A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [20]
‘Good morning,’ he says, as if we had all been waiting for him and can now get started. He has broad athletic shoulders which manage to make his off-the-peg suit look stylish. ‘I’m Sam Ogilvy.’
And, one by one, he makes his way around the room, shaking hands, moving with the easy confidence of an PS80,000 per annum salesman used to getting what he wants: a closed deal, a wage increase, a classy broad.
Ann goes first. She is reserved but warm; it’s a certainty that she’ll find him attractive. Their handshake is pleasant and formal: it says we can do business together.
The Hobbit is up next, standing up from the armchair to his full height, which still leaves him a good five or six inches short. Ogilvy looks to get the measure of him pretty quickly: a bright shining nerd, a number cruncher. The Hobbit looks suitably deferential.
And now it’s my turn. Ogilvy’s eyes swivel left and scope my face. He knew as soon as he came in that I’ll be the one he’s up against, the biggest threat to his candidature. I knew it too; Ann and Matt won’t cut it.
‘How do you do? Sam.’
He has a strong, captain-of-the-school grip on him.
‘Alec.’
‘Have you been here long?’ he asks, touching the tip of his tanned nose.
‘About ten minutes,’ Ann replies from behind him.
‘Feeling nervous?’
This goes out to anyone who feels like answering. Not me. Matt murmurs ‘Mmmm’, which I find oddly touching.
‘Yeah, me too,’ says Sam, just so we know he’s like the rest of us, even if he does look like Pierce Brosnan. ‘You ever done anything like this before?’
‘No,’ says Matt, sitting down with a deep, involuntary sigh. ‘Just interviews for university.’
Matt picks up a Sisby booklet from the table and starts flicking through it like a man shuffling cards. For a moment, Ann is stranded in the middle of the room, as if she had been on the point of saying something but had decided at the last minute to remain silent on the grounds that it would have been of no consequence. Sam smiles a friendly smile at me. He wants me to like him, but to let him lead. I stand up, a sudden attack of nerves.
‘Where are you off to?’ Ann asks, quick and awkward. ‘If you’re looking for the toilet it’s down the hall to the right. Just keep on going and you’ll come to it.’
She stretches out her long, pale right arm and indicates the direction to me by swatting it from left to right. A ring on her middle finger bounces a spot of reflected sunlight around the common room.
‘I was looking for it,’ I tell her. ‘Thanks.’
The loo is a clean, white-painted cuboid room with smoked-glass windows, three urinals, a row of push-tap basins and two cubicles. Half-a-dozen other candidates are crowded inside. I squeeze past them and go into one of the cubicles. There is a stale, hanging odour and I lock the door. Twenty to nine. Outside, one of the candidates says ‘Good luck’, to which another replies ‘Yeah’. Then the door leading out into the corridor swishes open and clunks shut. Somebody at the sink nearest my cubicle splashes cold water on to his face and emits a shocked, cleansing gasp.
I remain seated and motionless, feeling no need to shit now, only apprehension. I just want to focus, to be alone with my thoughts, and this is the only place in which to do so. The atmosphere in the building is so at odds with the princely splendour of Lucas and Liddiard’s office as to be almost comic. I put my head between my knees and close my eyes, breathing slowly and deliberately. Just pace yourself. You want this. Go out and get it. I can feel something inside my jacket weighing against the top of my thigh. The banana. I sit up, take it out, peel away the skin and eat it quickly in five gulped bites. Slow-burn carbohydrates. Then I lean back against the cistern and feel the flush handle dig hard into my back.
The water has stopped running out of the taps on the other side of the cubicle door. I check my watch. The time has drifted on to 8.50 without my keeping