Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

Introductions completed, Copeland suggested that they should all move into the office. They proceeded in single file, with Norman Ferrier explaining to Gryce the function of various machines en route, particularly a treadle contraption capable of turning out a thousand visiting cards an hour. Gryce, who had always craved a business card of his own in all the billets he had ever worked in, it was one of his few ambitions in life, found this of interest.

He was greeted effusively at the door of the office by Mrs Rashman, who cried, 'Hello stranger, bet you didn't expect to find us here!' and by Mr Hakim, who pumped his hand and chuckled: 'And I thought you were holding the fort while I was on holiday, if I had known you were going to sneak away like this I wouldn't have gone to the Algarve!' Everyone laughed again, a 'Tchair!' from Mrs Rashman and a 'Skork!' from Mr Hakim adding body to the chorus of amusement. There was another laugh, 'Parp!' that Gryce couldn't identify. He saw that a familiar-looking figure was doing some paperwork at a familiar-looking desk. The desk was familiar because it was the one he had sat at in his first week at British Albion, it was Vaart's desk with all its telltale marks and dents. The figure was familiar because he was the spitting image of the owner of the sweets and tobacco kiosk hard by Forest Hill Station where Gryce had bought many a Mars bar. 'And this is my fiancй, Mr Cooley from Stationery Stores,' said Mrs Rashman.

Rubbing his oil-smeared hands genially, so that he reminded Gryce less of Mervyn Johns and more of a Pickwickian coalman, Copeland said: 'No hope whatsoever of rustling up toffee, I suppose, Thelma?'

Or anyway, that was what Gryce thought he said, but Thelma took him to mean that there was no hope whatsoever of rustling up coffee.

'Pardon? Still haven't got any cups, Mr Copeland.' Without actually doing so she gave the impression of standing on one foot and twisting one ungainly leg around the other.

'Shoulda fetched er filin cabinet.' Vaart winked solemnly at Thelma to show he wasn't serious. 'Most importan fingada lot an we aster forgerrit.'

Gryce was having a good look around the partitioned-off area into which he had been led. Office, Copeland had called it, but it was really part office, part storeroom. The outer wall was fitted with broad wooden shelves stretching up as far as the high windows, and these were piled up with ream upon ream of paper of every size, boxes of business envelopes, blank postcards, gummed labels, newspaper wrappers, visiting cards enough to keep Norman Ferrier's treadle-operated press busy for a six-month. Where all that virgin stationery had come from Gryce did not care to guess, but he knew where the desks and chairs and filing cabinets had come from all right. It was as if British Albion's Stationery Supplies Department had been scooped up in a cyclone like the clapboard house of that girl played by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, and had come to rest in a corner of this Victorian printing works, complete to the last detail including coat-stand, wastepaper bins and indeed most of the staff.

'Just like home, dear, isn't it?' said Mrs Rashman.

'Shuddavad all new furnisher if we'd gonner ri way abaht it,' chuntered Vaart. 'They wouldena missed it. Stackser the stuff dahn in that Design an Mainenance Bay, there is.'

'We did consider all the pros and cons of that, Mr Vaart,' said Jervis, a shade testily Gryce thought, or perhaps that was just the officious way of speaking he had got into. As Fire and Safety Officer, he would have need of projecting a certain authority. 'If we'd been seen loading new furniture into the van it would have been a clear case of theft.'

'See, they cracked on they were taking all our desks and that back to the factory for renovation,' confided Mrs Rashman. 'Or I should say, they would have done, if they'd been stopped.'

Mr Hakim, smiling broadly, had produced an expensive crocodile-skin wallet, doubtless he had got it wholesale from a relative, and taken from it an official-looking paper which he handed to Gryce. 'As you can see, all our documentation was in order. Quite a souvenir, in years to come!'

It was in the style of the various forms and documents that Gryce had familiarized himself with in Stationery Supplies, complete with the British Albion trademark. 'Renovation/Repairs Requisitions — Authorization for Removal' it was headed. A typed inventory of all the office furniture was signed on the dotted line by Copeland and countersigned by an indecipherable scribble, probably bogus if anyone asked Gryce.

He ran his mind's eye over his master check-list which, come to think of it, would be in one of those filing cabinets not ten feet away from him. Eerie, when you looked at it in that light. 'But there's no such form, surely,' he pointed out.

'Our friend Mr Copeland ran it off on the treadle press I just showed you,' said Norman Ferrier urbanely. 'Not a bad job for an apprentice, wouldn't you agree?'

Copeland beamed at the compliment and said modestly that it would have looked more convincing if they'd been able to use the wash-pail.

'The Wharfedale,' translated Ferrier. 'We had the expertise, Mr Gryce. Most of your colleagues here have been taking printing courses of one kind or another at various night schools, plus a little private tuition from Mr Vaart and myself. But of course we didn't have the power.'

'Do you see, they'd cut off the electric, dear,' said Mrs Rashman. 'Well I mean to say, they would have done, wouldn't they? But the boys have managed to connect us up to the main cable. Apparently.'

'Or so we ope and trust,' said Vaart. 'They bin at it long enough.'

The Penney twins, whose bad breath was for once deodorized by the not unpleasant mixture of industrial smells thrown off by Copeland's ragged dungarees, chimed in.

'They could easily have connected us with the paint depot two doors away—'

'— but someone might have started asking why their electricity bill was going up in leaps and bounds—'

'— so they finally got us hooked up to the Electricity Generating Station on the river—'

'— who presumably don't have to pay for it. Haaark!'

Gryce, who was seething with indignation and had been so ever since Mr Hakim had shown him the bogus renovation requisition, felt that they were all straying far from the point. He turned to Copeland.

'Am I to understand that your memorandum from the Fire and Safety Officer was a put-up job, and that when you instructed me to locate the missing furniture and get it returned to the department, you were deliberately sending me on a wild-goose chase?'

'Very much afraid that's the case,' admitted Copeland. 'We had to cover our claques.'

'And all the while, what you were in effect doing between you was stealing this quantity of desks, filing cabinets and so on?'

'Let's say commandeered,' said Jervis.

'Eyejacked,' amended Vaart.

They were all looking very well pleased with themselves: a genial rogues' gallery, Gryce would have said. Plainly they were hugging themselves in anticipation of the question it was inevitable he should ask sooner or later.

'May one ask why?'

Norman Ferrier moved forward in the darting sort of way that seemed to be a characteristic, Gryce noticing that it was with some respect that the others stood aside to let him past. He led Gryce across to his desk, or rather to what was not his desk at all but rightly Copeland's desk: slightly larger than the others, junior executive type, catalogue number B4B/00621 as against the standard B4A/00621. It was very busily furnished with pots crammed full of pencils, filing trays piled high with papers, engraving blocks used as paperweights, plans, blueprints, specimen type-charts, and a book-trough tightly packed with a higgledy-piggledy assortment of bruised-looking volumes. Gryce saw some of the titles: The Authors' and Printers' Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, the Concise Oxford, Whitaker's Almanac, and several tattered Penguins, some of them looked like poetry. Quite the intellectual.