Stories Page 8

  That evening he said, “They’ve asked us back to dinner.”

  “You go. I’m tired.”

  “I shall go,” he said defiantly, and went. He did not return until very late.

  They had to catch the train early next morning. At the little station, they stood with their suitcases in a crowd of people who regretted the holiday was over. But Mary was regretting nothing. As soon as the train came, she got in and left Tommy shaking hands with crowds of English people whom, apparently, he had met the night before. At the last minute, the young Clarkes came running up in bathing suits to say goodbye. She nodded stiffly out of the train window and went on arranging the baggage. Then the train started and her husband came in.

  The compartment was full and there was an excuse not to talk. The silence persisted, however. Soon Tommy was watching her anxiously and making remarks about the weather, which worsened steadily as they went north.

  In Paris there were five hours to fill in.

  They were walking beside the river, by the open-air market, when she stopped before a stall selling earthenware.

  “That big bowl,” she exclaimed, her voice newly alive, “that big red one, there—it would be just right for the Christmas tree.”

  “So it would. Go ahead and buy it, old girl,” he agreed at once, with infinite relief.

  The Witness

  In the mornings, when Mr. Brooke had hung his hat carefully on the nail over his desk and arranged his pipe and tobacco at his elbow, he used to turn to the others and say hopefully: “You should have just seen Twister today. He brought my newspaper from the doorstep without dropping it once.” Then he looked at the polite, hostile faces; laughed a short, spluttering, nervous laugh; and bent his head to his papers.

  Miss Jenkins, the private secretary, kept a peke called Darling; and she had only to mention him for everyone to listen and laugh. As for Richards, he was engaged, and they pulled his leg about it. Every time he went purple and writhed delightedly under his desk. The accountant, Miss Ives, a tart old maid who lived some proud, defiant life of her own, had a garden. When she talked about trees the office grew silent with respect. She won prizes at flower shows. There was no getting past her.

  At eight, as they settled down for the day; at eleven, when cups of tea came round, slopped into saucers; at three in the afternoon, when they ate cream cakes—they all had something.

  Mr. Brooke had bought his terrier Twister simply so that he could make them notice him sometimes. First it was a canary, but he decided at last canaries couldn’t be interesting. Although Miss Jenkins’ peke did nothing but eat, she could talk about it every day and get an audience, but then she was a very attractive girl. She wouldn’t have been the boss’s private secretary if she weren’t. Mr. Brooke’s dog did everything. He taught it at night, in his room, to beg and balance and wait for sugar. He used to rub its ears gratefully, thinking: It will make them sit up when I tell them he can keep perfectly still for ten minutes by the watch the office gave me when I had worked for them twenty years. He used to say things like that to himself long after he had given up trying to attract their notice.

  And, after all, he had not been alone, had not added up figures from eight to four for thirty years, without making something of his own he could live from. He decided to keep the canary, because it took no room and he had come to enjoy its noise. He kept the dog, too, because it was company, of a kind. The real reason why he got rid of neither was because they annoyed his landlady, with whom he bickered continually. After office hours he used to walk home thinking that after supper he would make the dog bark so that she would come in and make a scene. These scenes usually ended in her crying; and then he could say: “I am alone in the world, too, my dear.” Sometimes she made him a cup of tea before going to bed, saying bitterly, “If you won’t look after yourself I suppose someone must. But don’t let that damned dog spill it all over the floor.”

  After she had gone to bed, and there was no chance of meeting her in the passage, he cut out pictures from magazines, sent off postal orders to addresses he was careful to keep hidden from her inquisitive eyes, and was not in the least ashamed of himself. He was proud of it; it was a gesture of defiance, like getting drunk every Friday. He chose Fridays because on Saturday mornings, when he was really not fit for work, he could annoy Miss Ives by saying: “I went on the loose last night.” Then he got through the hours somehow. A man was entitled to something, and he did not care for gardens.

  The rest of the week he used to sit quietly at his desk, watching them talk together as if he were simply not there, and wish that Miss Jenkins’ dog would get ill, and she would ask him for advice; or that Miss Ives would say: “Do help me with my ledger; I have never seen anyone who could calculate as fast as you”; or that Richards would quarrel with his girl and confide in him. He imagined himself saying: “Women! Of course! You can’t tell me anything.”

  Other times he stood looking out of the window, listening to the talk behind him, pretending not to, pretending he was indifferent. Two stories down in the street, life rushed past. Always, he felt, he had been looking out of windows. He dreamed, often, that two of the cars down below would crash into each other, and that he was the only witness. Police would come stamping up the stairs with notebooks; the typists would ask avidly, “What actually happened, Mr. Brooke?”; the boss would slap him on the shoulder and say: “How lucky you saw it. I don’t know what I would do without you.” He imagined himself in court, giving evidence. “Yes, your worship, I always look out of the window at that time every day. I make a habit of it. I saw everything….”

  But there never was an accident. The police only came once, and that was to talk to Miss Jenkins when her peke got lost; and he hardly saw Mr. Jones except to nod to. It was Miss Ives who was his real boss.

  He used to peep through the door of the typists’ room, where six girls worked, when the boss went through each morning, and go sick with envious admiration.

  Mr. Jones was a large, red-faced man with hair grown white over the ears; and after lunch every day he smelled of beer. Nevertheless, the girls would do anything for him. He would say breezily, “Well, and how’s life today?” Sometimes he put his arm round the prettiest and said, “You’re too cute to keep long. You’ll be getting married….” He said it as if he were handing out medals, something one had to do, part of his job. It’s only to make them work harder, thought Mr. Brooke bitterly, surreptitiously shutting the door and listening to how the typewriters started clattering furiously the moment Mr. Jones left. Then he used to go to the washroom and look at his own face in the glass. He had no white hair himself; he was quite a good-looking man, he thought. But if he put his arm round a girl’s shoulder he would get his face slapped, he knew that.

  It was the year he was fifty-five, retiring age, that Marnie de Kok came into the office as a junior, straight from school. Mr. Brooke did not want to leave off working. He couldn’t live on what he had saved; and in any case the office was all he had. For some weeks he looked crumpled up with apprehension; but Mr. Jones said nothing, and after a while he took heart again. He did not want to think about it; and besides, with Marnie there everything was changed. After one morning there was a different feeling in the office.

  She was a girl of eighteen from some little dorp miles away, the youngest of ten children. She had a small plump, fresh face that always had a look of delighted expectation, and a shrill; expressive voice, and was as slim and as quick as a fish. She darted about the place, talking to the staff as if it had never entered her head anyone in the world could not be pleased to waste his time on her account. She shattered the sacred silence of the main office with her gossip about her family; sat on the desks and swung her legs; put vases of flowers among the telephones. And even Miss Ives took off her glasses and watched her. They all watched her; and particularly Mr. Jones, who made plenty of excuses to leave his desk, with the indulgent, amused, faintly ironic smile with which one looks at children, remembering wha
t all that fearlessness and charm is going to come to. As for Mr. Brooke, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. For a while he was afraid to speak, for Marnie, like the others, seemed not to know he was there; and when he did, she looked at him with startled distaste, a look he was used to, though it in no way corresponded with what he felt about himself. She might be my daughter, he said to himself defensively; and he used to ask her with whom she ate lunch, what picture she had seen the night before, as a jealous lover can’t resist talking about his mistress, feeling that even to speak about what she has been doing robs it of its danger, makes the extraordinary and wonderful life she leads apart from him in some way his. But Marnie answered shortly, or not at all, wrinkling up her nose.

  Even that he found attractive. What was so charming about her was her directness, the simplicity of her responses. She knew nothing of the secret sycophancy of the office that made the typists speak to Mr. Jones in one voice and Miss Ives in another. She treated everyone as if she had known them always. She was as confiding as a child, read her letters out loud, jumped with joy when parcels came from home, and wept when someone suggested gently that there were better ways of doing her work.

  For she was catastrophically inefficient. She was supposed to learn filing; but in actual fact she made the tea, slipped over to the teashop across the road ten times a day for cream cakes, and gave people advice about their colds or how to make their dresses.

  The other typists, who were, after all, her natural enemies, were taken by surprise and treated her with the tenderest indulgence. It was because it occurred to no one that she could last out the first month. But Miss Ives made out her second paycheck, which was very generous, with a grim face, and snubbed her until she cried.

  It was Miss Ives, who was afraid of nothing, who at last walked into Mr. Jones’s office and said that the child was impossible and must leave at once. As it was, the files would take months to get straight. No one could find anything.

  She came back to her desk looking grimmer than ever, her lips twitching.

  She said angrily, “I’ve kept myself for twenty-seven years this March. I’ve never had anything. How many women have the qualifications I have? I should have had a pretty face.” And then she burst into tears. It was mild hysterics. Mr. Brooke was the first to fuss around with water and handkerchiefs. No one had ever seen Miss Ives cry.

  And what about? All Mr. Jones had said was that Marnie was the daughter of an old school friend and he had promised to look after her. If she was no good at filing, then she must be given odd jobs.

  “Is this an office or a charitable institution?” demanded Miss Ives. Tve never seen anything like this, never.” And then she turned to Mr. Brooke, who was leaning ineffectually over her, and said, “There are other people who should go too. I suppose he was a friend of your father? Getting drunk and making a pig of yourself. Pictures of girls in your desk, and putting grease on your hair in the washrooms …”

  Mr. Brooke went white, tried to find words, looked helplessly round for support to Miss Jenkins and Richards. They did not meet his eyes. He felt as if they were dealing him invisible blows on the face; but after a few moments Miss Ives put away her handkerchief, picked up her pen with a gesture of endurance, and went back to her ledger. No one looked at Mr. Brooke.

  He made himself forget it. She was hysterical, he said. Women would say anything. He knew from what men had told him that there were times you should take no notice of them. An old maid, too, he said spitefully, wishing he could say it aloud, forgetting that she, too, had made of her weakness a strength, and that she could not be hurt long by him, any more than he could by her.

  But that was not the only case of hysteria. It seemed extraordinary that for years these people had worked together, making the same jokes, asking after each other’s health, borrowing each other’s things, and then everything went wrong from one day to the next.

  For instance, one of the typists wept with rage all of one morning because Mr. Jones sent back a letter to be retyped. Such a thing had never been known. Such was his manner, as a rule, that a reprimand was almost as warming as praise.

  As for Marnie herself, she was like a small child who does not know why it had been slapped. She wandered about the office miserably, sniffing a little, until by chance Mr. Jones saw her and asked what was wrong. She began to cry, and he took her into his room. The door was shut for over an hour while clients waited. When she came out, subdued but cheerful, the typists cold-shouldered her. Then she rushed in to Miss Ives and asked if she could move her desk into the main office, because the other girls were “nasty” to her. Very naturally Miss Ives was unsympathetic, and she cried again, with her head among the papers on Mr. Brooke’s desk. It happened to be the nearest.

  It was lunch hour. Everyone left but Marnie and Mr. Brooke. The repugnance she felt for this elderly man with the greasy faded hair, the creased white hands, the intimate unpleasant eyes melted in the violence of her misery. She allowed him to stroke her hair. She cried on his shoulder as she had cried on Mr. Jones’s shoulder that morning.

  “No one likes me,” she sobbed.

  “Of course everyone likes you.”

  “Only Mr. Jones likes me.”

  “But Mr. Jones is the boss …” stammered Mr. Brooke, appalled at her incredible ingenuousness. His heart ached for her. He caressed the damp bundle huddled over his desk gently, paternally, wanting only to console her. “If you could just remember this is an office, Marnie.”

  “I don’t want to work in an office. I want to go home. I want my mother. I want Mr. Jones to send me home. He says I can’t. He says he will look after me….”

  When they heard steps on the stairs Mr. Brooke guiltily slipped back to his corner; and Marnie stood up, sullen and defiant, to face Miss Ives, who ignored her. Marnie dragged her feet across the floor to the typists’ room.

  “I suppose you have been encouraging her,” said Miss Ives. “She needs a good spanking. I’ll give it to her myself soon.”

  “She’s homesick,” he said.

  “What about her stepfather in there?” snapped Miss Ives, jerking her head at Mr. Jones’s door.

  “He’s sorry for her,” said Mr. Brooke, defending his own new feeling of protectiveness for the girl.

  “Some people have no eyes in their heads,” she said unpleasantly. “Taking her to the pictures. Taking her to dinner every night. I suppose that is being sorry for her, too?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Mr. Brooke hotly. But he was sick with dismay and anger. He wanted to hit Miss Ives, wanted to run into Mr. Jones’s room and hit him, wanted to do something desperate. But he sat himself down at his desk and began adding figures. He was behindhand as usual. “Slow but sure, that’s what I am,” he said to himself, as always, when he saw how the work piled up and he never was level with it. But that afternoon Miss Ives returned him three sheets of calculations and said, “Try to be more accurate, Mr. Brooke, if you please.”

  At four, when Mr. Jones came through the front office on his way home, Marnie was waiting to catch his eyes. He stopped, smiling; then realised the entire staff were watching, and went on, reddening.

  Marnie’s lips quivered again.

  “More rain coming,” said Miss Ives acidly.

  “Can I take you to your bus stop?” asked Mr. Brooke, defying Miss Ives. There was laughter from the open door of the typists’ room. Mr. Brooke had heard that kind of laugh too often, after he had left a room, to care about it now. Marnie tossed her head at Miss Ives. “I should be pleased,” she said daintily.

  They walked down the stairs, she racing in front, he trying to keep up. She seemed to dance down the street; the sun was shining; it dazzled in her bright hair. Mr. Brooke was panting, smiling, trying to find breath to talk. He knew that above their heads Miss Ives and the others were leaning over the sill and watching them with scornful disgusted faces. He did not care; but when he saw Mr. Jones come out of a shop, as if he had been waiting for Marnie, he stopped guiltily
and said: “Goodnight, sir.”

  Mr. Jones nodded, not looking at him. To Marnie he said, smiling gently, “Feeling happier? Don’t worry, you won’t be in an office for long. Some lucky man will marry you soon.” It was the sort of thing he said to his typists. But not as he said it now.

  Marnie laughed, ran up to him, kissed his cheek.

  “Well!” said Mr. Jones, looking fatuously pleased. He glared over Mamie’s head at Mr. Brooke, who hurried off down the street as if he had been given an order, without looking around. Soon he heard Marnie pattering up behind him.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said reproachfully.

  Her face was happy, guileless. “He’s like my dad,” she said.

  At the bus stop Mr. Brooke suddenly could not bear to see her go. He caught her arm and said, “Come to my place and see my dog Twister. You would like him.”

  She said, “You know, I didn’t like you at first. I do now.”

  “My dog can fetch the newspaper in the morning,” he said. “He never tears it.”

  “I like dogs,” she said confidingly, as if it were the most surprising news in the world.

  When they reached his room he was so proud, so flustered, that he could only look at her and smile. He unlocked it with shaking hands and dropped the key when he saw the landlady peeping through her window. Marnie picked it up and went before him into his room as if taking possession of it.

  “What a nice room,” she said. “But it’s too small. If you moved your bed …”

  She darted over to the divan he slept on and pushed it across a corner. Then she patted cushions, moved a chair, and turned to him. “That’s much better,” she said. “I’m good at this sort of thing. I’m a home girl. That’s what my mum says. She didn’t want me to come to an office. Dad and Mr. Jones fixed it up.”

  “Your mother is quite right,” said Mr. Brooke devotedly.