Free Devices and Desires by P. D. James

Physics Department, had, as always, doodled obsessively. His jotting pad was covered with hot-air balloons, intricately patterned and decorated; part of his mind had obviously been with his private passion. Caroline Amphlett moved, as always, with a quiet, efficient grace. Neither spoke. She had worked for Mair as his PA for the last three years and he knew her now no better than on that morning when she had sat in this same office being interviewed for the job. She was a blond girl, smooth-skinned, with wide-spaced, rather small eyes of an extraordinary deep blue, who would have been thought beautiful if she had shown more animation. Mair suspected that she used her confidential job as his PA to preserve a deliberately intimidating reserve. She was the most efficient secretary he had ever had and it irked him that she had made it clear that, if and when he moved, she would wish to stay at Larksoken.She had told him that her reasons were personal. That, of course, meant Jonathan Reeves, a junior engineer in the workshop. He had been as surprised and chagrined at her choice as he had at the prospect of taking up a new job with an unknown PA, but there had been an additional and more disturbing reaction. Hers was not a type of female beauty which attracted him, and he had always assumed that she was physically cold. It was disconcerting to think that an acned nonentity had discovered and perhaps explored depths which he, in their daily intimacy, hadn’t even suspected. He had sometimes wondered, although with little real curiosity, whether she might not be less compliant, more complicated than he had supposed, had occasionally had a disconcerting sense that the façade she presented to the power station of dedicated, humourless efficiency had been carefully constructed to conceal a less accommodating, more complex personality. But if the real Caroline was accessible to Jonathan Reeves, if she actually liked and wanted that unprepossessing wimp, then she hardly merited the tribute even of his curiosity.

8
    He gave his departmental heads time to get back to their offices before he rang for Hilary Robarts and asked her to come back. It would have been more usual to have asked her with careful casualness to wait behind after the meeting, but what he had to say was private and he had been trying for some weeks now to cut down the number of times when they were known to be alone together. He wasn’t looking forward to the interview. She would see what he had to say as personal criticism, and that was something which in his experience few women could take. He thought: “She was my mistress once. I was in love with her, as much in love as I thought I was capable of being. And if it wasn’t love, whatever that word means, at least I wanted her. Will that make what I have to say easier or more difficult?” He told himself that all men were cowards when it came to a showdown with a woman. That first post-natal subservience, bred of physical dependence, was too ingrained ever to be totally eradicated. He wasn’t more cowardly than the rest of his sex. What was it he had overheard that woman in the Lydsett stores saying? “George would do anything to avoid a scene.”Of course he would, poor sod. Women, with their womb-smelling warmth, their talcum powder and milky breasts, had seen to that in the first four weeks of life.
    He stood up when she came in and waited until she had taken the chair on the other side of the desk. Then he opened the right-hand drawer and took out a duplicated news-sheet which he slid across the desk towards her.
    “Have you seen this? It’s Neil Pascoe’s latest news-sheet from PANUP.”
    She said: “People Against Nuclear Power. That means Pascoe and a few dozen other ill-informed hysterics. Of course I’ve seen it, I’m on his mailing list. He takes good care that I see it.”
    She gave it a brief glance, then pushed it back across the desk. He took it up and read: “Many readers will probably have