Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

Still, that was neither here nor there. The fact was that he had got himself in a bit of a pickle.

'I thought I had mentioned the directory,' he bluffed. 'It was with the guidelines booklet, on top of Copeland's filing cabinet.'

'Was it, indeed?' Seeds asked, more of Pam than of Gryce.

'Are you sure?' said Pam. 'It would be very out of character for Copeland to leave it lying about. It's supposed to be a classified document.'

Gryce was beginning to rue the day he'd ever set eyes on Copeland's wretched filing cabinet. As soon as Mr Hakim returned from holiday he would put in an order for a supply of toffees of his own, and that would keep him out of mischief in future. Meanwhile, the best form of defence was attack: he would counter question with question.

'In what way classified?'

'Secret. For heads of department only.'

'Why secret?'

'Because,' said Pam, 'it would give the game away.'

While Gryce was wondering if it would be over-egging the pudding to ask what game, Seeds intervened hurriedly.

'I still think we're running before we can walk, Pam. Why don't we let him tell us, in his own words, what it was he was looking for?'

'You mean when I came across the internal telephone directory?' asked Gryce in some trepidation. Perhaps they knew all about the toffees, and were just waiting for him to dig his own grave.

'I mean after you read it,' said Seeds testily.

'Ah. I can't claim to have read it, but I did go through it pretty thoroughly. The first thing that struck me was that unlike all the other billets I've ever worked for, there's no advertising department.'

'Is that so very remarkable?' asked Seeds blandly.

'Oh, I think you'll find it is. Even the Docks and Inland Waterways had its own advertising manager.'

'We don't advertise,' said Pam. 'We're not even in the Yellow Pages.'

'Nor in the phone directory proper,' said Gryce. 'I've noticed that. According to Copeland—'

'Yes, we've all heard Copeland's explanation. Every head of department has his own direct line, which is more efficient et cetera and so on. It also just so happens that every head of department can accept outside phone calls and no one else knows who it is that's ringing or what the call is about. Of course, if we had a central line, with extensions, there'd have to be a switchboard, and that would mean the operators could listen in.'

Gryce's mouth fell open. 'Do you mean to say there's no telephone switchboard?' Nor was there, come to think of it. But if he'd inspected the office from top to bottom ten times over, he would never have thought of that.

Seeds, who appeared to have cast himself in the role of chairman of this particular tribunal, had been impatiently tapping his glass with a finger-nail during these exchanges.

'Getting back to the internal directory. You've said there's no advertising department listed and we're all agreed there's nothing so very sinister about that. What else did you notice?'

'No sales structure,' said Gryce. 'No reps, no market research bods, no—'

'There wouldn't be,' Pam cut in drily. 'We don't sell anything.'

Seeds gave an old-womanish 'Tsk!' of annoyance. 'You will keep jumping the gun, Pam! Let him tell his story in his own way!'

'There's not all that much to tell,' said Gryce truthfully.

'Saving your presence, that's for us to decide. Now you couldn't find anything in the internal directory to suggest a sales department in any way, shape or form. So you set out to look for it. Is that the size of it?'

'Not exactly. It did puzzle me for a while, I must confess, but then I chanced to have a little chat with Mr Grant-Peignton. He seems quite the historian, as regards Perfidious—'

'And what did he tell you?'

'That we'd diversified into property.'

Pam shocked Gryce by exclaiming 'Balls!' Whether Seeds was likewise shocked Gryce was none too sure, but it certainly provoked one of his famous glances.

Since she showed no signs of enlarging on this expletive, Gryce continued. 'Well now, that did seem to explain a great deal. I'm not particularly au fait with the world of property but I'm quite sure it's not bought and sold out of sample cases like so many—'

'Whatever British Albion does,' said Pam, to Gryce's annoyance interrupting what he thought was a rather pleasing display of verbal pyrotechnics, 'it doesn't buy or sell property. That's already established.' In other words, Get on with it.

'But what did occur to me, and mark you I didn't get further than the second floor, working downwards,' concluded Gryce, 'was that you'd think a firm this size, whether it buys or sells property or whatever it does, would run to a computer. It's probably in the basement.'

'It isn't in the basement,' said Pam. 'There isn't a computer. And do you know why there isn't a computer?'

Seeds' warning glances were as obvious as if he'd swung a red lamp in front of Pam's nose. Nevertheless, she answered her own rhetorical question.

'There isn't a computer because if there was a computer, the people who operate it would know what's going on.'

She seemed to have this obsession about something 'going on'. Gryce would have quite liked to know himself what Perfidious Albion was up to but it didn't seem worth making a song and dance over. If property wasn't the answer, then it was his bet that it was something to do with high finance.

It was out of politeness, then, that he asked: 'What is going on, precisely?'

Seeds answered, if you could call it an answer. 'What do you think?'

'I don't know. I was hoping one of you would tell me.'

'With great respect, I don't think you've quite finished telling us. You've done very well so far, you've observed that there's no advertising department, no sales force, no telephone exchange, no computer, and you've been with the company barely a week. I can tell you, there's people who've been on the staff for months and years without tumbling to a quarter of that. Now. What else?'

Patronizing devil, thought Gryce. On the other hand, Seeds had very kindly credited him with noticing the absence of a telephone exchange, which strictly speaking was not his discovery at all.

Gryce racked his brains. He could think of nothing else worth mentioning, except that curious phone call from Lucas, which considering that Seeds himself was supposed to have been the recipient of it, would be hardly appropriate at this stage.

'That's about all, I think.'

Seeds and Pam exchanged a glance, but not their accustomed one. This one plainly said, 'The poor boob.'

'I told you he didn't know,' said Seeds. 'The penny hasn't dropped.'

'It's incredible,' said Pam. 'Shall I tell him?'

'Considering what you've told him already, you might as well.' Seeds leaned back and began idly swilling the wine about in his glass, to show that the proceedings were no longer within his control. If he wasn't going to drink himself, thought Gryce as he contemplated his own empty glass, he might at least notice that other people could do with topping up. There was still half a bottle left, untouched since Seeds had poured the original three glasses.

Pam looked at Gryce with an expression of suppressed amusement.

'Do you mean to say you started on the twelfth floor and worked your way as far down as the second, and you didn't even notice they're all internal departments?'

Gryce was now glad that his glass was indeed empty, otherwise he might have been in the act of raising it to his lips and it would certainly have fallen out of his hand at this point. Of course! It was blazingly obvious, when you thought about it.

'Internal mail, but no external mail?' Pam persisted, still with a note of humorous incredulity. 'Invoice clearance, but no invoice despatch? An accounts department that does nothing else besides pay our salaries? A buying department that buys only office desks and office paper?'