by Lodge, David
“Wait till you see her.”
“Marjorie?”
“No, your shadow. Your shadow’s a bird, Vic!”
Shirley gave a little squeak of surprise and excitement. Vic stared speechlessly as Brian Everthorpe elaborated.
“A very dishy redhead. I prefer bigger boobs, myself, but you can’t have everything.” He winked at Shirley.
“Robin!” said Shirley. “It can be a girl’s name, can’t it? Though they spell it different. With a ‘y’ sort of thing.”
“In the letter it was ‘Robin’ with an ‘i,’” said Vic.
“An easy mistake,” said Brian Everthorpe.
“Stuart Baxter said nothing about a woman,” said Vic.
“I’ll bring her in. Seeing’s believing.”
“Let me find that letter first,” said Vic, riffling blindly through the papers in his Pending-tray, playing for time. He felt anger surging through his veins and arteries. A lecturer in English Literature was bad enough, but a woman lecturer in English Literature! It was a ludicrous mistake, or else a calculated insult, he wasn’t sure which, to send such a person to shadow him. He wanted to rage and swear, to shout down the telephone and fire off angry memoranda. But something in Brian Everthorpe’s demeanour restrained him.
“How old is she sort of thing?” Shirley asked Brian Everthorpe.
“I dunno. Young. In her thirties, I’d say. Shall I bring her in?”
“Go and find that letter, first,” Vic said to Shirley. She went into her office, followed, to his relief, by Brian Everthorpe. Everthorpe was getting a lot of mileage out of the mix-up, trying to make him look foolish. Vic could imagine him spreading the story all round the works. “You should have seen his face when I told him! I couldn’t help laughing. Then he went spare. Shirley had to cover her ears…” No, better to limit the damage, control his anger, make nothing of it, pretend he didn’t mind.
He rose from his desk and went through the anteroom into Shirley’s office. High up on one wall were some glazed panels. They were painted over, but someone had scraped away a small area of paint, exposing the clear glass. Shirley was peering through this spyhole, balanced precariously on top of a filing cabinet, steadied by the hand of Brian Everthorpe on her haunch. “Hmm, not a bad-looking wench,” she was saying. “If you like that type.”
“You’re just jealous, Shirley,” said Brian Everthorpe.
“Me, jealous? Don’t be daft. I like her boots, mind.”
“What in God’s name are you doing up there?” Vic said.
Brian Everthorpe and Shirley turned and looked at him.
“A little dodge of your predecessor,” said Brian Everthorpe. “He liked to look over his visitors before a meeting. Reckoned it gave him a psychological advantage.” He removed his hand from Shirley’s rump, and assisted her to the ground.
“I couldn’t find that letter,” she said.
“You mean you can see into reception from there?” said Vic.
“Have a dekko,” said Brian Everthorpe.
Vic hesitated, then sprang onto the filing cabinet. He applied his eye to the hole in the paint and gazed, as if through a telescope already fixed and focused, at the young woman seated on the far side of the lobby. She had copper-coloured hair, cut short as a boy’s at the back, with a mop of curls tilted jauntily forward at the front. She sat at her ease on the sofa, with her long, booted and pantalooned legs crossed at the ankles, but the expression on her face was bored and haughty. “I’ve seen her before,” he said.
“Oh, where?” said Shirley.
“I don’t know.” She was like a figure in a dream that he could not quite recall. He stared at the topknot of red-gold curls, straining to remember. Then she yawned suddenly, like a cat, revealing two rows of white, even teeth, before she covered her mouth. She lifted her head as she did this, and seemed to look straight at him. Embarrassed, feeling too like a Peeping Tom for comfort, he scrambled to the floor.
“Let’s stop playing silly buggers,” he said, striding back into his office. “Show the woman in.”
…
Brian Everthorpe threw open the door of Vic Wilcox’s office and motioned Robyn across the threshold with a flourish. “Doctor Penrose,” he announced, with a smirk.
The man who rose from behind a large polished desk on the far side of the room, and came forward to shake Robyn’s hand, was smaller and more ordinary-looking than she had expected. The term “Managing Director” had suggested to her imagination some figure more grand and gross, with plump, flushed cheeks and wings of silver hair, a rotund torso sheathed in expensively tailored suiting, a gold tiepin and cufflinks, and a cigar wedged between manicured fingers. This man was stocky and wiry, like a short-legged terrier, his face was pale and drawn, with two vertical worry-lines scored into the brow above the nose, and the hank of dark, flat hair that fell forward across his brow had clearly never had the attention of an expert barber. He was in shirtsleeves, and the shirt did not fit him very well, the buttoned cuffs hanging down over his wrists, like a schoolboy’s whose clothes had been purchased with a view to his “growing into” them. Robyn almost smiled with relief as she appraised his advancing figure—she already heard herself describing him to Charles or Penny as “a funny little man”—but the strength of his handshake, and the glint in his dark brown eyes, warned her not to underestimate him.
“Thanks, Brian,” he said to the hovering Everthorpe. “I expect you’ve got work to do.”
Everthorpe departed with obvious reluctance. “See you later, I hope,” he said unctuously to Robyn, as he closed the door.
“Like some coffee?” said Wilcox, taking her coat and hanging it on the back of the door.
Robyn said she would love some.
“Have a seat.” He indicated an upright armchair drawn up at an angle to his desk, to which he now returned. He flicked a switch on a console and said, “Two coffees, please, Shirley.” He thrust a cigarette pack in her direction. “Smoke?”
Robyn shook her head. He lit one himself, sat down and swivelled his chair to face her. “Haven’t we met before?” he said.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“I’ve a feeling I’ve seen you recently.”
“I can’t imagine where that would be.”
Wilcox continued to stare at her through a cloud of smoke. If it had been Everthorpe, she would have dismissed this performance as a clumsy pass, but Wilcox seemed teased by some genuine memory.
“I’m sorry I’m a bit late,” she said. “The roads were terrible, and I got lost.”
“You’re a week late,” he said. “I was expecting you last Wednesday.”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
“About halfway through the morning.”
“I hope I didn’t inconvenience you.”
“You did, as a matter of fact. I’d cancelled a meeting.”
He did not lighten this rebuke with a smile. Robyn felt herself growing warm with resentment of his rudeness, mingled with the consciousness that her own conduct had not been entirely blameless. Her original plan for the previous Wednesday had been to put in an hour or two of picket duty very early in the morning, and then go on to her appointment at Pringle’s. But on the picket line Bob Busby had pointed out to her that the Shadow Scheme was official University business and that she would be strike-breaking if she kept her appointment. Of course it was and of course she would! Stupida! She punched her head with her fist in self-reproach. She was inexperienced in the protocol of industrial action, but only too pleased to have an excuse to put off her visit to Pringle’s for a week.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Wilcox. “It was a bit chaotic at the University last Wednesday. We had a one-day strike on, you see. The switchboard wasn’t operating normally. It took me ages to phone.”
“That’s where I saw you!” he exclaimed, sitting up in his chair, and pointing a finger at her like a gun. “You were standing outside the University gates at about eight o’clock in the morning, last Wednesday.”
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br /> “Yes,” said Robyn. “I was.”
“I drive past there every day on my way to work,” he said. “I was held up there last Wednesday. Put two minutes on my journey time, it did. You were holding a banner.” He pronounced this last word as if it denoted something unpleasant.
“Yes, I was picketing.”
What fun it had been! Stopping cars and thrusting leaflets through the drivers’ windows, turning back lorries, waving banners for the benefit of local TV news cameras, cheering when a truck driver decided not to cross the picket line, thawing one’s fingers round a mug of thermos-flask coffee, sharing the warm glow of camaraderie with colleagues one had never met before. Robyn had not felt so exalted since the great women’s rally at Greenham Common.
“What were you striking about? Pay?”
“Partly. That and the cuts.”
“You want no cuts and more pay?”
“That’s right.”
“Think the country can afford it?”
“Certainly,” said Robyn. “If we spent less on defence—”
“This company has several defence contracts,” said Wilcox. “We make gearbox casings for Challenger tanks, and con-rods for Armoured Personnel Carriers. If those contracts were cancelled, I’d have to lay off men. Your cuts would become ours.”
“You could make something else,” said Robyn. “Something peaceful.”
“What?”
“I can’t say what you should make,” said Robyn irritably. “It’s not my business.”
“No, it’s mine,” said Wilcox.
At that moment his secretary came into the room with two cups of coffee, which she distributed in a pregnant silence, shooting curious, covert glances at each of them. When she had gone, Wilcox said, “Who were you trying to hurt?”
“Hurt?”
“A strike has to hurt someone. The employers, the public. Otherwise it has no effect.”
Robyn was about to say, “The Government,” when she saw the trap: Wilcox would find it easy enough to argue that the Government had not been troubled by the strike. Nor, as Philip Swallow had predicted, had the general public been greatly inconvenienced. The students’ Union had supported the strike, and its members had not complained about a day’s holiday from lectures. The University, then? But the University wasn’t responsible for the cuts or the erosion of lecturers’ salaries. Faster than a computer, Robyn’s mind reviewed these candidates for the target of the strike and rejected them all. “It was only a one-day strike,” she said at length. “More of a demonstration, really. We got a lot of support from other trade unions. Several lorry-drivers refused to cross the picket lines.”
“What were they doing—delivering stuff?”
“Yes.”
“I expect they came back the next day, or the next week?”
“I suppose so.”
“And who paid for the extra deliveries? I’ll tell you who,” he went on when she did not answer. “Your University—which you say is short of cash. It’s even shorter, now.”
“They docked our salaries,” said Robyn. “They can pay for the lorries out of that.”
Wilcox grunted as if acknowledging a debating point, from which she deduced that he was a bully and needed to be stood up to. She did not think it necessary to tell him that the University administration had been obliged to circulate all members of staff with a memorandum asking them, if they had been on strike, to volunteer the information (since there was no other way of finding out) so that their pay could be docked. It was rumoured that the number of staff who had responded was considerably smaller than the number of participants in the strike claimed by the AUT. “Do you have many strikes here?” she asked, in an effort to shift the focus of conversation.
“Not any more,” said Wilcox. “The employees know which side their bread is buttered. They look around this area, they see the factories that have closed in the past few years, they know how many people are out of work.”
“You mean, they’re afraid to strike?”
“Why should they strike?”
“I don’t know—but if they wanted to. For higher wages, say?”
“This is a very competitive industry. A strike would plunge us deep into the red. The division could close us down. The men know that.”
“The division?”
“The Engineering and Foundry Division of Midland Amalgamated. They own us.”
“I thought J. Pringle & Sons were the owners.”
Wilcox laughed, a gruff bark. “Oh, the Pringle family got out years ago. Took their money and ran, when the going was good. The company’s been bought and sold twice since then.” He took a brown manila folder from a drawer and passed it to her. “Here are some tree diagrams showing how we fit into the conglomerate, and the management structure of the company. D’you know much about business?”
“Nothing at all. But isn’t that supposed to be the point?”
“The point?”
“Of the Shadow Scheme.”
“I’m buggered if I know what the point is,” said Wilcox sourly. “It’s just a PR stunt, if you ask me. You teach English literature, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that? Shakespeare? Poetry?”
“Well, I do teach a first-year course that includes some—”
“We did Julius Caesar for O-Level,” Wilcox interjected. “Had to learn great chunks of it by heart. Hated it, I did. The master was a toffee-nosed southerner, used to take the pi—used to make fun of our accents.”
“My field is the nineteenth-century novel,” said Robyn. “And women’s studies.”
“Women’s studies?” Wilcox echoed with a frown. “What are they?”
“Oh, women’s writing. The representation of women in literature. Feminist critical theory.”
Wilcox sniffed. “You give degrees for that?”
“It’s one part of the course,” said Robyn stiffly. “It’s an option.”
“A soft one, if you ask me,” said Wilcox. “Still, I suppose it’s all right for girls.”
“Boys take it too,” said Robyn. “And the reading load is very heavy, as a matter of fact.”
“Boys?” Wilcox curled a lip. “Nancy boys?”
“Perfectly normal, decent, intelligent young men,” said Robyn, struggling to control her temper.
“Why aren’t they studying something useful, then?”
“Like mechanical engineering?”
“You said it.”
Robyn sighed. “Do I really have to tell you?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“Because they’re more interested in ideas, in feelings, than in the way machines work.”
“Won’t pay the rent, though, will they—ideas, feelings?”
“Is money the only criterion?”
“I don’t know a better one.”
“What about happiness?”
“Happiness?” Wilcox looked startled, caught off balance for the first time.
“Yes, I don’t earn much money, but I’m happy in my job. Or I would be, if I were sure of keeping it.”
“Why aren’t you?”
When Robyn explained her situation, Wilcox seemed more struck by her colleagues’ security than by her own vulnerability. “You mean, they’ve got jobs for life?” he said.
“Well, yes. But the Government wants to abolish tenure in the future.”
“I should think so.”
“But it’s essential!” Robyn exclaimed. “It’s the only guarantee of academic freedom. It’s one of the things we were demonstrating for last week.”
“Hang about,” said Wilcox. “You were demonstrating in support of the other lecturers’ right to a job for life?”
“Partly,” said Robyn.
“But if they can’t be shifted, there’ll never be room for you, no matter how much better than them you may be at the job.”
This thought had crossed Robyn’s mind before, but she had suppressed it as ignoble. “It’s the principle
of the thing,” she said. “Besides, if it wasn’t for the cuts, I’d have had a permanent job by now. We should be taking more students, not fewer.”
“You think the universities should expand indefinitely?”
“Not indefinitely, but—”
“Enough to accommodate all those who want to do women’s studies?”
“If you like to put it that way, yes,” said Robyn defiantly.
“Who pays?”
“You keep bringing everything back to money.”
“That’s what you learn from business. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Who said that?”
Robyn shrugged. “I don’t know. Some right-wing economist, I suppose.”
“Had his head screwed on, whoever he was. I read it in the paper somewhere. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” He gave his gruff bark of a laugh. “Someone always has to pick up the bill.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, I suppose I’d better show you round the estate. Just give me a few minutes, will you?” He stood up, seized his jacket and thrust his arms into the sleeves.
“Aren’t I supposed to follow you everywhere?” said Robyn, rising to her feet.
“I don’t think you can follow me where I’m going,” said Wilcox.
“Oh,” said Robyn, colouring. Then, recovering her poise, she said, “Perhaps you would direct me to the Ladies.”
“I’ll get Shirley to show you,” said Wilcox. “Meet me back here in five minutes.”
…
Jesus wept! Not just a lecturer in English literature, not just a woman lecturer in English literature, but a trendy lefty feminist lecturer in English literature! A tall trendy leftist feminist lecturer in English literature! Vic Wilcox scuttled into the Directors’ Lavatory as if into a place of sanctuary. It was a large, dank, chilly room, empty at this moment, which had been lavishly appointed, in more prosperous times, with marble washbasins and brass taps, but was now badly in need of redecoration. He stood at the urinal and peed fiercely at the white ceramic wall, streaked with rusty tear-stains from the corroding pipes. What the hell was he going to do with this woman every Wednesday for the next two months? Stuart Baxter must be off his trolley, sending someone like that. Or was it a plot?
It was strange, strange and ominous, that he had seen her before, outside the University last week. Her hair, glowing like a brazier through the early-morning mist, her high boots and her cream-coloured quilted jacket with its exaggerated shoulders, had drawn his gaze as he sat impatiently in a line of cars while the pickets argued with the driver of an articulated wagon that was trying to enter the University. She had been standing on the pavement, holding some silly banner—“Education Cuts Are Not Comic,” or something like that—talking and laughing excitedly with a big-bosomed woman stuffed into a scarlet ski-suit and pink moon boots, and he remembered thinking to himself: so it’s finally happened—designer industrial action. The two women, the copperhead in particular, had seemed to epitomise everything he most detested about such demonstrations—the appropriation of working-class politics by middle-class style. And now he was stuck with her for two months.
