by MARY HOCKING
Phillimore said uneasily, ‘Why are we stopping here so long?’
‘Power cut, sir.’
The woman addressed as Dot wailed, ‘Oh dear, I don’t like this.’ Spiers said, ‘I’ll tell you a funny story.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Dot,’ the woman above advised. ‘He’s got a dirty mind.’
‘But a power cut could last for hours,’ Phillimore protested.
‘And this chap in the train said, “Is this Cockfosters? . . .” ’
Tom said, ‘I’m going to sit down.’ He sat on the floor and found that he could see Norma Rossiter just below him. She had a bundle of papers under one arm and was dressed with unusual sobriety in a tobacco-coloured suit with matching shoes and handbag. She had even cut down on the costume jewellery. When she saw Tom she waved the papers at him and shouted, ‘I had to take these away from your precious Miss Huber by main force. She made some excuse about Ellis Phillimore pulling down a shelf and spilling everything all over the place.’
Spiers said, ‘Do I have to explain it to you?’
‘I understand all right; I just don’t think it’s funny.’
Phillimore knelt down and said to Norma, ‘Could you rouse someone below on your way out? We can’t stay here until the power is restored.’
‘I would have thought that was exactly what you would have to do.’
‘But it may be several hours!’
Spiers, who was sitting on the floor now, looked down at Norma approvingly. ‘Very nice, dear, very nice and proper.’
‘You think I’ll do?’ She looked up at him archly.
‘I think you’d do for anything, dear. But that’s not the impression you want to give, is it? Particularly as old Hillman is on the Appointments Board. I’d tone down the make-up a shade if I were you.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said.
They watched her go down the stairs. ‘She won’t do anything about it,’ Spiers said. ‘Our Norma wears make-up out of a sense of propriety; to reveal her face naked to the world would seem to her shameless, a terrible Puritan flamboyance!’
‘I don’t like this,’ Phillimore whispered to Tom. ‘Nothing has been the same since you pulled that switch.’ He hitched his jacket around his shoulders and absently pleated it in front of his chest.
‘You’re losing weight,’ Spiers told him.
‘You think so?’
‘Better be careful. I’ll be getting my ruler out.’
Dot said, ‘Do you mind?’
Spiers said to Tom, ‘Did I tell you I was going into the undertaking business?’
A voice called up the lift shaft, ‘Power’s back, Bert.’
Dot said, ‘And not a moment too soon!’
When Tom entered his office Phoebe was typing in a bad light. He switched on the electric light. She blinked and said without looking up, ‘Miss Rossiter was in such a state, she didn’t give me time to do the reports up neatly for her.’
‘She won’t get the job anyway.’
‘Poor Miss Rossiter. They’ll be very mean if they don’t give it to her. She does want it so much.’
Tom sat down and went through the motions of examining the post which had been left on his desk. When the trolley came, Phoebe went out to fetch coffee. He could hear her talking to one of the committee clerks. ‘She wasn’t so bad to work for really. She was an awful bitch, but at least you knew where you were with her; she was always the same.’ There were others, her tone implied, who were not so reliable. When she returned to the room she put a cup of coffee down on the desk in front of Tom without looking at him.
The atmosphere in the room was very bad, even the inanimate objects seemed shrouded in misery.
In the afternoon when she went to get tea from the trolley, she said to someone, ‘He just sits there all the time looking as though he’s got toothache. It’s getting me down being in the same room with someone who is so morbid.’ Tom picked up a pencil and began a sketch of her grey dress with the white, starched collar.
The telephone rang. It was Isobel to say that she would be out at a meeting of the Women’s Guild that evening.
‘I’ll put your dinner in the oven,’ she said.
He said, ‘Yes, all right.’ She had done this before without telephoning him about it.
‘It’s still very cold here,’ she said, as though she was ringing from the other end of England. ‘What’s it like there?’
‘It’s cold here, too.’
He drew a wolf’s head above the white collar.
‘Are you busy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mustn’t keep you, then.’
She seemed reluctant to ring off, so he said, ‘Don’t worry about my dinner.’
‘You’ll be sure to heat it through properly, won’t you?’ She sounded very anxious.
‘Yes, I’ll manage.’
That night he dreamt he was in a hospital bed. He was trying to tell a doctor about the Great Power, but all the doctor would say was, ‘When did this start?’ The doctor looked very grave; he wouldn’t be able to do anything unless he knew when it all started. But Tom could not think when it started, every time something came to his mind, he was reminded of something else, further back in time, as though his whole life had been a rehearsal for this moment in the hospital bed. But now he was in an aeroplane because they had to fight and there were people running. He abandoned the aeroplane and ran with them. Someone said to him, ‘You must write about this.’ But he couldn’t because he didn’t know when it started.
‘I have bad dreams,’ he said to Isobel at breakfast.
‘I have bad dreams, too.’
Once she would not have admitted to dreaming because she regarded the dreaming self as unhealthy. Now, not only did she admit to dreaming, but by her rather dismissive manner she suggested that her dreams were worse than his.
When he got to his office Phoebe seemed in better humour and he started to tell her about his dreams, but almost immediately he was interrupted by the ringing of the internal telephone. Phoebe lifted the receiver and replaced it again quickly.
‘Mr. Mather wants to see us,’ she said.
‘He’ll have to wait.’
But she was already on her way out of the room, drawn by the prospect of disaster. ‘He doesn’t usually have time for the lower orders,’ she said as they walked down the corridor. ‘Something terrible must have happened to direct his attention to me. Whatever can it be?’
‘I was about to tell you something much more terrible,’ Tom said testily.
Norma Rossiter was in the room with Mather. She sat clutching the arms of her chair as though forcibly restraining herself from violent action; the signs of struggle showed in her face which had a blurred look as if it had gone slightly out of focus. Mather lolled comfortably in his chair, gazing out of the window while one hand played idly with some papers on the desk; he looked as nearly benign as his saturnine features would allow. ‘Ah, come in!’ he said to Tom and Phoebe. He pushed the papers across the desk. ‘I wonder if you could explain how this came to be among the reports which Miss Rossiter took to her interview yesterday?’ He yawned and rubbed his hand up and down his cheek while Tom and Phoebe looked at the paper in front of them.
‘Once upon a time,’ they read, ‘there was a County Council which had forty secondary schools to care about, and of these forty schools. . . .’
‘I gather,’ Mather said, ‘that Miss Rossiter handed copies of reports to the members of the Appointments Board. Some of them got a report on Integrated Studies, while others got this little fairy story.’
Phoebe’s chin began to quiver and this set her cheeks wobbling like jelly; the upper part of her face remained set.
Norma Rossiter said, ‘You did it on purpose, you snivelling little toad!’
Phoebe put up a hand to shield the lower part of her face and a series of muffled yelps escaped between her fingers. Mather rubbed the bridge of his nose, plainly enjoying the situation. Tom thought: the world
is cracking up; it doesn’t take little green men from Mars to accomplish it, the enemy is here already.
‘This has ruined my life,’ Norma Rossiter said.
‘Your career, at any rate,’ Mather amended.
‘I told you everything was in a muddle. Miss Rossiter,’ Phoebe cried passionately. ‘I told you, I told you. . . .’
Tom said indifferently, ‘This is my fault. I take complete responsibility.’
Mather, who thought he had a monopoly of indifference, was put out. Someone had to take the affair seriously, but he had not expected it to be him. He looked at Norma Rossiter and at Phoebe and then examined his finger nails. ‘Mr. Norris and I will talk this over together,’ he said.
Norma Rossiter began to expostulate, changed her mind and walked to the door. Phoebe cringed back to let her pass and then slunk after her.
‘Now!’ Mather picked up the papers. ‘This fairy story of yours will take some explaining.’
‘It’s self-explanatory,’ Tom retorted. ‘I don’t write that badly.’
‘Then shall we say it will hardly enhance your chances of being appointed Area Education Officer of South Sussex.’
‘I don’t want to be appointed Area Education Officer of South, North, East or West Sussex! I’m not concerned with that at all.’
Mather peered suspiciously at Tom. His mind was befuddled by drink and as his perceptions became less sharp so he was more prone to take offence. It seemed to him that Norris was deliberately making light of the fears and anxieties proper to the occasion. Mather felt himself threatened at seeing his own role thus usurped. He said ponderously, playing for time, ‘Then what, may one enquire, is your concern?’
‘Oh God, that’s the question! Don’t think I don’t realise it. I ask it all the time. What am I doing, what are you doing?’ Tom took a turn about the room and then appealed to Mather, ‘Look, we’re all called to be saints, agreed?’ Mather looked incredulous; he wasn’t easily shocked but he was on the verge of shock now. ‘But it takes a lifetime to be a saint and I haven’t got the stickability; for every step forward, I take two backwards. And anyway, there isn’t the time.’
‘Nor, I would suggest, is this the time for sermons.’ Mather was angry and embarrassed.
‘But destruction! Now, destruction is another matter.’ Tom leant across the desk and gazed intently at Mather. ‘This is more your line of country. You know as well as I do that the destructive forces have something to tell you about yourself and they accomplish their work much more quickly. At least, that’s what I thought. But you have given me cause to doubt this; because you are a destroyer if ever there was one, yet you don’t seem to be making very good progress.’
‘To what am I supposed to be progressing?’ Mather’s face was a dull mulberry colour, even his eyes were pink.
‘Towards yourself, of course. But you’ve opted out by taking to drink. Oh, don’t be angry.’ Mather was hauling himself to his feet, his hands clutching the edge of the desk, elbows sticking out; there was something grotesquely froglike about him. ‘It’s much too late to be angry. Everyone knows you are drinking. It’s not the drinking that matters, it’s the waste of effort.’
Mather bared his teeth and flicked his tongue exploratively round them as though making sure he had enough saliva to give voice.
‘I’m not trying to be offensive,’ Tom assured him. ‘This is very important. You do see that, don’t you? If you decide on destruction you’ve got to be positive about it; take risks, cut all the corners. Otherwise you might just as well have opted for being a saint.’
Mather said hoarsely, ‘I am Chief Education Officer still. And I shall make sure. . . .’ He paused, his face clouded; then, unable to identify any particular ambition which could effectively be blocked, he said, ‘I shall make it my business to ensure that no appointment is offered which might deflect you from the pursuit of saintliness. Now, get out!’
‘I didn’t mean to upset you like this. I wanted you to understand.
‘Miss Coxon! MISS COXON! MISS C-O-X-O-N!’ Mather pounded his desk. When his secretary came into the room he ignored the urgent signals which she made and shouted, ‘What bloody good are you if you can’t protect me from maniacs like this?’ Miss Coxon pointed a warning finger towards her own room and he bellowed ‘I don’t care if it’s Jesus Christ out there, get Norris out of this room!’
Tom had already retreated into Miss Coxon’s room where he almost collided with County Councillor Hillman who was standing in the middle of the room, erect and seemingly in a state of shock.
Ill tidings travel fast and Phillimore was waiting to express his condolences when Tom returned to his own room.
‘Bad timing on your part, old man. No occasion for fairy stories. A hymn in praise of local government is what you should have produced at this stage of the game.’ Phillimore could hardly believe the way in which his fellow officers were falling from grace. A few months ago he would scarcely have credited his luck; but now, instead of exulting, he began to be worried. It was uncomfortably like the tale of the ten little niggers.
Phoebe interposed, ‘Do you know what Miss Rossiter said to me after we left the room? She said all I cared about was cats. Do you think it’s true?’ Phillimore studied her speculatively. ‘Wouldn’t it be awful to be the dried up little spinster who only cared about what happened to cats?’
Tom said, ‘You mustn’t worry about this. Whoever is to blame it isn’t you.’
But she was not to be comforted. ‘I can’t quite convince myself that I didn’t notice that there was at least one odd report on that pile. Or have I imagined that?’
‘I expect you’ve imagined it.’ Phillimore’s tone suggested the subject was open for discussion.
‘I wish I knew. Or would I rather not know? Did I want to do it in my subconscious?’
At the mention of the subconscious Phillimore began to ease his way to the door, being careful this time to avoid the piles of parcels on the floor. When the door had shut behind him, Phoebe said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, isn’t there anything I can do? If I went to old Hillman in sackcloth and ashes and knelt in the snow outside his gate. . . .’
Tom said, ‘She wouldn’t have got the job anyway.’
‘Why can’t they sack me?’ she asked vehemently. ‘It doesn’t matter about me. I’m an awful mess anyway. I wouldn’t mind living on national assistance. I’ve no pride. Though there’d be the cats; I’d worry about whether they had enough food. You know, I’m afraid it is true. They are so much more appealing than human beings.’
Madge Conroy, who had come in with post for signature, said robustly, ‘I should forget all about it if I were you. Serve Norma right for trying to pass off other people’s reports as her own.’
‘Should I go out and do good works, do you think? But I’ve got a nasty feeling it doesn’t count unless your heart is pure, and I’m afraid you can’t cheat God.’
Tom tried to read a memorandum on special allowances.
‘Aren’t you dramatising this a little?’ Madge Conroy said to Phoebe. ‘All you did was to hand her a pile of reports.’
‘I can’t convince myself that I didn’t notice that there was at least one odd report. . . .’
Tom signed the memorandum without reading it.
‘. . . all right, all right, if it makes you happy,’ Madge Conroy was saying.
The day dragged bleakly to a close. Phoebe seemed to have entered into a prolonged mourning for Norma Rossiter. Her attitude to Tom was increasingly hostile; she treated him as an interloper who by his intervention had lost her a cherished friend. He accepted this meekly because any attention was better than none.
‘I hope you’ll feel better about this in the morning,’ he said at the end of the day.
She was pulling on her woolly hat with the pom-poms and seemed not to be aware of him. He was suddenly afraid that she might not come in in the morning. He could not face the prospect of a morning without Phoebe. The world that was not Phoebe was like
a television serial left on in a room where people have turned away from the set; spasmodically one is aware of a word here, an action there, but the story line is lost and the words and actions are meaningless.
He was filled with a sense of foreboding as he went home. Isobel was out. The house was quiet and the quiet increased his sense of foreboding. It was as though somewhere, deep inside him, there was a person screaming with terror, but through all that skin and bone the voice could only be heard at night when it was quiet and sound carried.
Chapter Twelve
There was more snow the next day which brought the temperature up a little above freezing point with the result that there were a lot of burst pipes before the very cold weather set in again. People began to talk in terms of the cold lasting until Easter.
Isobel had a headache and was very listless; she decided not to get up. Tom could not remember her having a day in bed before. In the evening he prepared a meal for her, but when he took it to her she turned her face to the wall as though she was going to die. At any other time he would have worried about her, but now he could not summon up the necessary dismay; it was as though there was a block of ice somewhere behind his eyes.
He was not even disturbed about Miss Towton. He had telephoned her recently only to be informed by the driver of a removal van that she was dead; her furniture was being taken to her niece’s house in Tunbridge Wells. Tom, feeling nothing himself, nevertheless expected Phoebe to grieve. But Phoebe, having completed her period of mourning for Norma Rossiter, had become macabrely cheerful, drawing on a seemingly endless fund of graveyard jokes and supplying her fellow labourers in the corridor with Christmas cake and brandy snaps.
Appointments to the new authorities were now being made more rapidly with the result that thieving had started. Government reports. Development Plans, and copies of Education Acts mysteriously disappeared; people who possessed anything likely to be of value in their new work now locked desks and cupboards whenever they went out of the room. ‘In times of trouble people show what they are really made of,’ Phoebe said. She seemed well-satisfied, obviously finding the sins of her fellows easier to live with than their virtues.
