‘I’m sorry to be so late,’ said Jelly to Brian Moss of the velvety smooth voice, cunning eye and beautifully cut suit. ‘I had to go to the doctor. I hope you haven’t opened the post,’ she added. ‘You always get everything in such a muddle.’
‘I leave detail to you, my dear,’ he said. ‘I look after the major issues, the wider sweep, as befits the male. Shall we have coffee now?’
‘You mean will I make it?’ she asked, and did.
These days a good legal secretary is hard to find and, if they are found, are usually elderly women – the young ones decline to take work both so responsible yet so poorly paid. Legal secretaries often start out with crabby natures – those with an eye to detail often have these –and impatience with human folly gets the better of them, and feeds into the original disposition. It is not easy or pleasant to get correct, day after day, the detail by which human beings try to wrest justice from a world determined not to deliver it. People, it soon becomes clear to the legal secretary, veer either to the delinquent or to the boring. At the delinquent end of the scale – criminal or family law – there is too much distress; at the boring end – contractual or constitutional law – there is just yawning boredom. And even that boredom exists as a fragile, if opaque, lid on a bubbling cauldron of iniquity and roguery; scams so great, from the stealing of pension funds to the selling of junk bonds to the hijacking of nations, it is hard to believe it is happening. The detail of fraud is not so much interesting as incomprehensible to the non-criminal mind. Spelling mistakes creep in. Negatives where negatives should not be. The computer operator, the legal secretary, to whom the shameless effrontery of others so often is initially apparent, tends to stay silent. A bad dream induced by boredom, they tell themselves. It can’t be happening. Shut up, stay quiet, don’t rock the boat, look after yourself, keep the job. The world can’t be as bad as this, nor the people in it so villainous, so confident in their grey-suited villainy: the stories unfolding before my eyes upon the screen must surely be fiction.
And, after all, then the legal secretary, the computer operator, has, by virtue of training and inclination, no need for desperate action, seldom any personal craving for wealth or power, and finding so little villainy in themselves, even on close self-inspection, is not looking out for it in others. This may be a pleasant characteristic, but it is also dangerous. ‘I didn’t believe it; I didn’t want to rock the boat,’ are the initial pleas. ‘I thought they must know what they were doing; I was only obeying orders,’ the final ones. Good legal secretaries come too expensive to have their time wasted on coffee-making, but Brian Moss, a New Man in the home, was a Former Man in the office and liked Jelly to do it. Nor, when it came to it, did Jelly much mind. Brian Moss was too impatient to let the water boil and the coffee he made was lacklustre.
‘Excuse me,’ said Jelly later in the morning, when she was taking dictation.
‘Well, what is it? Grammar? Correct it as you go along. We have a lot of post to get through.’ Brian Moss was impatient. She liked the way his fingers tapped upon the table: imperative and irritable. It seemed to her the proper way for a man to be. He had just concluded a letter to a would-be father suing a Health Authority for causing his wife’s infertility. ‘My best regards to your wife. I hope the poodles are keeping bright and bushy-tailed.’
‘Poodles get their tails docked at birth,’ said Jelly. ‘Perhaps “bushy-tailed” is inappropriate.’
‘Replace it with some similar jocularity,’ said Brian Moss. ‘I leave it all to you.’
He stood behind Jelly’s chair and his hands slid round beneath her breasts, feeling the weight of each one. She felt her identity scatter as her pearls had scattered earlier in the day in the back of the Volvo. Sexual desire was inimical, it seemed, to single-mindedness.
‘You’re not wearing your pearls today,’ he said. ‘I like your pearls.’
‘They broke on the way to work this morning,’ said Angel, speaking through Jelly’s lips.
‘Please,’ begged Angelica, ‘not this too! Don’t mess this job up, as you did my marriage.’
‘Who, me?’ enquired Angel, all innocence. ‘I wasn’t even born when you were married.’
Angelica managed to manoeuvre the wavering Jelly out of the room and back to her desk. Brian Moss followed them both, believing them to be one.
The secretarial quarters at Catterwall & Moss were small, high-ceilinged squares of rooms looking out onto a soot-blackened wall, requiring always artificial light. Jelly’s was the partitioned end of the former Georgian library which served as Brian Moss’s office, which was grand, formal, old-fashioned, panelled in oak, but disproportioned as a result of that very partitioning. Brian Moss seldom entered the small room. He found it gloomy, not surprisingly. He spoke through the intercom and summoned whoever it was sat there: they changed with the years. Now he followed Jelly.
‘We’ve nowhere near finished the post,’ Brian Moss complained. ‘Some of these letters really have to go off today. You will just have to excuse the inexcusable, Miss White, if so it was, come back into my office and get on.’
Brian Moss looked at his secretary pleadingly, little-boy like. He had blue eyes and a face reckoned handsome, in the English manner: clean cut and under apparent control; his expression imbued with a gentle melancholy. At first Jelly did not reply: she was busy collecting personal belongings from her desk drawer; saving what was on the computer; evidently preparing the place for her successor.
‘Please,’ said Brian Moss. ‘I really am sorry. I shan’t lay hands on you again. Promise.’
It was in Brian Moss’s favour, Jelly told Angelica, that he was prepared to talk about his infringement of her body space. Many a man would maul you and then say nothing; would prefer to pretend, if the advances were rejected, that the advance had never occurred. Many a man, come to that, put in Angel, would spend a night with you and never refer to that event again either, and the woman, feeling rejected and diminished, would all too often collude and fall silent too. As if the very past were male, defined by the man’s memory of it, forget the female’s.
‘Do stop looking at me like that,’ he said. ‘Say something. Or, if you won’t, couldn’t we just get back to work?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Jelly. ‘According to the small print of my agency contract with you, I am free, in the event of sexual harassment, to terminate my employment without penalty.’
‘You’d have to prove sexual harassment,’ said Brian Moss, ‘and that would be difficult, even impossible. Your word against mine. Why do you think we agreed to that clause being there in the first place? Because it is meaningless, and because women like to see it there. It makes them believe they’re being taken seriously. But all that is by the by. I am actually a perfectly decent guy and don’t want to take advantage of you. You had your blouse unbuttoned so far down that I could see your nipples. And you’re not wearing a bra. So I didn’t think you’d mind. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’
Jelly quickly buttoned her blouse, which was indeed undone, but not to the extent Brian Moss suggested. Angel had no doubt managed to slip a button or so through a hole or so when she, Jelly, was thinking of something else. And how did she come to be bra-less? What Angel did was only vaguely recalled by Jelly, Angelica or Lady Rice, but the marks left upon the body – their nipples were sore and there were bite marks on their neck – stood between them and total forgetfulness. Jelly conceded that she might, albeit unknowingly, have provoked him, and consented to go back to work.
Brian Moss told Jelly a little about his wife, Oriole, whom he loved but who was so forgetful she would never even remember to comb her hair in the mornings, and would collect his children from school in a car into which she’d forgotten to put petrol. She was a danger to them. Once she’d left the iron on so it burned right through a ceiling; it was a regular occurrence for Oriole to let the bath overflow.
‘Would that count as unreasonable behaviour in a divorce court?’ Jelly asked, and Brian Moss looked quite disconcerted at the thought, and said he and Oriole were Catholics so there was no question of that anyway. But she now understood why he watched her own smooth, quick, certain movements with a kind of longing, a subdued passion for what was effective, efficient and reliable. She was pleased to see it. It was part of herself which had never in the past been properly appreciated.
Jelly worked late; so did Brian Moss: both of them in their separate rooms. The building was darkened. Computer screens gave off a luminous sheen; pot plants seemed to breathe, and to swell and diminish minutely with each breath.
Jelly could feel Angel whispering and nudging her: saying,
‘Look, here’s your chance. Do something! Take off your clothes; but leave on your suspender belt and stockings. Very nice too. And then just walk into Brian Moss’s office.’
‘But why?’ Jelly asked. ‘What would be the point of that?’
‘You’d get a rise,’ said Angel. ‘And you could make him do what you want.’
‘For someone as brazen as Angel,’ said Angelica, ‘she’s extremely naive. You’d just as likely find yourself fired by morning.’
‘You’re not here to earn a salary,’ murmured Lady Rice. ‘You’re here to make sure I get proper alimony from Edwin.’
‘What about revenge?’ asked Angel. ‘Edwin’s having a good time with Anthea. Anthea’s living in our house, sleeping in our bed –’
‘Don’t make me think about it,’ said Jelly, bile rising in her throat.
‘Brian Moss could stop you thinking about it,’ said Angel. ‘He could stop you thinking about it for at least two hours. Think how well Ram did only this morning. If one man fancies you, another man will. Make the most of it.’
‘Brian Moss has a wife at home,’ said Jelly. ‘I don’t do things like that. I don’t go with married men. Because Lady Rice is unhappy, why should Oriole Moss be unhappy, too?’
‘For that very reason,’ gritted Angel, bad Angel, avenging Angel, in Jelly’s ear. ‘If you spread the misery wide, you make it thinner for yourself,’ and Angel bit into the base of Jelly’s thumb so hard there was a mark for days, almost as sore as her breasts where Ram had pecked and nibbled at them.
‘I won’t do any such thing,’ said Jelly. ‘Angelica is right. I’d only get fired. That’s what happens in office romances.’
‘This is not an office romance,’ gritted Angel. ‘It is you fucking your boss in your own best interests.’
‘No,’ said Jelly.
‘But I want to. I mean to,’ yelled Angel in her head, drowning out reason. ‘I want Brian Moss now, you mean old bitch, and I’ll have him.’
‘Shut up,’ said Jelly, biting the other thumb. Lady Rice was humming to herself somewhere else; some sad, melancholy tune. ‘Don’t put this pressure on me. I’m tied to the mast, understand? And I’m not listening to you. I can cope with Lady Rice, I can cope with Angelica, but you – you’re a menace! Get out of my life!’
‘The ingratitude!’ shrieked Angel. ‘After all I did for you! You’d never have had the nerve and you know you loved it!’
‘I’m going home now,’ called out Brian Moss to Jelly White. ‘Must be home to bath the babies.’
‘That’s fine,’ called his secretary in reply. ‘I’ll turn the lights off and set the alarm.’
Brian went home by train. Jelly took the Underground, squashed with a thousand others into a space fit for a hundred, the smell of despair adding humidity to the air she breathed. How do I escape, how do I not do this? How not to be herded, squashed, insulted, abused? See, there’s the hem of my coat caught in the door: it will brush through the soot of ancient tunnels: that woman’s high heel driving between my toes, removing skin: that man’s crotch, that woman’s arse, rubbing against mine. We share the same torment, rebreathe each other’s air, use the strategies of the traumatised to escape all remembrance of the journey: as the slaves were whipped to the pyramids, simply for the fun of it, the pain of it, for a whipped slave works half as well, but a man must know when he’s beaten. So have his masters from the beginning of time insisted on the humiliation of their workforce. These days, through their Lodges and Confederations, they have got together over champagne and devised the public transport they never travel in to whip the workers to work: and are not jobs short and is not the living hard and precarious, and who can argue any more?
Do we not suffer? – the multi-voiced air of the metro rose to heaven, spoke to heaven – ‘Who will save us?’ But there came no reply. Suffering does not necessarily suggest its own relief: because things start does not mean they must end: oppression does not necessitate the rise of the hero, nor sin its saviour. And besides, everyone disliked each other too much to do anything about any of it. White hated black, black hated white, and all stations in between: parent hated child, child hated parent; police hated citizen, citizen hated police, man hated woman, woman hated man, the old hated the young, the young hated the old, and everyone hated the men who cried aloud, ‘Mind the doors, please,’ and sometimes with a strong hand in the middle of some wretch’s back – serve them right! – shoved yet another human unit to judder up against the sighing, sodden, juddering mass inside. In London, in Tokyo, in Moscow, or New York, in Sydney, Johannesburg or Toronto, in Seoul and Samarkand it is the same.
Thus Jelly travelled to Bond Street Station where she alighted. By the time she arrived at The Claremont she imagined she would, as usual, be Lady Angelica Rice again, albeit incognito, albeit with bruised and painful breasts and a sore chin. It had been a long day, starting with Ram, ending with jam. Angel laughed at the thought. She skittered into The Claremont and the doorman looked after her, not recognising her as Lady Rice, and wondering what agency she was from and why he had no commission.
‘You can’t live at The Claremont for ever, paying your bill by false pretences,’ said Jelly to Lady Rice. ‘A girl needs her own house and home, if only to put a red light above the door; write “model” on the wall. You don’t take enough notice of your own predicament.’
But Lady Rice wasn’t listening. She was weeping again.