Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  ‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve done a week’s supply, John.’

  ‘Of hundreds or fifties?’

  ‘The lot.’

  ‘Twenty-fives and tens as well?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  ‘Let me have a look.’

  Morris clipped the papers together and tossed them across on to Dyson’s desk. Dyson had for some reason assumed that Morris would bring them over and stand beside him while he went through them. He went through them none the less, frowning. He had spent most of the morning frowning, except when he had been talking to Sir William Paice and others. Morris lit another cigarette.

  ‘This is all right,’ said Dyson, taking pains to ink in one or two faint characters and slipped capitals, in lieu of anything else to correct. ‘This is quite good. Quite good work.’

  ‘What next, John?’ asked Morris.

  Dyson gazed at the sheets of copy, shuffling them about in his hand, trying to think.

  ‘You’d better do another week’s supply,’ he said.

  Morris accompanied Bob and Dyson to the Gates for lunch. Bob invited him; Dyson frowned all the way there, and abandoned the other two as soon as they were inside.

  ‘Every newspaper office has its own particular pub,’ explained Bob. ‘The Gates happens to be ours.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Morris, looking round the bar with his non-­committal eyes.

  ‘Well, some people go off to El Vino’s or the Falstaff. But a certain set on the paper come here pretty regularly. You can usually count on finding old Bill Waddy sitting up at the bar here, and old Gareth Holmroyd hovering about somewhere.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Morris. Bob introduced him to some of the usual crowd; and Morris asked Bill Waddy, who was buying, for a Pernod. They all stared at him over their halves of bitter. Morris appeared not to notice.

  ‘Who’s the joker up the end?’ he asked Bob quietly. ‘Is he one of your team?’

  ‘The one leaning on the bar? That’s Reg Mounce, the Pictures Editor.’

  ‘He’s high.’

  ‘A bit, possibly. It’s quite funny actually. You see that dog-eared piece of paper he’s showing Gareth and Mike? That’s a note he got from the Editor the other day, giving him the sack.’

  ‘What’s he flashing it around for, then?’

  ‘Well, he’s surprised by it, you see. The point is, people don’t get the sack on this paper. It’s that sort of paper. So he keeps going round asking everyone what they think he should do.’

  Morris stared at Bob expressionlessly.

  ‘And?’ he said.

  ‘Well, everyone thinks he should just ignore it. Pretend he never got it. People don’t think the Editor would have the nerve to challenge him about it.’

  ‘A popular man, is he, Reg?’

  ‘Oh God no. Everyone thinks he’s an absolute tit. It’s just a matter of solidarity.’

  ‘Oh. That.’

  ‘It’s that sort of office.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s really not at all a bad sort of office to be in.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Morris, conjuring another long cigarette out of the air. ‘Oh, sure, sure.’

  Relations between Dyson and Morris deteriorated still further after lunch. Morris left the Gates as soon as he had finished his Pernod. When Dyson and Bob got back to the office, he was at his desk already, typing. It was not the department’s battered old machine he was typing on; it was a brand new electric portable. Dyson stopped in his tracks, gazing at it. He was almost too angry to speak.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not standing for this. Year in, year out, Bob and I have had to make do with one rotten reconditioned typewriter between us. And the first day you arrive you contrive to get hold of this! Well, I’m not having it.’

  Dyson wrenched off his overcoat, dragging the lining out of the right sleeve. He sat down at his desk, not looking at Morris, his face rigid with anger. Morris watched him expressionlessly.

  ‘You can borrow it if you like,’ he said.

  ‘I can borrow it?’ cried Dyson, flaring up at once. ‘Did you say I can borrow it?’

  ‘Sure. Whenever you like.’

  Bob slipped a peppermint into his mouth, not daring to look at either of them until Dyson had found words to speak.

  ‘That typewriter’s going back at once,’ he said inadequately.

  Morris inhaled smoke, held it for some minutes, and then let it down his nose.

  ‘John,’ he said impassively, ‘this isn’t an office machine.’

  ‘What?’ snapped Dyson. ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘It’s my own.’

  ‘Yours? Where did you get it from?’

  ‘I bought it.’

  Bob averted his eyes again. It was as embarrassing to see a friend under the influence of adrenalin when one had not lost one’s own temper as it was to see him under the influence of alcohol when one was sober.

  ‘Bought it?’ queried Dyson, as if the word were some rare form of Sanskrit preterite.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘In a shop?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘In the lunch-hour?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘An electric typewriter?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  Dyson continued to gaze at Morris for some minutes, his mouth very slightly open. Then, abruptly, without a word, he turned away, picked up a piece of copy, and began to correct it with short, violent strokes and swirls of his pen. Morris turned his head slightly and caught Bob’s eye. Bob at once stopped moving the peppermint about in his mouth.

  ‘If you pay Schedule D,’ said Morris, ‘it’s tax-deductible.’

  Bob made a point of taking a benevolent interest in Morris over the next few days, to balance out Dyson’s hostility. He got him an office towel for the washroom. He told him to whom to apply for union membership. He showed him how to make out his expenses chits, filling in ‘office duties, 5s. 6d.’ for each day of the week, as laid down in the house agreement between union and management. Bob could remember his own loneliness and isolation when he had first come down and started work on the paper. Morris didn’t seem lonely or isolated himself, but a hard shell was usually a sign of vulnerability underneath.

  People were also taking a benevolent interest in Bob. Gareth Holmroyd, Ted Hurwitz, Mike Sparrow, Ralph Absalom – they were all keeping their eyes open for a house for him. Each day they brought him cyclostyled sheets from their local agents, and the telephone numbers of friends’ relatives whose relatives’ friends had seen a board up somewhere. Bob felt obliged to go and look at a certain number of these places out of politeness. He took mornings off from work to inspect houses of character in Ealing, imposing residences in Hendon, and important properties in select residential districts just 30 minutes from Waterloo. With unseeing eyes he gazed at usual offices, charming patios, ‘Ideal’ boilers, and mature fruit-trees. He asked the young men from the agents who showed him round if the pipes were lagged, and whether the soil was chalk or clay; he couldn’t think of any other questions. Almost the only thing he could think of coherently as he peered at the Dutch tiles and crazy paving was that according to his last statement of account he had £67 12s. 9d. in the bank. He dwelt on the figure gratefully. Whatever happened, however far he was driven by forces outside his control, there was surely no way in which a man with only £67 12s. 9d. could find himself acquiring a delightful property or superior detached residence. In the last analysis the £67 12s. 9d. would stand revealed; the pen would be taken out of his fingers just before he signed across the excise stamp; gentle hands would conduct him back to the comfortable shabby gloom of Flat 4, 86 Leominster Gardens.

  Jannie was taking a benevolent interest, too, inviting not Bob but Tessa out to look at houses she had found for them in S.W.23. The houses Jannie found did not have charming patios or mature rose-gardens. Most of them were noticeably short even on usual offices, and it did not occur even to the agents to describe them as
imposing or delightful. Still, they had something; they had potentialities. And sitting tenants.

  ‘It’s just a matter of agreeing compensation with them,’ said Jannie; leading Tessa in and out of rooms impregnated with such poverty and squalor as she had never dreamt existed. ‘Everyone does it. The present owner would probably arrange it for you, if you feel awkward about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tessa, trying not to breathe the sweet-sour air into her lungs.

  ‘You could knock this wall down, and make one large room through from front to back.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or make the flat at the back into the kitchen, and rent the basement out as a bed-sitter . . .’

  For Bob and Tessa’s house Jannie projected all the reconstruction and improvement which she and John had never found either money or energy enough to carry out in their own. As she took Tessa over a house, the West Indian family in the second-floor back dissolved in her mind into an au pair girl; the brass taps and greasy gas-rings in the ground-floor scullery into a row of shining white domestic machinery. She had never had an au pair girl or a laundry room herself. Her visualization was as generous to Bob and Tessa as it was careless of the existing occupiers. All Tessa could do was blush. She felt she was blushing all the time on these trips, at the conditions of life they were intruding upon, at Jannie’s plans to turn it to their advantage, at Jannie’s evident affection for her. Jannie really seemed to like her, in her oblique, distracted way. Perhaps just because she was Bob’s fiancée – but Tessa felt that it was for herself as well. She wished she could like Jannie more in return. She could see her qualities; she could see why Bob liked her. All the same, when Jannie spoke in that curious Oxford-and-Cambridge accent she had, she seemed to Tessa immeasurably remote and eccentric – a woman of some quite different generation. Then again, she was in love with Bob; and embarrassingly old to be. It was as if one’s aunt were competing against one.

  ‘It would be so nice if you did come and live near us when you’re married,’ said Jannie wistfully. ‘One does feel a bit cut off out here.’

  The whole business was ridiculous, of course. They would never get married – it should have been obvious to everyone. They couldn’t get married. Bob wasn’t in love with her. You didn’t get married to people who weren’t in love with you. But if Jannie couldn’t see this for herself, how could she explain it to her – now, after they had trailed round looking at all those houses? How could Bob suddenly start explaining it to John, to Gareth Holmroyd, to the Editor . . . ? How could she and Bob even put it in words to each other?

  ‘I mean,’ said Jannie, ‘it’s very central here. It’s just that one sometimes feels rather – oh, I don’t know. You and Bob could get a mortgage all right, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Tessa, blushing yet again. She didn’t know whether they could get a mortgage or not. She had no clear idea of what a mortgage was. And she resisted finding out, in the way that other girls she had known kept themselves in deliberate ignorance of such things as impregnation, in the unarticulated hope that if they didn’t know what it was it couldn’t happen to them.

  Mrs Mounce busied herself with being kind to Tessa, too. But this she found easier to bear, partly because Mrs Mounce had so many troubles herself that she was able to be kind back to her, and partly because Mrs Mounce’s world and Mrs Mounce’s advice seemed even more remote and unreal than Jannie’s.

  ‘Honestly, sweetest,’ said Mrs Mounce, ‘don’t go lumbering yourselves with a house and a mortgage right at the beginning. Rent a nice little flat somewhere where you know exactly what your outgoings are – where you know you’re not responsible for anything. You can always do a little bit here and a little bit there to brighten it up.’

  Tessa liked her, in a dreary sort of way – the sort of way one liked picking one’s nails or staying in bed all morning. They sat for hours drinking tea in Mrs Mounce’s flat downstairs, while Mrs Mounce talked about her affairs with moustached men in export-import, and Tessa looked at the little bit here and the little bit there which Mrs Mounce had done herself to brighten her own place up. Most of the little bits seemed to be made of cream-painted hardboard and enamelled black wrought iron. She imagined showing her parents round a home of her own decorated in the same way. ‘And this is the cocktail bar, Daddy. Bob and I made it out of hardboard and Formica . . . Do you like the individual wrought-iron bottle stands at the back? Bob screwed them on the mirror himself . . .’

  The thought made her smile to herself, for what she recognized were basically snobbish reasons. She was pleased to find she was still able to smile, even snobbishly. She had the impression that she hadn’t smiled for several months.

  Steadily, quietly, electrically, Erskine Morris typed the ‘In Years Gone By’ column several weeks into the future. There had never been so much ‘In Years Gone By’ copy set, or so much waiting to be set. From day to day the dark shades of his shirts, ties, and high-buttoning suits subtly changed. But the pallid face above them remained impassive, and the waiting cigarette continued to smoke ritually in the ashtray, like a joss-stick before some inscrutable joss. And Morris’s presence continued to cramp Dyson’s style. He was if anything more irritated by the quiet drumming of the electric typewriter than by the clatter of the old mechanical one. It was harder to notice exactly when it stopped, and Dyson liked to know. Round about four o’clock in the afternoon he would sometimes forget Morris, and sprawl back in his chair with his hands behind his head, yawning and looking at the ceiling, just as he had before Morris’s arrival. Then he would suddenly realize that the typing had ceased. Fearing that Morris had stopped to watch him yawning, he would at once return to his work, and try to conceal his yawns behind his hand. At other times, he would sit back in a thoughtful, philosophical mood, and ask Bob whether he felt one ought to have one’s name printed at the head of one’s private writing-paper. Morris’s typewriter would stop at once. ‘Oh, forget it, Bob,’ Dyson would mutter. A great deal of work was done by all three of them.

  Dyson became quite unlike himself in his dealings with Morris. Every time Morris got a telephone-call which sounded from his laconic replies as if it was private business, Dyson frowned at him warningly. He also prowled about the room from time to time, passing as if accidentally behind Morris’s chair, and looking over Morris’s shoulder out of the corner of his eye. It was in this way that he discovered that not all Morris’s application with the typewriter was devoted to ‘In Years Gone By’.

  ‘What’s this?’ he demanded one day. ‘ “Terry had been on tea for four years before he first began using horse.” What the hell’s this?’

  Morris helped himself to a couple of lungfuls of cigarette smoke.

  ‘It’s an article on junk,’ he said.

  ‘Junk?’

  ‘Drugs. It’s for the features department.’

  ‘They asked you to do it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Dyson walked round the room like a patrolling school­master.

  ‘Have you written anything else for other departments?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, a couple of leaders. Some diary pars.’

  Dyson patrolled on.

  ‘If you want to write anything for anyone else again,’ he said roughly, ‘do it in your own time, not in mine.’

  ‘OK, John,’ said Morris.

  Dyson knew he was behaving stupidly, which made him more graceless still. Bob tried to talk him out of it when they were on their own, at the sandwich bar in the Gates.

  ‘You’ll have to find him something else to do, John,’ he said. ‘He’s five weeks ahead on “Years Gone By” already.’

  ‘But what else can I give him to do?’ wailed Dyson. ‘He’s just a trainee – he doesn’t know how to do anything.’

  ‘He can learn, John, just like you and I did.’

  ‘Bob, I can’t let him sub, because I haven’t got time to go through it all again and check it. And can you honestly imagine him ringing up Sir William
Paice? Or the Bishop? Or even Canon Morley?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘He’s just not the type, is he, Bob? Anyway, poor old Eddy did “In Years Gone By” for over ten years; I don’t see why Mr Morris shouldn’t stick at it for a week or two.’

  ‘Morris isn’t the same sort of man as poor old Eddy, John . . .’

  ‘Don’t tell me! Honestly, Bob, that office was a happy place until Morris came. To me he seems to cast a blight over the whole day.’

  ‘You do overdramatize things a bit, you know, John. He’s a bit shy, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you know what Bill Waddy calls him, Bob? Erskine Absinthe. Fancy coming in here and demanding a Pernod on his very first day at the office! And he didn’t even buy a round himself! He just swilled down his Pernod and walked out!’

  ‘He’s a bit on the defensive, John . . .’

  ‘He never bought a round! And all this classless business he tries to put across. Honestly, Bob, he went to Rugby! Did you know that? I asked the personnel director. You and I went to ordinary grammar schools, Bob – but we don’t go round pretending to be classless. And he went to Rugby! Well, for God’s sake, Bob! For God’s sake!’

  Remembering all the dinners he had eaten at the Dysons’ when he had been living on his own, Bob invited Morris back to his flat one evening so that Tessa could cook dinner for him in his turn. Tessa was nervous about it; she had never entertained anyone in the flat before, apart from Mrs Mounce. She became worried about the appearance of the place, about her cooking, and about her anomalous position in the household. But Morris turned out to be completely uninterested in all three. When he arrived he put his cold, white hand in hers for a moment, and said ‘Hello, Tessa’ as if he had always been aware of her as part of the background furnishings. Then he ignored her for the rest of the evening. He produced a full bottle of whisky from his briefcase, poured out three tumblerfuls, and asked if he could have the television on.

  ‘There’s something coming up that I have an interest in,’ he said, fiddling expertly with the controls of the set.

  ‘Something you wrote?’ asked Bob, remembering the dialogue he had seen on Morris’s desk.