Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

There could be a hundred explanations. But it was all rather rum. So, if only Gryce could find a moment to settle his thoughts, was that curious business of the internal telephone directory in Copeland's filing cabinet. There was definitely a puzzle there to be got to the bottom of, one of these days.

Meanwhile, life had to go on. Come what may, Gryce had to eat; and furthermore he was blowed if he saw why he should eat at his own expense when there were heavily subsidized meals to be had for the asking. On the Tuesday, failing a second invitation to lunch from Seeds, and failing Pam keeping her promise to let him know where he could get his SSTs, he had been reduced to wandering about the streets until he found a shop that sold sandwiches wrapped in Cellophane. Hence the hunger that had caused him to dip into Copeland's toffees. It was an unsatisfactory meal and would have been a wretched one but for the chance that Mr Hakim was also taking a simple snack in the office from a variety of paper bags. Mr Hakim was departing on a fortnight's holiday in the Algarve at the end of the week and his lunch hours were very much taken up in seeing travel agents, getting currency from his bank and so on. They had a talk about the Algarve, where Gryce had never been. Gryce told Hakim something about Tenerife, advising him to try it one year, and then Mr Hakim departed to find out if he could buy espadrilles cheaper than in Portugal, from a cousin of his who imported fancy goods. Gryce spent the rest of the lunch hour going through his pockets and getting rid of old bus tickets.

On the Wednesday, however, using his new-found knowledge of the twelfth floor and its workings, he had gone up and signed for a supply of SSTs on his own initiative. He had returned to the seventh floor with every intention of inviting Pam to lunch only to find that Seeds had got there before him. In the Buttery, where he had the bad luck to fall in with the Penney twins who breathed with gusto all over his tongue salad, he could see them twittering like lovebirds at a neighbouring table. If he hadn't known they were arguing about the Albion Players he would have sworn they were in the throes of an affair like the long-suffering Cargill from Salary Accounts and the lady who was definitely not Mrs Cargill.

It had been the same on Thursday and today, Friday. On both occasions Pam and Seeds had waltzed off to the Buttery together without a glance in his direction, leaving him once again prey to the Penney twins. During the coffee break he had wandered across to Pam's desk and diffidently mentioned that he was now in a position to return the SSTs she had generously donated in his hour of need, but she had replied off handedly that it would do any time, meaning never.

All this would have been discouraging but for a parallel development in their acquaintanceship which unfolded in the lift.

Lifts, so Gryce had noticed in some of his previous billets, were very intimate places in their way. People behaved in them in a private, idiosyncratic manner not all that very far removed from pulling faces in the bathroom mirror. Beazley, as an example, was in the habit of jutting out his lower lip and blowing hard up his nostrils, while Grant-Peignton would make tocking noises as if in imitation of a grandfather clock. Neither would have dreamed of making such a public exhibition of himself outside the confines of the lift. Seeds, whenever he was a fellow passenger, was given to humming the opening bars of an obscure song called 'I'm Happy When I'm Hiking'; it was the only instance in which he evidenced an interest in music. Among other behaviour patterns noted by Gryce was that Copeland would sigh heavily as the lift stopped at each floor, swivelling up his eyeballs to invite collusion with his impatience from whoever was standing next to him; and Mrs Rashman, possibly in sympathy with Copeland, would bend slightly at the knees, while imploring, 'Come on, lift.'

For Gryce's own part, he was a bit out of touch with such rituals because at Comform he had worked on the ground floor of what was in any case a low-rise building. But quite quickly he managed to establish his own particular style. Riding to the seventh floor each morning and down again each evening, he took to levering himself up on the balls of his feet, at the same time sliding his back against the vinyl panelling of the lift and constricting his shoulder-blades so that they almost met. This seemed an acceptable enough arrangement to the other lift regulars, and Gryce was able to feel almost from the start that he was of their company. It was, he told himself, a bit like joining the freemasons.

So however discouraging — or anyway not actively encouraging, in fact quite cool really — Pam might have been in the relatively anonymous territory of the seventh floor, once within the vertical cloisters of the lift-shaft she was camaraderie itself. Gryce had not yet had the pleasure of travelling up with her in the morning — she was a notorious late-arriver, indeed it was a standing joke that Mrs Rashman would sing out, 'Here comes the early bird!' when she rolled in at ten past nine — but he seized with both hands the opportunity of travelling down with her in the evening. While Pam might be the last to arrive each day it could be said in her favour that she was also the last to leave. Gryce found that by loitering at the glass doors of the seventh floor foyer until he saw her gathering up her handbag, then summoning the lift and keeping his finger pressed on the 'Open' button, he had every chance of inducing her to run for it. This she did with the scuttering, crab-like movement common to all last-minute lift passengers. To recover her composure, as the lift descended to ground level and Gryce slid his shoulder-blades up and down against the vinyl panelling, Pam would peer into her handbag and ruminate: 'Now what have I forgotten?' Gryce took to saying: 'Door key? Purse? Season ticket? Adequate supply of the firm's ballpoint pens?' and thus a bond between them was forged.

Gryce shared the lift with Pam four times in his first working week: not bad going. It would have been five but for his over-zealousness on Tuesday when he had found himself stranded in Catering (Administration); he wondered if Pam had been disappointed not to see a certain familiar figure holding the lift doors open.

But they had made up for that. On one occasion — yesterday, Thursday, red-letter day — she had been so slow in clearing her desk that the building had just about emptied and they had had the lift to themselves. Gryce had been able to push the frontiers of their relationship forward a little by remarking, after they had enjoyed the familiar exchange about what Pam might have forgotten, 'You know, I'll swear these lifts are centrally-heated!' To which Pam had replied, 'It's air-conditioning, so-called. They pump in hot air all through the summer and cold air in winter.' Gryce had then made a great show of wiping imaginary beads of sweat from his brow. Pam had responded by puckering her lips and exhaling heavily — a genteel version of Beazley blowing up his nostrils — and making a fanning motion with her rolled-up Evening Standard. A cosy moment. It was going very well.

Gryce, however, was not one to run before he could walk and failing any luck on the Buttery front next week he was content to let their lift relationship blossom as slowly as might be necessary. He was, after all, in no hurry. It would be his first extra-marital affair, his first affair ever, actually, if you discounted his courtship of Peggy back at Docks and Inland Waterways, and he would just as soon take it slowly.

He was astonished when, as they reached ground level on this Friday evening, Pam called good night to one or two people and then turned back and asked him boldly which way he was going.

'What? Oh. East, usual, though I coo go west. I'm equidistal between two bus-sops.' In his surprise and delight Gryce slurred and tripped over his words like Copeland with a toffee in his mouth. He could feel himself going hot and hoped he wasn't blushing.