Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

Gryce registered, without having any prurient interest in the matter, the times at which his colleagues went to the lavatory each morning, and the number of minutes spent where no man could reach them. The record, he thought initially, was held by Grant-Peignton who regularly at ten minutes to eleven disappeared for upwards of half an hour with a bundle of papers under his arm. Not until the Thursday, when Gryce himself had to answer a call of nature at about this time, did he discover that Grant-Peignton was in fact stationed at the photo-copying machine in Traffic Control next door, where he was running off some plans of a new greenhouse for which planning permission was needed. They had quite a chat about greenhouses and coldframes, although Gryce was no authority on the subject. Contrary to his first impression Grant-Peignton seemed a nice chap, not standoffish at all.

Another visitor to the photo-copying machine, which he could see was quite the little social centre — rather like the water-cooler one saw in old American films — was Beazley, who was copying some private documents, probably the minutes of his precious boys' club. They exchanged pleasantries about a threatened miners' strike, Beazley gruffly advising Gryce to stock up on coal or coke. Although Gryce had installed gas-fired central heating with the insurance money accruing from his mother's death some years ago, he was grateful to Beazley. He had been right in thinking that the brusque manner was a mask for shyness.

One way or another, Gryce had conversations with everyone in Stationery Supplies before his first week was out, including even young Thelma who could be quite a chatterbox when you drew her out. She was keen on amateur dramatics, having once played the third witch in a school production of Macbeth, and was anxious to join the Albion Players as soon as there was a vacancy.

Mrs Rashman, Gryce was to learn, spoke of little but groceries: the nuisance it was that a particular brand of water biscuit was no longer stocked by most supermarkets, or the fact that small tins of corned beef were expensive, taken weight for weight with similar products. Her impending marriage to her gentleman friend from Stationery Stores, being a private matter, was never touched on. Not that Gryce had much curiosity about it, beyond still wondering if anyone would have the nerve to sting him for a contribution to her leaving present. He made no effort to picture Mrs Rashman going through the rigmarole of courtship — kissing, sitting about in City churchyards and so on. Provided they did not run into one another in the wine bar where the liaison had sprouted, she had no interest for him outside the context of the office.

Her obsession with groceries was a case in point. He was intrigued by the sheer volume of produce she accumulated on her shopping expeditions each lunch hour but he never wondered what she did with it all when it left the office. Her red canvas shopping bag crammed with special offers had a form, an entity, while it was perched at the side of her desk during office hours; it dematerialized, so far as Gryce was concerned, when its owner walked out of the lift in the evening. Mrs Rashman bought cat food, so it followed that she must own a cat: but since she never mentioned it, the cat had no existence. There would have had to be a blueprint for a cat, in the shape of a daily report on its doings, to give it any dimension, and even then it would exist only as an anecdotal facet of Mrs Rashman's own personality.

It was the same with Beazley's boys' club and its proposed new gymnasium, and Mr Hakim's brother who was a wholesale confectioner. They might be figments of the imagination for all Gryce cared, dreamed up to explain Beazley's raffle and Hakim's cutprice market in chocolates and sweets. They did not exist, because Beazley and Hakim did not exist outside office hours. Neither did any of the others. Neither did Gryce himself, as he had long ago realized.

That he led any kind of life beyond the office he was fuzzily aware of, in a sleepwalking kind of way, only while he was leading it. He had found in all his previous billets that once he had hung up his mackintosh and got his feet firmly beneath his own desk, the outside world evaporated, like the waking memory of a dream. That was already beginning to happen at British Albion, even though the desk he occupied could not be called his own: it belonged to Vaart who was on holiday, and he could picture Vaart, even though he had never met him, more vividly than he could conjure up the face of the ticket collector at London Bridge or his local newsagent or even his own wife. Trying to remember what his wife looked like, he could only focus on an image of the tennis player Billie Jean King, whom she resembled when her hair was done in a certain way. All this was proof that he had found a billet which suited him very well.

His wife had only once impinged on his consciousness during his first week with British Albion, and even that intrusion had been to do with an office matter. In his elation at having landed the job, he had forgotten, when leaving the building after his interview with Lucas of Personnel, to hand over the Part Two of his appointment card to the three one-armed commissionaires. On the Sunday evening before taking up his appointment, while emptying the pockets of his business suit so that his wife could sponge and press it, he had discovered the crumpled document and asked her to remind him at all costs to take it with him. This, naturally, she had failed to do, and he had sailed off without it. Thinking the matter important, as it certainly was, his wife had tried to ring him at the office. She had found that British Albion was not on the telephone. At least, it was not in the book under B for British or A for Albion, and directory enquiries could not help her.

She had mentioned this curious fact to Gryce on the Monday evening, and he in turn mentioned it to Copeland on the Tuesday. The opportunity arose when he handed over the long-lost Part Two: he had done this on the advice of the three one-armed commissionaires who, after a long conference, had refused to accept it on the grounds that its absence had already been recorded in their occurrence book.

He found Copeland at his desk in his partitioned-off space by the filing cabinets, where he was meticulously smoothing out a toffee wrapper. Unlike the rest of the clientele of Mr Hakim's Friday morning market stall, Copeland did not buy his sweets for home consumption. He kept a large presentation tin of Sharpe's Toffee Assortment in a private drawer of one of the filing cabinets, and dipped into it often. Combined with ill-fitting teeth, his fondness for sucking toffees probably accounted for his occasional obscurities of speech.

Copeland's cubby-hole had no door and Gryce didn't think that knocking on the waist-high metal partition would be appropriate. He place himself in Copeland's line of vision and hung about until Copeland looked up and, with an encouraging 'Mm!', cordially beckoned him in. To Gryce's relief he showed little interest either in the Part Two or in Gryce's confused account of his adventures with it. To his further relief, Copeland did however agree to take possession of the wretched thing, and flung it into a filing tray.

Copeland seemed disposed towards conversation. He could not ask Gryce to sit down, since his status as departmental head did not rate a chair for visitors, but he did perform a vaguely agreeable hand-signal which Gryce recognized as equivalent to the 'Stand easy' wave of his Air Force days.

'Dialect wine,' said Copeland, after Gryce had told him, in the form of a little anecdote, about his wife having hell's own job in trying to find British Albion's number.

Effectively forestalling any attempt by Gryce to have this cryptic remark amplified, Copeland then rose abruptly, went to the filing cabinet that housed his private drawer, and swallowing the toffee that was already in his mouth extracted another one from a large tin bearing a picture of Windsor Castle. This was done quite openly, apparently without it crossing Copeland's mind that he ought to offer one to Gryce; but when it came to unwrapping the toffee and popping it into his mouth, some belated delicacy of feeling impelled him to turn his back and hunch his shoulders as if performing a minor private ablution.