31st Of February (21 page)

5

Molly O’Rourke, wearing a bottle-green coat and skirt with a grey blouse and a red tie, stood outside the door of her room. She caught hold of Anderson by the sleeve and said “Hey.” He looked at his watch. “Ten minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to see VV.” They went in the room. She shut the door and stood against it, staring at him. “Men,” she said, “aren’t they all the bloody same! You give them all you’ve got; they take it without saying thank you, and leave without saying good-bye.”

“What?”

“I’m not a floozie, Andy, you know that. They all think I’m hard-boiled, but I’m not a floozie, though God knows I’ve been unlucky in my men. You’ve no right to treat me this way, Andy.” A tear dropped off her cheek and splashed to the coloured chart on her desk. A little yellow ran where the tear had dropped. “I gave myself to you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Molly.”

“All right.” She sniffed and stopped crying. A tear hung like an icicle on the end of her long white nose and then dropped, emasculating a little blot of red on the chart. “This kind of thing’s no good, is it? not what men go for at all – I know that. Aren’t you going to see me again, Andy?”

“What am I doing now?”

“Oh, you know what I mean. What about tonight? Busy, I suppose? And tomorrow night, and the night after tomorrow? I’m a fool to ask, I know that. Don’t bother to lie to me. And a fool to buy you a present. You haven’t even noticed it.”

“What present?”

“A bloody little desk calendar.”

“Desk calendar.” He began to laugh, but the laughter came out in choking hiccoughs.

“Stinking little chromium thing. Saw you’d got rid of your other one. I put it on your desk this morning. What’s funny about it?”

“You put it on the desk.” Anderson went on laughing until he remembered. “What about the date? What date did you put on it?”

“Why the right bloody date of course, today’s date, the twenty-eighth of February.”

“You’re sure of that? You’re sure you didn’t have a little joke?” He took hold of her arm. “Didn’t you have a little joke with me and put the date of the calendar at the thirty-first of February?”

“The thirty-first of February?” She glared at him in astonishment. “Why, there’s no such date.”

VV sat tapping his desk with a paper knife. His look was friendly but reserved and a little sad. His magnetism was flowing at only about a quarter strength. “You wanted to see me, Andy.’

Anderson explained about Kiddy Modes. As he explained and showed VV the letter terminating the contract he felt the absurdity of his own words. A year ago, a month ago, what he was saying would have made sense; today it was merely ridiculous. And what was ridiculous, he vaguely realized, was not simply agitation about losing Kiddy Modes’ account, but the whole social structure propped up by advertising campaigns and board meetings. This, he wanted to say to the sad gnome who sat opposite him tapping rhythmically at the desk, this is not reality as I know it, obscene and raw. Reality, Anderson wanted to say, is what I have experienced in the last few days and am enduring now; reality is the cellar stairs, the hidden diary, the changing expressions on a policeman’s face, the life torn in ribbons. Reality is the fourteen-year-old red-haired seducer slipping into her stepfather’s arms, the disastrous disgust with the world and herself in Mrs Vincent’s thin face. And if that vivid recollection of VV, his face red with suppressed desire, was true, the figure opposite him now who held the power of rebuke or praise, was a preposterous mask if the disordered flat, the open drawer, the stolen diary, were real. This solemn recitation of the significant must be a dream. Now, indeed, he saw with all the minuteness of a dream the yellow pattern on the green curtains that hung before the window, the hairs sprouting richly from VV’s nose and ears.

He stopped talking; and, like an actor taking up his cue, VV began. What was he saying? Anderson knew that the words must be important. He tried hard to listen, and even to make apposite replies; but he was all the time aware that what was said and done here could have no effect upon a fate already decided, though still imperfectly known. Snatches of speech came through to him.
Last night,
he heard,
last night –
what did that mean? – and
unfortunate incident –
could that refer to the burglary of his flat? But of course – the realization was delayed, but emerged finally – VV was saying that he had meant to discuss Anderson’s position last night, but hadn’t done so because of the trouble at dinner.
Holiday –
well
,
that was plain enough.

“I don’t feel inclined to take a holiday,” Anderson said firmly. He added, with a feeling of rich absurdity: “I have a job of work to do here.” He pointed to his face. “Hey Presto!” A joke! But his face felt as though it might crack if he bent it in a smile, and VV’s resigned sadness did not change. His expression became, if possible, more serious and he picked up the telephone and spoke inaudible words. They sat staring at each other. Supposing, Anderson thought, that I said: “Let us talk about something important. Tell me, did you sleep with your stepdaughter last night?” Would that open for both of us the floodgates of confession, should we be able at last to speak honestly with each other, to meet face to naked face? But he knew that the alien words would never be permitted to come through in true simplicity by the censor operating in VV’s mind, that they would emerge as something quite different from what was intended, as an insult or an attempt at blackmail. And would they not, after all, be that in a sense?

Two figures had crept into the room. How had they done so without Anderson’s knowledge? Creeping up behind my back, he thought indignantly; and it was literally true that anybody who entered the room must have done so behind his back, because the chair in which he sat had its back to the door. But it was a dirty trick that these two grotesques, made in the shapes of Reverton and Pile, should have sneaked in on tiptoe as they must have done. Now they sat, solemn as statesmen pondering the fate of Empire in an old
Punch
cartoon, sadder even than VV, mutes at a funeral. But at least their lips were not sealed. The mouths of these Charlie McCarthy characters opened and shut.
Holiday, holiday,
Anderson heard. Surely he had made his position clear? He leaned forward and said again, very slowly: “I don’t want to take a holiday.”

The dummies shrugged, inimitably lifelike. VV made a long speech. VV was an intelligent man, a man who could tell a Dover sole from a packet of crisps. Perhaps he would tell the dummies about his stepdaughter? But he talked instead about Kiddy Modes. Anderson shut off, as it were, the power current necessary to make connection with the words, and stared at the complicated whorls of smoke rising from Reverton’s pipe. While VV talked, the faces of the marionettes grew sadder and sadder.
Makes no difference,
VV said. Anderson could not forbear a smile, for they were echoing, a good while afterward, his own thought. It made no difference, absolutely none, whether they lost this account or all of their accounts. Was that not what was meant? Perhaps not, for a moment later, without intending to eavesdrop, he heard another connected phrase: “Extended leave on half-pay.” And then – it brought, almost, tears to his eyes – “Sympathy.” Ah, sympathy! What errors, casual injustices, deliberate villainies, are covered by thy name!

Now VV had finished speaking, and one of the marionettes would no doubt begin. But instead they waited for him, they deferred to him almost, they seemed to seek his opinion on the nonsense VV had been talking. He felt inclined to let them have it, to pepper these three stuffed or mechanical figures from the unworld of dream with a few rounds from the pop-gun of his private knowledge.
Pile, old boy, what’s your sex classification in Melian Street? VV, whose room did you sleep in last night? Who have you laid the finger on now for a ludicrous spot of emotional blackmail, Rev, do tell.
Or something simpler, something friendly, a piece of personal exhibitionism which might provoke the desired Buchmanite reaction.
Gentlemen – half-magnetizing, half-baked genius of the half world – here it is, what you’ve been waiting for, the unadmitted revelations of my whole inner life. Listen, and you shall hear.

There were the words, shiningly visible. Had they, in fact, been uttered. Looking round foxily at the three faces set in their stiff masks of regret, Anderson decided that they had not. It was better perhaps that they should stay unuttered in the presence of these dummies. Sinking back into the comfortable chair provided for him the prisoner at the bar smiled, waved a hand, refused to plead. His judges pronounced sentence. Anderson, now physically and emotionally limp, lounging in his chair almost with insulting ease, felt the immediate slackening of tension as he abandoned momentarily the world of reality. The sound track came back; and like a corpse miraculously granted the power of hearing, he listened to the elegies read at his graveside.

It was not, said good old Rev, removing his pipe from his mouth as a token of respect for the dead, it was not, Lord knew, that any of them wanted to lose old Andy. The copy lads who worked with him had always liked Andy, the production boys liked Andy, the Studio liked Andy, and – last and no doubt least important – the Board liked Andy. He had been a grand team man, consecutive, keen, tireless, a man who was on the job twenty-four hours a day. And Rev spoke with very special feeling, he said, about the question of team spirit, because he had been one of the boys himself not so long ago. He knew the difference between working with an awkward and with a decent copy chief. He would like to say about Andy that Andy had always played the game with everybody. But for the last few months, Rev was bound to say, Andy’s work hadn’t been what it was. It had been efficient all right – Andy was never less than efficient – but it had somehow lacked the spark. He wouldn’t enumerate all the little points he’d checked up on and worried about, Rev said, but Andy would remember them. He’d tried to take some of the work off Andy’s shoulders, but there it was – the dear chap was just a glutton for work, and was just the least bit huffy if you suggested he might be overdoing it. And then less than a month ago old Andy had taken just about the hardest knock a man could take. Since then his work – Rev pursed his lips, looked down at his pipe, shook a sad head – it was better to draw a veil. He’d just like to say, though, how pleased he was that Andy was being given this period of six months off duty. Beyond that time, of course, they couldn’t say anything, on either side. If he felt like coming back afterward, Rev would be the first to welcome a good fellow, and a great team man, back into the organization.

And now Pile, that hard-eyed, dry little old man, L E G Pile, cast his handful of earth upon the grave, addressing himself as he did so to the virtues of that conspicuously English institution, family life. Who would have supposed that the old man had so much sentiment in him? For his voice quavered, or at least, Anderson thought with too much flippancy, semi-quavered, as he told what his own family had meant to him, bustling Mrs Pile and the four little Piles, four little kiddies to have their napkins changed, their mouths filled, their clothes put on (more and more clothes put on, larger and larger meals eaten), their school fees paid – the two others fidgeted, but Anderson listened with the closest attention as old dry Mr Pile told how the institution of the family had helped to preserve him from fornication, drunkenness and extravagance. Anderson, said Mr Pile, had not been granted, alas, the blessing of a family. Might he be forgiven for discovering in the absence of the infant’s cry the lack of that inspiring, energizing influence that alone could bring a man unharmed through the valley of the shadow of death. (Who would have thought the old man had so much poetry in him?) They had seen and known this friend of theirs for years, they had valued Anderson’s advice and respected – nay, in his own case, been dazzled by – his intellect. His departure from them, unavoidable as it was by the keen standards of business ethics and efficiency to which Anderson would be the first to adhere, was nevertheless a tragedy. Might he be forgiven for saying, as he wished Anderson God-speed and good luck, that it was a family tragedy?

A family tragedy? Anderson saw the long pants, the thin ruffled hair, the goatish expression changing to one of annoyance. Aren’t all tragedies family tragedies? he heard himself asking. But these words, like the others, remained unspoken.

With the corpse now firmly underground, VV judged it safe to attempt a little act of resuscitation – nothing spectacular, nothing serious, a mere gesture to placate whatever gods may be, gods who think that full justice had not been done to Anderson. This was not to be looked on, VV then cried with a ghastly joviality not meant to convince, this was not to be looked on as a parting. Pull not those long faces. Say au revoir but not good-bye. Andy did not want a holiday – very well, then, he need not take a holiday. Let him take a rest cure, go to some little place where he would be well looked after. Let him return in six months’ time a new man, a well man, not disturbed any more by these terrible calendars that changed their dates (oh yes, VV injected parenthetically,
that
story is all round the firm and we can’t ignore such things, my boy.) Let him come back to us then and – VV added with a self-conscious drop from grand to commonplace – we shall be pleased to have a chat.

There was silence. The judge-executioners had done their work, and now they stared at him. Anderson returned their looks with a suitably dead gaze. Quietly, conscious of irreverence, Reverton coughed, and VV was startled into action. The question then arose, he said, of Andy’s – we are bound to use the word – successor. We thought at one time of promoting young Lessing—

Good old Rev took his pipe out of his mouth to say: But you told me yourself yesterday that people didn’t get on with him.

And we felt, pronounced Pile, that while excellent at his present work, he might be weighed down by the position of too much responsibility. But we have been fortunate enough to find a really excellent executive type—