A Word Child by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online

philosophical robe. Even the stars are not ageless and our breaths are numbered.
    Let us now get on to the office. Very little of my story actually takes place in the office, but as the office was so much a part of my mind it is necessary to describe it. I existed, as I have explained, near to the bottom of the power structure which rose above the clerical and stenographical level. I dealt with ‘cases’ concerning pay, little individual problems, not always unamusing. (Should this man’s ‘danger money’ affect his pension? Should that man’s paid sick-leave be extended in these circumstances? Should another man’s pay-rise be backdated in those?) I did not invent rules, I merely applied rules made by others. Sometimes the rules did not quite fit the cases, and there was a tiny occasion for thought. Usually no thought was necessary. I wrote out my view in the form of a ‘minute’, which I sent to Duncan, who sent it to Mrs Frederickson, who sent it to Freddie Impiatt, who sent it to Clifford Larr, and after that, or even before that, I did not really know or care what happened to it or whether it survived. Arthur Fisch, who devilled for me, wrote no minutes so there was someone to be superior to.
    I worked in a room with two other people. This Room and these people have a certain tiny importance because, as so often, the physical world figured the mental world. The two people who shared my room were Mrs Witcher (Edith) and Reggie Farbottom. Arthur worked in a cupboard (almost literally), a little room partitioned off from the corridor, with a corridor window as its only source of light. I regretted that I had not installed Arthur long ago in the Room, but it was too late now, and Arthur liked his cupboard. Mrs Witcher, it was said, had once been a shorthand typist who had risen to power through being someone’s Personal Assistant. When I first knew her she was a self-styled ‘head’ of the Registry, the vast complex where the files were stored. This might have been an important job but in her case it was certainly a standing up job and not a sitting down job; and could one actually say that such a one as Mrs Witcher was ‘head’ of the Registry? There was in fact another head, a man, who sat down, called Middledale, who really ran the Registry, while Mrs Witcher was just one of the more important of the filing clerks. There was some uncertainty about this even at the time. Later Mrs Witcher received a promotion and a desk, first in the Registry itself, and then in an adjoining room (not Middledale’s room, which had by then been converted to another purpose). During a period of office redecoration she moved into my room (the Room) which I then shared with a man called Perry (who afterwards emigrated to Canada). Mrs Witcher came in as a temporary and junior third, but somehow managed to stay, partly because Perry and I were too polite to turn her out, later because it had become a custom. What Mrs Witcher’s work was at first supposed to be I never understood, or tried to understand, as I regarded her presence as ephemeral. She had some task concerned with the checking of classifications, doubtless a routine matter of seeing that papers were being filed correctly. Later on however Mrs Witcher set herself up (or was set up by some superior authority) as a sort of watchdog over the classifications themselves, not only checking the files but controlling the divisions and sub-divisions into which they were separated: a task which raised very fundamental questions with which Mrs Witcher was patently not qualified to deal.
    That Reggie Farbottom had (as some people said) originally been a messenger was very unlikely. He had probably started life as some sort of trotting boy clerk. How he ceased being a standing man and became a sitting man I do not know. This was perhaps Mrs Witcher’s doing: he had long been her creature. The relation between them was mysterious.