Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  But I did feel something. In that horrible moment when I looked across the room and realized that poor old Eddy was dead I certainly felt something. I felt frightened, physically frightened. What else? I felt disbelief, and some sense of outrage that this should happen to me. Yes, I certainly felt something.

  And when the priest came to commit poor old Eddy’s body to the flames, Dyson felt something else. For slowly, propelled by some unseen force, the coffin began to jerk sideways, until it reached the wall of the chapel, when a trapdoor opened, and in a series of irregular jerks, man that was born of woman disappeared into the wings. Dyson was stunned by the vulgarity of it. That poor old Eddy should come to this! That he should last be seen being dragged jerkily offstage by theatrical machinery, like the cardboard ship in Dick Whittington! Dyson half expected him to come jerking back for a reprise of the First Collect. It would have been different if the trapdoor had been the actual door of the furnace; or if the coffin had been dragged by visible human operatives; or if it had gone smoothly, as by the hand of God or the power of irresistible mechanical principles. But as it was . . . As it was, Dyson had experienced a genuine spasm. And another, secondary spasm, when he thought about the first one, and realized that he was more appalled by vulgarity than he was by death.

  With great discretion, the overcoats in the front pews blew their noses. With great discretion, Laurence Evenden released the excess gas pressure in his duodenum. With great discretion, Dyson yawned, straining his muscles to keep his mouth shut at the same time. He yawned again, uncontrollably, concealing it behind his service-card. God, he thought, I really must give the beer at lunch a miss.

  Reg Mounce marched into Dyson’s department, kicking the door open in front of him.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said to Tessa, looking sourly round the room. ‘Both at the wake, are they?’

  He hesitated, frowning at a sheet of paper he was holding.

  ‘It was one or the other of your bright boy-friends who sent me this, was it?’ he demanded, tossing the paper down in front of her. She picked it up and read it.

  Editor to R. Mounce. PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.

  I cannot trace any acknowledgement from you of the memorandum I sent you on the twentieth of this month, regarding your talents and the scope for them in this office. Since the matter is important, I wonder if you would take the trouble to write to me again, indicating particularly whether such other arrangements as you will be making are likely to commence at an earlier date than one might other­wise suppose. Certain other arrangements which I must make naturally turn upon this.

  I trust that your own other arrangements are proceeding satisfactorily.

  ‘Some sort of joke, is it?’ demanded Mounce bitterly.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. It looks as if it’s from the Editor.’

  ‘Oh, it looks as if it’s from the Editor,’ said Mounce ironically.

  ‘It says it’s from the Editor.’

  ‘Oh, it says it’s from the Editor. The last one said it was from the Editor. But it wasn’t. It was just a load of crap that some joker had sent. All this crap about “other arrangements”! It’s just crap.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Tessa, wondering if perhaps it was. She tried to focus her mind on the words. ‘Other arrangements’ – well, other arrangements were alternative dispositions. And alternative dispositions were – well, they were other arrangements. But somehow, she felt, the words had passed right through her mind without leaving any deposit of meaning behind.

  ‘Well, isn’t it?’ said Mounce. ‘People aren’t asked to make other arrangements on this paper, are they? Have you ever heard of anyone in this office being asked to make other arrangements?’

  ‘Well, no . . .’

  ‘So it’s obviously a load of crap. Everyone saw that. This isn’t the Express, after all.’

  He took the note out of Tessa’s hands and began to read it through again, rubbing his chin uneasily.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘you don’t think this is from the Editor, do you?’

  ‘I’ve honestly no idea.’

  ‘I mean, this is just the sort of shit the Editor would write. “Other arrangements” – that’s just the sort of stinking thing he’d say.’

  ‘I thought,’ said Tessa timidly, ‘that you said people weren’t asked to make other arrangements on this paper?’

  ‘No, but what I mean is, if they were asked to make other arrangements, making other arrangements is just what the stinking Editor would call it.’

  Mounce held the note up to the light, as if looking for a water­mark.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said gloomily. ‘Now you’ve put doubts in my mind.’

  ‘I suppose you could ring the Editor’s secretary and check . . .’ suggested Tessa hesitantly.

  Mounce stared at her absently, pushing his lower lip up.

  ‘I suppose I could . . .’ he said. He read through the note again, frowning. Then he went over to the window, and gazed down into Hand and Ball Court for several minutes, frowning and pushing his lower lip up alternately.

  ‘I suppose that would be one way of tackling it,’ he said. He took another look at the note, putting a finger into his mouth and trying to dislodge some irritating morsel of lunch from between his back teeth. Slowly, still rereading the note and still working on his teeth, he wandered out of the room.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said gloomily, without turning his head, as he went through the door,

  ‘Hello,’ said Bob, coming back into the office and holding out a bag of sweets to Tessa. ‘Have a peppermint. How were things in the office, Tessa?’

  ‘All right. How was the funeral?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He picked up the mail and messages on his desk, and at once sorted out a small brown envelope addressed ‘R. Bell Esqre.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘something from the Editor.’

  He ripped it open.

  Editor to R. Bell, it said.

  ‘PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘What does it say?’ asked Dyson. ‘You look as white as a sheet.’

  Bob shook his head blankly.

  ‘It just says “congratulations”. But what on, for God’s sake?’

  Dyson thought for an instant, and then laughed.

  ‘Bob!’ he said reproachfully. ‘On your engagement!’

  Ten

  Bob, arriving at the office before Dyson one morning, found a man he had never seen before working at old Eddy’s desk. He appeared on the whole to be middle-aged. His face was middle-­aged – unnaturally neat and pale, with spare flesh padding the line of the jaw, and lifeless sandy hair brushed inertly to the shape of the head. But his clothes were young men’s clothes – a very dark jacket buttoned on four buttons, revealing a triangle of dark tan shirt with a strip of black suède tie, and an inch-and-a-half of tan cuff at each wrist. He looked up at Bob; his eyes were ageless and neutral.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and returned to his work.

  ‘Hello,’ said Bob. He took off his overcoat and sat down at his desk, staring at the man. He felt he ought to query his presence – particularly his use of poor old Eddy’s desk – but everything about him suggested that his right to be in the room was firmly established – perhaps more firmly even than Bob’s. Besides, Bob felt diffident about challenging an older man. Without taking his eyes off him, he opened the drawer of his desk and felt about inside it until he had located a toffee. The man continued to work. He was writing something in longhand, the paper turned sideways, the pen flying along the lines away from him at great speed. His left hand rested on the desk, a silver ring set with a large brown stone on the little finger, and between the first and second fingers a cigarette with a thin blue tape of smoke rising steadily from it. The finger-­ends were pale amber, the rest of the hand marble-white, and slightly fleshy. As Bob looked at it, the hand performed a sudden evolution like a conjuring-trick, turning over and producing from nowhe
re a pack of American cigarettes, with one of the cigarettes extended towards Bob. The right hand continued to write. The blue tape of smoke from the left hand snaggled for a moment, then the snaggle slid up the tape and disappeared, leaving the smoke rising as steadily as before from the underside of the hand.

  ‘Cigarette?’ said the man.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Bob.

  ‘My name’s Erskine Morris,’ said the man, vanishing the cigarettes as deftly as he had produced them, and continuing to write as he spoke. It looked like some sort of play he was writing, so far as Bob could see. There were names down the margin, each followed by a colon and a short sentence ending in a row of dots. ‘I’m Moulton’s replacement.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Bob. ‘Well, welcome to the department. My name’s Bob Bell.’

  ‘Hi, Bob,’ said Morris expressionlessly. Bob wondered if he was an Englishman who affected American usages, or an American with an English accent. Was he a young American with middle-aged English characteristics? Or a middle-aged Englishman with middle-aged American mannerisms? Or . . . Another thought struck Bob.

  ‘Does Dyson know you’re joining us?’

  ‘You tell me, Bob.’

  ‘He hasn’t said anything to me about it.’

  Morris wrote on in silence.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you round the office before,’ said Bob finally.

  ‘No,’ said Morris.

  ‘You’ve just joined the paper?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Who were you with before?’

  ‘I was at university before.’

  Bob stared at Morris – mainly at the back of his head, since it was turned slightly away from him to follow the speeding journeys of his pen across the paper.

  ‘You mean, you’ve just come down?’ said Bob, trying out of politeness not to sound incredulous.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You mean, straight down?’

  ‘Last year.’

  ‘Forgive me asking, but how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  Morris’s left hand stretched out from its one-and-a-half-inch cuff and stubbed out its half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Then, while the right hand wrote on, it conjured up the pack of cigarettes once again, conjured one out, and conjured a flame out of a butane lighter it suddenly turned out to be holding. Bob followed each movement with his eyes.

  ‘Which university were you at?’ he asked.

  ‘Cambridge.’

  ‘Cambridge? I was at Cambridge.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘John Dyson was at Cambridge.’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  Morris administered his sures and sure sures in a soothing tone, like pats on the head for an importunate child. Bob felt rather like a child, talking to Morris. He went over to the window and gazed down into Hand and Ball Court. Reassur­ingly familiar, homely figures like Gareth Holmroyd and Pat Selig were arriving for work, pacing out the well-worn diagonal trail across the court from the end of Hand and Ball Passage to the main door of the office. They seemed almost embarrassingly innocent and unsophisticated, compared with Morris.

  ‘Are you on the paper’s graduate trainee scheme?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I joined the paper as a graduate trainee.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Bob tried to imagine Morris completing the trainee scheme, joining the pensions fund, and going on to groove out the diagonal of Hand and Ball Court morning and night for twenty or thirty years. It was somehow not a very plausible picture.

  Erskine Morris . . .

  ‘That’s a coincidence,’ said Bob. ‘You’ve got the same initials as poor old Eddy Moulton.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll help you move poor old Eddy’s junk out of the desk, if you like, so you can move your own stuff in.’

  ‘Thank you, Bob – I’ve done it already.’

  Going back to his desk, Bob looked discreetly over Morris’s shoulder. The only page he could see of Morris’s manuscript started off:

  Benny: If Patrick says you’re going to get done, you’re going to get done, sunshine. Inne, Patrick?

  Old Man: No! No!

  Patrick: You see, sunshine? You’re going to get done. Patrick says so . . .

  [The camera holds Old Man in M.C.U., tightens on his terrified eyes, then whip-pans to C.U. of knife in Patrick’s hand.]

  ‘What did you do with poor old Eddy’s stuff?’ asked Bob.

  ‘I put it in the waste-paper basket,’ said Morris.

  Dyson got off on the wrong foot with Morris from the very beginning, even though Morris politely stopped writing while Bob introduced them, and sat back in his chair to look at Dyson.

  ‘Hi, John,’ he said, with some slight suggestion of benevolence in his voice, as if he were taking Dyson on his staff in spite of a prison record.

  ‘Erskine’s just joined the paper as a graduate trainee, John,’ said Bob. ‘He’s apparently coming to us as a replacement for poor old Eddy.’

  Dyson was visibly irritated.

  ‘I haven’t heard anything about this,’ he said. ‘I think there must be some mistake here. Are you certain you were told to come to this office?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Morris.

  ‘Well, I haven’t heard anything about it. I’m certainly expecting someone. God knows, I need someone. But someone experienced! A trainee is no earthly use in here at all.’

  Dyson took off his overcoat and went to his desk, frowning heavily. Morris said nothing. He put his cigarette to his lips, drew in smoke, sat silent and impassive for some moments, then blew the smoke out of his nose in two impassive grey plumes.

  ‘You can sit here for the moment,’ said Dyson, opening the mail from his in-tray, ‘while we get this sorted out. You can watch us at work. I haven’t got time to start showing you how to do anything. But you might pick up a thing or two just by looking. I suppose it’s all experience. Has Morley produced yet, Bob?’

  Bob shook his head.

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Dyson, clenching his fists. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ He looked across at Morris. ‘It’s a madhouse in here,’ he said. ‘Which university were you at?’

  ‘Cambridge,’ said Morris. When he was not writing or smoking, noticed Bob, he sat absolutely still, so still that the ribbon of smoke from his cigarette hung about almost undisturbed for two or three feet above his hand.

  ‘Which college?’

  ‘King’s.’

  Dyson was impressed.

  ‘I was at Sidney,’ he said in a different voice. ‘Well, well. As a matter of fact, I started on this paper as a graduate trainee myself. It’s not a bad office. Of course, it’s not typical. But then I doubt whether such a thing as a typical newspaper office exists. It’s a very funny business, the newspaper business.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Morris.

  ‘You get quite a good general introduction to the industry as a graduate trainee, you know. You’ll probably do six months in the news room first, then six months in the subs, then maybe six months in the commercial room . . .’

  Dyson broke off in mid-explanation, frowning at a piece of copy paper he had taken out of a little brown envelope marked ‘J. Dyson Esqre.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ he said irritably. ‘You are supposed to be here. The Editor’s sent you.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Morris.

  ‘I don’t know why I wasn’t told about this before,’ complained Dyson. ‘I think I should have been consulted. The Editor knew what the situation was in here.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Morris soothingly, conjuring up the cigarette pack again. ‘Have a cigarette, John, and tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.’

  Dyson set Morris to work copying out the extracts for the ‘In Years Gone By’ column. But Dyson’s opinion of him, which had risen noticeably on hearing that he had been at King’s, had fallen back to zero again; his having been at King’s was cancelled out by his having been right about his instructions to join D
yson’s department.

  A slight difficulty arose about whether he might type the extracts.

  ‘Eddy always used to write them out in longhand,’ said Dyson.

  ‘I’d prefer to type them.’

  ‘Yes . . . well . . . I suppose you could. There’s only one typewriter in here, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’ll use that for now. I’ll get another one sent in later.’

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to get another one,’ said Dyson. ‘We have to make do with one in here, sharing it. Poor old Eddy didn’t type, you see.’

  Morris typed throughout the morning, driving the carriage of the department’s battered portable along with his two hammering fingers just about as fast as it would go. He worked with scarcely a break to search out a new passage in the files, or to pick up the half-smoked end of his last cigarette from the ashtray, stub it out, light a new one, and put it down in its place. The noise of the typewriter and the gathering haze of cigarette smoke in the room both seemed to disturb Dyson. He kept glancing across at either the typewriter or the cigarette in the ashtray, and frowning. Morris’s presence also put him off his stroke on the phone. ‘Good morning, Sir William, I hope I’m not intruding . . .’ he would say, smiling self-deprecatingly at the distant Sir William. Then he would remember he was being watched by Morris, and he would frown, and stuff his finger into his left ear to keep out the noise of the typewriter. ‘What was that, Sir William? You were just doing what, Sir William?’ Then he would realize he was smiling again for Sir William’s benefit, and swing round in his chair so that Morris couldn’t see the smile.

  But when Morris stopped typing, just before lunchtime, and sat back in his chair looking through his handiwork, the silence disturbed Dyson even more. He stared at Morris disapprovingly, as if Morris had spent the whole morning in idleness.