Landlocked. Doris Lessing
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I simply will not be a secretary – the essence of a good one being (and he most particularly will demand this from now on) that she should deliver herself to the work heart and soul. I’ll stay on as a typist or something, but that’s all.
Mr Robinson was still waiting for her to produce a more sensible excuse. By now he had understood she would not be his secretary, but was going to show his annoyance by insisting on ‘explanations’.
‘Damn that sun,’ he muttered, half-glancing at Martha to suggest she should draw the curtains. She had already risen, when he remembered that her sitting there before him, in the clients’ chair, meant she was temporarily in a different role. He jumped up and tugged oatmeal-coloured curtains across the whole wall; so now the sun showed in a thousand tiny lines of sharp yellow light criss-cross over darkish linen.
He sat down again, smiling a small quizzical smile. Martha noted it with dismay, noted she was softening: the smile said: Are you being difficult perhaps? Do you want to be persuaded into it? Do tell me …
She felt absurd, theatrical, ridiculous. She knew if she said ‘yes’ to this job it would be one of the bad, serious decisions of her life. She did not know why: it simply was so. Her life could be changed by it – in the wrong way. She knew this. And it was also pompous and melodramatic to refuse, and she felt silly.
‘Listen, Mrs Hesse: the war’s on its last legs, that’s obvious. The senior partners will be coming home any minute now. In a year from now this firm will have taken all this floor and the floor above – it will be the biggest legal firm in the city. There’ll be five working partners and that’ll mean five personal secretaries and I reckon about ten typists and a couple of accountants.’ His voice was full of pride. A long way was Mr Robinson from the shabby old building in Founders’ Street (still only four or five hundred yards away in space, however) the shabby old rooms, the half-dozen typists. And a long way was he in imagination from the present arrangement of two smart rooms filled by Mr Robinson, Mrs Buss, Mrs Hesse. No, he was already the conqueror of two large modern glass-spread floors filled to the brim with lawyers, accountants and secretaries: ‘the biggest legal firm in the city’.
And he wanted Martha to be thrilled with him. The trouble was, she was thrilled. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to give in.
‘I’m awfully sorry, Mr Robinson,’ she said, awkwardly, but firm enough. He looked at her, hurt. To hide the red that flamed over his face, he jumped up from his chair and began rooting in a filing cabinet. ‘I can’t find,’ he muttered, ‘the Condamine Mining Company file.’
Martha sat on a moment, looking at the Condamine file which was immediately in front of her on his desk. Then she stood up. ‘Look, Mr Robinson,’ she was beginning, when he bent down to pick up a paper lying on the floor. As he straightened again, he banged his head hard on the sharp corner of a projecting drawer.
The bang went through Martha in a wave of sickness. As for him, he stood gripping the drawer with both hands, swaying with faintness, his face white, his closed eyelids squeezing out tears of pain. Martha’s teeth clenched with the need to comfort, her arms were held in to her waist to stop them going around him – and she said nothing, not a word, nothing. She stood like a pillar of cold observation. At least, she thought, I must avert my eyes from … She turned herself, went to the window, twitched back a corner of the oatmeal linen, and looked out over the stream of cars and lorries, over roofs, over to the black man who steadily bent and straightened, bent and straightened, the sun glinting red on his black polished chest and back, and sliding red streaks along his scythe. The grass fell in jade-green swathes, frothy with white flowers, on either side of him, and the smell of cut grass wafted in over the thick sweet smells of tobacco, sweat, ash, heated wood – Martha heard Mr Robinson’s breathing steady and settle. She felt sick with his sickness, but could not think of anything to do. If he hated her for her detachment from his pain, he was right. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked at last, and he said, with difficulty, ‘Yes, thanks.’ Off he went, out of the office, striding with his long spring-like stride, and she thought: Of course, he’s gone to get himself some water, I should have thought of it.
When he came back, he gave her a look of cold dislike, which she knew she had earned.
‘Do you want to leave altogether?’ he asked, sliding himself back into his chair, and slamming in drawers everywhere around him. On his forehead was a red bump in the middle of which was a blackish contusion, oozing blood. He sat dabbing at it.
‘Not unless you want me to,’ she said, remaining where she was, by the curtains.
‘If you think I’m not offering you enough money, then I think you’re being unreasonable.’
Since he was offering her Mrs Buss’s salary, he was more than reasonable.
‘It’s not that – look, it’s like this, I don’t think you quite realize just how marvellous Mrs Buss is – was, I don’t think you’ve got any idea.’
He gave her one of his quick assessing glances, quick from shyness, not from acuity, and concluded that the awkwardness of her manner meant insincerity. He said coldly: ‘My dear Mrs Hesse, you aren’t suggesting I don’t know Mrs Buss’s worth, surely? I’ve never in my life had anyone like that working for me, and I’m sure I never will. But now she’s gone, I can confess in confidence that sometimes it was too much of a good thing. I mean, sometimes I didn’t feel good enough for her – as for being late in the morning, I wouldn’t have dared! …’ He gave a hopeful laugh; she joined him emphatically. ‘I’m not asking you to be Mrs Buss, believe you me!’ Here he began a hasty uncoordinated shoving about of his files and papers all over the big surface of his slippery desk, which meant, as Martha knew (with an increasing exasperation which was compounded strongly, against her will, with affection) look, this is what I want, I want to be looked after as Mrs Buss did, just look at the mess I’m getting into! The papers, pushed too hard, went fluttering off to the floor, and Martha bent to pick them up, feeling ridiculous, because now Mr Robinson got up and bent too, cautious of his head though, and even giving the dangerous drawer humorous glances for Martha’s benefit, just as she had put up her hand backwards to touch her shoulderblade, in a sort of explanation to him. For a few moments, these two bobbed up and down, like a couple of feeding hens, Martha thought, picking up the papers that lay everywhere in the most touching scene of mutual harmony and good will. Luckily the telephone in the outer office rang, and Martha was released to answer it. ‘Robinson, Daniel and Cohen,’ said Martha, into the black tube, and Mrs Quest said dramatically: ‘Matty, is that you? You must come at once!’
Martha sat down, enquired: ‘Is he ill again then?’ and drew towards her a sheet of paper, adding pennies to pennies, shillings to shillings, and – since this was one of the firm’s big accounts – hundreds of pounds to hundreds of pounds. Mrs Quest had already rung twice that day, first to say that Mr Quest was having a bad spell and Martha must be prepared to come at any moment; and again to say that Mr Quest had turned the corner.
Martha was thinking that something had been forgotten in the interview with Mr Robinson: she was being paid an extra ten pounds a month to do the books. But now there would be accountants, and he would be entirely in the right to deduct ten pounds from her salary.
‘Matty, are you there?’
‘Of course I’m here.’
‘I’m waiting for the doctor.’
‘Oh, are you?’
‘Well, if you’ve got things to do, do them quickly, because you did say you’d come, and what with one thing and another I’m run off my feet. And I suppose you haven’t had any lunch again either.’
The sheer lunacy of this conversation went no deeper than the surface of Martha’s sensibilities. ‘I’ll be over on the dot,’ she said soothingly, and would have continued to soothe, if Mr Robinson had not abruptly arrived in the central office exclaiming: ‘Mrs Hesse!’ before he saw she was still on the telephone. Martha covered the mouthpiece and said: ‘Yes, Mr Robinson?’
‘When you’ve finished,’ he