The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner
Читать онлайн книгу.
he said. He paused. “As a matter of fact, Jane, I’ve moved into a small place” — still unable to say “furnished room” — “and I share the phone with the other tenants of the house. I’ll jot the number down tonight and give it to you in the morning.”
“Fine, Mr. Fowler,” she answered smiling, rejoicing in his victory over his pride. “I’ll send your new address and phone number down to Personnel tomorrow.”
When she had left he suddenly thought of a couple of wonderful sentences for his novel. Jason, remembering that dignity was a defence, reassessed his relationship with the older man. He saw now that Major Pawley’s dignity was not innate, but was a cloak donned by his superior to hide his abject terror.
He should put that down somewhere. But even as he reached for a sheet of blank paper he changed his mind. To hell with it; it was crappy writing. Ph.D writing. What was he going to write — a novel or an esoteric criticism for the little magazines? He’d work on Lead Them Through the Deep as soon as he got back to his room tonight.
He picked up an interdepartmental bulletin Jane had left on his desk and glanced at the usual bumf about staff changes, retirement and illnesses among those employed by Matheson-Corbett’s ten or twelve trade magazines. He was about to throw it in his wastebasket when his eye was arrested by an item at the bottom of the page. It said that G. G. MacFarlane, associate editor of Living, was retiring at the end of the month for reasons of health, after thirty-one years with the company. His successor would be Robert Clauser, currently editor of the trade magazine Motel and Motor Court Monthly.
Clauser! How could they promote that ex-bookkeeper to a job on the company’s biggest magazine? That was the unfairness of all large corporations, the promotion of people whose names came up through the sleazy machinations of office politics, with no regard for the brushing aside of others more fitted for the job. Why, Clauser couldn’t write a decent English paragraph, and now he had been promoted to a job that was largely a writing one.
Moving on to Living, the company’s prestige consumer magazine, had been Walter’s ambition since he joined the company. His newspaper background and the articles he had sold to magazines during a brief fling at freelance writing had shown him that the writing end of the magazine business was his particular forte.
Apparently the top brass didn’t agree with him. For five years he had been forgotten in this little corporate cul-de-sac as editor of Real Estate News, a stodgy little sheet read only by builders, housing contractors, and mortgage houses. His only “public” consisted of these people and a handful of new house owners and prospective house buyers who had been inveigled into buying a subscription.
Walter pulled the small pile of mail towards him, took a letter opener from a drawer, and began opening the letters.
The first two were objections to a story the previous month that decried the substitution of frame for brick construction in a housing development outside a neighbouring city. The first one was virulent in its condemnation of himself as a judge of building problems. It ended with that favourite phrase of letters-to-the-editor writers, “Cancel my subscription immediately!” Walter laughed, wishing it was in his power to do just that.
The second letter carried the signature of a lumber company president whose firm was a regular advertiser in the magazine. Instead of virulence it relied on the veiled threat of the polite executive coward. Walter crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the basket.
The rest of the mail consisted of brochures advertising the virtues of pre-cast stone and aluminum siding. There were three letters from new home owners wanting information on waterproofing a cement block basement wall, on the best way to age cedar shingles, and what to do about a humped hardwood floor. Beneath these he found an unopened envelope addressed to him personally, and he knew it was from his lawyers.
He read it slowly, amused by its juridical tone. There had been a slight hitch in the mortgage provisions and the buyer and his lawyer were holding a meeting with his own lawyer on Monday next. Would he also like to attend? There were a couple of paragraphs at the end of the letter regarding his fire insurance policy and a typographical error about taxes in the sale documents, which would have to be cleared up.
He rang for Jane, and when she entered he indicated that he had some dictation.
“You haven’t forgotten the trade editors’ conference this afternoon, Mr. Fowler?” she asked.
“I had, but I’ll attend it. Two-thirty, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
When she had sat down he dictated a letter to his lawyers. Then his eye fell on the letter from the man who had told him to cancel his subscription. He picked it up and read the name of the angry subscriber.
“Take another letter, Jane,” he said. After reading her the name and address he continued: “Mr. Collins, colon, Go to hell, period.” Sign it, “Yours vengefully, comma, Walter Fowler, editor.” Crumpling Mr. Collins’s letter in his hand and flinging it into a corner he said, “That’ll be all, Jane. Type the letter to the lawyers on plain paper and the one to that last gentleman on a Real Estate News letterhead.”
He saw his secretary purse her lips around a smile as she left the office. He sat back and wondered why he had let his own anger and frustration make him dictate such a letter to the unknown Mr. Collins. And why hadn’t he written an equally nasty letter to the president of the lumber firm? Yes, why hadn’t he? He knew the answer to that. Because the lumber dealer was a big advertiser, and would have him fired from the company if he did. He swung his swivel chair forward and stamped his feet on the floor. “You’re all guts, Fowler,” he said to himself. “All little-cog-in-the-big-wheel guts!”
He picked up the three letters seeking building and maintenance information and walked across the outer office to Grant McKay’s desk, where he placed the letters before the grey-haired old man who occupied it.
“How’s things this morning, Mac?” he asked.
“Not bad, Walter. Great day, isn’t it? Almost the first real spring day we’ve had so far.”
Walter pulled a chair from against the wall and sat down opposite the old man. “Did you read the bulletin this morning, Mac?”
“I glanced through it. Couldn’t say I read it.”
“They’ve given MacFarlane’s job down at Living to Bob Clauser.”
“I know, Walt. I heard about it last week.”
“The guy knows nothing about writing magazine copy. Here they are trying to bring the book’s circulation up to a half-million by the end of the year and they promote a dud like that to associate editor. George MacFarlane used to rewrite half the stories Living bought, especially the stuff from ministers’ wives and literary schoolteachers. That job needs a good journeyman journalist who can write bright readable English, not a son of a bitch who visits Matheson’s house and plays the recorder in the family band and secretly screws Mrs. Matheson on the side.”
Grant smiled and glanced quickly around the office, habitually searching out an eavesdropper. “It’s the old story, Walt. You know it as well as I. Naturally Matheson, who isn’t a publisher anyway, but a guy who sucked his way up from the accounting office, is going to give a promotion to a family friend —”
“Friend!” Walter shouted.
McKay glanced about him and lowered his voice. “Whether what you say about Clauser and Mrs. Matheson is true or not, that’s the way these things go. Just wait for six months; Clauser won’t last.” He shifted some papers on his desk with a nervous gesture. “You only survive, Walt, if you learn to roll with the punches. Wait and see what happens.”
It was on the tip of Walter’s tongue to say “What, wait the way you’ve done for thirty-five years?” But he realized he couldn’t hurt the old man like that.
He stood up and turned to go back to his office, seething with the injustice of Clauser’s appointment.
Grant said, “In six