Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

A slow frown etched into his forehead as he browsed on. After some time he turned back to the opening page and started to plough steadily through the volume from A for Accounts.

He had got to the letter F, and was wondering whether to rummage in Copeland's tin and fish out another butterscotch, when there was a sound so strange and unexpected that the hairs bristled on his neck.

It was a telephone ringing.

It was, to Gryce, like hearing the fog siren on an abandoned ship. The office was empty. Even when it was not, no telephone had rung at all during his two days with British Albion. Not encouraged, Copeland had said: memo in, memo out. Gryce's ears had already re-edited the familiar medley of background office noises so that the absence of the telephone no longer jarred. Now, it was its presence that jarred. In the silent, deserted aircraft hangar that the seventh floor in his fancy resembled, the ringing of the telephone sounded as raucous and urgent as a fire bell.

Gryce's first instinct was to get out of it. He slammed the filing cabinet shut, remembering with great presence of mind to push the lock home. He swallowed the sliver of butterscotch that lay on his tongue like a flat iron. The telephone went on ringing.

He had to get his raincoat.

Gryce had not much aural sense of direction and so he had no idea which of the seventh floor's sixty to eighty telephones had given him such a jolt. It was certainly not Copeland's, he knew that much. Trying to think rationally, he came up with the theory that someone was trying to get through to the departmental head of Traffic Control on his direct line. The direct lines did ring from time to time: Copeland had more or less said so.

Blundering across the office, however, Gryce realized that he was far off the mark. It was Seeds' phone that was ringing.

The discovery was at once calming and puzzling. It was a call for his own department, Stationery Supplies. Or, more likely at this hour, a personal call for Seeds from someone who probably thought the office closed at five-thirty or six instead of five. Gryce was on the premises for a legitimate reason: to file away documents that the Penney twins, in their wisdom, had washed their hands of. If a telephone rang, he was quite entitled to answer it. Indeed, since everyone else had cleared off and left him to it, he was the Joe Muggins who would have to answer it.

But departmental phones were not supposed to ring. Incoming calls were discouraged. And how would anyone know what number to call anyway, since the disc inside the dial where the extension number ought to be was blank?

It was probably a wrong number.

Gryce, compromising between acting positively and leaving well alone, gingerly lifted the receiver and listened.

There was the sound of a man breathing, such as he imagined his wife must have heard in a period when she was being plagued by obscene phone calls. Then a familiar voice, enunciating clearly as if dictating a telegram, said into Seeds' telephone:

'He was a member of the Forest Hill Liberal Club for a year, but only for social reasons. No further political connections.'

Gryce was so stunned at hearing this biographical fragment about himself — it could only be about himself, it would be stretching the long arm of coincidence too far for it to be otherwise — that he reacted in what it later dawned on him was the most foolish manner possible.

He answered, in a faltering, puzzled voice, 'Hello?' thus giving away his identity.

Lucas of Personnel, as it unquestionably was on the other end of Seeds' line, hung up.

Gryce grabbed his raincoat from its peg and ran for it.

'And what about you? Are you married?'

'Oh, very much so.'

They were in the Pressings wine bar, on the Friday evening. Gryce, sipping his second glass of Soave (he should have ordered a bottle and been done with it) congratulated himself again on the speed at which this first clandestine rendezvous had been arrived at. Nor was he in any doubt that clandestine was the right word: it was Pam, not he, who had headed for the discreet corner under the stairs.

He still couldn't believe it. Only four days, well, four and a half days, had gone by since that lunch they'd had with Seeds in the Buttery, yet here they were with their hands practically touching across a table made out of a sherry barrel, in a whitewashed cellar off the beaten track, discussing every subject under the sun. Including the fact that Pam had a husband called Peter who often worked far into the night, or laid claim to working far into the night more like, as an inspector of listed buildings for the Department of the Environment. Ideal.

It was even more unbelievable when you considered that things had not gone according to plan. His hopes of having another lunch with Pam on the excuse of returning her SSTs had come to nothing: friend Seeds had seen to that.

Gryce no longer knew what to make of Seeds since eavesdropping on that unnerving telephone message from Lucas of Personnel on Tuesday evening. He'd seemed pally enough on the face of it: they had had quite an invigorating discussion one afternoon about the route of the No. 73 bus after it reached Hammersmith. But he'd made no attempt to consolidate the easy-going acquaintanceship they had struck up on Gryce's first day: no further invitations to lunch, no offer to whistle up a copy of the guidelines booklet, no tips or wrinkles to make a newcomer feel more at home. On that level, it was not pitching it too strongly to say he'd been evasive.

It might well have happened, of course, that Seeds had had reports from Lucas of Personnel about Gryce intercepting his private phone calls. Gryce had fretted a good deal about that. He had thought of taking Seeds aside and explaining what he had been doing in the office at that hour, why he had answered the phone and what he had heard when he picked it up. But that might have put them both in an embarrassing position. Seeds might not have been able to tell him what was going on without breaching a confidence. He might have resorted to bluster and said something like, 'Well, you know what they say, old man. People with big ears never hear good of themselves.'

Not that Gryce had actually heard ill of himself: the reverse, when he thought about it. 'No further political connections', Lucas had said. A clean bill of health, that sounded like. Thank the Lord he had never been a blessed Communist.

The phone call business had Gryce stumped. He had toyed with several theories, none of them entirely convincing. Perhaps Lucas had mis-dialled: instead of ringing Seeds he had meant to ring some high-up or other — the head of Security came to mind, there had been a Security Department listed in that internal telephone directory — who would have had a reasonable enough interest in Gryce's political affiliations. This wouldn't have been the first billet Gryce had heard of that took pretty good care it was not harbouring reds under the beds. There was, it was common knowledge, such a thing as industrial sabotage.

Or again, it could conceivably have had nothing at all to do with the office. It could have been a personal affair between Seeds and Lucas. Perhaps they themselves were reds under the beds — or, as seemed more probable, members of the National Front or some such. Perhaps Lucas was abusing his position in Personnel with its wealth of confidential records to seek out possible recruits. If so, he would get no change out of Gryce.

Bringing it down to a more mundane level, it could simply have been that Lucas had been doing a spot of checking-up for Seeds on the old-boy net. Seeds might have got the idea into his head that Gryce was a political extremist of some kind — perhaps he'd seen some Marxist or National Front demo on television and spotted someone who looked uncommonly like Gryce: such things, in Gryce's experience, did happen — and he'd tipped Lucas the wink.