Nora Webster (14 page)

Eventually, Miss Kavanagh was alerted by the receptionist to Nora’s presence.

“Oh, you picked the worst morning of the whole year,” she shouted through the half-open window between the receptionist’s
office and the corridor. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Who said you were to come today?”

“Mr. Thomas Gibney said that I was to begin this morning,” Nora said.

“Oh, Mr. Thomas Gibney, wait until I get him!” Miss Kavanagh said and rummaged through the drawers of a filing cabinet.

After a while Miss Kavanagh disappeared and when she did not appear again Nora tried to catch the receptionist’s attention, but the receptionist did not look up. Nora wondered if she should raise her voice and demand that someone attend to her, but she did not think so.

As she stood waiting, the door was pushed open by a young woman who seemed different from all of the others who had come in before her. Her hair was beautifully cut and her clothes looked expensive. Even her glasses were special.

“Are you Mrs. Webster?” she asked.

“Oh, I know who you are,” Nora said. “You don’t look like any of the others coming to work. You’re Elizabeth.”

“Lord above, I hope I don’t look like any of the others!”

“You’re a Gibney, I would know that,” Nora said.

“Well, I would do anything I could not to look like one, but here I am. No one else would have me, so I’m back in Enniscorthy living at home and working in the office. The two things I said I would never do.”

“I knew your grandmother, on your father’s side,” Nora said, “and you are the image of her.”

“I remember her all right,” Elizabeth said. “She took to the bed in the house over there and never got up. She might well be still there for all I know.”

Nora hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should ask Eliza
beth to help her locate Miss Kavanagh.

“Are you waiting for somebody?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes, Miss Kavanagh.”

“Can she not be found? She’s normally buzzing about.”

“She appeared and then disappeared.”

“Yes, she often goes into the accounts department around now and shouts for a while. The best thing is if you come in with me and then we’ll steal by her.”

Nora followed Elizabeth through a door into a large and busy office and then into a smaller room that had a window with views of the mountains in the distance and the yard below, where many lorries and cars were parked. There were two desks in the room and some filing cabinets.

“The only thing I have managed to achieve since my return,” Elizabeth said, “is the removal of Elsa Doyle from this office to the office next door, complete with her pinafore and her squint. She started listening to my phone conversations and discussing them with me.”

“Elsa Doyle?” Nora asked. “Is that Davy Doyle’s daughter?”

“That’s who she is,” Elizabeth said. “As nosey as her father, but without his cunning. I told them at home that I was going to go back to Dublin and make my living on the streets if she was not removed from my office. Mind you, it was her office before I arrived. Would you like her desk?”

“Which desk?”

Elizabeth pointed at the desk nearer the door.

“Why don’t you claim it before anyone can stop you? I’ll say my father said, and no one will contradict me.”

Nora sat down at the desk while Elizabeth went outside and came back carrying a tray with tea and biscuits.

“I keep my own biscuits. I have a secret hiding place for them.
And be careful, Francie-Pants Kavanagh is looking for you. She’s on the warpath. She asked if I saw you. I neither confirmed nor denied.”

“Should I not go and find her?”

“Have your tea first.”

Soon, someone came to say that Miss Kavanagh was waiting in her office for Mrs. Webster and that she had instructions to accompany Mrs. Webster there immediately. Miss Kavanagh’s office was at the very end of the larger office; from a window she had a full view of everything that happened.

“Did Mr. William Senior or Mr. Thomas tell you what you are to do here?” Miss Kavanagh asked, looking up for one moment and then flicking through some papers on her desk.

“No, they didn’t.”

“Well, they didn’t tell me either and they have both gone to Dublin so we will have to work it out ourselves.”

Nora did not respond.

“That Elizabeth Gibney is the laziest girl in Ireland,” Miss Kavanagh said, “and the most unpleasant. Boss’s daughter or no boss’s daughter, it’s all the same to me. I treat everyone the same. And she put poor Elsa Doyle out of her office. Elsa is very obliging.”

Suddenly, she looked up.

“Now, there’s something I always do with everyone who starts here.”

She took out a folder.

“It’s a long tot,” she said, as she handed Nora a grubby sheet of paper with six figures on each line going down one side of the page and half one side of the overleaf.

“If you could tot that up for me, like a good woman,” she said and
then sat up straight looking at Nora directly and handing her a pen.

Nora began to tot. It was one of the things she had been good at when she worked at Gibney’s before, one of the things that old Mr. Gibney, who could not add himself without making mistakes, used to always ask her to do. She ignored Miss Kavanagh, who continued to stare at her while she worked at adding the figures. When she had added up the figures in the first column of numbers, she wrote down the result.

“Don’t write the figures down on that piece of paper! I want to use it again. Use this!”

Miss Kavanagh handed her a scrap of paper, thus causing her to lose her concentration. She decided it was better to start again, to make sure that she had everything right. When she had done the first two columns and was halfway through the third, Miss Kavanagh interrupted her again.

“Did Mr. William Senior or Mr. Thomas say that you were to share the office with that Elizabeth?”

Nora looked up at Miss Kavanagh and held her stare for a moment.

“Well?” Miss Kavanagh asked.

Nora looked down and began to tot up the third column of figures from the beginning. She tried not to think of Miss Kavanagh sitting opposite her and instead directed all her concentration at adding the figures. It was almost a battle between them now and she was ready, if Miss Kavanagh spoke once more, to ask her as politely as she could not to interrupt her. But, in thinking about this, she lost where she had been and was not sure now how much she had carried over from the third column to the fourth. She stopped for a second, and in stopping, lost her concentration completely.

“Hurry now,” Miss Kavanagh said. “I haven’t got all day.”

Nora decided that she would, once more, have to start from the beginning. She added the figures in the first column again as quickly as she could, but the result was not the same as the figure she had written down after her first attempt. She would have one more try, and this time would go very slowly and deliberately. If, a year ago, this scene had appeared before her, it would have been in a bad dream. The idea of totting numbers, being overseen by Francie Kavanagh, would have been unimaginable. It belonged to no future she had ever envisaged for herself. Once more, these thoughts interfered with her concentration and she had to stop. She looked out into the larger office.

“There’s no one out there of any interest to you now,” Miss Kavanagh said. “Head down and look at the figures.”

There was nothing else she could do. She wondered for a second if all the years of being away from work, the years spent cooking and cleaning the house and looking after the children and then being with Maurice when he was sick had affected her ability to keep her mind on the same single thing. If that was the case she would have to try harder, just add the numbers up and think of nothing else. It could not be impossible. No matter what came into her mind, she was to stop it. Just these figures. She started again at the beginning and moved with confidence and efficiency, letting nothing interfere with getting the correct result at the bottom and carrying the right number into the next column, and then presenting the final figure to Francie Kavanagh silently, with only a small hint of arrogance and contempt.

Miss Kavanagh looked at the final figure and then opened the top drawer of her desk and removed an adding machine. She walked out into the outer office and shouted.

“Someone come quickly. You! Miss Lambert. In here now!”

A girl came into the office without looking directly at either Miss Kavanagh or Nora.

“Now, I want you to check these figures on the adding machine. Oh, and don’t let Mrs. Webster see the result until I do. Bring it straight to me. I’ll be down in accounts. And hurry now! Mrs. Webster has already taken all day.”

The girl took the piece of paper from Miss Kavanagh and walked out of the room.

When it came to dinner-time, Nora had wasted the whole morning waiting for Miss Kavanagh or being taunted by her. Once she was out of the office and crossing the bridge, it could have been twenty-five years earlier; the feeling of pure freedom was the same. When she left Gibney’s at dinner-time or in the evening, she had always tried to pretend that she was never going back, that her time there had come to an end. Now, as she crossed the bottom of Castle Hill on her way home, it was not hard to have that feeling again; it was almost necessary. She would feel it again at half past five when she had finished for the day.

CHAPTER SIX

A
fter much negotiation it was agreed that she would spend the mornings in Elizabeth’s office working on orders and invoices and then after dinner she would sit in the larger office and deal with the salaries, bonuses and expenses of all the commercial travellers in the company. Miss Kavanagh explained to her that this was the most difficult job of all, as every traveller was paid at a different rate, but she could check back through the records to find the details. They had all been negotiated, Miss Kavanagh said, many years ago with the older travellers, and then more recently with the younger ones by Mr. Thomas Gibney. None of them knew what the others were paid, and none of them needed to know this, Miss Kavanagh said, but each of them was filled with suspicion and resentment.

“If it was me,” she said, “I would give them only their bonuses with no pay at all, and then we’d see results, and then their manners would improve. And if any of them come to you personally when
they find out that you are the one in charge of their salaries, don’t even look up at them. Say a small prayer and then send them to me. And if they waylay you and find you when I am not here, tell them that you are under instructions from Miss Kavanagh not to speak to them under any circumstances.”

Nora was distracted for a moment by the brown coat hanging from a hook in Miss Kavanagh’s office. She wondered if it was the same one that Una had told her about.

“Mrs. Webster,” Miss Kavanagh asked, “am I to take it that you have understood me?”

“I have understood you perfectly,” Nora said coldly.

Of the dozen commercial travellers, some had company cars; some did not. Some had a mileage allowance that was higher than others, and some of them also had an agreement that if they sold over a certain figure in a given year then their mileage allowance or their bonus, or in some cases both, would increase. There was a full drawer of a filing cabinet with invoices from the commercial travellers, a few of which contained detailed agreements about rates of pay. There was also a drawer with letters of complaint or claim from the commercial travellers and these, when Nora looked at them, gave her the clearest indication of the agreements between the company and the travellers.

When she told Elizabeth about the complexities of dealing with the money to be paid to these men, she laughed.

“My father, Old William, says it’s the only way to keep the travellers on their toes.”

Slowly, Nora realised that Miss Kavanagh, despite her claims to the contrary, did not understand the system. A girl called Marian Brickley had dealt with the matter for many years and had left to get married. Since then, there had been chaos. All Miss Kavanagh
did was threaten anyone who complained with expulsion from her office. As each new girl had been assigned the task of sorting out the mess, the mess had become even worse, until a number of the travellers had gone to see Mr. William Gibney Senior who had instructed his son Thomas to deal with the matter. Thomas had decided that Nora would be the best person to handle the commercial travellers and the payments due to them and also handle Miss Kavanagh herself, who suffered from a great personal antipathy to the commercial travellers and seemed to feel that a day without a noisy confrontation with at least one of them was a day misspent.

Nora found a pile of folders in the stationery cupboard at the end of the long office. Without consulting anyone, she took them to her desk and wrote the name of each traveller on the outside of a folder and began to compile notes on the agreement each one had with Gibney’s. When she encountered any of the travellers themselves, with Miss Kavanagh not paying attention, she asked them for a detailed account of the arrangement they had made with the company as well as a sheet of paper outlining how much money they thought they were owed and for what. Most of the travellers had been waiting a long time to be paid bonuses or allowances. Since she was new, they began to watch her, some anxious, others more determined and ready to wait for her near the door as she arrived in the morning, or as she left.

One of them told her that she had to write the amount each was owed on a single sheet of paper, just the amount, and then write “Urgent Payment” and pass this to Miss Kavanagh. When she looked at the files she found copies of these single sheets, so she believed that this was true. But she was also told that payments would be made only once a month on a day that had never been fixed, and that the person who decided the date of payment was Miss Kavanagh.

If travellers approached Miss Kavanagh while Nora was close by, she always began in the same way, as she came to the door of her office to greet them.

“Mrs. Webster and I myself are up to our eyes in work as you can see.” She would then retreat, shouting, “You’ll have to come back another time, like a good man,” before closing the door on them.

Nora, as she prepared the folders, developed a shorthand for the travellers. VB meant very bald; SB was skin-and-bone; SM stood for smiler; J stood for jockey. BT meant bad teeth; DF meant dandruff. Soon, she had names for all of them, names she shared only with Donal and Conor, who remembered each name as she invented them. She swore them to secrecy.

Miss Kavanagh fought with everyone, except Mr. William Gibney Senior and his two sons. When they appeared, Miss Kavanagh became meek, but after smiling and bowing to them, she would, once they had departed, summon to her office one of the lowliest bookkeepers or typists and start screaming, or she would wander out into the large office and stand behind a girl and shout, “What are you doing now? What are you doing now this minute to justify your presence in this building?”

Miss Kavanagh and Elizabeth Gibney ignored each other.

“She is unusual,” Elizabeth said to Nora, “because her bite is actually worse than her bark. I suppose they told you that the woman before you left to get married?”

Nora nodded.

“One day the poor woman was driven so demented that she took out the contents of one of the filing cabinets and threw them up in the air, using language about Miss Francie-Pants that was not edifying. She followed this with her views on my father and my brothers and me and then ran screaming out into the street. Her people, who live in
Ballindaggin, were summoned to take her home. Thomas and myself had to stay here late that night trying to re-fill the filing cabinet with the paper before my father, Old William, got to find out about it all. He won’t hear a word against Francie-Pants. He doesn’t know that I have nothing to do with the old battle-axe. I got a deal from Little William and Thomas only because I threatened them. I promised to seek revenge in ways as yet unimagined unless I was given my own office and unless Francie-Pants was told that I was off-limits.”

Nora enjoyed the mornings with Elizabeth, even when she saw how much of Elizabeth’s day was actually spent planning her weekend or discussing on the phone the weekend just past. She found that she could work easily in the office with her. Elizabeth talked to her only when no one whom she phoned was available. She had one phone with a direct line out and another that was an office extension. Often, she went over the same events in her personal life with several friends in succession. Nora learned that there was a man in Dublin called Roger who was steady, dependable and well placed. He wanted to see Elizabeth every weekend.

Elizabeth spent some weeks avoiding calls from him, letting calls on her direct line ring out if she thought it was Roger. She would then phone one of her friends, tell them about the call from Roger and ask for advice about how she might best avoid Roger in Dublin on Saturday night while making sure, in a later conversation with Roger, that he might, were she to come to Dublin, be available to escort her to some dinner or dance.

“I like him. I don’t know what he reminds me of,” she said to Nora. “Maybe a nice car that you’re used to, one that never breaks down. Or a winter coat that you never wear but are glad you have. And he’s mad about me and that helps. But I’d love a big romance! I mean someone a bit wilder. I’d love an international rugby player,
say. Mike Gibson now, or Willie-John McBride. Roger took me to one of the rugby dinners and they were all there. I didn’t listen to a word Roger said all evening. If he had told me that God Almighty was a woman and she was living in Bellefield with her husband, I would have nodded. I wish William or Thomas played rugby and could introduce me properly to members of the team. I’d love to go to a match in Lansdowne Road knowing that I’d be meeting up with the players in Jurys or the Gresham when they were all washed and dressed up, and they would know who I was.”

Every Friday at four Elizabeth Gibney left the office and drove to Dublin. She shared a room in a flat in Herbert Street and went out with her friends on Friday and Saturday nights and on a Sunday night she drove back to Enniscorthy. On Saturday afternoons she went shopping in Grafton Street. Some weekends, she saw Roger; on other weekends she did not tell him that she was coming to Dublin and then on Monday she would recount to Nora how close she had come to bumping into him, the narrow escapes she had had at various tennis club hops and rugby dances. During the week she tried to recover from the weekend, and lamented the fact that she could not go out in the town, since everyone recognised her as one of the Gibneys. Therefore, if she went out during the week, it was to Wexford or Rosslare and usually in the company of her brothers and their friends. She made such outings sound like duty. Her real life during the week was spent on the telephone to her friends in Dublin. It almost amused Nora to see that she did not know the names of any of the girls or women in the outer office, other than Elsa Doyle, whom she had removed from her office. If one of them came in while she was on the phone, she would ask her caller to wait a moment and then icily outstare the intruder until she had left the room and Elizabeth could resume her discussion of the weekend.

One Monday Elizabeth did not come in to work until almost eleven o’clock. Nora discovered that she could do her morning’s work in less than two hours without the distraction offered by the boss’s daughter, and she could manage the bonuses for the commercial travellers once she had unravelled the details, if she did not have Miss Kavanagh to deal with as well. She liked the peace, enjoyed having the office to herself.

When Elizabeth arrived, she seemed greatly excited.

“Did anyone call?”

“No,” Nora replied.

“On either of the phones?”

“No one called.”

She went over and checked the phones.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“What is a town clerk?” Elizabeth asked. “When I enquired from my mother she said it was someone who ran a town. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Nora said. “It’s a good job. A lot of town clerks go on to become county managers.”

“I met one last night.”

“The town clerk of where?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t remember. His name was, or is, Ray, that’s all I know. And someone introduced me as his fiancée, so maybe he has a fiancée, and she was at home watching television last night, or maybe I look like someone’s fiancée.”

“Was he nice?”

“At four o’clock in the morning he asked me to marry him, or else he nearly did. That was nice.”

“And what did you say?”

Elizabeth checked the phones again.

“I met him with your sister and her fiancé in Rosslare Golf Club. There was some do on and I went to it. Thomas was with me for a while. I went with him and his girlfriend, but then I got talking to your sister, who was very nice and, since dry Thomas and Dishwater his girlfriend were leaving, she made her fiancé offer me a lift home once we had some drinks in the Talbot, but of course I didn’t take the lift in the end. I was driven home by my town clerk. Maybe he’s town clerk of Wexford.”

“That would be a very good job,” Nora said. “And we can easily check.”

“If he doesn’t phone, can you phone your sister and get the full details on him?”

Nora hesitated. She had seen Una regularly, but had not been told that she had a boyfriend, let alone a fiancé. Nora did not want to phone her now on behalf of Elizabeth, which might suggest that she was prying into her life.

“I’m sure he’ll phone. I think town clerks might be very busy on a Monday morning,” Nora said.

“Or he might be calling his actual fiancée,” Elizabeth said.

“And Una was in good form?”

“Oh, yes, they’re a lovely couple. Someone said that last night in Rosslare, and it’s true.”