31st Of February by Julian Symons Read Free Book Online

carpet. He headed one sheet of paper with the words CRUNCHY-MUNCH and another with the words PREPARATION NUMBER ONE and stared at them. What a way to spend a life, he thought: Crunchy-Munch, the shaving revolution, and Sir Malcolm Buntz’s nephew. And for how many years now had that been his life. His triumphs had been a toothpaste, a chilblain ointment and a patent medicine, his disasters a breakfast food and a motor car. Could a life be more meaningless?
    He pulled up his thoughts again. That was the way Wyvern would think; those were not the thoughts of an executive who was looking for a place on the board and believed it to be almost within his grasp. There was a job to be done and you did it – well or badly. To give the job itself a moral value was a lot of nonsense.
    And then he noticed the desk calendar. The date it showed was the fourth of February. He felt suddenly very angry at the idea that somebody was playing this kind of vulgar and unpleasant joke on him. But there was a simple way to stop it. He pressed the buzzer for Jean Lightley and kept his finger on it, so that she came running into the room. He asked her questions. Gasping, she reiterated that she had not touched the calendar since she put it to the right date that morning. She did not know who had been in the room. “But nobody would alter your calendar, Mr Anderson.” She looked as if she thought he was mad.
    “Somebody has.” He said it very gently. “It’s been altered three times today, Jean. Unless there’s a magic spell on it.”
    “A magic spell!”
    He articulated clearly, as one would to a child. “Now I want you to take this calendar outside, and keep it in your room for the rest of the week. Then we shall see if the spell works when it’s on your desk as it does when it’s on mine. Do you understand?” She nodded. “That’s good, then. Off you go.” She retreated, her eyes flickering from his face to the brass calendar. When she was outside the door Anderson sighed with relief and regret. Relief that the calendar was out of the room, and regret that again he had acted foolishly. It remained to be considered who would want to worry him – and who would choose exactly that way to do it.
    That remained to be considered. In the meantime, it was certain that he would do no work that afternoon on Crunchy-Munch or Preparation Number One. He put on his hat and overcoat and left the office. On the way out he passed Mr Pile, who looked at him sharply, but said nothing. Mr Pile did not approve of staff leaving before the office closed at five-thirty, not even men who had a place on the board almost within their grasp.
     
     
    5
     
    It is well known that, in our carboniferous era, managers and administrators frequently find their lives separated into two distinct parts which involve a division of the personality. Fiction and film have familiarised us with the capitalist who is a tyrant to his employees, but an emotional slave to his wife and children; with the gangster whose eyes well with tears at thought of the old folk while he is treating the young ones with summary brutality; or with the theme ingeniously reversed, of the executive unendingly patient in his office, but brusquely unpleasant outside it. The case of Anderson resembled this classic businessman’s schizophrenia. In his capacity as advertising executive he had developed through years of training an incisive intelligence, and the ability to make quick and generally correct decisions about the people and problems confronting him; as a private citizen he was erratic, irresponsible and quite incapable of assessing the motives from which people act, or of maintaining a viewpoint for any length of time. This double nature was the cause of most of his misfortunes. A man of strong personality who wishes to achieve practical success in life will no doubt do so; a man of weak personality who recognizes his own limitations may batten very well off the strong or the rich; but