The Portable Door (1987) (14 page)

At five to two they went back to the office. The long stapler had, of course, vanished.

“My turn,” Sophie said. “I’ll go and look for it, and you can get on with the collating. All right?”

He’d been working away steadily for something like a quarter of an hour, his mind very much on other matters, when the door opened and someone he recognised drifted in; a tall, thin bald man, with clumps of white hair over his ears that reminded Paul of snow on the mountains in summer.

“Mr Carpenter,” he said. He sounded annoyed, and nervous. “I don’t think we’ve met since you came for interview. I am Theodorus Van Spee.” He held out a long-fingered, liver-spotted hand with bitten fingernails. On its middle finger was a thin silver ring.

“Hello,” Paul said awkwardly. Mr Van Spee (only he liked to be called Professor, Paul remembered) might look frail, but he had a grip like a scrapyard car-crusher. “Um, what can I do for you?”

The Professor seemed to be looking over Paul’s shoulder. “Oh, there’s nothing at the moment,” he said, in an accent that Paul reckoned was probably Dutch. “I was passing and thought I might as well introduce myself. Your colleague, Ms Pettingell; she’s not here—”

“She’s looking for something,” Paul said. “The stapler. We need it to staple up the—” He stopped babbling. “She’ll be back any minute,” he said. “Did you want—?”

The Professor’s thin lips curved very slightly into the ghost of a smile. “No, there is nothing important, I simply wished to introduce myself to her also, not having encountered her since the interview. So,” he went on, looking Paul straight in the eye and reminding him uncomfortably of several headmasters he’d known in his youth, “how are you settling in with us? Smoothly, I hope.”

For some reason, Paul felt a sudden urge to tell this strange man the truth; the whole truth, including the bits about swords in stones, frozen pizzas, claw-marks and Gilbert and Sullivan. In fact, it was only his instinctive terror of tall, thin authority figures that stopped him. “Oh, fine,” he said.

“Excellent,” said Professor Van Spee, frowning slightly. “No doubt to begin with everything seems a little strange, but that will quickly pass, I’m sure.” Once again he was staring over Paul’s shoulder at the blank wall, as if he was expecting to see something there. “And no doubt it is easier, the two of you starting at the same time. Always it’s easier when there are two, easier to learn the ropes together. It was so when I first started here. I began as a clerk, you see, just as you are now, but that was many years ago.”

Paul wanted to turn round and see just what was so fascinating about the wall, but he didn’t. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a great help.”

The Professor nodded absently. “And Ms Pettingell is a charming young lady,” he said. “She has a birthmark just above her navel, and her pet rabbit was called Lucky, though he died nine years ago. You should not buy her flowers, that would be most inappropriate, but she has a weakness for Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, although she is reluctant to admit it. She has no great interest in music, but you would do well to familiarise yourself with the works of Dickens, Turgenev and Dick Francis, all of which,” he added with a slight frown, “she reads for pleasure. Some knowledge of contemporary art would stand you in good stead, but guard against any temptation to show off; better to avoid the topic completely. Cars bore her; she affects an enthusiasm for motorcycles, but this is only to annoy her parents, in reality she does not care for them. Coca-Cola and fizzy orange she detests, though she will eat hamburgers and pizza if she is hungry; regularity of meals matters more to her than quantity or indeed quality, and often when she is surly and short-tempered, it is only because she needs something to eat. She drinks beer ostentatiously so as to appear unfeminine, but does not like the taste. You should avoid any mention of Birmingham, lest it awaken old memories that may distress her. Rats don’t trouble her; snakes and spiders do. She is firmly convinced that she is not beautiful; to assure her otherwise would merely antagonise her. Compliments should therefore concern her intelligence, resourcefulness and generosity of spirit—and should you choose to offer words of praise in respect of any of these, your remarks would be far from empty flattery.” A small gnat whirred past the Professor’s left ear; he snapped it out of the air between thumb and middle finger without looking at it. “Where money is concerned she is prudent and scrupulous, almost to a fault; be sure to repay what you borrow, though avoiding undue haste, and do not offer to pay for her in restaurants or places of entertainment. If you dine out together, take pains to remember what you ordered, so that the bill may be apportioned quickly and without dispute. She attended dancing lessons until she was twelve; she claims to despise dancing but secretly and guiltily enjoys it very much—you might care to seek basic instruction yourself, as she would not look kindly on your present shortcomings in this regard, should dancing occur. As you have yourself perceived, she can to a certain extent discern from your face what you are thinking; do not try and mask your thoughts, however, rather give her credit for a laudable measure of understanding and compassion. When you buy her a present, I would suggest either a short wool scarf or a good-quality pocket calculator. Above all, do not seek to impress, or pretend to be other than you are, and under no circumstances should you kiss her shortly after you have consumed peppermint.” He coughed, reached in his jacket pocket for a handkerchief, and carefully dabbed at the tip of his nose. “Excuse me,” he said, “I am due in a meeting with my partners. The fifth page from the bottom in that pile is out of sequence; please correct the error before they are stapled together.” His brow clouded, as though there was something he’d forgotten; then it relaxed. “Have a nice day,” he said, and left the room.

Several seconds passed before Paul woke up out of the trance he’d been in since the Professor started talking. As soon as he came round, he checked the fifth page from the bottom. He stared at it for a while, then put it away where it belonged, third from the top.

“Finished?” He hadn’t noticed her come back, and nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Almost,” he said.

“I found it,” Sophie said, waving the stapler triumphantly. “God only knows how it ended up in the broom cupboard.” She stopped, and looked at the piles of copied spreadsheets. “Haven’t you got any further than that?” she said. “You aren’t even halfway through.”

“Sorry,” he said awkwardly. “Only that old thin bloke with the little beard, Professor—” He paused, pretending he’d forgotten the name.

“Professor Van Spee?”

He nodded. “That’s him. Anyhow, he stopped by. Only just left, in fact.” He breathed in and looked away. “Do you know him from somewhere else?”

“Me?” She shook her head. “Never set eyes on him before the interview. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. He’s not a friend of the family, anything like that?”

“God, no. Why do you ask?”

Paul shook his head. “Nothing. That is, he said something that I thought might mean he knew you from somewhere, but it must just’ve been me getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “So what did you talk about?”

“The usual stuff,” Paul croaked. “How are you settling in, I expect it’s all very confusing to start with, that kind of thing.”

If she noticed anything odd about his tone of voice, she didn’t comment on it. They finished the collating together, sorted the result into bundles and stapled them up. “Right,” Sophie said, “I’ll take them up to Julie’s office, and I’ll meet you down in the strongroom. I’ll take the stapler too,” she added. “I expect someone’ll come looking for it sooner or later, and then at least someone’ll know where it is.”

Paul went back to his office and picked up his sweater. He didn’t put it on, in case Mr Tanner had been kidding after all, and somebody objected to him wearing tatty old clothes in the office. On the way down to the basement, he tried very hard not to think about what Van Spee had told him, and failed miserably. The weirdness of it all certainly wasn’t lost on him, but most of his thoughts led towards
Does that mean she—?
and veered hastily away. As he passed the waste-paper basket in reception, he took a packet of extra-strong mints out of his jacket pocket and dumped them.

It was probably just as well that he was somewhat preoccupied, or his first sight of the strongroom would have unnerved him completely. It struck him as a cross between an old–fashioned library and a maximum-security prison, with a touch of the mines of Mona thrown in for good measure. Mr Tanner hadn’t been fooling with him after all. The dust was deep on the shelves, and he devoutly hoped he wouldn’t come across the spiders who’d spun the enormous cobwebs that sagged from the corners of the room like the sails of becalmed galleons. The air was thick enough to grease axles with. About fifty years ago, someone had started painting the ceiling battleship grey, but had given up halfway. Paul could understand why.

Sophie wasn’t impressed, either. She arrived bearing two notebooks and two pencils, looked round and said, “God, what a dump.”

“It’s pretty horrible,” Paul agreed. “Did you manage to figure out exactly what we’re supposed to be doing here? It all sounded a bit vague to me.”

“Inventory,” Sophie replied, looking about her with distaste. “He wants a complete list of everything they’ve got in here and where it is; plus we’ve got to put it all in order, so they can find it again.”

“Bloody hell,” Paul said. It was a large room, bigger by half again than his bedsit, and the shelves that lined all four walls were rammed with black tin boxes, files, folders, ledgers and large, fat beige envelopes. “It’ll take for ever.”

She shrugged. “That’s what we’ve got to do,” she said. “I vote we take it in turns; one of us looks in the boxes and files and stuff and calls out what’s in there, the other one writes it down.” She paused, frowning. “And we’ve got to figure out some way of archiving it all. What we need are lots of yellow stickies, so we can write a number on each one.”

Paul nodded dumbly, still stunned by the magnitude of the task. “Yellow stickies,” he repeated. “Where do we get them from?”

“Julie, I suppose,” Sophie replied, “like everything in this place apart from breathing air. I’ll go and see to that. You look like you need to sit down already.”

While she was away, Paul wandered round the room, picking things off the shelves and putting them back in a despairing manner. Among the things he picked up was a tall, wide book handsomely bound in red leather. There wasn’t anything written on the spine, but when he opened it, he realised that it was a list—an inventory—of the things in the room. Unfortunately, it was very old and presumably out of date; it was written in spidery copperplate, and the ink had turned brown. As far as he was any judge of such things, it had to be at least seventy years old, and possibly more. Still, he thought, it was bound to come in handy (though he wasn’t quite sure how).

“Yellow stickies,” Sophie said triumphantly, coming in with a shoebox-sized carton in her hands. “Millions of them, and I didn’t even have to sign for them. I asked, and she just handed them over without a word.”

“Look at this,” Paul interrupted, and he showed her the book. She didn’t seem impressed.

“Don’t see how that’s going to help,” she said. “I mean, chances are there’s been lots of new stuff put in here since this was done, and loads of stuff taken out as well.” She turned the pages slowly. “Still,” she went on, “it gives us an idea of what we’re supposed to do. Look, there’s columns for when each thing was deposited, where it was put, and each time they’ve been taken out, who took them, and when they were brought back. Seems a fairly sensible way of going about it,” she said generously. “Look at some of these dates, though. They go back ever such a long way.”

Paul looked. On the two pages open in front of him, the earliest date was 1857 and the most recent was 1941. One or two items had been crossed neatly through, to show that they’d been handed back to their owners or otherwise disposed of. Not many, though.

“And that’s not all,” he went on. “Over in that corner there, there’s a stack of great big trunks, like old–fashioned luggage; and cases, like musical instruments live in, and some tea chests, all sorts of things.”

“Well,” Sophie replied, turning the pages of the book, “at least it might give us some idea of what they do here.”

Paul nodded. “I guess so.” He’d just noticed a glass case of stuffed birds on a high shelf, and next to it a mechanic’s blue-painted toolbox. “Though it looks to me like this is the place people dump their old junk,” he said. “Though not lately,” he added thoughtfully.

“Doesn’t look like much of this stuff was put here recently. I mean, look at these envelopes full of papers.”

Sophie looked up. “They’re old envelopes,” she said.

Paul grinned. “Did you ever collect stamps? No, me neither. But these have got to be pretty old, they’ve got King George and King Edward on them, and Queen Victoria. Worth a bob or two, for all I know. I wonder if anybody’d miss them?”

Sophie scowled at him. “Don’t you dare,” she said. He shrugged.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “there’s not many with Queen Elizabeth on, and even those are pretty ancient. When did she come to the throne? Nineteen fifty-something? In fact,” he added quietly, “if there’s anything here that’s more recent than fifty years old, I haven’t spotted it yet. Maybe that old book’ll be more use than we thought.”

“I don’t think so,” Sophie answered. “We’ve still got to start from scratch, that’s all there is to it.” She closed the book with a snap and put it on a shelf. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll start here, by the door, and work our way round. You can do the writing-down to start with, while I call out. Okay?”

Paul nodded, and picked up a notebook and pencil, while Sophie broke open the box of yellow stickies. “I’ll start at one,” she said. “All right, here goes.” She took out the envelope at the front of the bottom shelf nearest the door, and opened it. “Item one,” she said. “Envelope of papers—no, don’t bother writing that down. Share certificates,” she announced, “let’s see, seven, eight, nine hundred shares in Whitlow’s Bank, in the name of G.L. Mayer, whoever he is. Was,” she corrected herself. “This certificate’s dated 1901, SO presumably he’s dead by now. Funny,” she added. “You’re supposed to write and tell the company when a shareholder dies, and they send you a new certificate. I know that from helping out in Dad’s office. It makes all sorts of problems with tax and stuff if you don’t.”