Only The Ruthless Can Play

by John Burke

The absurdity of her question hit her as she swayed against his shoulder. If Western had known anything, David would have been keen to keep him alive.

  And when she had thought that, she realised that she was half assuming that David’s story was true. If Western had known anything … Known what? What was there to know? A resentful accusation dreamed up by a sad widow, fed into her son’s mind — and David had been convincing enough to make her wonder what Western knew and what Partridge had done.

  She said: ‘You can’t believe it, surely? You can’t think there’s anything in it — stealing an idea, committing murder, setting a highly-placed spy on you?’

  ‘Yes. I do believe it. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘But … ’

  She thought of the men she had known in the Company. She thought of the Partridges and the Dampiers, the men from overseas and the drab little schemers in London office. With a jolt she thought of Andrew.

  She knew that David could be right. They were capable of deceit. They were capable of the slow sapping of a man’s power and of his self-respect. There was no reason why they should not be capable of murder. If murder became necessary they would find excuses to justify it to themselves, just as they justified other things by the circulation of interminable memoranda written in agonisingly constipated prose.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘what can you hope to do?’

  ‘To expose the truth. Someone will give himself away sooner or later.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Yes. It all started here in Belby. Someone here will drop a remark, or get frightened and blurt out a wrong date or a wrong fact or … or something. And then I’ll know.’

  ‘But even then, what do you do about it?’

  ‘If I can show everyone the truth, they’ll believe it,’ said David simply.

  ‘The truth,’ Jessica echoed. ‘But there’s more to it than that. It takes a lot of proving. Just exposing it — just saying “Look, there it is” … that’s not enough.’

  ‘But it must be.’

  She put her hand on his, hoping he would turn the palm towards her. He sat quite still.

  ‘“The truth is great and shall prevail”?’ said Jessica softly.

  ‘Yes.’ He was delighted that there should be such an apposite quotation.

  ‘You know the next line?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘“When none cares whether it prevail or not.”’

  ‘But I care,’ he said with quiet intensity. And now he turned his hand and gripped hers tightly. ‘Jessica, I want you to understand. I want you to know. You’ve got to believe me — you’ve got to be with me on this.’

  It meant such a lot to him. His conviction of rightness was communicated to her like an electrical charge through his fingertips. She felt like saying ‘Yes, yes’ and nodding and promising and at the same time she was sorry for him: it was so naive, so schoolboyishly pure and idealistic, his belief that to state the self-evident truth was enough for it to be accepted. The ways of the world were more devious than that. But she sensed that if she told him this he would say simply that they ought not to be; that the world itself must be altered.

  He was sure. Yet he needed her reassurance.

  She said: ‘But the idea that Partridge would put an important man like Western on the Course simply to spy on you — ’

  ‘It would have to be someone big, wouldn’t it? He couldn’t trust anyone lower down the scale — and in any case it would have been difficult to get anyone of lesser importance on to the Course. I’m willing to bet Western came on at the last minute, after it was known that the London office had put me on it. He did, didn’t he?’

  ‘Well … — ’

  ‘You know something about it,’ he said. ‘You know, don’t you, Jess?’

  What she knew, or thought she had known, was that Western had been watching Dampier. She had told Dampier this.

  ‘What is it?’ said David urgently.

  Western had been watching David Marsh, but they had thought he was watching Dampier. Western had exchanged rooms with Bill Crowther in the London hotel not to be next to Dampier, but to be next to David. It was David’s room he had investigated — deliberately, and not by mistake as she had thought at the time.

  It could be her fault that Western was dead. Dampier, believing himself to be under surveillance, could have pushed Western over that rail.

  Fantastic. But no more fantastic than David’s suspicions. No more fantastic than the whole grotesque game of the Executive Course itself. When nerves were stretched as though on a gruelling battle course, casualties were all too likely. When you were trained to play a dangerous game for high stakes you might well decide to take the ultimate gamble.

  ‘What is it?’ said David again.

  ‘I’m trying to sort it all out in my mind,’ she said weakly.

  He accepted this. His fingers slackened their grip. He was perhaps a little disappointed, as though he had been hoping that with a few phrases, a few neat revelations, she would have been able to solve all his doubts. He said: ‘You’ll keep a lookout for me, won’t you? You’re in the middle of it all. Someone’s bound to say something. Dampier. Or someone. And if anyone makes a slip, tell me. Tell me everything — and if there is a slip anywhere, I’ll recognise it.’ He gave her a diffident smile. ‘After all, I’ve been studying the subject for years!’

  Jessica realised suddenly how late it was. David ought not to be here in her room at this hour. Unless, she thought incongruously, he intended to stay the night. She looked markedly at her watch and said: ‘You really must be going. Or … ’ And she left the rest to him.

  David got up and looked solemnly down at her. With great deliberation he said:

  ‘I think I love you, Jessica.’

  She wanted to laugh. Then she wanted to cry. Then she just felt unutterably weary and wished he would go so that she could lie down and sleep.

  ‘When this business is over,’ he was saying, ‘we’ll have time to talk about it, won’t we? You want to talk about it, don’t you? You know what I’m trying to say.’

  Time to talk, she thought. So much talk. And David so scrupulous. He only thought he loved her. He was too meticulous to commit himself further than that. When this business was over … Would it ever be over? The months and years of Andrew, with Andrew promising and half promising things in the future. But the future never came. That was one thing she had learnt: the future would always be the future, darting away ahead of you, always just that little bit more than an arm’s length away so that you could never grasp it.

  So David thought he loved her and vaguely he thought they might talk about it when all this was over. And when all this was over there would be something else.

  Or would David be different? David at least had no wife to impede him — or to serve as an excuse for comfortable evasiveness.

  ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘You’d better go.’

  He kissed her and went.

  A passionless kiss. You can do better than that, she silently accused him after he had gone. Come back and try again. Then she forced herself to go quickly to bed before she should start to want him too much.

  And lying there wide awake, she grimly admitted that she was no better than the rest of them. It was no good accusing Andrew or David. The place and the people obsessed her, too. She wanted to know how the Course would turn out, what Partridge had done or not done in the past, what had happened to David Marsh’s father, and what had happened to Philip Western.

  Dampier had been very anxious to get rid of her that evening. Even at the time she had thought it was unusual that he should send her to see Schroeder instead of going himself. He had wanted her out of the way. What was it he had said? Something about seeing someone … or having something to do …

  She would not make a good witness in a court of law. The exact words escaped her. But she was left with a vivid recollection of Dampier’s manner and of his fidgety determination to send her off on that errand, to get r
id of her for a short time.

  During that short time Philip Western had died.

  Nine

  Dampier said: ‘During the last few days you have seen the technical background to our worldwide operations. We have tried to build up for you a clear picture of the whole Intersyn organisation. I hope you see how all the pieces fit together. The whole,’ he said lamely, ‘is the sum of the parts.’

  Andrew thought that Dampier was looking very pale. He spoke without his usual bland conviction. There were no jokes about the technical boys and no sly implications that he. Dampier, really held all the threads in his own hands.

  ‘At this stage,’ he went on, ‘we usually have a discussion on Forward Planning. As you will have realised during your visits to the various processes, it is no good simply turning out material in vast quantities. The fact that we can produce several million miles of synthetic fibre more cheaply than anyone else in Western Europe is of little significance if there is no demand for such fibre. You will have noted that a new plant is standing idle in one corner of the factory while an older and less efficient building is working to capacity. But the newer process will play its part again within a few months. There was a temporary recession for which our planners had not allowed. Now we have been able to estimate future needs and balance our programme accordingly.

  ‘Forward Planning is essential in all industry today. It is not enough to guess what the public will be needing two years from now: if you guess, and go in for a new scheme of building plant and offices, you are liable to find that you have concentrated on a product which is on its way to being obsolete. New techniques are being developed all the time. New demands are being made by industrially advanced countries and by the emergent nations. Intersyn has to be able to calculate far ahead what the demands will be and to adjust its supply. Just as it would be silly for an oil refinery to concentrate on building expensive distillation and cracking plant with the emphasis on producing more and more gasoline, only to find that the demand is for increased quantities of heavy fuel oil, so it could be disastrous for Intersyn to get over-enthusiastic about one particular product, however profitable it may seem at the moment, if there is likely to be a demand for something different a year from now. We have to plan ahead. We have to decide today, as accurately as possible, what plant and raw materials and staff we shall need six months, a year, two years from now.’

  Dampier stopped. In previous lectures he had often looked round the class at such a juncture, waiting for a question or smiling like an actor who hears applause, even if only in his own head. Now he seemed to falter. He had stopped because he had lost his way.

  Unexpectedly, he said: ‘Er, yes.’ It was an incantation, an appeal to the Muses to inspire him once more.

  Hornbrook helped him out. Suavely he asked: ‘You mentioned staff requirements. I think that would be of particular interest to all of us.’ He looked round and there was a general murmur of agreement. ‘Forecasting of staff distribution is a key point in management — it would be a great help to us … ’ Hornbrook let the sentence trail gently away so that Dampier could take it up.

  Gratefully Dampier responded to the cue. ‘Absolutely. For most of you, staff questions will loom much larger than the purely technical ones of material and flow adjustment. Though they are, of course, linked. When our Forward Planning Analysts predict output requirements for the coming years, they also feed staff data into the computers. It must seem strange to some employees that Intersyn often declares certain people redundant while at the same time advertising widely for new staff. But we have to be realistic about such matters. It may seem harsh to some … ’

  Andrew found himself feeling sorry for Dampier. It was quite pathetic. Although he was talking fluently enough now, Dampier lacked the strength that he had shown at the beginning of the Course. He was saying familiar words and conveying ideas that he must have put across a hundred times before; but there was an undertone of doubt, almost of reproach. He was in danger of becoming an agnostic. Andrew wondered what had happened to him: who had hit him, and where?

  ‘It had always been part of the Course at Belby,’ Dampier plodded on, ‘to show how these questions of demand and supply are assessed. In the last year, however, more and more of the calculations have been taken over by London. The installation of new computers last year has made a great difference to the whole sequence of operations, and on the whole we think you will get a clearer idea of the work if we shift that discussion period to London. We’ll spend our last day here showing what actually happens when the statistics come in from Head Office — how process programming is adjusted in a few specific instances — and then you can fit this all in with what we see when we get back to London.

  ‘And speaking of getting back to London, I have a little piece of news for you.’ Dampier made a gallant effort to revive his roguish manner. ‘In view of the curtailing of the programme here — and, to be frank, in view of the recent unpleasant occurrence which has distressed us all — we have decided to allow you all a little treat.’ He smirked graciously. When it came to passing on a decision from the authorities, Dampier was skilled in implying that some of the credit for the decision rested with him. ‘Instead of travelling down to London on Sunday and reporting straight to the hotel, you can leave late Friday afternoon and have a weekend at home. The Course will be resumed first thing on Monday morning, so it would be advisable for you to report to the hotel late on Sunday unless you can be sure of reaching the lecture room straight from home on Monday morning.’

  There was a gratifying surge of comment. Dampier nodded, his self-possession somewhat restored. Computers might work out as many impersonal schemes as they liked, planning for the intake of brash young science graduates and for the ditching of the old pioneers who had built Intersyn up to what it was today; but it was the Dampiers of the world who added the human touch, handling men firmly but knowing just how to donate half holidays and pats on the head.

  During the morning tea break there was a scramble for the two telephones provided for private use in the rest room.

  Dampier, drinking from a very large cup which he affected and of which there was an equivalent in London office, went on nodding benignly.

  ‘I think,’ he said to Ames, ‘we all need a day or two to readjust.’

  Ames was delighted to be singled out for the honour of this communication. He agreed. Fervently he agreed. It was very thoughtful … very sensible … excellent policy. Yes indeed. Time to readjust.

  Men telephoned their wives and said they would be home on Friday evening or in the small hours of Saturday. A couple made jokes about turfing the lodger out of bed — but not too loudly, in case this was not in the accepted tradition of Company jokes. Blackwell, whose wife had gone away with the children for a fortnight, made plans to stay with a cousin and see a show.

  Hornbrook said to Andrew: ‘It’s free now.’

  ‘Hm?’ Andrew had been staring out of the window at the impeccable brightness of the laboratory window frames across the courtyard.

  ‘The telephone,’ said Hornbrook. ‘There’s one free now if you want to ring home.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, thanks.’ Andrew moved towards it and then said, though there was no reason why he should make excuses to Hornbrook: ‘I think I’ll leave it till later. No great rush.’

  The next lecture was one of those dry, uninspiring ones to which they all listened with impassive faces. One man’s eyelids drooped and his head sagged gently forward from time to time. A sympathetic colleague nudged him each time just as his head was about to plump down on to the desk. Andrew stifled a succession of yawns. Dampier was sitting in on the lecture at the back of the room. If he knew his job, he would report that this lecturer was not up to the task and should be sent back into his department to get on with useful work in future. Some people could put across their subject with clarity and enthusiasm; some, good in their own field, were unable to explain even the simplest points. This chap was hopeless.

&nbs
p; At the end of the lecture Jessica came in with some notes for Dampier. They stood a few feet away from Andrew. He looked at her, willing her to return his gaze. Once she glanced at him and half smiled, but that was all He knew what he intended to do this coming weekend. But he must get to her before that young Marsh did.

  The sight of her angered him. She could be so elusive when she wished to be. And then, when you caught her and enjoyed her, she would become clinging and just as exasperating in a completely different way. He didn’t know why he wanted her. All he felt was that Marsh wasn’t going to have her. He was going to prove to her this weekend that she wasn’t meant for Marsh.

  He met her on the way to the Senior Mess in the lunch hour.

  ‘You heard about us going home for the weekend.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yes, of course, you would.’ He kept his smile pleasant and comradely so that if anyone passed there would be nothing to provoke comment. ‘I was thinking what a nice little gift it was.’

  ‘Were you?’ Jessica’s hazel eyes seemed not to blink. They appraised him dispassionately as though she were making herself see him for the first time.

  Andrew was suddenly afraid that she would say no. Already it might be too late. It became imperative that things should work out as he wanted them to. He had made a decision — the sort of decision she always wanted him to make, the sort she had hinted at before the Course began — and now she must fall in with it.

  He said: ‘Shall I come to the flat this weekend, Jess?’

  ‘Oh.’ It was no kind of answer — just a sigh.

  ‘It seems too good an opportunity to miss, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

  ‘It was the first thing I thought of when Dampier told us.’

  ‘Was it?’ she said wonderingly.

  ‘Damn it, Jess’ — he kept his voice down but now he saw her blink as she recognised the note of violence — ‘you were the one who said we ought to be able to organise something on the Course. And now here’s a splendid opportunity.’