With that, Gilbert put both hands on the door handle, turned it and let the door swing open.
‘My God, Grace,’ Alistair’s voice called out, full of fret and worry, ‘we haven’t paid this bill. They could cut the electricity off at any minute.’
‘Ah, so close,’ Gilbert said, and then stepped aside to let Grace enter the office before him.
CHAPTER 4
Grace believed that everyone had a distinguishing characteristic. Whenever she thought of Alistair, she thought of paper – he was always waving it about, stuffing it in his pockets or sifting through the drifts of it that accumulated on his desk. On rare occasions he would even get to grips with writing on it. Today he was clenching an envelope in one hand and a couple of sheets of paper in the other and there was more, in a rough roll, protruding from the pocket of his chinos. Grace recalled the paper crane Mrs Hikaranto had given her and smiled. Alistair, her origami boss.
‘The brown stuff’s really going to hit the fan, Grace,’ he was saying, thrusting the papers towards her. ‘Except there won’t be any power for the fan, so it’ll just—’
‘Slide to the floor,’ Gilbert said behind Grace.
Alistair’s colouring, already stormy, darkened. ‘Yes, thank you, Gilbert. This is no time for your mordant wit.’
Gilbert came into the reception area and shut the front door behind him, which meant Grace had to tuck herself in between the leather sofa and the coffee table. The reception, with its art magazines and designer lamps, was furnished to impress clients, but was not spacious enough to accommodate Alistair and his two staff when Alistair was ‘achieving orbit’. This consisted of standing with his feet planted wide apart in the centre of a room while brandishing whatever was offending/upsetting him at the time. As he was fairly bulky to start with, and brandishing was accompanied by finger jabbing, Grace and Gilbert were often corralled into a tiny portion of the space not laid claim to by their boss.
‘Perhaps if you just let me see what you’ve got there,’ she said, soothingly, ‘I’m sure—’
‘It’s red, I tell you, Grace. Red.’
It took her a moment to realise that he was talking about the colour of the bill, and not that he’d run his eye over it and she needn’t bother.
‘How in God’s name has it got this far, Grace?’ Alistair’s voice was getting louder, rising in pitch. ‘Why didn’t you bring it to my attention earlier?’
There was a sound of barely concealed exasperation from Gilbert at the way nothing was ever Alistair’s fault, even though he opened all the post and was meant to pass Grace anything that needed action. It was a system that could have worked smoothly if Alistair didn’t have the organisational skills of a drunken gorilla. Sometimes Grace imagined he dealt with the post by standing in a corner of his room with his eyes closed and hurling it in the direction of his desk. While Grace tried to work around this by surreptitiously tidying up when he was out of the office and actioning things she found mouldering in the far reaches of his room, sometimes something important would elude her. This could be due to a mishap, such as Alistair letting post fall down the back of a piece of furniture or taking it home in his pocket and never bringing it back. Other times he was more imaginative in his stupidity. Once he’d even managed to sandwich incoming letters between outgoing ones and lobbed the whole lot into the postbox together.
Luckily for Gilbert, Alistair did not hear that exasperated noise, being deaf now to all but his own hysteria. Judging by the way he had screwed up the envelope and thrown it on the coffee table and was using both hands to shuffle through the offending paperwork, that hysteria was on the rise.
‘I’ll lose business through this,’ he was saying, ‘and more money because we’ll have to get reconnected.’
‘Alistair, I’m sure it’s nothing that can’t be sorted.’ Grace wasn’t sure of that at all, but calming him down was her first priority. Getting out of her prison between the sofa and the coffee table was her second.
‘How about we go to your office?’ she said, indicating one of the two doors in the wall opposite. ‘I can’t see what you’re worrying about while I’m trapped over here by the sofa.’
‘No, not my office … not just now.’ Alistair looked as evasive as it was possible for anyone to look without actually pulling up a trench coat collar and ramming a trilby down over their eyes. He moved towards the other door in the wall. ‘We’ll go into yours. But it doesn’t really matter where we go, Grace. This is beyond sorting.’
He opened the door and stepped into her office.
‘Why can’t we go to his?’ Gilbert said very quietly. ‘Do you think he’s got a fancy woman in there now? Over the desk?’
Grace didn’t reply, but she couldn’t help wondering what kind of mess Alistair’s office must be in if he didn’t want her to see it. God knew, she’d seen it in some terrible states.
Alistair replanted himself, but at least this time there was more space around him. Here too there was room enough for a desk, a couple of filing cabinets, an easy chair in which Gilbert took up residence whenever he was visiting and a wooden table holding everything needed to make tea or coffee, including a battered kettle. There would have been even more room if Alistair had not cut corners, literally, when overseeing plans to have this floor of the building converted. As a result, the place was Partition Heaven, which meant that instead of offering a layout where there was a spacious office leading off the reception area via one door, there were two less spacious rooms leading off the reception area via two doors. Alistair’s office was narrow at the front, but widened out near the back, a feat achieved by nicking a big square of space from Grace’s. Things were further complicated by the fact that the only way to get from one office to the other was to go back into the reception area and start again. Even more inconveniently, the only way to get to the toilet was through Grace’s office, and the only way to get to the kitchen was through Alistair’s. Neither of these arrangements was really convenient, particularly when Grace had to put up with clients trooping back from the toilet, sometimes only a few feet ahead of any smell they had created.
Grace took off her coat and hung it from the hook on the back of the door and saw Gilbert lower himself into the easy chair. She wondered if sitting at her own desk would give the impression that she wasn’t taking Alistair’s problem seriously enough. She remained standing, but reached over and turned on her computer.
‘Don’t fuss with that,’ Alistair snapped, ‘we’re meant to be getting this sorted.’ He waved the papers at her again.
Alistair’s mood was now morphing from fretting into tetchiness and it was possible there would be a short detour through snitty later. There had been a time when incidents like this one happened only every couple of months and between them he would simply be disorganised with overtones of bright and breezy. These days he got worked up about the slightest thing.
‘If you could just let me have a look.’ Grace tried reaching out for the papers, but Alistair did not appear ready to hand them over.
‘Perhaps,’ Gilbert said from the chair, ‘before you get bogged down in that, we could discuss my last payment?’ He pulled an envelope from his pocket. ‘I’ve brought in the invoice I submitted and the cheque you sent. Now, if you compare one with the other, you’ll see—’
‘I will not bloody see anything,’ Alistair shouted, his eyes flaring. ‘You don’t get it do you, Gilbert? This,’ the papers were waved again, ‘this is serious.’
‘So is my payment.’ Gilbert’s tone was affable, but Grace saw Alistair’s colour heighten further and he stopped moving, even stopped waving the papers. It was always a dangerous sign that he was about to take his tirade up another notch. Gilbert obviously thought that too, because he shoved the envelope back in his pocket, got to his feet and said, ‘How about I make us all a cup of tea?’ He had gathered up the kettle from the small wooden table and was carrying it out of the room before Alistair could wind himself up any more.
Grace
took her chance and got hold of a corner of one of the pieces of paper in Alistair’s hand, but as she pulled at it, he jerked away. ‘You’ve given me a paper cut,’ he said with a yelp and stuck his thumb in his mouth.
‘Sorry, Alistair. Really sorry … but I’m just trying to help. I can’t understand why you’ve got a bill. You pay by direct debit.’
He took his thumb out of his mouth. Stared blankly. ‘Do I? Yes. Or … or did I change it?’
Grace wondered how Emma put up with constantly having to iron out problems and sort out hiccups. At least Grace was getting paid for it. Well, some hours of it.
She held out her hand for the papers again. ‘Stop worrying, Alistair. I’m sure the electricity company has to leave twenty-eight days between sending a bill and a disconnection notice. Even then there has to be about a week before they actually do anything.’
‘Ivecheppedvedake,’ Alistair said, around the thumb that was now back in his mouth. Grace interpreted this as ‘I’ve checked the date.’
‘And?’
Alistair wiped his thumb on his pullover. ‘End of August. That’s six weeks ago, Grace. Which means that they might have sent a disconnection notice already and if I’ve … we’ve mislaid it, well …’
Gilbert came back into the room with the kettle. He glared at Grace in a meaningful way before saying to Alistair, ‘Your door is locked.’
‘So?’
‘So I can’t get through to the kitchen to top this up.’ Gilbert shook the kettle.
‘That bloody kettle shouldn’t be in here anyway,’ Alistair stormed, ‘it should be in the kitchen along with the rest of that junk on the table.’
‘But we don’t like to disturb you by coming through your room every time we want to make a hot drink,’ Grace said, trying to calm him down.
Gilbert stirred him up again. ‘Even when your office isn’t locked it’s a bind.’
‘Now, look—’
‘Perhaps I could just fill it from the toilet.’ Gilbert grinned. ‘Not the actual lavatory, of course, but the hand basin. If I tilted it to get it under the taps …’
Gilbert was acting out the extreme difficulties this would present when Alistair said very slowly and very softly, ‘If you do not put that kettle down, I will take it and shove it right up—’
‘I think there’s probably enough water in there already for two cups, Gilbert,’ Grace said hastily. ‘I’m not bothered about having anything.’
Gilbert gave her a little bow as if to underline how accommodating she’d been and what a pain Alistair was.
‘So, happy now, Gilbert?’ Alistair asked. ‘Good. Well, if it’s not too much trouble, perhaps you’d keep quiet from here on in, let Grace and me sort out this great big stinking mess?’
Gilbert raised his eyebrows at the tone, but carried the kettle back over to the wooden table.
‘I’m sure it’s not a mess, Alistair,’ Grace soothed. ‘I will ring the electricity company. I’m presuming you haven’t done that?’
‘When have I had the time?’
She did not say, during the two-hour lunch breaks you seem to be taking these days, and she ignored the way Gilbert was rolling his eyes, secure in the knowledge that with his back turned to Alistair, he would not be seen.
‘If we pay by direct debit,’ Grace said reasonably, ‘then this bill is obviously a mistake. If we don’t, we’ll simply send them a cheque, explain the problem. There’s no way the electricity is going to go off.’
At that moment there was a clunk and the lights went out.
Alistair bellowed into the darkness, ‘I was right, but oh no, you wouldn’t have it. And now look.’
‘She can’t look, it’s gone dark,’ Gilbert said from somewhere near the wooden table and there was a stumbling noise and then an ‘Ow, bugger,’ which Grace hoped wasn’t Alistair attempting to find Gilbert and grab him by the throat. The sound of china hitting against china suggested Gilbert was trying to move around too.
‘Stay still, both of you,’ she said, ‘you’re going to hurt yourselves. Let your eyes get used to the gloom. And Gilbert, did you just switch the kettle on?’
‘I did. And then the lights went out … Ah.’
‘It’s tripped the switch on the fuse box, that’s all. There’s obviously something wrong with it. Nothing to do with the red bill.’ She started to feel around her desk until she reached the drawers. Pulling open the middle one, she extracted a torch and, when she had turned it on, shone it first at Alistair to make sure he was still upright, and then at Gilbert. ‘Unplug the kettle, will you?’ she said, ‘I’ll just go and turn the electricity on again. I’ll only be a couple of seconds. Don’t move.’
She picked up her chair and, carrying it and the torch, made her way slowly back out into reception. The electricity box was high up on the wall just outside the front door and soon, by climbing on the chair, she had opened it and found the switch that was in the ‘off’ instead of the ‘on’ position. She flicked it back up and there was that clunk again, and then light. She blinked at the brightness and closed the front of the box.
When she got back to her office, Gilbert was sitting on the edge of her desk with his trouser leg rolled up, examining a red mark just below his knee.
‘Desk or easy chair?’ she asked.
‘Both,’ he replied.
Alistair appeared to have calmed down. ‘Thank you, Grace,’ he said and looked shamefaced. This was the nice Alistair, the one who, although frustrating to work for, made up for it by being kind and funny. The other Alistair appeared to have melted away into the dark.
She put the torch carefully back in the drawer exactly where it had been lying before and held her hand out for the papers. This time Alistair gave them to her and she put them on her desk and flattened out the creased evidence of all the waving and fretting to which Alistair had subjected them.
A quick skim over the figures left her none the wiser, and then something caught her attention.
‘Alistair, this bill isn’t ours. It’s not even for anyone in this street. Saracen Place, that’s quite a hike away.’
Alistair came and looked over her shoulder.
‘But the bill came to me.’
‘When? I’ve never seen it. I’d have noticed if it had been hanging around since the end of August. Where did you find it today?’
‘My in tray.’
‘This isn’t making sense. Your in tray has been cleared out many times since August.’ She didn’t say by her. ‘When I had a quick peek last, you were more or less up to date.’
Alistair picked up the papers again. He was frowning, but as Grace watched she saw a tiny relaxation in the frown as if he’d just had a thought.
‘Unless …’ he said, ‘unless it was among those papers I found at the bottom of my briefcase. You know the briefcase I take to the Chamber of Commerce meetings? I haven’t used it since the last one and I was clearing it out ready for yesterday’s meeting and … yes … I remember taking some papers out of the bottom of it and placing them on the floor.’ He beamed at her. ‘Yes, that’s probably it.’
Grace knew that was the best explanation she was likely to get. Asking him how he’d managed to open someone else’s post, continue to think it was his, file it in his briefcase even though it was a red bill and then wipe its existence completely from his mind was pretty pointless. She just hoped that the people in Saracen Place weren’t still groping around in the dark because of him.
‘Perhaps I ought to take a look at those other papers that were in your briefcase as well,’ she said.
He nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, of course, Grace. Good idea. I’ll get them now.’ Another smile and he trundled from the room.
‘That,’ Gilbert said, rolling down his trouser leg, ‘was a classic, even by Alistair’s standards. He’s getting worse.’
‘Shh.’
When Alistair came back, he was not holding any papers but he had put on his coat. The offending briefcase was clutched to his chest.
>
‘There’s not another Chamber of Commerce meeting now, is there?’ Grace asked, staring at it.
Alistair appeared to be ignoring her. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said brightly. ‘Can you just hang on till I get back?’ He called across to Gilbert. ‘You too … as you’re here anyway.’ He started to leave the room.
Grace followed him. ‘Those papers, Alistair, remember you were going to fetch them?’ But the front door was already closing behind him.
Back in Grace’s office, Gilbert had taken up residence in the easy chair again. ‘Marvellous. Now I’ll have to wait for him and I’ll end up rushing around to get Vi’s supplies. And he’s forgotten all about my payment.’ He gave her a sly smile. ‘I don’t suppose, Grace, that you could take a look?’
Over the next twenty minutes, Grace sorted out where Gilbert’s payment had been messed up, and when she tried Alistair’s office door and now found it open, left him a note on a large piece of paper about the new cheque he needed to write for the outstanding amount. On the floor was what she assumed were the other papers he had found in that briefcase. She sifted through them and the in tray to make sure none of it was toxic. She answered a couple of letters on Alistair’s behalf, putting them in envelopes ready to drop in the postbox on her way home. She checked the answer phone and dealt with what she could, leaving Alistair another larger note about a couple of things that only he could sort out.
In the kitchen she emptied the fridge of everything looking past its best, put it all in the bin and then, carrying the full bin-liner through to the reception area, left it near the door to take downstairs when she went out. She walked back through to her office to give Mrs Macintosh, the New Zealander, a quick call to see how her husband had got on at the emergency dentist and, finally, she pulled down the blinds on the two windows overlooking the street and had a bit of a clean around with the duster and polish kept in her drawer next to the torch.
‘For goodness’ sake, Grace,’ Gilbert said, ‘just sit down and relax. Have a cold cup of tea. You do not get paid to do all this extra stuff. Remind me again how many hours of office admin are in your contract?’
Playing Grace Page 5
