The Gilded Ones

by Brooke Fieldhouse

  Everything was maple; maple floor, maple desks, maple cupboards. People were milling everywhere in a state of herd happiness, smiles, teeth, hands gripping hands. There were hi-fives, ‘yos’, it was a hive of human bees converting the nitty nectar of work a day problems into design honey. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew was playing on a hidden tape deck.

  My heart banged its way back down the chequer plate stair when I saw six other guys in suits waiting in white Wassily chairs, their Samsonite briefcases resting on the maple. They all looked older than me and were doubtless more experienced. I didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Hiiii, Puuulse – it has to be!’ A petite black girl was gripping my hand – shoulder as well, it felt like she was trying to kiss me. She saw me looking at the suits in chairs, saw my face. ‘No worrieees, these guys are sales reps,’ then in a whisper, ‘we call them heat-seeking reps, you know like missiles?’ Her voice went up at the end, as if it were a question. ‘I’ll show you round. Jon-n-Den’ll be with you innajiff.’

  Funny, half a second ago I’d been worrying about not getting the job because of the competition. The news about the heat-seeking reps had slightly dampened my appetite and I had an awful feeling that I was going to be offered the job. Oh, this place was swish all right, it was a managerial position, but it was all bigger than I’d thought. There were sixty people in the room, and I could see all of them at once.

  ‘I’m Tanni bythewayye,’ she brushed my fingers with her hand as if she were scattering stardust. ‘You can shower here,’ she enthused sweeping aside a sliding door and presenting a darkish chamber with wooden duckboards. ‘Not nowwe!’ She spotted my look of alarm and her hand went back up to my shoulder.

  ‘Guys like to bike in… 5am in summer. We’re always at our desks by 0800hrs.’ What happened in between? She saw what I was thinking, stepped backwards on the maple and out went the index finger which seemed to be pointing straight at my crotch. ‘Power breakfast, right?’ Another question – except she was telling me, not asking.

  ‘We sometimes have a shared lunch… Jon-n-Den are super-cheffy – otherwise it’s do your own thing, eat al desko.’ While she was speaking I was watching both of our reflections on the walls. Every section of wall that hadn’t got a window in it had been clad with full-height mirror. It felt like being in a gym.

  There was no privacy in this office. Brain storming, bubble-diagramming, typing, printing, drawing, coffee-making on the Bosch cappuccino machine; telephoning, canoodling… mmm there’d be plenty of that – I could feel it in the air – would all happen under the public gaze. The place where I worked at the moment had been nicknamed ‘The Dating Agency’ and I wanted to get away from office politics. This was stylish, but it was more of the same in a different guise.

  ‘Okaaay, Jon-n-Den are hot-to-trot – ready to roll!’ Tanni shimmied away to attend to the heat-seeking reps.

  Probably because it was transparent I hadn’t noticed it before, but right in the middle of the human bustle was a glass box. Glass roof, glass walls, glass door, and it was a sufficiently large space to accommodate a circular white-topped table. Sitting at the table and opposite one another were two men, one dark curly-haired and wearing a sweatshirt with red and black hoops like Dennis the Menace. The other man was bald, shiny and wore a white shirt open at the neck.

  The curly-haired man was my age, the bald one about 40. There was nothing on the table and, as the two appeared to be motionless, I assumed it was a kind of art installation. They saw me, waved, and the bald man’s hand movement turned into a ‘come hither’ with his finger. I pushed, crossed the threshold and closed the glass door behind me. I was surprised how quiet it was after the frenzy outside.

  They stood. I’d guessed that ‘curly’ was Den. He had little dark eyes with V-shaped eyebrows that gave the impression they’d been painted on, like a trainee circus clown. As for ‘baldy’… I know this sounds prejudiced, politically incorrect and everything… but I have a dislike of bald men – oh, don’t misunderstand me I admire big tall baldies – but this guy stood barely five feet above the maple. He was a white-shirted goblin and as we shook hands I noted that he had the breath of a dragon.

  ‘This is where we hire and fire…’ instructed Baldy… Fire? A visit from St George wouldn’t come amiss here. ‘… And if we want to get really nasty…’ He nonchalantly produced from his pocket a white remote control, jabbed at one of the buttons and hey presto, the glass walls of the box frosted. I couldn’t believe it. In one move we were cocooned in a milk-like substance, invisible to and from the melee outside.

  ‘It’s an electric current… changes the molecules in the glass. Same as the ones just installed in the toilet cubicles at Philippe Starck’s Café Costes in Paris.’ I’d seen the magazine articles and I had to admit it was impressive.

  ‘Have a go.’ Baldy lobbed me the remote. I fingered it and watched the crazy scene outside come and go.

  ‘Try the green button.’ I pressed. The tabletop started to rotate at the speed of the Telecom Tower restaurant. Red brought it to a stop.

  ‘It’s a little game we play when we have our “blue-sky” sessions. We call it thinking inside the box.’ I gave a chuckle of recognition and felt a bit of a creep.

  ‘I’m Good Cop, and this is Bad Cop,’ said Baldy indicating Dennis the Menace. ‘But we swap roles sometimes.’

  The recently opaqued glass door behind me opened twelve inches.

  ‘It’sonlyme!’ The voice was invisible, female, and the kind of ‘little girlie’ diction which signalled the theatrical.

  ‘Arya reddy for yer teas?’ Again, little girlie, but this time parodying a northern skivvy.

  Orders were taken through the door giving the procedure a curious air of disembodiment.

  We sat at the table; Den on my right, Baldy on my left, and me with my back to the door. Talk was perfunctory and they seemed to have no wish to see my work. Again, the door behind me opened, but wider this time and throwing a shaft of sunlight across the tabletop.

  ‘’Eres yer teas!’

  … Silence. I half turned to look at the person who had just entered. She was aged about forty, five foot five, slim, with hair the colour of thick-cut marmalade and worn in a mid-length bob. She had a smiling, comfortable kind of face, blue eyes with gold lights and I’d sufficient experience of office life to recognize mischief when I saw it.

  She was wearing a good-quality grey-blue plaid wool skirt, and navy cashmere V-neck pullover worn on top of a white school blouse. Her make-up was understated and she was wearing stockings – yes on a day like this – pale fine denier ones… On her feet were what appeared to be cream ballet pumps which gave me the uncomfortable recollection of last night’s dream. God, I felt tired.

  She bent forward and placed the black metal tray, with three white half-spherical mugs, on the table – closer to Den than to Baldy and me. I had the slightest glimpse of white garter belt as the wool of her skirt rode up.

  ‘Thank you, Polly.’ Den’s voice sounded like a tired caress… he’d read my thoughts. ‘Her circulation’s not good.’

  ‘That’s right, it needs frequent massage.’ She’d dropped the girlie-speak. It was the sophisticated contralto of an ex-private school and uni graduate.

  ‘That’ll be all, Polly,’ said Den.

  There was a polite cough from Baldy, and a ‘… for now that is.’

  She turned, moving awkwardly and walking from the knee as if she’d recently hurt her back, carefully opened the glass door and closed it behind her.

  ‘… You married, Pulse?’ Baldy spoke, eyeing me solemnly as if he was about to hatch a plan.

  It was a normal question – particularly for a job interview but I could feel myself blushing. There was Denise, but I didn’t want to go into that.

  ‘We’re both hitched,’ volunteered Baldy ‘… not to one another of course!’ He held up his right hand in
a ‘get-you!’ gesture. ‘Den the Men’ looked at him furiously.

  ‘My kids are at uni – one at Southampton and… t’other at UEA,’ persisted Baldy.

  The way he pronounced ‘t’other’ was tuther. Both of these guys were from the South – smooth, clipped speech, almost certainly ex-private school. Was there a soupÇon of mockery going on, or was I being oversensitive?

  ‘Den’s kids are still babes… aren’t they, Den?’ Den’s little eyes seemed to take on a renewed bout of fury.

  ‘… So, if we offer you this job… will you be moving out of London?’

  This was the bullet I had to bite.

  ‘Well, what I thought I’d do is suck it and see…’

  ‘Oh, we like to do that here don’t we… don’t we, Den?’ Baldy was almost shouting that last phrase. There was the sound of a leather shoe sole scraping the maple floor.

  ‘… I thought I’d commute weekly and look for digs – initially, until I’ve… sucked it – so to speak.’ I gave a nervous chuckle and regretted my attempt at banter as the table shook with the impact of Den’s shoe against its pedestal.

  ‘Well in that case…’ said Baldy clasping his hands together across his stomach, inhaling through his teeth and looking in the direction in which Polly had disappeared. ‘… I think we should be able to fix you up with something.’

  There was a noise as the door thudded closed and I realized that Den had got up and left the glass box.

  ‘Don’t mind him; he’s all right when you get to know him. We’d very much like you to join us here. Welcome aboard. When can you start?’

  Three

  I cowered rather than sat, on the return train journey, hoping very much that I wouldn’t run into anybody I knew. There’s nothing like being offered a job to give one a moment of elation, but it hadn’t lasted. After I left The Old Bottle Works I got an early lunch and went on a longish walk on the all-pebble beach.

  By the time I caught the train back to Victoria it was mid afternoon and I was looking forward to standing hugger-mugger on the District Line. Imagine Southern Railways every day? Promo Designs were clearly ‘the business’, they were slick, had an up-and-coming reputation. It would be a good career move… but I just wasn’t happy with the office politics. How long before I fell out with Baldy, how soon before Dennis the Menace blew himself and everybody around him to pieces. I felt depressed.

  I ran through a mental to-do list”

  •wait for formal job offer to arrive

  •give notice – breaking the news to Geoff would be pleasurable, but not to Ros… ‘Judaaasss, I thought we were a team!’

  •buy a Southern Railways season ticket

  •look for digs… oh God, Polly!

  I slid the buckle on my attaché case, opened and gazed into it – as one does when one’s in the depths… took out the copy of Building Design (BD) magazine which had arrived the day before but because of all the excitement I hadn’t read it. There were usually several copies in the office but I always had one posted to my flat. There was never time to read it in the office, and anyway… there were office spies.

  Anybody seen trawling the classifieds was marked as a potential deserter. They might return to work after daring to take a perfectly innocent week’s holiday and find somebody else doing their job… doing it better. There were even mischief-makers who would remove attractive-looking advertised posts, scissoring them from the magazine. It was all fuel for the fire of suspicion.

  What with the rhythm and rattle of the train I couldn’t concentrate on the articles on Building Regulations, Conservation, and an update on the about-to-open new airport terminal at Birmingham. I cast my eye down the classifieds. Why not? It was no different from buying hi-fi, a suit, a pair of shoes… an attaché case – you still kept looking after you’d made your purchase, just to reassure yourself you’d made the right decision. Then I saw it…

  Lloyd Lewis Associates requires office manager for small design practice in North London. Managerial experience essential; salary negotiable…

  Patrick Lloyd Lewis had been my hero… well not exactly hero, but as a teenager instead of girlie pictures I’d perhaps rather oddly had photos of his work pinned up in my bedroom. He was ‘a name’ – except nobody really knew that much about him. I’d read somewhere that he’d recently lost his wife.

  When I got to Victoria I made straight for the payphones. I was curious, that’s all. The article I’d had pinned up on my wall at home in the north of England mentioned that he drove a Jensen, had a house in Cheyne Walk. It had chimed with my desperately undernourished juvenile aspirations.

  I put in the 10p piece, dialled the number. It rang out. My watch said 5.45pm; too late, they’d have all gone home. After six rings there was a noise like a full strike in a bowling alley followed by sufficient silence to give me time to clear my throat.

  ‘Lloyd Lewis.’ The male voice sounded artificial, plummy – not Eton, more provincial thespian. There was an emptiness about the acoustic at the other end of the phone – as if the voice were coming from a large indoor auditorium, the speaker centre stage, under spotlight.

  ‘I’m interested in your advert for an office manager.’ There was another silence and I could hear a tiny fleshy popping sound following by an ‘O’.

  ‘And why, do you want to come and work here?’ The ‘why’ sounded slightly ridiculous, as if it were spoken for the benefit of an audience which was close to the speaker, not for me standing miles away in a phone booth. It was definitely Shakespearean, as if he was holding a skull in one hand, the clunky black Bakelite telephone handset in the other… Well, if he thought I was going to hesitate he was wrong. I had my elevator pitch ready.

  ‘I work in an office of 250 right now. I want experience running a small office to a high professional standard producing top quality design.’ There was a further silence, and in my fantasy, I could visualize him scrutinizing the skull, bringing his popping lips close to its grinning teeth.

  ‘Then you need to come and see me.’ The emphasis on the ‘see’ gave the voice the minute tetchiness of the practised and predatory homo.

  I fumbled with my Filofax. When? I’d already given Geoff the story of a dead aunt. I would need to rustle up an excuse for another day off. If I suggested tomorrow then I could say it was food poisoning from the post-funeral prawn sandwiches.

  ‘I could come tomorrow?’

  ‘…Tomorrow?’ The thespianite voice gave the impression that my suggestion had been nothing short of insubordination. ‘Come right now!’

  I suppose I could be there in an hour. It was going to be a long day.

  ‘Err…’

  ‘Tomorrow…’ the voice boomed again, ‘and… Tomorrow. May be too late!’

  Four

  It was a quarter to seven when I shuffled up the steps of the tube station and across the cool terrazzo floor of a ticket hall flooded with commuters on their way home. A man and a woman were standing on opposite sides of the space selling contrasting political newspapers, each shouting their repetitive slogan.

  ‘Zowjalist Wergar!’ The man’s voice sounded angry and threatening.

  ‘… Gweene Party!’ The woman’s cry seemed to be in supplication, as if each were characters singing an ominous duet in an opera. It was a relief to get out into the stifling heat of the street.

  Stupid! I hadn’t been concentrating and I’d got off a stop too soon. I walked up the hill, past the pub where Ruth Ellis shot her lover, past the enormous church with its fat tower… Derelict for years, but still trying to hang onto the present by its two clocks. Both telling different times, both wrong but ‘be right twice a day guv’nor!’ Clocks in high places are too expensive to keep going these days. It’s as if the price of reliability has risen beyond our means. Two days previously I’d read about five thousand police who’d taken on a group of ‘rioting South Yorkshire miner
s’. Why was it that the streets of the South – particularly certain parts of London – seemed to be paved with soft gold?

  I assumed that I knew this area because I’d been here before. It was twelve years ago while at college in the North, and I’d got myself a summer job in an architect’s office. Mum had almost passed out when I told her. She’d never been to London. I got digs in a big house… owner was an artist, spent most of his time in Spain so I had the attic – two cavernous rooms. I always got up early and – unless it was raining – walked over Primrose Hill into Gloucester Place. The other guys in the office thought I was mad.

  Funny how memory presses in upon you… Not with the stuff you can recall, but with what you can’t. Look once and you think you’ve got the hang of things, look again and you find that the world is very different to what you thought.

  The houses I remembered round here were huge – detached, with red brick that looked as if it had been dusted in paprika. There had been neglected gardens, pointy roofs and clumpy terracotta gateposts whose tops were spiky like the helmets of Genghis Khan’s soldiers. The house I was standing in front of today was completely different to what I’d imagined.

  It was the end of a row of twelve, a five-storey terrace, and ‘perfect’ in the sense that all houses were virtually identical. Sulphur-yellow brick, sticky black-painted iron railings – gates and balconies encrusted with ferrous flowers. I guessed at 1785. It looked like the wing of a country house of that date.

  But there was something wrong. The other wing – and the centre section which no doubt had been intended to have stone columns and pediment – was missing. What lay beyond the last house in the terrace were more of the paprika-dusted pointy roofed homes which had been built a century later.