Stay with it, girl, she said to herself as the office junior came to tell her to go away because they were locking up now, you’ve got four more days of this. Think (she said to herself) of the Honour of the Firm. Think of old man Moss hauling himself up by his bootstraps out of the slums of nineteenth-century Liverpool, studying all the hours God sent at the Mechanics Institute to pass his examinations, qualify, meet up with old man Berwick and found the greatest accounting firm the world has ever known. She had read this stirring story in the recruitment pamphlets they had sent her when she joined, and the recollection of it never failed to arouse in her strong feelings of pure apathy. Oddly enough, the pamphlet had been curiously reticent on the subject of old man Berwick, preferring to concentrate on his more dashing colleague, and Jane often wondered where he had pulled himself up out of by his bootstraps. Harrow, probably.
A year or so back, the compilers of the same recruitment guide had been going round interviewing members of staff for the new edition, and they had asked Jane what the most satisfying, fulfilling, life-enhancing thing about working for the firm was, in her lowly opinion. She had replied, without hesitation, going home, and they hadn’t included her in the guide or even the video, although she prided herself that she had the best legs in the department. Since the rest of the legs in the department belonged to Mr Shaw, Mr Peterson, Mr Ferrara and Mr Timson respectively, this was no symptom of vanity on Jane’s part, merely the scrupulous accuracy and devotion to truth which marks an accountant out from his fellow creatures.
Since then, Jane had kept her opinion of her chosen career very much to herself; but, as if to compensate, she let it out of its cage pretty freely once she was alone with it. As she was now, for instance, on a cold Monday night in Bridport.
There are few excitements to compare with one’s first night in a strange new town, and despite her weariness and a deplorable urge to take her tights off and watch “Cagney and Lacey” on the black and white portable in her room at the Union Hotel, Jane set out to immerse herself completely in the town. After all, she reckoned, she might never come here again; live this precious moment to the full, crush each ripe fruit of sensation against the palate until the appetite is cloyed in intoxicating richness.
The cinema was closed when she eventually found it, what with it being half past September, and since she had no wish to be raped, robbed or murdered she didn’t go into the White Hart, the Blue Ball, the Bunch of Grapes, the Prince of Wales, the Peacock, the Catherine Wheel, the Green Dragon, the Four Horseshoes, the Hour Glass, the Half Way House, the Bird in Hand, the Bottle and Glass, the Jolly Sportsman, the Dorsetshire Yeoman, the Boot and Slipper, the Rising Sun, the Crown and Cushion, the Poulteney Arms, the Red Cross Knight, the Two Brewers, the Black Dog, the Temporary Sign, the Duke of Rochester, the Gardeners Arms or the Mississippi Riverboat Night Club. Apart from these, the only place of entertainment open to the public was the bus shelter, and that was a touch too crowded for Jane’s taste. She went back to the Union Hotel, had a glass or orange juice and some fresh local boiled carpet with gravy in the dining room, and went upstairs to catch the last ten minutes of “Cagney and Lacey”, which had been cancelled and replaced with athletics from Zurich.
Isn’t it fortunate, Jane reflected, that I brought a good book with me. The only thing which can stop me enjoying my book is if the proprietors of this charnel-house forget to put a shilling in the meter. She picked the book out of her suitcase, opened it where her expired Capitalcard marked the place, and began to read.
This is not the right book, she said to herself as her eye fell upon the corduroy furrows of the page. This is the book I finished reading yesterday.
You can tell of your Torments of the Damned. You can, if you wish, allude to Sisyphus and the Stone. You can wax eloquent, especially if you are a television evangelist, about what is going to happen to the fornicators and the bearers of false witness when they finally come eyeball to eyeball with the Big G. But you cannot begin to describe, not if you speak with the tongues of men and of angels, the exquisite agony of being stuck in a fleabag hotel in a shut town with a choice between watching a load of tubby East Germans putting the shot in their underwear or reading a detective story every detail of whose plot is etched on your mind.
