The Gap Year, Part I

The first time was an accident. It was a cold, rainy Sunday toward the end of winter. Douglas had everything he wanted; there was no need to go out. He read the newspaper while he drank his coffee. He gave the kitchen and bathroom a long overdue cleaning. He had brought work home from the office and devoted an hour to reading the report of the administrative reorganisation committee and writing a response to it. Then he picked up a book and read. It wasn’t until he went to bed that he realised he had not said, had not heard, a word all day long. It had been, he decided, not a bad way to spend the day. Peaceful, unstressed. Although he didn’t know it at the time, that was his first day of silence.

The next day was a horror. The train into the city sat unmoving for half an hour between stops. No explanation was given for the delay. After five minutes had passed, a man seated two rows ahead of Douglas took out his mobile and rung his office to announce that he would arrive late for a meeting. His example catalysed the other passengers, and a wave of phone calls spread outward from him. A babble of shouted conversations soon filled the car, as each person struggled to be heard over the din. Douglas tried to bury himself in the newspaper, but the noise prevented him from concentrating.

The underground was packed by the time the train arrived, and he had to ride one stop past his usual station before he could make my way to an exit and get off. He had to rush to the office to arrive in time for an appointment with a fractious author. He needn’t have hurried. Lydia Paskings wasn’t there. When she showed up an hour late, no one had to announce her arrival. Her progress down the hall toward Douglas’s office was marked by a tirade about the stupidity of the taxi driver who had brought her from her hotel.

After complaining for the first fifteen minutes and demanding sympathy and a freshly brewed cup of coffee from the assembled staff, she turned to Douglas and asked irritably what he was going to do about his company’s ‘criminal’ refusal to arrange the author’s tour she wanted. When Douglas explained in a studiedly calm voice that the declining sales of her books made a tour infeasible, she exploded again. Douglas and the rest of the staff were treated to another outburst. It ended with her shouting that she would take her book elsewhere unless her wishes were satisfied. From somewhere down the hall came the sound of laughter, quickly muted. Douglas found it hard to keep from smiling. It has been almost too easy to manoeuvre her into making her oft-repeated threat again. ‘As you wish, Lydia. Have your agent call me. We will arrange to cancel the contract.’

She paused in mid-rant as the meaning of his words sunk in. ‘You can’t mean that. I’m one of your best-selling authors.’

‘If that is true, Lydia, then you will have no trouble finding another publisher. Allow me to have the porter find you a taxi.’ Douglas lifted the phone and buzzed the porter’s desk on the ground floor. ‘Ms Paskings is about to leave. Please ring for a taxi for her. Thank you.’ Douglas stood up and opened a cabinet. He pulled out a manuscript box and handed it to the suddenly quiet author. ‘I think you will find this in the same pristine shape in which it was delivered to us.’

Lydia Paskings suddenly found her voice. She slammed the box against Douglas’s desk. It slid onto the floor and the pages of the manuscript cascaded out. ‘I’ve made this publisher what it is today. If you think I’m going to stay here and be insulted . . .’

Douglas cut in. ‘No, under the circumstances asking you to stay would be unreasonable on my part. I’m sure that a taxi has been found for you by now.’

‘I can find my own taxi.’

‘As you wish.’

Lydia stood up. She seemed uncertain of what to do next. Douglas knelt down and gathered the loose sheets of the manuscript and stuffed them back into the box. When he handed it to her, she appeared stunned by the suddenness of the dismissal. She stared at the box as if she didn’t know what it was. After a moment, she picked up her purse and set it atop the box. ‘You are a bastard. You know that, don’t you?’ She spoke softly, as if to herself. If anything, she appeared dismayed and saddened by the realisation of this side of Douglas’s personality.

Douglas made a dismissive gesture with his hand. He wasn’t sure whether he was indicating to Lydia that she should leave or whether he was pushing away her assessment of him. She took one final look at him and then left. She hadn’t walked twenty feet before she found her voice again and started shouting. ‘If this is the way you treat authors, you soon won’t have any left. I’ll make sure that everyone learns of this outrage. All of you should start looking for jobs now. This place won’t be around much longer.’ She continued in the same vein until the lift arrived.

The lift doors had barely closed before Miles Pope, the managing director of the press, stood in the door of Douglas’s office. ‘Are we rid of her then?’ More and more often of late, he delegated the task of dealing with difficult authors to Douglas.

‘I believe so. I will call her agent. Sophie has already prepared the papers voiding the contract for the current book and arranging for the reversions of the rights to the previous books as they go out of print. I’m sure her agent and Lydia will make demands, but the matter should be settled within a week or two. She will need to find another publisher quickly. If the rumours are true, she needs the income to support herself in the style she wants.’

Behind Miles, several staff were looking out a window in the corridor overlooking the front entrance. They were pointing and giggling. Douglas heard one of them say, ‘There’s the old cow now. Pity the poor driver who picks her up.’ Another glanced around. When she saw Douglas watching them, she held her hands up and mimed applause.

Miles nodded with satisfaction. ‘Good work, Douglas. I knew we could rely on you to sort this out properly.’

‘Happy to have been of help, Miles.’

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look particularly happy.’

To his surprise, Douglas realised that Miles’s assessment was accurate. He wasn’t happy about it at all, and even a man he thought unusually insensitive had seen that. ‘I’m becoming too good at this. I hope at least that I haven’t grown to like it. That worries me sometimes—that I am become good at being a bastard.’

A brief look of annoyance crossed Miles’s face. He did not welcome the intrusion of moral concerns into his business. If necessary, he could countenance the occasional platitude, but ethics were in his opinion best limited to unctuous utterances at the proper moment—after-dinner speeches and the like. As always when confronted by an employee acting in a way he found disagreeable, he opted for a work cure. ‘Well, we have a meeting with the design and marketing people shortly. I’ll see you there.’ He shot Douglas a brief speculative look as he left.

Douglas sighed inwardly, both because of the prospect of the meeting and because of that speculative look. Miles would be watching now for any recurrence of doubt or hesitation on Douglas’s part about playing his assigned role of hatchet man. Douglas knew that if he gave Miles much evidence of second thoughts, he risked being called in by another director and sent packing. He began gathering the files he would need for the meeting. He wasn’t looking forward to it. The meeting promised to be raucous and contentious. The heads of both departments would show up with an unnecessarily large contingent of staff from their offices. Their claques, thought Douglas. A dozen people getting absolutely nothing done while their managers wrangled over trifles.

The staff meeting was worse than Douglas had anticipated. The head of the design department and her staff seemed to view it as a forum to vent their inane complaints about being expected to actually do some work and bend their artistic sensibilities to production schedules. The marketing department rejected three-quarters of the proposed dust jackets for the fall list and complained that the mock-up for the catalogue was overdue. Miles sat at the head of the table, his elbows resting on the table and his hands steepled before his face. His eyes shifted from one speaker to the next. He appeared to be enjoying the tumult and noise. The perennial argument between the two departments was of long-standing and, in Douglas’s opinion, was approaching mortal warfare because of Miles’s reluctance to make a decision and then enforce it.

When the two department heads appealed to Miles and asked for a decision, he turned to Douglas. ‘You’re being very quiet today, Douglas. What is your opinion?’

Douglas recognised his cue. He spoke directly to Miles, as if the others were not present. ‘Sorry, Miles. My mind was elsewhere. I was thinking again about our discussion last week of outsourcing design and production work and of looking into hiring an outside marketing firm.’ Douglas did not look away from Miles, but he knew from the sudden silence in the room that he had the attention of everyone there. Douglas had in fact mentioned the possibility of eliminating the two departments only in jest, as a way to end the bickering. ‘But that is a discussion for the future. For the present, we must deal with the current problems with the current staff.’

Douglas looked around the table and found the head of the design department. ‘Philippa, I would remind you—again—that we will not remain in business if your department does not do its job.’

Philippa Henricks began to protest. ‘I cannot cope with this workload with the present staffing levels. I have spoken with you about this before and . . .’

‘Enough.’ Douglas held up his hand to stop her. ‘Your staff is adequate to do the work assigned it. It’s just needs to be better managed.’ The marketing department tried hard to suppress its smiles. The design department looked dismayed, with one exception. One of the more junior members of that group had looked up when Douglas spoke and then nodded almost imperceptibly. Douglas tried to remember his name. Robert something. ‘Now, the catalogue needs to go to the printer by the end of next week. That is an absolute deadline. I’m assigning Robert to do the design work.’ When everyone turned to look at the young man who had nodded, Douglas knew that he had at least remembered the first name correctly. ‘You’ll will be working with . . .’ Douglas glanced down the row of marketing people present. ‘with Alexis.’ He picked out another young person he knew to be ambitious and anxious to impress. ‘Both of you will report directly to Miles and myself. Stay on after the meeting and we will discuss a schedule.’

‘Now, as for the jackets for the fall season.’ Douglas reached across the table and picked up the stack of boards with the designs. He turned to Miles again and held up each board in turn. ‘This one is fine, don’t you think?’ The two of them went through the various designs, accepting most of them and rejecting a few. Miles asserted his independence by disagreeing with Douglas about one cover. Douglas deferred to him. When they finished, there were two piles on the table. Douglas indicated the pile of rejects and began apportioning the work of revising them to various members of the two departments, ignoring the heads of the two departments. He was amused to see how quickly the staff abandoned their loyalty to their supervisors in their haste to demonstrate their willingness to follow him. When he finished, he turned to Miles and waited for him to speak.

The director smiled broadly and beamed at everyone seated around the table. ‘Well, I call that a good meeting. We have accomplished quite a bit today.’ Miles stood up and headed for the door. When Philippa Henricks tried to stop him, he said, ‘Sorry, I’m late for another meeting. Talk with Douglas.’

The look that Philippa shot Douglas said that she would rather talk with an axe-wielding psychopath. Her dislike of Douglas had become hatred in the past half-hour. It had been a mistake to promote her, thought Douglas. He wondered if the events of the meeting would encourage her to resign or whether she would attempt to hang on a bit longer. It might take more to get rid of her. She could be astonishingly dense about reading between the lines and understanding what was being said to her. The head of the marketing department would, Douglas expected, be more pliable. Andrew had proved himself capable of resilience in the past. The message to him had been delivered and received. Andrew will wait a day or two, thought Douglas, and then he will drop by to have a ‘chat’.

Douglas motioned Robert and Alexis forward to the chairs next to him. He picked up the mock-up of the catalogue and bent over it. The others filed out of the room.