BREAKING NEWS, said the TV monitor: HOME SECRETARY RESIGNS. There was footage of the man looking haggard and climbing with his guide dog into the backseat of a torment that for the moment still resembled a ministerial car.
Lawrence inclined his head toward the others, who were staring raptly at the monitor. He spoke close to my ear.
“Look at these bastards,” he whispered. “The man’s being crucified and these people are already excited about what it means for their jobs.”
“What about you? Don’t you care?”
Lawrence grinned.
“Oh, it’s bad news for me,” he whispered. “With my brilliant track record, I was next in line to be the man’s guide dog.”
Lawrence took me to his office. He said he had to check his messages. I was nervous, I don’t know why. There wasn’t anything of Lawrence on the walls-just a generic framed photo of Waterloo Bridge, and a laminated card showing the mustering points in the event of fire. I caught myself checking my reflection in the window glass and then thinking,
He looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have to reschedule your interviews. It’ll be chaos around here for the next few days.”
The phone went and Lawrence listened for a moment. He said, What? Shouldn’t someone more senior be doing that? Really? Oh, great. How long do I have? He put the phone down on the table and then he put his head down on the desk. In the corridor outside the office there were sounds of laughing, shouting, doors slamming shut.
“Bastards,” said Lawrence.
“What is it?”
“That phone call? Off the record?”
“Of course.”
“I have to write a letter to the outgoing home secretary, expressing our department’s deep regret at his leaving.”
“They don’t sound particularly regretful.”
“And to think that but for your journalistic sensitivity to detail, we’d never have noticed.”
Lawrence rubbed his eyes and turned to his computer screen. He laid his fingers on the keyboard, then hesitated.
“God!” he said. “I mean, what do you write?”
“Don’t ask me. Did you know the man?”
Lawrence shook his head. “I’ve been in rooms he was in, that’s all. He was a twat, really, only you couldn’t say that because he was blind. I suppose that’s how he got so far. He used to lean slightly forward, with his hand on his guide dog’s harness. He used to lean, like this, and his hand would sort of tremble. I think it was an act. He didn’t tremble when he was reading Braille.”
“You don’t sound as if you’ll miss him much either.”
Lawrence shrugged. “I quite admired him. He was weak and he turned that into a strength. A role model for losers like me.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’re doing self-deprecation.”
“So?”
“So, it doesn’t work. Studies have shown. Women only pretend they like it in surveys.”
“Maybe I’m only pretending to do self-deprecation. Maybe I’m a winner. Maybe becoming the Home Office’s press bitch was my own personal Everest.”
He said all this without facial inflection. He stared into my eyes. I didn’t know where to look.
“Let’s bring this back to my article,” I said.
“Yes, let’s,” said Lawrence. “Because otherwise this is going somewhere else, isn’t it?”
I felt adrenaline aching in my chest. This thing that was happening, then, it had apparently slipped quite subtly over some line. It had become something acknowledged, albeit in a relatively controlled form that both of us could still step back from. Here it was, if we wanted it, hanging from a taut umbilicus between us: an affair between adults, minute yet fully formed, with all its forbidden trysts and muffled paroxysms and shattering betrayals already present, like the buds of fingers and toes.
I remember looking down at the carpet tiles in Lawrence’s office. I can still see them now, with hyperreal clarity, every minute gray acrylic fiber of them, gleaming in the fluorescent light, coarse and glossy and tightly curled, lascivious, obscene, the gray pubic fuzz of an aging administrative body. I stared at them as if I had never seen carpet tiles before. I didn’t want to meet Lawrence’s eyes.
“Please,” I said. “Stop it.”
Lawrence blinked and inclined his head, innocently. “Stop what?” he said.
And, just like that, for the moment, it was gone.
I breathed again. Above us, one of the fluorescent tubes was buzzing loudly.
“Why did the home secretary have to resign?” I said.
Lawrence raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. I thought you were a journalist.”
“Not a serious one.
“The home secretary had to resign because he fast-tracked a visa for his lover’s nanny.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t really care one way or the other. But he never seemed that stupid to me. Oh, listen to them.”
From outside Lawrence’s door there was laughing and shouting. I heard the sound of paper being scrunched into a ball. Feet scuffed on the carpet. A paper ball clanged into a metal waste-paper basket.
“They’re playing corridor football,” said Lawrence. “They’re actually celebrating.”
“You think they set him up?”
He sighed. “I’ll never know what they did to him, Sarah. I didn’t go to the right schools for that. My job is just to write a good-bye letter to the man. What would you put?”
“It’s hard if you didn’t really know him. I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities.”
Lawrence groaned.
“But I’m terrible at this,” he said. “I’m the sort of person who needs to know what I’m talking about. I can’t just write some spiel.”
I looked around his office.
“I’m in the same position,” I said. “And like it or not, you seem to have become my interview.”
“So?”
“So, you’re not making it easy for me.”
“In what way?”
“Well, you haven’t exactly personalized this place, have you? No golf trophies, no family photos, nothing that gives me the slightest clue who you are.”
Lawrence looked up at me. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities,” he said.
I smiled. “Nice,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I felt the ache of adrenaline again.
“You really don’t fit in here, do you?”
“Listen, I very much doubt I’ll still be working here tomorrow if I can’t think of something suitably noncommittal to write to the old boss in the next twenty minutes.”
“So write something.”
“But seriously, I can’t think of anything.”
I sighed. “Shame. You seemed too nice to be such a loser.”
Lawrence grinned. “Well,” he said. “You seemed quite beautiful enough to be so mistaken.”
I realized I was smiling back at him. “A little blond of me, you think?”
“Hmm. I think your roots are showing.”
“Well I don’t think you’re a loser, if you must know. I think you’re just unhappy.”
“Oh, do you? With your gimlet eye for emotional cues?”
“Yes, I do.”
Lawrence blinked and looked down at his keyboard. I realized he was blushing.
“Oh,
“Maybe I’m just doing vulnerable.”
Lawrence drew in his elbows-drew in all of himself in fact, so that he appeared to withdraw into his body on the royal-blue upholstery of his swivel chair. He paused, and tapped out a line on his computer. The keyboard was a cheap one, the kind where the keys have a high travel and they squeak on the downstroke. He sat there so long without moving that I went behind his desk and looked over his shoulder to see what he had written.
You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen_
That was the unfinished sentence that stood, without resolution or caveat, on his computer screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the line. From outside in the street, police sirens screamed in and out of phase. He turned to me. The bearings squealed in his chair.
“So tell me something,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Is it your husband who makes you unhappy?”
“What? You don’t know anything about my husband.”
“It was one of the first things you said to me. About your husband and his opinions. Why would you mention him to me at all?”
“The subject came up.”
“The subject of your husband? You brought it up.”
I stopped, with my mouth open, trying to remember why he was wrong. Lawrence smiled, bitterly but without malice.
“I think it’s because you’re not very happy either,” he said.
I moved quickly out from behind his desk-my turn to blush now-and I went over to the window. I rolled my head on the cool glass and looked down at the ordinary life in the street. Lawrence
