by Iris Murdoch
Rainborough had been with SELIB now for more than a year and had not succeeded in getting used to it. In order to take up his present post as head of the Finance Department he had abandoned a safe and peaceful position in the Home Office, and had been regretting the change ever since. Surveying the scene which now confronted him, he felt somewhat of the emotions of a man catapulted from the security of the feudal system into a brisk expanding society where the doctrines of laissez-faire were just beginning to pay dividends to enterprising individuals. Rainborough was not an enterprising individual and had no intention of starting, at his time of life, upon the task of becoming self-made. He considered that the efforts which he had put into his education at school and at the university should be enough to carry him by their inertia, with only a small expenditure of further energy, through a reasonable career as a public servant, and even earn him in the end the title of a distinguished man.
Rainborough had left the Civil Service in a moment of divine discontent. Such moments were rare in his life, and the mood which inspired them was ephemeral. How ephemeral he now had ample time to realize as he looked with distaste upon his surroundings and wondered if he would ever have occasion in the future to put to use the self-knowledge which he had bought at so high a price. When Rainborough had started on his career as an administrator, being then a young Assistant Principal in the Treasury, one of his superior officers had remarked about him, ‘Young Rainborough produces highly intelligent and polished stuff — but somehow it’s always entirely useless.’ This saying was reported to Rainborough, who heard it without surprise and fell forthwith into a senile resignation from which he had never since recovered. This resignation had, in the course of the years, developed into a quiet melancholy, and it was in order to escape from this melancholy, which for a moment had seemed excessive, that Rainborough had so rashly leapt from the frying-pan into the fire.
As head of the Finance Department, Rainborough held what was potentially a key position in SELIB. This fact had been pointed out to him in a fatherly way, when he had joined the organization, by the Director, Sir Edward Guest, an elderly public servant who had been exhumed from retirement to decorate SELIB’s summit with his well-known name and his presumed experience. ‘As you’ll know from your time in the Treasury, my dear fellow,’ said Sir Edward, ‘the man who controls purse-strings controls policies. Financial matters are matters which admit of a wide interpretation, especially in a young organization such as this one. We shall be looking to you for a lead.’ Rainborough had harkened seriously to these words, and they had conjured up for him a vision of power, the sense of whose delicious temptations, absent for so long from his resigned spirit, he had almost forgotten.
But the vision faded soon. Rainborough very quickly realized that the situation presented by SELIB was one which was completely beyond him. There were times when he felt that SELIB had got so totally out of hand that it was beyond the power of any human being to control it. There were other times when he suspected that an administrator of genius might perhaps in time have reduced it to order. But he never wavered in his certainty that there was nothing whatever which he, Rainborough, could do about it. As he liked to point out to his colleagues, the realm represented by the Board resembled Renaissance Italy in its profusion of lively independent centres, while being unlike it in the quality of the results produced. Each department showed a vigorous sense of its own autonomy, which it often carried to the point of ignoring completely the existence of the other departments. The only power which was recognized by all was that of Establishments, whose beneficent activity was naturally a matter of general interest.
Sometimes in a mood of curiosity Rainborough would roam about the building. His arrival in distant departments passed unmarked and caused no uneasiness, since no one had the faintest idea who he was. He would wander along far-flung corridors, glancing into rooms where from behind trestle tables piled with dusty files came the merry laughter of girls and the clatter of tea-cups. Here and there, however, Rainborough would happen upon some earnest worker, some swot, mocked at by his companions, who was busy, surrounded by documents and works of reference, investigating the history of Polish agriculture or the incidence of unemployment in cities in Bavaria. The labour of these scholars was, however, rendered void by an entire lack of liaison between one department and another, which brought it about that while on the one hand much research was often devoted to the discovery of matters which, elsewhere in the office, were already well known, on the other hand, even when the assembled data would have been of some value to someone in SELIB, it rarely found its way to the right place.
All this Rainborough saw and deplored; and at times he dreamt of sweeping through the office like a cyclone and setting all to rights. But he knew in his heart that the task was beyond him. In any case, to achieve it he would have had first to conquer more power for himself; and the conquest of power in any form was something for which Rainborough knew himself to be unfitted. He looked back with nostalgia to the Civil Service, where an age-old hierarchy, ancient values, and hallowed modes of procedure reduced to a minimum the naked conflict of personalities. Concerning these things he would often discourse at length to the only other person in SELIB whom he took to be his equal, one G. D. F. Evans, a Cambridge man and also an erstwhile Civil Servant, who was head of the so-called ‘Social Services’ Department.
Rainborough had regarded Evans, to begin with, with a certain amount of suspicion. What he suspected was that Evans might in fact turn out to be what he himself ought to be, the power that would cleanse SELIB, making all things new. So Rainborough would devise all sorts of testing questions relating to their work, to which Evans would invariably return the satisfactory reply, ‘Got me there, old man! I’m afraid I haven’t done my prep on that one!’; or else Rainborough would come bounding unexpectedly into Evan’s room at all hours of the day, only to find him either absent or reading Proust. For some time this did not quite reassure him that Evans might not perhaps be working secretly; but in the end he decided that Evans was harmless, and was able to relax in the knowledge that no one in the office was being less idle than himself.
It was Evans who had first pointed out to Rainborough, on a long afternoon when they had been drinking tea together and surveying the office with the calm objectivity of historians, that a new social phenomenon had made its appearance. This was the rise to power of the grade of Organizing Officer. This grade, originally sparsely staffed, had been invented to give positions of some small dignity to various nondescript ‘experts’ who had been recruited by SELIB to give advice on problems ranging from publicity techniques in Balkan countries to the teaching of English by the direct method. Very soon, however, the grade had been invaded by an army of young women who, appointed initially as typists, had rapidly set about bettering themselves, and having once got a foothold in this new territory advanced with formidable speed, leaving behind a trail of repercussions and precedents of which their successors were not slow to take advantage. The key idea in this social change was the idea of the Personal Assistant; and the ambition of these young women, intoxicated by the absence of any insuperable barrier to their advance to higher levels of income and prestige, combined with the lethargy of their chiefs, who had no further possibilities of promotion for themselves, produced a real shift of power. It was rapidly becoming the case that these energetic young women were in fact the only people who understood the working of SELIB and really knew what was going on.
Prominent in this band of beautiful adventurers were Miss Perkins, the Personal Assistant of Evans, and Rainborough’s Miss Casement, who had recently received a further promotion to the position of Organizing Officer grade I. Evans was laughingly pointing out that these young women and their friends would soon be able to run the entire office themselves. ‘Then we can just stay at home and draw our salaries!’ said Evans. Rainborough, who found this cynicism in bad taste, was far from being amused at the social change to which Evans had drawn his attention
. He felt, in a way which he suspected to be a little absurd, if anything rather nervous at the thought of the pretensions of this group of young vigorous females whose lust for advancement recognized no ancient laws concerning the natural superiority of university graduates, members of the other sex, or persons seconded from administrative posts in the Civil Service. It was with something of a shock, too, that he had realized that the first and foremost of these harpies was his own Miss Casement. This, too, had been pointed out to him by Evans. ‘Your P.A. is the Queen Bee, you know,’ Evans had told him, with a note of envy in his voice.
It was in fact some time before this that Rainborough had started to pay attention to Miss Casement. He had been struck first by her extraordinary industry. She was to be found at all hours of the day employing her spare time, which was considerable, in reading through the entire files of the Finance Department. These files were confused and voluminous, consisting partly of papers which SELIB had taken over on its creation from other international voluntary organizations. Over these complicated documents Miss Casement pored for long hours, taking notes. She called this ‘familiarizing herself with the background’. Rainborough admired her thoroughness. He had intended, on his appointment, to do precisely this himself; but the files of the SELIB Finance Department presented such a horrible contrast to the orderly and intelligent files of the Home Office that he had become discouraged and decided it was not worth the trouble.
Also, Miss Casement was pretty. So, in point of fact, were most of the other O.O.s. But there was little doubt that Miss Casement was the prettiest. Rainborough pointed this out to Evans with some pride. Miss Casement had a very highly finished complexion, a small mouth of the type much favoured in the early nineteenth century, and an abundance of dark hair which, laid out by her hairdresser in regions like an elaborate garden, managed, in spite of the variety of curls, rolls, fringes, and pinnacles into which it was extended, to remain always exquisitely tidy. Beneath this hair there was, at the back, an expanse of smooth, slightly lemon-coloured neck, which had of late been particularly engaging Rainborough’s interest, and, in front, the smile before mentioned which, although small in area for the reason given, was in intensity and brightness a considerable event. Miss Casement’s eyes were not her best feature, being inclined to narrowness, but her eyelashes, whether endowed by nature or contrived by art Rainborough could never decide, were long and sweeping; and out of this alluring boskage Miss Casement’s gaze, when not directed to her typewriter or to the departmental files, now tended more and more to rest upon Rainborough.
It was through Miss Casement that Rainborough began gradually to be aware of an entirely new range and type of feminine charms. He noticed, for instance, that when she sat down, Miss Casement hitched her skirt up so that the whole of her legs from the silken knees downward were plainly visible, together with an inkling of underclothes. This gesture, which Rainborough had imagined was affected only by film stars when being photographed for the evening papers, infuriated and delighted him. He then observed that it was in daily use by all the girls in the office. So it was that Rainborough, who had been used, when he admired a woman, to confine his attention to her head, her conversation and the simpler bodily curves, started to become a connoisseur in such matters as perfume, lipstick, shoes, stockings, bracelets, ear-rings, and nail varnish; and always it would happen in this way, that Rainborough would be struck by some new and delightful aspect of his junior, and would then find the same note repeated, like a fading tinkling echo, through the whole office, until gradually, in his imagination, SELIB became peopled by a host of women, terrible and desirable by reason of their artificiality.
When it had occurred to Rainborough that he was interested in Miss Casement, he had decided to find out something about her and had sent to Establishments to ask to see her personal file. This request had been refused by Establishments, who seemed to regard it as in rather bad taste. The qualifications and past histories of officers of SELIB were, in the view of Establishments, sacred and mystical secrets which were not to be divulged to any but members of their own priestly caste. This discretion, which was an obvious corollary of the unsettled social hierarchy of SELIB, was respected by Rainborough, whose sense of historical necessity was strong. He therefore had to have recourse to other methods. He had begun by asking Miss Casement a few direct questions; but these had been badly received. He asked her once about her education, to which she replied shortly that she had ‘attended college’: a phrase which Rainborough found repellent and which filled him with suspicion. Because of certain peculiarities in Miss Casement’s vocabulary, Rainborough was certain that she had once been in the Civil Service, but although she admitted to having worked ‘in connexion with the Ministry of Labour’, he was unable to discover what her tasks had been. However, he soon abandoned these more abstruse researches and began to concentrate on simpler matters, such as discovering her Christian name.
This had proved surprisingly difficult. When Miss Casement had occasion to sign any document for him, she did so with an indescipherable scrawl of initials. It was only when, driven to desperation, he had looked in her handbag just before she was due to go on her summer holiday, that he had discovered from her passport that her name was Agnes May Casement. This discovery but drove Rainborough into a deeper frenzy. Which of these lovely sounds was the one to which Miss Casement most commonly answered? Every day at eleven and at four there occurred meetings of the O.O.s, called respectively the coffee-meeting and the tea-meeting, and presided over by Miss Casement and Miss Perkins, where ‘the cuties’, as Evans called them, gathered together to discuss matters of office procedure and feminine interest. Rainborough tried once or twice, by listening at the door of these gatherings, to find out what he wanted to know; but so far as he could find out by this method, which he abandoned when he was surprised by a latecomer in a listening attitude, the young women without exception addressed each other as ‘Miss So-and-so’. This discovery increased his awe of them considerably.
It was in the end the office messenger Stogdon who revealed to Rainborough that Miss Casement was most properly addressed as ‘Agnes’. This revelation occurred when Rainborough once surprised Stogdon chatting with Miss Casement and addressing her in this way: a degree of familiarity which, it soon appeared, he had achieved with all the young women in a remarkably short time. They in turn doted on him and called him ‘Stoggers’. This man was a continual source of pain to Rainborough, whom he treated with a sort of hideous friendliness and complicity. ‘Them young ones, they’re real smarties,’ he would exclaim, concerning the O.O.s, and something in his manner would associate Rainborough with himself as belonging among ‘the old ones’. ‘They’ll make things hum before they’re much older!’ Stogdon would say, with a leer which Rainborough interpreted as a threat to himself. Stogdon’s evident assumption that most decisions in the office were now taken by Miss Casement and her friends maddened Rainborough the more as there was some slight element of truth in it. ‘Sir Edward Guest is the director of the Board,’ he once said coldly to Stogdon, ‘not Miss Casement.’ But Stogdon had only replied by winking, as if to say, ’You and I, we know better!’ On another occasion Stogdon said to Rainborough with a sigh, ‘Ah, them young girls, they got all their lives before them. What it is to have your life before you, eh?’ This ‘eh’ with which Stogdon ended so many of his sentences enraged Rainborough as much as the sentiment expressed. He wanted to point out that he too had his life before him, and such as they were, his prospects were certainly brighter than Stogdon’s. The man doesn’t realize who I am, Rainborough thought, with the desperation of one who knows that he is confronted with a nature against which he has no way of asserting himself. He was without the means to impress Stogdon. And then the thought, with all its melancholy, would follow: Well, who am I, anyway?
During the earlier stages of what Rainborough and Evans called her ‘campaign’ Miss Casement had quietly continued to perform her duties as a typist, which took up in fa
ct remarkably little time, in the intervals of her other activities. Later on, however, as she took over more and more of Rainborough’s work, and as she passed from the stage of accompanying him to conferences to the stage of representing him at conferences, she began to be restive. At last she said firmly, ‘We must have a typist.’
‘I thought we had one!’ said Rainborough, who was in a bad temper that day.
Miss Casement ignored this, and said, ‘We only have to ask Establishments.’ This kindly body was indeed ready to provide staff of any description in response to a department’s lightest wish.
‘Well, you fix it,’ said Rainborough, and went away for the week-end.
When he returned he found that the office had been rearranged. Previously he had occupied the larger room, which gave on to the corridor, while Miss Casement occupied a smaller inner room which gave only on to his room. He now found that his desk had been moved into the inner room, while Miss Casement and the typist were installed in the other one.
‘I thought you’d probably rather have the single room,’ Miss Casement explained vaguely. Rainborough had made no comment; in a way, the arrangement suited him quite well, and he was able to lead an even more peaceful existence. Most of the business which found its way towards him through the door from the corridor came no farther than Miss Casement.
The typist attracted Rainborough’s interest for a short while. He suspected that Miss Casement had not in fact acquired the girl from Establishments, but had selected her privately herself. From one or two things that were said, Rainborough thought it possible that the typist had been at school with Miss Casement, but in a lower form. The girl was, in any case, Miss Casement’s slave. She was a dowdy, fluffy girl, off whom pieces continually fell as off a moulting bird; and Miss Casement, who had, Rainborough suspected, chosen her carefully for just these qualities, proceeded to make her life a misery. This process was so painful to hear that Rainborough often had to shut the door so as not to hear it. The girl, whom Miss Casement always referred to, and Rainborough soon found himself following her example, as ‘the little typist’, was very often to be found in tears.
