Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

A cleverly-worked-in reference, that, to Mrs Rashman's preoccupation with groceries. It brought the house down. Gryce fervently wished he'd brazened the party out from the beginning. He'd never known such merriment.

Synchronizing with Mrs Rashman's high-pitched 'Tchair-hair, tchair-hair!' as she doubled up with mirth, a telephone started to ring for only the second time in Gryce's stay with British Albion.

The general reaction was interesting. You would have expected shouts of 'Oh, blow!' or 'Tell them we've all gone home', or even a sympathetic word for the Penney twins at this interruption of their efforts: 'It's Sir John Betjeman, wants to know who his rivals are!' — something on those lines. But everyone in Stationery Supplies fell silent.

Gryce noted the different responses of his colleagues. Seeds looked shifty; Pam, he thought, nervous. The Penney twins looked guilty for some reason, not exasperated at being thrown off their stride as you might expect. Copeland, Beazley and Grant-Peignton looked studiously non-committal. Vaart was rolling his eyes and whistling under his breath, evidently with the aim of exonerating himself from any blame for the interruption. Ardagh, with whom Gryce had had little truck as yet, had a look that could not be defined. If asked to select a word, Gryce would have said paranoiac. Really, the man's resemblance to Hitler in appearance was quite remarkable. As for Mrs Rashman, she looked unhappy.

It was Seeds who moved. That didn't surprise Gryce: if he had been a gambling man, he would have taken bets on it. Seeds made his way to the pile of telephones that had been jumbled together in a corner by the workmen from Design and Maintenance, and picked up one receiver after another while the telephone went on ringing. Nobody spoke. Finally Seeds located the right instrument, presumably his own, and answered it. 'Yes? Yes… Yes… Right… Leave it with me.' He replaced the receiver. 'Sorry about that, chaps.' Those who had been looking inquiringly at Seeds swivelled back to the Penney twins. Those who had been looking studiously at the floor — notably Pam — did the same. The Penney twins resumed their poem. But it seemed flat now: all the life had gone out of the party.

Seeds did not resume his original place in the circle surrounding Mrs Rashman. He sidled round the outskirts of it until he was next to Pam. As applause, and to Gryce's ear somewhat forced laughter, greeted the end of the Penney brothers' doggerel, Seeds whispered something to Pam. Everyone saw him doing it, but pretended not to. Pam nodded imperceptibly.

The celebrations seemed to be over, the formal part of them anyway. The circle broke its ranks, some people converging on Mrs Rashman to wish her luck and admire her steak knives, others to congratulate the Penney twins on a really brilliant composition. In all the criss-crossing, Pam managed to insinuate herself next to Gryce without anyone except himself particularly noticing.

'Do you fancy another drink at the Pressings this evening?'

Gryce was disappointed, although not much surprised, to find Seeds sitting with Pam in what, with an element of wishful thinking, he had already begun to look upon as their usual corner in the Pressings wine bar. If there was nothing going on between those two then he was a Dutchman.

One good thing: Seeds had already got in a bottle of red plonk and three glasses. While Gryce was a white wine man if left to himself, it would at least save him the price of a round unless they were going to make a night of it. But he would have to remember that it was his shout next time, if there was a next time.

His attempts at conversational preliminaries — he had worked out a jocular set-piece on the theme of it making a nice change to be able to park one's posterior after standing up all day — were cut short by Pam, who seemed in a brass-tacks mood. So, for that matter, did Seeds, whose expression could only be called glowering.

'You were going to tell me if you saw anything strange,' said Pam without preamble, although Gryce had made no such promise. 'What have you found out?'

Gryce had no particular urge to hedge, it was just that he had an aversion to direct questions, they made him feel put-upon.

'Well now. It depends entirely what you'd call—'

'Just answer Pam's question,' Seeds butted in with offensive weariness. Really: the pair of them were carrying on like two French resistance workers interrogating a captured parachutist in a barn. The impression was heightened by the fact of Pam wearing a beret and a tightly-belted white raincoat. Take into account her black stockings, or black tights more likely, and the effect was what Gryce supposed was called sexy. He would have been quite dry-mouthed had Seeds not been present as resident gooseberry.

'You were on the prowl today,' said Pam. 'I'm asking what interesting discoveries you made.'

The only phrase that formed itself in Gryce's mind was 'It depends, entirely what you'd call interesting discoveries.' But he did not wish to risk another rebuff from Seeds, who was beginning to strike him as quite the Jekyll and Hyde: it was blow hot one minute and blow cold the next with this one.

Gryce didn't reply, but he resisted the impulse to lick his lips.

'We know you were on the prowl,' insisted Pam, 'because that phone call to Ron this morning was from the commissionaire who stopped you.'

'I don't think,' said Seeds, with one of the cautionary glances that seemed to be part of his stock-in-trade, 'we need go into that at this stage.'

'Oh, for heaven's sake, he's not stupid!' flared Pam. And in the same snapping voice, though what he had done to deserve it he did not know, she continued to Gryce: 'You were seen poking your nose into the eighth floor, and someone else saw you on the sixth.'

'Quite the little espionage network,' murmured Gryce.

'Yes. There is. Luckily it was our network and not theirs.'

"Theirs"? Who's "theirs"?'

'Tell him,' said Pam to Seeds.

Seeds waggled his head about in a demurring sort of way. 'You're sure you're not putting the cart before the horse here?'

'Ron, he knows !'

'Yes, but does he know? That's the whole point, surely?'

Pam closed her eyes and breathed out forcibly, to demonstrate exasperation tempered with patience. She then put down her glass of wine and held up her hands in an ironic gesture of surrender. 'All right, all right, we'll go back to square one.' And then to Gryce, in deliberate zombie tones to show that she was fed up of asking the same question over and over again, although in truth she had asked it only once: 'You-set-off-today-to-scour-the-building-from-top-to-bottom-now- Why?'

In the kind of bossy mood she was in, thought Gryce, she wouldn't want to listen to a long rigmarole about why he'd deemed it best to avoid Mrs Rashman's presentation ceremony. Anyway, unless he told the story properly, it might not reflect creditably upon himself.

'Well, I mentioned the other — the other day— ' He corrected himself delicately. To say 'the other night' in front of Seeds might compromise both Pam and himself '— that I'd been leafing through the internal telephone directory.'

'No, you didn't tell me that at all,' said Pam sharply. 'You said you'd been looking at the guidelines booklet.'

'Which, from what I gather, was lying about on Copeland's filing cabinet,' put in Seeds. Pam must have given him a blow-by-blow account of their conversation. Gryce wondered if Seeds knew that it had taken place after office hours, at this very table, when he and Pam had come within an ace of touching hands.