Nice Work (1) - David Lodge - nprtheeconomistworld’s blog

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P587-588

Monday, January 13th, 1986. Victor Wilcox lies awake, in the dark bedroom, waiting for his quartz alarm clock to bleep. It is set to do this at 6.45. How long he has to wait he doesn't know. He could easily find out by groping for the clock, lifting it to his line of vision, and pressing the button that illuminate the digital display. But he would rather not know. Supposing it is only six o'clock? Or even five? It could be five. Whatever it is, he won't be able to get to sleep again. This has becoming a regular occurrence lately： lying awake in the dark, waiting for the alarm to bleep, worrying.

Worries streak towards him like enemy spaceships in one of Gary's video games. He flinches, dodges, zaps them with instant solutions, but the assault is endless：the AVCO account, the Rawlinson account, the price of pig-iron, the value of the pound, the competition from Foundrax, the incompetence of his Marketing Director, the persistent breakdowns of the core blowers, the vandalizing of the toilet in the fettling shop, the pressure from his divisional boss, last month's accounts, the quarterly forecast, the annual review...

In an effort to escape this bombardment, perhaps even to doze awhile, he twists on his side, burrows into the warm plump body of his wife, and throws an arm around her waist. Startled, but still asleep, drugged with Valium, Marjorie swivels to face him. Their noses and foreheads bump against each other; there is a sudden flurry of limbs, an absurd pantomime struggle. Marjorie puts up her fists like a pugilist, groans and pushes him away. An object slides off the bed on her side and falls to the floor with a thump. Vic knows what it is: a book entitled Enjoy Your Menopause, which one of Marjorie's friends at Weight Watchers' club has lent her, and which she has been reading in bed, without much show of conviction, and falling asleep over, for the past week or two.
On retiring to bed Vic's last action is normally to detach a book from Marjorie's nerveless fingers, tucking her arms under the covers and turn out her bedside lamp, but he must have neglected the first of these chores last night, or perhaps Enjoy Your Menopause was concealed under the coverlet.

He rolls away from Marjorie, who, now lying on her back, begins to snore faintly. He envies her that deep unconsciousness, but cannot afford to join her in it. Once, desperate for a full night's sleep, he had accepted her offer of a Valium, sluicing it down with his usual nightcap, and about next morning like a diver walking on seabed. He made a mistake of two percentage points in a price for steering-boxes for British Leyland before his head cleared. You shouldn't have mixed it with whisky, Marjorie said. You don't need both. Then I'll stick to whisky, he said. The Valium lasts longer, she said. Too bloody long, if you ask me, he said. I lost the firm five thousand pounds this morning, thanks to you. Oh, it's my fault, is it? she said, and her lower lip began to tremble. Then to stop her crying, anything to stop that, he had to buy her the set of antique-look brass fire-irons she had set her heart on for the lounge, to give an extra touch of authenticity to the rustic stone fireplace and the imitation-log gas fire.

Marjorie's snores become louder. Vic gives her a rude, exasperated shove. The snoring stops but, surprisingly, she does not wake. In other rooms his three children are also asleep. Outside, a winter gale blusters against the sides of the house and swishes the branches of trees to and fro. He feels like the captain of a sleeping ship, alone at the helm, steering his oblivious crew through dangerous seas. He feels as if he is the only man awake in the entire world.

Nice Work (1) - David LodgeP588-589

The alarm clock cheeps.
Instantly, by some perverse chemistry of his body or nervous system, he feels tired and drowsy, reluctant to leave the warm bed. He presses the Snooze button on the clock with a practiced finger and falls effortlessly asleep. Five minutes later, the alarm wakes him again, cheeping insistently like a mechanical bird. Vic sighs, hits the Off button on the clock, switches on his bedside lamp (its dimmer control turned low for Marjorie's sake), gets out of bed and paddler through the deep pile of the bedroom carpet to the en suite bathroom, making sure the connecting door is closed before he turns on the light inside.

Vic pees, a task requiring considerable care and accuracy since the toilet bowl is low-slung and tapered in shape. He does not greatly care for the dark purplish bathroom suite (“Damson”, the estate agent's brochure had called the shade) but it had been one of the things that attracted Marjorie when they bought the house two years ago - the bathroom, with its kidney-shaped handbasin and goldplated taps and sunken bath and streamlined loo and bidet. And, above all, the fact that it was ‘en suite’. I've always wanted an en suite bathroom, she would say to visitors, to her friends on the phone, to , he wouldn't be surprised, tradesmen on the doorstep or strangers she accosted in the street. You would think ‘en suite’ was the most beautiful phrase in any language, the lengths Marjorie went to introduce it into her conversation. If they made a perfume called En Suite, she would wear it.

Vic shakes his last drops from his penis, taking care not to sprinkle the shaggy pink nylon fitted carpet, and flushes the toilet. The house has four toilets, a cause of concern to Vic's father. FOUR toilets? he said, when first shown over the house. Did I count right? What's the matter, Dad? Vic teased. Afraid the water table will go down if we flush them all at once? No, but what if they start metering water, eh? Then you'll be in trouble. Vic tried to argue that it didn't make any difference how many toilets you had, it was the number of times you flushed them that mattered, but his father was convinced that having so many toilets was an incitement to unnecessary peeing, therefore to excessive flushing.

He could be right, at that. At Gran's house, a back-to-back in Easton with an outside toilet- you didn't go unless you really had to, especially in the winter. Their own house in those days, a step up the social ladder from Gran's, had its own indoor toilet, a dark narrow room off the half-landing that always niffed a bit, however much Sanilav and Dettol his mother poured into the bowl. He remembered vividly that yellowish ceramic bowl with the trademark ‘Challenger’, the big varnished wooden seat that was always pleasantly warm to the bum, and a long chain dangling from the high cistern with a sponge-rubber ball, slightly perished, on the end of it. He used to practise heading, flicking the ball from wall to wall, as he sat there, a constipated schoolboy. His mother complained of the marks on the distemper. Now he is the proud owner of four toilets - damson, avocado, sunflower and white, all centrally heated. Probably as good an index of success as any.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P589-591

He steps on the bathroom scales. Ten stone, two ounces. Quite enough for a man only five feet, five and a half inches tall. Some say - Vic has overheard them saying it - that he tries to compensate for his short stature by his aggressive manner. Well, let them. If it wasn't for a bit of aggression, he wouldn't be where he is now. Though how long he will stay there is far from certain. Vic frowns in the mirror above the handbasin, thinking again of last month's accounts, the quarterly forecast, the annual review... He runs hot water into the dark purple bowl, lathers his face with shaving foam from an aerosol can, and begins to scrape his jaw with a safety razor, using a Wilkinson's Sword blade. Vic believe fervently in buying British, and has frequent rows with his eldest son, Raymond, who favours a disposable plastic razor manufactured in France. Not that this is the only bone of contention between them, no, not by a long chalk. The principal constraint on the number of their disagreements is, indeed, the comparative rarity of their encounters, Raymond invariably being asleep when Vic leaves for work and out when he returns home.
Vic wipes the tidemark of foam from his cheeks and fingers the shaven flesh appraisingly. Dark brown eyes stare back at him. Who am I?

He grips the washbasin, leans forward on locked arms, and scans the square face, pale under a forelock of lank brown hair, flecked with grey, the two vertical furrows in the brow like a clip holding the blunt nose in place, the straight-ruled line of the mouth, the squared-off jaw. You know who you are: it's all on file at Division.
Wilcox: Victor Eugene. Date of Birth: 19 Oct. 1940. Place of Birth: Easton, Rummidge, England. Education: Endwell Road Primary School, Easton; Easton Grammar School for Boys; Rummidge College of Advanced Technology. MI Mech. Eng. 1964. Marital Status: married ( to Marjorie Florence Coleman, 1964). Children: Raymond (b.1966), Sandra(b.1969). Gary(b.1972). Career: 1962-64, apprentice, Vanguard Engineering; 1964-66, Junior Production Engineer, Vanguard Engineering; 1966-70, Senior Engineer, Vanguard Engineering, 1970-74, Production Manager, Vanguard Engineering; 1974-78, Manufacturing Manager, Lewis & Arbuckle Ltd; 1978-80, Manufacturing Director, Rumcol Castings; 1980-85, Managing Director, Rumcol Castings. Present Position: Managing Director, J. Pringle & Sons Casting and General Engineering.
That's who I am.

Vic grimaces at his own reflection, as if to say: come off it, no identity crises, please. Somebody has to earn a living in this family.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P591-593

He shrugs on his dressing-gown, which hangs from a hook on the bathroom door, switches off the light, and softly re-enters the dimly lit bedroom. Marjorie has, however, been woken by the sound of plumbing.
‘Is that you?’ she says drowsily; then, without waiting for an answer, ‘I'll be down in a minute.’
‘Don't hurry,’ says Vic. Don't bother would be more honest, for he prefers to have the kitchen to himself in the early morning, to prepare his own simple breakfast and enjoy the first cigarette of the day undisturbed. Marjorie, however, feels that she must put in an appearance downstairs, however token, before he leaves for work, and there is sense in which Vic understands and approves of this gesture. His own mother was always first up in the mornings. to see husband and son off to work or college, and continued the habit almost till the day she died.

As Vic descends the stairs, a high-pitched electronic squeal rises from below. The pressure of his foot on a wired pad under the stair-carpet has triggered the burglar alarm, which Raymond, amazingly, must have remembered to set after coming in at God knows what hour last night. Vic goes to the console beside the front door and punches in the numerical code that disarms the apparatus. He has fifteen seconds to do this, before the squeal turns into screech and the alarm bell on the outside wall starts yammering. All the houses in the neighborhood have these alarms, and Vic admits that they are necessary, with burglaries increasing in frequency and boldness all the time, but the system they inherited from the previous owners of the house, with its magnetic contacts, infra-red scanners, pressure pads and panic buttons, is in his opinion overelaborate. It takes about five minutes to set it up before you retire to bed, and if you come back downstairs for something you have to cancel it and start all over again. The sufferings of the rich, Raymond sneered when Vic was complaining of this one day - Raymond, who despises his parents' affluence while continuing to enjoy its comforts and conveniences, such as rent-free centrally heated accommodation, constant hot water, free laundry service, use of mother's car, use of TV, video recorder, stereo system, et cetera et cetera. Vic feels his blood pressure rising at the thought of his eldest son, who dropped out of university four months ago and has not been usefully occupied since, now swaddled in a duvet upstairs, naked except for a single gold earring, sleeping off last night's booze, Vic shakes his head irritably to rid his mind of the image.

He opens the inner front door that leads to the enclosed porch and glances at the doormat. Empty. The newspaper boy is late, or perhaps there is no paper today because of strike. An infra-red scanner winks its inflamed eye at him as he goes into the lounge in search of reading matter. The floor and furniture are littered with the dismembered carcasses of the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. He picks up the Business Section of the Times and takes it into the Kitchen. While the kettle is boiling he scans the front page. A headline catches his eye: ‘LAWSON COUNTS THE COST AS TAX HOPES FADE.’

Nigel Lawson, the Chancellor, is this weekend closeted with his Treasury team assessing the danger to his economic strategy from last week's rise in interest rates, and the sharp rise in unemployment.

So what else is new?

The kettle boils. Vic makes a pot of strong tea, puts two slices of white bread in the toaster, and opens the louvres of the venetian blinds on the kitchen window to peer into the garden. A grey, blustery morning with no frost. Squirrels bound across the lawn like balls of fluff blown by the wind. Magpies strut from flowerbed to flowerbed, greedily devouring the grubs that he turned up in yesterday's gardening. Blackbirds, sparrows, robins, and other birds whose names Vic doesn't know, skip and hop about at a discreet distance from magpies. All these creatures seem very much at home in Vic's garden, although it is only two miles from city centre. One morning not long ago he saw a fox walking past this same window. Vic tapped on the pane. The fox stopped and turned his head to look at Vic
for a moment, as if to say, Yes? and then proceeded calmly on his way, his brush swaying in the air behind him. It is Vic's impression that English wildlife is getting street-wise, moving from the country into the city where the living is easier - where there are no traps, pesticides, hunters and sportsmen, but plenty of well-stocked garbage bins. and housewives like Marjorie, softhearted or softheaded enough to throw their scraps into the garden, creating animal soup-kitchens. Nature is joining the human race and going on the dole.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P593-595

Vic has eaten his two slices of toast and is on his third cup of tea and first cigarette of the day when Marjorie shuffle into the kitchen in her dressing-gown and slippers, a scarf over her curlers, her pale round face puffy with sleep. She carries the Daily Mail, which has just been delivered.
‘Smoking,’ she says, in a tone at once resigned and reproachful, condensing into a single word an argument well-known to both of them. Vic grunts, the distillation of an equally familiar rejoinder. He glances at the kitchen clock.
‘Shouldn't Sandra and Gary be getting up? I won't waste my breath on Raymond.’
‘Gary doesn't have school today. The teachers are on strike.’
‘What?’ he says accusingly, his anger at the teachers somehow getting displaced on to Marjorie.
‘Industrial action, or whatever they call it. He brought a note home on Friday.’
‘Industrial inaction, you mean. You don't see teachers out on the picket line, in the cold and the rain, have you noticed? They're just sitting around in their warm staffrooms, chewing the fat, while the kids are sent home to get into mischief. That's not action. It's not an industry, either, come to that, It's a profession and it's about time they started to act like professionals.’

‘Well...’ says Marjorie placatingly.
‘What about Sandra? Is the Sixth Form College taking “industrial action” too?’
‘No, I'm taking her to the doctor's.’
‘What's the matter with her?’
‘Marjorie yawns evasively. ‘Oh, nothing serious.’
‘Why can't she go on her own? A girl of seventeen should be able to go to the doctor's without someone to hold her hand.’
‘I don't go in with her, not unless she wants me to. I just wait with her.’
Vic regards his wife suspiciously. ‘You're not going shopping with her afterwards?’
Marjorie blushes. ‘Well, she needs a new pair of shoes...’
‘You're a fool, Marjorie!’ Vic exclaims. ‘You spoil that girl something rotten. All she thinks is clothes, shoes, hairstyles. What kind of A-Levels do you think she's going to get?’
‘I don't know. But if she doesn't want to go to unversity...’
‘What does she want to do, then? What's the latest?’
‘She's thinking of hairdressing.’
‘Hairdressing!’ Vic puts as much contempt into his voice as he can muster.
‘Anyway, she's a pretty girl, why shouldn't she enjoy clothes and so on, while she's young?’
‘Why shouldn't you enjoy dressing her up, you mean. You know you treat her like a doll, Marje, don't you?’
Rather than answer this question, Marjorie reverts to an earlier one.
She's been having trouble with her periods, if you must know,’ she says, imputing a prurient inquisitiveness to Vic, although she is well aware that such gynaecological disclosures
are the last thing he wants, especially at this hour of the morning. The pathology of women's bodies is a source of great mystery and unease to Vic. Their bleedings and leakages, their lumps and growths, their peculiarly painful-sounding surgical operations - scraping of wombs, stripping of veins, amputation of breasts - the mere mention of such things makes him wince and cringe, and lately the menopause had added new items to the repertory: the hot flush, flooding, and something sinister called a bloat. ‘I expect he'll put her on the pill,’ says Marjorie, making herself a fresh pot of tea.
‘What?’
‘To regulate her periods. I expect Dr Roberts will put Sandra on the pill.’
Vic grunts again, but this time his intonation is ambiguous and uncertain. He has a feeling that his womenfolk are up to something. Could the real purpose of Sandra's visit to the doctor's be to fix her up with contraception? With Marjorie's approval? He knows he doesn't approve himself. Sandra having sex? At seventeen? With whom? Not that spotty youth in the army-surplus overcoat, what's his name, Cliff, not him for God's sake. Not with anyone. An image of his daughter in the act of love, her white knees parted, a dark shape above her, flashes unbidden into his head and fills him with rage and disgust.
He is conscious of Marjorie's watery blue eyes scanning him speculatively over the rim of her teacup, inviting further discussion of Sandra, but he can't face it, not this morning, not with a day's work ahead of him. Not at any time, to be honest. Discussion of Sandra's sex-life could easily stray into the area of his and Marjorie's sex-life, or rather the lack of it, and he would rather not go into that. Let sleeping dogs lie. Vic compares the kitchen clock with his watch and rises from table.

‘Shall I do you a bit of bacon?’ says Marjorie.
‘No, I've finished.’
‘You ought to have a cooked breakfast, these cold mornings.’
‘I haven't time.’
‘Why don't you get a microwave? I could cook you a bit of bacon in seconds with a microwave.’
‘Did you know,’ says Vic, ‘that ninety-six per cent of the world's microwave ovens are made in Japan, Taiwan or Korea?’
‘Everybody we know has got one,’
says Marjorie.
‘Exactly,’ says Vic.
Marjorie looks unhappily at Vic, uncertain of his drift. ‘I thought I might price some this morning,’ she says. ‘After Sandra's shoes.’
‘Where would you put it?’ Vic inquires, looking round at the kitchen surfaces already cluttered with numerous electrical appliances - toaster, kettle, coffee-maker, food-processor, electric wok, chip-fryer, waffle-maker...
‘I thought we could put the electric wok away, We never use it. A microwave would be more useful.’
‘Well, all right, price them but don't buy. I can get one cheaper through the trade.’
Marjorie brightens. She smiles, and two dimples appears in her pasty cheeks, still shiny from last night's application of face cream. It was her dimples that first attracted Vic to Marjorie twenty-five years ago, when she worked in the typing pool at Vanguard. These days they appear infrequently, but the prospect of a shopping expedition is one of the few things that are guaranteed to bring them out.
‘Just don't expect me to eat anything cooked in it,’ he says.
Marjorie's dimples fade abruptly, like the sun going behind a cloud.
‘Why not?’
‘It's not proper cooking, is it? My mother would turn in her grave.’

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P596-598

Vic takes the Daily Mail with him to the lavatory, the one at the back of the house, next to the tradesmen’s entrance, with a plain white suite, intended for the use of charladies, gardeners and workmen. By tacit agreement, Vic customarily moves his bowels in here, while Marjorie uses the guest cloakroom off the front hall, so that the atmosphere of the en suite bathroom remains unpolluted.
Vic smokes a second cigarette as he sits at stool, and scans the Daily Mail. Westland and Heseltine are still making the headlines. STOP THE NO. 10 WHISPERS. MAGGIE'S BID TO COOL OFF BATTLE. He flicks through the inside pages. MURDOCH FACING UNION CLASH. THE IMAM'S CALL TO PRAYER MAKES THE VICAR TALK OF BEDLAM. HEARTACHE AHEAD FOR THE BRIDE WHO MARRIED TWICE. WE'RE IN THE SUPER-LEAGUE OF NATIONS. Hang about.

“Britain is back in the Super-League of top industrial nations, it is claimed today. Only Germany, Holland, Japan
and Switzerland can now match us for economic growth, price stability and strong balance of payments, says Dr David Lomax, the Natwest's economic adviser.”

‘Match’ presumably means ‘beat’. And since when was Holland an industrial superpower? Even so, it must be all balls, a mirage massaged from statistics. You only have to drive through the West Midlands to see that if we are in the Super-League of top industrial nations, somebody must be moving the goalposts. Vic is all in favour of backing Britain, but there are times when the Mail's windy chauvinism gets on his tits. He takes a drag on his cigarette and taps the ash between his legs, hearing a faint hiss as it hits the water. 100 M.P.G. FAMILY CAR LOOKING GOOD IN TESTS.

“Trials have been started by British Leyland of their revolutionary lightweight aluminum engine for a world-beating family car capable of 100 per gallon.”

When was the last time we were supposed to have a world-beating aluminum engine? The Hillman Imp, right? Where are they now, the Hillman Imps of yesteryear? In the scrapyards, every one, or nearly. And the Linwood plant a graveyard, grass growing between the assembly lines, corrugated-iron roofs flapping in the wind. A car that nobody wanted to buy, built on a site chosen for political not commercial reasons, hundreds of miles from its component suppliers. He turns to the City Pages. HOW TO GET UP AHEAD OF ESTEEM.

“What has been designated Industry Year has got off to a predictably silly start. Various bodies in Manufacturing Industry are working themselves into one of their regular lathers about the supposed low social esteem bestowed upon engineers and engineering.”

Vic reads this article with mixed feelings. Industry Year is certainly a lot of balls. On the other hand, the idea that society undervalues its engineers is not.

It is 7.40 when Vic emerges from the lavatory, The tempo of his action begins to accelerate. He strides through the kitchen, where Marjorie is listlessly loading his soiled breakfast things into dishwasher, and runs up the stairs. Back in the en suite bathroom, he briskly cleans his teeth and brushes his hair. He goes into bedroom and puts on clean white shirt and a suit. He has six business suits, which he wears in daily rotation. He used to think five was enough, but acquired an additional one after Raymond wisecracked, ‘If that's the charcoal grey worsted, it must be Tuesday.’ Today it is the turn of the navy-blue pinstripe. He selects a tie diagonally striped in dark tone of red, blue and grey. He levers his feet into a pair of highly polished black calf Oxfords. A frayed lace snaps under too vigorous a tug, and he curses. He rummages in the back of his wardrobe for an old black shoe with a suitable lace and uncovered a cardboard box containing a brand-new clock radio, made in Hong Kong, sealed in a transparent plastic envelope and nestling in a polystyrene mould. Vic sighs and grimaces. Such discoveries are not uncommon at this time of year. Marjorie has a habit of buying Christmas presents early, hiding them away like a squirrel, and then forgetting all about them.

When he comes downstairs again, she is hovering in the hall.
‘Who was the clock radio for, then?’
‘What?’
‘I found a brand-new clock radio at the back of the wardrobe.’
Marjorie covers her mouth with her hand. ‘Sst! I knew I'd got something for your Dad.’
‘Didn't we give him a Christmas present, then?’
‘Of course we did. You remember, you rushed out on Christmas Eve and got him that electric blanket...Never mind, it will do for next year.’
‘Hasn't he already got a clock radio? Didn't we give him one a few years ago?’
‘Did we?’ says Marjorie vaguely. ‘Perhaps one of the boys would like it, then.’
‘What they need is a clock with a bomb attached to it, not a radio,’ says Vic, patting his pockets, checking for wallet, diary, keyring, calculator, cigarettes and lighter.
Marjorie helps him on with his camelhair overcoat, a garment she persuaded him to buy against his better judgement, for it hangs well below his knees and, and he thinks, accentuates his short stature, as well as making him look like a prosperous bookie. ‘When will you be home?’ she inquires.
‘I don't know. You'd better keep my dinner warm.’
‘Don't be too late.’
She closes her eyes and tilts her face towards him. He brushes her lips with his, then jerks his head in the direction of the first floor. ‘Get that idle shower out of bed.’
‘They need sleep when they're growing, Vic.’
‘Raymond's not growing, for Christ's sake. He stopped growing years ago, unless he's growing a beer belly, which wouldn't surprise me.’
‘Well, Gary's still growing.’
‘Make sure he does some homework today.’
‘Yes, dear.’
Vic is quite sure she has no intention of carrying out his instructions. If she hadn't arranged to take Sandra to the doctor's Marjorie would probably go back to bed herself, now, with a cup of tea and the Daily Mail. A few weeks before, he'd returned home soon after getting to work because he'd left some important papers behind, and found the house totally silent, all three children and their mother sound asleep at 9.30 in the morning, No wonder the country is going to the dogs.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P598-600

Vic passes through the glazed porch and out into the open air. The cold wind ruffles his hair and make him flinch for a moment, but it is refreshing after the stale warmth of the house, and he takes a deep breath or two on his way to the garage. As he approaches the garage door it swings open as if by magic - in fact by electricity, activated by a remote-control device in Vic's pocket - a feat that never fails to give him a deep, childlike pleasure. Inside, the gleaming dark blue Jaguar V12, Registration Number VIC 100, wait beside Marjorie's silver Metro. He backs the car out, shutting the garage door with another touch on the remote control. Marjorie has now appeared at the lounge window, clutching her dressing-gown across her bosom with
one hand and waving timidly with the other. Vic smiles conciliatingly, puts the automatic gear lever into Drive, and glides away.
Now begins the best half-an-hour of the day, the drive to work. In fact it is not quite half-an-hour - the journey usually takes twenty-four minutes, but Vic wishes it were longer. It is an interval of peace between the irritations of home and theanxieties of work, a time of pure sensation, total control, effortless superiority. For the Jaguar is superior to every other car on the road, Vic is convinced of that. When Midland Amalgamated headhunted him for the MD's job at Pringle's they offered him a Rover 3500 Vanden Plas, but Vic stuck out for the Jaguar, a car normally reserved for divisional chairmen, and to his great satisfaction he had got one, even though it wasn't quite new. It had to be a British car, of course, since Pringle's did so much business with local automotive industry - not that Vic has ever driven a foreign car: foreign cars are anathema to him, their sudden invasion of British roads in the 1970s marked the beginning of the region's economic ruin in his view - but he has to admit that you don't have a lot of choice in British cars when it comes to matching the top-of-the-range Mercedes and BMWs. In fact the Jag is just about the only one that can really wipe the smiles off their drivers' faces, unless you're talking Rolls-Royce or Bentley.

He pauses at the T-junction where Avondale Road meet Barton Road, on which the rush-hour traffic is already beginning to thicken. The driver of a Ford Transit van, though he has priority, hangs back respectfully to let Vic filter left, Vic nods his thanks, turns left, then right again, picking his way through the broad, tree-lined residential streets with practised ease. He is skirting the University, whose tall redbrick clock, tower is occasionally visible above trees and rooftops. Though he lives on its doorstep, so to speak, Vic has never been inside the place. He knows it chiefly as a source of seasonal traffic jams about which Marjorie sometimes complains (the University day begins too late and finishes too early to inconvenience Vic himself) and of distractingly pretty girls about whose safety he worries, seeing them walking to and fro between their halls of residence and the Students' Union in the evenings. With its massive architecture and landscape grounds, guarded at every enterance by watchful security staff, the University seems to Vic rather like a small city-state, an academic Vatican, from which he keeps his distance, both intimidated by and disapproving of its air of privileged detachment from the vulgar, bustling industrial city in which it is embedded. His own alma matter, situated a few miles away, was a very different kind of institution, a dingy tower block, crammed with machinery and lab benches, overlooking a railway marshalling yard and a roundabout on the inner ring road. In his day a College of Advanced Technology, it has since grown in size and been raised to the status of a university, but without putting on any airs and graces. And quite right too. If you make college too comfortable nobody will ever want to leave it to do proper work.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P600-602

Vic leaves the residential area around the University and filters into the traffic moving sluggishly along the London Road in the direction of the City Centre. This is the slowest part of his morning journey, but the Jaguar, whispering along in automatic, takes the strain. Vic selects a cassette and slots it into the four-speaker stereo system. The voice of Carly Simon fills the interior of the car. Vic's taste in music is narrow but keen. He favours female vocalists, slow tempos, lush arrangements of tuneful melodies in the jazz-soul idiom. Carly Simon, Dusty Springfield, Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Randy Crawford and, more recently, Sade and Jennifer Rush. The subtle inflexions of these voices, honeyed or slightly hoarse, moaning and whispering of women's love, its joys and disappointments, soothe his nerves and relax his limbs. He would of course never dream of playing these tapes on the music centre at home, risking the derision of his children. It is a very private pleasure, a kind of musical masturbation, all part of the ritual of the drive to work. He would enjoy it more, though, if he were not obliged to read at the same time, in the rear windows of other cars, crude reminders of a more basic sexuality. YOUNG FARMERS DO IT IN THEIR WELLIES. WATER SKIERS DO IT STANDING UP. HOOT IF YOU HAD IT LAST NIGHT. It, it, it. Vic's knuckles are white as he grips the steering wheel. Why should decent people have to put up with this crap? There ought to be a law.

Now Vic has reached the last traffic lights before the system of tunnels and flyovers that will conduct him without further interruption through the centre of the city. A red Toyota Celica draws up beside him, then inches forward as its driver rides his clutch, evidently intending a quick getaway. The lights turn to amber and the Toyota darts forward, revealing, wouldn't you know it, a legend in its rear window, HANG GLIDERS DO IT IN MID-AIR. Vic waits law-abidingly for the green light, then presses the accelerator hard. The Jaguar surges forward, catches the Toyota in two seconds, and sweeps effortlessly past - Carly Simon, by happy coincidence, hitting a thrilling crescendo at the very same moment. Vic glances in his rear-view mirror and smiles thinly. Teach him to buy a Jag car.

It won't, of course. Vic is well aware of the hollowness of his small victory, a huge thirsty 5.3-litre engine pitted against the Toyota's economical 1.8. But never mind common sense for the moment, this is the time of indulgence, suspended between home and work, the time of effortless motion, cushioned in real leather, insulated from the noise and fumes of the city by the padded coachwork, the tinted glass, the sensuous music. The car's long prow dips into the first tunnel. In and out. down and up. Vic threads the tunnels, switches lanes, swings out on to a long covered ramp that leads to a six-lane expressway thrust like a gigantic concrete fist through the backstreets of his boyhood. Every morning Vic drives over the flattened site of his Gran's house and passes at chimney-pot level the one in which he himself grew up, where his widower father still stubbornly lives on in spite of all Vic's efforts to persuade him to move, like a sailor clinging to the rigging of a sinking ship - buffeted, deafened and choked by the thundering torrent of traffic thirty yards from his bedroom window.

Vic swings on to the motorway, going north-west, and for a few miles gives the Jaguar its head, moving smoothly up the outside line at 90, keeping a watchful eye on the rear-view mirror, though the police rarely bother you in the rush hour, they are as eager as anyone to keep the traffic flowing. To his right and left spreads a familiar landscape, so familiar that he does not really see it, an expanse of houses and factories, warehouses and shed, railway lines and canals, piles of scrap metal and heaps of damaged cars, container ports and lorry parks, cooling towers and gasometers. A monochrome landscape, grey under a low grey sky, its horizons blurred by a grey haze.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P602-603

Vic Wilcox has now, strictly speaking, left the city of Rummidge and passed into an area known as the Dark Country - so called because of the pall of smoke that hung over it, and the film of coaldust and soot that covered it, in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. He knows a little of the history of this region, having done a prize-winning project on it at school. Rich mineral deposits were discovered here in the early nineteenth century: coal, iron, limestone. Mines were sunk, quarries excavated, and ironworks sprung up everywhere to exploit the new technique of smelting iron ore with coke, using limestone as a flux. The fields were gradually covered with pitheads, foundries, factories and workshops and rows of wretched hovels for the men, women and children who worked in them: a sprawling, unplanned, industrial conurbation that was gloomy by day, fearsome by night. A writer Thomas Carlyle described it in 1824 as ‘A frightful scene ... a dense cloud of pestilential smoke hangs over it forever...and at night the whole region becomes like a volcano spitting fire from a thousand tubes of brick.’ A little later, Charles Dickens recorded travelling ‘through miles of cinder-paths and blazing furnaces and roaring steam engines, and such a mass dirt, gloom and misery as I never before witnessed. Queen Victoria had the curtains of her train windows drawn when she passed through the region so that her eyes should not be offended by its ugliness and squalor.

The economy and outward appearance of the area have changed considerably since those days. As the seams of coal and iron were exhausted, or became unprofitable to work, mining and smelting diminished. But industries based on iron-casting, forging, engineering, all those kinds of manufacturing known generally as ‘metal-bashing’ - spread and multiplied, until their plants met and merged with the expanding industrial suburbs of Rummidge. The shrinkage of heavy industry, and the development of new forms of energy, have reduced the visible pollution of the air, though the deadlier fumes of leaded petrol exhaust, drifting from the motorways with which the whole area is looped and knotted, thicken the characteristic grey haziness of the Midlands light. Nowadays the Dark Country is not noticeably darker than its neighbouring city, and of country there is precious little to be seen. Foreign visitors sometimes suppose that the region gets its name not from its environmental character but from the complexions of so many of its inhabitants, immigrant families from India, Pakistan and Caribbean, drawn here in the boom years of the fifties and sixties, when jobs were plentiful, and now bearing the brunt of high unemployment.

All too soon it is time to slow down and leave the motorway, descending into smaller-scale streets, into the congestion of traffic lights, roundabouts, T-junctions. This is West Wallsbury, a district dominated by factories, large and small, old and new. Many are silent, some derelict, their windows starred with smashed glass. Receiverships and closures have ravaged the area in recent years, giving a desolate look to its streets. Since the election of the Tory Government of 1979, which allowed the pound to rise on the back of North Sea oil in the eighties and left British industry defenceless in the face of foreign competition, or (according to your point of view) exposed its inefficiency (Vic inclines to the first view, but in certain moods will admit the force of the second), one-third of all the engineering companies in the West Midlands have closed down. There is nothing quite so forlorn as a closed factory - Vic Wilcox knows, having supervised a shutdown himself in his time. A factory is sustained by the energy of its own functioning, the throb and whine of machinery, the clash of metal, unceasing motion of of the assembly lines, the ebb and flow of workers changing shifts, the hiss of airbrakes and the growl of diesel engines from wagons delivering raw materials at one gate, taking away finished goods at the other. When you put a stop to all that, when the place is silent and empty, all that is left is a large, ramshackle shed - cold, filthy and depressing. Well, that won't happen at Pringle's, hopefully, as they say. Hopefully.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P603-605

Vic is very near his factory now. A scarlet neon, Susan's sauna, subject of many nudge, nudge jokes at work. but to Vic merely a useful landmark, glows above a dingy shop-front. A hundred yards further on, he turns down Coney Lane passes Shopfix, Atkinson Insulation, Bitomark, then runs alongside the railings that fence the Pringle site until he reaches the main entrance. It is a long fence, and large site. In its heyday, in the post-war boom, Pringle's employed four thousand men. Now the workforce has shrunk to less than a thousand, and much of the plant is in disuse. There are buildings and annexes that Vic has never been inside. It is cheaper to let them rot than to clear them away.

Vic hoots impatiently at the barrier; the security man's face appears at the window and flashes an ingratiating smile. Vic nods grimly back. Bugger was probably reading a newspaper. His predecessor had been fired at Vic's insistence just before Christmas when, returning unexpectedly to the factory at night, he found the man watching a portable TV instead of the video monitors he was paid for watch. It looks as though this one is not much of an improvement. Perhaps they should employ another security firm. Vic makes a mental note to raise the matter with George Prendergast, his personnel Director.

The barrier is raised and he drives to his personal parking space next to the front entrance of the office block. He checks the statistics of his journey on the digital dashboard display. Distance covered: 9.8 miles. Journey time: 25 mins. 14 secs. Average for the morning rush-hour. Petrol consumption: 17.26 m.p.g. Not bad - would have been better if he hadn't put the Toyota in its place.

Vic pushes through the swing doors to the reception lobby, a reasonably impressive space, its walls lined with light oak panelling installed in a more prosperous era. The furniture is looking a bit shabby, though. The clock on the wall, an irritating type with no numbers on its face, suggests that the time is just before half-past eight. Doreen and Lesley, the two telephonist-receptionists, are taking off their coats behind the counter. They smile and simper, patting their hair and smoothing their skirts.
‘Morning, Mr Wilcox.’
‘Morning. Think we could do with some new chairs in here?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Wilcox, these are ever so hard.’
‘I didn't mean your chairs, I mean for visitors.’
‘Oh...’ They don't know quite how to react. He is still Mr New Broom, slightly feared. As he pushes through the swing doors and walks down the corridor towards his office, he can hear them spluttering with stifled laughter.
‘Good morning, Vic.’ His secretary, Shirley, smirks from behind her desk, self-righteous at being at her post before the boss, even though she is at this moment inspecting her face in a compact mirror. She is a mature woman with piled hair of an improbable yellow hue, and a voluptuous bosom on which her reading glasses, retained round her neck by chain, rest as upon a shelf. Vic inherited her from his predecessor, who had evidently cultivated an informal working relationship. It was not with any encouragement from himself that she began to address him as Vic, but he was obliged to concede the point. She had worked for Pringle's for years, and Vic was heavily dependent on her know-how while he eased himself into the job.

Nice Work (1) - David Lodge P605-607

‘Morning, Shirley. Make us a cup of coffee, will you?’ Vic's working day is lubricated by endless cups of instant coffee. He hangs up his camelhair coat in the anteroom that connects his office with Shirley's and passes into the former. He shrugs off the jacket of his suit and drapes it over the back of a chair. He sits down at his desk and opens his diary. Shirley comes in with coffee and a large photograph album.
‘I thought you'd like to see Tracey's new portfolio,’ she says.
Shirley has a seventeen-year-old daughter whose ambition is to be a photographic model, and she is for ever thrusting glossy pictures of this well-developed young hussy, crammed into skimpy swimsuits or reveals underwear, under Vic's nose. At first, he suspected her of trying to curry favour by pandering to his lust, but later came to the conclusion that it was genuine parental pride. The silly bitch really couldn't see that there was anything dubious about turning your daughter into a pin-up.

‘Oh yes?’ he says, with scarcely concealed impatience. Then, as he opens the portfolio: ‘Good Christ!’
The pouting, weak-chinned face under the blonde curl is familiar enough, but the two huge naked breasts, thrust towards the camera like pink blancmanges tipped with cherries, are a new departure. He turns the stiff, polythene-covered pages rapidly.
‘Nice, aren't they?’ says Shirley fondly.
‘You let someone take pictures of your daughter like this?’
‘I was there, sort of thing. In the studio.’
‘I'll be frank with you,’ says Vic, closing the album and handing it back. ‘I wouldn't let my daughter.’
‘I don't see the harm,’ says Shirley. ‘People think nothing of it nowadays, topless sort of thing. You should have seen the beach at Rhodes last summer. And even television. If you've got a beautiful body, why not make the most of it? Look at Sam Fox!’
‘Who is he?’
‘She. Samantha Fox. You know!’ Incredulity raises Shirley's voice an octave. ‘The top Page Three girl. D'you know how much she earned last year?’
‘More than me, I don't doubt. And more than Pringle's will make this year, if you waste any more of my time.’
‘Oh, you,’ Shirley says roguishly, adept at receiving reprimands as if they are jokes.
‘Tell Brian I want to see him, will you?’
‘I don't think he's in yet.’
Vic grunts, unsurprised that his Marketing Director has not yet arrived. ‘As soon as he is, then. Let's do some letters in the meantime.’

The telephone rings. Vic picks up the receiver. ‘Wilcox.’
‘Vic?’
The voice of Stuart Baxter, Chairman of Midland Amalgamated's Engineering and Foundry Division, sounds faintly disappointed. He was hoping, no doubt, to be told that Mr Wilcox wasn't in yet, so that he could leave a message for Vic to ring back, thus putting him on the defensive, knowing that his divisional chief knew that he, Vic, hasn't been at his desk as early as him, Stuart Baxter. Vic becomes even more convinced that this was the motive for the call as it proceeds, because Stuart Baxter has nothing new to communicate. They had the same conversation the previous Friday afternoon ,about the disappointing figures for Pringle's production in December.
‘There's always a downturn in December, Stuart, you know that. With the long Christmas holiday.’
‘Even allowing for that, it's well down, Vic. Compared to last year.’
‘And it's going to be well down again this month, you might as well know that now.’
‘I'm sorry to hear you say that, Vic. It makes life very difficult for me.’
‘We haven't got the foundry on song, yet. The core blowers are always breaking down. I'd like to buy a new machine, fully automated, to replace the lot.’

‘Too expensive. You'd do better buy in from outside. It's not worth investing in that foundry.’
‘The foundry has a lot of potential. It's a good workforce. They do nice work. Any road, it's not just the foundry. We're working on a new production model for the whole factory - new stock control, new purchasing policy. Everything on computer. But it takes time.’
‘Time is what we haven't got, Vic.’
‘Right. So why don't we both get back to work now, instead of nattering on like a couple of housewives over the garden fence?’
There is a momentary silence on the line, then a forced chuckle, as Stuart Baxter decides not take offence. Nevertheless he has taken offence. It was probably a foolish thing to say, but Vic shrugs off any regret as he puts the receiver down. He is not in the business of ingratiating himself with Stuart Baxter. He is in the business of making J. Pringle & Sons profitable.
Vic flicks a switch on his telephone console and summons Shirley, whom he had gestured out of office while Baxter was talking, to take some letters. He leafs through the file of correspondence in his In-tray, the two vertical lines in his brow above the nose drawing closer together as he concentrates on names, figures, dates. He lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, and blows two plumes of smoke through his nostrils. Outside the sky is still overcast, and the murky yellow light that filters through the vertical louvres of window blinds is hardly enough to read by. He switches on his desk lamp, casting a pool of light on the documents. Through walls and windows comes a muffled compound noise of machinery and traffic, the soothing, satisfying sound of men at work.