The Portable Door (1987)

by Tom Holt

  She nodded. “You didn’t fancy going with them?”

  “I wasn’t asked.”

  “Oh.” She frowned. “My sister Fleur—she’s five years older than me; she works for a bank, and they sent her to New York for a year. She really liked it over there.”

  “Mum and Dad say it’s great there,” he said. “Nice hot weather, and the people are very friendly. I’d like to go and visit them,” he added, “some day, when I’ve saved up.”

  “Fleur’s in Borneo at the moment,” she said. “After that, it’ll probably be either Tokyo or Chile. Travelling around is one of the things she likes most about her job.”

  Paul decided he couldn’t care less about her sister Fleur. “Sounds pretty interesting,” he said.

  “Oh, most of the time it’s just sitting behind a desk, talking on the phone,” Sophie replied. “And I don’t think she’s ever got time to go out and see things or stuff like that. Still, I guess it must be nice to know that you’re in the same country as all the scenery and fascinating stuff, even if you never get around to doing anything about it before it’s time to come home. It’s like me,” she added, with a faint wry grin. “A cousin of mine came up from the country to stay for a while, and she went off to see the Tower and St Paul’s and the Planetarium and the London Eye and all that sort of thing, and a week later she’d done it all and went back to Norwich. I’ve lived here since I was three and never been to any of them. I suppose I might get around to it some day. But it just goes to show; you can be surrounded on all sides by loads of amazing stuff and never really know it was there.”

  He had the feeling that she was telling him something, but he couldn’t make out what it was. “I went to the Planetarium once,” he said, “with a school party. Can’t say I liked it much. You had to lean right back in your seat to see what was going on, and I hurt my neck.”

  There wasn’t much anybody could say about that, and Sophie duly didn’t say it. Paul had the feeling that things weren’t going well. This was supposed to be the stage where you got talking about things—family, childhood experiences, all that stuff—and lost track of the time, and eventually the waiters came and threw you out because they wanted to tidy up and go home. He was sure that was how it was supposed to be, and presumably Uncle Trevor and Cousin-in-law Eric had been here and done this and got a passing grade at the very least, good enough to get them through into the next round. He tried to think of a perceptive observation about Life, but nothing occurred to him.

  “Eat your ham roll,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Your ham roll,” she said. “You haven’t touched it.”

  “Oh, right.” He wasn’t the least bit hungry; also, he had no illusions about what sort of spectacle he presented when consuming food. In fact, he’d always been deeply puzzled as to why so many dates, assignations and encounters are traditionally structured around meals; because by no stretch of the imagination is eating an attractive spectacle, and even golden lads and lasses tend to sound like hotel plumbing when drinking soup. He nibbled self-consciously at the rock-hard roll, and was painfully aware of the crumbs that snowed down his shirt-front.

  “Did you bring an old pullover?” she asked.

  He nodded gratefully. “I don’t know if he actually meant that seriously or if it was just him being funny,” he said, “but I thought I’d better not take any chances. What about you?”

  Her eyebrows tightened a little. “That’s why I’m wearing this horrible scruffy old suit I bought for six pounds in an Oxfam shop,” she replied. “Not that it bothers me at all, I hate having to wear all these stupid work clothes. My mum had to go out and get them for me, I haven’t got a clue about all that stuff. Might as well be back at school, wearing uniform.”

  Paul nodded. In the wild, he wore interchangeable jeans and anything he happened to find in the T–shirt drawer that passed the sniff test. Dressing up in suits struck him as a bizarre leftover from a previous century, while doing laundry and ironing shirts had come as a very nasty shock, as if he’d gone to the doctors and been prescribed a course of leeches.

  “I’m still not sure exactly what it is we’re meant to be doing,” he said. “For one thing, what do they need a strongroom for? I thought that was just banks.”

  She shook her head. “Lawyers and accountants too,” she said. “My dad’s office has got one. Well, they call it a strongroom; it’s actually a converted toilet with a Yale lock on the door. It’s where they keep people’s share certificates and bonds and stuff.”

  He thought for a moment. “Maybe that’s what J.W. Wells and Co. does,” he speculated. “Maybe they’re just accountants, after all.”

  “Don’t think so,” she replied. “I mean, I’m not an expert or anything, but it doesn’t strike me as much like my dad’s place. I think they’re either stockbrokers or they do import-export. Or commodities,” she added, “whatever that involves. I think they buy up loads of stuff from one lot of companies and sell it to another lot of companies for more than they paid for it.”

  “The bauxite, you mean?”

  “Yes, though really that wouldn’t fit at all, would it? Maybe they’re into mineral rights as well as minerals.”

  Paul frowned. He wasn’t sure minerals had rights, though he couldn’t see offhand why they shouldn’t. He couldn’t remember having seen mineral rights activists picketing steelworks on the telly, or being stopped in the street and asked to sign petitions about it, but maybe the movement was still in its infancy.

  At five to two they went back to the office. The long stapler had, of course, vanished.

  “My turn,” Sophie said. “I’ll go and look for it, and you can get on with the collating. All right?”

  He’d been working away steadily for something like a quarter of an hour, his mind very much on other matters, when the door opened and someone he recognised drifted in; a tall, thin bald man, with clumps of white hair over his ears that reminded Paul of snow on the mountains in summer.

  “Mr Carpenter,” he said. He sounded annoyed, and nervous. “I don’t think we’ve met since you came for interview. I am Theodorus Van Spee.” He held out a long-fingered, liver-spotted hand with bitten fingernails. On its middle finger was a thin silver ring.

  “Hello,” Paul said awkwardly. Mr Van Spee (only he liked to be called Professor, Paul remembered) might look frail, but he had a grip like a scrapyard car-crusher. “Um, what can I do for you?”

  The Professor seemed to be looking over Paul’s shoulder. “Oh, there’s nothing at the moment,” he said, in an accent that Paul reckoned was probably Dutch. “I was passing and thought I might as well introduce myself. Your colleague, Ms Pettingell; she’s not here—”

  “She’s looking for something,” Paul said. “The stapler. We need it to staple up the—” He stopped babbling. “She’ll be back any minute,” he said. “Did you want—?”

  The Professor’s thin lips curved very slightly into the ghost of a smile. “No, there is nothing important, I simply wished to introduce myself to her also, not having encountered her since the interview. So,” he went on, looking Paul straight in the eye and reminding him uncomfortably of several headmasters he’d known in his youth, “how are you settling in with us? Smoothly, I hope.”

  For some reason, Paul felt a sudden urge to tell this strange man the truth; the whole truth, including the bits about swords in stones, frozen pizzas, claw-marks and Gilbert and Sullivan. In fact, it was only his instinctive terror of tall, thin authority figures that stopped him. “Oh, fine,” he said.

  “Excellent,” said Professor Van Spee, frowning slightly. “No doubt to begin with everything seems a little strange, but that will quickly pass, I’m sure.” Once again he was staring over Paul’s shoulder at the blank wall, as if he was expecting to see something there. “And no doubt it is easier, the two of you starting at the same time. Always it’s easier when there are two, easier to learn the ropes together. It was so when I first started here. I began as a
clerk, you see, just as you are now, but that was many years ago.”

  Paul wanted to turn round and see just what was so fascinating about the wall, but he didn’t. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a great help.”

  The Professor nodded absently. “And Ms Pettingell is a charming young lady,” he said. “She has a birthmark just above her navel, and her pet rabbit was called Lucky, though he died nine years ago. You should not buy her flowers, that would be most inappropriate, but she has a weakness for Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, although she is reluctant to admit it. She has no great interest in music, but you would do well to familiarise yourself with the works of Dickens, Turgenev and Dick Francis, all of which,” he added with a slight frown, “she reads for pleasure. Some knowledge of contemporary art would stand you in good stead, but guard against any temptation to show off; better to avoid the topic completely. Cars bore her; she affects an enthusiasm for motorcycles, but this is only to annoy her parents, in reality she does not care for them. Coca-Cola and fizzy orange she detests, though she will eat hamburgers and pizza if she is hungry; regularity of meals matters more to her than quantity or indeed quality, and often when she is surly and short-tempered, it is only because she needs something to eat. She drinks beer ostentatiously so as to appear unfeminine, but does not like the taste. You should avoid any mention of Birmingham, lest it awaken old memories that may distress her. Rats don’t trouble her; snakes and spiders do. She is firmly convinced that she is not beautiful; to assure her otherwise would merely antagonise her. Compliments should therefore concern her intelligence, resourcefulness and generosity of spirit—and should you choose to offer words of praise in respect of any of these, your remarks would be far from empty flattery.” A small gnat whirred past the Professor’s left ear; he snapped it out of the air between thumb and middle finger without looking at it. “Where money is concerned she is prudent and scrupulous, almost to a fault; be sure to repay what you borrow, though avoiding undue haste, and do not offer to pay for her in restaurants or places of entertainment. If you dine out together, take pains to remember what you ordered, so that the bill may be apportioned quickly and without dispute. She attended dancing lessons until she was twelve; she claims to despise dancing but secretly and guiltily enjoys it very much—you might care to seek basic instruction yourself, as she would not look kindly on your present shortcomings in this regard, should dancing occur. As you have yourself perceived, she can to a certain extent discern from your face what you are thinking; do not try and mask your thoughts, however, rather give her credit for a laudable measure of understanding and compassion. When you buy her a present, I would suggest either a short wool scarf or a good-quality pocket calculator. Above all, do not seek to impress, or pretend to be other than you are, and under no circumstances should you kiss her shortly after you have consumed peppermint.” He coughed, reached in his jacket pocket for a handkerchief, and carefully dabbed at the tip of his nose. “Excuse me,” he said, “I am due in a meeting with my partners. The fifth page from the bottom in that pile is out of sequence; please correct the error before they are stapled together.” His brow clouded, as though there was something he’d forgotten; then it relaxed. “Have a nice day,” he said, and left the room.

  Several seconds passed before Paul woke up out of the trance he’d been in since the Professor started talking. As soon as he came round, he checked the fifth page from the bottom. He stared at it for a while, then put it away where it belonged, third from the top.

  “Finished?” He hadn’t noticed her come back, and nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “Almost,” he said.

  “I found it,” Sophie said, waving the stapler triumphantly. “God only knows how it ended up in the broom cupboard.” She stopped, and looked at the piles of copied spreadsheets. “Haven’t you got any further than that?” she said. “You aren’t even halfway through.”

  “Sorry,” he said awkwardly. “Only that old thin bloke with the little beard, Professor—” He paused, pretending he’d forgotten the name.

  “Professor Van Spee?”

  He nodded. “That’s him. Anyhow, he stopped by. Only just left, in fact.” He breathed in and looked away. “Do you know him from somewhere else?”

  “Me?” She shook her head. “Never set eyes on him before the interview. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. He’s not a friend of the family, anything like that?”

  “God, no. Why do you ask?”

  Paul shook his head. “Nothing. That is, he said something that I thought might mean he knew you from somewhere, but it must just’ve been me getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “So what did you talk about?”

  “The usual stuff,” Paul croaked. “How are you settling in, I expect it’s all very confusing to start with, that kind of thing.”

  If she noticed anything odd about his tone of voice, she didn’t comment on it. They finished the collating together, sorted the result into bundles and stapled them up. “Right,” Sophie said, “I’ll take them up to Julie’s office, and I’ll meet you down in the strongroom. I’ll take the stapler too,” she added. “I expect someone’ll come looking for it sooner or later, and then at least someone’ll know where it is.”

  Paul went back to his office and picked up his sweater. He didn’t put it on, in case Mr Tanner had been kidding after all, and somebody objected to him wearing tatty old clothes in the office. On the way down to the basement, he tried very hard not to think about what Van Spee had told him, and failed miserably. The weirdness of it all certainly wasn’t lost on him, but most of his thoughts led towards Does that mean she—? and veered hastily away. As he passed the waste-paper basket in reception, he took a packet of extra-strong mints out of his jacket pocket and dumped them.

  It was probably just as well that he was somewhat preoccupied, or his first sight of the strongroom would have unnerved him completely. It struck him as a cross between an old–fashioned library and a maximum-security prison, with a touch of the mines of Mona thrown in for good measure. Mr Tanner hadn’t been fooling with him after all. The dust was deep on the shelves, and he devoutly hoped he wouldn’t come across the spiders who’d spun the enormous cobwebs that sagged from the corners of the room like the sails of becalmed galleons. The air was thick enough to grease axles with. About fifty years ago, someone had started painting the ceiling battleship grey, but had given up halfway. Paul could understand why.

  Sophie wasn’t impressed, either. She arrived bearing two notebooks and two pencils, looked round and said, “God, what a dump.”

  “It’s pretty horrible,” Paul agreed. “Did you manage to figure out exactly what we’re supposed to be doing here? It all sounded a bit vague to me.”

  “Inventory,” Sophie replied, looking about her with distaste. “He wants a complete list of everything they’ve got in here and where it is; plus we’ve got to put it all in order, so they can find it again.”

  “Bloody hell,” Paul said. It was a large room, bigger by half again than his bedsit, and the shelves that lined all four walls were rammed with black tin boxes, files, folders, ledgers and large, fat beige envelopes. “It’ll take for ever.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what we’ve got to do,” she said. “I vote we take it in turns; one of us looks in the boxes and files and stuff and calls out what’s in there, the other one writes it down.” She paused, frowning. “And we’ve got to figure out some way of archiving it all. What we need are lots of yellow stickies, so we can write a number on each one.”

  Paul nodded dumbly, still stunned by the magnitude of the task. “Yellow stickies,” he repeated. “Where do we get them from?”

  “Julie, I suppose,” Sophie replied, “like everything in this place apart from breathing air. I’ll go and see to that. You look like you need to sit down already.”

  While she was away, Paul wandered round the room, picking things off the shelves and putting them back in a despairing manner. Among the things he
picked up was a tall, wide book handsomely bound in red leather. There wasn’t anything written on the spine, but when he opened it, he realised that it was a list—an inventory—of the things in the room. Unfortunately, it was very old and presumably out of date; it was written in spidery copperplate, and the ink had turned brown. As far as he was any judge of such things, it had to be at least seventy years old, and possibly more. Still, he thought, it was bound to come in handy (though he wasn’t quite sure how).

  “Yellow stickies,” Sophie said triumphantly, coming in with a shoebox-sized carton in her hands. “Millions of them, and I didn’t even have to sign for them. I asked, and she just handed them over without a word.”

  “Look at this,” Paul interrupted, and he showed her the book. She didn’t seem impressed.

  “Don’t see how that’s going to help,” she said. “I mean, chances are there’s been lots of new stuff put in here since this was done, and loads of stuff taken out as well.” She turned the pages slowly. “Still,” she went on, “it gives us an idea of what we’re supposed to do. Look, there’s columns for when each thing was deposited, where it was put, and each time they’ve been taken out, who took them, and when they were brought back. Seems a fairly sensible way of going about it,” she said generously. “Look at some of these dates, though. They go back ever such a long way.”

  Paul looked. On the two pages open in front of him, the earliest date was 1857 and the most recent was 1941. One or two items had been crossed neatly through, to show that they’d been handed back to their owners or otherwise disposed of. Not many, though.

  “And that’s not all,” he went on. “Over in that corner there, there’s a stack of great big trunks, like old–fashioned luggage; and cases, like musical instruments live in, and some tea chests, all sorts of things.”

  “Well,” Sophie replied, turning the pages of the book, “at least it might give us some idea of what they do here.”

  Paul nodded. “I guess so.” He’d just noticed a glass case of stuffed birds on a high shelf, and next to it a mechanic’s blue-painted toolbox. “Though it looks to me like this is the place people dump their old junk,” he said. “Though not lately,” he added thoughtfully.