The door was opened by a woman of about fifty in a dark charcoal suit with a collar so crisply pressed it might have been made of cardboard. She had the kind of short, steel-grey hair that was barbered rather than simply cut, white at the temples and swept back from a broad, composed forehead.
"Yes?"
"Good morning," Jon said. "I'm Jonathan Gibson. I have a letter..." He was already unclipping the handbag, the fingers working with their own quiet competence. "I'm the new junior secretary. I was told to ask for the office manager."
"That would be me," said the woman. "Miss Partridge." She did not smile, but neither did she sound unkind. She stepped back from the door in a way that was neither a welcome nor its opposite, simply an opening of sufficient space for him to enter. When Jon hesitated, she said "Come in, then, Mr Gibson."
The entrance hall was well-kept and quiet, floored in black and white tile, with a wide staircase rising at the back and a polished wooden reception counter along one side at which a young man long bright red hair was already at work, sorting correspondence with the focused efficiency of someone who has been there since half past eight. He glanced up briefly when Jon entered, offered the small, neutral smile of a colleague who has nothing particular invested in you yet, and returned to his work.
Miss Partridge held out her hand without preamble.
Jon produced the letter first. She took it, unfolded it, read it with the speed of someone who had read many such letters and knew exactly where the relevant information lived on the page, then folded it back along its original creases and returned it to him.
"And your certificate?"
He produced that too. She examined it rather more carefully than the letter, her eyes moving in a small, systematic pattern down the columns of qualifications and grades. Jon watched her face and saw precisely nothing there. Not approval. Not disapproval. Simply the controlled expression of professional assessment.
"Typewriting at sixty words per minute," she said, not as a compliment, but as a fact to be noted.
"Yes."
"We shall see." She returned the certificate. "You are not late, which is a better start than your predecessor. Follow me."
She moved towards the staircase at a pace that required Jon to take slightly longer steps than was comfortable in the modest heels, and he fell in behind her, handbag over one arm, concentrating on the stairs.
"The office occupies the second and third floors," Miss Partridge said, as they climbed. "Partners on the third, which you will have occasion to visit on errands and under instruction but not otherwise. Senior associates on the second, east side. Junior associates share the rooms on the second, west side. The secretarial pool occupies the large room at the centre of the second floor. You will work from there."
"Yes, Miss Partridge."
She glanced back at him briefly over her shoulder. The glance said: you are young, and probably not very capable, and I am reserving judgement but am not hopeful. Then she returned to looking at where she was going.
They reached the second floor. A carpeted corridor ran in both directions, lined with frosted glass doors through which the shapes of figures and furniture were faintly visible. The lights were already on. The day was already in motion.
Miss Partridge stopped at a door near the centre of the corridor, broader than the others, and pushed it open.
"The secretarial pool," she said.
Jon's first impression was of light. The room was large and south-facing, with tall windows that let in a good amount of the mild April morning, and it was filled with the particular organised busyness of a place where work begins early and continues without interruption. Perhaps a dozen small desks were arranged in neat rows across the main floor, each with a typewriter, an in-tray, and sufficient room for not very much else.
And at almost every desk: a man.
Young men, mostly, in skirts and blouses and cardigans, hair pinned or rolled or dressed in styles that caught the light. A few older ones among them, but it was largely a young room. Some were already typing, the clatter of their machines filling the air with an uneven, overlapping rhythm. Others were sorting papers or reading documents or conferring in low voices with one another over the space between their desks. Along the walls and at the periphery of the room, separated from the pool by a half-height partition of frosted glass and dark wood, were the offices of the junior associates: smaller rooms, glimpsed through the glass, with proper desks and bookshelves and, in a couple of cases, a second door leading further in.
And at the far end, arranged so that they overlooked the pool with the quiet authority of geology overlooking a river, were the senior associates' offices, each with their own secretary positioned just outside, at a desk that was a grade above the pool desks in every discernible way.
"Your desk is there," said Miss Partridge, indicating a desk in the second row from the front, near the window. "Your supervisor will speak with you about your duties in due course. For now, you will be responsive to the requirements of any member of staff who requires secretarial assistance, and you will conduct yourself accordingly at all times." She paused, and looked at him with the air of someone deciding how much to say. "You are a pool secretary. Your function is to be helpful and to learn how to be more helpful. Good morning, Mr Gibson."
She was gone before he'd finished saying good morning back.
Jon stood for a moment in the entrance to the room and took a breath.
Then someone at the nearest desk to his caught his eye.
It was the smile that Jon noticed first, wide and immediate and entirely guileless, the smile of someone who was genuinely pleased to see a new face and had no complicated feelings about it whatsoever. The young man was perhaps Jon's age, sitting perfectly straight with his hands folded on the desk in front of him, and he had hair the colour of turned honey, elaborately dressed in soft waves that swept up from the temples and were pinned, with considerable architectural confidence, at the back. His blouse was pale yellow with a small lace collar. His skirt was dove grey. His lipstick was a warm coral.
His chest was, there was no other word for it, substantial. It preceded the rest of him into any conversation by a noticeable margin.
Jon stared.
He knew that face. He'd seen it every week for three school years. He'd seen it in class, on the football field, in the dining hall.
Biff?
William 'Biff' Meadows. Quarterback, starting first team, the absolute embodiment in Jon's world of a young man who had been given, by genetics and circumstance, a set of gifts that made everything else optional. He was not especially intelligent, but cheerfully untroubled by this, because intelligence had never been particularly required of him.
Here, apparently, he was a junior pool secretary with an elaborate hairdo and a very well filled bra.
The intelligence, Jon thought, had not noticeably changed.
"Hello!" said William warmly. "Are you the new one? I'm William. I started last Monday, so I've been here a week, which means I know ever so much more than you about everything, so don't be afraid to ask." He paused, and appeared to give this a moment's honest reflection. "Well, I know where the lavatories are and which of the partners takes her tea with one sugar and which takes two and which won't touch it unless it's in a proper cup. Which is actually quite a lot, when you think about it."
Jon sat down at the desk beside him. "Jon," he said. "Jon Gibson."
"It's quite nice here, actually. Everyone seems very..." He broke off as a woman in a pinstriped suit passed through the room without looking at either of them, and instinctively adjusted his posture and smoothed the front of his skirt. "Well, professional," he finished. "Most of them don't really look at you much unless they want something. Which is fine, isn't it? I suppose that's how it works."
"I suppose it is," said Jon.
It was, as it turned out, precisely how it worked.
The supervisor arrived shortly after nine. He was a man of about thirty named Mr Calloway, with dark, neat hair, on the shorter side for men in this world, reaching down to his chin. He had the measured calm of someone who had been doing this particular job for a long time. He spoke to Jon for perhaps four minutes, in a low, unhurried voice, explaining the distribution of tasks, the order of priorities, the correct way to address various members of staff, and the precise method by which correspondence was to be logged before it went anywhere. He was not unkind. He was also not in any way suggesting that these were negotiations.
"You'll find it straightforward enough once you've found your feet," he said, in the tone of someone who found it entirely possible that this might take quite some time.
The morning accumulated itself around Jon in layers.
A junior associate named Miss Fairweather appeared at his desk at half past nine with a sheaf of handwritten notes and asked him to type them up. She said it crisply, without looking at him with any particular attention, and walked away again. Jon fed the paper into the typewriter with hands that were apparently familiar with typewriters and was rather relieved to discover, over the next ten minutes, that his fingers did indeed know what they were doing. The shorthand notes were a different matter, they were someone else's shorthand, someone whose system was only approximately familiar to whatever buried muscle-memory this body was operating on, but he managed.
At ten o'clock, a second associate, younger this time, a Miss Hargreaves who couldn't have been much older than Jon himself, came to collect Miss Fairweather's typed pages. She stopped on her way back to glance at Jon with the frank, assessing look of someone inspecting something of mild interest.
"You're the new one?" she said.
"Yes. Jon Gibson."
"You've done your hair very nicely," she said, in a tone that was matter-of-fact rather than flattering, the way one might observe that a vase had been arranged correctly. Her hand reached out and adjusted a loose strand at Jon's temple, tucking it back with a proprietorial ease that left no room for the question of whether he'd have preferred she didn't. "There. That's better. Miss Fairweather likes things tidy."
She walked away.
Jon sat quite still for a moment.
In his own world, in 2026, this was the sort of thing that got written up in company policies. Unsolicited physical contact. Commenting on appearance. The quiet, structural assumption that his presentation was partly a matter of general interest to the office.
Here it was simply Tuesday. Or Monday, rather. Simply Monday.
A senior partner, he didn't catch her name, walked through the pool at eleven and paused to look at William, who straightened automatically and smiled.
"Your typing's coming along," the woman said, with the faint surprise of someone who hadn't entirely expected it. She looked at William's chest in the frank, unguarded way that people in this world looked at things they found aesthetically interesting, the same way someone might glance at a painting on a wall, and then moved on without further comment.
William, beside Jon, smoothed his blouse with a small, satisfied expression.
"I think she likes me," he confided, in a murmur.
Jon decided that the wisest thing was to say nothing and type another half-dozen lines.
The clatter of the room settled into a kind of rhythm: typewriters and footsteps and the low, purposeful voices of women on their way somewhere. He made two trips to the third floor with correspondence, getting lost on the way back once, finding the pool again by instinct more than direction. He fetched tea for a rolodex worth of people who asked for it without looking up from what they were doing. He was given a ledger and shown where it lived. He was told not to use the good paper for drafts.
Nobody was rude to him. Nobody was especially anything to him. He was a resource that had been placed in the room and would be drawn upon as required. It was perfectly clear and, in its way, perfectly comfortable. He had a function, and the function would be performed, and this was the world and how the world was arranged.
At a quarter to one, Mr Calloway appeared at the centre of the room and produced, "Luncheon, gentlemen. Be back at your desks by two."
The room began, with the organised rustling of people who are already thinking about their sandwiches, to tidy away its immediate tasks. Around Jon, coats were reached for, compacts were consulted, hair was confirmed still present and correct. William was on his feet in moments, already tucking in his blouse with one hand and locating his handbag with the other.
"Do you know anywhere nice?" he asked, with the complete confidence of someone who assumes the answer will be satisfying.
Jon picked up his own handbag and considered the question. He thought of Charing Cross, the grey April pavements, the street he'd walked down a few hours ago for the first time in his life.
"Not yet," he said. "But I expect we'll find somewhere."
