She hadn’t finished writing her notes up when the bell went again, and the telephone with it. Bonne Mère, grumbled Arlette, pressing buttons, scarcely even home and a day like this …
“Yes; this is Arlette van der Valk.”
A clipped, high woman’s voice resonated haughtily.
“This is Madame Hervé Laboisserie. I’ve been wondering whether you’d care to call round, and we could discuss a matter, don’t you know. This afternoon, preferably.” There were times when Arlette responded to this kind of remark by ‘Come to my office and we’ll see’, but the holiday had been expensive and house-calls not to be sneezed at.
“Very well; two-thirty,” which sounded either over-eager or over-scornful, but she didn’t care that badly.
“Oh. Well, yes, I think that will be satisfactory.”
“What’s the address?”
“Oh. Rue Ravel, number twenty-one. The Orangerie end.” Surprised that anybody needed telling. Why can’t people carry essential information in their head? The voice showed symptoms of complaining about this.
“Excuse me will you? – I’ve somebody waiting.” She hated having people waiting, but if they would come without appointments … Making them wait on purpose was a puffy trick running counter to all she tried to live by. Nothing is more boring than the very-busy-clerk making believe that he is Managing something. She had begun her career by apologizing to people kept waiting. She then discovered that this made them more suspicious, as though there were a catch somewhere.
All she said now to the person studying the flower-prints with a little more attention than they merited was, “Will you come in?”
“Good those,” turning round with a connoisseur’s air, “early nineteenth century.” Since this expertise was fairly easily acquired by anyone not suffering from myopia – the date was as usual printed at the bottom with the artist’s and engraver’s names – there was not much to say but, “They’re supposed to make a wait less boring.”
A gentleman of forty. Soigné about the hair and fingernails, and aftershaved with elegant-smelling toiletries. An executive suit, a shimmering tie, fine, fragile Italian shoes, the air of his time being worth a great deal. Briefcase – all very Via dei Condotti. He snapped it shut, held out a card between his fingertips.
“Xavier Marchand.” Slight formal bow, assured easy manner. Impressive. Since she was fifty-two years old and experienced, she resolved to watch him on the way out, make sure a print didn’t get slid in the briefcase. They were worth some money, if not much. Now he was busy inspecting her big marine landscape.
“Please sit down.”
“Sorry – splendid thing, that.”
“Forgive me just a moment.” To put the phone back to ‘record’ since she loathed being interrupted by it, to write ‘14.30 Twenty-one, Rue Ravel. Mme Hervé Laboisserie’. Was that spelt right? – bourgeoisie! Out of the corner of her eye, she caught this bourgeois fiddling with a cigarette case and matching lighter. There are the lacquer ones from Dupont, the florentine ones from Cartier – part of the panoply, she thought with some irritation. She preferred Sergeant Subleyras. So turn a patient-bland, boiled eye upon the present interlocutor.
She was taken aback. He was staring out of the window with haggard concentration upon twigs and a patch of sky, oblivious to what she said or did. All the elaborate veneer had cracked across from side to side like the Lady of Shalott’s looking-glass. She had been mistaken. It was understandable, because she did sometimes get the fast-paced, high-priced executives. Generally, they were trying to get out from under an adultery rap or cover some such turpitude that would make the pyramid more slippery still. Blackmail always in their minds, they were sensitive about the tape-recorder and hated anything in writing. This was not the same. She regretted her toffee-nosed reaction.
“Monsieur Marchand,” she said gently.
“I’m sorry. You’re waiting for me to tell you what it’s all about. I had a spiel prepared. Now I find there’s no use for it. To the point – it’s all said in one sentence really. My wife has left me.” The monosyllables held nothing but plain blank misery.
She took one of his cigarettes. He was there at once with the electronic thing: she preferred her pale-green plastic Cricket, but this was necessary.
“I’d better hear why, in your view.”
“Simple, I’m afraid. I was no longer good enough for her.”
“With someone else?”
“No – or I don’t think so. Maybe. Not yet, perhaps.”
Simplest, and most difficult of all, the man who has to spit it out. He will spit it on a park bench, for he asks nothing but to be allowed to talk. To face Arlette he had screwed himself up: hence the façade.
The moment he realized he could talk and that she would listen, it flowed without a prompt. Business training kept him from rambling much: all to the point.
He’d lost his job out of the blue. Secure job, in which he felt content and competent; the right man. So he was, and well-thought-of by his company, which was large, prosperous, established. He was not given any sack. The thing was being streamlined and the job no longer existed. From no more than loyalty – you’d think – they’d find you another. Error. If the job no longer exists, from head office’s standpoint, neither do you. Arlette, who had heard such tales before, was unsurprised at the heartlessness of it: a heart is a muscle, to be preserved from accidents or even twinges. These fates are the other face of the coin.
On this side is the high salary and the plummy perks; aeroplanes and restaurants, careful servility from juniors and golf-club familiarity from seniors; a slice of secrets and strategies, a promise of power. One day, though, a seed lodges in a vice-president’s mind: on its label is written some euphemism about Structures. Something to do with Next Year’s Model.
You have done nothing wrong, and are surprised. Your immediate superior, who has known you some years and in whose heart, it might be thought, is more than greed, fear, and effrontery, prevaricates at length, until you realize – at length – that it was his neck or yours. So, it’s yours. No hard feelings about that, of course.
You’ll say it to nobody else but yourself – this is upsetting. But you’re unworried. You have a proven record of success, eminent titles to esteem, numerous valuable connections, and know all the ropes. You belong, and you’re in.
You don’t actually, and you aren’t, but it takes some months to find this out. By then your past, which was yesterday, has suddenly become remote. Let’s see, old chap, your record was on last year’s model: we’re talking about this year’s: you aren’t really in on that, are you now? Next year’s? Somehow the company has a new policy, which is not to hire anyone new over the age of thirty-five. We’re stretching that of course, since it’s for you. You’re on the short list.
Quite gradually it becomes we’re-keeping-you-in-mind, old chap, and do give my regards to your lovely wife. Your lovely wife has by this time found out.
You hadn’t wanted to upset her, so you hadn’t said anything about it. She is accustomed to reticence in matters of business. Some wives do gossip, and there have been leaks known. But now six months have gone by. You are living in more expensive fashion than before, because things the company paid for … there was not much saved and gratuities melt with horrid speed. You must keep up your subscriptions, buy new suits. Nobody must be allowed to perceive the smallest ripple in your customary ways, business manners, or leisure pursuits. Nothing in the community is so deadly as a loss of face. Let it once place you in the Russian sector – meaning in a low income bracket – and you’re finished.
Xavier put it all well, thought Arlette. Quietly, without inflated language and with little self-pity. He had been struck by the plague; it is endemic in the community and nobody is ever quite immune. It was when he spoke of his wife that he became unbalanced and bitterness rose, a thick black smoke, to choke him.
The failure is in a lack of imagination? Businessmen are not paid to have imagination, and it is unfair to blame them for failure to escape from this world of rigid shibboleths and slogans in which they must believe in order to survive, into which they lock themselves.
Can they even be blamed for the male failure towards the woman, an even more glaring failure to imagine what it is like for her? In the business world all values are childish and only vanity can reign. Does one need more evidence than the toys and gadgets upon which they so rely? In this world the woman is trapped. She too has to put out more flags. They come uncommon high in price for him; for her still higher. She must acquire a thicker defensive plating of boastfulness and arrogance, and women are not good at this. They become crude and shrill and hateful. The giver of life has been forced into a world to which she is not in the least suited. She hates her own hardness, and revenges herself upon the men. Her resentment is bitterer still when she does not perceive why she must degrade all within her and around her.
Why, wondered Arlette, does he come to me? Thinking that I would soften the conduct of this woman towards him, with understanding and explanations? He will have told his tale to men, who will have bought drinks, nodded wisely, shrugged helplessly, muttered ‘Women … just shows you, though …’
Useless to point out that when economies began to bite, the wife’s expenses, which he found extravagances, were the first to be curbed. The very bent he had encouraged and fomented; an elegant wife being needful to standing. In Arthur-Davidson language, he it was who ‘nursed the pinion that impelled the steel’.
“Did she write to you?”
“A word. Telling me not to pursue her, or try to find her. Advising me ‘to forget all that’ –‘not to think of it any more’! Twenty years of marriage. I loved her. To lose one’s job, already … and then that … As though the moment I no longer brought in the pile of loot, I no longer existed. Don’t talk to me of loyalty. One thing, thank God for it – there are no children.”
If allowed to go on talking, he would provide answers to a good many unspoken questions. Mm; ‘twenty years’ was certainly a rhetorical exaggeration. One could begin digging out explanations. But nobody wanted them.
“Where are you living?”
“In a room. Where was the point in trying to hang on to the flat? Even if it had been possible – what sense would it make? This is where it has all hit hardest – a whole life gone. What am I now? – nothing. Once you’re poor, nobody has any use for you.” She didn’t need to ask why he had come: he’d come to be pitied.
“There’s nothing in view?”
“Nothing. Why bother, now? The advantage of a great misery is that you forget, at least, about the small ones.” A sad little smile. He tapped the briefcase. “All this is still intact, or just. Rub cream into the leatherwork: keep things polished, brushed, pressed. Good quality stuff, wears well. But a few more months and even that … little signs. They show up when people look for them, and in business the eyes are pretty sharp. A suit begins to look a bit dated …” The shoes look mended, the tie begins to fray; imperceptibly a dingy, shabby air hangs about things. “I’m dressing for dinner in the jungle.” It was flooding him now, and she had to put a stop to it.
“All right,” said Arlette. “You’re still fleeing. There comes a moment when you stop fleeing. Touching bottom, as the platitude has it, there’s no place to go but up. But you’re still looking backwards.”
Arthur, who had a phrase for most things, would have said Ichabod. Fair Ichabod ol’ man; there’s no going back to things like that. Mr Polly said it first. The woman had been right in that at least. “I’m not saying she was right – far from it. But having done as she did, she was right to warn you not to try to follow her. Where do you live?”
He did not hesitate.
“Round the corner – in the Rue de Flandre,” the smile brittle.
And, she guessed, with no telephone.
“Yes, you hadn’t far to come. Handy – I haven’t far to go. I’ll come and see you. One has to drain the abscess, you know. And here – this is too formal. I mean, I’m in my office, behind the desk, and you are very stiff and tight. I’ll come and see you – say, tomorrow afternoon. You come to see me, that’s fine, breaks the ice. So, tomorrow, we’ll talk about it.”
“Money,” bleakly.
“Tomorrow,” said Arlette.