Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

He took a tentative sip of coffee and seeing that Seeds was looking at him in anticipation of a humorous reaction he thought of making the standard grimace of disgust, but decided instead upon raising his eyebrows and cocking his head slightly, at the same time arranging his mouth in the judicious pout of one who is prepared to concede a point in an argument.

'I've tasted worse. I don't known when, mark you, but I have definitely tasted worse.'

'Wait till you try what passes for tea,' said Seeds.

'Oh, I thought this was tea!' That should have been the end of the litany but Seeds seemed to expect more, so he added: 'It's certainly an improvement on the witches' brew they used to dispense at my last billet.'

'Where was that, without being nosy?'

'I served three years before the mast at Comform, if that name means anything to you. Office supplies, filing systems, you name it.'

'Oh, yes. Hammersmith somewhere, aren't they?'

'We-e-ll. Technically Hammersmith. Possibly just inside the Hammersmith border, though I wouldn't swear to it.'

'Long, two-or-three-storey building, white-fronted. Near Chiswick flyover.'

'No, no, I'll tell you what you're thinking of, you're thinking of what used to be the bottling plant. Lemonade, soft drinks, what were they called now?'

'Berry's.'

'Berry's. "You can taste the berries in Berry's." Since taken over by — it was either Watney's or Bass-Charrington, one of the big brewery giants anyway. No, no. Very similar building, admittedly, but we were much further out.'

'Towards Richmond, Twickenham, that way?'

They discussed the location of Gryce's last billet until Seeds had it placed to his satisfaction. Gryce had been given no work to do by Copeland, he expected he would be allowed to get the feel of the place for a day or two, and Seeds' duties seemed to leave him plenty of time for conversation. There was a sheaf of documents in front of him, multi-carbon affairs — order vouchers by the look of them — and occasionally he would run a pencil over the various columns and boxes and then rubber-stamp the top copy. This he placed in a folder, while the five or six flimsies were dispersed in a stacking arrangement of wire trays. The folder of top copies was kept in a separate wooden out-tray, so if they were order vouchers as Gryce supposed, they would obviously be collected or handed in at the end of the day for processing. It was much the same system as he had been used to in his last billet, except that Seeds' order vouchers, if that was what they were, would be internal ones and they were uniform in size and style, whereas at Comform he had had to cope with a variety of printed forms, Xeroxed pro-formas and even letters. Regular customers were sent blank order vouchers with every invoice but they refused to use them, so he had had the job of transferring their orders to the standard form before the work such as Seeds was doing now could even begin. He could see that he was going to have an easier time of it here.

'Not wishing to be personal, what prompted you to transfer your allegiance to Perfidious Albion?' asked Seeds when the question of Comform's whereabouts on the map had been settled. 'Perfidious Albion,' Gryce was to learn, was Seeds' wryly humorous appellation for the company they worked for. Others called it 'the factory', 'the madhouse', 'the labour camp' and suchlike, but Seeds' contribution in Gryce's view was the most original. It was genuinely witty. The real name of the firm was the British Albion Group.

'Why does one ever switch jobs?' he replied with the world-weary shrug that the question seemed to call for. 'Apart from the seven-year itch, or three-year itch in my particular case, I used to dread fighting my way back to Forest Hill every evening. Getting there wasn't so bad.'

'It's a long way,' said Seeds sympathetically.

'It's a very long way.'

'Right across London, just about.'

'Not just about, it is right across London. Discounting the City.'

'I mean,' said Seeds ingratiatingly, seemingly anxious to patch up this little difference of opinion, 'imagining you were leaving here every rush hour, and travelling the same distance, you'd have to be living out in — where? Bromley? Sidcup?'

'Well, perhaps not so far out as that but pretty far out all the same. Croydon, say. Whereas here, I can get off the train at London Bridge and it's — what, by bus? Five minutes it took me this morning.'

'Yes, you were rather lucky there. Unless the service has very much improved.'

Seeds too, it transpired, had once travelled to and from London Bridge, when living for a time at Honor Oak Park. He now lived at Turnham Green, where he had the choice of tube or bus. After some discussion of Seeds' travelling arrangements, Gryce felt he had known him all his life.

Presently Copeland came up to Seeds' desk to ask after the whereabouts of, if Gryce had overheard correctly, the clockwork insect. Copeland, although enquiry would show that he was only two years Gryce's senior, looked older. The likeness to Mervyn Johns was only a facial one: structurally, he was well on the way to resembling Alfred Hitchcock. Signs of an unsuitable diet there — widower, very possibly. The lapels of his suit, a good one but of an old-fashioned cut, were flecked with dandruff, the trousers bagged. He would have been happier, thought Gryce, in a tweed sports coat and flannels. There seemed to be no office policy on clothes, not that you expected one in this day and age. Ardagh and Grant-Peignton wore sports jackets in conservative colours, Seeds, like Gryce himself, a dark suit from Montague Burton's. Hakim wore a lightweight suit in pale fawn, too flashy by far for office wear. The Penney brothers wore navy blue blazers. Gryce, who called himself observant, saw for the first time that they must be identical twins. 'The Penney's dropped!' he told himself: he would share the joke when he knew them better.

The industrious Beazley, surprisingly, was the only man in the office to work in his shirt sleeves; a heavyish mohair jacket hung over the back of his chair. Mrs Rashman plainly owned a large wardrobe of unremarkable dresses bought at chain-stores: turning his gaze away from her, Gryce was immediately unable to remember whether today's pattern was floral, striped or what. Mrs Fawce, or Miss Divorce as he still called her to himself, looked as if she sometimes came to the office in trousers, but today she was wearing a straight bottle-green skirt and a lime-green top thing. Good legs, not that he would be expecting the kind of relationship that legs came into. Gryce's eyes travelled up from them and she smiled at him briefly, reminding him as she did so of Diana Rigg.

The stockbook index, not clockwork insect, that Copeland was looking for was quickly found in the wire-basket arrangement but he remained at Seeds' desk to discuss the illness of someone they both seemed to know called Norwich Terrier. Gryce, for all that Copeland had not given him any work, began to feel embarrassed at sitting there doing nothing. His temporary desk offered no distractions: Vaart's filing trays and other bits and pieces had evidently been locked away. It was bare except for its telephone receiver.

It was a commonplace-enough desk, in dull-finish grey metal. Black composition top, panel sides, front courtesy panel, three left-hand drawers locking, right-hand filing drawer also locking, the kind of thing his last billet had sold in thousands, catalogue number B4A/00621. It could, come to think of it, very well be a Comform desk at that. He slid his chair back a little and ducked his head to see if he could find the trademark beneath the rim of the desk top. Yes, it was there all right: the gold transfer pretty well worn off by now but it was definitely a Comform desk.