The mall was cunning preparation for the lobby of the office block. It cooled and shrank pedestrians. It echoed with the click of heels, and the heavy doors of taxi cabs, and sighing ventilation ducts. The shiny brick-veneers, the mirrored colonnades, the fish-trap cloisters leading to the finance palaces and the trading brokerages which were the tenants there, did not invite ill-discipline or dawdling. The mall’s misanthropy struck Rook and Anna dumb, just as the deep, cool shade of conifers will silence those who exit from a field. They did not speak. They even blushed a little, as if they guessed their weekend intimacy could not be hidden here. Their entry to Big Vic was self-conscious, too, Anna’s face a little too composed and Rook’s — unanswered — greetings to the lobby staff, the uniformed commissionaires, too hearty for the time of day. They shared — a shade too clumsily — a segment of Big Vic’s rotating doors. They shared the lift for twenty-seven floors. But once they reached the office lobby they headed for their desks as if the only love they shared was love of work.
Rook was in the best of moods, and with good cause. He was relieved to find his desk was, for the moment, clear. Normally by that time on a Monday, Victor would have sent his Fix It list — a sheaf of notes, queries and instructions, recriminations. Victor himself did not like to deal with people on the telephone, or even speak to clients face to face. What was to blame for that? His hibernating temperament? His hearing aid? His shield of wealth? He read reports. He scanned accounts. He watched the share and stock prices dance banking quicksteps round their decimals on the office VDUs. If there was anything to be done, then Rook could do it. He had younger legs and ears. But on that Monday, there were no tasks for him, no estate manager to intimidate by telephone (‘We note that field beans are a trifle mean this year. And late’), no groundless tension to diffuse amongst the market traders, no thin letter of regret, refusal, to be composed and sent, no group executive meetings to be called and chaired while Victor claimed some old man’s malady as pretext for staying in his room or on the roof.
Such liberty! It suited Rook. He had his own plans for the day and these involved a little horseplay at the office desk. He was used to having sex with Anna on his bed. A day or two of anything is time enough for it to seem routine. It had been fun — exhilarating fun — but not adventurous. His sexual needs were escalating. Making love to her at work was what engrossed him now. Big Vic’s solemnity was more a stimulation than a restraint. The need for stealth and speed and stiflement would blunt the appetite, you think? Think twice. Lovemaking is at its best when it transgresses social ordinances and strays far from the trodden path into the briars of the undergrowth, where risk and lust run neck and neck.
Rook wanted something more subversive than bed-steading. He wanted intercourse with Anna in the place where he had sat for months and contemplated her. He wanted office sex, with all the office work continuing, and all the VDUs alight, and these two colleagues, ankled by their underclothes, and pressed together like a pair of angler’s worms. No one would think it odd if, later in the day, he called Anna to his room for consultations. She’d come, an innocent. He wasn’t sure that she would share his eagerness — but from the appetite she’d shown for making bed-top love he had an inkling that she might.
He draped his jacket on his chair and then — with nothing else to do so early in the day — he went to Victor’s office suite. The birthday throne was still outside, its plastic foliage evergreen and fresh. It seemed so foolish now that he had wasted so much effort on this birthday gift, for a man who had no appetite for sentiment. He pulled the foliage with its sticky tape free from the wood. He’d get someone to take it to the atrium and reconnect the stems where he had snapped them free. Or else he’d put them in a pot, a comic bouquet for Anna’s desk — a teasing prelude for the courtship that he planned for her in his own room, at his own desk. But first — the bouquet in his hand — he knocked on Victor’s door. He knocked again. And tried the handle. The door was locked. The old man’s growing soft, Rook thought. He’s slept through dawn for once. Rook bent to peer through the keyhole in the door. The inner key was in the lock.
‘No signs of life!’ he called out cheerily — and inanely — to the company accountant who, carrying a steaming coffee and a bank of ledgers, was passing through the lobby, tiptoeing through, in fact, as if he wished to keep his presence secret.
‘Where’s Victor, then?’ The accountant shook his head and seemed unwilling to meet Rook’s eye or match his cheeriness. ‘Where’s Victor, then?’ Rook asked again.
‘He won’t be down today.’
‘Why not?’ Again Rook had to settle for the shaken head. The accountant went into his room, and slammed the door shut with his heel.
Rook took his bouquet to Reception. The women there were busy at their desks.
‘Where’s Victor’s schedule for today?’ he asked. Again he had to ask the question twice.
‘It’s cancelled.’
‘Oh, yes. Why’s that?’
No one could say. No one seemed keen to even talk about this rarity of Victor absent from his desk, his schedule ‘cancelled’ for the day. It was perplexing that the staff were unforthcoming and morose when here was opportunity for them to waste a little time with talk.
‘What’s going on?’ Reception shrugged and held its tongue.
‘Why so grumpy, then?’ Rook asked out loud. ‘The Monday miseries? Too much to drink on Sunday night? Cheer up, cheer up. It’s only a job. “Work not shirk is life’s best perk. So join my harem, said the Turk.”
Their smiles were thin and stretched. Something embarrassed them. He waited, unsure of what the problem was, but certain that these three women, hired for their public charm and cheerfulness, were ill at ease. At last he said, unflippantly, ‘What’s up with you three, then?’ Still, there were no volunteers to look him in the eye. At last the eldest of the women said with a voice that quavered in and out of key, ‘It’s not for us to say.’
‘It’s not for us to say.’ In other words, this was a private thing, too personal and intimate for them to comment on, despite Reception’s reputation as the building’s bourse for rumour and hearsay. Rook no longer was perplexed. He guessed what caused their awkwardness, their blushing jealousy. Some office spy had spotted him and Anna out on the town on Saturday, perhaps. Or walking hand in hand towards Big Vic. The word had spread. The word ‘Romance!’ For some reason he could hardly understand this out-of-office liaison was not approved. You’d think this was some tutting medieval monastery, Rook thought (seated for the moment at his desk). Was this just jealousy, or sullen irritation that he’d breached an office code that those in charge and close to Victor should be as continent as him? Or was secrecy the culprit? Did Reception and Accountancy and, come to think of it, the uniformed Commissionary at mall level, resent that Rook had kept his tryst with Anna to himself for one weekend?
‘Ridiculous!’ He spoke the word out loud. It was ridiculous. Unlikely, too. The men and women in Big Vic were magnetized and not rebuffed by any hint of scandal or of secrecy. They loved the ribaldries of life. Particularly the trio at Reception. They wore their grandest, most libertine of smiles when there was gossip to be shared and prurience to trade. They would not drop their voices and their eyes, and act like undertakers’ clerks. They would have looked Rook in the eye and said, ‘What’s this I hear?’ or ‘You had a nice time Saturday! A little pigeon spotted you and Anna rubbing noses in a bar …’