Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

'Pardon? No, there's only this, Mr Gryce.'

'How do you know?'

'They left it behind, Mr Gryce,' said Thelma mysteriously.

'"They". What do you mean, left it behind?'

'That's what the commissionaires said, Mr Gryce. They said it should have gone with the rest of the stuff and they weren't going to have it stuck in the entrance hall where everyone could see it. So they fetched it down here.'

'Meaning the commissionaires?'

'Yes, Mr Gryce.'

Yesterday morning, that must have been, before anyone except Thelma — the only one who had had sight of the blessed filing cabinet when it had been incongruously dumped among the potted plants in the entrance hall — had arrived at the office. An irrelevant image of three one-armed commissionaires manhandling a hefty metal filing cabinet flitted into Gryce's mind. They must have found a porter's trolley or barrow somewhere.

However, that was by no means the point at issue. Left behind? Should have gone with the rest of the stuff? Gone where?

'You seem privy to a good deal of information denied the rest of the staff, Thelma.'

'Pardon?'

'I'm asking how you know all this.'

'Oh, I see. I heard one of the commissionaires talking to my uncle.'

'Your uncle being—?'

'He's one of the commissionaires.'

Gryce regarded Thelma's moonlike face. He could never decide whether it was a study in imbecility or whether blank expression concealed depths of intelligence or, what was probably nearer the mark, native cunning.

'One assumes, then, that your uncle was not among the commissionaires who denied you access to the Albion Players yesterday evening?'

'Pardon? No, Mr Gryce, he's in charge of the Files Depository.'

'Which is how you come to be prowling around here, instead of buying sweets in Leather Lane market as you were asked?'

'I was going to go in a minute, Mr Gryce.'

'I'm sure you were. Do you often come down here, Thelma?'

'Sometimes, if my uncle lets me. Depends if he's in a good mood.'

'Under what pretext?'

'Pardon?'

'The Files Depository is supposedly out of bounds except for authorized personnel. What possible excuse can you offer for being down here?'

Thelma shrugged her podgy shoulders and giggled. 'I just tell him I'm bored with nothing to do upstairs, so he lets me have a look round. See with me being just a school-leaver, nobody cares. They think I'm too young.'

'That suggests you've been having "a look round" as you put it in other departments?'

'Some of them.'

'Yes,' said Gryce, putting sternness into his voice — mock-sternness, he hoped it came out as, he didn't want to be hard on the girl but she really was going to get herself into trouble one of these days, for instance if he took it into his head to make a sudden pass at her there was nothing she could do to prevent it. 'You had a good "look round" at the Albion Players' meeting last night, didn't you? Hm? You do realize you were nearly caught?'

Thelma shuffled her feet. Coming from anybody else, it would have been called stamping.

'Just wanted to know what was going on, Mr Gryce.'

'Did you, indeed? And what is "going on", in your considered opinion?'

'Don't know, Mr Gryce.'

Thelma giggled again, nervously this time, and then composed her features into an exaggeratedly sober expression. Looking this way and that through the petrified forest of abandoned furniture, to ensure they were not overheard, she added melodramatically: 'My dad says it's germ warfare.'

'Your dad,' said Gryce, 'is mistaken.' ('A fool', he'd nearly said there.) 'Now my advice to you, Thelma, is to get yourself off to Leather Lane at once, and don't concern yourself with what doesn't concern you.'

'Pardon? Yes, Mr Gryce.'

Waiting for the lift under the steely eye of Thelma's uncle, Gryce peered closely at his watch as if it were transmitting a lengthy telex message. It was well into the Stationery Supplies department's staggered lunch hour. He would go straight up to the Buttery, hoping that Pam would be keeping a place for him.

On last night's form, she should have eyes for nobody else at lunch-time. While the hoped-for snogging session in the dark alley next to the St Jude's Institute had not materialized, owing mainly to Gryce's having no idea how to suggest it, they had had a quick drink at the Pressings wine bar, to the exclusion, it was to be noted, of Seeds. Hand-holding had taken place and they had talked easily of making another assignation when time was less of the essence. Gryce had staggered home at ten with a cooked-up story about office stocktaking at the ready. Fortunately he had found his supper in the oven and his wife out at the pictures with a friend; how often he had seen that situation in newspaper cartoons, and now here it was in real life! That left him with the stocktaking excuse unused; he was thinking in terms of an early dinner in Soho.

But Pam was not in the Buttery. Nor was anyone else from Stationery Supplies. Standing with his plate of cold roast beef and ample portion of coleslaw, he had become quite a fan of the Salad Bowl, it really was good value, he recognized no one at all, save an unmistakable face from Catering (Administration).

The man who resembled Jack Lemmon was lunching alone, with a paperback novel propped up against the sugar bowl. He was wolfing his ham and egg pie as if his life depended on his getting through every last morsel by a certain time. Probably it did: noses were kept very much to the grindstone in his particular neck of the woods. He barely glanced up when asked whether he minded if Gryce joined him.

Gryce considered himself to have been well-briefed by Pam. 'Just work round to the Albion Players casually,' she had said. 'Quite a few people have a pretty shrewd idea what we're trying to do, so if they're at all interested, you can safely leave it to them to make the running once you've given them an opening.' More importantly she had added: 'Ron Seeds dearly wants to see what's in the Catering Admin files, that's why he was so taken with your safe-breaking capabilities! I think we're more likely to get whatever there is to be got straight from the horse's mouth.' Gryce heartily concurred.

By way of introducing himself he asked the Jack Lemmon-looking person if he would mind if Gryce had the salt.

'We have met, by the by. I was the wretch who disturbed you at your labours while trying to unload some bumph on C10. In the event it turned out I wanted C12.'

Jack Lemmon grunted without looking up and turned a page. Then, as he must have judged his minimal response over-churlish even by his own standards, he supplemented the grunt with: 'Get any joy?'

'Not really. In fact, truth to tell, I got very short shrift indeed from presumably your head of department. Fellow in a chef's hat.'

'Hatch,' said Jack Lemmon succinctly.

'Yes, he did peer balefully out of a hatch. Somewhat reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show.'

'Hatch is his name! Clifford Hatch!' Although Jack Lemmon spoke with withering scorn, the clearing-up of this little misunderstanding well and truly broke the ice. He closed his paperback, a copy of The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw. This left the way open for Gryce to ask if he liked Irwin Shaw. Other authors could then be tossed into the conversation, and after that dramatists — Agatha Christie, Harold Pinter, Oscar Wilde. It would then be but a short step to mentioning the Albion Players.

'If you're going to ask me to join that knockabout minstrel troupe,' said Jack Lemmon before Gryce had a chance to put this process into effect, 'don't.'

Gryce could only describe himself as taken aback. He confessed as much to Jack Lemmon, saying that he must be a mind-reader.

'I was assuming that was what it was all about,' said the other modestly, unbending somewhat in the light of his small triumph. 'You're the third one today.'