Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher
the light failed and the warm blue evening surrounded them.
It was as simple as that.
(i.m. M.W.)
The air was plump, cold, full of anticipation. Something would fall from it. He was walking along the famous street with a briefcase that was not new; it was empty. To the left and to the right, ministries stood like serious cliffs. Whitehall. At this moment, the people he had worked with all summer and autumn and half the winter, they were sitting down in their office chairs and asking each other whether they wanted anything from downstairs. Their lives were going on, unambitiously, teaching English as a foreign language. Today was the day he started work in the public service, at the centre of the public service, in a building just off Whitehall.
George had a pass to the building – his building, he must start to think. It was in his pocket. He felt it now, as he walked. He knew exactly where he was to go, on this first morning. Mr Castry – Bill, he was supposed to call him – had taken him round and introduced him to people the Thursday before. He had not remembered very much, but Bill had made sure that he knew exactly where to go the following Wednesday. Everything else can come after that, he had said. George had got up at the weekend and walked all the way from the flat in Bloomsbury he was sharing with the Brazilian girl and the American girl. It was a rehearsal of his first day. The streets had been empty at half past eight on a Sunday morning, apart from some tourists and people who might have been hurrying to a Sunday service, here and there. George had walked down to Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, to the outside of the building where he was going to work. He wanted to make sure that it was still there, where he remembered it was. Nobody was there to see him, and he had walked away quickly, not pausing, his trainers making no sound on the pavement. He might have been walking past purely by chance.
The office where he had worked for the last eight months was a cheerful and undemanding place. A temporary place. It accepted applications from overseas students to study the English language, and it assigned them to the appropriate class. Julie was in charge. She had been there for donkey’s years, she said. Her husband was something in business. Something to do with bacon or coffee, but he was in the City; he never saw any bacon or coffee unless it was in the snackbar by the tube. For most of his day, bacon and coffee were just figures on a screen, Julie explained. Great mountains of notional bacon and coffee. She didn’t know how he could stand it, all day long. There was a sense of fun in the office. They had opened the letters, had filled in the forms that were needed and, twice a week, had gone to the communal meeting room where the biggest empty table was, and arranged the applications from the past few days in order of classes. Probably Julie could have done this on her own, but she liked to get everyone involved. Sometimes a student came to demand his money back or to complain, because he had not succeeded in learning enough English. Those, too, were occasions of fun, once the complaining student had been refused and pacified and sent on his way. Julie had a way of rolling her eyes and holding her hands up to heaven that everyone copied. That office had been only until Christmas, and George had understood that from the start. The office he was going into would be for his entire life, from today onwards. He curbed his spirit of fun. The door to his building was open.
‘Good morning,’ he said to the man in uniform sitting behind the desk. A walk-in cupboard behind him was piled high with documents, tagged and ordered. George pulled out his plastic pass from his pocket and showed it carefully, the right side up so that the guard could inspect it.
The guard looked at it briefly, then at George, more curiously. ‘Morning,’ he said. Of course George should have been more casual about it. He felt like a criminal who, gaining access to a guarded building, had made himself stand out in some way. ‘Starting to snow,’ the guard said. His tone was not friendly, but it made George feel that he was accepted, grudgingly, within the building; it explained, too, something about the day that he had not understood. The metallic sensation of weight and chill obscurity in the air was not, as it had seemed, official London welcoming George to his new life. It was what had happened many times before without reference to the lives of any men or women: it was the sensation of snow about to happen. But George did not have to answer: a woman came out from the cupboard.
‘Is it now,’ she said, only glancing at George.
‘It won’t settle,’ the guard said. George was pleased he had not misunderstood and tried to start a conversation. The office he was to work in was on the third floor. There was no need to ask anyone’s advice about how to get there. One day, quite soon, he would know the names of both these people, and greet them with kindly deference.
He took the lift, and in a moment there he was in the corridor where the committee’s offices were. There were four doors, and there were labels on three of them, giving people’s names or their job titles. The fourth stood slightly open, a strip-light on. From inside he could hear a woman’s voice, slightly muttering, and the sound of heavy documents being moved from one pile to another.
Before he could knock, the noise halted, and the door was opened wide. A woman with white hair in a bob, a sharp nose and bulbous eyes was there; she was wearing a coat and a scarf, and underneath a skirt in a large floral pattern, which seemed to be too long for her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, I say.’ Her voice was light and metallic, grating. She was assessing him, not in an unfriendly way but without a welcoming smile. ‘I know who you are. You’re our baby Clerk, aren’t you? It’s George, isn’t it? I was saying to Pam, only this morning – trust the powers that be to send us a baby Clerk to nanny through, just when all this is kicking off. Patrick’s not going to be one bit pleased. He’ll be tearing his hair out.’
There was a sharp ring from inside the office. The woman turned and went inside, picking up the telephone. ‘Energy Committee, Andrea speaking – oh, hello!’ Her voice went from stern to girlish; she giggled. ‘No, Patrick, don’t you be – I’ll tell you something, there’s a lovely surprise for you when you get in, a lovely surprise waiting, your favourite thing … Oh. Who told you? … Well, no one tells me anything … Oh, about the usual, I would say. I expect you’re phoning to say you’re late in, as ever. Well, let me tell you …’
George walked away, feeling he should not listen to this flirtatious conversation. The walls were hung with mezzotints; eighteenth-century politicians and bishops on the shiny magnolia walls. Another door stood open to an empty office: its windows were hung with dirty grey net curtains, too long for the space and falling to a pile on the windowsill.
‘That was Patrick,’ the woman said, coming out of the office with a dark blue document clutched to her bosom. ‘What are you doing down there? Come back and sit down with your aunty Andrea. She’ll tell you what’s what. You’ll never guess. Patrick’s calling from the phone box at the top of Whitehall. He says— Well, did you hear that bang?’
‘No,’ George said. ‘What bang was that?’
‘That bang!’ Andrea said. ‘Half an hour ago, that bang. I wondered what it was so I went down and asked the front desk, they didn’t know any more than I did. What bang, he says. It made me jump, I can tell you.’
There was a pause. Andrea was inspecting him in close detail, standing with her legs apart.
‘Well, we can’t have you standing in the corridor all day,’ she said. ‘I expect I’d better show you where your office is, and you can make yourself at home. It’ll be funny not having Mike in there. Ah, well.’ She sighed theatrically. ‘Now, these are my keys. I’ve got a set for everyone’s office. Don’t waste your time asking me if you can borrow them when you forget yours – ooh, Andrea, pretty please, it’ll only be this once, I’ve never forgotten them before. I’ve got a good reply to that sort of thing. No. Way. Sunshine. Because there’s no way I let them, my keys, I mean, out of my possession. So you’ve just got to hang on to yours. Welsh, are you?’
George’s office was quite bare: there was a desk facing the door, an empty bookcase, and nothing more but a desk tidy, and a pair of