Office Romances
‘Oh no, I couldn’t,’ Angela said in the outer office. ‘Really, Mr Spelle. Thank you, though.’
‘Don’t you drink then, Miss Hosford? Nary a drop at all?’ He laughed at his own way of putting it. He thought of winking at her as he laughed, but decided against it: girls like this were sometimes scared out of their wits by a wink.
‘No, it’s not that, Mr Spelle –’
‘It’s just that it’s a way of getting to know people. Everyone else’ll be down in the Arms, you know.’
Hearing that, she changed her mind and quite eagerly put the grey plastic cover on her Remington International. She’d refused his invitation to have a drink because she’d been flustered when he’d come into the outer office with his right hand poked out for her to shake, introducing himself as Gordon Spelle. He hadn’t said anything about the other people from the office being there: in a matter of seconds he’d made the whole thing sound romantic, a tête-à-tête with a total stranger. Any girl’s reaction would be to say she couldn’t.
‘Won’t be a moment, Mr Spelle,’ she said. She picked up her handbag from the floor beside her chair and walked with it from the office. Behind her, she heard the office silence broken by a soft whistling: Gordon Spelle essaying ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’.
Angela had started at C.S. & E. at half past nine that morning, having been interviewed a month ago by Miss Ivygale, her immediate employer. Miss Ivygale was a slender woman of fifty or thereabouts, her face meticulously made up. Her blue-grey hair was worked on daily by a hairdresser, a Mr Patric, whom twice that day she’d mentioned to Angela, deploring the fact that next March he was planning to leave the Elizabeth Salon. At C.S. & E. Miss Ivygale occupied an inner office that was more luxuriously appointed than the outer one where Angela sat with her filing cabinets and her Remington International. On the window-sill of the outer office Miss Ivygale’s last secretary, whom she referred to as Sue, had left a Busy Lizzie in a blue-glazed pot. There was a calendar that showed Saturdays and Sundays in red, presented by the Michelin Tyre Company.
In a small lavatory Angela examined her face in the mirror over the wash-basin. She sighed at her complexion. Her eyes had a bulgy look because of her contact lenses. The optician had said the bulgy look would go when the lids became used to the contact lenses, but as far as she was concerned it never had. ‘No, no, you’re imagining it, Miss Hosford,’ the optician had said when she’d gone back after a month to complain that the look was still there.
In the lavatory she touched one or two places on her cheeks with Pure Magic and powdered over it. She rubbed lipstick into her lips and then pressed a tissue between them. She ran a comb through her hair, which was fluffed up because she’d washed it the night before: it was her best feature, she considered, a pretty shade, soft and naturally curly.
‘I like your dress, Miss Hosford,’ he said when she returned to the outer office. ‘Fresh as a flower it looks.’ He laughed at his own description of the blue-and-white dress she was wearing. The blue parts were flowers of a kind, he supposed, a type of blue geranium they appeared to be, with blue leaves sprouting out of blue stems. Extraordinary, the tasteless stuff a girl like this would sometimes wear.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘We don’t bother much with surnames at C.S. & E.,’ he told her as they walked along a green-carpeted corridor to a lift. ‘All right to call you Angela, Miss Hosford?’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
He closed the lift doors. He smiled at her. He was a tall, sleek man who had something the matter with his left eye, a kind of droop in the upper lid and a glazed look in the eye itself, a suggestion of blindness. Another oddness about him, she thought in the lift, was his rather old-fashioned suit. It was a pepper-coloured suit with a waistcoat, cut in an Edwardian style. His manners were old-fashioned too, and the way he spoke had a pedantic air to it that recalled the past: Edwardian again perhaps, she didn’t know. It seemed right that he had whistled ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ rather than a current pop song.
‘I suppose it’s your first job, Angela?’
‘Oh, heavens, no!’
‘I’d say you were twenty.’
‘Twenty-six, actually.’
He laughed. ‘I’m thirty-eight myself.’
They left the lift and walked together through the elegant reception area of C.S. & E. When she’d walked through it for her interview Angela had been reminded of the lounge of a large, new hoteclass="underline" there were sofas and armchairs covered in white ersatz leather, and steel-framed reproductions of paintings by Paul Klee on rust-coloured walls, and magazines on steel-topped tables. When Angela had come for her interview, and again when she’d arrived at C.S. & E. that morning, there’d been a beautiful black-haired girl sitting at the large reception desk, which was upholstered here and there in the same ersatz leather as the sofas and the armchairs. But at this time of the evening, five to six, the beautiful black-haired girl was not there.
‘I’d really have said it was your first job,’ he said when they reached the street. He smiled at her. ‘Something about you.’
She knew what he meant. She was often taken to be younger than she was, it had something to do with being smalclass="underline" five foot one she was, with thin, small arms that she particularly disliked. And of course there was her complexion, which was a schoolgirl complexion in the real sense, since schoolgirls rather than adults tended to be bothered with pimples. ‘Attack them from inside, Miss Hosford,’ her doctor had advised. ‘Avoid all sweets and chocolate, avoid cakes and biscuits with your coffee. Lots of lemon juice, fresh fruit, salads.’ She ate lots of fruit and salads anyway, just in case she’d get fat, which would have been the last straw. She naturally never ate sweet things.
‘Horrid being new,’ he said. ‘Like your first day at school.’
The street, fashionably situated just off Grosvenor Square, was busy with people impatient to be home: it was a cold night in November, not a night for loitering. Girls in suede boots or platform shoes had turned up the collars of their coats. Some carried bundles of letters which had been signed too late to catch the afternoon dispatch boys. In the harsh artificial light their faces were pale, sometimes garish with make-up: the light drew the worst out of girls who were pretty, and killed the subtleties of carefully chosen lipstick and make-up shades. God alone knew, Angela said to herself, what it did to her. She sighed, experiencing the familiar feeling of her inferiority complex getting the upper hand.
‘Hullo, Gordon,’ a man in a black overcoat said to Gordon Spelle. The man had been walking behind them for some time, while Angela had been listening to Gordon Spelle going on about the first day he’d spent at school. Miserable beyond measure he’d been.
‘God, it’s chilly,’ the man said, dropping into step with them and smiling at Angela.
‘Angela Hosford,’ Gordon Spelle said. ‘She’s come to work for Pam Ivygale.’
‘Oh, Pam, dear Pam!’ the man said. He laughed in much the same way as Gordon Spelle was given to laughing, or so it seemed to Angela. His black overcoat had a little rim of black fur on its collar. His hair was black also. His face in the distorting street-light had a purple tinge, and Angela guessed that in normal circumstances it was a reddish face.
‘Tommy Blyth,’ Gordon Spelle said.
They entered a public house at the corner of a street. It was warm there, and crowded, and quite attractively noisy. Fairy lights were draped on a Christmas tree just inside the door because Christmas was less than six weeks away. Men like Tommy Blyth, in overcoats with furred collars and with reddish faces, were standing by a coal fire with glasses in their hands. One of them had his right arm round the waist of C.S. & E.’s black-haired receptionist.