Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

'By the way, I dug this out for you. Let me have it back when you've read it, they're few and far between.'

It was, after all, the celebrated guidelines booklet. If she had offered it in the right spirit — as a little token gift, a special favour, an act of friendship — he could have been touched and grateful. As it was, she was behaving like a welfare officer.

'Many thanks indeed, it's very kind of you,' said Gryce with what he thought was a touch of haughtiness. 'But I've already had sight of it, courtesy of Copeland.'

He shouldn't have blurted that out. Now he would have to cover his tracks.

'It was lying about on top of his filing cabinet,' he added shiftily.

Pam, he couldn't think why unless she suspected him of doing what in fact he had been doing, namely helping himself to Copeland's toffees, was giving him a look that put him in mind of the glances she and Seeds had exchanged during their dust-up in the Buttery on Monday.

' And were you any the wiser?'

'Not significantly. To give you a for instance: although there's a list of subsidiary companies as long as your arm, nowhere are we told what it is they actually do, or what Perfidious Albion itself actually does.'

'I know,' said Pam — as intriguingly as, the other day, she had said, 'Well may you ask' when he had raised the same question.

But whereas on that occasion she had been silenced by Seeds with one of his looks, this time she did the job for herself. While throwing off this cryptic remark she had risen to her feet and was now heading for the stairs, leaving Gryce to follow or not as he thought fit.

On the half-landing, however, she paused, on the excuse of fiddling with her gloves, and after looking thoughtful for a moment came out with something quite provocative.

'Look, this may sound silly, and we've both had too much to drink, but I can't make my mind up whether you're an observant person or not. I mean in some ways you seem to be one and in other ways you don't.'

'I keep my eyes open,' said Gryce huffily, but with an interrogative lilt to show that he would like to hear what came next.

'If you hear or see anything strange,' said Pam, 'will you let me know? I mean, privately.'

'Anything strange. Now how would you define strange?'

That was what Gryce meant to answer, but he hadn't the time, for she was once more on the move, taking the rest of the stairs so quickly that she was out in the street before he caught up with her.

The evening air hit them both. Pam, despite those sessions with Mrs Rashman in the days when the seventy-three had departed from the same stop as the thirty-eight and the one-seven-one, was evidently no more used to three glasses of wine on an empty stomach than was Gryce himself.

'I feel queasy,' she muttered, swaying a little. 'Think go loo.'

'Not bad idea,' Gryce slurred.

The ladies' and the men's room were on opposite sides of the half-landing. When Gryce emerged, having to his surprise vomited rather a lot, the door to the ladies' was open. The street was quiet by now and he thought he heard the sound of retreating footsteps. Following them unsteadily, he was in time to see a thirty-eight pulling away from the now deserted bus-stop. Pam, or it might not have been her at all, since the windows were steamed up, did not wave.

It had been an unsatisfactory evening, taking it all round.

On the following Monday, just before all the department's furniture was moved out and a few days before it vanished altogether, Vaart returned from holiday and Gryce shifted to the desk vacated by Mr Hakim who would by now be sunning himself on the Algarve.

Vaart was not at all as Gryce had imagined him. He'd seen him as like that South African statesman, not Vorster, the other one. Instead, he looked like Mickey Rooney. Nor was he South African or Dutch, although it was probable that his father had been one or the other. He spoke with a strong cockney accent and was what Gryce called a knocker.

It was Gryce's experience that there was a knocker in every billet. Sometimes there would be two or three, but one would always rise naturally above the others, sometimes to the status of office 'character'. The knocker took an irreverent approach to the organization that employed him and could be relied on to comment on each and every example of inefficiency or red tape with some such rhetorical question as 'Would you believe it?' or 'Isn't it marvellous?' (in Vaart's case, 'Ennit marllous?'). But he was usually an unmalicious soul who, provided he didn't overdo it, performed a useful role as a safety-valve for the frustrations of office life.

Vaart, when introduced by Seeds, was amiability itself, and even helped Gryce carry all his paraphernalia — 'arse-wipe', as he inelegantly called it — across to Hakim's desk. He seemed in no hurry to get back in harness after his holiday, and after lighting a cigarette, which he held concealed in the palm of his hand between bunched fingers, like a workman, he assumed a loitering position with the plain intention of idling half the morning away.

Gryce had gathered that Vaart's duties, when he got round to performing them, were concerned with maintaining stock levels, including liaising with Stationery Stores and ordering bulk supplies of stationery from Central Buying on the fifth floor as and when necessary. While orders on such a scale would obviously have to be checked and countersigned by Copeland, it seemed a remarkably responsible job for one who, without being unkind, could barely pronounce his own name. Vaart was certainly not what you would call run-of-the-mill clerical material.

'Arja gerron wiv Cowpland, den? Gerrin on your tits, izze?'

'Seems all right,' shrugged Gryce, anxious neither to endorse any implicit criticism of his master nor to get off on the wrong foot with one who might be, for all he knew, Copeland's sworn enemy.

'Eezer bleedin washerwoman. Azze given you one of is toffees? One of is creamy assortmen? I bettee azzen! What? Tuh!'

Vaart's laugh, like most of his observations, had a positively derisive flavour. Gryce dutifully, but non-committally, responded: 'Sha!'

It took him some little time to steer Vaart away from the dangerous area of personalities. Having disposed of Copeland, Vaart seemed inclined to go on, in none too modulated tones, to discuss the shortcomings of Seeds, Beazley and the Penney twins, whom he described as wankers. Only by asking him for what knowledge he might have of the forthcoming reorganization programme did Gryce manage to stem his good-humoured but nevertheless perhaps compromising flow of abuse.

'Starts amorrer, sposed to.'

'Tomorrow. And what does it entail, exactly?

'Chrise knows. Tuh! Tellya one fing, all these desks aster to be moved, so you're wastin your time spreadin all that shit out like a bleedin greengrocry stall. Tuh! Loser bleedin lot, fore they've finished.'

'All that shit' was Gryce's stock of blank white and pink check-lists, requisition forms A and B, blue slips and so on which he had begun to display in neat piles about Hakim's desk. He began at once to gather them up again. He had fully intended to spend the morning submitting a new pink check-list to Catering (Administration), with probably a strongly worded memorandum stapled to it. That would have meant acquiring a stapling machine: he had that task earmarked for the afternoon. But now he could coast through the day with a clear conscience.

'At least after the holocaust I shall have a desk of my own. That's one thing.'

'Leave it out! Invoiced for one, avyer?'

'It's news to me that I had to.'

'Iss not gerna walk ere, izzit? You wanna slap inner ninvoice, sharpish. Take weeks. Monfs. Equipment Supplies, fif floor, nexer Cenral Buyin. Lorrer bleedin wankers. Worsan us, an that's sayin sumfin.'