Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

The dealer, who seemed anxious to get back to his card-school, was as far as Gryce could make out telling him that even if the furniture had been brought to basement three, which it hadn't, he would need the required authorization to release it.

'I do realize that, it's in hand. Meanwhile have you any objection if I at least look around and see if the furniture can be located?'

'Bess fing you can do, mate, is inden for all new furnisher. Save yerseller lorrer bovver.'

Gryce, had he been in the mood for debating, could have pointed out that without a requisition form to its name his department would be hard-pressed to indent for so much as a new coat-hook. He thought it more prudent, since the dealer plainly imagined himself to have delivered a devastating parting shot, to leave the matter there. The game of brag had resumed, and none of the workmen seemed to care whether he went, stayed, or set the place on fire.

As inconspicuously as he could, Gryce moved on. He now saw that beyond the workmen's rest area the Design and Maintenance bay took on a different character. Here the desks were old and broken, the chairs lopsided on their pedestal bases, the glass-topped tables cracked, the filing cabinets buckled and rusting where the gun-metal paint had flaked away. He was in an elephants' graveyard of office furniture.

Picking his way through a thicket of mildewing composition floor tiles, lengths of hardboard and plywood oddments, he was soon out of sight of the workmen. He came across a green glade of metal wastepaper bins, hundreds of them, nothing much wrong with them but presumably deemed too small since the ones now in use were bigger; and then, beyond a leaning stack of the familiar waist-high partitions, more filing cabinets. Some of them were newish, not really ready for the scrap heap yet if economy was any consideration in this establishment, which apparently it wasn't, and others of the old wooden type such as he had noticed in the Files Depository.

With a shock of apprehension Gryce realized that he had in fact strayed into the Files Depository. The two departments sharing the basement obviously converged, with no dividing wall, the junkyard of abandoned furniture and fittings serving as a no-man's-land between them.

All he could say was that security was definitely a hit-and-miss affair at British Albion. At the Albion Players' meeting last night, after the excitement caused by Thelma eavesdropping from the fire-escape — he was sure it had been Thelma, though the intruder hadn't been caught — there had been some discussion about no-go areas in the office and the Files Depository had been singled out for mention. He wondered if anybody, Lucas of Personnel to name but one, realized that you could walk into the place more or less off the street. He had better turn back.

Cursing his squeaking shoes, Gryce was about to retrace his steps — the neutral zone was fully five or six yards away, but by arching his toes so that they pressed up against the leather of his toecaps he could probably eliminate the squeak altogether — when he saw, jutting out from under the heavy base of one of the old wooden filing cabinets, the corner of a scuffed piece of paper, a bill or invoice or something of that sort that had worked its way loose from an over-full drawer. What encouraged him to pick it up was the old-fashioned lettering visible beneath" the ingrained dust: —ION PRINTERIES.

It was indeed an invoice: Dr to THE ALBION PRINTERIES, Estb. 1891. Grain Yard, London Bridge SE1. A date of some four years ago, when as Grant-Peignton had recounted the place had been pulled down. And, in the badly-aligned lettering of some battered old typewriter of yore, a table of hieroglyphics recognizable only to someone steeped in commerce: qty 12 grs rms 8093/1, qty 6 grs rms 7842/02, and so on. In the cash column was the item as per quote — as per agreed quotation, to the initiated.

Gryce had a head for numbers. There had been a standing joke at his last billet, that he ought to go on that television quiz programme Mastermind with Comform catalogue numbers as his chosen subject. The tattered invoice might have meant nothing to nine out of ten of his fellow-slaves at British Albion but to Gryce it was the Rosetta Stone. Quantity twelve gross reams 8093/1 — that was the code number of his own pink check-lists (the white ones were 8093, without the oblique digit). Quantity six gross reams 7842/02, they must be a long-obsolescent version of the holiday roster forms, the code number of the present series being 7842/14. Gryce always registered details of that kind: there was hardly a number on his master check-list that you could stump him with, wet behind the ears though he might be in terms of length of service.

What it came down to, then, was that he had stumbled across probably the very last invoice submitted by British Albion's parent company before it had been devoured by its own progeny. Gryce's first thought was that it would make a nice souvenir for Vaart, given that he was capable of appreciating such a gesture: he was, after all, one of only a handful of British Albion personnel who had worked for a time in the old building when his previous billet, Buckton's printing works wasn't it, had been absorbed in the early days of expansion. He would be able to frame it and hang it in his bathroom, always assuming there was a bathroom in whatever East End hovel he inhabited.

Gryce was about to tuck the invoice in his wallet when he noticed that the bottom portion of it was folded back. Turning it over revealed a boxed-off space for the recipient's address, designed to fit snugly into a window envelope. The recipient's address was typed in the same ill-aligned characters:

Special Supplies Division, HM Stationery Office

— followed by an address in Slough, no doubt a Stationery Office depot of some kind.

What was it that some Doubting Thomas had asked at last night's meeting? 'What documentary proof have we got that we're working for the Government?' And Grant-Peignton had replied, had he not, 'Our case rests not on the existence of documents but on their non-existence.' Well, if that had been the case, it was the case no longer. Gryce recalled the sensation caused by Seeds when he had made certain revelations. It would be as nothing to the sensation caused by Gryce. In his mind's eye he could see himself walking up the aisle of the St Jude's Institute, turning, facing his audience, producing from his wallet the vital scrap of evidence. '… That documentary proof, however, ladies and gentlemen, has now to come to light …' Oh, yes, it would be someone's finest hour all right.

As he put the invoice carefully away in his wallet, between two pound notes, Gryce heard a footfall. It was a footfall in the literal sense, in that the foot had been raised some inches from the ground and then allowed to drop with a crash. It was followed by another. It could only be young Thelma.

'Mr Gryce!' This was in the loudest of stage-whispers. 'It's over here!'

'Thelma, you gave me the shock of my life, I thought you were supposed to be out buying sweets? And what's over where?'

He too thought it prudent to whisper. But his question was too lengthy to be comfortably sustained at such a level, and he felt ridiculous. Bubbles to it: if anyone came at least he had some semblance of an excuse, Thelma had none.

'Pardon? Oh, that filing cabinet that I keep my things in.'

Thelma's clodhopping steps led him back to the sanctuary of Design and Maintenance. Lying on its side among a clutter of old bulletin boards, fire extinguisher brackets, free-standing ash-trays and anglepoise desk lamps was a metal filing cabinet with a wisp of red wool tied to its top drawer handle.

'Well, that would appear to be Exhibit A, Thelma. Any sign of the rest of our belongings?'