Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

'Oh? Really?' Gryce was keenly interested. 'Who were the other two, if it's not a rude question?'

'What's-her-name for one. Works in your department.

'Pam Fawce.' Oh, charming. Ask someone to do a job for you and then do it yourself.

'That's her. She was sitting where you're sitting now, not five minutes ago.' Charming.

'Who was the other one?'

'Don't know his name, he grabbed me in the lift coming in this morning.'

'Did he look like Jeremy Thorpe, would you say? Passing resemblance?'

'I wouldn't say that. Tell you the truth, he looked a bit like you. Talks like you as well, you could be brothers.'

Seeds! Attempting to steal Gryce's thunder and ingratiate himself with Pam (with whom, by the way, a sharp word must be had). Well, they would see about that.

It would be rather a coup if Gryce could succeed where the other two had failed.

'Of course, when you say knockabout minstrel troupe, you're probably taking the Albion Players at their face value. Does it occur to you to wonder why three people in the space of a morning should canvass you to join?'

'It's obvious.' Jack Lemmon pushed aside his empty plate and reached for his dish of pear Melba, Gryce must try that one of these days, it looked very tempting. 'You want to know what's going on in Catering Admin.'

So much for Pam's 'Quite a few people have a pretty shrewd idea what we're trying to do.' The understatement of the year, that was. It was clearly all round the office exactly what the Albion Players were up to, they might as well print it on posters and pin them up on all the bulletin boards.

'There is,' admitted Gryce with pointless caution, 'a certain amount of curiosity in some quarters.'

'Yes, well you know what curiosity did, don't you?' ('Killed the cat,' Gryce replied to himself automatically.) 'If you lot want to get yourself fired, that's up to you, but leave me out of it. Because you are, you know, you're all going to finish up out on your ears.'

Privately, that was Gryce's opinion too. In all honesty, he couldn't argue against such a case.

Jack Lemmon had finished his pudding course with incredible speed and was picking up his paperback novel even as he dabbed strawberry syrup from his mouth with a serviette. 'And if anyone wants to know what we're doing up there, I can tell them what I'm doing, I'm doing my job. Listen, friend, I was out of work for eight months before I came to this place. I do my job, I work eight hours a day, I keep my head down, I draw my salary once a month and I don't ask questions. All right?'

These sentiments too were so close to what Gryce's would have been if left to himself that he could think of nothing to say. He had expected Jack Lemmon to rise and stalk off to the escalator, en route for an afternoon's grind in Catering (Administration). Instead, the man sat clutching his book and glowering. Perhaps he had another two minutes or so to kill before his lunch hour expired.

In the event it was Gryce who rose to leave first. A sensation of the floor vibrating told him that a person known to him had approached. True enough, Thelma was standing by his table. 'Excuse me, Mr Gryce, could I have a word with you, only I think it's important?'

Thelma, he didn't know what she thought she was playing at, she merely grinned inanely when he asked her questions, led him down the Buttery's stainless steel escalator to the first floor. 'It's through here, Mr Gryce.'

They were at the point where you either had to go down the stairs to the ground floor or up them to the second. Thelma seemed to want to get him into the foyer. If she had a journey by lift in mind, he could tell her for nothing that the lifts did not function at this level.

Gryce followed her nonetheless, obediently. The first floor was new territory to him, his much discussed exploration of the premises having been mandatorily curtailed at the second. He noticed at once that there was something different about this floor, although he couldn't place what it was. The familiar glass doors led into the familiar open-plan offices — Auditing, Invoice Clearance and Data Processing according to the directory sign, though all concerned with these activities seemed to be at lunch — and, opposite, there were the three familiar sets of flush sliding doors of the lifts.

Each of the lifts had in front of it a little wooden barricade, like a novice-event showjumping fence, as a reminder that since the fuel crisis of whenever it was the lifts were no longer programmed to stop at the first floor. This was not the detail, however, that had glanced obliquely into Gryce's mind. He now saw what it was. There were not three lifts, there were four of them.

That didn't make any sense at all. British Albion was served by three lifts, it was a known fact. Yet here, sandwiched between them and the stairs, was an extra one. How could it possibly go anywhere, either up or down?

Like the other three conventional or established lifts, it had its individual call-button, to which Thelma applied her thumb. Even as Gryce opened his mouth to say, 'It's not the slightest use pressing that, Thelma, the lifts don't operate on the first floor and I beg leave to doubt if this particular specimen is a lift at all,' the doors slid open to reveal that this would not have been a correct appraisal.

Thelma had pulled aside the wooden barricade affair and stepped into the lift. Bearing in mind the discussion he had recently had about curiosity killing cats, Gryce now had to decide whether to follow her.

'It's all right, Mr Gryce, it only goes up one floor,' urged Thelma, as if she thought she was being reassuring. Gryce, he supposed he didn't want to lose face by appearing timid, joined her without enthusiasm.

Thelma was right, it only went up one floor, and an uncommonly long time it took about it too. More like a goods hoist than a lift. Gryce had plenty of time to notice another unusual feature: it had two sets of doors instead of one, the second lot being at right angles to the ones through which he had just reluctantly entered. He had seen lifts like this in old-fashioned department stores, where on one floor you stepped out in one particular direction and on the next floor in another.

It was this other pair of doors that slid open as the lift shuddered to a stop. Stretching before them was a narrow corridor, running parallel with the outer wall of the building in the direction of the extension housing the Buttery.

From the red-printed notices on the concrete-slab walls — 'Safety helmets to be worn', 'No naked lights' and the like, not to mention a framed copy of The Factories Act, Gryce judged that they were in a service area. This was the second floor and they were going towards the Buttery, although that was on the third. Gryce remembered what Seeds had told him about the notorious revolving mechanism by which the Buttery was supposed to turn full circle to catch the sun, although it had never done any such thing. That slab of useless machinery would be housed beneath the floor of the Buttery and it was obviously towards it that he and Thelma were heading.

So it proved. The corridor culminated in a thick steel fire-door, through which Thelma noisily led the way. Gryce did wish her parents had taught her the gentle art of walking; if anyone heard her clattering footsteps there would be a great deal of explaining to do.

Thelma, I hope you haven't dragged me all the way along here simply to—'

It was not at all like what Gryce had been expecting. Quite what he had been expecting he couldn't say: something, he supposed, on the lines of those cut-away diagrams of the clock-tower of Big Ben or the boiler-room of the Queen Mary that he remembered from the educational periodicals of his boyhood. He had half-imagined a circular structure, obviously it would be the same shape and dimensions as the Buttery, with an enormous cog-wheel thing that would be the actual revolving mechanism, plus all sorts of cranks, pistons and so on to make it go round, or not go round.