Page 76 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
What about Dorothy? Her work on honey bees was important, but she’d found it a struggle to be taken seriously. Only now were her results beginning to be published.
It was after a conversation with Frank, Eleanor and Dorothy over supper one night that Nancy realized something else important. They’d been discussing Nancy’sresearch and the structure of the department where she worked at Brandingfield. Nancy had been complaining about it being like a male club.
‘They go out to lunch together on Fridays and never invite me,’ she complained. ‘Not that I can afford it, but it would be nice to be asked.’
‘Have you ever asked yourself why you can’t afford it but they can?’ Dorothy said sharply. ‘How many of them are on your level?’
‘Two, I think, are junior researchers like me.’
‘And how long have they been in their jobs?’
‘One of them a year, the other only a month longer than me.’
‘Find out how much they earn.’
‘How do I do that? Nobody discusses that sort of thing.’
‘Yes, yes. Bad form to talk about, I know all that. I could never persuade the supper club to see how unfairly we’re treated. It doesn’t matter that we’re women, we’re doing the same jobs as the men. Find a way to ask.’
So Nancy picked Philip Saunders, who’d been least stand-offish, took him for coffee and asked him direct what he earned. He was taken aback, but when she begged him, explaining her suspicions and resulting sense of injustice, he told her. She was staggered. His salary was a third higher than hers. ‘You have to remember, though,’ he said, ‘that I’m married and my wife’s having a baby soon.’
‘But I do the same work as you!’ she cried.
Philip’s eyes slid away in embarrassment. ‘Just don’t tell them it was me who took the lid off.’
‘I won’t,’ she replied, but she was furious.
‘Go carefully,’ Dorothy warned when Nancy told her, but to no avail.
Everything was thin about Dr Staunton. His physique, his hair and his voice were all thin and so were his excuses. When she marched into his office the following day and demanded to talk about her salary, he looked outraged.
‘You’re very full of yourself, young lady. And you’re new. Perhaps when you’ve been here a full year, we’ll look at making an adjustment. In the meantime, I’d rather you didn’t discuss such private matters with your colleagues. It causes an unpleasant atmosphere, I find.’
He was adamant in his refusal to discuss the matter and she sensed that there was little more she could do without endangering her employment. She’d just have to argue hard when her salary review came round. But she felt so angry and overlooked that she could hardly concentrate on her work for the rest of the day.
In many ways, she’d been right that it was good for her and James to be working apart. She hadn’t realized before how much they’d come to rely on one another in their professional sphere. But there were downsides. Among new colleagues, she had to stand up for herself and face insults and indignities she’d never had to deal with before. Philip Saunders was pleasant to her, but two of the other three were definitely not.
Burly Jim Davies played prop forward for a local rugby team and had locker room manners. He also had athreatening way of looming over her when he was making a point, which he did after she had to ask him for a second time not to let his equipment encroach on her part of the worktop. ‘Crikey, it’s like working with one’s nanny,’ he sneered. ‘Tidy up, do this, do that.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, though she took a cautious step back.
After that, he started calling her ‘Nanny’ instead of Nancy, which brought smiles from the others. When she asked him to stop, he accused her of ‘not being able to take a joke’.
She confided in James, but he advised her not to speak to anyone higher up about it. ‘You’ll be seen as a troublemaker,’ he said, and she knew in her heart that he was right.
If the nickname had been the only jibe, she might have frowned and borne it, but Jim enjoyed needling her. She went about her business one morning unconscious of a notice pinned to the back of her overall that read ‘Kiss me quick’ in Jim’s distinctive scrawl. Fortunately no one tried to take up the invitation, but she couldn’t understand the giggles until a female technician took her aside and detached it.
‘Jim Davies only treats women nicely if he finds them attractive,’ the woman told her, then realized the unintended insult and bit her lip.
‘Don’t worry, I’m rather glad he doesn’t,’ Nancy said in a heartfelt tone. ‘I just wish he wasn’t so horrid.’
‘You can either play along with him,’ Dorothy said later when Nancy told her, ‘and make him laugh, or you can try ignoring him.’
‘I’d rather die than play along with him,’ Nancy spat. Soignore him she did and she tried her best to concentrate on her work. But he persisted in calling her Nanny.
Worse, though, were the attentions of an older technician, a fatherly man who was initially friendly and helpful to Nancy when she needed anything. There came a time when, if he found her alone in the lab, he would stand a little too close and she’d have to edge away. Then one day, she felt his clammy hand on her back, warm, stroking her, then moving downwards to her bottom. Utterly disgusted, she pushed him away and fled to the ladies’ room, where she waited, staring at herself in the mirror, until her heart stopped pounding. She dared not say anything to anyone about it, it felt too shameful, but she avoided being alone with him again. He’d got the message, anyway, she thought, for his manner towards her became more guarded and he would not meet her eye.
James, too, she gauged, got on much better without her constant presence supporting and reassuring him. Having lost his emotional prop, he ‘manned up’ and gained confidence in his own abilities. He talked of the future, of seeking an academic research post under Professor Briggs or perhaps a post abroad. Hong Kong, maybe, or South Africa. ‘There are more opportunities and the money’s good. Just for a few years.’
