When the World Was Steady (10 page)

‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘Very good. We’ve got an opening in the mail room, for a clerk. Not perhaps the most fascinating work, but quite varied. You learn a lot about how the place works, and where everyone is.’ She fixed her eye on him to see whether he wavered, but his eager, nervous expression remained unchanged. ‘Do you think that might suit? Thirty-five hours a week, four pounds eighty-three an hour?’

He nodded, fidgeted, signed the contract. Every time she saw
an American signing, Virginia felt a little remorseful. Unlike her sullen, knowing compatriots, adolescents like Calvin could not foresee the scrimping, the nights of greasy cafeteria meals, the exhausting monotony that awaited them. Some British adventure! But Calvin seemed ready to seize it and run.

Virginia had two more interviews before lunchtime, both recent school leavers galvanized into feeble job-searching by their parents—three out of four of whom were already themselves in the employ of the great University. With such ‘legacy’ cases, it was always advisable to place the offspring somewhere, however briefly, no matter how moronic they seemed, to avoid the ire of their fathers and mothers.

This morning, Rosemarie did indeed head for the kitchen; and young Franklin was sent to join his father driving trucks for the works department. Because of their visits Virginia managed to miss Martin altogether, but she could not escape Simon’s watchful eye: he called to her from behind his desk as she showed Rosemarie, the last one, out.

Ramsbottom was a small, thick man, and even when seated he found it difficult to look imposing. But he tried. He was a judo aficionado and had decorated his walls with snaps of himself and his mates (other balding, sagging fellows in their forties and early fifties), robed in white, kicking up their heels. On the wall behind his swivel throne—above his head, for all visitors to see and remark upon—glittered a gilded plaque announcing some minor judo triumph. It had been in this office and the one before for some years, but every time the plaque was mentioned, Simon still blushed with pleasure. He was that sort of man: a little pompous, a little foolish, full of bluster at the wrong moments; but to Virginia somehow charming.

‘Gorgeous! Good morning!’ he called from the shadows of his lair. On her way to the lift, Rosemarie heard him and ruffled her poodle ringlets; but Virginia knew, after all these years, that
the call was for her, purely to embarrass, and it did.

‘Simon?’

‘Give us the time of day, won’t you? I haven’t had a word, not a word! Have I offended?’

‘It’s been a hectic morning, in, out, in, out, the revolving door of temporary.’ She could see her hands trembling so she clasped them firmly on the back of the visitor’s chair. ‘What about you? You haven’t exactly made a point of visiting me.’

‘You’re in my dreams, Virginia, I see you day and night.’ Simon winked.

‘Simon, please!’ She felt a little dizzy at the insinuation, but she was still harbouring irritation underneath and recovered in time to make a barbed point in return—not for the first time either. ‘If I’m dancing through your dream life, Simon, do you know what I’m saying?’

‘Racy, Virginia. A little racy even for me.’

She lowered her voice. ‘I’m telling you to sack that boy next door before he tears this department apart. And I mean it.’

Simon stopped grinning. ‘For a Christian, that’s pretty un-Christian, Miss Simpson.’

‘God hasn’t come into the office before. This isn’t about God, and you know it—that boy’s a sinner, fine, so are you and so, for that matter, am I. But he’s an evil influence.’

‘He’s very good at his job.’

‘So would thousands of others be. He chats up Mandy. He’s rude to my prospectives and—’

‘Familiar, not rude. They like it.
Mandy
likes it.’

‘And I’ve said this before, Simon, he’s got something against me. He wants my job.’

‘Of course he does, Virginia. More to the point, he wants
my
job. Be worried if he didn’t. Brains enough, ambition, someday maybe he’ll get it. You and I won’t be kicking around this corridor forever, you know.’

‘Well, I don’t know about you and maybe you don’t care about me, but I like to think my job is safe for a few more years at least. And he’s doing his best to gnaw away at it. At me.’

‘You know me. You know I care. It’s just that … I’ve got to consider the future, what’s best for the future. I hardly see Mandy in this chair.’

Virginia smoothed the pleats in her skirt and spoke very slowly. Part of her wanted to say ‘Why not
me
in that chair?’, just because she knew it had never occurred to him; it hadn’t really consciously occurred to her before now, not even when she joked with Mandy about Martin. But she didn’t. What she said was more difficult than that, more embarrassing. She hissed, in a rasping, tight voice, ‘If you care, make him stop doing the newsletters. They’re
mine.
’

‘Goodness.’

She didn’t look up. She looked at her fingers and her pleats and the pulled threads in the ancient olive carpet.

‘You’ve always hated those damn newsletters. And the boy needs to learn. I thought—he thought—it was doing you a favour. This can’t go on, you know. From today, those newsletters are officially his. I’ll send round a memo. You’re behaving like a child. I would never have expected it. Jesus, Virginia.’

She glanced at him. He was bobbing and swivelling slightly, visibly upset. Even amid her rage and nerves she felt the twinge of her attraction. He was perhaps not beautiful when angry, but he was quite sweet.

‘You know I don’t like it when you take the Lord’s name in vain,’ she said.

‘That’s more like it, V. But I mean it about the newsletters. It’s beneath you. Not another word, OK?’

‘Beneath me! Beneath me! Not another word! We’ll see about that!’ As she crossed the hall to her office, Virginia’s internal monologue was in a fine lather, and she was convinced the day could not
get any worse. Then she heard her mother’s voice—a warbling echo from a couple of doors down. A warbling, but authoritative echo.

When Virginia dashed out of the door in a morning panic, Melody Simpson consciously lowered her shoulders and sat very still at the table, listening. Her hearing was unaffected by age. She heard chattering sparrows and starlings in the trees along the block, mingling with the passage of cars and footsteps; she heard phrases of classical music from the flat upstairs; she heard Bella whistling in her feline sleep; and she heard beneath it all the faint, rhythmic hum of blood in her ears—the movements of her heart. It was only recently that she had started to listen in this way, until she felt she could catch the gurgling of inner workings right down to her toes. The sounds were reassuring; she knew she was alive.

During the war, her husband gone, Melody would stand in the doorway of her daughters’ room and listen in this way, her face forward, her nose and eyes listening too, all recording the soft soughing of their infant breaths and the innocent, infrequent rustlings when they rolled or shifted. Then, despite Melody Simpson’s early knowledge of loss—of her husband, of the future she had wanted—hers was a defiant listening, as though simply absorbing the sounds of her children’s sleep could protect them forever, as though she alone, by doing this, kept them alive.

But now, listening for herself, she was much less confident: she did so because she feared that one morning she wouldn’t hear anything. Her veins and arteries and lungs and bowels might simply cease their music, and were she not attentive, she might not even know it. Melody Simpson, who had not even been truly afraid when the surgeons hacked off one, and later, the other breast (she had known all along the tumours would be benign)—Melody Simpson was afraid of death.

She could find nothing perceptibly wrong with herself, no aches or illnesses, no loss of memory or coordination, but something had changed since the night a month or so before when she awoke unreasonably from a sound sleep, heard the bedside clock ticking in the blackness and thought just this: soon I will die. She felt it as certainly as she had felt her invincibility for so many years and there was no arguing with this knowledge, no point in talking about it to Virginia or to anyone else.

In the subsequent weeks, Mrs Simpson had resolved two things: not to do any more anything she did not want to do, and to go to the Isle of Skye before the summer was out. The former decision was behind the basket and the winch, behind her suggestion of a picnic (she
wanted
one, after all), and the latter, she knew, was driving Virginia crazy. But Melody Simpson was known for her strong will, and to Skye they would go. That’s all there was to it.

She cleaned up the breakfast dishes and wiped the table with special care: such tasks had become quite exciting, now that she could so easily have eschewed them, as she had the shopping, on the grounds of Resolution Number One. Cleaning was now a choice rather than a duty, a secret pleasure. She sometimes joked to herself that if she had known it would be so simple to relieve the aura of burden around housework, she would have done so years ago.

Today she did not even mind the shopping, because it was for her picnic. She bought plump cherry tomatoes and scrubbed potatoes from the stall at the bottom of the hill; she bought a Viennese loaf from the baker, still hot and reeking deliciously of dough; she bought slices of baked ham and coarse, foreign smoked sausage from the surly Italian grocer; and she took at the last minute a small container of spiced, cracked black olives from the same man, insisting before she did so that he offer her one to taste. She spent the morning making a potato salad in garlic mayonnaise,
a dish she and Virginia both loved. She packed the food in plastic boxes and placed it, along with the cutlery and two of her finest plates, in a large plastic bag from John Lewis.

After some thought she wore an old summer dress of flowered cotton, and a lilac cardigan with scalloped edges over her shoulders. She made certain that her foam bust was even and firmly secured. She combed and fussed over her hair until she was certain that the thinner moments in her scalp were spanned by sufficient curls. Like spun sugar, her hair did not move once it had been sculpted, but she wore a hairnet anyway, just in case.

It was not pure altruism that had Melody Simpson taking such care over lunch with her daughter: she had more complex motives than a delightful
déjeuner sur l’herbe
. Her plan was to let her needs be known to the University—that is, to the executive enclave of Directors of Personnel, Permanent & Temporary: she was going to make damn sure that she and Virginia got to Skye. To this end she even rouged her cheeks and splashed her wrists with toilet water. And as she set out to find a taxi, her best china clanking in her large plastic bag, Melody Simpson felt a full surge of her old confidence.

It was only a quarter to one when she greeted the large, bald guard at the entrance to Virginia’s building. He, surprised by such good humour, accompanied her to the third floor and pointed a route through the warren of passages that would take her to Personnel.

Peering into cubicles as she wound around the building, Mrs Simpson’s mind was twitching so fast that she almost bypassed the department—which looked the same as it had on her last visit five years before, only slightly more worn. The offices on the left—where Virginia’s was, she knew, but not which one—were closed to the corridor, so she stepped into the first on the right and almost bumped into a freckled youth in tinted glasses.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked, unperturbed. ‘I don’t suppose
you’re looking for a job?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Martin Evans, at your service. Older than I look.’

‘Martin, may I sit?’

He waved at the chair where Simon’s interviewees waited to be seen. ‘Rest your young self. Refresh your beauty.’

‘Young?’ Melody Simpson trilled with laughter. The lad was cocky, and she liked him. ‘Aren’t you a charmer! A recent addition to this dull corner?’

‘Dull? Not dull here! A laugh a minute.’

‘I think my daughter finds it dull.’

‘You? A daughter? Who might she be?’

‘That isn’t quite right. She wouldn’t think to find it tiresome. I find it tiresome for her. Virginia Simpson, and she needs a holiday.’

‘Don’t we all! You’re Mrs Simpson, then?’

‘That’s been my name since before you were born. I don’t know what
you
do. It’s not in your power to dole out holidays, is it?’

‘Not even jobs, yet, let alone holidays. But I’m working on it. Tell me what you’re after.’

‘Just a couple of weeks for the poor lamb. She’s over-tired. A couple of weeks in a couple of weeks.’

‘That’s pretty short notice, Mrs Simpson. I gather she
wants a
holiday?’

‘She’s never known what’s good for her. She wouldn’t have ended up an old maid if she had. She wouldn’t have ended up
here
. Her sister was always much more sensible, although even that’s backfired. Divorce, you know. Very distressing.’

‘Of course. Very.’ His smile now was something Mrs Simpson didn’t quite recognize, or approve of. Perhaps she didn’t like him after all.

‘Mother, you’re early.’ Virginia emerged from behind a filing
cabinet. Mrs Simpson realized that there was a second door to the corridor she had not noticed when she came in.

‘It’s bad manners to eavesdrop, Virginia.’

‘I’ll be right with you. It’s not one yet. Now, Martin, about the newsletters—’

‘I’ve actually just—’

‘About the newsletters, Simon and I have discussed it and we think it’s best if you take them over officially. I don’t really have time any more. He’ll send round a memo this afternoon.’

‘Oh good,’ said Mrs Simpson, piqued by her daughter’s brusqueness. ‘Less work, more chance of a holiday. Go on, Martin, I’m sure you can do
all
of Virginia’s work. You look capable enough.’

‘No doubt, Mother.’ Virginia’s hands were making and unmaking little fists. ‘Let’s go now. I can leave the rest till after lunch.’

Martin, whose eyes were not wholly clear behind their brownish glass, was grinning again. As they walked out, Mrs Simpson could have sworn he winked at her.