Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  But how could he ring Morley to find out where the hell his copy for Friday was? Every time he stretched out his hand to pick up the phone it rang in his face.

  ‘Hello,’ he sighed into it; ‘Dyson . . . Yes . . . Good . . . Bless you . . . Bless you, bless you . . . Wonderful . . . Perfect . . . Bless you.’

  And scarcely had he had time to put it down and mutter ‘Silly tit’ before it was ringing again. It was an awfully bad day for Dyson, as he told Bob from time to time, when he had a moment.

  ‘Somebody wouldn’t like to ring Morley, would they,’ he pleaded, ‘and find out where the hell his copy for Friday is?’

  The words broadcast themselves about the empty air, their urgency fading by the inverse square of the distance.

  ‘Bob!’ he said.

  ‘John,’ said Bob politely.

  ‘I said somebody wouldn’t like to ring Morley, would they, Bob?’

  Bob slipped another toffee into his mouth. Reg Mounce, the appalling Reg Mounce, was just crossing the Court, kicking sourly at the paving stones as he went, just in case inanimate matter was in some way capable of sensation.

  ‘I’m a bit tied up at the moment, John,’ said Bob absently. ‘Got some writing to do in a minute.’

  Dyson stood up, trying to get the work on his desk into perspective by gazing down upon it from a great height. Supposing the phone didn’t ring for a minute; whom should he call first? Morley, perhaps – then Sims might be back from court . . . No, he’d have to ring Straker, because this was the day Straker had a committee at twelve. But Straker would go on for at least ten minutes about immaculate conception, and he would probably miss Morley.

  The phone rang again.

  ‘Oh God,’ he groaned. ‘Hello; Dyson . . . Ah, I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning . . . Yes – I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning . . . Exactly – I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning . . .’

  By the time he put the phone down he couldn’t remember what it was he had been worrying about before. The state of the rack, no doubt; that was what he worried about most of the time. He looked anxiously at the rack of galley proofs behind him. He had only seven ‘The Country Day by Day’ columns in print, and he had sworn never to let the Countries drop below twelve. He had a ‘Meditation’ column for each of the next three days – unless Winters had made a cock-up about immaculate conception, in which case he had only two-and-a-half pieces – but he should have had a running stock of fourteen Meditations. He would have a blitz on Countries; he would have a blitz on Meditations. But then what about the crosswords? He counted them up miserably. God Almighty, he was down to his last eight crosswords! Day by day the presses hounded him; with failing strength he fed them the hard-won pieces of copy which delayed them so briefly. On and on they came! They were catching him up!

  He sank back into his chair and banged the palms of his hands against his forehead.

  ‘I honestly sometimes wonder how I’m expected to carry on,’ he said. ‘I slave and slave to keep this department going! I work my guts out doing three men’s work! I literally work myself into the ground! But what happens? I get no cooperation! I have to try and stagger through with half the staff I need! I have to share a secretary with Boyle and Mounce and Brent-Williamson and half the paper’s specialists! I honestly sometimes think I’m heading for a crack-up!’

  Bob put the bag of toffees away in his pocket.

  ‘All right, John,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Morley a buzz if you like.’

  Dyson stopped heading for a crack-up.

  ‘Bless you, Bob!’ he said. ‘You’re a poppet, you really are. I’m sorry I went on about it like that. I know how busy you are. We’re all busy. We’re all under strain. I’m sorry, Bob.’

  Bob hunted through the mess of telephone numbers scribbled on the old blotter propped up against the end of Dyson’s desk.

  ‘It’s Gerrard’s Cross 5891,’ said Dyson. He got up and walked across to the window, where he stood wriggling his fingers impatiently, as if playing an invisible bassoon. “You dial GE 4. I’m not trying to get at you personally, Bob. You know that. It’s the frustrations of the job.’

  Bob dialled GE and then F for frustrations. He pressed the receiver rest down and began again.

  ‘I don’t know how you always manage to seem so calm,’ said Dyson. ‘Doesn’t the job ever get you down, too?’

  Bob dialled GE 2. Perhaps certain aspects of working with Dyson were a little 2 much for him, he thought. He started again.

  ‘I toil all the hours God made at this job,’ said Dyson bitterly, ‘and somehow I feel I never quite get on top of it. It’s like trying to fill a bottomless bucket. You just about get next week’s stuff straightened out – and already it’s gone, it’s used, it’s forgotten, and the week after’s on top of you.’

  ‘May I speak to Canon Morley, please?’ said Bob into the phone.

  ‘Television, that’s the answer, Bob. Make a name for yourself with a little spare time work in the evenings on the box, and you can dictate your own terms. If people like Brent-­Williamson and Mitchell Farjeon can do it, I don’t see why I can’t. I know at least as much about Indonesia, say, as Brent-Williamson does about books.’

  He yawned, and looked at his watch.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you in the chair, Bob,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to slip along to Bush House now to do a talk for the West African service. If anyone wants me, tell them I’m on my way up to the composing room.’

  Bob nodded. Dyson put on his overcoat, and folded away his spectacles in his inside breast pocket to stop them being rained upon. He looked dark and nervous and almost forty.

  ‘Hello?’ said Bob into the phone. ‘Is that Canon Morley . . . ?’

  ‘Be cross with Morley,’ said Dyson. ‘Copy by first post tomorrow or else. I’ll be back in time for lunch.’

  The bang of the door as Dyson went out woke old Eddy Moulton. He had been dreaming about a journalist he had known in the old days called Stanley Furle, who had never gone anywhere without his gold-knobbed cane and a carnation in his button hole. One day Stanley Furle had fallen down the basement steps of the Falstaff and given himself a black eye on the knob of the cane! Old Eddy smiled at the thought of it. He dipped his pen in the ink and began to copy out in his close, careful longhand a report which had been published exactly a hundred years ago on Thursday week, about a boiler bursting in Darlington with the loss of thirteen lives. Nothing much surprised old Eddy Moulton, but he was taken aback very slightly to find that night had fallen already.

  Various members of the staff emerged from Hand and Ball Passage during the last dark hour of the morning, walked with an air of sober responsibility towards the main entrance, greeted the commissionaire, and vanished upstairs in the lift to telephone their friends and draw their expenses before going out again to have lunch. Furtively among them came a short, rather fat man in a shapeless raincoat and a shapeless trilby hat. He kept his eyes cast down upon the gleaming dark pavements, as if he was trying to avoid meeting other people’s gazes, or treading on the gaps between the paving stones. He did not walk across the middle of Hand and Ball Court, but shuffled along close to the walls, surreptitiously feeling them as he passed. He was the sort of man who calls at news­paper offices carrying sheaves of brown paper on which he has written down messages from God or outer space setting forth plans for the spiritual regeneration of the world.

  He slipped through the swing doors while the commissionaire was looking the other way, got past the enquiries desk with his head turned slightly to one side so that his face was hidden by the sagging brim of his hat, and shuffled into the lift among a crowd of typists, messengers, and accountants from the wages department. His face was shiny and mottled, with wire-framed spectacles which rode up an inch above his left ear. He looked out of place among the crisply laundered shirtsleeves of the accountants, and the elegantly skimpy suits of the messengers. He kept his head half turned away from them all, pretending to
be absorbed in the brass plate which carried the name and address of the makers of the lift. He got out at the fourth floor, and began to walk quickly along a corridor with a worn maroon carpet, past offices with heavy doors painted dark brown. The corridor lights were inadequate; there was a vaguely war-time air about the place. Somewhere a man was talking to himself, or on the telephone. ‘Um,’ he said gloomily, and over and over again. ‘Um . . . Um . . . Of course . . . Of course . . . Um . . .’ Two men with their hands in their pockets, both smoking pipes, came down the corridor in the opposite direction, talking about what had happened after old Harry Stearns had told Bill Waddy what he thought about the paper’s treatment of Mitchell Farjeon. The man in the shapeless hat turned aside and stood close up against one of the brown office doors, as if awaiting a summons to enter, until the men had passed by and disappeared, leaving only a trail of laughter and tarry Balkan tobacco smoke.

  At the end of the corridor he came to a door with the letter G painted on the woodwork, in enamel yellowing with age. He tapped on it deferentially with his fingertips.

  ‘Come in,’ said a woman’s voice.

  He opened the door to exactly the diameter of his stomach, and squeezed through. Inside the room a large woman with a flat, placid face was sitting at a desk.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said shyly, taking his hat off.

  ‘Good morning,’ she replied, no less shyly.

  He closed the door carefully behind him, smiling deferentially, tiptoed across the room to an inner office, and edged himself into it. There was the sound of a key being turned.

  The large woman at the desk picked up the house phone and dialled a number.

  ‘Mr Dancer?’ she said. ‘The Editor is in.’

  Mounce, the Pictures Editor, was busy putting the fear of God into his staff. He had plenty of the fear of God to hand, but just at present only one member of his staff to put it into, a small, meek photographer called Lovebold, some twenty years older than himself. There were a great many pictures in the Pictures Department. The ones around the walls were almost exclusively of naked women, some of them supplied as advertising material by freelance agencies and firms selling photographic products, others clipped out of the magazines to which Mounce subscribed. The photographs intended for publication in the paper were laid out on tables. These were of restored cathedrals, Cotswold villages, sunsets over lakes, seagulls in flight, small children gazing at clowns, and of patterns of light and shade formed by steel girdering, frost, moving traffic at night, sparks from welding, arrangements of cogwheels, and sunshine on old stone. Mounce was looking at a sheaf of prints which Lovebold had just brought down from the darkroom. They showed patterns of light and shade formed by the rigging of sailing-boats.

  ‘What’s all this crap supposed to be?’ he asked insultingly.

  ‘I thought it was the sort of crap you wanted,’ said Lovebold.

  ‘Well, it’s crap.’

  ‘I thought we were supposed to be taking this sort of crap.’

  ‘It’s all crap.’

  Mounce looked through the photographs once again, then handed them back to Lovebold with a grimace.

  ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Take them away and put some captions on them.’

  Lovebold looked slowly through the pictures in his turn.

  ‘I was thinking of something like “Symphony in Rope”,’ he said diffidently.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Mounce.

  ‘What do you think, then?’

  ‘I don’t think anything. If “Symphony in Rope” is the best you can dredge up out of your stinking little mind, put “Symphony in Rope” on them.’

  ‘Or how about “Symphony for Strings”? Do they have symphonies for strings?’

  ‘How should I know? They’re a spotty lot of pix, anyway. I don’t care what spotty caption you put on them.’

  ‘How about “String Symphony”?’ suggested Lovebold. ‘Like “Spring Symphony”?’

  Mounce walked up to the other end of the room without replying. He sat down at his desk with his back to Lovebold, and began to sort through a stack of agency pictures.

  ‘ “String Symphony”!’ he said after a little while. ‘God give me patience! If this was a real newspaper, and not a rest home for old gentlemen, I’d scare the living shits out of you lot. If this was the Express, and not just a load of old toilet-paper, I’d have fired you and your snotty little friends as soon as I set eyes on you.’

  ‘I’ll go and do the captions,’ said Lovebold, edging towards the door.

  ‘ “String Symphony”! God give me strength!’

  ‘You tell me what you want, Reg, and I’ll do it.’

  Mounce swung round in his chair indignantly.

  ‘Oh, thanks!’ he said. ‘I’m not your wet nurse, you know. I’m not your private arse-wiper. Try and use a bit of initiative, sonny! You wouldn’t have lasted a week on the old West Midlands Post. You know what I did once on the Post?’

  ‘You mean when you tried to get through a police cordon by saying . . . ?’

  ‘I mean when I practically breezed through a police cordon by saying I was the Home Office pathologist! Know how I got my job on this paper?’

  ‘You just walked in off the street . . .’

  ‘I just walked in off the street and told them to give it to me! Still, I’m wasting my breath telling all this to a pinhead like you.’

  Mounce had re-immersed himself in the agency pictures. Very quickly Lovebold faded through the door and closed it behind him.

  ‘Lovebold!’ shouted Mounce. ‘Come back here, Lovebold!’

  Lovebold came back into the room, sighing noiselessly.

  ‘Lend me a fiver, will you?’ said Mounce.

  Lovebold sighed again.

  ‘Can’t, I’m afraid, Reg,’ he said.

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘I haven’t got a fiver on me, Reg,’ said Lovebold, pulling a single pound-note out of his back-pocket and showing Mounce the empty lining. Mounce took the pound.

  ‘Don’t give me this crap,’ he said. ‘Show me what you’ve got in your other pockets.’

  ‘Oh, come on now, Reg. Be reasonable.’

  ‘Let’s see what you’ve got in your jacket pockets, for a start.’

  ‘All right,’ said Lovebold wearily. He took a small, tightly-folded bundle of notes out of his breast pocket, and counted off four.

  ‘You can’t fool Uncle Reggy,’ said Mounce.

  Lovebold fetched an expenses chit, while the matter was still fresh in Mounce’s mind, and wrote down at random on it two nights’ expenses in Wolverhampton, with lunches and entertainment for contacts, adding up to £6 8s 4d. He gave it to Mounce to sign. Mounce folded his hands and closed his eyes.

  ‘For what we are about to receive,’ he said, ‘may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

  A bluff, friendly, man-to-man relationship with your staff, he reflected as he scribbled his signature; that was the way to do it. A bit of bluster – one’s staff respected it.

  A little turning of the old blind eye – they loved you for it. And if they ever took it into their heads to let you down you could always get them the boot for fiddling their exes.

  Towards lunch time the sky grew lighter again, and when old Eddy Moulton woke up just before one o’clock he had the impression that it was the following day. The days went very fast when you were old, he reflected. He began to copy out a piece of political intelligence about the intentions of Lord Derby.

  It was the noise of Dyson coming in that had woken him.

  ‘Did somebody manage to get some copy out of Morley?’ asked Dyson. He sounded very cheerful. His arrival seemed to bring the bustle of the outside world into the room.

  ‘Promised for tomorrow,’ said somebody, looking up from a book he was reading for review. ‘How did your thing go?’

  ‘Oh, marvellously! I adore broadcasting; I really feel in my element. Do you know, Bob, I’m always sorry to get to the end of the script. I’d like to go on all da
y.’

  He hung up his coat, and rubbed his hands together vigorously, full of smiles.

  ‘I feel completely recharged, Bob,’ he said. ‘A tremendous sense of psychic energy. This afternoon I’m going to have a blitz on crosswords.’

  He sat down at his desk, and began to stack papers together, and shuffle the stacks into a different order.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Bob,’ he said, ‘I’m getting quite a following in West Africa. The producer had a letter this week from some girl in Conakry, of all places, asking for my photograph. Of course, I shan’t send her one.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Do you think I ought to, Bob? Perhaps I should. You think I should, do you?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Well, you know, it seems a bit film-starrish. I don’t know whether I’ve got time to mess about sending pictures of myself out.’

  Bob yawned.

  ‘How about some lunch?’ he said.

  ‘All right. I mean, it’s not as if I had a publicity manager. I am rather pushed. But you think I should?’

  ‘Sure. Where shall we go? The Gates?’

  ‘If we must, I suppose. Perhaps it would be rather mean to disappoint her. Eddy, we’re going to the Gates. Will you keep an eye on things?’

  One by one and two by two the sober, responsible men emerged from the main door again to go out for lunch. The Foreign Editor, the Literary Editor, the Diplomatic Correspondent, and the Rugby Football Correspondent made up a party to share a taxi to the Garrick. Mr Dancer, the Chief Sub-Editor, went to a workmen’s café in Whitefriars Street. The senior advertising men, swishing rolled umbrellas, strolled grandly off to sip hock at El Vino’s. The Editor shuffled out, unnoticed by anyone, and caught a number fifteen bus to the Athenaeum.

  At the Gates of Jerusalem, just round the corner from Hand and Ball Court, Bob and Dyson found Bill Waddy, the News Editor, with Mike Sparrow, Ralph Absalom, Ted Hurwitz, and Andy Royle. It was that sort of set which went there. Gareth Holmroyd, the Assistant Industrial Editor, was buying stout for Lucy from the Library and Pat Selig, the woman’s page sub. Round the far side of the bar Mounce was talking to a girl with brown eyes and straight blonde hair. He raised his glass to Bob and Dyson, and winked. It was the sort of pub where you’d expect to find the Waddy-Absalom-Hurwitz set, and Gareth Holmroyd, and Mounce leaning over some rather plain girl.