A tide of angst and the suppressed urge to flee had already charged the atmosphere in the room, rippling up through the obligatory start of term veneer of compulsory optimism. As the staff, with some foreboding, took their seats at the rectangular table, Styles' eyes darted round the room, as if in search of underlings in ambush. Nervously filling the short time it took for the staff to seat themselves, she used the moments to stroke the emblems of her status. She smoothed the pleated skirt of her wincingly ill advised lime green suit, which set off her sallow skin to bilious effect. She buttoned and unbuttoned her jacket several times, and ran her fingers under the expandable bracelet of her gold Tissot watch. The table she was sitting at was bare apart from her black Mont Blanc pens and the paperwork for the training session. Typically for Styles, there was no evidence of a printed agenda for the session. Interesting, thought Eva.
"Shall we begin?" Given Barbara Styles' aspirations to upward mobility, nature had proved less than cooperative, endowing her with a voice reminiscent of a circular saw felling timber. Her voice did not emerge from her centre, but escaped instead like some captive from a provisional refugee camp located in the constricted drainpipe of her neck. This sense of constraint was not only audible, but even visible. She made repeated involuntary, raptor like jerks of the neck, often accompanied by abrupt asymmetrical gyrations of her shoulders, as if trying in vain to shake off some inner blockage. When she was really tense, like today, she reminded Eva of a clockwork mechanical toy. On the rare occasions when she was relaxed she was more reminiscent of those toy dogs with nodding heads that people put on the parcel shelves of their cars.
Smiling to herself (Styles noted this with some puzzlement and even displeasure, which Eva took as further evidence of a hidden agenda), Eva held on to this thought of the nodding dog to help her through what was to follow. The only effective defence on an occasion like this was an unassailable sense of proportion, which meant subcutaneous, intravenous humour. As (with a jerking nod and a neck twisting twitch) Barbara Styles began speaking, Eva's eyes were drawn to the finger ballet being performed as a sideshow by her hands, whose staccato like dance was quite out of step with what she was saying. In a series of sharp darts with the fingers, like office guerrillas outrunning invisible foes, Dr. Styles would draw this or that sheet of paper closer towards her, move another a little to the left or right, straighten the angle of another, or push some papers away from her, before readjusting them back to where they had been before. It occurred to Eva to wonder whether this finger ballet sideshow might after all be the real show, and the words just a smokescreen. On the basis of similar experiences in morning assemblies, when jaw dropping statements had been accompanied by similar finger ballets, Eva felt sure that this dance too was the forerunner of something ominous.
The incessant nervous precision behind this adjustable two dimensional barrier of office supplies suggested an inner struggle taking place inside Styles' mind. Perhaps, thought Eva, to convince herself of whatever version of reality was currently most expedient for her. Reality was a notoriously elastic concept at Our Lady of Ransom's, and truth did not even figure in its vocabulary. The little minuet of adjustments repeated itself with deft little variations throughout the next three minutes or so, during which Styles broached the theme of the day's training session.
"I thought it would be helpful….".
("To whom?" Eva couldn't help wondering)
"…… to run through some typical situations that crop up in boarding, and discuss…..
("DISCUSS?" thought Eva incredulously. "Can this mean that Ransom's is no longer a dialogue free dictatorship? When was that edict passed?")
Eva found that her mind had temporarily wandered at this point, in retreat before a thunderous avalanche of corporate jargon. The mind numbing effects had already set in like a drug, Eva noted, aware of a fog forming in her head, like protective wadding against what promised to be a morning of pure bullshit. Perversely, she found herself relieved to discover that she was still capable of seeing it coming.
Meanwhile, a silent, unanimous wave of "Oh shit!" had already passed telepathically round the rest of the teachers sitting around the heavy, angular table. Bodies tensed, rapid glances were exchanged, Pauline Jenkins turned her back suddenly on the group and made herself intently busy sorting a set of three marker pens in front of a virginal flipchart. Red. Blue. Green.
"It's a pity she can't find any pictures to straighten," thought Eva. "That seems to be her only passion."
Barbara droned on with worrying blandness, before looking over to her loyal deputy Pauline Jenkins, who to give her credit was looking uncomfortable. This was a bad sign. Pauline might be a Ransom's robot, but she was not without some vestigial sense of human decency.
"What we….("Ah!" thought Eva, "that telltale royal we!")
".. envisage here is that we just run through one or two.."
("The whole gamut then," thought Eva).
"…… situations that tend to crop up in boarding from time to time ("Haven't we just heard all this before?," thought Eva, "or have we just moved into a time loop in a parallel universe?").
"…… and look at the best way…."
("Meaning, of course, the most expedient way," Eva felt herself thinking through the fog)
"……. to handle them."
("Meaning how to avoid having to handle them at all," Eva concluded).
Eva was quite adept at deciphering Styles' utterances by now. So, it seemed, were most of her colleagues. Less than five minutes into the Inset, a second wave of visceral symptoms passed like a sympathetic barometer change round the table, as vegetative nervous systems went into familiar Ransom's high alert. Asthmatic bronchial tubes battened down their hatches in panic, blood pressure levels rose, acid corroded into stomach linings, and large intestines knotted in Irritable Bowel dread.
"If Styles is chairing an in-service training session for boarding staff," Svetlana had said to Eva the night before, "expect a carve up. She would never lower herself to be present at anything to do with boarding unless her own personal agenda was involved. This isn't about professional training. This is a box job."
The 'box job' was Ransom's slang for Styles' principal management tool, which she herself referred to as "putting people back in their boxes". A typical 'box job' might consist of a combination of put downs, humiliations private and public, or social snubs. Most typically it entailed a creative onslaught of all of the above in varying sequences. This had the added advantage of disorienting even the most intelligent target, thus bearing a close resemblance to wars of attrition in armed combat. Indeed the more intelligent the target, the greater the likelihood that they would be reduced to a gibbering idiot. For this reason, among others, intelligence is a huge drawback in the lower echelons of corporate life. Almost as much of a drawback as morals.
The "Art of War" and Machiavelli's "Prince" might in some respects be regarded as the Old and New Testaments of the corporate Bible, even, or perhaps most especially, in an independent school like Ransom's that was a religious foundation, where awkward traits like principles and compassion can so easily get in the way. The 'box job' thus complied in all respects with the imperatives of virtuoso multitasking and flexibility (there were almost always several box jobs running concurrently at any one time). Luckily for Styles, unluckily for everyone else, putting people back in their boxes also happened to be her favourite hobby. More than this, it was a compulsion, which had implications. Dr. Styles did not know it yet, but her penchant for the box job meant that, under the right circumstances, she could be played even more easily than she could do the playing. But not today.
In a world of counterfeits, the real is the ultimate enemy. Having grasped this, it was not difficult for Eva to predict who would be the targets of this ideological reality surgery. She herself would be one of them, for sure. Four months earlier, she had attempted to alert the Deputy Pauline Jenkins to the fact that a new and inexperienced Assistant Housemistress in Immaculate Conception, the house next to Martyrs, was being bullied by the Housemistress, Pat Sherman. Looking back, Eva could see that this had been a futile act of windmill tilting.
Sherman was a globular sociopath. However, not only was she the longest surviving member of the boarding staff at Ransom's, but by some miracle of corporate natural selection (the survival of the fattest, perhaps, or the triumph of matter over mind) she had even managed to establish her globular, sociopathic way of dealing with people as the norm. Bullying? What bullying? Sherman had successfully offloaded almost her entire workload on to her new Assistant Fakhriya. Fakhriya got the girls up in the morning, Fakhriya put the girls to bed at night, Fakhriya attended to their needs at break and at lunch. Fakhriya was on active duty sixteen or seventeen hours a day, every day. She even seemed to be on duty most weekends. Meanwhile Sherman, who had the smallest teaching load of any Housemistress at Ransom's, around six lessons a week, plus a couple of meetings, spent most of her time with her feet up in her flat watching DVDs and drinking wine, washing down bag after bag of savoury snacks. Fakhriya was exhausted within ten days and had gone round to Carol, her counterpart in Martyrs, for support and advice. Eva, who spent a lot of time round at Carol's, had been there at the time.
They had to tread carefully. "Have you tried writing down your work schedule and showing it to Pat?" Carol asked.
"Yes, I did that last Thursday," sobbed Fakhriya. "She just told me it would balance out over the term, and that I had only been here a month!"
Carol and Eva exchanged a glance, acknowledging familiar territory.
"Well, continue keeping a record of your hours," Eva had urged.
"Of course," Fakhriya had said.
"Have you talked to the Senior Housemistress?" asked Carol next, already guessing what the answer would be.
"Yes, she invited me round for coffee a couple of days ago, but she admitted to me she wouldn't touch this with a bargepole, she's scared shitless of Pat Sherman."
Nothing new there then. One of the reasons Pat Sherman was being so difficult at the moment was because she had been passed up for promotion to the post of Senior Housemistress at the start of this academic year. The job had gone to Eddie (Edwina) Bennett, who was nice but spineless and not terribly bright (Styles and Jenkins liked people like that).
Carol and Eva had discussed the situation, and had decided that Fakhriya didn't look as if she would be able to take much more of this, so Eva volunteered to go and talk to Pauline about it. Some sort of rational professional framework was needed here to enable the two to work together. Rational. At Ransom's. Right.
Eva had made an appointment to see Pauline and had put the situation to her as neutrally as she could. Pauline had listened impassively, told Eva to leave it with her, and then done absolutely nothing. She had obviously been learning fast at the feet of the Headmistress. After another month of doing two people's jobs for sixteen hours a day, Fakhriya had done something quite unexpected: first she had gone to pour out her woes to Father Barnes, the school chaplain. Then she had gone to see a lawyer, who had nearly wet himself laughing when she told him what hours she was working. Fakhriya discovered that there were things called laws that were designed to protect people in the workplace and that there were things called rights that she could invoke in a situation like this. She made an appointment to see Styles, sat down in her study and started talking about duty of care. Every now and again the outside world managed to find a chink in the Ransom's armour. And whenever that happened, Ransom's always seemed to be caught with its trousers down. A deal was hastily made with a Head who purported to have been taken completely unawares by the situation, and Fakhriya left Ransom's with a rather fatter bank balance than when she had arrived. Father Barnes looked particularly pleased with himself around that time, although Styles couldn't figure out why.
Clearly, however, in the managerial climate of Ransom's, there could only be one rational explanation for this embarrassing departure less than a term after Fakhriya's arrival. It must be someone's fault, that is someone else's fault than the management's. The secret of corporate managerial success being to have all the power, and preferably all the money, but none of the responsibility, Fakhriya must, logically, have left because she had not been adequately supported by her colleagues. The colleagues must, therefore, be punished. They must also be punished for having made a nuisance of themselves.
But even Eva was rather surprised now at the Inset to hear the Fakhriya dilemma being presented in Styles' circular saw like voice as a "hypothetical situation" that might need to be dealt with in boarding. There was a lot of rapid eye contact around the table, none of which was lost on Styles, as the rest of the staff at last, suddenly and with some consternation, grasped what the game was. Even as their ears heard the words that Styles was uttering, it was difficult for their minds to accept that the Head of a school of this standing could do anything so unprofessional, or indeed as potentially open to legal action, as to humiliate staff, one after the other, and in each other's presence, under the pretext of a training session. Styles' eyes narrowed as she uttered one of those sighs of contentment that were typical of her just as the knife went in. Then she threw out the bait at Eva:
"So, what would you do in this situation?"
Eva knew she was the prey, but found herself unable to resist the bait.
"Well, having established that the member of staff concerned ("God, how I hate this corporate speak!" she thought) has spoken to her line manager, the housemistress, and discussed her written record of working hours, and having checked that the Senior Housemistress was already aware of the situation, I would take the matter to the Deputy."
"NO!" retorted Dr. Styles with voice raised. "That is exactly what you SHOULDN'T do!"
Public wrist slappings were nothing unusual at Ransom's, but Eva found herself more curious than angry. She actually felt that the Head was making the most almighty fool of herself:
"So what would you advise in a situation like this?" she found herself able to ask quite blandly.
"Well," came the rather blustered reply, "the important thing is not to push it up the pyramid!"
("PUSH IT UP THE PYRAMID???", everyone round the table found themselves asking wordlessly).
"I'm sorry," said Eva, trying not to laugh, "I'm not sure I quite follow you…"
The word 'pyramid', it seemed, was now the Ransomite euphemism for 'pecking order'.
Styles, who was never at her most gracious when being legitimately challenged, spluttered some more impatient bluster.
"Well, if a new assistant housemistress is not coping with her duties…"
("Aha!" thought Eva, so this is the version of reality we are being asked to swallow: 'not coping with her duties! The poor woman was being BULLIED!")
"….. then it is the responsibility of her colleagues to support and advise her to enable her to cope!" Stunned silence.
"I see," said Eva, reeling slightly from the stink of a fresh pile of corporate bullshit. "So you would see this kind of issue as being no concern of the management?"
"No," said Dr. Styles triumphantly. "As I said, this kind of thing should not be pushed up the pyramid."
("I know just what I'd like to push it up!" thought Eva).
"And what," said Eva out loud, politely but with emphasis, enunciating carefully, "about duty of care?"
Eva couldn't have known it, but this was the lance that Fakhriya had used in her final conversation with the Head. Barbara Styles dodged this unexpected, and awkwardly appropriate invisible challenge with her whole body, jerking to one side with a wide eyed glance of alarm. Partially recovering from the shock in a very short time, however, she affected not to have heard the question and became very interested in the paperwork in front of her again. The greasy, stinking, globular form of Pat Sherman, who had deliberately sat herself strategically opposite Eva in order to watch the skewering, glowed and preened with an almost sexual satisfaction. She had just been given carte blanche in public, and she intended to make full use of it.
This opening gambit turned out to be the first in a battery of professional put downs aimed at almost all the house staff except, conspicuously, Pat Sherman. One by one, they were all obliquely but publicly reprimanded for having had the effrontery to trouble the management with their petty little boarding issues. Their mission in life, it seemed, was to make themselves as invisible as possible and not to pester the grown ups. As the implications of the Styles gospel of boarding management slowly began to sink into the minds of her stunned staff, they found their will to stand up for themselves waning, in spite of themselves. It was a classic piece of corporate goal post moving. But the best was yet to come.
"So!" sighed Dr. Styles contentedly and with deadly understatement (as the rest of the company still quivered in their seats, on the verge of emotional collapse, feeling as if they had just been savaged by vampires), "That takes care of the Inset part."
("The Inset PART??!") Discreet panic stricken looks were exchanged.
"Fortunately we still have plenty of time.."
("We do?! For what?!")
".. to move on to our main theme for today.."
("Aha," thought Eva, irritating Styles with another of her knowing smiles. Rule number one, which Styles had mastered a long time ago. NEVER give your agenda away until your guns are properly loaded and facing the right way, and the enemy is preferably exhausted from another skirmish)….
"Which is……"
("Go ahead you blood sucking bitch! Make my day!")
"The Old Ransomites' Reunion."
So that was it. The 'Inset' had not really been an Inset at all. It had been a two pronged stratagem for putting a few jumped up little house staff into their boxes, while at the same time softening them up for this. Now it made sense. You had to hand it to her. It was cunning. That was the thing with these stratagems: whichever way the axe fell, you lost. Unless, ruminated Eva, unless you simply stopped playing their game and started your own. This thought elicited her third rogue smile of the morning, which in turn elicited her fourth, as Eva noted Styles' frown of annoyance on seeing her so at ease with herself.
"Sorry, Stylesie dear," thought Eva, smiling directly at her, "but you've just blown your cover. Oh dear, now what are you going to do? And, which is just as bad, you have pushed several people in this room this morning to a point where they have far more to gain by not cooperating with you than they have by cooperating with you."
Eva was reminded of something else her mother Svetlana had said the night before: "Some people are so clever, they're stupid." In spite of herself, her curiosity as to what was going to happen next almost overcame her sense of sorrow and dismay at the poisonous mind set she was being exposed to. Almost.
For now it seemed, salt was about to be rubbed into the great wound of last year's Old Ransomites' Reunion. Every other year, during the first weekend of the May half term holiday, there was a corporate 'expectation' of the boarding staff that they would voluntarily give up a weekend of their holiday in order to wait tables and clear up vomit at the Ransomite bacchanalia for old students of the school, plus spouses, partners and cronies. A small select group of students would also be chosen to assist them, who were likewise expected to feel corporately honoured to have their bottoms pinched and their breasts ogled and to wade through sick until the small hours of the morning.
The year before last, the whole occasion had got even more out of hand than usual, and several drunken spouses, partners or cronies, had entered a boarding house (blind drunk in the small hours of the morning) where some of the girls had at last retreated, exhausted, to sleep. There had been one unspecified 'incident', in which two girls had been woken, frightened and molested by the intruders, and another in which Carol had discovered a party of several revellers of both sexes cooking breakfast with her bacon and eggs in the house kitchen at six o' clock in the morning, having somehow broken into the house.
These excesses had led several members of the house staff to write a letter to the Head with a copy to the Board of Governors, in which they categorically refused to have anything to do in future with what was, after all, a private social function involving guests for whom they had no professional responsibility, and expressing their dismay at students of the school being exposed to this kind of behaviour from people who should be setting them an example. It had been taken as a given by the boarding staff from that time to this that their cooperation from the event had been withdrawn. Under the circumstances this seemed more than reasonable.
How naive can one get? Pauline Jenkins had disappeared discreetly a few minutes earlier, and returned now with two VIPS: Patrick Donahue, Chairman of the Old Ransomites' Committee, and Andrew Moran, Treasurer of the Board of Governors. They entered the room, oozing smiles. Eva winced. One sat down at the corner of the rectangular table nearest the door, the other walked right round the room and sat himself down at the corner diagonally opposite. Dr. Styles formed the third angle of an invisible isosceles triangle, which had been constructed through the seating arrangements to contain the house staff. Eva could smell the tactics already. It all looked as casual as it was meant to look. There followed an effulgent, bowing and scraping introductory speech by Styles, who bobbed and danced like a mating partridge in front of so much status in one small room, babbling on about "thinking outside the box."
"So, having been put back into our boxes, we now have to think outside them! Nothing like being kept on one's toes, is there?" thought Eva.
Moran and Donahue made some sympathetic noises about the Bacchanalian excesses, before moving into their spiel. They spent the next fifteen minutes, smiling relentlessly throughout, talking about a marquee, how big it would be, where it would be located on the lacrosse pitch, where the band would play, what kind of music would be played, where the bar would be, how many courses the meal would have, where the extra parking facilities would be. The anxious frowns on the faces of the housemistresses and their assistants round the table began to melt in relief, and even gratitude. Except for Eva. Eva sat back in her chair and looked round the room, taking in the seating constellation and the way that Moran and Donahue were basically talking to each other across the room, and the way that none of the other people present had even been given a chance to speak.
So that, then, was that. It had been decided, without a single word of discussion, let alone opposition, that this year's Reunion would be held in a marquee, rather than in the main building. Even Jane Trowbridge and Carol seemed not to have noticed how brilliantly this performance had willfully missed the point, which was that the house staff had already unanimously decided that they wanted nothing further to do with the event, nor to spend a weekend of their hard earned holidays waiting at tables and clearing up vomit. It was, Eva had to admit, a very deft piece of boardroom sleight of hand. You had to hand it to them. They had handed it to them. On a plate. Eva got into her car and drove round to her mother's.
Svetlana, taking one look at the expression on her daughter's face, went wordlessly into the kitchen as Eva went to sit down in front of the fire, and came back with a bottle of vintage Medoc and two huge glasses.
"Here," she said, pouring her a glass.
Eva sighed, too drained to speak. She gazed for quite a while into the flames of the fire, sipping thoughtfully. Svetlana waited.
"You know," said Eva, "there were moments in that room today when I was completely fascinated, even enjoying it. It's like staring into the eyes of a snake. It's mesmerizing."
"Yes, Eva, I know," said her mother. "That is why it is so important that you get out of there as soon as you can. This is the kind of poison you are dealing with. Its fascination is what makes it so deadly, you see? As long as you live and work near it, it either kills you by sapping your strength, or turns you into an addict. Before you know it, you're outdoing them in venom. We become like what we loathe."
"It's terrifying," said Eva.
"It is," said her mother. "Listen, why don't you book a flight to Prague for half term? It'll give you something to look forward to. It always does you good!"
Eva's eyes filled with tears.
"Prague seems such a long way away today," she said, her voice shaking.
Svetlana took her hand and squeezed it.
"It only seems a long way away as long as you're moving away from it. Make the choice, Eva."
聚合中文网 阅读好时光 www.juhezwn.com
小提示:漏章、缺章、错字过多试试导航栏右上角的源