Just before closing he came back to his seat from the chief clerk’s desk, and found that he had no customers – he glanced out, saw Heather cross the Public Space to stand by the door, and sensed already the little shift of perspective that would come about when she locked it shut, and the team were left alone again. Perhaps it was just a new boy’s self-consciousness, but he felt a mood of solidarity settled on the staff when the public had gone. They barely showed it, of course – ‘No, you’re just in time!’ said Heather, with a grudging laugh, and Paul saw a large young man scoot in past her, smiling keenly, though in fact it was 3.28, he was within his rights, and the smile expressed confidence more than apology. He was feeling in his breast pocket, his smile now slightly mischievous as he homed in on Geoff’s position, where a customer was already waiting. Paul had an impression of quirky liveliness and scruffiness, such as you didn’t see much in a town like this, something artistic and a little preoccupied, more like a person from London or it could be Oxford, only fifteen miles away. He could well be an Oxford type, with his pale linen jacket curling at the lapels and his blue knitted tie. A pen had made a red ink stain, not far from his heart. His dark curly hair half-covered his ears, there was something witty and attractive in his expression, though he wasn’t exactly handsome. Paul leant forward and for a few expanded, trance-like seconds watched him gazing at Geoff, over the shoulder of the man in front of him. His head was on one side, with the vacantly calculating frown of impatience, the tip of his tongue on his lower lip; and then, just for a moment, his face stiffened, his eyes widened as if to fill themselves with Geoff, and then narrowed into a slow blink of amused indulgence; and of course Paul knew, and his heart thumped with feelings he couldn’t disentangle, of curiosity, envy and alarm. ‘Can I help you?’ he said, and his own voice sounded loud and almost mocking.
The man looked at him without moving his head, and then with a widening smile, as if he knew he’d been caught out. He came over. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘you’re new!’
‘Yes, I’m the new boy,’ said Paul, pleasantly, and feeling a bit silly.
The man looked at him appreciatively as he felt in his breast pocket. ‘Well, me too,’ he said, his voice quick and deep, with a curl of humour in it.
‘Oh, yes?’ said Paul, wary of being too familiar, but laughing a little.
‘Well, new master, but it’s much the same. Now I’ve got to pay this in for the Colonel.’ He had a paying-in book, the slip all made out, and a cheque for £94: Corley Court School, General Account. Paul saw, in the moment he stamped it, an image of the school, teeming and condensed, wealthy and famous, he was sure, though he had never heard of it.
‘Where is it, actually?’ he said.
‘What, Corley?’ – the man said the word as one might London, perhaps, or Dijon, with cultured certainty and polite surprise. ‘It’s out on the Oxford road, about three miles away. It’s a prep-a-ra-turry school,’ he said, in a Noël Coward voice.
‘The bank is about to close, ladies and gentlemen!’ announced Heather.
‘Look, you’d better give me some money,’ said the man. ‘Don’t they have drinking-up time in here?’
‘Afraid not,’ said Paul, with a nod and a smile, in the way one always conceded a customer might have a point; but with some further concession of this one’s charm. The man looked at him acutely for a moment before getting out his pen; he had one of those thick biros with four different colours, red, green, black and blue. He wrote a cheque for £5, in neat but imaginative writing, having chosen the green ink. His name was P. D. Rowe. Peter Rowe in the signature.
‘End of the month,’ he said, ‘we’re paid today.’
‘How would you like it?’
‘Oh, god… four pound notes and a pound in silver. Yes,’ said Peter Rowe, as he watched, nodding his head, ‘time to go really wild this weekend.’
Paul tittered without looking at him, and then said, ‘Where can you go wild round here, I wonder?’ very quietly, as he really didn’t want Susie to hear him.
‘Hmm, yes, I take your point,’ said Peter Rowe. Paul felt oddly conscious of at last having a personal conversation, as the other cashiers did with the customers they knew, and though he didn’t know Peter Rowe at all, he was very interested in the answer. ‘I always think there must be something going on, don’t you?’ He received the money and slid the coins into a D-shaped leather purse he had. ‘Though in a little place like this, it may take some finding.’ He smiled, with a flicker of eyebrows.
Paul heard himself saying, ‘Well, let me know!’ Whatever this going wild entailed had only the vaguest form in his head, and his excitement was mixed with a feeling he was out of his depth.
‘Okay, I will,’ said Peter Rowe. As he crossed the Public Space he glanced in at Geoff again with another little flicker of comic surmise, which Paul felt in a horrified rush of understanding was meant as a sign to him too, and then looked back with a flash of a grin as he went out through the door.
On the way home Paul thought about Peter Rowe and wondered if he’d see him again straight away in the town. But most of the shops were shut and the pubs not yet open and a mood of premature vacancy had settled on the sun-raked length of Vale Street. He felt weary but restless, shut out from the normal play of a Friday night. All down the street, house-doors were protected by striped awnings, or stood open behind bead curtains to let in the air. He caught radio talk, music, a man raising his voice as he went into another room. The drapers and outfitters had covered their shop-windows with cellophane to keep the goods from bleaching in the sun. It was the sugary gold of the cellophane on a bottle of Lucozade, and changed all the clothes inside into unappealing greens and greys. On the tiny stage of Mews’ window a woman stepped forward, through the amber light, in a cotton frock, her blank face and pointed fingers raised in genteel animation; while a man stood dependably, in flannels and a cravat, with an endlessly patient smile. They had been like that all week, flies buzzing and dying at their feet, and would surely remain there till the season changed, when one day the peg-board screen behind would shift, and a living arm come groping through. Paul went on, glancing unhappily at his strolling reflection. In the chemists’ window there were those enormous tear-shaped bottles of murky liquid, blue, green or yellow, which must have some ancient symbolic function. Dim sediment gathered in them. He wondered what happened at a wild weekend – he saw Peter dancing to ‘Twist and Shout’ with a roomful of friends from Oxford. Perhaps he was going to Oxford for the party; a preparatory school was hardly the place for a rave-up. He didn’t fancy Peter, he felt slightly threatened by him, and saw their friendship stirring suspicions in the bank. Already he seemed to be a week or two ahead.
After supper he went up to write his diary, but felt oddly reluctant to describe his own mood. He lay on the bed, staring. He wrote, ‘Mrs Keeping came into the bank before lunch, but she totally ignored me, it was quite emb. Mr K v cool too, and only said he hoped my hand was all right. Also Mrs Jacobs took ages to realize who I was, though then she was reasonably friendly. She drew out £25. I don’t think she could remember my name, she referred to me as “our young man”.’ Something about the clashing curtains and the carpet, both nice enough in themselves, made Paul feel acutely lonely, the three mirrors of the dressing-table blocking the evening sun. The bulb in the ceiling light glowed in weak competition with it. There was the matching suite, dressing-table, wardrobe, bed with quilted headboard, and then nothing that went with anything else. They had the air of things not wanted elsewhere in the house, the scratchy armchair, the wrought-iron lamp, the souvenir ashtrays, the brown wool rug made by Mr Marsh himself, at what must have been a low moment. Paul started on a sentence about Peter Rowe coming into the bank, but a superstitious impulse made him cross it out after three or four words. He blocked out the words with his biro till the place shone.