Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

'I don't know. I can only guess what might have happened to Thelma. The last person who stumbled on anything of any magnitude about British Albion was a rather simple office boy from In-house Mail. He stole some letters: one of them was a secret memorandum from a certain Government department, let's say it came into my possession. The boy was arrested, charged, found unfit to plead and shoved into an institution where he remains. For myself, I staged a diplomatic heart attack and vanished. If that sounds melodramatic, Mr Gryce, let me assure you they'll go to extraordinary lengths to cover their tracks.'

'Then, if I may say so, aren't you taking a tremendous risk in being here?' asked Gryce. After what he had heard, he certainly felt at risk himself, for all that Thelma, still grinning gormlessly, seemed to have no appreciation of the danger she had led them both into.

'I don't think we are. Look at it from their point of view. We're not the ones who are trying to upset their applecart, it's your interfering Albion Players who are doing that. We have our own fish to fry.'

'So ere we are, then,' repeated Vaart. It seemed to be his catchphrase of the moment.

Gryce surveyed his colleagues, or former colleagues as he supposed they had now become through their actions. He couldn't help but admire their nerve. What they were doing was certainly criminal but they were as jolly and carefree as a seaside concert party. He was reminded of that film, The Lavender Hill Mob. Ferrier, he now saw, could easily be played by Sir Alec Guinness who was a master of disguise.

'The fact remains that you have simply walked into a printing factory that doesn't belong to you and appropriated it for yourselves.'

'Why not?' said Ferrier. 'It was here to be taken. The plant was here, it needed renovation but we've managed that over the months. We've repaired the roof, we've got our electricity although I'm not going to enquire too closely how, and we've acquired enough stocks of paper to last us a year. We're in business, as you can see.'

What Gryce could certainly see was that the stocks of paper referred to were very large indeed. They couldn't possibly have been left behind with the printing plant, there were no signs of damp or anything of that kind, it was brand new paper, it must have cost a fortune.

He saw that the Penney twins were grinning bashfully and looking slyly towards Copeland. If they were trying to will him to speak out on their behalf, they succeeded.

'The Brothers Penney,' said Copeland paternally, 'will enlighten you as to how we came by our socks of paper, if you're at all furious.'

Thus prompted, the Penney twins commenced the chortling narrative with which they clearly hoped to impress Gryce no end. Stitching their fragmented sentences together he was able to gather that the famous calling-in process — of which he had now been put in charge so some of the blame would as likely as not rub off on him if any of this got out — was the key to it all. They had worked in league with Vaart who was in charge of maintaining the levels of stationery stocks, and with Mrs Rash man's fiancé Mr Cooley, of Stationery Stores. The calling-in process was, it seemed, the Penney twins' own ingenious invention, its sole purpose being to stock up the Albion Printeries with paper.

First, through Vaart, they had requisitioned enormous quantities of blank stationery of every kind and distributed them among selected departments, making sure they had genuine signatures for each consignment in case anyone checked up. Then, claiming that the various paper and envelope sizes had been declared obsolescent, they had set the calling-in process in motion and got all the stationery back again, together with various printed forms that were no use to anybody — that, Gryce learned, was merely a smokescreen to hide their real purpose. Hundreds of parcels of quarto, foolscap, envelopes of all sizes, invoice blanks, display cards and crown paper sheets (put through the books as planning materials for Design and Maintenance) had been returned to Stationery Stores, where Mr Cooley had promptly put them into a plain van and shipped them across to the Albion Printeries. If anyone wanted to know where the stuff had got to, his records would show that it had been mistakenly codemarked as classified material and fed into the shredding machine.

' Rather neat,' concluded Charles Penney.

'— though we say it as shouldn't,' added Hugh Penney.

'Foolproof,' said Charles Penney, determined to have the last word.

'The ole fing's foolproof, carn find a flaw nowhere,' said Vaart.

Gryce was not so sure, his natural caution would not permit him to be sure. He could see that they were all waiting for him to say something, what they obviously wanted was a word of congratulation. They were not going to get it. There must be a snag somewhere, whatever Vaart said.

Gryce thought long and hard, then an involuntary smile crept across his face, he hoped he didn't look too malevolent.

'What about,' he asked triumphantly, ' the rates?'

'Haaark!' 'Fiff!' 'Keeesh!' 'Tuh!' 'Tchair!' 'Skork!' 'Parp!' He'd put his foot in it. He'd said the wrong thing. They were laughing at him.

'Really, Mr Gryce!' exclaimed Ferrier patronizingly. (Better than what the others were saying, anyway. 'We weren't born yesterday, you know' and 'Sod me, is that all yew can bleedin say?' were among the medley of comments when the laughter had died down.) 'The rates, I can assure you, are taken care of. I made discreet enquiries at the town hall. They're paid once a quarter by the Paymaster General's office in Crawley. The rates demand was obviously fed into the computer when British Albion absorbed us and it's never been taken out again. Nor can it be until someone gives the order, which of course they won't.'

'Any more objections, Mister Gryce?' asked Mr Hakim in what Gryce thought was an unwarrantably sneering voice, considering that he was only a guest in this country.

'None at all,' said Gryce stiffly. 'I wish you all luck.'

'We shall need something more practical than luck,' said Ferrier. 'We need help. We're very few in number, although there are more of us than you see here today. There are twenty-four of us altogether, the others are waiting for the appropriate moment to slip away from British Albion, it wouldn't do to make a mass exit. But there's not enough of us. The Clarion Press is going to be very busy and we shall be on the lookout for willing labour right from the start.'

Gryce, with his usual attention to irrelevant detail, missed the main burden of Ferrier's remarks. 'The Clarion Press?'

From among the mass of papers on his desk Ferrier extracted several white sheets with a printed heading in good clean type. It was, Gryce conceded, a very good example of letterhead design, bold without being brash, uncluttered without being ultra-modernistic. It was only a layman's view but he would say that Ferrier knew his onions when it came to typography.

'Some of us thought it had unfortunate Fabian overtones but we had to call it something. The new signboard goes up in Grain Yard tomorrow and the last evidence that the Albion Printeries ever existed will have gone. If anyone is curious about us we are journeymen apothecaries, come to set up our stall. This area is about to thrive again, Mr Gryce, they'll need printing. Did you look about you when you came here today? You probably wouldn't have noticed but something is stirring. There are little workshops appearing in ramshackle buildings that have been closed down for years, one-man businesses taking their chance with short-term leases. It's like watching people creeping up from the deep shelters after all the bombs have fallen. The odds are still stacked against them but they want to have one last try, even though all the powers in the land conspire against them. "And nobody perceived how interesting it was, this interchange of activities, this ebb and flow of money, this sluggish rise and fall of reputations and fortunes." There are reputations and fortunes to be made in and about Grain Yard, Mr Gryce. Very small reputations and tiny fortunes, but we're going to help to make them and we intend to make our own. The question is, will you join us?'