I made a non-committal grunt.
‘Be glad, shall we, when he comes back?’
I glanced at his amused, quizzical face and saw that he knew as well as I did that when Gordon reappeared to repossess his kingdom, I wouldn’t be glad at all. Doing Gordon’s job, after the first breath-shortening initial plunge, had injected me with great feelings of vigour and good health; had found me running up stairs and singing in the bath and showing all the symptoms of a love affair; and like many a love affair it couldn’t survive the return of the husband. I wondered how long I’d have to wait for such a chance again, and whether next time I’d feel as high.
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed,’ Alec said, the eyes electric blue behind the gold-rimmed specs.
‘Noticed what?’ Rupert asked, raising his head above papers he’d been staring blindly at for ninety minutes.
Back from his pretty wife’s death and burial poor Rupert still wore a glazed otherwhere look and tended too late to catch up with passing conversations. In the two days since his return he had written no letters, made no telephone calls, reached no decisions. Out of compassion one had had to give him time, and Alec and I continued to do his work surreptitiously without him realising.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Rupert nodded vaguely and looked down again, an automaton in his living grief. I’d never loved anyone, I thought, as painfully as that. I think I hoped that I never would.
John, freshly returned also, but from his holidays, glowed with a still-red sunburn and had difficulty in fitting the full lurid details of his sexual adventures into Rupert’s brief absences to the washroom. Neither Alec nor I ever believed John’s sagas, but at least Alec found them funny, which I didn’t. There was an element lurking there of a hatred of women, as if every boasted possession (real of not) was a statement of spite. He didn’t actually use the word possession. He said ‘made’ and ‘screwed’ and ‘had it off with the little cow’. I didn’t like him much and he thought me a prig: we were polite in the office and never went together to lunch. And it was he alone of all of us who actively looked forward to Gordon’s return, he who couldn’t disguise his dismay that it was I who was filling the empty shoes instead of himself.
‘Of course, if I’d been here...’ he said at least once a day; and Alec reported that John had been heard telling Gordon’s almost-equal along the passage that now he, John, was back, Gordon’s work should be transferred from me to him.
‘Did you hear him?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Sure. And he was told in no uncertain terms that it was the Old Man himself who gave you the green light, and there was nothing John could do about it. Proper miffed was our Lothario. Says it’s all because you are who you are, and all that.’
‘Sod him.’
‘Rather you than me.’ He laughed gently into his blotter and picked up the telephone to find backers for a sewage and water purification plant in Norfolk.
‘Did you know,’ he said conversationally, busy dialing a number, ‘that there are so few sewage farms in West Berlin that they pay the East Berliners to get rid of the extra?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ I didn’t especially want to know, either, but as usual Alec was full of useless information and possessed by the urge to pass it on.
‘The East Berliners take the money and dump the stuff out in the open fields. Untreated, mind you.’
‘Do shut up,’ I said.
‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘And smelled it. Absolutely disgusting.’
‘It was probably fertilizer,’ I said, ‘and what were you doing in East Berlin?’
‘Calling on Nefertiti.’
‘She of the one eye?’
‘My God, yes, isn’t it a shock? Oh... hello...’ He got through to his prospective money-source and for far too long and with a certain relish explained the need for extra facilities to reverse the swamp of effluent which had been killing off the Broads. ‘No risk involved, of course, with a water authority.’ He listened. ‘I’ll put you in, then, shall I? Right.’ He scribbled busily and in due course disconnected. ‘Dead easy, this one. Ecology and all that. Good emotional stuff.’
I shuffled together a bunch of papers of my own that were very far from dead easy and went up to see Val Fisher, who happened to be almost alone in the big office. Henry Shipton, it seemed, was out on one of his frequent walkabouts through the other departments.
‘It’s a cartoonist,’ I said. ‘Can I consult?’
‘Pull up a chair.’ Val nodded and waved hospitably, and I sat beside him, spread out the papers, and explained about the wholly level-headed artist I had spent three hours with two weeks earlier.
‘He’s been turned down by his own local bank, and so far by three other firms like ourselves.’ I said. ‘He’s got no realisable assets, no security. He rents a flat and is buying a car on HP. If we financed him, it would be out of faith.’
‘Background?’ he asked. ‘Covenant?’
‘Pretty solid. Son of a Sales Manager. Respected at art school as an original talent: I talked to the Principal. His bank manager gave him a clean bill but said that his head office wouldn’t grant what he’s asking. For the past two years he’s worked for a studio making animated commercials. They say he’s good at the job; understands it thoroughly. They know he wants to go it alone, they think he’s capable and they don’t want to lose him.’
‘How old?’
‘Twenty-four.’
Val gave me an ‘Oh ho ho’ look, knowing, as I did, that it was the cartoonist’s age above all which had invited negative responses from the other banks.
‘What’s he asking?’ Val said, but he too looked as if he were already deciding against.
‘A studio, properly equipped. Funds to employ ten copying artists, with the expectation that it will be a year before any films are completed and can expect to make money. Funds for promotion. Funds for himself to live on. These sheets set out the probable figures.’
Val made a face over the pages, momentarily re-arranging the small neat features, slanting the tidy dark moustache, raising the arched eyebrows towards the black cap of hair.
‘Why haven’t you already turned him down?’ he asked finally.
‘Um,’ I said. ‘Look at his drawings.’ I opened another file and spread out the riotously coloured progression of pages which established two characters and told a funny story. I watched Val’s sophisticated world-weary face as he leafed through them: saw the awakening interest, heard the laugh.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘Hmph.’ He leaned back in his chair and gave me an assessing stare. ‘You’re not saying you think we should take him on?’
‘It’s an unsecured risk, of course. But yes, I am. With a string or two, of course, like a cost accountant to keep tabs on things and a first option to finance future expansion.’
‘Hm.’ He pondered for several minutes, looking again at the drawings which still seemed funny to me even after a fortnight’s close acquaintance. ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s too like aiming at the moon with a bow and arrow.’
‘They might watch those films one day on space shuttles,’ I said mildly, and he gave me a fast amused glance while he squared up the drawings and returned them to their folder.
‘Leave these all here, then, will you?’ he said. ‘I’ll have a word with Henry over lunch.’ And I guessed in a swift uncomfortable moment of insight that what they would discuss would be not primarily the cartoonist but the reliability or otherwise of my judgement. If they thought me a fool I’d be back behind John in the promotion queue in no time.
At four-thirty, however, when my inter-office telephone rang, it was Val at the other end.
‘Come up and collect your papers,’ he said. ‘Henry says this decision is to be yours alone. So sink or swim, Tim, it’s up to you.’