The Choir by Joanna Trollope

Author:Joanna Trollope [Trollope, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75788-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

9

LONDON LIFE WAS NOT AS NICHOLAS HAD IMAGINED IT WOULD BE. To begin with, everyone—Ianthe, Mike, Steven, and Jon—was always out, seeing people. Nicholas had thought that a stream of rock bands would come through the office and his days would be interestingly taken up with making them coffee and soothing them when Ikon turned them down, but it seemed that deals were done elsewhere and outside recording sessions took up twenty-four hours of each week’s seven days. The office was where the mail came and where Nicholas answered the telephone. When people rang, they usually said, “Is Mike there?” or Steve or Jon or Ianthe, and when Nicholas said he was sorry, they weren’t, but could he take a message, they usually said not to worry, they knew where he’d be most likely, and rang off. Sometimes one of the partners came in and gave Nicholas a master tape, which he had to take off to a studio in Wardour Street to have a lacquer cut. He liked that. He liked watching the cutting head on the lathe at work; it made him feel that something in his life was really happening. When he spent whole days in the office longing to be sent to the cutting studio, or even better the pressing plant in Wimbledon, he felt that nothing was happening at all.

The office was a single room about sixteen feet square with a tiny alcove off it, a lavatory two floors down, and a view of yellow brick walls and fire escapes. The partners had furnished it, in their initial enthusiasm, with two dark brown tubular desks, cubes of foam furniture upholstered in corduroy, huge plants, and self-conscious lighting. Then they had realized about the need to earn back their investment, and had simply left it to silt up with the disorganized clutter of their business. There were full ashtrays and burn marks on everything, the dark brown carpet was scuffed and gritty, and the leaves of the plants had begun to rattle from drought.

Sighing, Nicholas began to put his matron-taught skills to work. There was nothing to clean with, and a first foray into the Charing Cross Road showed a complete dearth of the kind of shop that sold brushes or buckets. He approached the black woman he met sloshing water on the interminable stairs in the building, who immediately stopped sloshing and gave him all her equipment to clean with and came to watch him while he did it because, she said, she’d never seen a man do such a thing before. He cleaned for a whole day and Jon came in at six o’clock, scattering ash, and sniffed and said, “Weird smell. Any messages?”

The evenings were a bit better if he managed to sort of grab one of the partners and get taken with them wherever they were going. They were quite nice to him in an absentminded way but he still felt very much that he was living on the edges of other people’s lives rather than in the centre of his own.

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