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who inhibited men because of what some people described as her briskness. And she knew this. She knew it because she had once heard the nickname that some spiteful person had pinned on her and which had acquired wide currency. The Head Prefect.
I am not like that, she said to herself. I am not.
But in the eyes of others, she must have been. And when she attempted to be more feminine and to eschew any sign of highhandedness, it did not help at all. Then somebody made matters worse by coining a new nickname, again one which stuck, and travelled. Mrs. Thatcher.
Who among us wants anything more than to be appreciated by some and loved, we hope, by a few? Why is the world so constructed that some find this modest goal easy to achieve and others find that it for ever eludes them? The essential unfairness of the world? Yes. Its heartlessness? Yes. Its unkindness to a certain sort of brisk and competent woman? Yes again.
31. Dinner at the Mermaid
AT DINNER at the Mermaid Inn, Oedipus Snark chose scallops as his first course. The waiter who took his order, a young man with neatly barbered hair who had just completed a degree in English at the University of Sussex, asked, “Scallops, sir?” Oedipus nodded, and Barbara Ragg, looking up from her scrutiny of the menu, said, “Oh, scallops. Yes, I’ll have those too.”
The waiter scribbled on his notepad. “And for your main course, sir?”
“Lamb cutlets, please.”
“Such a wise choice,” said the waiter, before turning to Barbara. “And your main course, madam?”
“I’ll take lamb cutlets too,” replied Barbara Ragg. She looked up at the young man with ill-concealed irritation. She did not think there was any need for a waiter to compliment one on one’s choice of food, and yet so many of them did. They should be neutral, equally impassive in the face of good and bad choices, as impressed by Mr. Sprat’s opting for lean as by his wife’s preference for fat. But there was more: he had taken Oedipus’s order first, she noticed. Were waiters no longer trained to take the woman’s order first, or did they now feel they had to give the man precedence, purely to make the point that they had risen above the old sexist courtesies? For a few moments she mused on the implications of social change for the strict rules of etiquette. What, for example, was the position when dealing with same-sex couples? If two women in such a relationship were dining together, and if the waiter normally observed the rule of asking women first, should he then take the order of the more feminine partner before that of the more masculine one—if such a distinction were obvious? And would such a policy be welcome or would it provoke hostility? People could be touchy, and it might not be a good idea to do anything but leave it to chance. But if the waiter turned first to an overtly masculine-looking partner, he might be suspected of doing so solely in order to avoid being thought to attend to the feminine partner first. And that would reveal that he had secretly made a judgement of roles. So only one course of action remained—for the waiter to look at neither diner while he said, dispassionately staring into the air above their heads, “Now, which of you two is first?” That would perhaps be the most tactful way of addressing the matter. Perhaps.
Oedipus Snark also looked irritated. He had no objection to the waiter’s taking his order first—indeed he rather expected it, being an MP and being in the public eye. What he objected to was Barbara’s choosing exactly the same courses as he had. Had she no imagination? Or was she trying to be like him? That really annoyed him. He could understand, of course, why somebody should wish to imitate him, but he did not like it to be so obvious. I shall have to get rid of her, he thought; she’s going to have to go.
“I read something interesting about scallops the other day,” Barbara remarked. “Did you know that the best scallops are those that are hand-picked by divers? Apparently the other ones are sucked up by great vacuum cleaners and that bruises the scallop—ruins it, they say.”
Oedipus nodded. He was thinking of a new research assistant he had met in the House of Commons library. She had certainly been hand-picked, he thought, as opposed to being sucked up by