‘Shall we sit on the sofa?’ he said.
The words were loud in his ears.
Seven
The day had been very tiresome, and when Francine shut the front door of her flat against the windy, dark grey late afternoon, she had a satisfying sensation of slamming it also on the administrative harness of the office and the dumb moon faces yoked within it. It had been dark all day, the great wads of cloud pressing down and sending people scuttling through the streets as if beneath the sole of a large, descending boot. The atmosphere of force had found its way into the building: there was a sudden assertion of regimes, a resistance to leisure, and when the rain began to hurl itself against the windows people bent their heads and worked faster.
She had anticipated an idle day, one in which she would sit and steep pleasurably in thought, perhaps sharing a little of it with anyone who happened by her manner to scent the presence of a drama; but instead she had been driven reluctantly into productivity, with not even a stint by the photocopier or a run to the Italian café near by for the office cappuccinos to provide any opportunity for reflection. Her night away from home had left her with an enlarged sense of the personal, and combined with the detachment wrought by little sleep and the red wine, the cuffs and chains of duty were tight and painful. By the end of the afternoon a helmet was clamped around her aching head and her tongue was thick and bitter with instant coffee. At five thirty she left the office for the weekend, not even lingering to be ensnared in the customary Friday evening drift of the City to the local pubs.
She had phoned Lynne at the agency that morning to ask if she had any work for the next week, and Lynne had said that Personnel at Lancing & Louche were pleased with her and wanted her to stay on. There might be a chance of a permanent, Lynne said, seeing as the lady away on leave was still phoning in sick and didn’t know when she’d be back. She was called Sally, and Francine disliked her for the fact that, even though Sally was middle aged, overweight, and had greying, frizzy hair — facts revealed in a framed photograph of Sally dancing in a disco opposite a bald man with flailing arms and red eyes which Francine had found on her desk — Mr Lancing kept calling her Sally as well. Sally was a ‘career’ secretary and had been there a long time: she had put luminous pink stickers with her name on on all her files and a large one on her telephone extension too, as if to remind herself of who she was in case anyone called for her. She had a pair of slippers in flowered material which she changed into when she got to work. One of the secretaries had told Francine that when she found them beneath her desk, positioned neatly side by side in front of the chair as if Sally had been snatched from them by illness where she sat. Francine had put them in a drawer, along with the photograph, the roll of stickers, and a manicure set which also belonged to Sally, feeling confident that her superiority would bring its own rewards.
She was glad she would be staying at Lancing & Louche for a while: it was a big company and she liked the youthful commerce of the corridors, the legions of smart secretaries, the young men with sleek hair who rushed in and out of the broking rooms, the hushed acres of carpet and confidential mahogany doors of the executive floor at the top of the building where meetings were held. She was usually asked to take coffee into Mr Lancing’s meetings, prepared on a tray by one of the aproned women in catering and handed to her outside the door, and although she disliked its suggestion of servitude, the sudden silence and raised circle of heads as she entered the room made the duty more gratifying. Their eyes followed her to the door, and sometimes, after she’d shut it, she could hear different tones in their voices and the occasional burst of meaningful male laughter.
Her last job had been a two-week assignment to a dingy little office behind Waterloo station — normally she only worked in the City, and she was sure Lynne had sent her on this job to get her back for the one before, where she hadn’t left on very good terms and they’d complained to the agency — working for a fat man called Mr Harris, who wore brown shirts with stains dotted like islands over the expanse of his belly. She didn’t know what Mr Harris did, even at the end of her two weeks. The business of the companies she worked for rarely had any bearing on the work she was expected to do. Mr Harris received few telephone calls and his correspondence was featureless. She spent most of her time typing long lists of figures and addresses into a database.
She was alone in the office with Mr Harris, and the slack pace of trade meant that he was obsessed with everything she did, rushing over to her desk when she opened a file or typed a letter to make sure she was doing it properly.
‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ he would say encouragingly, while Francine prickled with irritation beside him. He would stand too close to her, his open mouth emitting clouds of rancid breath, and often a tiny rain of saliva would spatter across her desktop. He watched her continually, making comments about her mood and habits or the expression on her face.
‘You like your coffee,’ he would nod if she got up to make a cup. He would offer her biscuits, custard creams which he kept in a drawer, and she would refuse them. ‘That’s how you keep your nice slim figure, isn’t it, Francine?’
Normally Francine found it easy to understand her life at the office. Her rank and station were clear, her duties and regalia always the same, her employer a distant, regimental figure whose peculiarities were generally substantial enough to be discussed at lunch-time. The band of her cohorts was genial, and usually manufactured a set of easily grasped distinguishing features on the surface of a deep homogeneity. Every office was at pains to possess its own character: ‘What do you think of this place, then?’ people would ask Francine at the end of her first day, and although she never really thought anything, they would proudly tell her that she would get used to it in the end.
With Mr Harris, though, Francine had begun to feel as if she didn’t know who she was. Without the armour of a corporate identity, she had felt him clawing at her person, simulating a hideous intimacy which for the first time revealed to her the precarious contract on which her position was founded. Her transience normally safeguarded her liberty, but locked in with Mr Harris’s fascination the days had seemed long. His presence had become hourly more predatory, and although Francine knew that the termination of his lease on her was not far off, the fingering, probing quality of his ownership subdued her into the belief that it would never end. She became listless in the evenings, avoiding her reflection in the windows of the Underground train as she made her lonely journey to Waterloo the next morning. At the end of two weeks he asked her to stay on and she said that she had another job to go to the next week. She didn’t tell Lynne what she had done.