Sufferance, page 9
* * *
What was happening at home was not my only worry. Conditions at work were becoming worse. On the Monday of that week, the deadline had arrived by which wealthy men in the ‘protected community’ should have declared their assets. The director—who, in contrast to the head and the deputy-head of my section, I had always believed to be a decent man—called us together and announced that the first phase was complete. Now we were entering the second, which involved double-checking what we had learned and trying to find assets that had been concealed. He said: We’ve asked the wealthy to come forward but I fear that some of them will instead have tried to conceal their assets.
We would address this in two ways. He explained that half of us would now make an inventory of all the property—real and personal—above a certain value thought to belong to anyone in the ‘protected community’. This would be done secretly. As he put it: We’ll catch any defaulters by working from the other direction: start with the assets and find the owner.
The other half of his staff would be interrogating men on the list to find out if they had tried to hide assets. By the end of this phase we would have identified the assets of the wealthy members of the ‘protected community’ either listed by themselves or detected if they had failed to report them. Once we had identified assets belonging to a specific individual, we would freeze them and they would be seized. He ended by saying that our heads of section would allocate specific duties. I was hoping I would be assigned to trace assets since that might allow me, with luck, to investigate the ownership of the store.
My head of section immediately called us—me and the seven colleagues at my level—into his office where he was waiting with his deputy. He said: Enough of all this list-making. Now we’re going to start putting the screws on the bastards. Then he looked at me and added: If that’s all right with you.
I tried to smile as if he were making a joke, but I knew he realised how little I liked this work. It was for that reason, I believe, that by deliberate malice, when he divided us into two groups, he assigned me to interrogate men on the list. He knew how much I would hate that task.
The four of us were each given a numbered list and the head and his deputy also had one each. Each individual on the list would be summoned for examination. The head of section required that when each person was interviewed about the return he had lodged, we should assume he had lied about his assets. He said: We all know from experience how devious and greedy these people are and we need to take measures in the light of that. The relatives and friends will know pretty much what the assets of any individual actually are and so what we’ll do is to bring pressure on the one in front of us and force him to reveal the true assets of, say, his brother-in-law or his business partner.
So that he could show us how it was done, we had to sit in on the first few of his interviews. He shook the Return of Assets in the face of his victim and bellowed that he knew he was lying. That went on for some minutes while the poor man sat white-faced in silence. Then in a more reasonable tone the head would say: We will seize all your assets if you don’t tell us what your sister’s husband owns.
I tried to conceal how appalled I was by this. I have always believed that if there are no laws and there is only arbitrary power then nothing has meaning or value, and I don’t want to live in a world like that. However, I had no choice but to go through the motions at the very least.
The richest hundred and fifty families were divided among the four senior people in our section: the head, his deputy, my friendly colleague, and myself. Of course the first thing I did was to scan my list to see if the girl’s father was on it. He was not. It was then easy enough for me to find an opportunity when my colleague was out of the room to look at his. The name was not there either.
There were strict rules about keeping files locked up and away from the sight of anyone who had no legitimate reason for seeing them, and therefore it would be hard to get a sight of the lists being processed by my two superiors.
The returns began to arrive, and we spent some time confirming what we had been told and trying to find out if anything had been hidden. That involved talking to the bank-managers and accountants of the subjects and often to their employees. Then we summoned the men on ‘our’ list and interviewed them. My colleague and I did this in the room we shared. I hated having to shout at and intimidate them, and I freely admit that I was not very good at it. On the other hand, I was saddened to see how willingly and effectively my colleague—the one man at work apart from the director whom I had regarded as a decent person—went about these unsavoury tasks.
Now that I was spending so much of my time encouraging informers and tracking down assets using these methods, I knew how meticulous the search was both for property and for people themselves belonging to that section of society. And of course it was especially the wealthy ones who were being put under scrutiny.
I went over and over in my mind what the authorities knew about the girl’s family to try to work out how probable it was that they would take an interest in them and in her. It was virtually certain that the family would come within their purview through their ownership of the store. What I did not know was if the girl’s father was the sole proprietor or if he had one or more partners. (Assuming he was involved in its ownership at all!) If the latter, then if an official summoned one of the co-owners for interrogation, it was likely that the issue of his partner would arise.
I asked the girl about her father’s involvement in the store, but she was irritatingly unenlightening—presumably because she did not know anything about her father’s business and had probably never thought about the matter.
It was one afternoon about now that I casually asked my head of section what the difference in meaning was between the two rubrics on the list of names. Without looking up, he just said: Once the subject has been relocated, then, obviously, the assets default directly to the state.
* * *
Amid the growing gloom, something hopeful happened at last. The next day my elder daughter came home and announced with some satisfaction that she had found work. It was very poorly paid and in a distant part of the city, so her tram-fare would reduce her earnings still further. But she would be able to make a small contribution to the household expenses. Later my wife told me that the job was only temporary to see if she ‘suited’. The establishment was not one that had a wealthy or remotely fashionable clientèle, although the quality of their work was good. At least it meant she would not be associating with collaborationists.
That evening I opened one of our remaining bottles of wine to celebrate.
From now on my elder daughter left the house with her sister and myself and caught the same tram as her sibling.
* * *
I was now so busy that for several weeks I had had no time to visit the house on Tuesdays as I had promised the girl I would. She pestered me about that every evening when I got home—exhausted as I was. She knew from the wireless about the regulation requiring a return of assets and was anxious that I should take the inventory of all the valuables her parents owned and register it with my own department. She believed that was the only means of preventing their being stolen by the servant.
I tried to explain to her that was wholly inappropriate as well as impossible. I avoided telling her it would be unwise to draw attention to her father and herself, but I told her that her father’s assets were not my concern. Though I did not say it, I thought that such a preoccupation with wealth was unnatural and unhealthy in a child of that age.
* * *
My daughter’s small subventions would not materially improve our financial situation and so the day after she found work, my wife and I took a decision about the domestic. My wife was pretty sure that she was no longer stealing from us, if she ever had been—and that was perhaps because money was tighter and so she had less latitude.
There was a difficulty. We were worried that if we let her go, she might make use of her knowledge of the girl’s presence to avenge herself on us. We agreed to try to dismiss her the next day but to tread carefully, as if edging over the thin ice on a frozen lake. If she even hinted that she would make trouble, we would withdraw and keep her on, telling her she had misunderstood our meaning.
* * *
In the office we began to draw up accounts for our ‘clients’ as we smilingly called the wealthy individuals whose holdings we were investigating. We subordinates were instructed to report to the head and his deputy whenever we discovered the existence of a safe or a bank-deposit. They would then deal with it themselves on the grounds that we were not to be trusted. The two of them would each be a witness for the probity of the other.
I noticed they were not very interested in real property even though that was where the highest values were.
* * *
As arranged, I came home from work early enough to catch the domestic while she was still there. She looked surprised to see me, and I think she guessed what was coming. My wife set the girl a task in the living-room, and then we three adults sat round the kitchen-table. My wife and I began to talk about the effects of the rise in prices. Some things had doubled—or even tripled—while my salary had dropped by a fifth. She must have guessed what we were leading towards because she started talking about how difficult things were for her with her husband being too unwell to work and a daughter still at school.
Since she had not hinted that she could make trouble for us over the girl, we went on to say we were terribly sorry but we just could not afford her services any more. She looked shocked and asked if she could work just three days a week or even two. (We had talked this over and agreed that if we were going to dismiss her, it had to be a clean break. To have her coming to the house but being resentful at being given half the work was the worst of all options.) We told her we could not afford to have her even for one day. She was silent for a moment and then said: You can afford to take in this girl and feed her and she isn’t even your own kind.
My wife and I looked at each other? Was this a hint that she knew she could make things awkward for us? What did she mean by your own kind? Did she merely mean that the girl was not a blood-relative in which case the remark was perfectly harmless. Or was she alluding to the girl’s membership of a different community and warning us that she could get us into trouble? I thought not and so I said: I’m very sorry but that’s what we’ve decided. We won’t need you to come again.
She got up and slowly took off her apron and then put on her coat. She went to the door and just said: I’ll miss the children.
My wife said: And they’ll miss you. We all will.
It was the truth. She was a cheerful soul.
We went and told the girl that the domestic was leaving and would not be coming back. There was an emotional parting between the two of them. My younger daughter arrived from school in time to join in and shed a few tears. Rather to my dismay, the girl said: Come and visit us. Promise.
It was odd that the girl was so aware of her superior wealth and sophisticated life in comparison with my family and lost no opportunity to lord it over my daughters, and yet at the same time she had no reserve or self-consciousness with folk like the domestic or the joiner’s wife. I suppose she did not see them as people to whom she had to prove her superiority. Or perhaps it was because she felt she could give them orders.
The girl was so upset afterwards that she turned on my wife and myself and said: I suppose you sacked her because she stole a few things.
So I was right and she had known that. I wondered if she had been blackmailing the woman. Yet in that case they would surely not have been on such good terms.
Seeing our surprise, she said: Oh I know all about what she was getting up to. How she fiddled the change from the money for shopping and so on. But her husband is an invalid and she can hardly feed her family. I don’t know how they’ll manage now. It’s not fair you did that to her.
I said I was surprised that she was so sorry to see the domestic go since it was she who had damaged her doll. She just looked at me with contempt and flounced out of the room.
I said to my wife: She seems so sure that the domestic wasn’t responsible for the doll that I think there can be only one explanation: She did it herself.
My wife looked at me strangely but made no reply. I began to wonder if she had learned or guessed more of the truth about that incident than she was prepared to tell me.
* * *
The bureaucracy imposed on us by the occupying power was simultaneously meticulous in its attention to detail and blundering in its overall strategy. An example of that was what now happened at work. My section had been processing the returns of assets for several weeks when it was realised that there was no way to ensure compliance by the ‘protected community’ with the requirement to register their possessions when the authorities had no knowledge of who was and who was not a member of that community. They could not carry out random checks when they had no list of who was subject to the regulation. This problem had emerged across the country.
And so the day after we had parted from the domestic, the Ministry of Protection announced a new regulation. All members of the ‘protected community’ over the age of fourteen had to go to their local Department of Protection and register their addresses ‘for their own security’ and must not move house without reporting their new address to the department within a week of the move. On registering they would be given a new and distinctive identity-card in exchange for the existing one. Those under that age could be registered by their parents now but were not required to, although they would have to be registered by a later unspecified date. The deadline for registration of those over fourteen was two months in the future.
My wife and I were relieved that the girl was outside the scope of those regulations because she was not yet fourteen—though her birthday was only a few weeks away. I was pleased I did not have to make a decision about whether or not she should register. She was clearly in an anomalous position, so there was ambiguity about her status. My wife agreed that we should wait for her parents to return and leave it to them to sort it out. After all, we said to each other, if we registered the girl now, we would not know which was the correct address to give for her—our own or that of her parents.
* * *
That week-end things came to a head inside the apartment. For weeks tensions had been building up. The various privations—the bad food, the cold because we could not afford to heat the apartment as before, the power-cuts that were becoming more frequent and meant we sometimes spent the evening in darkness unable to read and without the comfort of the wireless—were making us all tired and less willing to put up with each other’s irritating habits.
My wife had stopped buying special foodstuffs to accommodate the girl—we simply could not afford to. Rationing had been announced, though not yet introduced, but prices had risen steeply. That was a form of rationing by cost which made certain items unaffordable, and, given how short of cash we were, my wife and I had little patience for the girl’s faddishness about food. She refused to eat bacon or pork or pig’s trotters, and often those were all that was on sale at the butcher’s. In protest, she simply left the food uneaten on her plate and one of our daughters would take it.
My elder daughter would come home exhausted after a hard day at work followed by a long tram-ride. Her new employer had shown herself to be a difficult person to work for and was constantly making new and unreasonable demands: tidy the work-room, clean the shop, make lunch for the other seamstresses. My daughter felt that she was being treated like a skivvy rather than an apprentice whose low wages reflected the fact that she was there to learn as much as to work.
She complained that on the few occasions her employer had allowed her to do anything creative, she had been dismissive of her designs, and she believed it was because she was an embittered old woman who was envious of her youth and talent. What made it worse was that the couturière had a favourite, a girl of about the same age who had also only just been taken on as an apprentice. She gave her far more interesting work to do, and she had already begun to help with the design of the dresses. My daughter remarked that she suspected that the woman was a member of the girl’s community and this explained why she was so spiteful and penny-pinching.
A new problem arose. My elder daughter began to demand a bigger role in decisions about the way we lived and when I objected, she pointed out that the household now had two wage-earners, and I had to concede the point—though in truth her contribution was very small. It irked her more than ever that we were making heavy sacrifices for the girl, and on several occasions, when she was alone with my wife and myself, she revealed her unhappiness that some of her cash was going towards feeding ‘the ingrate’.
In fact, we were all becoming less indulgent towards the girl’s boastfulness and querulousness. And then on that Sunday evening there was an incident at supper that marked what turned out to be the beginning of a new stage in the deterioration of our relations with her.
She had been chattering on as usual about the amusing things she and her friends used to get up to. I wasn’t paying any attention, and I didn’t think anyone else was, but suddenly my younger girl said indignantly: The other day you said your best friend’s parents have a house by the lake and now you’re saying it’s halfway up a mountain!
