Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  “Dr. Penrose understands that everything we say is confidential,” Wilcox said.

  “If it’s all right by you, Vic, it’s all right by me,” said Ted Stoker with a smile. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” He sat down and plonked two hands the size of hams on the surface of his desk as if to prove the point. He was a tall, heavily-built man with a face composed of pachydermatous folds and wrinkles from amongst which two small, pale and rheumy eyes looked out with lugubrious humour. “What can I do for you?”

  “You sent us a letter,” said Wilcox, taking a paper out of his briefcase.

  “Yes, we did.”

  “I think there was a typing error in it,” said Wilcox. “It says you’re looking for a reduction of five per cent on our prices for cylinder blocks.”

  Stoker looked at Robyn and grinned. “He’s a caution,” he said, jerking his head in Wilcox’s direction. “You’re a caution, Vic,” he repeated, turning back to Wilcox.

  “There’s no mistake?”

  “No mistake.”

  “Five per cent is ridiculous.”

  Stoker shrugged his massive shoulders. “If you can’t do it, there’s others who can.”

  “What others?”

  Stoker turned to Robyn again. “He knows I can’t tell him that,” he said, grinning with delight. “You know I can’t tell you that, Vic.”

  Robyn acknowledged Stoker’s asides with the thinnest of smiles. She didn’t relish the role of stooge, but she couldn’t quite see how to get out of it. Stoker was in control of this conversational game.

  “Is it a foreign firm?” Wilcox said.

  Stoker wagged his head slowly from side to side. “I can’t tell you that either.”

  “I could bite the bullet and come down by two per cent on the four-bore,” said Wilcox, after a pause.

  “You’re wasting your time, Vic.”

  “Two and a half.”

  Stoker shook his head.

  “We’ve been doing business together for a long time, Ted,” said Vic reproachfully.

  “It’s my duty to accept the lowest bid, you know that.” He winked at Robyn. “He knows that.”

  “The quality won’t be as good,” said Wilcox.

  “The quality is fine.”

  “You’re already sourcing from them, then?” Wilcox asked quickly.

  Stoker nodded, then looked as if he wished he hadn’t. “The quality is fine,” he repeated.

  “Whoever it is can’t be making any money out of it,” said Wilcox.

  “That’s their problem. I have my own.”

  “Business not so good, eh?”

  Ted Stoker addressed his answer to Robyn. “We sell a lot to the third world,” he said. “Irrigation pumps, mostly. The third world is broke. The banks won’t lend them any more money. Our Nigerian order book is down fifty per cent on last year.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Robyn.

  “It is,” said Ted Stoker. “We may have to go on to short time.”

  “I mean for the third world.”

  “Oh, the third world…” Stoker shrugged off the insoluble problems of the third world.

  Wilcox was busy with his calculator while this conversation was going on. “Three per cent,” he said, looking up. “That’s my last offer. I just can’t go any lower. Say yes to three per cent and I’ll tear your arm off.”

  “Sorry, Vic,” said Ted Stoker. “You’re still two per cent adrift of what I’m offered elsewhere.”

  When they were back in the car, Robyn said, “Why were you doing those calculations if you were already prepared to come down by three per cent?”

  “To fool him into thinking he’d pressured me into it, got himself a bargain. Not that it did fool him. He’s a shrewd old bugger, is Ted Stoker.”

  “He didn’t tell you who the other company were.”

  “I didn’t expect him to. I just wanted to see his expression when I asked him.”

  “And what did it tell you?”

  “He’s not bluffing. There really is somebody offering four or five per cent below our price. More important, they’re already supplying Rawlinson’s. That means I can find out who they are.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll get a couple of our reps to sit in a car outside Rawlinson’s and make a note of the name on every wagon that goes into the place. They can sit there all week if necessary. With a bit of luck we’ll be able to find out who’s delivering cylinder blocks and where from.”

  “Is it worth going to such lengths?” Robyn asked. “How much is this business actually worth?”

  Wilcox thought for a moment. “Not all that much,” he admitted. “But it’s the principle of the thing. I don’t like to be beaten,” he said, pressing the accelerator so that the Jaguar surged forward with a squeal of tyres. “If the mystery supplier turns out to be Foundrax, I’ll make Norman Cole rue the day.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll blast him. I’ll attack his other customers.”

  “You mean assault them?” said Robyn, shocked.

  Wilcox guffawed, the first full-blooded laugh she had heard from him. “What d’you think we are—the Mafia?”

  Robyn flushed. His melodramatic talk of setting men to spy on Rawlinson’s had misled her.

  “No, I mean attack ’em with low prices,” said Wilcox, “take his business away. Tit for tat, only our tit will be a lot more than his tat. He won’t know what hit him.”

  “I don’t see the point of all this jockeying and intriguing and undercutting,” said Robyn. “No sooner do you get an advantage in one place than you lose it in another.”

  “That’s business,” said Wilcox. “I always say it’s like a relay race. First you’re ahead, then you drop the baton and someone else takes the lead, then you catch up again. But there’s no finishing line. The race never ends.”

  “So who gains in the end?”

  “The consumer gains,” said Wilcox piously. “At the end of the day, somebody gets a cheaper pump.”

  “Why don’t you—all of you, you and Norman Cole and Ted Stoker—why don’t you put your heads together and make a cheaper pump instead of squabbling over a few per cent here or there?”

  “What would happen to competition?” said Wilcox. “You’ve got to have competition.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve just got to. How did you get to where you are?”

  “What?”

  “How did you become a university lecturer? By doing better than other people in exams, right?”

  “Actually, I’m opposed to competitive examinations,” said Robyn.

  “Yes, you would be,” said Wilcox. “Having done all right out of them, you can afford to be.”

  This observation made Robyn angry, but she could not think of a satisfactory reply. “I’ll tell you what it reminds me of, your precious competition,” she said. “A lot of little dogs squabbling over bones. Foundrax has stolen the Rawlinson’s bone from you, so while they’re chewing on that one you’re going to steal another bone from them.”

  “We don’t know it’s Foundrax, yet,” said Wilcox, ignoring the analogy. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” said Robyn. “Could I have Radio Three on?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” said Wilcox.

  The rest of the journey passed in silence.

  …

  On the following Monday morning, Rupert Sutcliffe put his head round Robyn’s door in the middle of a tutorial to say she was wanted on the telephone. As part of the economy drive, telephones capable of communicating with the outside world had been removed from the offices of all but the most senior members of the University, and consequently a good deal of expensive academic and secretarial time was wasted running up and down the corridor to and from the phone in the Department Office. Pamela, the Department Secretary, usually avoided interrupting a class, but apparently she wasn’t in the office when this call came through, and Sutcliffe, who was, had thought fit to fetch Robyn. “It
sounded important,” he said to her in the corridor. “Somebody’s secretary. I thought it might be your publisher.” But it wasn’t her publisher’s secretary who spoke when she picked up the phone. It was Shirley.

  “Mr. Wilcox for you,” she said. “I’m putting you through.”

  “It’s Foundrax,” Wilcox said, without any preliminaries. “I thought you’d like to know. Two of our reps sat in a car outside Rawlinson’s for two days and a night, nearly froze to death they said, but they got the name on every wagon that went in. The likeliest was a Midlands firm called GTG. My transport manager used to work for them, luckily, so he gave his old mates a buzz and soon found out what they were delivering to Rawlinson’s. Guess what? Four-bore cylinder blocks from Foundrax.”

  “Have you brought me to the phone just to tell me that?” Robyn enquired icily.

  “Don’t you have your own phone?”

  “No, I don’t. Furthermore, I was in the middle of a tutorial.”

  “Oh, sorry,” said Wilcox. “Why didn’t your secretary tell Shirley?”

  “I don’t have a personal secretary,” said Robyn. “We have one secretary between fifteen of us, and she isn’t in the office at the moment. She’s probably in the store-room steaming open letters so we can reuse the envelopes. Is there anything else you’d like to know, or can I go back to my tutorial now?”

  “No, that’s all,” said Wilcox. “I’ll see you on Wednesday, then.”

  “Goodbye,” said Robyn, and put the phone down. She turned to find that Philip Swallow had wandered into the office, holding a paper in his hand rather helplessly as if he were looking for Pamela.

  “Hallo, Robyn,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Cross,” she said. “That man Wilcox I’m supposed to be shadowing seems to think he owns me.”

  “Yes, it is depressing weather,” Swallow said, nodding. “How’s that shadow business going by the way? The VC was asking me only the other day.”

  “Well, it’s going.”

  “The VC is looking forward to your report. He takes a personal interest in the scheme.”

  “Perhaps he’ll take a personal interest in keeping me on, then,” said Robyn. She smiled as she said this, from which Swallow evidently inferred that she had made a joke.

  “Ha, ha, very good,” he said. “I must remember to tell him that.”

  “I hope you will,” said Robyn. “I must dash now, I’m in the middle of a tutorial.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Swallow. “Tutorial” was one of the words he still recognized without too much difficulty, perhaps because it had a lot of vowels in it.

  …

  When Robyn Penrose rang off, Vic Wilcox replaced the telephone receiver on its cradle slowly and deliberately, as if trying to convince some invisible observer that that was what he had intended to do. In fact, he prided himself on being a fast gun when it came to using the phone—quick to snatch up the instrument as soon as it rang, and the first to put it down when the conversation had served its purpose. He had a theory that this gave you a psychological advantage over a business adversary. Robyn Penrose wasn’t a business adversary, but he didn’t like the sensation of having been put in his place by her abrupt termination of his call. Somehow he had miscalculated, supposing that she would be as elated as himself at having solved the mystery of Rawlinson’s supplier. He had expected congratulations and had received instead a flea in his ear.

  He shook his head, as if he could physically dismiss these irritating thoughts, but they lingered, retarding his progress through the files on his desk. He tried to picture the context in which Robyn Penrose had received his call. Where was the telephone to which she had been called? How far had she walked to come to it? What would she have been doing in the tutorial? He could summon up only the vaguest images to answer these questions. Nevertheless, he began to develop some dim appreciation of why she might not have been overjoyed to receive his news. This did nothing to improve his humour. When Shirley brought him the fruits of that morning’s dictation to sign he complained about the layout of one of the letters and told her to do it again.

  “I always do quotations that way,” she said. “You never complained before.”

  “Well, I’m complaining now,” he said. “Just do it again, will you?”

  Shirley went off muttering about some people being impossible to please. Then Brian Everthorpe, who had been off sick the previous Thursday and Friday, came huffing and puffing into Vic’s office, having picked up a rumour about the Foundrax–Rawlinson’s affair. Vic briefly filled him in.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to see Ted Stoker?” he said. “I would have come with you.”

  “There wasn’t time. I fixed it up on the spur of the moment, straight after seeing Norman Cole. Did it all through Shirley on the car phone. You weren’t available,” he lied, though it was a safe lie, since Brian Everthorpe seldom was available when you wanted him.

  “Took your shadow with you, though, I hear,” said Everthorpe.

  “She happened to be with me at the time,” said Vic. “It was her day.”

  “Sounds more like it was yours,” said Everthorpe with a leer. “You’re a dark horse, Vic.”

  Vic ignored this remark. “Anyway, as you gathered, we found out that Norman Cole is undercutting us on cylinder blocks at Rawlinson’s by five per cent.”

  “How can he do it at that price?”

  “I don’t think he can for long.”

  “What are we going to do—go after him?”

  “No,” said Vic.

  “No?” Everthorpe’s bushy eyebrows shot up.

  “We’d make ourselves look weak, fighting with Foundrax for the Rawlinson account. Like little dogs squabbling over a bone. Not much meat on the Rawlinson bone, when you work it out. Let Norman Cole have it. Let him choke on it.”

  “You’re going to let him get away with poaching on our business?”

  “I’ll drop a hint that I know what his game is. That’ll worry him. I’ll let him twist in the wind a while.”

  “Looks to me like we’re twisting in the wind.”

  “Then I’ll hit him.”

  “With what?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Vic.”

  “I’ll let you know,” said Vic coldly. “Feeling better, are you?”

  “What?”

  “Weren’t you off sick last week?”

  “Oh, yes! That’s right.” Brian Everthorpe’s illness had evidently not engraved itself on his memory. “Touch of flu.”

  “I expect you’ve got a lot of work to catch up on, then.” Vic opened a file to signify that the interview was over.

  A little later he phoned Stuart Baxter and told him he wanted to let Brian Everthorpe go.

  “Why, Vic?”

  “He’s no good. He’s idle. He’s stuck in old grooves. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him.”

  “He’s been with the company a long time.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He won’t go without a fight.”

  “I’ll enjoy that.”

  “He’ll want a hefty golden handshake.”

  “It’ll be money well spent.”

  Stuart Baxter was silent for a moment. Vic heard the rasp and snick of a cigarette lighter at the other end of the line. Then Baxter said, “I think you should give Brian a chance to adjust.”

  “Adjust to what?”

  “To you, Vic, to you. It’s not easy for him. I suppose you know he had hopes of your job?”

  “I can’t think why,” said Vic.

  Stuart Baxter sighed. Vic imagined plumes of smoke jetting from his nostrils. “I’ll think about it,” he said at last. “Don’t do anything hasty, Vic.”

  For the second time that day Vic heard the click of a telephone receiver being put down before he was able to replace his own. He frowned at the instrument, wondering why Stuart Baxter was so protective towards Brian Everthorpe. Perhaps t
hey were both Masons. Vic himself wasn’t—he had been approached once, but couldn’t bring himself to go through all the mumbo-jumbo of initiation.

  Shirley came back into the office with the retyped letter. “Is that all right?” she said, with a surprisingly obsequious smile.

  “That’s fine,” he said, scanning the document.

  “I believe Brian mentioned to you his idea for a Pringle’s calendar,” she said, hovering at his shoulder.

  “Yes,” Vic said, “he did.”

  “He said you weren’t keen.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “It would be a great chance for Tracey,” said Shirley wistfully.

  “A great chance to degrade herself,” said Vic, handing her the letter.

  “What d’you mean?” said Shirley indignantly.

  “You really want pictures of your daughter in the altogether stuck up on walls for anybody to look at?”

  “I don’t see the harm… What about art galleries?”

  “Art galleries?”

  “They’re full of nudes. Old masters.”

  “That’s different.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “You don’t get blokes going into an art gallery and staring at a picture of Venus or whatever and nudging each other in the ribs saying, ‘I wouldn’t mind going through her on a Saturday night.’”

  “Ooh!” gasped Shirley, averting her face.

  “Or taking the picture home to wank off with,” Vic continued remorselessly.

  “I’m not listening,” Shirley said, retreating rapidly to her office. “I don’t know what’s got into you.”

  No more do I, Vic Wilcox thought to himself, feeling slightly ashamed of his outburst, as the door closed behind her. It was in fact several weeks before he realized that he was in love with Robyn Penrose.

  2

  The winter term at Rummidge was of ten weeks’ duration, like the autumn and summer terms, but seemed longer than the other two because of the cheerless season. The mornings were dark, dusk came early, and the sun seldom broke through the cloud cover in the brief interval of daylight. Electric lights burned all day in offices and lecture rooms. Outside, the air was cold and clammy, thick with moisture and pollution. It drained every colour and blurred every outline of the urban landscape. You could hardly see the face of the clock at the top of the University’s tower, and the very chimes sounded muffled and despondent. The atmosphere chilled the bones and congested the lungs. Some people attributed the characteristic adenoidal whine of the local dialect to the winter climate, which gave everybody runny noses and blocked sinuses for months on end and obliged them to go about with their mouths open like fish gasping for air. At this time of the year it was certainly hard to understand why human beings had ever settled and multiplied in such a cold, damp, grey place. Only work seemed to provide an answer. No other reason would make anyone come here, or having come, stay. All the more grim, therefore, was the fate of the unemployed of Rummidge and environs, condemned to be idle in a place where there was nothing much to do, except work.