Keith Waterhouse - Office Life

'What I am telling you, if you will allow me to continue,' said Lucas with great courtesy, 'is that your executive committee is the management.'

It was a pity, thought Gryce as Vaart passed a remark that he simply couldn't hear in all the surrounding racket, that Grant-Peignton was not wearing his frock. They would have got on much faster.

Order, not without some difficulty, had been restored, Lucas of Personnel taking advantage of the stunned silence that followed to cover a good deal of ground.

The history of the Albion Players was briefly related. The executive committee had started life as a clandestine management committee, charged with keeping up morale, deflecting awkward questions and pacifying awkward customers, and ensuring that the system ran flawlessly. (This would mean, if Gryce had got hold of the right end of the stick, that Pam, Ardagh and Grant-Peignton were all in fact senior to Copeland, no wonder he'd become sick to the back teeth if he'd known what the score was.) At the appropriate time they had brought the Albion Players or British Albion Investigation Committee into being, with the sole purpose of providing a channel where rumours and conjectures could be disposed of, mainly by creating counter-rumours and counter-conjectures. Such notions as that the company was secretly processing ration books or identity cards, or that it was an undercover headquarters for some future coup, had all been cleverly insinuated into the minds of the membership by Mrs Pamela Fawce, who was by way of being the company's senior manager. Lucas regretted that Mrs Fawce was not yet present, his conjecture being that she was in consultation with her masters.

There had been one more impassioned interruption, surprisingly enough from Seeds. White-faced, he had stalked down the body of the hall to face Lucas.

'No, I will not be silent, Mr Ardagh! I think Mr Lucas should be made aware that I have been spending an average of fifteen hours a week on Albion Players business. Not only have I attended every single meeting but I have had many ex officio meetings with Mrs Fawce, usually in my own time. I have been responsible for the selection and screening of new members, again in my own time. I have travelled both to the outermost suburbs and as far afield as Rugby at my own expense, in company with Mrs Fawce who in passing allowed me to pay for her lunch, in order to report back on what could be ascertained about the subsidiary companies. Now you have the brass nerve to tell me that all this work, all this sacrifice of time and money, was to no purpose, and that Mrs Fawce was quite deliberately leading me up the garden!'

Gryce could well understand Seeds letting off steam in this way. It was what he had felt like doing himself upon learning that the scene with Copeland and the Penney twins over the missing furniture had been calculatedly staged to throw everyone off the scent.

'I'm afraid that's the case, Mr Seeds,' replied Lucas. 'Any out of pocket expenses will, in due course, be refunded.'

'You can stick them up your jacksey!' shouted Seeds uncharacteristically. He turned on his heel and marched back up the aisle. Gryce fully expected him to barge out of the hall, banging the swing doors behind him. Instead he resumed his accustomed position at the back, and after fuming for a moment took out a pocket diary and began scribbling in it furiously. He would, concluded Gryce, be working out his expenses.

'I'm afraid,' continued Lucas, 'that we owe an apology not only to Mr Seeds but to a great many of you, who have given of your time freely when you might profitably have been doing other things. All I can say in mitigation is that the charade was necessary. Incidentally, I owe Mr Seeds a further apology. If I was unnecessarily curt when he rang the telephone number of Binns Brothers of Rugby the other day and was put through to the "export manager", that was only because I feared he was beginning to recognize my voice. The object of monitoring calls to those moribund factories, let me assure you, was not to keep tabs on anyone present here tonight, but simply as a double-check that enquiries were not being pursued by any other person or persons. As you can imagine, we rather frown on individual endeavour!

'I was saying the charade was necessary. How long it could have continued I know not. Probably it was inevitable that sooner or later we should so to speak have had to bring down the curtain on the Albion Players. As you know, however, events have rather conspired to force our hand. Is Mr Gryce present?'

The question, or request to make himself known as he took it to be, caught Gryce on the hop. Confused and, he was very much afraid, blushing, he shambled to his feet, despite Vaart's curt advice: Tellimer piss off!' He was painfully yet pleasurably aware of a sea of faces turned in his direction.

'I must congratulate you, Mr Gryce, on some very astute detective work. As one of British Albion's new boys, let it never be said that you allowed the grass to grow beneath your feet!'

'Thank you indeed!' stammered Gryce, bobbing absurdly, and wondering why this handsome tribute was not taken as the cue for a round of applause. Vaart tugged at the hem of his jacket. 'Siddarn, silly sod!' Gryce did so reluctantly, feeling that his moment of glory had been an uncommonly muted one.

'The observant Mr Gryce, as your chairman has just informed you, has stumbled upon the existence of a company known as United Products. I don't know whether Mr Gryce's curiosity led him to set foot in United Products House, but in the event that he got past the commissionaires he would have found a more or less exact duplicate edition of Albion House. That having become common knowledge, it would be only a matter of time before you compared notes with your colleagues at United Products, as colleagues they indeed are, and began to make further discoveries. You would learn, almost certainly, of the existence of other organizations, all of them to a greater or lesser extent replicas of British Albion and United Products. How many of them there are I am not at liberty to divulge, but there are several more of them in London and they exist in all our great cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Each one, I may say, has its equivalent of the Albion Players, so if Mr Seeds feels he has been hoodwinked, he is not alone.

'You would also have learned, ladies and gentlemen, that the boards of directors of all the companies in this network are one and the same — and may I say at this juncture that there is nothing sinister or conspiratorial about your directors. They are public-spirited men with a strong sense of duty, responding, as they will always respond, to a call from Government to perform a service for their country. If, as our eagle-eyed friend Mr Gryce has observed, they meet in bizarre surroundings, that has less to do with considerations of secrecy than with the pragmatic fact of their having nowhere else to go, the architect having quite forgotten to include a boardroom in his final blueprint. That, of course, was the least of our construction problems!'

This oblique reference to the Buttery's notorious non-working revolving mechanism, and probably to other structural cock-ups that Gryce hadn't heard about, got Lucas his first ragged laugh of the evening. He certainly knew how to hold an audience. Or anyway, how to hold most of it: for the man who looked like George Formby was on his feet and asking a long rambling question that was inaudible to Gryce and, it would seem, to Lucas also.

'I'm sorry, Mr Aintree, I didn't catch all of that.'

'I was merely asking if the architectural shortcomings of the establishment are relevant, and whether you are being entirely frank about the board meetings not being secret, bearing in mind—'