Loser Takes Al

Nobody knew. Somebody said, “It must be on the eighth floor.” (He spoke with awe as though he were referring to the peak of Everest—the eighth floor was as far as the London County Council regulations in those days allowed us to build towards Heaven.)

“Who lives in Room 10?” I asked the liftman again.

“Don’t you know?” he said sourly. “How long have you been here?”

“Five years.”

We began to mount. He said, “You ought to know who lives in Room 10.”

“But I don’t.”

“Five years and you don’t know that.”

“Be a good chap and tell me.”

“Here you are. Eighth floor, turn left.” As I got out, he said gloomily, “Not know Room 10!” He relented as he shut the gates. “Who do you think? The Gom, of course.”

Then I began to walk very slowly indeed.

I have no belief in luck. I am not superstitious, but it is impossible, when you have reached forty and are conspicuously unsuccessful, not sometimes to half-believe in a malign providence. I had never met the Gom: I had only seen him twice; there was no reason so far as I could tell why I should ever see him again. He was elderly; he would die first, I would contribute grudgingly to a memorial. But to be summoned from the ground floor to the eighth shook me. I wondered what terrible mistake could justify a reprimand in Room 10; it seemed to be quite possible that our wedding now would never take place at St Luke’s, nor our fortnight at Bournemouth. In a way I was right.

THREE

The Gom was called the Gom by those who disliked him and by all those too far removed from him for any feeling at all. He was like the weather—unpredictable. When a new tape machine was installed, or new computers replaced the old reliable familiar ones, you said, “The Gom, I suppose,” before settling down to learn the latest toy. At Christmas little typewritten notes came round, addressed personally to each member of the staff (it must have given the typing pool a day’s work, but the signature below the seasonal greeting, Herbert Dreuther, was rubber stamped). I was always a little surprised that the letter was not signed Gom. At that season of bonuses and cigars, unpredictable in amount, you sometimes heard him called by his full name, the Grand Old Man.

And there was something grand about him with his mane of white hair, his musician’s head. Where other men collected pictures to escape death duties, he collected for pleasure. For a month at a time he would disappear in his yacht with a cargo of writers and actresses and oddments—a hypnotist, a man who had invented a new rose or discovered something about the endocrine glands. We on the ground floor, of course, would never have missed him: we should have known nothing about it if we had not read an account in the papers—the cheaper Sunday papers followed the progress of the yacht from port to port: they associated yachts with scandal, but there would never be any scandal on Dreuther’s boat. He hated unpleasantness outside office hours.

I knew a little more than most from my position: diesel oil was included with wine under the general heading of Entertainment. At one time that caused trouble with Sir Walter Blixon. My chief told me about it. Blixon was the other power at N°45. He held about as many shares as Dreuther, but he was not proportionally consulted. He was small, spotty, undistinguished, and consumed with jealousy. He could have had a yacht himself, but nobody would have sailed with him. When he objected to the diesel oil, Dreuther magnanimously gave way and then proceeded to knock all private petrol from the firm’s account. As he lived in London he employed the firm’s car, but Blixon had a house in Hampshire. What Dreuther courteously called a compromise was reached—things were to remain as they were. When Blixon managed somehow to procure himself a knighthood, he gained a momentary advantage until the rumour was said to have reached him that Dreuther had refused one in the same Honours List. One thing was certainly true—at a dinner party to which Blixon and my chief had been invited, Dreuther was heard to oppose a knighthood for a certain artist. “Impossible. He couldn’t accept it. An O.M. (or possibly a C.H.) are the only honours that remain respectable.” It made matters worse that Blixon had never heard of the C.H.

But Blixon bided his time. One more packet of shares would give him control and we used to believe that his chief prayer at night (he was a churchwarden in Hampshire) was that these shares would reach the market while Dreuther was at sea.

FOUR