‘How about Strollers?’ Lilia was asking, and Tip Dainty pointed out that Clark’s were using it already. ‘Cliff Hangers, Strath?’ Lilia repeated, but in his blunt, rugby-playing way R.B. Strathers said Cliff Hangers was useless.
Mulvihill’s sister, who was the manageress of a mini-market, was surprised when Mulvihill didn’t put in an appearance at a quarter to nine, his usual time on Fridays. Every other evening he was back by ten past seven, in time for most of the Archers, but on Fridays he liked to finish off his week’s work so as to have a clean plate on Monday. He smelt a little of the wine he drank in the Trumpet Major, but since he always told her the gossip he’d picked up she never minded in the least having to keep their supper back. She knew it wasn’t really for the gossip he went to the public house but in order to pass a few moments with Ox-Banham and R.B. Strathers, to whom he owed his position at Ygnis and Ygnis. Not that either Ox-Banham or R.B. Strathers had employed him in the first place – neither had actually been at Ygnis and Ygnis in those days – but Ox-Banham had since become the executive to whom Mulvihill was mainly responsible and R.B. Strathers was naturally important, being the managing director. Miss Mulvihill had never met these men, but imagined them easily enough from the descriptions that had been passed on to her: Ox-Banham tight-faced in a striped dark suit, R.B. Strathers big, given to talking about rugby matches he had played in. Lilia was peculiar by the sound of her, and Capstick, who designed the best advertisements in Ygnis and Ygnis, was a bearded little creature with a tendency to become insulting when, he reached a certain stage in drunkenness. Tip Dainty became genial.
Miss Mulvihill missed these people, her Friday people as she thought of them: she felt deprived as she impatiently waited, she even felt a little cross. Her brother had said he was going to pick up the timber pieces for the bookcase, but he’d have done that in his lunchtime. Never in a million years would he just stay on drinking, he didn’t even like the taste. Shortly after ten o’clock the Scotch terrier, Pasco, became agitated, and at eleven Miss Mulvihill noticed that her crossness had turned to fear. But it wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that she telephoned the police.
On the following Monday morning the employees of Ygnis and Ygnis arrived at the office building variously refreshed after their weekend. The body had been removed from the back lift, no trace of the death remained. The Hungarian, Wilkinski, was surprised that Mulvihill was not already in the office they shared, for normally he was the first of the two to arrive. He was still pondering the cause of this when the tea-woman, Edith, told him she’d heard Mulvihill had died. She handed Wilkinski his tea, with two lumps of sugar in the saucer, and even while she released the news she poured from her huge, brown enamel teapot a cup for the deceased. ‘Oh, stupid thing!’ she chided herself.
‘But however dead, Edith? However he die, my God?’
Edith shook her head. It was terrible, she said, placing the edge of the teapot on Mulvihill’s drawing-board because it was heavy to hold. She still couldn’t believe it, she said, laughing and joking he’d been Friday, right as rain. ‘Well, it just goes to show,’ she said. ‘Poor man!’
‘Are you sure of this, Edith?’ The fat on Wilkinski’s face was puckered in mystification, his thick spectacles magnifying the confusion in his eyes. ‘Dead?’ he said again.
‘Definitely,’ Edith added, and moved on to spread the news.
My God, dead! Wilkinski continued to reflect, for several minutes unable to drink his tea and finding it cold when he did so. Mulvihill had been the easiest man in the world to share an office with, neither broody nor a bore, a pleasant unassuming fellow, perhaps a little over-worried about the safety of his job, but then who doesn’t have faults in this world? He’d been happy, as far as Wilkinski had ever made out, with his sister and their dog in Purley, a few friends in on a Saturday night to cheese and wine, old films on the television. Anything to do with films had interested him, photography being as much of a hobby as his do-it-yourself stuff. In 1971, when Wilkinski’s elder daughter married, Mulvihill had recorded the occasion with the camera he’d just bought. He’d made an excellent job of it, with titles he’d lettered himself, and a really impressive shot of the happy couple coming down the steps of the reception place. Unfortunately the marriage had broken up a year ago, and the film was no longer of interest. As dead as poor old Mulvihill, Wilkinski thought sadly: my God, it just goes to show. Ernie Tap low, the art buyer’s assistant, came in at that point, shaking his head over the shock of it. And then Len Billings came in, and Harry Plant, and Carol Trotter the typographer.
Elsewhere in the building life continued normally that morning. The confectionery manufacturers arrived to see the proposals Ygnis and Ygnis had to put to them concerning the promotion of their new chocolate bar. Ox-Banham displayed posters and advertisements, and the labels and window-stickers Mulvihill had designed. ‘Go,’ one of the confectionery men said. ‘Yes, I like that.’ Ox-Banham took them down to the television theatre and showed them a series of commercials in which children were dressed up as cowboys and Indians. Afterwards his secretary, Rowena, poured them all drinks in his office, smiling at them and murmuring because it was part of her duty to be charming. Just occasionally as she did so she recalled the conjunction that had taken place in the office on Friday evening, Ox-Banham’s wiry body as brown as a nut in places, the smell of his underarm-odour preventive. She liked it to take place in the dark, but he preferred the lights on and had more than once mentioned mirrors, although there were no mirrors in the office. They took it in turns, his way one week, hers the next. The only trouble was that personally she didn’t much care for him. ‘I want you to fix it immediately,’ she’d said in her no-nonsense voice on Friday, and this morning he’d arranged for her to be moved into the copy department at the end of the month. ‘I’ll need a new girl,’ .he’d said, meaning a secretary. ‘I’ll leave that to you.’
Ox-Banham introduced the confectionery men to R.B. Strathers, in whose office they had another drink. He then took them to lunch, referring in the taxi to the four times Strathers had been a reserve for the South African rugby team: often a would-be client was impressed by this fact. He didn’t mention Mulvihill’s death, even though there might have been a talking point in the fact that the chap who’d designed the wrapper for the Go bar had had a heart attack in a lift. But it might also have cast a gloom, you never could tell, so he concentrated instead on making sure that each of the confectionery men had precisely what he wished to have in the way of meat and vegetables, solicitously filling up the wine-glass of the one who drank more than the others. He saw that cigars and brandy were at hand when the moment came, and in the end the most important man said, ‘I think we buy it.’ All the others agreed: the image that had been devised for the chocolate bar was an apt one, its future safe in the skilful hands of Ygnis and Ygnis.
‘Wednesday,’ said Miss Mulvihill on the telephone to people who rang with messages of sympathy. ‘Eleven-thirty, Putney Vale Crematorium.’
As the next few weeks went by so life continued smoothly in the Ygnis and Ygnis building. Happy in the copy writing department, Rowena practised the composition of slogans and thought up trade names for shoes, underwear and garden seeds. She wrote a television commercial for furniture polish, and explained to Ox-Banham that there would now be no more Friday evenings. She began to spend her lunchtimes with a new young man in market research. Unlike Ox-Banham, he was a bachelor.