Days (25 page)

She threads her way among the bookcases, a tall woman, narrow and bony. She walks with a birdlike precision, picking her way around piles of merchandise and browsing customers with long ostrich unfoldings of her tweed-trouser-clad legs. Everything about her, from her flat chest to her tight mouth, says iron and impenetrability; her flinty eyes and bunned black hair, iron and impenetrability. She is forty-five years old, looks fifty-five, feels sixty-five. She is not a woman you would want to have as an enemy, nor one you would much like to have as a friend – her passions are too intense, too internalised, too focused, to make her easy company. But she is, for all that, a worthy Head of Books.

She reaches the heart of the department, the information counter, where a dozen young men are waiting for her. Her faithful subordinates. Her darlings. As one they raise their faces towards her, like chicks in the nest when the mother bird returns with a worm. Glad as the sight of them makes her, Miss Dalloway purses her lips tighter still, crushing any possibility of a smile.

“What do you want us to do, Miss Dalloway?” one of the young men asks, a gloomy-looking lad with a bulging forehead like a cumulonimbus cloud. “Do you want us to go and sort them out?” It is evident from the way he poses the question that he doesn’t relish the prospect of a physical altercation but is nonetheless ready to carry out whatever orders his head of department gives.

“That won’t be necessary, Edgar. Not yet.”

“I could set up a dumpbin there,” offers another – poor, plump Oscar, who, as a result of a run-in with the Technoids a couple of weeks ago, is wearing a cast on his forearm. It started out as name-calling across the connecting passageway, escalated to pushing and shoving, and climaxed in a brawl, with Oscar in the thick of it. Poor, brave boy.

“Thank you, Oscar,” says Miss Dalloway, “but for now we’re going to sit tight and wait. Master Sonny will be down within the hour, and whichever way he resolves the matter will govern our next move. ‘Our patience will achieve more than our force’ – for now.”

“What chance do you think we have of getting that floorspace back, I mean legitimately?” asks another of the Bookworms.

“I can’t say, Mervyn. The best we can hope for is that Master Sonny hears the strength of our argument and judges fairly.”

It isn’t much comfort to her dear worried darlings, but Miss Dalloway herself isn’t convinced that the arbitration will go their way and, much as she would like to, she cannot project an optimism she doesn’t feel. Her misgivings are many, but principal among them is the concern that although she has right on her side (about that she
is
convinced), she isn’t going to put her case across as charismatically as Mr Armitage, Head of Computers, will put his. She has never had much skill as a diplomat, largely because she has never had to be much of a saleswoman. She is firmly of the belief that books should be bought on their own merits, without hype or pressure tactics, and so hard sell is anathema to her and her department, whereas in Computers hard sell is all customers get from the moment they cross the threshold. And so Miss Dalloway fears that, the rightness of her cause notwithstanding, Mr Armitage’s polished, coaxing, genial style will prove more appealing to Master Sonny than any fervent, impassioned pleading on her part.

She wishes her uncertainty and anxiety were not so transparent to her darlings, she wishes she could spare them worry, but she can’t, so instead she orders them back to work. Work is the eternal balm for the troubled mind.

“Mervyn, some of the titles in the Mystery section have got out of alphabetical order. Salman, the Bargains table needs tidying up. Oscar, there’s a customer over there who looks like he needs serving. Colin, you and Edgar set out that delivery of atlases in the Travel section. The rest of you all have things to do. Off you go and do them. Come on, chop-chop!”

She claps her hands, and they scatter obediently. They would die for her. They would.

Miss Dalloway retires to her desk, which is tucked away in a corner of the department more book-strewn than most, and which is sheltered on one side by piles of hardbacks which rise to form a teetering, haphazardly stacked crescent three metres high. The desk is an antique cherrywood monster with scroll feet and deep drawers. On it sits the only computer Miss Dalloway will permit in her department. If it was up to her she would do without the machine – nothing wrong with pen, paper, and typewriter, in her view – but she is obliged to use the computer in order to submit inventories and accounts, carry out stock-taking, and send and receive internal memoranda. It’s a handy enough tool in its way, but Miss Dalloway cannot for the life of her understand the mystique, the hysteria, that seems to surround anything even remotely computer-related. All this talk of cutting-edge technology when there exists already a piece of technology so honed, so refined over the ages, so wholly suited to its task, that it can only be described as perfect.

A book.

As a source of easily retrievable information, portable, needing no peripheral support systems, instantly accessible to anyone on the planet old enough to read and turn a page, a book is without peer. A book does not come with an instruction manual. A book is not subject to constant software upgrades. A book is not technologically outmoded after five years. A book will never “go wrong” and have to be repaired by a trained (and expensive) technician. A book cannot be accidentally erased at the touch of a button or have its contents corrupted by magnetic fields. Is it possible to think of any object on this earth more – horrible term –
user-friendly
than a book?

Dead wood.
The Technoids’ chant echoes dully, hurtfully through her head.

That, alas, is how the majority of people, not just Technoids, regard books: not simply as artifacts made of pulped tree but as obsolete things, redundant, in need of paring away. Dead wood. It’s cruel, and no less so for being true. More and more these days people are deriving their entertainment and education from electronic media, the theatre of the screen replacing the theatre of the mind as the principle arena of the imagination. That is understandable, in that it requires less effort to look passively at visual images than to synthesise one’s own mental images from the printed word. Yet how much more intense and indelible in the memory than a computer graphic is the mental picture evoked by a skilled writer’s prose! Take the pleasure of being led through a good story well told and compare it with the multiple choices and countless frustrating U-turns, reiterations, and dead ends of the average computer game or “interactive” (whatever
that’s
supposed to mean) CD-Rom – no contest. By simple virtue of the fact that it takes place on a machine, digital entertainment is cold and clinical, lacking tactility, lacking
humanity
, whereas a book is a warm, vibrant thing that shows its age in the wear and tear of usage and bears the stamp of its reader in fingerprints and spine creases and dog-ears. On a winter’s night, beside a blazing log fire, with a glass of wine or a mug of hot chocolate to hand, which would you rather snuggle up with – a computer or a book? A construct of plastic and silicon and wires that displays committee-assembled collages of text and image premasticated into easy-to-swallow chunks, or the carefully crafted thoughts of a single author beamed almost directly from mind to mind through the medium of words?

Oh, Miss Dalloway knows in her heart of hearts that it is wrong to single out computers (and Computers) as the source of her department’s woes when there are dozens of other factors contributing to the decline in popularity of the printed word, but it is better to have an enemy that is concrete, visible, and conveniently close-to-hand than to rail vainly against the growing indifference of the entire world. And so, for better or worse, she has chosen Computers (and computers) as her enemy. Or rather, her enemy was chosen for her by a callous, thoughtless decision made eighteen months ago in the Boardroom of Days.

And that is another reason why she does not feel confident that the imminent arbitration will go her way. The Day brothers run their store electronically, dispensing their edicts and e-memos from on high, and none of them has, to her knowledge, ever expressed a particular fondness for the literary arts, unless you count Master Fred’s love of newspapers, which Miss Dalloway does not. (Newspapers, in her view, can barely be described as
literate
, let alone literary.) The Day brothers were the ones who handed over part of her department to Mr Armitage and his Technoids. How can she expect them to be on her side?

With a weary sigh, Miss Dalloway switches her computer on and waits for it to boot up. (You don’t have to wait for a book to boot up.) She has achieved the minimum level of computer-literacy necessary to operate the machine, no more, so her fingers are not confident on the keyboard as she calls up the e-memo that arrived half an hour ago from the Boardroom.

From: the Boardroom

Time: 10.28

To: Rebecca Dalloway, Books

The MANAGEMENT’s attention has been drawn to various uncontractual deeds perpetrated by members of your department, arising as a result of strained relations with an adjacent department.

The MANAGEMENT is keen to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, and to this end will be sending down a representative to hear the grievances of both department heads and deliver a binding judgement.

Once MASTER SONNY’s judgement has been delivered, both departments are to abide by his decision. Any further violations of employee behaviour protocols as stipulated in Clause 17 sections a) to f) of the employer/employee contract will result in the immediate dismissal of the staff members involved
and
their head of department.

MASTER SONNY will arrive between 11.30 and 11.40 this morning.

cc. Roland Armitage, Computers

She studies the e-memo carefully in the hope of finding something new in its wording, some hitherto unnoticed hint of bias that will reassure her that everything is not as dark as it looks. Nothing about it offers a clue to the mood prevailing in the Boardroom, although, given that Security has been advising the brothers about the dispute since it began, the phrase “keen to resolve the situation as quickly as possible” wins a small, mirthless smile from her each time her eyes pass over it. Having shown absolutely no interest in the acts of vandalism and violence going on in their store for so many months, for the brothers suddenly to send down one of their number at such short notice smacks of irritation. It is as though they have been hoping the problem would go away of its own accord but, as it hasn’t, have finally decided that enough is enough. That, again, does not bode well. Exasperation and clear-eyed impartiality seldom go hand in hand.

The fact that it is Master Sonny and not Master Chas who is coming down gives Miss Dalloway further cause to frown. A visit from Master Chas to the shop floor is a rarity, from Master Sonny unheard of. Everyone knows about Master Sonny’s drinking habit, his dissolute lifestyle. Is this a mark of how seriously the brothers are taking the dispute, that they are sending down the youngest, least experienced, and least reliable of them? But then why should that be a surprise? It has often occurred to Miss Dalloway that the sons of Septimus Day don’t have the faintest idea what they are doing, and that it is in spite of them, and not thanks to them, that the store continues to turn over a profit at all.

Things were not like this in Mr Septimus’s day, an era Miss Dalloway is not alone in recalling with fondness. The founder of Days might have been a hard, fearful man, but at least you knew where you were with him.
He
was not prone to issuing decrees wilfully.
He
did not go around allocating portions of one department to another for no worthwhile reason. He was a man whose very ruthlessness meant he could be trusted.

Miss Dalloway well recalls how every day Mr Septimus would tour the premises, striding through departments with perhaps a valued customer or a cherished supplier in tow but more often than not on his own, unafraid, wearing his aura of authority like an invisible suit of armour, pausing now and then to chide a sales assistant for sloppy dressing, or listen to a query from a head of department, or receive the compliments of a passing (and patently awestruck) shopper.

Was that when things began to go wrong for Days, when Mr Septimus, in the wake of his wife’s death, gave up his public appearances in the store, withdrew to his mansion, and handed over the reins of management to his sons? Was that when the rot set in, when the proprietor no longer appeared accessible, and therefore accountable, to staff or customers? Or is it simply that Mr Septimus’s seven sons cannot hope to maintain the high standard he set? It would seem inevitable that the clarity of one man’s unique vision should be diffused when his sons try to take his place, as when a single beam of white light, refracted, breaks up into a blurred spectrum of colours, losing its sharpness and its power to illuminate.

Miss Dalloway switches off the computer and reaches for the well-thumbed paperback edition of Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
which is lying on the desktop. The book has become her Bible since the dispute began. Opening it, she extracts a Days card she has been both concealing inside it and using as a bookmark.

The card is a Platinum, and the name on it reads MRS C A SHUKHOV.

Malcolm – like all her darlings, a good, honest boy – handed the card in to her on Tuesday afternoon, saying it had been left behind on the counter accidentally by its owner, a rather distracted-looking woman who had used it to buy a Russian phrasebook. Miss Dalloway’s first instinct was that of any honourable employee: she would contact Accounts and inform them about the lost card.

Then it occurred to her that a God-given opportunity had just fallen into her lap.

She glances over her shoulder. The haphazard stack of books which seems to have accumulated arbitrarily over the past few weeks around her desk is tall enough to hide her from the security camera that is positioned to include her desk in its viewing sweep. It is unlikely that her department is scanned very thoroughly anyway, since shrinkage has never been much of a problem in Books. Nevertheless, the privacy afforded by this screen of hardbacks (which her Bookworms built to her specifications, carefully and conscientiously adding to it day after day over the course of a couple of months) has been useful in masking from the Eye some industrious activity of the kind that the Day brothers, were they to learn of it, would doubtless consider extremely “uncontractual”.