The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [35]
Septimus resided in Sevenoaks with his wife, Norma, and his two children, Winston and Elizabeth, who attended the local comprehensive school. They would have gone to the grammar school, he regularly informed his colleagues, but the Labour government had stopped all that.
Septimus operated his daily life by means of a set of invariable subroutines, like a primitive microprocessor, while he supposed himself to be a great follower of tradition and discipline. For if he was nothing, he was at least a creature of habit. Had, for some inexplicable reason, the KGB wanted to assassinate Septimus, all they would have had to do was put him under surveillance for seven days and they would have known his every movement throughout the working year.
Septimus rose every morning at 7:15 and donned one of his two pinhead-patterned dark suits. He left his home at 47 Palmerston Drive at 7:55, having consumed his invariable breakfast of one soft-boiled egg, two pieces of toast, and two cups of tea. On arriving at platform one at Sevenoaks station, he would purchase a copy of the Daily Express before boarding the 8:27 to Cannon Street. During the journey Septimus would read his newspaper and smoke two cigarettes, arriving at Cannon Street at 9:07. He would then walk to the office and be sitting at his desk in his glass cubicle on the sixth floor, confronting the first claim to be adjusted, by 9:30. He took his coffee break at 11:00, allowing himself the luxury of two more cigarettes, when once again he would regale his colleagues with the imagined achievements of his children. At 11:15 he returned to work.
At one o’clock he would leave the “great Gothic cathedral” (another of his expressions) for one hour, which he passed at a pub called the Havelock, where he would drink a half pint of Carlsberg lager with a dash of lime and eat the dish of the day. After he finished his lunch, he would once again smoke two cigarettes. At 1:55 he returned to the insurance records until the fifteen-minute tea break at four o’clock, which was another ritual occasion for two more cigarettes. On the dot of 5:30, Septimus would pick up his umbrella and reinforced steel briefcase with the initials S.H.C. in silver on the side and leave, double-locking his glass cubicle. As he walked through the typing pool, he would announce with a mechanical jauntiness, “See you same time tomorrow, girls,” hum a few bars from The Sound of Music in the descending elevator, and then walk out into the torrent of office workers surging down High Holborn. He would stride purposefully toward Cannon Street station, umbrella tapping away on the pavement, while he rubbed shoulders with bankers, shippers, oil men, and brokers, not discontent to think himself part of the great City of London.
Once he reached the station, Septimus would purchase a copy of the Evening Standard and a pack of ten Benson & Hedges cigarettes from Smith’s newsstand, placing both on the top of his Prudential documents already in the briefcase. He would board the fourth carriage of the train on platform five at 5:30, and secure his favored window seat in a closed compartment facing the engine, next to the balding gentleman with the inevitable Financial Times, and opposite the smartly dressed secretary who read long romantic novels to somewhere beyond Sevenoaks. Before sitting down he would extract the Evening Standard and the new pack of Benson & Hedges from his briefcase, put them both on the armrest of his seat, and place the briefcase and his rolled umbrella on the rack above him. Once settled, he would open the pack of cigarettes and smoke the first of the two allocated for the journey while reading the Evening Standard. This would leave him eight to be smoked before catching the 5:50 the following evening.
As the train pulled into Sevenoaks station, he would mumble good night to his fellow passengers (the only word he ever spoke during the entire journey) and leave, making his way straight to the semidetached at 47 Palmerston Drive, arriving at the front door a little before 6:45. Between