contents of the locked leather wallets. As the bank closed at three, most shopkeepers dropped off their takings later, in the swivelling chute of the safe. Counting and entering the paid-in cash and cheques was the first task of the day. Geoff counted money with eye-puzzling speed, the rubber thimble on his right forefinger pulsing over the notes. Paul was lightly distracted by the sense of competition, as well as by Geoff’s sleepy but determined morning presence, hair still damp, aftershave new and sharp. He sighed and started on a batch again. Mrs Marsh had reduced his military bandage to a neat pad at the base of his thumb, but he still felt clumsy and went cautiously. Ten-shilling notes were the dirtiest and most torn, and had sometimes to be set aside. Ten-pound notes he always took more slowly, out of respect. Susie had asked him about his bandage, and the story of last night had come out and given him a first enjoyable taste of being a character, with comical adventures. He heard her say, ‘Did you hear what happened to young Paul?’
There were three positions on the counter – Jack nearest the door from the street, Geoff in the centre, and Paul waiting to be discovered at the far end, closest to the Manager’s office. Geoff was informally keeping an eye on Paul, and Paul even more informally, in fact quite furtively, was keeping an eye on Geoff. It was absurd to have a thing about Geoff, but there he was all day long, on view, in his tight-fitting suit and zip-up ankle-boots with built-up heels hooked over the bar of his stool. Mr Keeping made sardonic allusions to Geoff’s boots, but didn’t actually ban them. Among the girls, too, at their desks and typewriters behind them, Geoff’s looks were a bit of a joke, one of those jokes that of course allowed them to be talked about. Paul felt no such freedom. When they ribbed Geoff about Sandra, the girl he was seeing from the National Provincial, it was Paul who blushed and felt his pulse quicken at the curiosity in the air. He imagined being kissed by Geoff, suddenly but inevitably, in the staff-room Gents, and then Geoff – ‘Opening!’ said Hannah, as the front door was unlocked, and with a flutter of nerves Paul sat back on his stool and squared his hands on the counter in front of him.
His first customer was a farmer paying in cheques and drawing a large cash sum for his men’s wages – Fridays were heavily to do with paying wages and banking the week’s takings, alarming queues building up while he tallied fifty or sixty cheques. Hundreds of pounds could pass through his window at a time. He felt the farmer, George Hethersedge, was treating him as a bit of a fool for never having seen him before. He seemed to suggest he would look back on this moment of ignorance with rueful embarrassment. Paul had a rough sense, as he counted the notes and totted up the cheques on his adding-machine, that the name Hethersedge had implications, a weight and a place in the light and shade of local opinion. Like many of these quick-set local names, it also had a terrifying overdraft attached to it. He saw how strange it was, in normal social terms, for him to know this. This slight social awkwardness seemed to lie at the heart of their professional relations.
Quite hidden by Mr Hethersedge was a little old lady, Miss M. A. Lane, whose hand trembled and who seemed distraught by the business of cashing a cheque for ?2. She peeped at Paul through the scrap of coarse veil on the front of her hat. He liked old people, and enjoyed her anxious respect and even slight fear of him as a quick-witted official. Then there was Tommy Hobday, the chemist from next door, who was in and out all the time and knew his name; and then the little shock of contact and novelty began to dull, and his own fear, of error or exposure, subsided slowly into the routine of a very busy day. Inside the front door was a shallow lobby with a further glass door that had a tightly sprung closer – the snap and swallow of the closer announced the incessant unrhythmical coming and going of the customers.
Just before lunch Paul heard a voice in the Public Space, and sensed a small commotion with it – now Miss Cobb had appeared and was speaking in a strange delighted tone like someone at a party: then the voice again, sharply gracious, Mrs Keeping, of course, ‘No, no, no,
‘Good morning, madam,’ Paul said almost humorously, unsure if he should use her name.
‘Good morning,’ said Mrs Jacobs, genial, rummaging, perhaps herself unaware who he was. Out on to the counter came glasses case, head-scarf, twenty Peter Stuyvesants, a paper bag from Hobday’s with the rattle of tablets, an orange paperback upside-down, a novel… Paul couldn’t quite see… at last a cheque-book. Then the changing of the glasses, the puzzled reach for the pen. She wrote her cheque in a raffish, off-hand way, keeping up a vague air of absurdity, as if money were an amusing mystery to her. Paul smiled patiently back, scanned and stamped the cheque, which was for ?25, and asked her how she would like it. It was only then, with a brief stare, that she took in who he was. ‘Oh, you’re you!’ she said, in a jolly tone but none the less placing him, as the funny little man of the night before, whose name she had probably forgotten. Paul smiled as he leant over the cash drawer by his left knee, freed a bundle of clean green oners from its paper wrapper. Rather lovely, it seemed to him, the fine mechanical sameness of the Queen’s face under his counting fingers. He counted them out again for her, at a pace she could follow – ‘There you are, Mrs Jacobs.’
‘And your hand, yes,’ she said, confirming it was him. Paul raised it to show the dressing, and wiggled his fingers to show it was working.
‘Good for you,’ said Mrs Jacobs, finding her purse, and cramming the notes into it – again as if she found money somewhat unmanageable. ‘It’s our young man,’ she murmured to her daughter as she rejoined her; but she herself was now murmuring to Mr Keeping, who had emerged from his office, with his trilby in his hand and his raincoat over his arm, despite the cloudless splendour of the sky as seen through the clear upper halves of the bank windows. Paul supposed they were going to walk him home.
Today he had a late lunch-break, which he preferred – he had the staff-room to himself and read his Angus Wilson over his sandwich without anyone asking questions; and when he got back, it was only an hour to closing time. In the afternoons he felt more confined, on his high stool, swivelling fractionally between the deep cash drawer by his left knee and the wooden bowls of pins, paper-clips and rubber-bands on the counter to the right. Where he’d felt purposeful and efficient in the morning he now felt stiff and disenchanted. The cash drawer boxed him in. His knees were raised, the balls of his feet taut against the metal foot-rest, his thighs spread as he leant forwards; he jiggled his knees for relief from the numbness in his upper thighs and buttocks. The low curved back to the stool nodded forward if it wasn’t leant on; though it turned upwards nicely when he pressed and arched against it. He got a faint tingling, an odd compound of numbness and arousal, in the hidden zone between the legs. Queues formed in front of him, with their shuffle of private faces – vacant, amiable, accusing, resigned – glimpsed only by him, and half the time he had a half-erection, seen by no one, caused by no one, under the counter.
Just before closing he came back to his seat from the chief clerk’s desk, and found that he had no customers – he glanced out, saw Heather cross the Public Space to stand by the door, and sensed already the little shift of perspective that would come about when she locked it shut, and the team were left alone again. Perhaps it was just a new boy’s self-consciousness, but he felt a mood of solidarity settled on the staff when the public had gone. They barely showed it, of course – ‘No, you’re
