In the end, he looked at his fist, lying like a leaden paperweight on the stack, and at the crumbled end of his pencil. He licked the dent in his forefinger and flipped through the pages. Twenty or thirty of them, newly buttoned, lay neatly on the desk … the rest mounted obstinately upwards. He checked the clock: he had not risen for more than seven hours. To save a minute, he had gone so far — God help him! — as to pass water in the waste-paper basket. But it was no good. Even as he calculated the extent of his commitment, the corners of the page under his fist, the page he had just finished correcting, twitched and curled into dog-ears. Exhausted, he fell back in his chair and watched the papers rising slowly into the air, gathering under the ceiling like cumulus, blown this way and that in the breeze from the fan, scudding against the mouldy cornices, sinking down in the four corners of the room. Enough was enough. He reached for the telephone.
‘This is the residence of Aubrey Fluxman,’ the machine began. ‘Should you wish to leave a message …’
*
Fluxman had also been working that morning, banging away at the typewriter, when the lenses of his spectacles began to vibrate. He knew at once that something catastrophic was afoot. He listened to the first breathless accounts of the unfolding drama on the radio while he tweezered a screw from among the hammers. Then he slipped into a serviceable tracksuit, with an elasticized waistband, and went out into the streets.
The fruits of that convulsive instant lay scattered everywhere. The riverside coffee bars and eateries stood empty. In the shadowy interior of the Hottentot, which he had frequented in his youth, a leather banquette coughed. He crept in to take samples, hooking red and brown buttons from their resting places with the end of his pencil. He ventured into the furniture factory as well, despite the warnings of the security guards, to see with his own eyes the dowelled dead in the basement, sprawled among scatter cushions as fat as puffer fish, looking for all the world as if they had merely lain down to rest. In the Gravy Boat, it was business as usual. Just hours before, the regular morning sprinkling of tea-sippers and French-knitters had rushed away in a panic when the armchairs inflated beneath them. But the proprietor was treating it all with the levity appropriate to a minor mishap. Half-price for standing room only, snacks on the house. Finding a pillar to lean against, Fluxman ate a Croque Monsieur and drank a beer, which he normally denied himself in the daylight hours. Later, he simply wandered through the unnaturally rounded afternoon, mourning every vanished quilt and pucker in the urban upholstery.
Although it was early, many businesses had closed their doors, and the streets were filling with people on their way home from work, clerks and secretaries stepping warily from the lobbies of office buildings, blinking into the light like people after a matinée at the cinema. The gondolas were packed with more than the usual quota of tourists and touts, the carriages of the funiculars were bursting. Everywhere he saw the same bewildered expressions, the same pursed lips, which might be suppressing laughter or tears, the same downcast eyes, as if people were hunting for fallen change in the cracks of the pavements. They hurried by or stood whispering furtively on street corners, avoiding one another’s eyes, clutching handfuls of their own clothing. Fluxman moved among them, wide-eyed, gazing at bare flesh between yawning lapels, coats held together with paper clips, safety-pinned cuffs and stapled shirt-fronts. On a corner near the station, a businessman was plucking the rubber-banded toggles of his duffel coat, and Fluxman, stooping to gather more samples, listened to that elastic adagio as if he had never heard music before.
Arriving home in the early hours, he let his answering machine stammer out its messages. Please to call Figg. Enough is enough: a meeting of the Society is in order. Then the worried voice of Munnery: Figg suggests a meeting. What do you think? Then Levitas, who hated speaking on the telephone. Munnery had called him too, and Wiederkehr, and Banes. Then Figg again, sounding drunk. The whole Society was in an uproar.
*
It became clear at last to the most faithful Members of the Society, standing by with their bundles of pencils, that the call for help from the City Fathers would never come. It was a bitter pill, but it had to be swallowed.
An extraordinary meeting of the Society was convened at short notice on the night after the great unfastening. They gathered at the Café Europa as usual, and although some semblance of calm had returned to the city after the disturbances of the previous day, each had a story to tell about the hazards he had faced just making his way through the streets to their rendezvous.
Wiederkehr had almost plunged into a crevasse that had opened up in the cobbles at his feet as he crossed St Cloud’s Square.
‘It may have been an unguarded excavation,’ Fluxman ventured to say. ‘You know how the procurers are always stealing the red lanterns.’
‘It was a dry dock,’ Wiederkehr said tetchily. ‘It gaped as suddenly as speaking. One moment there was solid earth beneath my bluchers, the next a black hole as big as ten swimming baths, with a catamaran lying in the deep end.’
‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, I nearly broke my neck too,’ said Munnery. ‘Fell over a tombstone in the High Street. I transposed it at once with a mossy bench from the boneyard, but the damage had already been done.’ He showed them the torn knees of his suit.
Fluxman noticed, as he examined his friend’s frayed tweed, that his trousers were tied up with a length of typewriter ribbon, but he said nothing. Munnery had brought a bulging portfolio of maps with him, and while they spoke, he was readjusting the highways and byways with his blue pencil, and keeping an eye on the more irresponsible rezonings.
‘If the Fathers will not come to us, we must go to them,’ Fluxman said when it was his turn to speak. ‘We must do our duty for Alibia.’
‘About time,’ said Figg. ‘What shall we say?’
‘The simple truth: stop putting the cart before the horse. Take care of the paperwork, and the world will take care of itself.’
‘But who will believe it?’ said Banes.
As if to support his point, the first municipal reupholstery squad burst in through the batwing doors, clutching lumpy pouches full of leather-covered buttons, and waving bodkins as long as pencils. They fell to with a vengeance. Most of the patrons fled. But the Members would not budge, on principle, and boldly continued with their meeting. For their pains, Munnery got the sleeve of his jacket stitched to the arm of his chair, and might have spent the night there, had Wiederkehr not slashed him loose with a swift pass of his 2B.
*
Naturally, it fell to Fluxman to lead the delegation that went to discuss the problem of declining standards with the City Fathers.
A special audience was held in the oak-panelled council chamber. Fluxman presented their case. He showed how the seeds of decline had been sown in mischief and trivialities. He pointed to instances of looming chaos, like the great unfastening, and cited statistics on damage to property, loss of life and limb, and low levels of investor confidence. He painted a gloomy picture of a future in which everything was out of order, and nothing ran smoothly to a creditable conclusion.
‘If appropriate measures to secure law and order are not taken soon,’ he concluded, ‘it will be too late. Getting things right is not just a matter of form (although that is important enough in itself), but of necessity. Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured.’