People in Glass Houses Read online

  For William Maxwell and Alan Maclean, and in memory of Blanche W. Knopf

  … and in such cases Men’s natures wrangle with inferior things, Though great ones are their object.

  OTHELLO, Act III, Scene IV

  Contents

  1. Nothing in Excess

  2. The Flowers of Sorrow

  3. The Meeting

  4. Swoboda’s Tragedy

  5. The Story of Miss Sadie Graine

  6. Official Life

  7. A Sense of Mission

  8. The Separation of Dinah Delbanco

  Also by Shirley Hazzard

  Copyright

  1. Nothing in Excess

  ‘The aim of the Organization,’ Mr Bekkus dictated, leaning back in his chair and casting up his eyes to the perforations of the sound-proof ceiling; ‘The aim of the Organization,’ he repeated with emphasis, as though he were directing a firing-squad — and then, ‘the long-range aim,’ narrowing his eyes to this more distant target, ‘is to fully utilize the resources of the staff and hopefully by the end of the fiscal year to have laid stress—’

  Mr Bekkus frequently misused the word ‘hopefully’. He also made a point of saying ‘locate’ instead of ‘find’, ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’, and never lost an opportunity to indicate or communicate; and would slip in a ‘basically’ when he felt unsure of his ground.

  ‘— to have laid greater stress upon the capacities of certain members of the staff at present in junior positions. Since this bears heavily’ — Mr Bekkus now leant forward and rested his elbows firmly on his frayed blue blotter — ‘on the nature of our future work force, attention is drawn to the Director-General’s directive set out in (give the document symbol here, Germaine), asking that Personnel Officers communicate the names of staff members having — what was the wording there?’ He reached for a mimeographed paper in his tray.

  ‘Imagination,’ Germaine supplied.

  ‘— imagination and abilities which could be utilized in more responsible posts.’ Mr Bekkus stopped again. ‘Where’s Swoboda?’

  ‘He went to deposit your pay-cheque, Mr Bekkus.’

  ‘Well, when he comes in tell him I need the figures he’s been preparing. Better leave a space at the end, then, for numbers of vacant posts. New paragraph. Candidates should be recommended solely on the basis of outstanding personal attributes, bearing in mind the basic qualifications of an international civil servant as set forth in Part II (that’s roman, Germaine) of the Staff Regulations with due regard to education, years of service, age, and administrative ability. Read that back. … All right. We’ll set up the breakdown when Swoboda comes across with the figures. Just bang that out, then — copies all round.’ Mr Bekkus was always saying ‘Bang this out’ or ‘Dash that off’ in a way that somehow minimized Germaine’s role and suggested that her job was not only unexacting but even jolly.

  ‘Yes, Mr Bekkus.’ Germaine had closed her book and was searching for her extra pencil among the papers on the desk.

  ‘You see how it is, Germaine,’ said Mr Bekkus, again leaning back in the tiny office as if he owned it all. ‘The Director-General is loosening things up, wants people who have ideas, individuality, not the run-of-the-mill civil servants we’ve been getting round here.’ His gesture was apparently directed towards the outer office, which Germaine shared with Swoboda, the clerk. ‘Not just people who fit in with the requirements. And he’s prepared to relax the requirements in order to get them.’

  Germaine wrinkled her forehead. ‘But you did say.’ She turned up her notes again.

  ‘What did I say?’ asked Mr Bekkus, turning faintly hostile.

  ‘Here. Where it says about due regard.’

  ‘Ah — the necessary qualifications. My dear girl, we have to talk in terms of suitable candidates. You can’t take on just anybody. You wouldn’t suggest that we promote people merely to be kind to them?’ Since Germaine looked for a moment as if she might conceivably make such a suggestion, he added belligerently, ‘Would you?’

  ‘Oh — no.’ And, having found her pencil under the Daily List of Official Documents, she added, ‘Here it is.’

  ‘Why, these are the elementary qualifications in any organization today.’ Holding up one hand, he enumerated them on his outstretched fingers. ‘University education’ — Mr Bekkus would have been the last to minimize the importance of this in view of the years it had taken him to wrest his own degree in business administration from a reluctant provincial college. ‘Administrative ability. Output. Responsibility. And leadership potential.’ Having come to the end of his fingers, he appeared to dismiss the possibility of additional requirements; he had in some way contrived to make them all sound like the same thing.

  ‘I’ll leave a blank then,’ said Germaine. ‘At the end of the page.’ She tucked her pencil in the flap of her book and left the room.

  Stupid little thing, Mr Bekkus thought indulgently — even, perhaps, companionably. Germaine at any rate need not disturb herself about the new directive: she was lucky to be in the Organization at all. This was the way Mr Bekkus felt about any number of his colleagues.

  ‘Yes, come in, Swoboda. Good. Sit down, will you, and we’ll go over these. I’ve drafted a memo for the Section Chief to sign.’

  Swoboda pulled up a chair to the corner of the desk. Swoboda was in his late thirties, slender, Slavic, with a nervous manner but quiet eyes and still hands. Having emerged from Europe after the war as a displaced person, Swoboda had no national standing and had been hired as a clerk by the Organization in its earliest days. As a local recruit he had a lower salary, fewer privileges, and a less interesting occupation than the internationally recruited members of the staff, but in 1947 he had counted himself fortunate to get a job at all. This sense of good fortune had sustained him for some time; it is possible, however, that after more than twenty years at approximately the same rank it was at last beginning to desert him.

  Bekkus wanted to be fair. Swoboda made him uneasy, but Bekkus would have admitted that Swoboda could turn in good work under proper supervision. Mr Bekkus flattered himself (as he correctly expressed it) that he had supervised Swoboda pretty thoroughly during the time he had had him in his office — had organized him, in fact, for the maximum potential. Still, Swoboda made him uneasy, for there was something withdrawn about him, something that could not be brought out under proper supervision or even at the Christmas party. Bekkus would have said that Swoboda did not fully communicate.

  But Bekkus wanted to be fair. Swoboda was a conscientious staff member, and the calculations he now laid on the corner of the desk represented a great deal of disagreeable work — work which Bekkus freely, though silently, admitted he would not have cared to do himself.

  Bekkus lifted the first page. ‘All right. And did you break down the turn-over?’

  ‘Here, sir. The number of posts vacated each year in various grades.’

  Bekkus glanced down a list headed Resignations and Retirement. ‘Good God, is that all? Is this the total? How can we fit new people in if hardly anyone leaves?’

  ‘You’re looking at the sub-total. If you’ll allow me.’ Swoboda turned the page to another heading: Deaths and Dismissals.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ said Bekkus with relief. ‘This means that we can move about fifty people up each year from the Subsidiary into the Specialized grades.’ (The staff was divided into these two categories, and there had been little advancement from the Subsidiary to the Specialized. Those few who had in fact managed to get promoted from the lower category were viewed by their new colleagues much as an emancipated slave must have been regarded in ancient Rome by those born free.)

  ‘The trouble, of course,’ went on Bekkus, ‘is to find capable
people on the existing staff. You know what the plan is, Swoboda. The D.-G. wants us to comb the Organization, to comb it thoroughly’ — Bekkus made a gesture of grooming some immense shaggy animal — ‘for staff members of real ability in both categories who’ve been passed over, keep an eye open for initiative, that kind of thing. These people — these staff members, that is — have resources which have not been fully utilized, and which can be utilized, Swoboda. …’ Mr Bekkus paused, for Swoboda was looking at him with more interest and feeling than usual, then pulled himself together and added, ‘within the existing framework.’ The feeling and interest passed from Swoboda’s expression and left no trace.

  Bekkus handed back the tables. ‘If you’ll get Germaine to stick this in at the foot of the memo, I think we’re all set. And then bring me the file on Wyatt, will you? That’s A. Wyatt, in the Translation Section. I have to take it to the Board. It’s a case for compulsory retirement.’

  ‘Got one,’ Algie Wyatt underlined a phrase on the page before him.

  ‘What?’ asked Lidia Korabetski, looking up from the passage she was translating.

  ‘Contradiction in terms.’ Algie was collecting contradictions in terms: to a nucleus of ‘military intelligence’ and ‘competent authorities’ he had added such discoveries as the soul of efficiency, easy virtue, enlightened self-interest, Bankers Trust, and Christian Scientist.

  ‘What?’ Lidia asked again.

  ‘Cultural mission,’ replied Algie, turning the page and looking encouraged, as if he studied the document solely for such rewards as this.

  Lidia and Algie were translators at the Organization. That is to say that they sat all day — with an hour off for lunch and breaks for tea — at their desks translating Organization documents out of one of the five official languages and into another. Lidia, who had been brought up in France of Russian and English parentage, translated into French from English and Russian; Algie, who was British and had lived much abroad, translated into English from French and Spanish. They made written translations only, the greater drama of the oral interpretation of debates being reserved for the Organization’s simultaneous interpreters. The documents Algie and Lidia translated contained the records of meetings, the recommendations of councils, the reports of committees, the minutes of working groups, and were not all noted for economy or felicity of phrase. However, both Algie and Lidia were resourceful with words and sought to convey the purport of these documents in a faithful and unpretentious manner.

  In the several years during which Lidia and Algie had shared an office at the Organization, it had often been remarked that they made an odd pair. This is frequently said of two people whose personalities are ideally complementary, as was the case in this instance. It was also commonly agreed that there was no romance between them — as is often said where there is nothing but romance, pure romance, romance only, with no distracting facts of any kind.

  When Lidia first came to share his office, Algie was about fifty-five years old. He was an immense man, of great height and bulky body, whose scarlet face and slightly bloodshot blue eyes proclaimed him something of a drinker. His health having suffered in the exercise of a great capacity for life, he shifted himself about with a heaving, shambling walk and was breathless after the least exertion. When he entered the office in the morning he would stand for some seconds over his desk, apparently exhausted by the efforts, physical and mental, involved in his having arrived there. He would then let himself down, first bulging outwards like a gutted building, then folding in the middle before collapsing into his grey Organization chair. For a while he would sit there, speechless and crimson-faced and heaving like a gong-tormented sea.

  Although education and upbringing had prepared him for everything except the necessity of earning his own living, this was by no means Algie’s first job. During the thirties he had worked for the Foreign Office in the Balkans, but resigned in order to go to Spain as a correspondent during the Civil War. He spent most of the Second World War as an intelligence officer with the British Army in North Africa and during this time produced a creditable study on Roman remains in Libya and a highly useful Arabic phrase-book for British soldiers. After the war, his private income having dwindled to almost nothing, he entered the Organization in a dramatic escape from a possible career in the world of commerce.

  It was not known how Algie came to apply to the Organization; still less how the Organization came to admit him. (It was said that his dossier had become confused with that of an eligible Malayan named Wai-lat, whose application had been unaccountably rejected.) Once in, Algie did the work required of him, overcoming a natural indolence that would have crushed other men. But he and the Organization were incompatible, and should never have been mated.

  The Organization had bred, out of a staff recruited from its hundred member nations, a peculiarly anonymous variety of public official, of recognizable aspect and manner. It is a type to be seen to this very day, anxiously carrying a full briefcase or fumbling for a laissez-passer in airports throughout the world. In tribute to the levelling powers of Organization life, it may be said that a staff member wearing a sari or kente was as recognizable as one in a dark suit, and that the face below the fez was as nervously, as conscientiously Organizational as that beneath the Borsalino. The nature — what Mr Bekkus would have called the ‘aim’ — of the Organization was such as to attract people of character; having attracted them, it found it could not afford them, that there was no room for personalities, and that its hope for survival lay, like that of all organizations, in the subordination of individual gifts to general procedures. No new country, no new language or way of life, no marriage or involvement in war could have so effectively altered and unified the way in which these people presented themselves to the world. It was this process of subordination that was to be seen going on beneath the homburg or turban. And it was Algie’s inability to submit to this process that had delivered his dossier into the hands of Mr Bekkus at the Terminations Board.

  To Algie it seemed that he was constantly being asked to take leave of those senses of humour, proportion, and the ridiculous that he had carefully nurtured and refined throughout his life. He could not get used to giving, with a straight face, a continual account of himself; nor could he regard as valid a system of judging a person’s usefulness by the extent of his passion for detail. He found himself in a world that required laborious explanation of matters whose very meaning, in his view, depended on their being tacitly understood. His idiosyncrasy, his unpunctuality, his persistence in crediting his superiors with precisely that intuition they lacked and envied, were almost as unwelcome at the Organization as they would have been in the commercial world. He was, in short, an exception: that very thing for which organizations make so little allowance.

  Sometimes as Algie sat there in the mornings getting back his breath, Lidia would tell him where she had been the previous evening, what she had been reading or listening to, some detail that would fill the gap since they had left the office the night before. When she did not provide these clues, it usually meant that she had been seeing a lover. She would never have mentioned such a thing to Algie, because of the romance between them.

  Like many of the women who worked at the Organization, Lidia was unmarried. Unlike them, she remained so by her own choice. Years before, she had been married to an official of the Organization who had died on his way to a regional meeting of the Global Health Commission in La Paz. (His car overturned on a mountain road, and it was thought that he, like many of the delegates to the Commission, had been affected by the altitude.) Lidia had loved this husband. For some time after his death she kept to herself, and, even when this ceased to be the case, showed no inclination to remarry. She was admired by her male colleagues and much in demand as a companion, being fair-haired, slender, and not given to discussing her work out of office hours.

  ‘Mustn’t forget,’ Algie now said. ‘Got an appointment at two-thirty. Chap called Bekkus in Personnel.’
r />   Lidia gave an absent-minded groan. ‘Bekkus. Dreary man.’

  ‘A bit boring.’ This was the strongest criticism Algie had ever been known to make of any of his colleagues.

  ‘Boring isn’t the word,’ said Lidia, although it was. She became more attentive. ‘Isn’t he on the Appointments and Terminations Board?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Committee for improving our calibre.’

  Algie quoted:

  ‘Improvement too, the idol of the age,

  Is fed with many a victim.’

  There was nothing Algie enjoyed more than the apt quotation, whether delivered by himself or another. It gave him a momentary sensation that the world had come right; that some instant of perfect harmony had been achieved by two minds meeting, possibly across centuries. His own sources, fed by fifty years of wide and joyous reading, were in this respect inexhaustible. He had an unfashionable affection, too, for those poets whom he regarded as his contemporaries — Belloc, Chesterton, de la Mare — and would occasionally look up from his work (the reader will have gathered that looking up from his work was one of Algie’s most pronounced mannerisms) to announce that ‘Don John of Austria is gone by Alcalar,’ or to ask ‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?’

  From all of which it will readily be seen why Algie’s file was in the hands of Mr Bekkus and why Algie was not considered suitable for continued employment at the Organization. It may also be seen, however, that Algie’s resources were of the kind never yet fully utilized by organization or mankind.

  ‘Yes, here it is.’ Lidia had unearthed a printed list from a yellowing stack of papers on the heating equipment beside her. ‘R. Bekkus. Appointments and Terminations Board.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been appointed,’ Algie remarked, pushing his work away completely and preparing to rise to his feet, ‘so perhaps it’s the other thing.’ He pressed his hands on the desk, heaved himself up and presently shambled off into the corridor.