Free In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower Page B

His name is Mr Fleming.
    Jim and Tom had met him before this in Melbourne. They were summoned down for an emergency conference. Terrific speculation in Sydney! They told mad jokes and we stared at each other with great colossal eyes, as if we were having a wondering competition. But they chew themselves up with worry. When they arrived home after the conference they raced each other in to tell me the news. All our communications from Melbourne are by mail, and one by one, for weeks and months, the familiar signatures on letters had been disappearing. Why? We wasted a lot of time pondering over all this.
    So I said, ‘Well, what?’
    Tom just drew a finger across his throat. Every time I mentioned a name, there went the finger across his throat again. Then a deep staring silence. Well, what about the new general manager?
    Tom said seriously, ‘Oh, he’s just a little guy. He’s got this big desk, and he practically never stands up. See him sitting there, he looks normal, then he stands up and he’s level with my belt!’
    â€˜No!’
    â€˜Yes, truly.’ Jim joins him in a judicious shaking of heads.
    â€˜He couldn’t be!’
    â€˜No. Honestly. He’s a little guy like Napoleon.’
    Then they laughed and laughed, and hopped and danced over the linoleum, and made more fun of him, telling incredible stories, exorcising him. In a way, because of families and mortgages, they are in his power. After his letters began to arrive for all of us, marked Secret and Confidential , which we read and exchanged, I understood better why black magic might be needed.
    â€˜Yes,’ they nodded. ‘He’s a little guy like Hitler.’
    Zoe used to say, ‘Salesmen. I don’t know how you can put up with them. Expense-account types. You see them buying each other lunches and dinners. Hear them, I should say! I don’t know why you just don’t expire, having to listen to them.’
    â€˜But they’re not like that. I must have told you all wrong.’
    â€˜Believe me,’ Zoe said, seeming very worldly wise, ‘they would be, if they could.’
    â€˜ No . They haven’t even been given expense accounts. They’re not ordinary. Stephen’s a salesman, and you liked his conversation. If that’s how you see everyone.But they’re no more salesmen than I am whatever title Mr Fleming gives me on the taxation return.’
    Zoe combed and plaited her long black hair. She looked like Pocahontas. ‘I’ll concede that,’ she said, which I thought rather a grand way of putting it. ‘But it’s a tame routine for you.’
    It would be dull for Zo, and it will get dull for me. But I am not bullied. No one unconsciously wishes me harm. We never quarrel. Every day we smile at each other with real liking, the two men and I, and because good-natured people are new to me, the day is well spent.
    But this is not my life.
    Anna paused and stared at the wall, at the square yellow weave of the curtains and, outside the window, at a rather feeble acacia full of uncritical sparrows.
    She wrote:
    Russell and Lily have twin daughters—Vanessa and Caroline. Though Lily wanted dozens of children, she isn’t supposed to have any more. She has gone back to work already. The babies are still very small. Stephen and Russell write to each other, but it was Zoe who told me this in a letter from Paris. She has graduated and gone away now. Why do all the people you like have to be somewhere else? But Paris! The postcards and photographs Zoe has sent home! They make me feel I have never seen a building or a street. Who wouldn’t be there? You could admire any one of them for months on end. Zoe belongs there. She says she is deliriously busy, deliriously happy. And I am jealous—or would be, if I could want to be Zoe. All that has happened feels necessary. I can’t picture it different. I would not want to be someone else.

    The other