Even now, he realised, he still had a small urge to say out loud the dreadful thing he had been doing. It was all so clear. Every detail was still vividly with him. Perhaps only speaking of it, thrusting it all into the clear light of day, would get rid of it, would make it vanish like a twist of fog as the rare dreams he ever had did at the shrill sound of the alarm on the table beside him.
The clock, rattling off as it always did at the exact stroke of 7:30, removed this last temptation.
Thomas swung back the bedclothes and set his little feet on the chilly floor.
But the regular bustle of his morning routine did not chase away the awful thing he had been doing in the secret hours of the night, the thing that the real Thomas Henniker, carefully shaving his red, round, chubby cheeks in front of the bathroom mirror, would never have done. Could never have done. Could never, never, never do. Still, as he brought the safety-razor smoothly down towards his chin, he could see himself sitting operating the very computer which it was his duty from time to time to work at and obeying that extraordinary voice that had seemed to come out of the console itself. Obeying the wicked instructions of that awful, wheezy, rhythmical voice, like a mouth-organ articulating, as it told him how to put money into the Zygo account.
Zygo. That name. That extraordinary name. How could he, even in sleep, have come to think it? The name that was bound to come at the very end of the series of sales-commission accounts so that, by a process he was unable to understand, it was easy to direct sums into it from hundreds of other accounts scattered up and down the country. To direct into this convenient, accessible slot all those tiny, unregarded decimal points of cash that no one was going to query. How could he have invented all that? And then the diabolical final twist. He could remember it as clearly as all the rest. The way in which you instructed the machine to take all the decimal pence that followed the memorable pounds, except for those numbering less than lo. Then no one would eventually be alerted by the fact that their account always seemed to come to an exact figure.
It was really extraordinarily clever.
Thomas Henniker nicked himself with the razor. It was something he had not done for five years at least. Probably ten.
“Thomas,” Mousie said the moment he presented himself for breakfast. “You’ve given yourself a cut. There, just at the point of your chin. How could you be so careless? Today of all days.”
What was today? Why was it “of all days”? For a moment his mind, where usually all the facts of his existence stood neatly tabulated, topsy-turvied in uncertainty. Then he remembered. This was the day that Mousie had fixed on for him to issue the dinner invitation to Mr. Watson, Mr. Watson, a good ten years his junior, who had swept effortlessly to a seat on the board and the managership of the department in which he himself had year by year climbed at last to the assistant managership. To Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson, Mrs. Watson who was rumoured among the junior staff to be an Honourable.
It had been a task he had tried to wriggle out of. But Mousie had been adamant.
“It’s no use your just being good at your work, Thomas. If you’re going to get promotion before it’s too late, you’ve got to show you’re made of the right stuff. You’ve got to show you possess savoir-faire.”
The brimming rs of her Aberdeen voice, granity like the pale grey, glittering stone of the far Northern city itself, had made a great deal of that last, scarifying French term.
And Thomas, deep within convinced he had not got savoir-faire and never could acquire it, had answered, firmly as he could, “Yes, dear.”
So today he must make himself give the invitation, despite the unsightly little dab of cottonwool on his chin. Because if he did not, somehow, get that seat on the board he would never be able to provide his Mousie at the closing of her days with the house in the Dee Valley on which she had set her heart, a house standing in its own grounds somewhere in that infinitely desirable area presided over by Balmoral Castle itself, Scottish home of Her Majesty.
And now, seated opposite him at the little table, teapot in its embroidered cosy in front of her, Mousie began to let forth a curious keening sound.
He had half-known it was bound to come at this moment, and had inwardly dreaded it. She was embarking on her favourite poem, the only poem either of them had ever spoken aloud in all the thirty years of their life together, the Canadian Boat Song.
The first time she had voiced this yearning, in the same dirgelike tones she used now, Thomas had been foolhardy enough to point out that, though Deeside did indeed fall just within the Highlands, the Hebrides were in fact on the very other side of Scotland. He had not come top in geography at school for nothing.
But he had long ago learnt that when his Mousie keened out these words in this manner they merited only the tribute of silence.
And now that tribute earned him an unexpected reward.
“Perhaps, Thomas,” his wife said, lifting the teapot, “you had better leave asking the Watsons till tomorrow. I don’t know what he might think of you, going up to him looking like that.”
“Yes, Mousie,” Thomas said.
And off he went to work, not a minute late, not a minute early. He never was. But when in the course of his duties he had to enter some information on the computer a tiny sweat broke out all along the top of his chubby shoulders as he sat down at the console. He could remember exactly what that wheezing, rhythmical, mouth-organ voice had instructed him to do.
Later, over his solitary lunch, he thought about it. Somehow, he reasoned, he must have acquired the information necessary to carry out that appalling scheme without having realised it. When he had first been shown how to use the computer he had not bothered himself with anything more than he would need to know to give it such new instructions as might from time to time be required. If he had been told any of the theory behind the practicalities he had ignored it. Or so he had thought. But perhaps some of it had stuck. And then, too, he had always been good at figures. He could remember his father, when he was no more than eight or nine, saying, after they had been playing some arithmetic game as the three of them had sat at Sunday dinner, “Mother, that boy’s got a real head for figures. He’s going to go far one of these days.” It had been one of the proudest moments of his life.
But he had never thought it would lead him to this. To this terrible knowledge that he seemed to have acquired from nowhere.
For all the rest of that day he forced himself to concentrate ferociously on his work. And at home in the evening there was luckily a good documentary on television which helped keep his mind off the awful thought and when that was over they watched the news as usual and then set about their customary evening chores getting to bed exactly at eleven as they always did.
But no sooner had he put out the bedside light and settled down on his pillow than the voice that had wheezed and commanded in his sleep the night before came back into his mind exactly as he had heard it. It was like a belch recalling the flavour of a meal eaten hours earlier. And it left an equally sour feeling in his stomach.