The New Collected Short Stories (29 page)

‘Good morning, Kevin,’ said Chris Parnell, almost running past him. He had an anxious look on his face. He should have my problems, thought Kevin, glancing round to see Haskins
stirring his first cup of tea of the morning.

‘That’s Chris Parnell,’ Haskins told Ronnie, before sipping his tea. ‘Late again – he’ll blame it on British Rail, always does. I should have been given his
job years ago, and I would have been, if like him I’d been a Sergeant in the Pay Corps, and not a Corporal in the Greenjackets. But management didn’t seem to appreciate what I had to
offer.’

Ronnie made no comment, but then, he had heard his father express this opinion every workday morning for the past six weeks.

‘I once invited him to my regimental reunion, but he said he was too busy. Bloody snob. Watch him, though, because he’ll have a say in who gets my job.’

‘Good morning, Mr Parker,’ said Haskins, handing the next arrival a copy of the
Guardian
.

‘Tells you a lot about a man, what paper he reads,’ Haskins said to Ronnie as Roger Parker disappeared into the lift. ‘Now, you take young Kevin out there. He reads the
Sun
, and that’s all you need to know about him. Which is another reason I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t get the promotion he’s after.’ He winked at his
son. ‘I, on the other hand, read the
Express
– always have done, always will do.

‘Good morning, Mr Tudor-Jones,’ said Haskins, as he passed a copy of the
Telegraph
to the bank’s Chief Administrator. He didn’t speak again until the lift doors
had closed.

‘Important time for Mr Tudor-Jones,’ Haskins informed his son. ‘If he doesn’t get promoted to the board this year, my bet is he’ll be marking time until he retires.
I sometimes look at these jokers and think I could do their jobs. After all, it wasn’t my fault my old man was a brickie, and I didn’t get the chance to go to the local grammar school.
Otherwise I might have ended up on the sixth or seventh floor, with a desk of my own and a secretary.

‘Good morning, Mr Alexander,’ said Haskins as the bank’s Chief Executive walked past him without acknowledging his salutation.

‘Don’t have to hand him a paper. Miss Franklyn, his secretary, picks the lot up for him long before he arrives. Now he wants to be Chairman. If he gets the job, there’ll be a
lot of changes round here, that’s for sure.’ He looked across at his son. ‘You been booking in all those names, the way I taught you?’

‘Sure have, Dad. Mr Parnell, 7.47; Mr Parker, 8.09; Mr Tudor-Jones, 8.11; Mr Alexander, 8.23.’

‘Well done, son. You’re learning fast.’ He poured himself another cup of tea, and took a sip. Too hot, so he went on talking. ‘Our next job is to deal with the mail
– which, like Mr Parnell, is late. So, I suggest . . .’ Haskins quickly hid his cup of tea below the counter and ran across the foyer. He jabbed the ‘up’ button, and prayed
that one of the lifts would return to the ground floor before the Chairman entered the building. The doors slid open with seconds to spare.

‘Good morning, Sir William. I hope you had a pleasant weekend.’

‘Yes, thank you, Haskins,’ said the Chairman, as the doors closed. Haskins blocked the way so that no one could join Sir William in the lift, and he would have an uninterrupted
journey to the fourteenth floor.

Haskins ambled back to the reception desk to find his son sorting out the morning mail. ‘The Chairman once told me that the lift takes thirty-eight seconds to reach the top floor, and
he’d worked out that he’d spend a week of his life in there, so he always read the
Times
leader on the way up and the notes for his next meeting on the way down. If he spends a
week trapped in there, I reckon I must spend half my life,’ he added, as he picked up his tea and took a sip. It was cold. ‘Once you’ve sorted out the post, you can take it up to
Mr Parnell. It’s his job to distribute it, not mine. He’s got a cushy enough number as it is, so there’s no reason why I should do his work for him.’

Ronnie picked up the basket full of mail and headed for the lift. He stepped out on the second floor, walked over to Mr Parnell’s desk and placed the basket in front of him.

Chris Parnell looked up, and watched as the lad disappeared back out of the door. He stared at the pile of letters. As always, no attempt had been made to sort them out. He must have a word with
Haskins. It wasn’t as if the man was run off his feet, and now he wanted his boy to take his place. Not if
he
had anything to do with it.

Didn’t Haskins understand that his job carried real responsibility? He had to make sure the office ticked like a Swiss clock. Letters on the correct desks before nine, check for any
absentees by ten, deal with any machinery breakdowns within moments of being notified of them, arrange and organise all staff meetings, by which time the second post would have arrived. Frankly,
the whole place would come to a halt if he ever took a day off. You only had to look at the mess he always came back to whenever he returned from his summer holiday.

He stared at the letter on the top of the pile. It was addressed to ‘Mr Roger Parker’. ‘Rog’, to him. He should have been given Rog’s job as Head of Personnel years
ago – he could have done it in his sleep, as his wife Janice never stopped reminding him: ‘He’s no more than a jumped-up office clerk. Just because he was at the same school as
the Chief Cashier.’ It wasn’t fair.

Janice had wanted to invite Roger and his wife round to dinner, but Chris had been against the idea from the start.

‘Why not?’ she had demanded. ‘After all, you both support Chelsea. Is it because you’re afraid he’ll turn you down, the stuck-up snob?’

To be fair to Janice, it had crossed Chris’s mind to invite Roger out for a drink, but not to dinner at their home in Romford. He couldn’t explain to her that when Roger went to
Stamford Bridge he didn’t sit at the Shed end with the lads, but in the members’ seats.

Once the letters had been sorted out, Chris placed them in different trays according to their departments. His two assistants could cover the first ten floors, but he would never allow them
anywhere near the top four. Only
he
got into the Chairman and Chief Executive’s offices.

Janice never stopped reminding him to keep his eyes open whenever he was on the executive floors. ‘You can never tell what opportunities might arise, what openings could present
themselves.’ He laughed to himself, thinking about Gloria in Filing, and the openings she offered. The things that girl could do behind a filing cabinet. That was one thing he didn’t
need his wife to find out about.

He picked up the trays for the top four floors, and headed towards the lift. When he reached the eleventh floor, he gave a gentle knock on the door before entering Roger’s office. The Head
of Personnel glanced up from a letter he’d been reading, a preoccupied look on his face.

‘Good result for Chelsea on Saturday, Rog, even if it was only against West Ham,’ Chris said as he placed a pile of letters in his superior’s in-tray. He didn’t get any
response, so he left hurriedly.

Roger looked up as Chris scurried away. He felt guilty that he hadn’t chatted to him about the Chelsea match, but he didn’t want to explain why he had missed a home game for the
first time that season. He should be so lucky as only to have Chelsea on his mind.

He turned his attention back to the letter he had been reading. It was a bill for £1,600, the first month’s fee for his mother’s nursing home.

Roger had reluctantly accepted that she was no longer well enough to remain with them in Croydon, but he hadn’t been expecting a bill that would work out at almost £20,000 a year. Of
course he hoped she’d be around for another twenty years, but with Adam and Sarah still at school, and Hazel not wanting to go back to work, he needed a further rise in salary, at a time when
all the talk was of cutbacks and redundancies.

It had been a disastrous weekend. On Saturday he had begun to read the McKinsey report, outlining what the bank would have to do if it was to continue as a leading financial institution into the
twenty-first century.

The report had suggested that at least seventy employees would have to participate in a downsizing programme – a euphemism for ‘You’re sacked.’ And who would be given the
unenviable task of explaining to those seventy individuals the precise meaning of the word ‘downsizing’? The last time Roger had had to sack someone, he hadn’t slept for days. He
had felt so depressed by the time he put the report down that he just couldn’t face the Chelsea match.

He realised he would have to make an appointment to see Godfrey Tudor-Jones, the bank’s Chief Administrator, although he knew that Tudor-Jones would brush him off with, ‘Not my
department, old boy, people problems. And you’re the Head of Personnel, Roger, so I guess it’s up to you.’ It wasn’t as if he’d been able to strike up a personal
relationship with the man, which he could now fall back on. He had tried hard enough over the years, but the Chief Administrator had made it all too clear that he didn’t mix business with
pleasure – unless, of course, you were a board member.

‘Why don’t you invite him to a home game at Chelsea?’ suggested Hazel. ‘After all, you paid enough for those two season tickets.’

‘I don’t think he’s into football,’ Roger had told her. ‘More a rugby man, would be my guess.’

‘Then invite him to your club for dinner.’

He didn’t bother to explain to Hazel that Godfrey was a member of the Carlton Club, and he didn’t imagine he would feel at ease at a meeting of the Fabian Society.

The final blow had come on Saturday evening, when the headmaster of Adam’s school had phoned to say he needed to see him urgently, about a matter that couldn’t be discussed over the
phone. He had driven there on the Sunday morning, apprehensive about what it could possibly be that couldn’t be discussed over the phone. He knew that Adam needed to buckle down and work a
lot harder if he was to have a chance of being offered a place at any university, but the headmaster told him that his son had been caught smoking marijuana, and that the school rules on that
particular subject couldn’t be clearer – immediate expulsion and a full report to the local police the following day. When he heard the news, Roger felt as if he were back in his own
headmaster’s study.

Father and son had hardly exchanged a word on the journey home. When Hazel had been told why Adam had come back in the middle of term she had broken down in tears, and proved inconsolable. She
feared it would all come out in the
Croydon Advertiser
, and they would have to move. Roger certainly couldn’t afford a move at the moment, but he didn’t think this was the right
time to explain to Hazel the meaning of negative equity.

On the train up to London that morning, Roger couldn’t help thinking that none of this would have arisen if he had landed the Chief Administrator’s job. For months there had been
talk of Godfrey joining the board, and when he eventually did, Roger would be the obvious candidate to take his place. But he needed the extra cash right now, what with his mother in a nursing home
and having to find a sixth-form college that would take Adam. He and Hazel would have to forget celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary in Venice.

As he sat at his desk, he thought about the consequences of his colleagues finding out about Adam. He wouldn’t lose his job, of course, but he needn’t bother concerning himself with
any further promotion. He could hear the snide whispers in the washroom that were meant to be overheard.

‘Well, he’s always been a bit of a lefty, you know. So, frankly, are you surprised?’ He would have liked to explain to them that just because you read the
Guardian
, it
doesn’t automatically follow that you go on Ban the Bomb marches, experiment with free love and smoke marijuana at weekends.

He returned to the first page of the McKinsey report, and realised he would have to make an early appointment to see the Chief Administrator. He knew it would be no more than going through the
motions, but at least he would have done his duty by his colleagues.

He dialled an internal number, and Godfrey Tudor-Jones’s secretary picked up the phone.

‘The Chief Administrator’s office,’ said Pamela, sounding as if she had a cold.

‘It’s Roger. I need to see Godfrey fairly urgently. It’s about the McKinsey report.’

‘He has appointments most of the day,’ said Pamela, ‘but I could fit you in at 4.15 for fifteen minutes.’

‘Then I’ll be with you at 4.15.’

Pamela replaced the phone and made a note in her boss’s diary.

‘Who was that?’ asked Godfrey.

‘Roger Parker. He says he has a problem and needs to see you urgently. I fitted him in at 4.15.’

He doesn’t know what a problem is, thought Godfrey, continuing to sift through his letters to see if any had ‘Confidential’ written on them. None had, so he crossed the room
and handed them all back to Pamela.

She took them without a word passing between them. Nothing had been the same since that weekend in Manchester. He should never have broken the golden rule about sleeping with your secretary. If
it hadn’t rained for three days, or if he’d been able to get a ticket for the United match, or if her skirt hadn’t been quite so short, it might never have happened. If, if, if.
And it wasn’t as if the earth had moved, or he’d had it more than once. What a wonderful start to the week to be told she was pregnant.

As if he didn’t have enough problems at the moment, the bank was having a poor year, so his bonus was likely to be about half what he’d budgeted for. Worse, he had already spent the
money long before it had been credited to his account.

He looked up at Pamela. All she’d said after her initial outburst was that she hadn’t made up her mind whether or not to have the baby. That was all he needed right now, what with
two sons at Tonbridge and a daughter who couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted a piano or a pony, and didn’t understand why she couldn’t have both, not to mention a wife who had
become a shopaholic. He couldn’t remember when his bank balance had last been in credit. He looked up at Pamela again, as she left his office. A private abortion wouldn’t come cheap
either, but it would be a damn sight cheaper than the alternative.