by MARY HOCKING
He tried again. ‘We call one another by our Christian names in this section. What is yours?’
‘Phoebe, Mr. Norris.’
He looked at her thoughtfully and caught a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes before the heavy lids were lowered. He could see that she would not have got on well with Norma Rossiter.
‘Very well, Miss Huber. I’ll see if I can find one or two things to occupy you for the next half-hour, and later we can have a chat about the work in this section.’ He was briskly formal. She did not like that. It was surprising, given those inscrutable features, that she could register changes of mood so effectively. Tom felt the cold breath of her displeasure. His reaction was unexpected. He did not enjoy dealing with staff because he disliked managing other people and he suffered from the disability of always being able to see the other person’s point of view; but now, confronted with this unhappy creature, he felt neither pity nor understanding, but an agreeable sense of a conflict from which he had every intention of emerging the victor.
‘There is a mountain of reports on the top of that cabinet which need sorting out. I’m afraid they go back for over a year.’ He didn’t sound apologetic. ‘The only ones I need left out are the schools sub-committee reports and the reports of the education committee. The rest can be filed away in the cupboard by the door. If you could make a start on the filing it would be a great help. You can use my desk. There are one or two people I have to see.’
He did not wait to give her any more instructions; he had an idea that she was both intelligent and efficient.
There was, in fact, only one person whom he had to see, but he suspected that their business together might occupy some time. He went into the next office and said to Madge Conroy, ‘Is there anyone in the interview rooms?’
She looked up from a pile of staffing returns and raised her eyebrows.
‘If not,’ he went on, ‘perhaps we could have a talk in one of them?’
‘You would feel safe, would you?’
The two committee clerks kept their heads well down; nevertheless, he noticed an air of suppressed excitement on the face of one of them.
‘I know you are annoyed with me,’ he said to Madge Conroy. ‘Come and have a talk about it.’
She got up and followed him out of the room. They walked in silence to the end of the corridor. The first interview room was occupied, but the second was empty. They sat down, one on either side of the table, and she said, ‘You do the talking. I can’t trust myself.’
It was surprising that one could know a person for so long without noticing certain things about their appearance. In spite of all her open-air activity and the impression of robust strength which her stocky body conveyed, the skin of her face was clear and sensitive, even the present flush of anger or confusion was delicately done. He noticed also, now that she was not her usual buoyant self, that there was an unexpected shyness in the eyes and the rather pouting lips were prepared for defeat. She was a more emotional person than he had imagined. He realised that this was a situation he could not joke his way out of, and he began to feel rather wretched.
‘I’ve upset you, haven’t I?’ he asked soberly.
‘You know the work load this section carries. We put up with it because we all think you’re such a super bloke to work for!’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Did you have to do this to us, now, of all times?’
‘It’s not as bad as that, surely?’ he protested uncomfortably.
‘You don’t know how bad, do you? I bet you didn’t ask any questions about her.’
‘I couldn’t. Holmes brought her along with him. You know what a cunning bastard he is.’
‘You mean you saw her and you still said “Yes”?’ She put one hand over her eyes; from where he was sitting it looked as though she was holding her breath. He was aware that, although she would now try to make a joke of it, the despair was genuine. The strain of the reorganisation was beginning to tell even on her.
‘This isn’t like you,’ he said, meaning that it was not like his image of her. In plays there is often a character whose function it is to bring the conversation down to earth at that moment when the audience is beginning to find the atmosphere too rarified. If he had been casting such a part, Madge Conroy would have been his choice. Why couldn’t life imitate the theatre? Why couldn’t she simply play the part to which she was so eminently suited, the person who is always cheerful, practical, and, above all, stable? Why did she have to remind him that none of us remains long in a state of equilibrium?
‘She drove them mad in Sites and Buildings; that was why she went to Special Services. And that was before we had to contend with reorganisation!’
‘I’ll keep her in my room,’ he said. ‘There’s quite a lot that she can do. You were saying only the other day that we should never get round to sorting out all those confidential records and deciding what to keep and what to burn.’
‘And you think if I can’t do it, she can take it in her stride, do you?’
He had never known her to be so touchy. ‘I think she could do the dogsbody work.’
‘She’ll do that all right. And if you kick her in the teeth every now and again, you’ll probably keep her happy.’
‘I’ve never known you talk like this about anyone before.’
‘We all have unplumbed depths of nastiness,’ she said wearily.
‘I’ll see she behaves.’
She expressed her scepticism with a wry smile which provoked him to declare, ‘There won’t be any nonsense from Miss Huber.’ She eased her chair back and stood up. ‘I can’t say “amen to that” or give any other pious response. But I’ll try to keep out of her way; that’s the most I can promise.’
Tom said nothing, knowing her well enough to be sure she would do more than she promised. On the way down the corridor, she said:
‘What went wrong between her and Norma Rossiter?’
‘Something to do with a cat.’
‘I’d like to have been a fly on the wall when those two fought that out!’
Tom returned to his room wondering how Miss Huber had fared in his absence.
She had already gone some way to restore order to chaos. Reports were laid out in neat stacks on his desk and she was leaning forward, a report in one poised hand, surveying the state of play with the intense, avaricious concentration of the addicted card player. Immediately she saw him, not only did her attitude change but her whole body changed, her shoulders drooped, her very flesh seemed to crumple and become flaccid. She affected a flustered stammer, ‘I . . . I’ve made such a m . . mess. Oh dear. . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter. I told you to use the desk.’
‘But all your own papers. . . .’ She looked up at him, shoulders hunched, cringing. She had grey eyes, narrow but long; they met his for a moment and then slid away giving the impression of something snakelike making its escape within the skull.
‘My papers are on the chair over there,’ he said stonily. ‘What is wrong with that?’
‘As long as you don’t mind. . . .’
He came to stand beside her, looking down at the table. ‘What is that pile over there?’ He pointed to a pile which by its uneven shape suggested that it contained a miscellany of reports.
‘Those are my queries.’ She turned away and flicked another report down on the pile nearest the door.
‘Queries?’
She looked longingly at the stacks on the table; it was obvious she could scarcely bear to drag her mind away from this elaborate game of patience. ‘I thought you might want to glance through the finance committee reports,’ she said. ‘There might be one or two items in them which affect the recommendations of the schools sub-committee. And there are several reports of the working party on reorganisation which seem to require some action.’
In a person of her type, intelligence and efficiency would be accompanied by an obsessive attention to detail: he should have been prepared for that. He said, ‘I’ll have a look at the queries
later.’
There was nowhere for him to sit. He went to the window and pretended to study a copy of the Burnham report on teachers’ pay. She said, ‘That is last year’s. Shall I get the current one for you?’
‘I am one of those people who are always a year behind, Miss Huber,’ he said drily.
She enjoyed this. ‘I sometimes think it would be nice to live life backwards, don’t you?’
‘I don’t think I’d fancy being a baby again,’ he replied, surprised at this turn of the conversation.
‘It would be all right provided we were armed with the psychological knowledge we had gained,’ she said. ‘Think how unpleasant we could make things for our parents.’
For some reason he could not quite understand, Tom found this remark particularly shocking. As his mother had died when he was eight and he had never been able to establish a satisfactory relationship with his father, one might have thought that the subject of filial disaffection would leave him comparatively unmoved. For the second time that day, he found himself wondering about all those books he had written about happy families. Phoebe Huber went on with her work. In spite of her nervousness, she was not one of those women who cannot be silent in company.
When the tea trolley came she went out of the room and he heard her saying to one of the juniors that she would get Mr. Norris’ tea. The offer was made in a helpful manner and was gratefully accepted: Miss Huber, it seemed, was quite capable of establishing good relationships at this level. She used the tea break as an opportunity of expressing her gratitude to him for coming to her rescue; she made it sound as though this had been a very personal gesture on his part. He had been sure that she would not let the afternoon pass without doing this. She also expressed the hope that she would not let him down, in a tone which conveyed a firm belief in her own unworthiness. This, too, was predictable. He felt he now had the measure of Phoebe Huber. A pity he wasn’t a novelist, she would not belong in a children’s book.
It was four o’clock. He had let the afternoon slide by without doing any work and he would have to take the notes of this morning’s meeting home with him. A junior came in with post for him to sign. Phoebe Huber began to clear a space on the desk, but he said, ‘I can manage over here.’ He cleared papers from the chair by the window and sat with the folder of letters on his lap. He could feel cold air coming in through the cracks at the sides of the window. Although the sun was shining, its light no longer softened the landscape as it did in summer and the line of the Downs was drawn razor-sharp against the even blue sky. He felt slightly short of breath and he hoped he was not going to panic here in his own office; once that happened, he would not be safe anywhere. He opened the folder and began to read through the letter on the top of the pile; it was to a head teacher who had raised queries about the pupil-teacher ratio and Madge Conroy had obviously decided that the best way to keep this particular woman quiet was to give her a dauntingly statistical analysis of the position not only in her own school but over the county as a whole. By the time he had read it through, and raised one or two queries, he was in command of himself again. He signed several letters of appointment, and was reading through a long memorandum to the County Treasurer on the subject of per capita allowances, when Phoebe Huber said:
‘You illustrate your own books, do you?’
‘Sometimes.’ He looked up and saw that she was looking at the report on which he had sketched the wolf.
‘Are you writing now?’ she asked.
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Isn’t that rather uncomfortable?’
‘Yes.’ He was surprised that she should realise this, and he said without thinking what it might lead to, ‘I had an idea, but it’s got knotted up inside me.’
‘About wolves?’
‘I seem to have something at the back of my mind about the wolf coming back to live in this country. In the wild, I mean. . . .’
‘They have them in Italy, don’t they? I remember reading one year, when there was a very severe winter, that they came down from the hills and ate a postman.’
‘Oh? No, I don’t remember that.’
There was a pause while Phoebe Huber studied the sketch of the wolf approvingly as though she thought every report should have one.
Tom said, ‘I couldn’t remember whether I read this thing about the wolf in a newspaper, or whether it was an idea of my own I wanted to use in a story. Fact and fiction get muddled sometimes. . . .’
‘Would it be suitable for a children’s book?’ She put the report to one side reluctantly. ‘One has to be so careful nowadays what is served up to the little dears. I remember liking the more bizarre stories when I was young.’
Encouraged by this preference for the bizarre, Tom said, ‘The trouble with writing stories is that you get your head so full of them, sometimes you don’t know whether it is you or your characters speaking. . . .’ The telephone rang, denying him the opportunity to observe Phoebe Huber’s reaction. Norma Rossiter made strident claim to his attention.
‘What the bloody hell, Tom! I’m waiting in the entrance hall. You’re giving me a lift to Little Chart Special School, remember? And we have to pick up Councillors Hillman and Lacey.’
‘I wonder how I survive,’ Tom said heavily as he put the receiver down.
‘I don’t know why we bother so much about survival, do you?’ Phoebe Huber asked. ‘After all, we’re going to die anyway.’
Norma Rossiter was sitting on the bench by the front door when Tom got out of the lift. She was wearing a purple cloak with an enormous long-haired fur collar, a green dunce’s cap with a very high steeple with an orange plume, and boots and gloves of a matching green. It was the sort of outfit Marlene Dietrich could have carried off, and it required impeccable make-up. Norma’s make-up, though generous, had been hastily applied and the line of the mouth was crooked; the whole impression was of an actress who, having made a good attacking start with a part, has lost her nerve midway through the action.
Nerve of a kind she had, however.
‘I want your advice,’ she said as they walked to the car. In spite of her constant insistence that she must run her own show, she made frequent appeals to Tom for advice. ‘Do you think I should apply for both deputyships, or concentrate on one?’
‘Let’s get these papers stacked away first.’ She always maintained that at committee meetings “I play it by ear”; but the papers she had thought it necessary to take to this meeting scarcely supported this claim to spontaneity. In addition to minute books and the customary case files, there was a mound of miscellaneous reports and case histories which had been appropriated from the records of other Departments. It was easy to see why Norma’s relations with other officers were strained. ‘This stuff will have to go in the boot,’ Tom said. ‘Otherwise, there won’t be room for Hillman, let alone Lacey.’
‘Wait a minute! These are in very careful order.’ She stood beside him, the wind catching the fur collar and blowing her coarse, coppery hair out on either side of the steeple hat; she had doused herself in a scent which was strong enough out here and would be overpowering in the confined space of the school library. Although she was so determined to make an assault on the senses, her committee papers bore more evidence of defeat than mastery; not only was the agenda item number recorded on the corner of each individual page, but there were neat hieroglyphics which presumably related to a private cross-reference system. She superintended the placing of the papers in the boot, and even when this was done she looked at them, beady-eyed, as though she could scarcely bear to be parted from them. Perhaps aware of showing too much concern, she said jokingly, ‘You don’t keep a hamster in your boot, like Edgar Holmes?’
‘Do you need all those papers?’ he asked when they were in the car.
‘My committee isn’t like yours,’ she said defensively. ‘They go into everything in painstaking detail.’
Tom thought that this might be because their officer left them little alternative.
As soon as they were on the main road, Norma said, ‘Now, what do you suggest about this business of the deputyship?’
‘You mean the senior officer posts?’ he asked, rather mystified. ‘Surely you’ll try for assistant education officer?’
‘Senior officer . . . assistant education officer!’ She rocked about in the seat and the safety belt came undone. ‘My dear old chap, I mean to apply for Deputy! What I can’t make up my mind about is whether to go for the West Sussex post or. . . .’
‘Deputy! You’d never be considered. Even Marsden has given up hope of that.’
‘Bertie Marsden is no bloody good.’
‘But he is the Deputy Education Officer for South Sussex.’
‘Only because Mather couldn’t get rid of him. I can tell you now that if this reorganisation hadn’t come about, I should have made out a case for equivalent status with Bertie. It is absolutely scandalous the amount of policy-making I have to do while Bertie spends weeks searching for the exact date in nineteen-seventeen when St. John’s School ceased to be a church school!’
‘You’ll never be considered.’ Tom had not thought of applying for a deputyship; even so, it annoyed him that Norma should think she could leap over not only Bertie Marsden, but himself, Phillimore, Edgar Holmes, to say nothing of a dozen officers from East and West Sussex.
‘Male chauvinist pig!’ she exclaimed, albeit quite good- humouredly because she did not regard Tom as a serious rival. ‘Local government needs a breath of fresh air. In fact, it needs a bloody great hurricane to sweep it clean of all those timid, mealy- mouthed, limited officers who are quite incapable of living in the modern local government structure which more and more will be modelled on the management concepts of the industrial world. . . .’
She talked endlessly about management concepts at the meetings of section heads. Mather used to whisper to Tom, ‘What’s she on about? I never understand half the woman says.’
Tom allowed his mind to wander. They had turned off the main road now and ahead the lane narrowed and began to climb; through gaps in the hedges he could see the hills gathering round. As he drove his mind recorded images: a tree scratching at the sky, more of twig than leaf on its branches now; the sun’s rays weakly pencilled on thin grey cloud; straw laid across the entrance to a field, already mashed into the mud by the tractors’ tyres. They passed through a village, small, a few cottages straggling up the hill; not much colour in the gardens, and the one dash of scarlet by a stone wall a reminder of a coming need for warmth. The earth had been recently turned and a big thrush pecked for worms, pausing every few seconds to turn its head from side to side, alert for predators. Children shouted and waved, just as though they had never seen a car before.
