To the North (18 page)

“It sounds odd to me,” said Miss Tripp.

“I’m afraid,” Emmeline suggested, “it may be the shorthand. Do you think perhaps we had better go through it again?”

“I suppose,” said Miss Tripp tartly, “they have secretaries in Malaga.”

“I suppose so: why?”

“I suppose a secretary in
Malaga
couldn’t make mistakes?”

“I’m afraid no hotel would send off such a silly letter— No, never mind, Miss Tripp; go on with what you were doing; I’ll just write down the translation myself.”

Miss Tripp, going scarlet, turned from Emmeline to the fireplace with a convulsive movement, as though she were about to dive up the chimney. “It seems,” she said, “I am not a success in this office: nothing I do is right.”

Emmeline felt for a moment they must be engaged in unholy theatricals: such things did not happen this side of the footlights. No one had struck this note in the office before. There sat Miss Tripp, trembling, in a vivid and not pleasing pink spotted frock that had no doubt last summer at Oxford seen happier days. No doubt she had punted in ‘it, making meanwhile clear-headed remarks to recumbent friends in a voice that, penetrating the hawthorns, rang down the curves of the Cher and across the meadows. No doubt she had then been esteemed and admired:
this
seemed too cruel. What had Emmeline done—delaying with Markie, leaving the office unsmiling to clients, Miss Tripp unattended and prey, as it now appeared, to these morbid reflections? Where had she been?— she dared not account for herself. Over her bright day Nemesis fell like an axe. She said faintly: “Do tell me what is the matter.”

Miss Tripp was quite ready for this. “The matter is,” she said in a calm, analytical voice, “simply, that I am human.”

Emmeline, utterly taken aback, stared at her secretary with a surprise that was most unfortunate. “Yes?” she said.

But Miss Tripp had paused to let this remarkable statement sink in. She was in perfect command of herself: the clock ticked on, evidently some more from Emmeline was expected. “But why not?” said Emmeline helpless.

“It does not affect you much.”

Emmeline wondered a moment if Miss Tripp had really no money besides their ten shillings, if she was starving.

“Though I daresay,” reflected Miss Tripp, “that if one died in one’s chair, or even just fainted, you
might
notice.”

“—I hope you’re not ill?”

“Oh dear no,” said Miss Tripp, smiling bitterly. “I find it hard to express my own point of view,” she went on fluently. “Naturally I should never believe in allowing personal feeling to impinge on business relations: I think that’s a fearful mistake. All the same, there are degrees in impersonality.”

“Oh yes … yes.”

Not for nothing had the unhappy stenographer said this all over again and again to herself in her bath; it came out with a patness, an impressive conviction that was confounding to Emmeline, for whom—she felt in a flash, with profound contrition—it was as though the very furniture had complained. “What you really mean,” she said, colouring, “is, that you find us inhuman?”

Meeting Emmeline’s clear and penitent gaze Miss Tripp, who was really quite young, lost her nerve, dropped her voice and began to mumble.

“What did you say?” said Emmeline anxiously.

“I said, that’s for you to decide.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Emmeline, in despair.

In rehearsing emotional dialogue, in or out of the bath, there remains always one point, unconsciously reached, at which one rings down the curtain. There is a shyness even in fancy; Miss Tripp had never heard herself going beyond this point. There was much she wished to have Emmeline understand but was not prepared to express. In Miss Tripp’s bath there was always a later point when the curtain—having dropped, as they say on theatre programmes, for a few minutes to denote the passage of time—rose on an Emmeline fully enlightened, stricken, up to date with the whole arrears of Miss Tripp’s feeling.

The arrears were stupendous. In the first place Miss Tripp had always greatly disliked being called Miss Tripp (which smacked to her of the ribbon counter) and would have wished to be called, as by friends, briefly, Tripp. More, she had hoped that, with Emmeline, the depressing gaiety of her surname might have given place to the softer “Doris.” Then, she had dressed to attract, and for Emmeline’s eye alone: as her dresses, striped, checked or polka-dotted became more striking, her ties and jumpers more compellingly vivid, Peter might blink but Emmeline took no notice: with the same delicate, ignorant, abstract mildness might Tripp have been greeted had she appeared naked. At the period of the telephone calls Tripp had been going through a terrific emotional crisis; but though she had reeled from the telephone Emmeline asked no questions. When Tripp stared into blackness above the typewriter it had been: “Headache, Miss Tripp? Then do go home.” Kindness became annihilating. … As for business experience—Tripp could see for herself her employers were inefficient. (Sitting by cynically while the pair blandished their clients, it did not occur to Tripp that one had something to learn in the way of charm, or might be instructed in sympathy.) If clients returned, Tripp saw plainly it was because Peter cajoled them, or Emmeline’s air suggested that heaven was brooding over their enterprise: one did not think much of all this. As for salary, her ten shillings went in a half-week’s bus fares and lunches: she was very much out of pocket. All this might have gone for nothing— but what had she, what remained? Tripp was not the richer by half a smile. She was (or saw herself) Emmeline’s confidential secretary, countenancing for her sake the absurd Peter, that walking reproach to Cambridge, who squeaked and fluttered about her, more like a bat than a young man. But where was the confidence? Where were the smiles, the gleams of satirical understanding, the dear sense of impositions endured together, of jokes shared grimly enough, that should cement an association between females? Not by as much as a glance did Emmeline say: “We are here to suffer.” When Peter, in concentration, rippled his finger joints, Emmeline shuddered—but not at Tripp. When Emmeline’s head ached till she bit her lip and shaded her eyes from the window, she took aspirin silently. Flowers Tripp brought for Emmeline’s desk were beautifully acknowledged, then, as papers began to mount up, removed to the mantelpiece. Emmeline had the air and eyebrows, the same fatal expression of being elsewhere, of the young man who had ignored Tripp at Oxford. Daily, this had all become more exacerbating: it was to work for a stone.

What Tripp could not hear herself saying (the momentary “curtain” in her rehearsals), though night after night, turning on more and more hot water, she had savoured the rich cataclysmic effect of its having been said, was: “I shouldn’t stay here a moment if it were not for you.”

Were it not for Emmeline, Tripp’s dash through life would have been electric. She would have been secretary to a member of parliament: having weathered with him the storms of political crisis she would, her material gathered, have withdrawn— leaving perhaps his affections not disengaged—to write a great,
the
really great, political novel… . This career, mapped out daily in further detail, had all the mournful brightness of a alternative one does not adopt.

Here they both sat, Tripp and Emmeline, half-turned unhappily in each other’s direction, in the drowsy glare of the Bloomsbury afternoon. It is extraordinarily difficult to make a strong scene sitting down. Emmeline kept repeating: “I’m sorry you’re not happy.”

“It’s not that, so much,” said Tripp with the smile of one well accustomed to suffering. “It’s just that I never seem to be any good.”

“Oh, yes, you
are
: really.”

“What you want is an automaton.”

It was on the tip of Emmeline’s tongue to say: “We could not afford one.” Instead she said: “Oh, but we like initiative.”

“My initiative seems to cast rather a blight. I don’t mind Mr. Lewis calling me ‘the stenographer’ if that really seems to him funny, but I do mind him drooping about when I say things and cracking his fingers behind my back. What he would like, obviously, is a platinum blonde.”

“I don’t think he would, at all. But Miss Tripp, if you really do feel we are wasting your time, if you don’t feel you’re getting the kind of experience that you wanted … You make me feel very bad: I do realise that you are working for us for almost nothing—”

“Of course,” said poor Tripp, awkwardness, misery and the idea of money making her more and more unpleasant, “your and Mr. Lewis’s business methods
are
very much your own, you know. Even if Mr. Lewis did want a blonde kind of automaton, I don’t think a girl of that kind would work here for a moment, if you don’t mind my saying so. I do wonder sometimes if
any
other girl would. There’s no routine, and when I move my elbow I knock my funny bone. When Mr. Lewis yawns it goes right down my back. One’s expected to take responsibility without being trusted—”

“—Oh, that’s not
true
!”

“Well, without being acknowledged. If I hang up my hat on the rack, Mr. Lewis moves it; he wants all the pegs for his muffler. If I hang it up in the washplace it falls down and the people from the archaeological society tread on it. Not that my hat matters; it’s just an example.”

“Oh, but your hat does matter!”

“When your friends come in, I have to sit on the stairs.”

Emmeline, hearing all this with bent head, said, “If that’s how you feel, really …”

“I suppose,” said Tripp, chin up, “you are sacking me?”

“Oh, no,
no
. But if you felt that there was something else that you might be doing …”

“Yes—I should be secretary to a member of parliament. That might lead to anything.”

“Of course,” agreed Emmeline, without a tremor of pity for the member of parliament. “In that case, I feel we have really no right to be keeping you here… . I’m just giving you a chance to sack
us
.”

She smiled, looking straight at Tripp kindly and anxiously, but with that myopic vagueness bound to remain for its object so disconcerting and sometimes cruel. Having left her spectacles in the restaurant she saw in Tripp’s place simply an angry blurr. “You do see?” she added.

“
I
see,” said Tripp, stony.

“I’m so glad we’ve discussed things,” said Emmeline, gathering reassurance.

“I’m afraid I’ve hardly begun… .”

“Oh … But you do feel it might be better—?”

“No doubt I’m a fool,” said Tripp, “but I’m staying—unless you sack me.”

“Staying?” Emmeline faltered.

“You may well be surprised, after all I’ve said. You may quite well ask why I’ve stayed so long.”

“I thought you enjoyed the work,” said Emmeline, hopeless. She looked round the dear, pale-green walls of her office, witnesses to such devotion, the stress of such happy excitement. The place was a studio to her, even a shrine.

“If I
enjoyed
booking students to Spain,” said Tripp crisply, “I could do that at Cook’s without having my hat walked on and spending half the afternoon on the stairs. You may find me invisible, Miss Summers, but it must be annoying sometimes that I can’t be actually walked through.”

“What on earth do you mean?” said Emmeline. “Really, we can’t discuss this if it upsets you. I know this room’s very small; I should like to extend our offices. If we have seemed unfriendly —I’d no idea—I can only say I’m more than sorry.”

Tripp produced a handkerchief, not to weep into but to examine from hem to hem with a hard ferocity. She had conducted the scene masterfully, so far, as she might have taken a punt up a crowded river: Emmeline could but respect her. Now, eyes red-rimmed, face congested as though by a spasm of indigestion: “
Sorry
!” cried Tripp, “Sorry? I wouldn’t work here at all if it weren’t for you!”

“Oh …” said Emmeline. She stared at the fatal letter from Malaga, her mind recording a quite superficial astonishment: one had not expected Tripp to go off like this. What had one expected? Little—punctuality, bridling diligence, the impassable patronage of the educated young female towards employers who had respectively failed at the wrong university and attended none. She had been cheap, she wrote the King’s English, absented herself at tea-time, and did not sniff… . But all this time in Miss Tripp the juices of an unduly prolonged adolesence had violently been fermenting: now with a pop they shot out the cork from the bottle. The effect on Tripp, certainly, did not appear catastrophic: the bottle remained intact, Tripp’s outline (at which Emmeline stole a look) was once more placid, as though some natural process had reached conclusion. Doubtless she felt much better. Certainly she felt justified: what Doris Tripp said, she stood by: it had to be right… . For Emmeline, however, the air had become fumy.

Emmeline had enough with which to reproach herself. There was no doubt she had been as unscrupulous as only the pure can be. Her own passion for business, however disinterested, had led to the exploitation of Tripp—why ask why she was exploitable?—one had been affected by Peter’s cynical: “More fool she.” Of Tripp’s interior, Emmeline had not for a moment attempted to take account. Emmeline’s exaltation was dangerous and unsparing, she would have cut off her own hand to advance travel and had undoubtedly taken a finger or two of Tripp’s. She had taken for granted that Tripp should stay late to work with her when there was high pressure: devotion to the business had been assumed. Had she been at all aware of something insistent, brooding, of the cloak spread for her to walk upon with an embarrassing flourish? The air did always clear, certainly, when Tripp left the office. It was too true, they
had
guyed her, her genteel self-sufficiency inviting the rather fairy-like malice of the two partners. Comparison with the seductive efficiency of a platinum blonde
had
been implicit in Peter’s use of “stenographer.” And this afternoon—oh fatal lunch, fatal Markie, fatal letter from Malaga—it had been Tripp who paid hard for Emmeline’s straying faculties.

Her straying faculties— Alas, not only this afternoon was the office smaller and darker for an Emmeline ardently elsewhere, to a devotion in deed only, dulling, drained of the spirit. She was in love, and hung between earth and heaven: meanwhile the typed correspondence in black and violet, gathering dust a little, mounted up on her desk. Maps were maps, the world shrank in its net of red routes, of rails and airways: this was a small office regarding a courtyard, where Tripp bumped her elbow and Peter crackled his finger joints. Light, centring round one figure, withdrew from the distance, from continents into which she had shot her travellers like arrows, from ripple seas, ribbed hills, white-and-shady cities to which this office had been the arch.