He suddenly imagined he was in the King’s Theatre, at a performance of Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Tinkerbell’s light was fading. He stepped forward and said, “Clap your hands if you believe in freedom.” From every corner of the theatre there arose a great sound of clapping, and it lasted for a long time, and it rose to the height of the theatre and beyond, and it came from the heart.
Male Networking
Stuart’s interview was scheduled for ten o’clock. When he arrived at nine-thirty, Faith was in the waiting room.
“I decided to come early,” said Faith. “Elaine’s been in five minutes already.”
“It’s always best to be early,” said Stuart, lowering himself into one of the government-issue chairs.
“Oh yes,” said Faith. “The early bird catches the worm etcetera etcetera.”
Stuart had long been aware of Faith’s annoying habit of adding several etceteras to any observation. In his state of anxiety, and with the awareness that nothing he could do now would affect the outcome of the selection procedure, he added his own etcetera out of sheer recklessness. “I suppose they’re going to ask us our view on various things etcetera,” he said.
Faith did not appear to notice the obvious mimicry. “Yes, they can ask anything at all. Except for things that are not allowed, of course, such as where you went to university and so on. Things that used to carry ridiculous weight.”
“Yes,” said Stuart, and then added, “McGill in your case, I believe.”
Faith looked at him sideways, unable to decide whether he was being sarcastic or not. “Anyway,” she said. “One of the reasons I came early was so that she’d be able to tell me what questions they asked. She can tell me while you’re inside for your interview.”
Stuart narrowed his eyes. “But that’s not fair,” he said. “You’ll have an advantage. I won’t be able to ask her what to expect.”
Faith thought for a moment. “Well, you’ve had other advantages. All we want is a level playing field.”
Stuart mentally counted to ten before he responded. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what those advantages are. Just tell me.”
“Male networking, for one.”
Stuart stared at her. “What networking?” he asked. “And how? How do I network?”
Faith smiled. “How do I know?”
“But you’ve just accused me of something; you’ve just accused me of networking. Tell me how I network. When? Where? How? With whom? Tell me.”
“You can’t expect me to know the details,” said Faith. “Secret societies probably. I imagine that you belong to a couple of secret societies – most men in Edinburgh do.”
“Name them,” said Stuart.
“How can you expect me to name them?” answered Faith. “They’re secret, aren’t they? A secret society that lets people know its name would be a pretty weak secret society.”
“So how do you know they exist?” pressed Stuart.
“Oh, they exist all right,” Faith said. “They exist to help men get an advantage over women.” She paused. “Do you have lunch with your friends?”
Stuart shrugged. “Yes, sometimes.”
“Well, there you are. That’s networking. Men who have lunch with one another network. That’s how they do it.”
“So, men can’t have lunch with one another. Can women have lunch?”
“Of course they can.”
“But men can’t?”
“That’s different. Women don’t network when they have lunch etcetera etcetera.”
Stuart looked incredulous. “I see.” But then he thought: Yes, it’s true men have excluded women from so much in the past; they have been massively unjust. And if women were doing the same things now that men used to do – and still do in many cases – then he had no grounds to be indignant. Men could hardly complain after such a long history of discrimination.
He looked down at the ground. He realised that what he was now feeling – this sense of being excluded, this sense of being treated unfairly – was exactly what women had been obliged to put up with for years. And it was painful, just as it had been painful for them.
They sat in silence for the next twenty minutes. Then the door opened and Elaine emerged. She was smiling, and she winked conspiratorially at Faith. She did not look at Stuart.
Stuart was called in. There was the Board, all three of them, seated on the other side of a large square table, facing the candidate’s seat. In the chair was the Supreme Head of Personnel herself, flanked on one side by the Deputy Supreme Head of Personnel, and on the other by a thin woman with grey hair who was introduced as the external assessor. After Stuart was seated, the Supreme Head of Personnel said, “Well, Mr. Pollock, you’re applying for this very senior post – may I ask you: what makes you think you’re the right person for this job?”
Stuart felt his heart beating hard within him. “If you want an honest answer, then it’s this: I think I’m the best person for this post because the other two candidates are, well, not very impressive.”
The Supreme Head of Personnel drew in her breath sharply. “Really, Mr. Pollock, it’s not for you to judge other applicants. That’s quite out of line.”
“Is it?” said Stuart. “Well, is it out of line to point out that one of the other applicants can’t do long division? Or that the other is a classic operator? Yes? Is that out of line? I suspect it is. But I don’t really care, you see, because I know that you’ve already decided whom you’re going to appoint.” He paused. “No, don’t look so outraged. You have. And I have absolutely no chance at all of appointment because this isn’t about merit any more. We’ve given up on merit and it’s all a question of who you are or where you’re from. Just like the old days! Isn’t that amazing – we spent a long time trying to overcome that sort of thing – appointing people on the basis of where they came from – and now, hey presto, we’re back doing exactly that. But with a different set of beneficiaries this time.”
The Supreme Head of Personnel seemed to be struggling for breath. “You do yourself no favours,” she said at last.
“No, I don’t suppose I do,” said Stuart. “But you know what? I don’t care in the slightest. I’m withdrawing from this farce. I’m no longer an applicant.”
The Board sat quite mute. They had lost the ability to appreciate truth, so concerned were they with appearance and the insubstantial.
“So,” said Stuart rising to his feet. “I don’t need to waste any more of your time. Oh, and by the way, that essay I wrote . . . ”
“Actually, we thought it very impressive,” said the Supreme Head of Personnel.
“You would,” said Stuart. “Because it’s utterly meretricious, from start to finish. It embodies every meaningless cliché of our times. It employs every cheap shibboleth by which people like you identify one another. And finally, my wife wrote it.”
He left the room. Outside, Faith and Elaine were in a huddle. They looked up, surprised to see Stuart emerge so quickly.
“That’s me out of the running,” said Stuart. And then to Elaine, as if as an afterthought, he said, “Elaine, can you tell me what 2,456 divided by 145 is? I don’t need the answer right now, but I’d love to know sometime.”
They stared at him. He left.
A Road to Freedom
That evening, Stuart left the office at lunchtime. Working flexi-hours, as he did, he was well in credit for that week and could take the afternoon off if he wished. A meeting had been pencilled in for three that afternoon, but since that involved only two others, one of whom was the insufferable Elaine, Stuart felt he could ask for it to be transferred to the following day.
“That’s a pity,” said Elaine, when he called her to put her off. “I was looking forward to going over this morning’s ordeal with you.”
Stuart grimaced. It would not have been an ordeal for her, nor indeed for Faith; rather, it would have been what people called a shoo-in for both of them.
“I withdrew my candidacy,” he said tersely.
There was a shocked silence at the other end of the line. “You? You withdrew?”
“That’s what I said. I thought it best. There are good reasons why one should not take that particular job.”
Again there was a silence – this time one of unease. “Why do you say that, Stuart?”
Stuart took a deep breath. “Something of a poisoned chalice,” he said quietly. “But I can’t talk about it freely over the phone.”
Now Elaine sounded alarmed. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that I don’t fancy being in that seat when . . . Look, I really can’t talk about it.”
Elaine was quiet for a few moments before continuing, “By the way, what did you mean when you said something about division? When you left the waiting room this morning, you said something about division and . . . ”
“Oh, that was nothing,” said Stuart. “Just a little joke.”
“Well, I didn’t think it was terribly funny. You know that we’re not meant to make jokes in the office. Jokes can be offensive.”
Stuart felt his anger rise up within him. “Oh,” he said, “I’d forgotten. We have to be humourless.”
“I didn’t say that. You really twist people’s words, you know, Stuart.”
“Well, anyway, I have to go now. Congratulations on getting the job.” He knew that the results would not be known officially for ten days, but he was confident enough of his prediction.
Elaine gasped. “How did you know that? I was told that nobody would be informed until . . . ” She stopped herself. But it was too late, Stuart’s suspicions had been confirmed.
“I hear that they told you this morning. On the spot.”
“You’re not meant to know that.”
Stuart smiled to himself. It was so predictable. “Well, I do, but don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody. I’ll let them keep up the façade of open competition.” He looked up at the ceiling, trying to imagine Elaine’s expression as she took his call. Smugness would have changed to disquiet and then returned to smugness once more.
He rang off and walked across the floor of his office to the window overlooking the harbour. The thought occurred to him that he could go to sea. People did that in the past – they gave it all up and went to sea. But he could not do that; there was Bertie and little Ulysses and years of wage slavery ahead of him. Wage slavery . . . it was not an expression he would have used of his own position, but now that he came to think of it, it was not all that inappropriate. Everyone – or just about everyone – was a wage slave, in a sense. They went to the office, put in the hours, often working with people they did not like (Elaine and Faith), sometimes with people who could not even do long division (Elaine) or who kept going on about Dunfermline and what people in Dunfermline thought about this, that or the next thing (Faith) or who were fanatical about some issue (that man in the post room who listened in on his portable radio set to ground-to-air transmissions from Edinburgh Airport Control Tower), or who were sycophantic to those in authority over them (Faith, principally, but Elaine too when the opportunity arose).
He watched as a small boat nosed its way out to sea. Boats were a metaphor for freedom. Setting sail meant more than simply slipping away from the quayside; it meant putting the constraints of terra firma behind you; it meant turning your back on the security of the land for the uncertainties and risks of the sea. The sea was water . . . there’s an insight, thought Stuart . . . and those who went upon it put themselves, composed largely of water, at the mercy of that medium that would dissolve us all. And the sea did that, as sailors in the past used to recognise; if they went overboard they would simply compose themselves and wait for an end that was ordained to be.
Existential freedom . . . As a young man he had flirted briefly with philosophy, and had read, in a directionless and untutored way, various paperback books he had found in an Oxfam shop. He had stumbled across a book on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and had been taken by the whiff of freedom that emanated from its pages. Authenticity, it seemed, was everything: you had to make choices about your life, you had to live in the fullest way, to be authentic. That was real freedom, the author suggested, and M. Sartre, sitting in his Left Bank café with . . . what was her name again? Simone de Beauvoir . . . that was echt authenticity. They were no wage slaves, Jean-Paul and Simone; they did not have to clock in to their café at nine in the morning and stay there, being appropriately authentic, until five o’clock.
He moved away from the window. I shall never be authentic, he said to himself, as long as I work in this place, with these people, doing the sort of thing they want me to do. I’m fed up with inventing inauthentic figures; I’m fed up pretending that things are better than they are and expecting the public to believe it all. I’ve finished with that now. No longer. No more.
He went downstairs to the floor on which the office of the Supreme Head of Personnel was located. He went to her assistant’s door and knocked.
“Do you have an appointment to see me?” asked the assistant.
Stuart laughed. “To see you? Are you seriously suggesting that people need to make an appointment to see you to make an appointment to see her?”
“Yes,” said the assistant. “I am.”
“In that case,” said Stuart. “Please note down this message – to yourself, to pass on, in due course, to her. Pollock, S, Department of Creative Statistics: resignation, with immediate effect, coupled with a request to be allowed not to work one month’s notice, as per contract, and to take the notice period as accumulated leave in lieu.” He paused. “Did you get that?”
“Yes,” said the assistant. “I did.”
“Good,” said Stuart, and he left by the door that, although unmarked, was in his mind labelled Freedom; the door we all long to find, and sometimes never locate, but sometimes do.
Stuart Has Lunch
Leaving the office, Stuart was light-headed, almost to the point of feeling intoxicated. The full enormity of what he had done was yet to come home to him, but he knew that his life had changed – and changed irrevocably. Handing in his resignation to the Supreme Head of Personnel had been a simple enough affair: a few minutes with her assistant, the dictation of a resignation note in the language that bureaucrats so loved, and then . . . into the street – not metaphorically, he thought wryly.
There was no reason for them not to accept his resignation. Firstly, there was no particular shortage of people like him. Statisticians were two a penny, or, to put it in their terms, 2.165 a penny . . . He smiled at the joke, relieved that having done such a thing, he was still able to see the humour in anything. Secondly – and this was perhaps the more important consideration – the Supreme Head of Personnel would be delighted to accept the resignation after his performance at the promotion board. He had not minced his words there, and had said things that he – and, he suspected, a lot of other people – had been wanting to say for quite a time. He had long itched to say that he simply did not believe in the utterances that so many organisations made their employees chant: the mission statements, the virtue signalling, the gobbledygook. Why should everybody believe the same thing, sign up to the same ideology? Why should people have to say, “We are here to promote excellence,” as they so often had to declare, when what they were doing was a straightforward job of administration? He had dared to say that this was all pious nonsense, and in so doing he had challenged the ideology. They would never accept that and they would be pleased to see the back of him.
He decided to go and treat himself to a long lunch at The Shore, a restaurant on a quay known as The Shore. That, he thought, was honesty: to call yourself The Shore when your address was The Shore. That was the sort of unpretentious, down to earth integrity that was so lacking elsewhere. He wondered whether restaurants had mission statements, and, if they did, what they would be. Feeding people would be a good one, or Serving dinner might also be suitable. There was a mission statement for everybody, if one thought about it. Fixing teeth wou
ld do for a dental surgery, and Cleaning clothes might be highly appropriate for a dry-cleaning business. This policy of honesty could be taken even further: a bank might say Looking after your money, but making quite a lot for ourselves in the process. One would applaud a bank that said that, and might even place one’s hard-earned money in their hands. An airline might say Flying you from place to place, but charging for your luggage, sandwiches on the plane, and so on. Or they might proclaim, We land and we take off, which had a certain direct charm to it. There were so many possibilities, if only people would get beyond the trite protestations of conformity.
He realised, of course, that he should be giving some thought to things other than mission statements and the confounding of bureaucrats. Usually a resignation was accompanied by the contemplation of all the implications it involved. There were all sorts of schemes whereby the leaving of a secure job may be made more palatable – deals offering six months’ salary, or part-time re-engagement, or even early retirement on full pension. Stuart had gone into none of these, and had simply resigned with immediate effect. What would this do to his pension? He had a reasonable number of pensionable years’ service: he assumed that whatever benefits had accrued under his pension scheme would sit there until he reached whatever age statisticians retired at. That, of course, was receding into the distant future as the pensionable age continued to be raised. The Greeks had been so fortunate: for years they had allowed many state employees to retire at forty-five on pensions that were close to their final salary. Then the Germans had heard of that, and had disapproved, and spoiled the Greeks’ fun. Here, of course, sixty-five had long been the age of retirement, but was rapidly becoming seventy, and beyond. Soon there would be eighty-year-old functionaries and retirement would be limited in many cases to a few years at the most.
Stuart was far too young to worry too much about these matters, but Irene might. She might ask awkward questions about his frozen pension. She might even enquire how he proposed to meet household expenses when there was no salary coming in. That was, admittedly, a pertinent question, but he would find some other source of income. There was so much he could do . . .