strong swimmer. She wouldn’t take foolish risks. And I can’t wish her dead. You can’t preach love and practise hatred.”
“I can—wish her dead, I mean. Maybe the Whistler will get her. Or you might win the action and then she’ll have to pay you. That’d be a laugh.”
“That’s not very likely. I consulted a lawyer at the Citizen’s Advice Bureau when I was in Norwich last Friday. I could see he thought it was serious, that she did have a case. He said I ought to get myself a lawyer.”
“Well, get one.”
“How? Lawyers cost money.”
“Get legal aid. Put a note in the newsletter asking for contributions.”
“I can’t do that. It’s difficult enough keeping the newsletter going, what with the cost of paper and postage.”
Amy said, suddenly serious: “I’ll think of something. There’s still four weeks to go. Anything can happen in four weeks. Stop worrying. It’s going to be all right. Look, Neil, I promise you that libel action will never come to court.” And, illogically, he was, for the moment, reassured and comforted.
7
It was six o’clock, and at Larksoken Power Station the weekly interdepartmental meeting was drawing to a close. It had lasted thirty minutes longer than usual. Dr. Alex Mair took the view, which he could normally enforce by brisk chairmanship, that little original thought was contributed to a discussion after three hours of talking. But it had been a heavy agenda: the revised safety plan still in draft; the rationalization of the internal structure from the present seven departments to three, under Engineering, Production and Resources; the report of the District Survey Laboratory on their monitoring of the environment; the preliminary agenda for the local Liaison Committee. This annual jamboree was an unwieldy but useful public-relations exercise which needed careful preparation, including as it did representatives from the interested government departments, local authorities, police, fire and water authorities, the National Farmers’ Union and the County Landowners’ Association. Mair sometimes grudged the work and time it involved but he knew its importance.
The weekly meeting was held in his office at the conference table set in front of the south window. Darkness was falling and the huge pane of glass was a black rectangle in which he could see their faces reflected, like the gaunt, disembodied heads of night travellers in a lighted railway carriage. He suspected that some of his departmental heads, particularly Bill Morgan, the Works Office Engineer, and Stephen Mansell, the Maintenance Superintendent, would have preferred a more relaxed setting, in his private sitting room next door, the low, comfortable chairs, a few hours of chat with no set agenda, perhaps a drink together afterwards in a local pub. Well, that was one management style, but it wasn’t his.
Now he closed the stiff cover of his folder in which his PA had meticulously tagged all the papers and cross-references, and said dismissively: “Any other business?”
But he was not allowed to get away so easily. On his right, as usual, sat Miles Lessingham, the Operations Superintendent, whose reflection, staring back into the room, looked like a hydrocephalic death’s head. Glancing from the image to the face, Mair could see little difference. The stark overhead lights threw deep shadows under the deep-set eyes, and the sweat glistened on the wide, rather knobbly forehead with its swathe of fair, undisciplined hair. Now he stretched back in his chair and said: “This proposed job—rumoured job, I should say—I suppose we’re entitled to ask whether it has been formally offered to you yet? Or aren’t we?”
Mair said calmly: “The answer is that it hasn’t; the publicity was premature. The press got hold of it somehow, as they usually do, but there’s nothing official yet. One unfortunate result of our present habit of leaking any information of interest is that the people most concerned become the last to know. If and when it is official, you seven will be the first to be told.”
Lessingham said: “It will have serious implications here, Alex, if you do go. The contract already signed for the new PWR reactor; the internal reorganization, which is bound to create disruption; electricity privatization. It’s a bad time for a change at the top.”
Mair said: “Is there ever a good time? But until it happens, if it does happen, there’s little point in discussing it.”
John Standing, the Station Chemist, said: “But the internal reorganization will go ahead, presumably?”
“I hope so, considering the time and energy we’ve spent planning it. I should be surprised if a change at the top alters a necessary reorganization which is already under way.”
Lessingham asked: “Who will they appoint, a Director or a Station Manager?” The question was less innocent than it sounded.
“I imagine a Station Manager.”
“You mean that the research will go?”
Mair said: “When I go, now or later, the research will go. You’ve always known that. I brought it with me and I wouldn’t have taken the job if I couldn’t have continued it here. I asked for certain research facilities and I got them. But research at Larksoken has always been somewhat of an anomaly. We’ve done good work, are still doing good work, but logically it should be done elsewhere, at Harwell or Winfrith. Is there any other business?”
But Lessingham was not to be discouraged. He said: “Who will you be responsible to? The Secretary of State for Energy directly or the AEA?”
Mair knew the answer but had no intention of giving it. He said quietly: “That is still under discussion.”
“Along, no doubt, with such minor matters as pay, rations, scope of your responsibilities and what you are going to be called. Controller of Nuclear Power has a certain cachet. I like it. But what precisely will you control?”
There was a silence. Mair said: “If the answer to that question were known, no doubt the appointment would have been made by now. I don’t want to stifle discussion, but hadn’t we better confine it to matters within the competence of this committee? Right, is there any other business?” And this time there was no reply.
Hilary Robarts, the Acting Administrative Officer, had already closed her file. She hadn’t taken part in the questioning but the others, Mair knew, would assume that that was because he had already told her the answers.
Even before they had left, his PA, Caroline Amphlett, had come in to take away the teacups and clear the table. Lessingham made it a habit to leave his agenda behind, a small personal protest against the amount of paper which the formal weekly meeting generated. Dr. Martin Goss, head of the Medical Physics Department, had, as always, doodled obsessively. His jotting pad was covered with hot-air balloons, intricately patterned and decorated; part of his mind had obviously been with his private passion. Caroline Amphlett moved, as always, with a quiet, efficient grace. Neither spoke. She had worked for Mair as his PA fo
r the last three years and he knew her now no better than on that morning when she had sat in this same office being interviewed for the job. She was a blond girl, smooth-skinned, with wide-spaced, rather small eyes of an extraordinary deep blue, who would have been thought beautiful if she had shown more animation. Mair suspected that she used her confidential job as his PA to preserve a deliberately intimidating reserve. She was the most efficient secretary he had ever had and it irked him that she had made it clear that, if and when he moved, she would wish to stay at Larksoken. She had told him that her reasons were personal. That, of course, meant Jonathan Reeves, a junior engineer in the workshop. He had been as surprised and chagrined at her choice as he had at the prospect of taking up a new job with an unknown PA, but there had been an additional and more disturbing reaction. Hers was not a type of female beauty which attracted him, and he had always assumed that she was physically cold. It was disconcerting to think that an acned nonentity had discovered and perhaps explored depths which he, in their daily intimacy, hadn’t even suspected. He had sometimes wondered, although with little real curiosity, whether she might not be less compliant, more complicated than he had supposed, had occasionally had a disconcerting sense that the façade she presented to the power station of dedicated, humourless efficiency had been carefully constructed to conceal a less accommodating, more complex personality. But if the real Caroline was accessible to Jonathan Reeves, if she actually liked and wanted that unprepossessing wimp, then she hardly merited the tribute even of his curiosity.
8
He gave his departmental heads time to get back to their offices before he rang for Hilary Robarts and asked her to come back. It would have been more usual to have asked her with careful casualness to wait behind after the meeting, but what he had to say was private and he had been trying for some weeks now to cut down the number of times when they were known to be alone together. He wasn’t looking forward to the interview. She would see what he had to say as personal criticism, and that was something which in his experience few women could take. He thought: “She was my mistress once. I was in love with her, as much in love as I thought I was capable of being. And if it wasn’t love, whatever that word means, at least I wanted her. Will that make what I have to say easier or more difficult?” He told himself that all men were cowards when it came to a showdown with a woman. That first post-natal subservience, bred of physical dependence, was too ingrained ever to be totally eradicated. He wasn’t more cowardly than the rest of his sex. What was it he had overheard that woman in the Lydsett stores saying? “George would do anything to avoid a scene.” Of course he would, poor sod. Women, with their womb-smelling warmth, their talcum powder and milky breasts, had seen to that in the first four weeks of life.
He stood up when she came in and waited until she had taken the chair on the other side of the desk. Then he opened the right-hand drawer and took out a duplicated news-sheet which he slid across the desk towards her.
“Have you seen this? It’s Neil Pascoe’s latest news-sheet from PANUP.”
She said: “People Against Nuclear Power. That means Pascoe and a few dozen other ill-informed hysterics. Of course I’ve seen it, I’m on his mailing list. He takes good care that I see it.”
She gave it a brief glance, then pushed it back across the desk. He took it up and read: “Many readers will probably have learned by now that I am being sued by Miss Hilary Robarts, the Acting Administrative Officer at Larksoken Power Station, for alleged libel arising from what I wrote in the May issue of the news-sheet. I shall, of course, strenuously defend the action and, as I have no money to pay for a lawyer, will present my own defence. This is just the latest example of the threat to free information and even free speech presented by the nuclear-energy lobby. Apparently now even the mildest criticism is to be followed by the threat of legal action. But there is a positive side. This action by Hilary Robarts shows that we, the ordinary people of this county, are making our impact. Would they bother with our small news-sheet if they weren’t running scared? And the libel action, if it comes to trial, will give us valuable national publicity if properly handled. We are stronger than we know. Meanwhile I give below the dates of the next open days at Larksoken so that as many of us as possible can attend and put our case against nuclear power during the question time which normally precedes the actual tour of the station.”
She said: “I told you, I’ve seen it. I don’t know why you wasted your time reading it out. He seems determined to aggravate his offence. If he had any sense he’d get himself a good lawyer and keep his mouth shut.”
“He can’t afford a lawyer. And he won’t be able to pay damages.” He paused, and then said quietly: “In the interests of the station I think you should drop it.”
“Is that an order?”
“I’ve no power to compel you and you know that. I’m asking you. You’ll get nothing out of him, the man’s practically penniless, and he isn’t worth the trouble.”
“He is to me. What he describes as mild criticism was a serious libel and it was widely disseminated. There’s no defence. Remember the actual words? ‘A woman whose response to Chernobyl is that only thirty-one people were killed, who can dismiss as unimportant one of the world’s greatest nuclear disasters, which put thousands in hospital, exposed a hundred thousand or more to dangerous radioactivity, devastated vast areas of land and may result in deaths from cancer amounting to fifty thousand over the next fifty years, is totally unsuitable to be trusted to work in an atomic-power station. While she remains there, in any capacity, we must have the gravest doubts whether safety will ever be taken seriously at Larksoken.’ That’s a clear allegation of professional incompetence. If he’s allowed to get away with that, we’ll never get rid of him.”
“I wasn’t aware that we were in the business of getting rid of inconvenient critics. What method had you in mind?”
He paused, detecting in his voice the first trace of that reedy mixture of sarcasm and pomposity which he knew occasionally affected him and to which he was morbidly sensitive. He went on: “He’s a free citizen living where he chooses. He’s entitled to his views. Hilary, he’s not a worthy opponent. Bring him to court and he’ll attract publicity for his cause and do your own no good at all. We’re trying to win over the locals, not antagonize them. Let it go before someone starts a fund to pay for his defence. One martyr on Larksoken headland is enough.”
While he was speaking she got up and began pacing to and fro across the wide office. Then she paused and turned on him. “This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? The reputation of the station, your reputation. What about my reputation? If I drop the action now, it will be a clear admission that he was right, that I’m not fit to work here.”
“What he wrote hasn’t hurt your reputation with anyone who matters. And suing him isn’t going to help it. It’s unwise to let policy be influenced, let alone jeopardized, by outraged personal pride. The reasonable course is quietly to drop the action. What do feelings matter?” He found that he couldn’t remain seated while she was striding to and fro across the office. He got to his feet and walked over to the window, hearing the angry voice but no longer having to face her, watching the reflection of her pacing figure, the swirling hair. He said again: “What do feelings matter? It’s the work that is important.”
“They matter to me. And that’s something you’ve never understood, have you? Life is about feeling. Loving is about feeling. It was the same with the abortion. You forced me to have it. Did you ever ask yourself what I felt then, what I needed?”
Oh God, he thought, not this, not again, not now. He said, still with his back to her: “It’s ridiculous to say that I forced you. How could I? And I thought you felt as I did, that it was impossible for you to have a child.”
“Oh no it wasn’t. If you’re so bloody keen on accuracy, let’s be accurate about this. It would have been inconvenient, embarrassing, awkward, expensive. But it wasn’t impossible. It still isn’t impossible. And for Go
d’s sake, turn around. Look at me. I’m talking to you. What I’m saying is important.”
He turned and walked back to the desk. He said calmly: “All right, my phrasing was inaccurate. Have a child by all means, if that’s what you want. I’ll be happy for you as long as you don’t expect me to father it. But what we’re talking about now is Neil Pascoe and PANUP. We’ve gone to a lot of trouble here to promote good relations with the local community and I’m not going to have all that good work vitiated by a totally unnecessary legal action, particularly not now when work will soon begin on the new reactor.”
“Then try to prevent it. And since we’re talking about public relations, I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned Ryan Blaney and Scudder’s Cottage. My cottage, in case you’ve forgotten. What am I expected to do about that? Hand over my property to him and his kids rent-free in the interests of good public relations?”
“That’s a different matter. It’s not my concern as Director. But if you want my opinion, I think you’re ill advised to try and force him out simply because you’ve got a legal case. He’s paying the rent regularly, isn’t he? And it isn’t as if you want the cottage.”
“I do want the cottage. It’s mine. I bought it and now I want to sell it.”
She slumped back into the chair and he, too, sat. He made himself stare into the eyes in which, to his discomfort, he saw more pain than anger. He said: “Presumably he knows that and he’ll get out when he can, but it won’t be easy. He’s recently widowed and he’s got four children. There’s a certain amount of local feeling about it, I understand.”
“I’ve no doubt there is, particularly in the Local Hero, where Ryan Blaney spends most of his time and money. I’m not prepared to wait. If we’re moving to London in the next three months, there’s not much time to get the question of the cottage settled. I don’t want to leave that kind of unfinished business. I want to get it on the market as soon as possible.”
