The Portable Door (1987) (29 page)

The smile faded, and she shrugged. “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said.

“Oh.”

Now she was grinning, the special secret grin of the House of Tanner. “You should see your face,” she said.

Instinctively, Paul tried to look normal. “Sorry,” he said. “But—oh for crying out loud, you’re Mr Tanner’s
mother
—”

“So?”

“Well—” Paul didn’t bother trying to complete the sentence. She knew what he meant.

That grin again. “Picky bugger, aren’t you? And there was me thinking I’d found Mr Right at last—shallow, immature, one-track mind. Desperate,” she added pleasantly. “That’s got to be the one,” she went on, “I mean, anybody who’s pathetic enough to go mooning round like a spaniel with the runs over a boring, miserable, bony little—”

“Look,” Paul said.

Mr Tanner’s mum fluttered her eyelashes at him. He’d never actually seen it done before. “Now me,” she said, “I’m shallow. I’m so shallow I’m a bloody rice paddy. Definitely a one-track mind. Also,” she added with a faint sigh, “desperate. But at least I don’t moon about. Acquire target, lock and load, that’s always been my motto. It’s the goblin way, it’s whatsit, cultural, like ancestor worship or Morris dancing.” She shook her head. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, mind,” she added fairly. “I mean, look what I got out of it. Our Dennis. But really, I’d have thought it’d have suited you down to the ground.”

Paul’s spine crawled. “No offence,” he said. “But.”

“Yeah, I’m a goblin, so fucking what?” She scowled; and a dozen or so assorted males saw her and thought,
What an incredibly gorgeous scowling girl
. “Why should you care? It may only be skin deep, but it’s a bloody sight better than you’ll ever get any other way. And it doesn’t wash off, or peel away at the full moon or anything. I can be this for as long as I want. Or I can do blonde if you’d rather.”

“No,” said Paul.

“Suit yourself.” She sighed. “Bloody fool, that’s what you are, though. You want to know where your precious Sophie is right now?”

“No.”

“Tough.” She closed her fist, then opened it again; and on the flat of her palm was a little round glass globe, which shone like a bonsai star. Paul tried to look away, but the light held him, and in the heart of the globe he could see the miserable Italian sandwich bar, and inside that a table, and on one side of it the back of a man’s head, and over his shoulder—

Mrs Tanner closed her hand. “
Your
special table,” she said, “where you and she went when she bought you that ham roll. She’s buying
him
ham rolls now.”

“Yes,” Paul snapped, “all right. I think it’s time I went back to the office now. If you came through the door, I guess you’d better come too.”

She shook her head. “I’d rather walk, thanks,” she said.

He looked at her. “From Ankara?”

“There’s short cuts,” she replied. “Takes about ten minutes, from here. Ask Countess Judy, or Ricky Wurmtoter. I guess that’s something you haven’t got your head round yet; things can be so much easier if you’re with us. And if you’re against us,” she added, “well—”

“I see,” Paul said.

She grinned. “No, you don’t, stupid,” she said. “I’m not threatening you, or anything like that. In fact, I probably still like you, if only because you get up our Dennis’s nose so much. I’m just telling you, that’s all. I don’t know,” she went on, finishing her coffee and licking the last smear of froth off the inside of the rim, “maybe I’m just getting soft-hearted in my old age. But you, there’s no excuse for you. What’s on the surface isn’t good enough, you’ve got to have solid milk chocolate all the way through. Bloody humans.”

“I thought you said I was shallow and pathetic?”

“I was being nice. In goblin terms, I mean. We pride ourselves on shallow. I guess that’s why your lot’s never liked us very much.”

“I suppose so,” Paul said, politely.

“Balls.” She grinned, again. “You don’t like us ‘cos we’ve got big teeth and claws and we only like our food if it’s still twitching a bit, and we don’t look like you. I’ll say this much for us, we’re much more broad-minded. I mean, lots of goblin girls fancy humans.”

Paul swallowed. “Really?”

“Straight up. We aren’t bothered because you don’t look like us. Looks don’t matter to us, see, because we can be anyone or Anything we like. That comes in dead handy when you’re shallow, like us.” She sighed. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “and you’re right. We look like horrible, savage monsters and we act like it, too, whereas your lot are all straight backs and smooth skins and ethics and right-and-wrong and doing the decent thing by each other and wanting to make the world a better place. Probably that’s why we fancy you, purely on a short-term, back-seat-of-a-car basis. There’s not a lot to be said for our mob, really, except that we’ve got all the money and we have all the fun.” She looked at him, then clicked her tongue. “Mostly, anyhow.”

She stood up. A waiter fell over a table. “Oh, and one other thing. I didn’t put you-know-what in your desk drawer, and neither did our Dennis. And it sure as buggery didn’t get there on its own. Now you think on.”

Paul jumped up. “Hold on,” he said. “Do you know who put it there?”

“Yes. Saw ‘em do it.”

“Fine. Who was it?”

But she shook her head. “Really and truly I’d like to tell you,” she said, “but I’m not allowed. Honestly,” she added. “Just watch out, that’s all. There’s a whole lot of stuff going on at the moment. Most of it’s nothing to do with you, but—” She shrugged. “Be careful. You’ve managed to get yourself mixed up with some very unusual people, not like the sort you grew up with. Compared with our lot, even the real bastards where you come from fight fair, give up their seats on trains to old ladies and only ever play for matchsticks. Like, for example, the very worst your kind can do to each other is kill someone. That’s practically Vegan when you consider what we get up to sometimes.” The Tanner grin flicked across her face. “Not that I’m trying to scare you or anything.”

“Of course not,” Paul replied. “And why the hell should I believe anything you tell me, anyhow?”

She smiled. “You know,” she said, “you’ve put me in mind of something a kid like you said to me once, not long after we’d had a chat pretty much on the lines of this one, where I’d told him to watch his back, and he said, Yeah, sure. Always stuck in my mind, it has, what he said then.”

“Really? What was that, then?”

“Aaaaargh,” Mr Tanner’s mum replied. “Be seeing you.”

T
here seemed to be no end to the spreadsheets. More than once, Paul nearly managed to nerve himself to go to Mr Tanner’s office and ask what they were for; after all, he was in on the big secret now, there was no reason why he shouldn’t be told. At least it torpedoed what had been his explanation of choice, namely that the spreadsheets were a futile exercise designed either to prompt his resignation or to test his aptitude for some other, more meaningful task. Instead, he was forced to conclude, there had to be some very good reason behind it all, something that justified employing two people. He wondered why he hadn’t been told what it was, now that he was officially a trainee wizard, or whatever he actually was. Presumably there was a very good reason for that, too.

Days on end now passed when he didn’t speak to Sophie at all; and when one or other of them did break silence, it was only to ask for the loan of a pencil, or to apologise for the accidental collision of feet under the desk. She went out for lunch every day. Whether she spent every lunchtime feeding ham rolls to the performance potter, or whether mostly she sat on her own in the miserable sandwich bar, Paul didn’t know and wasn’t going to ask. Whenever it occurred to him that the way he was behaving was childish, counter-productive, idiotic and just plain rude (which was generally no more than twice or three times an hour), a little voice in the back of his head pointed out that she was treating him exactly the same, and somehow that made it all right. He had a nasty suspicion that the little voice in the back of his head sounded just like Mrs Tanner, but on balance he rejected the idea. He didn’t need outside help to be childish and stupid, after all.

Every lunchtime he’d get out the portable door and set it up against the wall; but ever since the Ankara incident, he couldn’t quite bring himself to go through. It wasn’t just that he was terrified of meeting Mrs Tanner again—meeting her and not recognising her, or at least not until it was too late; somehow he’d lost his taste for the whole experience. It’d been fun, no question about that, but he couldn’t dislodge from his mind the thought that it was—well, shallow, just as the door itself was only about half a millimetre thick. Flying visits to exotic places, where he spent no money and no time, where the food didn’t make him fat and the booze didn’t make him drunk; how precisely was that different from Mr Tanner’s mum dressed in her skintight, skin-deep gorgeousness, picking up cute humans in bars? Goblin is, he couldn’t help thinking, as goblin does; and on balance, he’d rather be a failed human being.

Instead, he tried to resume the drab but familiar business of being Paul Carpenter. He rang up his friends, none of whom he’d spoken to for weeks (they hadn’t called him, of course) and arranged to meet them in pubs. He lost games of nomination whist with Duncan and Jenny, and listened to Neville whining about the iniquities of the Microsoft Corporation until it was time to go home. He defrosted frozen pizzas and caught up on his reading. That was all skin deep too, and he knew it; so much so that some days he dreaded looking into his shaving mirror, for fear he’d see a snout and tusks.

Then a Thursday came when he finished his stack of printouts and Julie came by to collect them but didn’t bring down any more. Instead, she told them both that they were wanted in the main conference room in half an hour. Sophie pointed out that she still had a heap of spreadsheets to do, but Julie just shrugged and said they’d have to wait; so Paul filled in the thirty minutes’ waiting time by finishing them off for her, something he hadn’t even suggested ever since the performance potter had appeared on the scene.

The conference room door was shut when they got there. Neither of them seemed to want to be the one to knock; instead, they stood outside like unwanted carol-singers. It was the first time Paul had been in the waiting area outside the conference room since his interview, and he couldn’t help thinking that if the magic stuff was worth its weight in dried snot, he’d be able to reach out an invisible hand and press a reset button. But then the door opened, and Mr Wurmtoter’s head appeared round it.

§

“There you are,” he said. “We were wondering where you’d got to.”

Today he was wearing a black polo neck under a houndstooth check sports jacket, and the claw on the chain round his neck was a dull ivory colour. He held the door open for them and they went through.

It was the same room, except that it wasn’t. The oak panelling on the walls was still the same light-devouring shade of black oak; the table was, if anything, even more brightly polished; the crystal chandelier might have grown an extra diamond or two, but that could just have been Paul’s imagination; the floorboards still groaned under his feet, as though demanding to know how long it was going to be before the partners bit the bullet and got rid of this clown. Every detail corresponded with the nightmare vision that had been engraved on his memory for the last few months, except—it took him something like twenty seconds before he realised what it was—the whole thing had rotated through ninety degrees. The curtained bay window, instead of being on the right, was now at the end, directly behind the chair at the head of the table.

Well
, Paul thought,
fine;
he dismissed the detail from his mind and tried to concentrate. Apart from himself, Sophie and Mr Wurmtoter, who was leaning against an ancient radiator that stood where the window had been last time, the only other person in the room was the grim-faced man he’d last seen at the interview, who he now knew to be Humphrey Wells. He ransacked his trivia banks and turned up his traumatic conversation with Mr Tanner on the night of the armed goblins. According to Mr Tanner, Mr Wells Junior was an Associate of the Society of Thaumaturgical Practitioners; what that actually meant he had no idea.

Mr Wells had his nose in a sheaf of papers when they came in, and it took thirty seconds or so for him to finish whatever it was he was doing; then he looked up, seemed to catch sight of Paul and Sophie out of the corner of his eye, and frowned. The impression he gave was that they were a tiresome chore that needed to be got out of the way before he could press on with the work he was meant to be doing. Not particularly subtle (Paul was prepared to bet money that the vitally important document he hadn’t been able to tear himself away from was
The Times
crossword, or something equally crucial) but it worked, so what the hell?

“Ms Pettingell,” he said, “Mr Carpenter, thanks for coming along.” He paused, as if trying to figure out why in hell he should want to expend lifespan on two such unsatisfactory specimens. “We haven’t seen much of each other since you joined the firm, so I thought it was about time we got together, got to know each other a bit better, find out how you’re settling in, all that sort of thing. Everything going well?” He allowed them a quarter of a second in which to reply, then continued: “I see you’ve been working with Dennis Tanner for the last few weeks; mineral rights development and office procedures.”

Silence, presumably requiring a reply. Before Paul could think of anything to say, Sophie muttered, “Yes.” It seemed to do the trick; Mr Wells nodded and jotted something down on his incredibly important piece of paper (probably a South American seabird, seven letters, beginning with J).

“Excellent,” said Mr Wells. “Now the drill is, we like our trainees to spend a few weeks with each of the partners in turn, so we can assess where your particular strengths lie, and you can decide which area of our business you’d like to specialise in. Usually when we have two trainees at one time, we assign them to different departments.” He raised his head as he said this and looked directly at them for the first time since they’d entered the room. “But as it happens, right now I’m engaged on a project that calls for what you might describe as support in depth, so both of you will be working with me. Any problems with that?”