Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [115]
The more often the words friend, friendship, friendly are spoken, the odder they sound. If you are looking for friends, he can imagine the man saying, join a club, play skittles, fly model planes, collect stamps. Why expect your employer, IBM, International Business Machines, manufacturer of electronic calculators and computers, to provide them for you?
And of course the man is right. What right has he to complain, in this country above all, where everyone is so cool to everyone else? Is that not what he admires the English for: their emotional restraint? Is that not why he is writing, in his spare time, a thesis on the works of Ford Madox Ford, half-German celebrator of English laconism?
Confused and stumbling, he expands on his complaint. His expansion is as obscure to the Personnel man as is the complaint itself. Misapprehension: that is the word the man is hunting for. Employee was under a misapprehension: that would be an appropriate formulation. But he does not feel like being helpful. Let them find their own way of pigeonholing him.
What the man is particularly keen to find out is what he will do next. Is his talk about lack of friendship merely a cover for a move from IBM to one of IBM’s competitors in the field of business machines? Have promises been made to him, have inducements been offered?
He could not be more earnest in his denials. He does not have another job lined up, with a rival or anyone else. He has not been interviewed. He is leaving IBM simply to get out of IBM. He wants to be free, that is all.
The more he talks, the sillier he sounds, the more out of place in the world of business. But at least he is not saying, ‘I am leaving IBM in order to become a poet.’ That secret, at least, is still his own.
Out of the blue, in the midst of all this, comes a phone call from Caroline. She is on vacation on the south coast, in Bognor Regis, and at a loose end. Why does he not catch a train and spend Saturday with her?
She meets him at the station. From a shop on the Main Street they hire bicycles; soon they are cycling along empty country lanes amid fields of young wheat. It is unseasonably warm. Sweat pours from him. His clothes are wrong for the occasion: grey flannels, a jacket. Caroline wears a brief tomato-coloured tunic and sandals. Her blonde hair flashes, her long legs gleam as she turns the pedals; she looks like a goddess.
What is she doing in Bognor Regis, he asks? Staying with an aunt, she replies, a long-lost English aunt. He does not inquire further.
They stop at the roadside, cross a fence. Caroline has brought sandwiches; they find a spot in the shade of a chestnut tree and have their picnic. Afterwards, he senses she would not mind if he made love to her. But he is nervous, out here in the open where at any moment a farmer or even a constable might descend on them and demand to know what they think they are up to.
‘I’ve resigned from IBM,’ he says.
‘That’s good. What will you do next?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll just drift for a while, I think.’
She waits to hear more, waits to hear his plans. But he has no more to offer, no plans, no ideas. What a dullard he is! Why does a girl like Caroline bother to keep him in tow, a girl who has acclimatized to England, made a success of her life, left him behind in every way? Only one explanation occurs to him: that she still sees him as he was in Cape Town, when he could still present himself as a poet to be, when he was not yet what he has become, what IBM has made of him: a eunuch, a drone, a worried boy hurrying to catch the 8.17 to the office.
Elsewhere in Britain, employees who resign are given a send-off – if not a gold watch then at least a get-together during the tea break, a speech, a round of applause and good wishes,