They came down the staircase in a loose group, Jon and William joined at the first-floor landing by three others from the pool — Paul, James and Stanley — who had fallen in together with the ease of people who had established a lunchtime routine over the preceding weeks and were willing to extend it to newcomers. Jon had spoken to each of them during the course of the morning in the brief, functional way of people sharing a workspace: a question about the filing system here, the loan of a spare carbon sheet there. He knew their names and their desks and not very much else yet.
They were nearly at the bottom of the stairs when the front door opened.
Jon heard it before he saw her: the door swinging back with more confidence than strictly necessary, and then the loud thud of boots on the black and white tile that had the particular rhythm of someone who has never much worried about whether they were making too much noise.
She was perhaps eighteen. Jon's own age, or close enough. She stood in the entrance hall below them with one hand still on the door and the other thrust into the pocket of a jacket that was doing something quite specific and deliberate with the conventions of 1955. It was cut close, dark navy, with narrow lapels and a slightly exaggerated collar, the kind of thing that owed something to the tailoring on Savile Row and something to the photographs of American rock and roll musicians that were beginning to appear in the music papers. Her trousers were high-waisted and sharply creased, her boots were two-tone. Her hair — dark, almost black — was swept back from her face with pomade into a structure of controlled waves and a small, precise quiff at the front that would have required a mirror, several products, and a genuine commitment to the project. The overall effect was expensive and slightly combative, in the manner of someone who has worked out exactly what they want to look like and who doesn't get told No very often.
She glanced up the stairs.
Her eyes landed on Jon.
The look that followed was not subtle. It was the look of someone who saw something they found interesting and had no particular reason to pretend otherwise. Her gaze moved, with unhurried directness, from his face downward, pausing at approximately the level of his chest in the frank, unguarded way that Jon was beginning to understand was simply how this world worked, but which his nervous system had not yet fully agreed to accept. It lasted perhaps three seconds. It felt considerably longer.
Jon felt the back of his neck go warm.
Then, from just behind his left shoulder, William said: "Oh!"
The sound was light and bright and entirely unguarded, the sound of someone who has just seen something that makes them genuinely happy, and the girl's attention moved off Jon like a searchlight swinging to a new target, immediate and total.
"Babe," she said.
She crossed the hall in a few quick strides and William came down the last two stairs to meet her, and she pulled him into an embrace that was confident and unhesitating and left no room for ambiguity about the nature of the arrangement. The kiss that followed was brief but thorough. One of her hands was at the back of his neck. The other came to rest on his hip and then migrated a few inches further back. William made a small, muffled sound that might have been surprise and might have been contentment, but was probably both.
Paul, on Jon's left, studied the ceiling. James examined his handbag. Stanley looked at the door.
Jon looked at the floor.
When they separated, William was slightly pink and still smiling, and the girl kept one hand where it was.
"I didn't know you were coming," William said.
"Thought I'd surprise you. I'm having lunch with Mother, so I thought I'd come early and see if you were about."
"I'm about," said William, and giggled.
Jon had been looking at her face since the embrace ended and the slow, specific weight of recognition had been assembling itself at the back of his mind the way it had on the train that morning when he'd read the name on the letterhead. The structure of it was the same. The quality of the self-assurance was the same. The way she occupied a space, the assumption that the space would accommodate her.
Sarah McMillan.
He had wondered, on the train, what she would be like here. Now he knew.
Her gaze came back to him briefly, with the air of someone tying off a loose end.
"Who's this?"
"Jon Gibson," said William. "He's new. He started this morning."
"Mm." The assessment was short and not unkind, simply conclusive, in the way of someone who has looked at a thing and formed a view and is not planning to revisit it. Then her attention was back on William, entirely, the way it had been from the moment she'd seen him.
"Don't be late back or you'll get in trouble with mother," she said, and straightened his collar with a brisk, proprietorial hand.
"I'm never late," said William, with mild indignation.
"You were late on Thursday."
"I was three minutes late on Thursday and it was raining."
She reached up and patted his cheek once, with the fond condescension of someone who finds an argument charming precisely because they have already won it. Then, in the same fluid motion, her hand dropped to his blouse, and she gave him a brief, entirely unembarrassed squeeze that made William inhale sharply and then laugh, a high, surprised sound, and bat her hand away with his own.
"Sarah."
"Two o'clock," she said, unrepentant, and walked past all of them towards the interior of the building with her hands back in her pockets and her heels on the tile.
William watched her go with the expression of someone who has just been slightly dazed by a weather event but is very pleased about it.
"That's Sarah," he offered, to no one in particular.
"We gathered," said Paul.
They stepped out into the April afternoon and turned left onto Exeter Street, five of them together, their heels and shoes making a varied percussion on the pavement. Jon fell in beside Paul, who was slightly shorter than him with very dark curly hair worn to his shoulders and a cardigan the colour of late autumn leaves that he'd pulled on over his blouse against the chill. James was on Paul's other side, a little older than the rest of them, perhaps twenty-three, with the quiet, settled quality of someone who has already made the significant decisions and is comfortable with them. Stanley was the tallest of the group and the oldest at twenty-four.
"There's a place round the corner on Wellington Street," said Paul. "Nothing fancy, but the sandwiches are good and they don't rush you."
This was agreed upon without debate, which told Jon that they had been here before and found it satisfactory.
The café was small and warm and smelled of tea and fried onions, with a counter along one side and half a dozen tables covered in red-checked oilcloth. A woman of about fifty behind the counter acknowledged them with a nod, and they found a table near the window.
Menus were produced, examined briefly, and set aside by everyone except Jon, in favour of whatever each of them apparently always had. When a boy of around 16, wearing a functional red dress and white apron with his long platinum hair tied back in a loose bun, who Jon assumed was the proprietor's son, came over to take their order, William looked up with a smile of the wattage Jon remembered from football games, the kind that assumed a good reception and generally got one, and said he'd get the lot, waving off the others' mild demurrals with a pleasant finality.
"Don't be silly, it's no trouble at all. I'll get it. Mother gives me a perfectly ridiculous amount of pocket money, it has to go somewhere."
Paul, beside Jon, said: "His allowance is more than my wage. I have done the arithmetic."
"Have you really," said William, apparently genuinely pleased by this.
"It's not a compliment, William."
"I know, but it's still quite impressive, isn't it?"
The sandwiches arrived: thick-cut, on good bread, with tea in heavy cups. The table relaxed into the comfortable rhythm of people who are no longer required to be professional for a defined period. Jon ate and mostly listened.
Paul was seeing a girl called Margaret who worked at a shipping office in the City; they'd been together eight months and he was, he said, thinking seriously about things, by which he appeared to mean one particular thing, though he was not prepared to say so directly. He turned his teacup in its saucer repeatedly while he talked about this, in the manner of someone working something out.
James was engaged. The announcement was made without preamble and received with the warmth of people who already knew but were happy to hear it again. She was called Howard, she was a draughtsman at a firm in Southwark, and the wedding was in September. "I'm absolutely terrified," James said, with the expression of someone who is terrified and entirely at peace with this.
"Of the wedding?" Jon asked.
"Of all of it. The ceremony. The dress. Having to remember to write my new name on everything for the next forty years." He said this with a rueful smile that contained no actual complaint. "Mr James Howard. I've been practising." He paused. "I keep writing it slightly wrong."
Stanley, at the end of the table, was quietly eating his sandwich and offered, when appealed to, that he was finding it much the same. "Three months," he said. "I still look up when someone says Mr Albright-Cross and then realise they mean me." He looked down at his plate. "My mum keeps calling me by the wrong name on the telephone. Not on purpose, I think. She just forgets."
"It'll settle," said James, with the authority of someone who needed to believe this.
William, meanwhile, was describing Sarah with the unguarded enthusiasm of someone who had not yet been together with someone long enough for enthusiasm to require any qualification. She was wonderful, obviously. She was very funny, when you got to know her. She was incredibly stylish, which anyone could see. She did have rather a strong personality, but William seemed to regard this as a point in her favour rather than a caveat, in the way of people who find strong personalities restful because they remove the need for any particular navigation.
"How did you meet?" Jon asked.
"At a dance," said William, with a smile. "In February. She asked me to dance, which I thought was awfully forward at the time, but then I realised that's just how she is about everything, really. She sees something she wants and she just..." He gestured with his teacup to indicate a direct line between desire and acquisition.
Jon nodded. He could see that.
The table had found its easy register now, the kind of conversation that moves between subjects without effort, trading small pieces of information and opinion without any particular agenda. Jon listened and occasionally contributed and found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was comfortable. These were, he thought, decent people. Ordinary people, going about their ordinary lives in a world he had been dropped into without warning or preparation, and they were neither strange nor difficult. They were simply getting on with things. So was he.
Eventually William looked at him over the rim of his teacup with an expression of mild, benign curiosity.
"What about you, Jon? Are you seeing anyone?"
Jon opened his mouth, and then stopped.
The question was so simple that he had been on the verge of answering it without thinking, the way you did when someone asked you something obvious. No, he'd been about to say. No, I'm not seeing anyone.
But was that true?
He was Jon Gibson, junior pool secretary of Lewisham, who had a father who sent him off to work with pride and a mother who made sure he didn't miss his train and a wardrobe full of clothes his hands knew how to choose. He had a secretarial certificate with commendable marks. He had a handbag that matched his shoes. He had, in other words, a life. A whole life, lived from birth to this morning, that he had arrived in the middle of and was currently navigating backwards from the outside.
And Sarah McMillan had looked at him with that slow, considered look, and shifted her attention away only when William appeared. Which suggested, perhaps, that Jonathan Gibson was not entirely invisible to that type of attention. Which meant, possibly, that someone else had looked at him that way before. Which meant, conceivably, that there was a someone.
He genuinely did not know.
"Not at the moment," he said, which was at least probably accurate. Then he picked up his sandwich and changed the subject slightly. "Have you been at school here in London, all of you?"
It was sufficient to move things along. The conversation turned, and the remaining fifteen minutes of lunch dissolved in the agreeable way of lunch breaks everywhere when the company is good and the sandwiches are adequate.
William settled the bill and the proprietor thanked him with the warmth reserved for reliable customers who always order the same thing and never cause any trouble.
They walked back along Wellington Street and turned up Exeter Street, and the door of number fourteen appeared ahead of them with the mild, solid authority of a place of work resuming its claims on the day.
Paul checked his watch. "Two minutes."
They went up the steps.
Jon followed the others through the door and back across the black and white tile and up the stairs, the familiar smell of the building settling around him again: paper and beeswax polish and the faintest trace of cigarette smoke from somewhere above. The pool was already partially resettled, Mr Calloway at his central desk with his papers arranged, the typewriters beginning to resume their irregular chorus.
Jon removed his hat and coat, sat down at his desk, placed his handbag at his feet, straightened his in-tray, and uncapped his pen.
Beside him, William was already consulting a small mirror, examining his hair with the focused attention of someone performing a structural survey, then snapping it shut with a satisfied click.
"All present and correct," he announced, to no one in particular.
Jon fed a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, positioned his fingers, and turned his attention to the afternoon.
