Begin again, p.19
Begin Again, page 19
“Yes, was it? As a matter of fact, I haven’t read any of his.”
“Oh, haven’t you? You ought to try them. I always look out for them.”
“Yes. Although as a matter of fact I never do read detective stories.” It was the simple truth, so it was a pity it sounded both crushing and snobbish. But anyway, thought Florence unkindly, I didn’t come here for light chat, with all that work waiting upstairs.
“Well, Miss Somerset, you wished to see me about something?” Efficiency rose uppermost again.
“Yes. That is—I wanted to make a suggestion.”
“Oh. Yes?” Miss Stevens’ tone was absolutely noncommittal.
“We—at least I mean I—” (better not drag Miss Conway into it perhaps) “seem to spend an awful lot of time running up and downstairs to the filing cabinets. I mean we’re always having to go down there to check up things. So I thought—at least, don’t you think it would be better—if— since our department’s stuff is quite separate, I mean—if we could have a filing cabinet of our own upstairs?” Without pausing for Miss Stevens’ comment, Florence, once launched, became fatally enthusiastic and voluble. “You see, then everything would be to hand—and we could do the filing ourself, and it would mean less work for Miss Smith, and then when we wanted to look up something it wouldn’t mean looking through thousands of things that have absolutely nothing to do—”
“Just a moment, Miss Somerset.” Miss Stevens firmly stemmed the torrent of Florence’s eloquence. “I don’t think you quite realize that, in a big office like this, no department’s work is separate in any real sense. All are interdependent and, of course, subject to the head office.”
(Poor Florence! How was she to have realized that the independence of her department was entirely the wrong note to have stressed, that it was just the occasional suggestion of this, in fact, in Miss Locke’s attitude that goaded to the point of fury her immediate superior, Miss Stevens.)
“Oh,” said Florence, with an ill-timed effort at persuasiveness, “but really, you know, in practice our work is quite separate, isn’t it?”
She waited for an assent that did not come. Instead Miss Stevens inquired, “Have you had any experience of filing yourself, Miss Somerset?”
“Well—er—no, actually not.”
“Well, can you say that you thoroughly understand the system on which our filing is worked?”
“I expect I—I mean, it wouldn’t be very difficult just to invent a system just for our department. I mean, since we’d be the only people handling it. . . .” The filing system in use downstairs had always seemed to Florence completely inexplicable and arbitrary. Thankfully conscious that it was not her job to understand it she had been accustomed to refer for direction to Miss Smith.
“Invent a system!” Miss Stevens laughed kindly. “I don’t think we could run a department on an amateur filing system very satisfactorily.”
A boiling sense of injustice swelled up in Florence. It was all very well for some one who sat in a chair and had a secretary of her own to run about for her to dismiss the idea so lightly. It was all very well to suggest the filing would be in a muddle if she did it—why should it, why in heaven’s name should it? She had as much—more—brains than any one who had invented a rotten system. Why couldn’t she—why shouldn’t she—it was a shame not to listen properly—they weren’t giving her a chance—it wasn’t fair. . . .
All pretence at a suitably subordinate manner vanished. The perfect secretary (at best an elusive dream) went up in smoke.
“Well, I think,” said Florence with a reckless and intensely satisfying emphasis on the “I,” “that it’s a very good idea and you ought at least to give it a trial!”
Miss Stevens raised her eyebrows and there was a nasty silence. At last, in an icy voice, she said:
“Perhaps, Miss Somerset, if you were to occupy yourself with training your memory instead of trying to reorganize the office you would not find that you wasted so much of your time.”
This not unmerited rebuke had a quite startling effect on Florence. She bounced up in her chair, turned red in the face, and exclaimed hoarsely: “I don’t think it’s worth my while. I think I’ll be leaving here anyway.” Then she blew her nose violently, dropping at the same time a pencil on the floor. It rolled away under a desk.
Miss Stevens raised her eyebrows. “Just as you like, Miss Somerset. I dare say you’re wise.” She turned away and reached for her scribbling-block. “I’ll send your notice in to Mr. Charles, shall I?” She was quite calm and unimpressed.
“Thank you,” said Florence, suddenly deciding, a little tardily, to emulate Miss Stevens’s collected manner.
“Would you like to leave at the end of the week or the month? You have a right to leave at the end of the week, but it is more convenient for us, of course, if you stay the month out.”
“Very well,” said Florence, feeling exactly like a dismissed cook, promising grudgingly to “oblige” her employer a little longer.
“So I think that is all for this morning, isn’t it, Miss Somerset?” It was the usual formula of dismissal.
“Thank you,” said Florence a little meaninglessly, and somehow got herself out of the room (abandoning the pencil). On the stairs she thought, irrelevantly, that she must probably have a temperature.
“I’m leaving,” she announced abruptly to Miss Conway. It was quite a bombshell.
“Why, good gracious! She didn’t want you to go just because of that silly idea about the filing?” cried Miss Conway, amazed. “Silly” slipped out by mistake, but Florence did not care or notice.
“No. At least, not exactly. I sacked myself actually. I shouldn’t think she was sorry. As far as I remember I was very rude.”
“Were you really?” Miss Conway, accustomed to a nervous and diffident Florence, was intrigued. “What did you say?”
“I don’t really remember.” Florence slumped down in her chair, feeling that all she wanted in the world was to lie quite flat and be left alone.
“Well, I dare say you’re right,” said Miss Conway after a moment’s pause, echoing unconsciously Miss Stevens’s verdict on the situation. “I don’t think—you’ll excuse my saying this, won’t you, Miss Somerset?—that you’re altogether cut out for office work, are you? I expect you’ve felt that yourself sometimes. You’re clever, aren’t you?”
She was not being sarcastic.
“They used to think so at Oxford,” said Florence bitterly.
“Well, there you are,” said Miss Conway sagely, “you’ve been up to the University, you see. You’re different from most of us here. We left school at sixteen and started in the filing office. It’s different, you see, for us.”
“If what you’re suggesting is true, it’s the most frightful criticism of a University education.”
“Have a bit of chocolate, won’t you?”
Florence took the chocolate, not wanting it in the least, and munched it mechanically. Presently she said, “I don’t suppose it’s altogether Oxford. I expect I should have been a bloody bad secretary anyway.”
Miss Conway, profoundly shocked at Florence’s language, said, “You’re feeling rotten, aren’t you? Why don’t you go and lie down for a bit and then go home?”
“How can I with all this work? I haven’t begun yet.”
“Perhaps I could help you out with some of it. What is it all?”
“God knows. Millions of frightful letters. I think I’d better not go to the party I was going to this afternoon. I think I’d better stay here and type till midnight.”
“Here, let me look at it,” said Miss Conway, very properly disregarding this suggestion and beginning rapidly and efficiently to sift the pile in front of Florence. “This can wait—this isn’t important—this must go and this and this. . . . You have got a lot, haven’t you?”
“Some of it’s yesterday’s,” said Florence, concealing the fact that a little of it was actually the day before yesterday’s.
“I’m afraid you’ve missed the American mail with some of this. Well, never mind. Since we have missed it there’s no particular hurry now. I wouldn’t let Miss Locke know.”
“I say, why should you bother? I mean it’s awfully nice of you but you oughtn’t to bother over it. It’s not your work.”
“That’s all right, Miss Somerset. I haven’t very much of my own this morning. Now I wonder if I can manage to read your shorthand? I could easily finish off these for you.” Miss Conway picked up all the pile she had sorted as urgent.
“Oh, it’s awfully nice of you. But I shouldn’t think you possibly could. I can’t myself very often.”
“Let me look at your notebook. Oh, I think I can read this all right.”
“How marvellous of you,” said Florence. Her admiration of such an extraordinary talent was profound.
“I’m used to other people’s outlines, you see. I give Miss Smith a lesson now and then. Besides when you know the work as well as I do. . . .” There was not the slightest trace of boastfulness or superiority in her manner. Just a plain statement of fact.
“Look, Miss Somerset. You lend me your notebook and I’ll just finish off this little lot. And while I’m doing it you can be looking out the queries we want and bringing the index up to date.”
“It’s frightfully nice of you,” said Florence gratefully. Miss Conway deftly inserted note-paper and carbon and was immediately away at her usual speed. Sometimes she checked and frowned thoughtfully at Florence’s scribblings. The solution (or possibly, thought Florence, a neat alternative?) was never very long in coming.
Presently Miss Conway said, “That book of Fraser’s— you needn’t bother to look up the title—it was called ‘Firm Furrow’ wasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, that was it. Of course—I ought to have remembered. Wasn’t it good?”
“Was it? I didn’t read it. I just saw it lying round here one day.”
Florence marveled.
“Can you be sending it down to the mail, Miss Somerset? They like parcels by twelve on Saturdays you know.”
“Oh, bother! Miss Stevens has it. I ought to have asked for it when I was there—I forgot.”
Miss Conway understood very well Florence’s reluctance to reapproach Miss Stevens.
“All right, never mind,” she said, and presently Florence heard her telephoning to the mailing clerk, “I say, Elsie, be an angel and get a manuscript called ‘Firm Furrow’ out of old Stevens, will you, for us? We don’t want to stir up the old girl again this morning. You will, won’t you? That’s a good girl.”
Florence thanked her silently for that blessed “we.”
Miss Conway’s fingers pounded the keys faster and faster, while Florence continued her checking in a sort of trance. She could not as yet realize what she had done, nor whether she was glad or sorry. She thought about how dirty her fingernails were and whether she could stop and buy some more handkerchiefs on the way to the station.
At twelve o’clock Miss Locke came into the room.
“Is it true that you’ve just told Miss Stevens you’re leaving, Miss Somerset?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why didn’t you come to me about it first?” Miss Locke, her authority slighted, spoke more sharply than was perhaps necessary. It had been unpleasant to learn the news second-hand and by chance from Miss Stevens. “After all, you work for me, don’t you, not Miss Stevens. You should have come to me first.”
Miss Locke was certainly not prepared for the effect of this speech on Florence, who suddenly, quite without warning, flung the handful of index cards she was holding onto the ground and exclaimed wildly, unpardonably,
“Oh, for God’s sake leave me alone for one second. Isn’t it sufficient that I’m jolly well going as soon as I can?”
Miss Conway stopped typing. Her mouth fell open. Miss Locke gazed in dismay at the distorted face of her usually meek secretary. The index cards lay on the floor and nobody picked them up.
“Dear me,” said Miss Locke at length, mildly (for she was a kind woman, and naturally distressed by the spectacle of so much misery, so much rage), “dear me, Miss Somerset. I think you’ll be all the better for a little holiday, won’t you?”
“I’m going now—this minute, this second,” cried Florence. Tears were now streaming down her face. She knew she was behaving inexcusably and took a savage delight in so doing. “I shan’t stay here any longer.” She gave her typewriter an angry push. “I can’t stand it a moment more. I’ve loathed and hated every minute—yes, I dare say it’s all my fault, don’t say so, I know what you think.” She gave a savage sniff. It was a lamentable scene.
“She’s been feeling rotten all day,” put in Miss Conway.
“Perhaps you’d better go home, Miss Somerset.”
“I will. I jolly well will,” said Florence, and rushed in a blundering and utterly undignified way from the room.
For a moment after she had gone both Miss Locke and Miss Conway were too taken aback to speak. They gazed mutely at Florence’s disordered desk, at the typewriter pushed awry, at the littered floor.
“Dear me,” said Miss Locke again at length. “I’m afraid she’s left things in rather a muddle. What a funny way to behave.”
“She’s usually ever so quiet.”
“Well, well.” Miss Locke shrugged her shoulders. “It’s rather awkward. I wanted her to do a few urgent letters for me. . . .”
“Can I help you, Miss Locke?”
• • • • • • •
Huddled on the top of a bus, Paddington-bound, Florence shivered and scrubbed at her eyes. Anyway she wasn’t going back to the empty flat to think about nothing else all the week-end. She was going to Leslie’s party if she died in the attempt.
Chapter X
I
“I wonder what you’ll think of Florence now,” said Leslie to her mother as they sat in the summer-house on the Saturday morning of the party. “She’s an awfully interesting sort of person, I always think. She gets a lot out of things.” Her glance strayed thoughtfully to a vivid bed of tulips, while she tried to imagine her London friends in these sylvan surroundings. “You must get her to talk to you about her novel.”
“Yes, I’m very interested in it. It’s very clever of her to find the time to write if she’s working all day.”
“Well, mummy, when you care about a thing, you know —I mean really care. . . . Besides Florence and Jane take their work in their stride. I mean I’d never describe them as being sort of chained to their work at all. Their real life—I mean their real life,” said Leslie with meaning, “goes on all the time beside it.”
Mrs. Fisher digested these remarks in a kind silence.
“You won’t like Jane quite so much.”
“Won’t I, dear?” Mrs. Fisher’s lips twitched, but Leslie detected no amusement in her mother’s accustomed interest.
“No. Although I think she’s a very sort of admirable person in a way. I mean I think she has a quite unusual talent for living. I can’t quite express what I mean. It’s something to do with going right on her way and never minding about other people at all.”
“How nice for her, darling.”
“Yes. I don’t expect you see quite what I mean. As a matter of fact, I don’t expect you will when you meet her either. It isn’t very obvious, and people—especially women—don’t always like her very much at first.”
“Dear me. Well, I hope I shall be clever enough to see it fairly soon.”
Leslie glanced sharply at her mother.
“Well, anyway, mummy, you’ll like seeing them for yourself, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes, dear. Thank you. I shall be very interested to see Florence again. I’ve hardly seen her since she came to stay here once when she was quite a little girl.”
“Quite a little girl? Oh, you mean when she was about fifteen. Oh, but of course she’s quite different now. She’s developed enormously. Mentally, I mean, of course.”
“I remember she had very decided views about things then. She was very down on circuses, I remember. Does she still think them so cruel? It was rather awkward at the time, because I had got tickets for you both for Olympia. I had to cancel them.”
“Circuses? I don’t know whether she still minds about them. But I’m glad you remember her as quite an exceptional person.”
“Oh, yes. Quite.”
As a matter of fact, all my friends are rather exceptional, thought Leslie, selecting carefully a blade of grass to chew.
“And she used to write long letters every day to a friend. Even while she was here, every single day. Such devotion, I thought.”
“Oh, mummy! That wasn’t a friend. I mean, she was school games captain,” said Leslie seriously. “It was the most unhealthy type of devotion. It was a jolly good thing she got over it when she did. It might have warped her whole character.” Respecting her mother’s innocence, Leslie said no more.
“Really, dear? Well then, as you say, it was lucky she recovered. I remember thinking at the time that it probably wouldn’t last. I shall enjoy meeting her again.”
There was a pause.
“I think it should be a nice party,” said Leslie hopefully.
“I’m sure it will, dear. Although it seems rather a long way for people to come just for half a day, but nobody thinks much of that nowadays, I know. Leslie, I shan’t bother to stay with you all very long. I’ll just be here to meet them all when they arrive and then—”
“Oh, but mummy! You’re meant to stay. Darling, really you are. You really must. At any rate, long enough to talk to them a bit. I want you to hear about living in London and things from them all. And see for yourself that they’re not just rackety and overworked, but people who—who— well, who get something out of life. You will stay, won’t you, mummy?”
Mrs. Fisher wondered how long it would take her to begin to feel dead and buried.
“Well, but, Leslie, they’ll be wanting to play tennis—”
“You must talk to them while they’re sitting out,” said Leslie earnestly. “To Jane and Florence, of course specially. They can tell you all about the sort of life they lead in London. It would be sort of helpful, wouldn’t it?”
