The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [103]
THREE
“Steady, boys, steady!”
1
AT FIVE O’CLOCK, when they were all getting their things, Miss Cobb, the Manager’s secretary, made a rare appearance in the staff-room. “Oh, Mr. Bryant,” she said, “with Miss Carter away, I wonder if you would walk with Mr. Keeping.”
“Oh,” said Paul, glancing round at the others, “I don’t know …” In his mind he was already halfway home, in the high summer evening.
“I’ll do it,” said Heather Jones.
“Mr. Keeping did ask for Mr. Bryant,” said Miss Cobb. “He likes to get to know the new staff.”
“Well, of course I will, in that case,” said Paul, blushing, with no idea, really, what he was being asked.
“I’ll tell Mr. Keeping. In five minutes, in the Public Space? Thank you so much …”—and Miss Cobb withdrew, with her sad flinch of a smile.
In a week he had got to know all their names, which were still coloured and almost physical for him, made distinct by their newness and the need to tell them apart. Heather Jones and Hannah Gearing; Jack Reeves, the chief cashier; Geoff Viner, the second cashier, a bit of a looker; Susie Carter, a good-natured chatterbox, who was off today, attending a funeral in Newbury. Her empty chair and shrouded typewriter had quietened the office behind him. He slid his thermos into his briefcase and said quietly to Heather, “What does Susie do with Mr. Keeping exactly?”
Heather seemed to think for a moment. “Oh, she just walks home with him.”
Hannah, with her more maternal note, said, “Mr. Keeping likes someone to keep him company. Normally Susie goes because she lives up past the church. It’s a nice little walk, really—it’ll only take you five minutes.”
“Just don’t say, ‘How are you, Keeping?’ ” said June Underwood.
“I won’t,” said Paul, to whom the whole business sounded odd and euphemistic. From what he had seen of him, Mr. Keeping was a cool and formal sort of man, with a sarcastic streak, but he’d noticed the staff took a strangely protective attitude to him. If they’d ever thought it odd for a middle-aged man to need walking home, they treated it now as the normal thing. He said, “Isn’t the Manager meant to live over the bank?” He’d seen upstairs, where the sitting-room of the bank house was lined with filing-cabinets and the bedrooms were stacked with old desks and junk.
“Well, this one doesn’t,” said Jack Reeves, who’d just got his pipe going, the coarse dry smoke like a sign of his authority.
Geoff Viner, taming his hair with a comb and the flat of his hand, said, “I assume you don’t know Mrs. Keeping.”
“Oh, you know her, Geoffrey, do you!” said June, and a bit of a laugh went round the room.
Jack Reeves said, “I assure you Mrs. Keeping has no intention of living over the shop.”
“I’d hardly call the Midland Bank a shop,” said Heather.
“Her words, not mine,” said Jack.
“Well, she’s got the boys to think of too,” said Hannah. “They need a proper garden to run around in.”
“What children have they got?” said Paul.
“Well, I say boys … John’s at college, isn’t he.”
“John, the elder boy, is at Durham University”—Jack Reeves frowned over his pipe, out of his greater intimacy with the Manager. “Julian is in the Sixth Form at Oundle School, and doing very well, I believe.” He sucked and nodded and gazed over their heads. “They talk of Oxford”—and he went out, leaving them half a roomful of smoke.
In the Gents Paul washed the money smell, copper and nickel and grubby paper, from his hands. The geyser rumbled. Grey-black suds speckled the basin. He was bothered about the imminent walk, but it was an opportunity, as his mother would say, and it looked a little easier if the Keepings had sons, one of them about Paul’s own age. John and Julian: he saw them, seductive images spun from nothing; already they were showing him around their large garden. He smiled narrowly at himself in the mirror, turning a little to left and right: he had a long nose, the “Bryant nose,” his mother said, disclaiming it; his hair was cut horribly short for the new job, and the strip light, which spared nothing, brought out its odd