was supposed to put me at my ease, but what did she mean by again, as if we’d been reborn? Then glowering Marion from our sister Service and just one of her spear-carriers, the bigger, gloomier one, who said we hadn’t met and his name was Anthony, then held out his hand and nearly broke mine.
‘I like a game of badminton myself,’ he told me, as if that made everything all right. So I said, ‘Great, Anthony, where do you play?’ – but he didn’t seem to hear me.
Then Percy Price, keen churchman, rugged face in lockdown. And that shook me, not so much because Percy cut me dead but because he must have handed over temporary command of Stardust to his many lieutenants so that he could be present for the meeting. Then, close on Percy’s heels, carrying a plastic cup of tea reminiscent of the one on Ed’s tray from the self-service café, Guy Brammel, conspicuously at ease in the company of the diminutive Joe Lavender, grey-man of the Office’s secretive internal security section. Joe was carrying a box file and I remember facetiously asking him, just for the human connection, whether the janitors had checked its contents at the door, and getting a dirty look in response.
While they trooped in I was also trying to work out what they all had in common apart from their grim expressions because groups like these don’t form by accident. Ed, as we all now know, is a member of our sister Service, which means that in any hardball inter-Service shoot-out he’s our find and their mistake, so live with it. Therefore assume a lot of inter-Service haggling about who gets what part of the cake. And when all that’s been done and dusted, there will have been one of those last-minute rushes to make sure the audiovisual system in the room we’re sitting in is up and running, because we don’t need another fuck-up like last time, whatever last time was.
Then, just as everyone is finally sitting down comfortably, enter my same two janitors bearing the same coffee urn, water jugs and sandwiches that nobody had got around to eating at the film show, and Andy the cricketing one winks at me. And when they’ve gone, in drifts the spectral figure of Gloria Foxton, the Office’s über-shrink, looking as if she’s been hauled out of bed which she may well have been, and three paces behind her my own Moira of Human Resources bearing a thick green file that I suspect is about me, since she’s carrying it very deliberately blank side outward.
‘You haven’t heard from Florence, by any chance, have you, Nat?’ she asks me in a worried way, pulling up beside me.
‘Not sight nor sound, alas, Moira,’ I reply boldly.
Why did I lie? To this day I can’t tell you. I wasn’t practising. I had not set out to lie. I had nothing to lie about. Then a second look at her tells me that she knew the answer before she asked the question and she was testing my veracity, which made me feel an even bigger fool.
‘Nat,’ says Gloria Foxton, with urgent psychotherapeutical sympathy, ‘how are we?’
‘Bloody awful, thanks, Gloria. How about you?’ I reply cheerfully, and get an icy smile to remind me that people in my position, whatever that is, don’t ask shrinks how they are.
‘And dear Prue?’ she enquires for extra fondness.
‘Marvellous. Firing on all cylinders. Got Big Pharma in her sights.’
But what I’m really feeling is a surge of unjustified anger for certain hurtful wisdoms Gloria uttered five years back when I unwisely sought her free advice on matters Steff, such as ‘Might it just be possible, Nat, that by throwing herself at every boy in her class, Stephanie is making a statement about her absent father?’ – her gravest offence being that she was probably right.
We are settled at last and high time too. Gloria in the meantime has been joined by two Unter-shrinks, Leo and Franzeska, who both look about sixteen. In aggregate I therefore have a cool dozen of my chers collègues sitting in a half-circle, each with their unobstructed view of me, because somehow the formation of the chairs has reshaped itself and I’m stuck out on my own like the boy in the painting being asked when he last saw his father, except it isn’t my poor father they’re here to ask about, it’s Ed.
*
Guy Brammel has decided to open the bowling, as he would say, which makes