Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

Now he was back in the gate-lodge or despatch office or whatever one chose to call it in Grain Yard, with its linoleum-covered counter, its litter of old billheads and its nest of flattened cardboard. Squalid, it looked on renewed acquaintance. Sordid. The patch of tacky printer's ink was over here, by the inner door, not of course that it followed that the toffee-paper Gryce had found adhering to his foot had been in the same spot; once the ink was on his shoe he could have picked it up anywhere in the room. But the inner door was worth a closer examination than he had given it yesterday.

The door knob, as he had surmised, was shiny from recent use. With the outside door you couldn't tell one way or the other, it had a corroded iron handle that gave nothing away. But this one was brass, and gleaming where it should have been thick with dust. Pam, of course, had rattled it, but she hadn't got dust on her hand or she would have said something about it, she was fastidious about things like that if not about where she engaged in extra-marital relations. This room was frequently used as a passage to the printing works, was Gryce's guess, it would be less conspicuous than unchaining the gates. He tried the door knob as Pam had done, and this time the door opened.

Gryce found himself out in the worn brick-paved yard with an uninterrupted view of the printing works a few yards away, a soot-grimed old nonconformist chapel of a place with high arched windows. Those windows hadn't been in view when he and Pam had caught their glimpse of the building from outside the gates, so it was only now that he saw they were not shuttered and boarded-up as he'd expected, not one of them. He wouldn't swear it was new glass in all those windows, but it was certainly glass that had had a good clean.

Staring up at the roof, he didn't know what he hoped to see up there but he did note that some of the slates had been replaced, he heard a noise like one of the drayhorses that must have clattered over this brick-paved yard many a time. Gryce lowered his gaze to the church-porch-like entrance of the printing works. Thelma was loping towards him, a sly, silly grin on her face.

'Mr Copeland says would you like to come in for a minute, Mr Gryce.'

Before passing through the doorway and finding not a gutted factory but what looked like a fully-operational printing shop Gryce lowered his gaze to the church-porch-like entrance and said that Thelma was the last person he expected to find in the vicinity of Grain Yard. This assessment was quickly revised when he saw the Penney twins waving inanely from a gantry overlooking a sturdy Wharfedale press, its name embossed on an iron plaque such as Gryce had seen on the cabs of steam locomotives, that dominated all the bits and pieces of machinery surrounding it. The fact that the Penney twins were wearing identical workmen's dungarees made them look more like Tweedledum and Tweedledee than ever.

Three other men, all wearing brown dust-coats, were sorting out cases of type arranged in sloping cabinets like the newspaper racks in a public reading room. Two of them Gryce didn't recognize but the third, who looked far more at home in the garb of a warehouseman or shopfloor overseer than in his usual business suit, was Vaart. He too waved and called out a word of greeting that Gryce didn't quite catch — probably 'Wotcher, cock' if he knew his Vaart.

Moving a little further into the iron-girdered hall — Thelma, still simpering idiotically, seemed to be trying to edge him towards the big Wharfedale printing press — Gryce saw that there were yet another three men present, although only their heads were visible by reason of their being in a deep trench where they seemed to be laying or repairing electric cables. This work, while being expertly carried out by the look of it, was a three-handed operation rather than a six-handed one: for as Gryce looked down into the trench from the narrow plank traversing it, he saw that each stooping toiler sported an empty shirtsleeve tucked into braided trousers. Neatly folded on the clay and rubble of the excavations were three uniform jackets, surmounted by three peaked hats.

Nor had he yet been waved to, or nodded at, or in the case of the three one-armed commissionaires ignored by, the Albion Printeries' full complement. Beyond a bank of what at a guess were Linotype machines, like old-fashioned dentists' chairs with all sorts of inky-looking devices attached, was a glass-partitioned area, presumably the works office. Moving about in it, they seemed to be assembling stacks of blank paper on shelves, could be observed the figures of Mrs Rashman and Mr Hakim. The sight of them was comparatively unsurprising to Gryce: if he had found someone to take his bet that he had seen them crossing London Bridge the other day, he could have been the better off by a large sum of money.

Copeland was not yet visible. Gryce was not sure what he would have to say to him when he did become visible. He hadn't expected to find all these people, he hadn't even expected to find Copeland himself — only evidence more substantial than a folded toffee wrapper, perhaps, that he had been here. Gryce's private theory, which he had not voiced even to Pam, had been that the old printing works was being used as a store for large quantities of secret documents, perhaps the millions of identity cards mooted in the minutes of the Albion Players the other night. If that were the case, it would make sense for the head of Stationery Supplies to be in charge of it. But it patently wasn't so. Although a majority of those present were from Stationery Supplies, they didn't look in the least secretive. What they did look was as if they were thoroughly enjoying themselves, like children turned loose on an enormous John Bull printing outfit. Gryce could see neither rhyme nor reason in it.

'It's Mr Gryce,' announced Thelma, addressing a pair of scuffed shoes that protruded from under the printing press. The owner of them was lying face upwards on a low-slung trolley affair, of the kind used by mechanics when inspecting the undersides of motor vehicles. Propelling himself into view with oil-stained palms, he revealed a pair of filthy, tattered dungarees and a countenance so smudged with ink and grease as to be unrecognizable to Gryce.

'Ah, Mr Christ. I'd better not shake hams, but allow me to bid you welcome to the Albumen Penises. Now let me see, I believe you know most of us…?'

As Copeland rose to his feet, wiping his hands on what looked to Gryce like an old vest, the Penney twins descended from their gantry and Vaart and the other two men in the brown dust-coats drew nearer, forming a semi-circle around their visitor, or unwelcome intruder, depending in which light they saw Gryce's arrival. Copeland, it had to be said, seemed friendly enough.

'I don't think you've met Norwich Terrier. Mr Terrier, Mr Christ.'

'How do you do?' Norwich Terrier, now known to be Norman Ferrier, and supposedly convalescing in the West Country after a heart attack or dicky ticker as Vaart had termed a condition clearly as fictitious as Copeland's Asian flu, gravely shook hands. He was what Gryce would have called a studious-looking man, stoop-shouldered, with some resemblance to the middle-aged Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr Chips. A type more likely to be found behind the counter of a secondhand bookshop than in an office, not that he had set foot in the office for the last eighteen months, by all accounts.

'And Normal Service, our Five and Seventy Austria.'

'Ah, Mr Service, not in Cumbria after all!' Gryce couldn't help saying as their hands met.

'Norman Jervis, in fact,' said the Fire and Safety Officer. A commissionaireish sort of individual, he struck Gryce as, but of a senior rank and with all limbs intact. 'As you say, not in Cumbria after all! Fiff!' His laugh was so infectious that Gryce found himself sharing the general mirth. 'Keeesh!' Tuh!' 'Haark!' 'Sha!'