Free The Players And The Game by Julian Symons Page B

going behind your back. Or of blaming you, either. This was a reasonable attempt to cut corners that seems to be causing a bit of trouble, that’s all. Can we go back to the old system from next week?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Then let’s do that. The saving doesn’t justify causing staff trouble.’
    ‘I’ll make a note of it.’ Before Lowson could hang up he went on. ‘Have you seen Esther Malendine’s paper? About job enrichment?’
    ‘It’s on my desk. I haven’t looked at it yet.’
    ‘I understand Hartford asked her to do it. She produced it without consulting me. I should like to make clear that it’s purely a personal view of her own. As Personnel Director there’s very little of it that I go along with. And I do resent the fact that it’s been produced behind my back.’
    ‘I’m glad you told me,’ Bob Lowson said. The remark was the reverse of the truth. It was all trivial stuff, complaints by and about Paul Vane, but the total effect was a little disturbing. He riffled the pages of the report, and started to glance through it.
     
    At lunchtime Paul Vane had one drink more than usual, and when on his return he met Joy Lindley in a corridor he stopped and spoke to her. They went that evening to a pub that he knew people from Timbals did not use.
    ‘You’re looking prettier than ever, Joy.’ It was the kind of remark he had been making to women for nearly twenty years. In fact the best thing about her was her legs, but she had that elixir of youth which in the last decade he had become more and more anxious to drink.
    ‘I thought you’d forgotten me.’
    ‘That wouldn’t be possible.’ They were sitting on bar stools, and he put a hand on her knee. ‘How are things? Are you happy in your work?’
    ‘Miss Popkin’s back now, and she’s a bit of a trial, always going on about this and that. And Mr Hartford’s all right I suppose, but he never says if he likes anything you’ve done, only if there’s something wrong. I mean, it’s as though what he’d really like is for you to be a machine.’ She took Paul’s hand off her knee and put it on the bar. ‘And I’m not a machine.’
    ‘That’s very interesting.’ He knew that he ought not to be talking to a girl who worked for Brian Hartford in this way, but he plunged on. ‘Do you know my deputy, Esther Malendine?’
    ‘The one with those funny glasses? She doesn’t come into the office much, but she’s always talking to Mr Hartford on the phone. She’s terribly clever, isn’t she? I mean, terribly interested in all sorts of new ideas. I can’t understand half of them, but then my mum always did say I was a bit dim.’
    ‘I’ll tell you something, Joy. I can’t understand them either.’ He felt a glow of pleasure at the way she talked, calling her mother ‘mum’. Why, she might be fourteen, and in the exhilaration of the moment he felt that he was no older. ‘Perhaps I’m a bit dim too.’
    She stayed another half-hour, and had one more drink. He told her a bit about the problems of being personnel director in an organisation like Timbals. ‘The great thing is to remember that the group’s made up of people, and you have to deal with those people as individuals. It’s no use talking to them about work-study methods, they don’t know what you mean.’ She nodded, wide-eyed. He did not put his hand on her knee again.
     
    Alice spent the afternoon playing bridge. In fact, she spent all her afternoons now playing bridge. When she and Paul had first married they had played a little, what is sometimes called honeymoon bridge, but now she found subtleties and refinements in the game that she had not known to exist. She got bridge books out of the library, and played through at home the games and problems given as examples in the newspapers. She also began to smoke, not cigarettes, but small cigars, which she often kept in her mouth until they had gone out.
    At first Penelope had been her partner, but Penelope could not be