When Bernice arrived early the following Monday, she had two surprises. One was that Brenda, the receptionist and heavily painted company figurehead, had gone. Bernice asked Brenda's replacement what had happened, and the woman - who introduced herself as Glenda - said that Brenda had married one of the building's security men, and having achieved the marital state, promptly resigned.
Bernice's second surprise was to find a large bunch of flowers on her desk. With it was a card that inside said 'Good Luck on the first day of this historic venture', signed Martin. There was also a copy of the Penguin edition of The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz. This was all very nice, she thought, but was it normal? And why today? In fact Martin had bought some flowers for Bernice a couple of weeks before, and had intended to give them at the end of their meeting that first Tuesday. Unfortunately the direction the latter took meant that flowers for Bernice would have been out of the question. Instead he gave them to Cristina, who seemed extraordinarily grateful to receive these cast-offs, Martin noted without understanding why. Women, he thought simplistically.
Bernice had little time for pondering on Martin's gifts too much. Today they had to get moving if they were to stand any chance of launching to schedule and so keeping both The Board in the editorial office and the Board on the top floor of the North tower happy. The copy from George and Dave had finally turned up on her desk on Friday evening, a week late in both cases. George's was barely 500 words long, and seemed to be born of a real struggle to order his thoughts. Dave's by contrast was ruled by a steely logic, and was a massively complete and deeply original analysis of the working of international stock markets and their effects on the man and woman on the Clapham Omnibus. Pity it was 10,000 words long, rather than the 2,000 she had originally asked for. Clearly she would face some interesting challenges managing George and Dave.
Meanwhile Wobs had been quietly getting on with his design in the corner of the office. He had actually produced several, some wilder than the others. For example, one of them used a completely square format instead of the more conventional rectangular one, and another was perfectly circular. Unfortunately Bernice had to kill these fairly early on, and urged Wobs to concentrate on a boring A4 format. He seemed disappointed, but not unduly so. In fact he rather welcomed Bernice's discipline, her ability to judge. This was one reason why he had wanted the job, to learn and understand such things, currently quite foreign to him. As if reflecting this in some obscure way, today's T-shirt said 'Umpteen Squares', and showed a rather psychedelic array of shaded cubes.
Kate had already subbed Pete's article, massacring it mercilessly. Bernice hoped this was just pre-launch restiveness, a desire to let rip with copy. Certainly reading it through herself she had not thought it that awful - a little loose perhaps, but not actually badly written. Kate had also subbed all the articles that Bernice had produced, snipping here and there to produce far tighter copy. Now she was already working on the new features, muttering the while over George's, and slashing hard at Dave's in an attempt to bring it down to manageable proportions. Now that she had something she could get her teeth into, she seemed very quiet and subdued, but this was hardly the case: in fact she was channelling all of her considerable energy on to the sentence currently before her - burning away superfluous material like some kind of mental laser beam. The overall design of the dummy needed to be finished by Wednesday, and its production by Thursday, so that copies could be printed over the weekend. Simultaneously Bernice would need by then to have the real launch issue off to a good start.
Chris arrived at 9 am exactly, as she had asked him to. He entered the office rather uncertainly, suddenly looking even younger than his years. He was on new ground now, never having worked in, or even seen, a real office before. He was conscious that as the newcomer he was entering other people's patches, where there were all kinds of hidden dynamics that he would have to uncover and take note of. In fact he was rather over-estimating the situation, as he soon realised, since the group of people there had failed yet to gell into that strange beast called a team.
Bernice introduced him and noted with interest the different ways he reacted to people. With the women he was at ease, smiling, seductive even, while with Pete and Wobs he was more cautious. She felt she was observing males of some exotic animal species sizing each other up in the jungle rather than the introduction of new staff. She wondered how - and whether - the chemistry would work out.
Chris was due to go off to his induction course at 10, but first Bernice wanted to get the office layout sorted out. One of the side-effects of having George and Dave dumped on her was that she turned up to an office that had already been staked out by them. Bernice was not one to insist on rank or its privileges, but she did want a functional office. This meant introducing some order into the disposition of desks. She decided that George was the man for this.
"George," she said when he turned up at his usual 9.30 am, "let me introduce you to Chris." Chris got up from his desk and shook hands with George rather stiffly, while the latter pressed his lips together and nodded briefly. Fascinating, thought Bernice. "George," she continued, "I need your help." She knew that for most people, and for George in particular, an appeal for aid was the best way to win them over.
"Yes, Bernice, what can I do for you?" he said, his formality softening slightly.
"Well, I don't know what to do about this office. It's at sixes and sevens at the moment; what it really needs is someone to take charge of it. I was wondering whether you might do that for me?"
"Well, yes, I'm sure I could manage something," said George, glad to have a task he felt capable of shining at in a way that with writing copy to a tight deadline he did not.
"Perhaps if you could have a word with everyone in the office, find out what there needs are - who they need to be next to, that sort of thing, and then we could talk it over - tomorrow, say?"
"A pleasure," said George rubbing his hands together. One down, some to go, she thought.
"Chris, while we've got a moment, perhaps we could have a chat." She said, turning to Chris. He had been sitting at a desk rather quietly, still rather bemused by this new and unfamiliar environment.
"I've been looking at the pieces you wrote for your university newspaper" - damn, thought Chris, I'm not going to be fired already, am I? - "they're fine as far as they go, but there's one or two things you could do to improve your style." She was thinking much more clearly now - certainly more so than on Friday, when she had forgotten even to look at the samples of his journalism he had brought with him. When she did, that weekend, she found his writing rather weaker than she expected, more self-indulgent, rather novelistic than journalistic. But she supposed that this was simply a fault of youth that could be corrected.
"You need to write more sharply, pack more in to each sentence. Keep it short. Watch out for clichés as you write: well-worn phrases can be a useful way of conveying information compactly, but use them sparingly and consciously - not by accident or through laziness. Make sure that the opening line of the first paragraph is a real winner: if you don't hook the reader then you may not be given the chance to do so later in the piece. Also, each paragraph needs to follow on logically from the last. Here," she said, drawing a series of boxes with lines connecting them, "this is quite a useful way of structuring a piece: each box is an idea, and should flow smoothly from and to the two boxes around it. Never go back: if you find yourself repeating an idea put it with the first appearance. Do you read The Economist?"
"Occasionally, yes," said Chris. Once actually, in his local barber's when he couldn't find Punch.
"Well, I recommend that you use some of your reading allowance to buy it. It's a good example of the kind of writing I'm talking about. Though I wouldn't try to emulate their rather superior tone until you have gained their authority - which may take a decade or two. Here's a few recent issues. Read through them and see if you can find anything relevant that might make a feature. I've not had time recently for luxuries like reading."
Chris was a little perplexed by this new tone in her voice as she explained the rudiments of good journalistic writing. In the interview he had found her pretty much as a hundred other women he had sweet-talked, but now there was something else, something he decided had to be called authority. He began to realise that the power relations between them were much more complex than he was used to, and that he would not always be able to smile and cajole his way out of difficulties as he usually did with women.
He went back to a desk - it didn't real feel 'his' in any way - and read the magazines for the few minutes that remained before his induction. He was surprised that they made his head hurt. Even though each news item was short, it packed a lot in and moved a long way in its arguments. It was quite unlike the self-indulgent writing that he and other students had practised in their course essays, and indeed quite unlike the verbose and obscure academic texts they waded through. Hitherto he assumed that he could write as naturally as he could speak, but reading The Economist he began to understand that journalism was a profession that required hard work, not a dilettante's pastime that could be swanned into.
These and the other thoughts that had come to him in his short time at Wright's so far occupied him rather more than the video that he was soon watching in the personnel department. In fact had it not been for the distraction of a rather attractive young female who was also being inducted, and to whom he could not resist lobbing one of his most engaging smiles with the usual effect, he might almost have done some serious thinking for the first time in his life.
He came back clutching the standard worker's diary and calendar, and found the office much as he had left it. The only difference was that George deeply engaged mapping out the office on squared paper, with little cut-outs representing desks and chairs. Wobs, as ever, was engrossed in his work, listening to his Walkman and jigging from side to side as he also moved pieces of paper around prior to sticking them down, but to rather more effect than George. Kate was shaking her head as she scored out entire paragraphs of copy. The muffled cry of 'sugar' could be heard from time to time as she came across some particularly dreadful patch in the text she was subbing. Bernice was scribbling notes on a pad. It was nearly noon.
"Right, then," said Bernice. "I don't know about you lot, but I'm hungry. Since today is effectively the start of a new era" - she almost said historic venture - "I propose that we celebrate by going out to some local eatery." Hitherto they had eaten in the worker's canteen on the first floor of the South block. "And everything on the company. Kate, you know Southdon, what's local, good - and not too expensive given that I've got to get these expenses past Martin?"
"Nothing really," said Kate, ever one to tell it as it was.
"Come on, there must be something - don't people eat in this town?"
"Well, there is Achilles'...." Kate conceded.
"Achilles, that sounds suitably heroic. Shall we go there, then?" she asked, still trying to whip up some liveliness in the office. Chris, sensing this, responded.
"Sounds good to me, I could eat a Trojan horse...." He smirked, pleased with his wit, though no one else except Bernice seemed to be.
"Just wait..." said Dave lugubriously as they stood up to leave.
Achilles was a greasy spoon just the other side of the railway tracks, in the older part of town away from the high-rise blocks that hemmed in the dual carriageway. From the outside it looked nondescript, with little cards offering standard café fare. Bernice was a little disappointed, hoping for something rather more interesting.
Inside, the proprietor, Achilles Kokkos, greeted them expansively. He was standing behind the tall counter that ran down half the length of the café. Under the counter were various sandwiches and cakes, visible to customers through the clear plastic front. Behind him were huge gleaming urns that were used for producing tea, and also a battered coffee making machine. The smell of steam and fresh ground coffee filled the room, especially in winter. Opposite the counter was a single row of fixed seats and tables at right angles to the wall, while further back into the café were several more clusters. The walls were covered with various faded images of ruined classical temples and picturesque island harbours. Although downmarket, it felt very cosy, very welcoming.
"I give you welcome," Achilles said in confirmation of this, spreading his arms as if embrace them all.
Achilles, as his name suggested, was Greek. Now he was fat and balding, with a heavy black moustache touched with grey that hung over his mouth. His twinkling eyes were deep-set amidst folds of fat and wrinkles. Once, though, he had been a god. Lithe and slim he had broken the hearts of Greek maidens throughout the Cyclades. And proof of this was to be found in the three other residents of the café. They were now dumpy middle-aged ladies, dressed in black like figures from an ancient tragedy, but in their hearts they were still swooning maidens, just as Achilles was still their Adonis. For reasons that were never explained, all three of them - unrelated except through their unswerving and unquestioned devotion to Achilles - had followed him when he had come to England, and now helped him run his café, working long hours for little except one of his haughty looks.
"Right, then," said Bernice when the seven of them had colonised a couple of tables. Pete had remained in the office to eat his sandwiches which he brought with him everyday, and even Bernice's offer to stand him lunch was insufficient to tempt him to abandon the food that had been prepared for him so lovingly by his wife. Not to have eaten it would have been disloyal, he felt, much as he would have liked to join them in Achilles'. He also had to wait for his daily lunchtime call.
"What are the specialities here?" she asked Kate, but before she could answer Dave said:
"Ask." So she did.
"Well, today we have many good things," Achilles began. "All good sandwiches and toasts. We have the banana and peanut butter, the strawberry jam and yoghurt, the liver and melon, the spicy rice and calamari, the sausages and walnuts and many, many, many more, including of course, our Special," he said, proud of his inventive selection.
"Well," said Bernice, taken aback by this bounty. "What's the Special?" hardly daring to imagine what outrageous combination of foods it might contain.
"The special is cheese."
"Have you got honey and chocolate?" asked Wobs.
"But certainly we have it. You want it big or small?" Achilles asked.
"I'll take it small - but I'll also have a rice and calamari. And a Lucozade to drink."
"Coming up soonest. Yeenekess - " he shouted to the women who were in the kitchen, and then followed this with a stream of spiky consonants and flat vowels as he ordered the food for Wobs. "And the other ladies and sirs?" he asked in his most ingratiating voice.
The other ladies and sirs made their choices, which duly appeared. Despite their monstrous appearances, the sandwiches were surprisingly good to eat.
"Well," said Chris after enjoying an appetising mackerel and apricot sandwich, "I can see myself coming back to this particular heel bar quite often...," he said, trying once again to raise a smile. This time Bernice and Dave laughed out loud, Kate smiled despite herself - she did not, on principle, approve of puns - while George and Janice looked mystified. Bernice felt it incumbent on her to help them along: "You know, Achilles' Heel and all that."
"Oh right," said Janice, laughing slightly, still afraid that she was missing the point. George smiled weakly.
"A bar for heels indeed," added Dave somewhat blackly, dragging on one of his cigarettes. Ah, well, thought Bernice, a little cynical, but better than nothing. And after these first attempts from Chris to break the social ice that was clogging the group, she felt she had another reason to be glad she had taken him on.
Bernice's second surprise was to find a large bunch of flowers on her desk. With it was a card that inside said 'Good Luck on the first day of this historic venture', signed Martin. There was also a copy of the Penguin edition of The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz. This was all very nice, she thought, but was it normal? And why today? In fact Martin had bought some flowers for Bernice a couple of weeks before, and had intended to give them at the end of their meeting that first Tuesday. Unfortunately the direction the latter took meant that flowers for Bernice would have been out of the question. Instead he gave them to Cristina, who seemed extraordinarily grateful to receive these cast-offs, Martin noted without understanding why. Women, he thought simplistically.
Bernice had little time for pondering on Martin's gifts too much. Today they had to get moving if they were to stand any chance of launching to schedule and so keeping both The Board in the editorial office and the Board on the top floor of the North tower happy. The copy from George and Dave had finally turned up on her desk on Friday evening, a week late in both cases. George's was barely 500 words long, and seemed to be born of a real struggle to order his thoughts. Dave's by contrast was ruled by a steely logic, and was a massively complete and deeply original analysis of the working of international stock markets and their effects on the man and woman on the Clapham Omnibus. Pity it was 10,000 words long, rather than the 2,000 she had originally asked for. Clearly she would face some interesting challenges managing George and Dave.
Meanwhile Wobs had been quietly getting on with his design in the corner of the office. He had actually produced several, some wilder than the others. For example, one of them used a completely square format instead of the more conventional rectangular one, and another was perfectly circular. Unfortunately Bernice had to kill these fairly early on, and urged Wobs to concentrate on a boring A4 format. He seemed disappointed, but not unduly so. In fact he rather welcomed Bernice's discipline, her ability to judge. This was one reason why he had wanted the job, to learn and understand such things, currently quite foreign to him. As if reflecting this in some obscure way, today's T-shirt said 'Umpteen Squares', and showed a rather psychedelic array of shaded cubes.
Kate had already subbed Pete's article, massacring it mercilessly. Bernice hoped this was just pre-launch restiveness, a desire to let rip with copy. Certainly reading it through herself she had not thought it that awful - a little loose perhaps, but not actually badly written. Kate had also subbed all the articles that Bernice had produced, snipping here and there to produce far tighter copy. Now she was already working on the new features, muttering the while over George's, and slashing hard at Dave's in an attempt to bring it down to manageable proportions. Now that she had something she could get her teeth into, she seemed very quiet and subdued, but this was hardly the case: in fact she was channelling all of her considerable energy on to the sentence currently before her - burning away superfluous material like some kind of mental laser beam. The overall design of the dummy needed to be finished by Wednesday, and its production by Thursday, so that copies could be printed over the weekend. Simultaneously Bernice would need by then to have the real launch issue off to a good start.
Chris arrived at 9 am exactly, as she had asked him to. He entered the office rather uncertainly, suddenly looking even younger than his years. He was on new ground now, never having worked in, or even seen, a real office before. He was conscious that as the newcomer he was entering other people's patches, where there were all kinds of hidden dynamics that he would have to uncover and take note of. In fact he was rather over-estimating the situation, as he soon realised, since the group of people there had failed yet to gell into that strange beast called a team.
Bernice introduced him and noted with interest the different ways he reacted to people. With the women he was at ease, smiling, seductive even, while with Pete and Wobs he was more cautious. She felt she was observing males of some exotic animal species sizing each other up in the jungle rather than the introduction of new staff. She wondered how - and whether - the chemistry would work out.
Chris was due to go off to his induction course at 10, but first Bernice wanted to get the office layout sorted out. One of the side-effects of having George and Dave dumped on her was that she turned up to an office that had already been staked out by them. Bernice was not one to insist on rank or its privileges, but she did want a functional office. This meant introducing some order into the disposition of desks. She decided that George was the man for this.
"George," she said when he turned up at his usual 9.30 am, "let me introduce you to Chris." Chris got up from his desk and shook hands with George rather stiffly, while the latter pressed his lips together and nodded briefly. Fascinating, thought Bernice. "George," she continued, "I need your help." She knew that for most people, and for George in particular, an appeal for aid was the best way to win them over.
"Yes, Bernice, what can I do for you?" he said, his formality softening slightly.
"Well, I don't know what to do about this office. It's at sixes and sevens at the moment; what it really needs is someone to take charge of it. I was wondering whether you might do that for me?"
"Well, yes, I'm sure I could manage something," said George, glad to have a task he felt capable of shining at in a way that with writing copy to a tight deadline he did not.
"Perhaps if you could have a word with everyone in the office, find out what there needs are - who they need to be next to, that sort of thing, and then we could talk it over - tomorrow, say?"
"A pleasure," said George rubbing his hands together. One down, some to go, she thought.
"Chris, while we've got a moment, perhaps we could have a chat." She said, turning to Chris. He had been sitting at a desk rather quietly, still rather bemused by this new and unfamiliar environment.
"I've been looking at the pieces you wrote for your university newspaper" - damn, thought Chris, I'm not going to be fired already, am I? - "they're fine as far as they go, but there's one or two things you could do to improve your style." She was thinking much more clearly now - certainly more so than on Friday, when she had forgotten even to look at the samples of his journalism he had brought with him. When she did, that weekend, she found his writing rather weaker than she expected, more self-indulgent, rather novelistic than journalistic. But she supposed that this was simply a fault of youth that could be corrected.
"You need to write more sharply, pack more in to each sentence. Keep it short. Watch out for clichés as you write: well-worn phrases can be a useful way of conveying information compactly, but use them sparingly and consciously - not by accident or through laziness. Make sure that the opening line of the first paragraph is a real winner: if you don't hook the reader then you may not be given the chance to do so later in the piece. Also, each paragraph needs to follow on logically from the last. Here," she said, drawing a series of boxes with lines connecting them, "this is quite a useful way of structuring a piece: each box is an idea, and should flow smoothly from and to the two boxes around it. Never go back: if you find yourself repeating an idea put it with the first appearance. Do you read The Economist?"
"Occasionally, yes," said Chris. Once actually, in his local barber's when he couldn't find Punch.
"Well, I recommend that you use some of your reading allowance to buy it. It's a good example of the kind of writing I'm talking about. Though I wouldn't try to emulate their rather superior tone until you have gained their authority - which may take a decade or two. Here's a few recent issues. Read through them and see if you can find anything relevant that might make a feature. I've not had time recently for luxuries like reading."
Chris was a little perplexed by this new tone in her voice as she explained the rudiments of good journalistic writing. In the interview he had found her pretty much as a hundred other women he had sweet-talked, but now there was something else, something he decided had to be called authority. He began to realise that the power relations between them were much more complex than he was used to, and that he would not always be able to smile and cajole his way out of difficulties as he usually did with women.
He went back to a desk - it didn't real feel 'his' in any way - and read the magazines for the few minutes that remained before his induction. He was surprised that they made his head hurt. Even though each news item was short, it packed a lot in and moved a long way in its arguments. It was quite unlike the self-indulgent writing that he and other students had practised in their course essays, and indeed quite unlike the verbose and obscure academic texts they waded through. Hitherto he assumed that he could write as naturally as he could speak, but reading The Economist he began to understand that journalism was a profession that required hard work, not a dilettante's pastime that could be swanned into.
These and the other thoughts that had come to him in his short time at Wright's so far occupied him rather more than the video that he was soon watching in the personnel department. In fact had it not been for the distraction of a rather attractive young female who was also being inducted, and to whom he could not resist lobbing one of his most engaging smiles with the usual effect, he might almost have done some serious thinking for the first time in his life.
He came back clutching the standard worker's diary and calendar, and found the office much as he had left it. The only difference was that George deeply engaged mapping out the office on squared paper, with little cut-outs representing desks and chairs. Wobs, as ever, was engrossed in his work, listening to his Walkman and jigging from side to side as he also moved pieces of paper around prior to sticking them down, but to rather more effect than George. Kate was shaking her head as she scored out entire paragraphs of copy. The muffled cry of 'sugar' could be heard from time to time as she came across some particularly dreadful patch in the text she was subbing. Bernice was scribbling notes on a pad. It was nearly noon.
"Right, then," said Bernice. "I don't know about you lot, but I'm hungry. Since today is effectively the start of a new era" - she almost said historic venture - "I propose that we celebrate by going out to some local eatery." Hitherto they had eaten in the worker's canteen on the first floor of the South block. "And everything on the company. Kate, you know Southdon, what's local, good - and not too expensive given that I've got to get these expenses past Martin?"
"Nothing really," said Kate, ever one to tell it as it was.
"Come on, there must be something - don't people eat in this town?"
"Well, there is Achilles'...." Kate conceded.
"Achilles, that sounds suitably heroic. Shall we go there, then?" she asked, still trying to whip up some liveliness in the office. Chris, sensing this, responded.
"Sounds good to me, I could eat a Trojan horse...." He smirked, pleased with his wit, though no one else except Bernice seemed to be.
"Just wait..." said Dave lugubriously as they stood up to leave.
Achilles was a greasy spoon just the other side of the railway tracks, in the older part of town away from the high-rise blocks that hemmed in the dual carriageway. From the outside it looked nondescript, with little cards offering standard café fare. Bernice was a little disappointed, hoping for something rather more interesting.
Inside, the proprietor, Achilles Kokkos, greeted them expansively. He was standing behind the tall counter that ran down half the length of the café. Under the counter were various sandwiches and cakes, visible to customers through the clear plastic front. Behind him were huge gleaming urns that were used for producing tea, and also a battered coffee making machine. The smell of steam and fresh ground coffee filled the room, especially in winter. Opposite the counter was a single row of fixed seats and tables at right angles to the wall, while further back into the café were several more clusters. The walls were covered with various faded images of ruined classical temples and picturesque island harbours. Although downmarket, it felt very cosy, very welcoming.
"I give you welcome," Achilles said in confirmation of this, spreading his arms as if embrace them all.
Achilles, as his name suggested, was Greek. Now he was fat and balding, with a heavy black moustache touched with grey that hung over his mouth. His twinkling eyes were deep-set amidst folds of fat and wrinkles. Once, though, he had been a god. Lithe and slim he had broken the hearts of Greek maidens throughout the Cyclades. And proof of this was to be found in the three other residents of the café. They were now dumpy middle-aged ladies, dressed in black like figures from an ancient tragedy, but in their hearts they were still swooning maidens, just as Achilles was still their Adonis. For reasons that were never explained, all three of them - unrelated except through their unswerving and unquestioned devotion to Achilles - had followed him when he had come to England, and now helped him run his café, working long hours for little except one of his haughty looks.
"Right, then," said Bernice when the seven of them had colonised a couple of tables. Pete had remained in the office to eat his sandwiches which he brought with him everyday, and even Bernice's offer to stand him lunch was insufficient to tempt him to abandon the food that had been prepared for him so lovingly by his wife. Not to have eaten it would have been disloyal, he felt, much as he would have liked to join them in Achilles'. He also had to wait for his daily lunchtime call.
"What are the specialities here?" she asked Kate, but before she could answer Dave said:
"Ask." So she did.
"Well, today we have many good things," Achilles began. "All good sandwiches and toasts. We have the banana and peanut butter, the strawberry jam and yoghurt, the liver and melon, the spicy rice and calamari, the sausages and walnuts and many, many, many more, including of course, our Special," he said, proud of his inventive selection.
"Well," said Bernice, taken aback by this bounty. "What's the Special?" hardly daring to imagine what outrageous combination of foods it might contain.
"The special is cheese."
"Have you got honey and chocolate?" asked Wobs.
"But certainly we have it. You want it big or small?" Achilles asked.
"I'll take it small - but I'll also have a rice and calamari. And a Lucozade to drink."
"Coming up soonest. Yeenekess - " he shouted to the women who were in the kitchen, and then followed this with a stream of spiky consonants and flat vowels as he ordered the food for Wobs. "And the other ladies and sirs?" he asked in his most ingratiating voice.
The other ladies and sirs made their choices, which duly appeared. Despite their monstrous appearances, the sandwiches were surprisingly good to eat.
"Well," said Chris after enjoying an appetising mackerel and apricot sandwich, "I can see myself coming back to this particular heel bar quite often...," he said, trying once again to raise a smile. This time Bernice and Dave laughed out loud, Kate smiled despite herself - she did not, on principle, approve of puns - while George and Janice looked mystified. Bernice felt it incumbent on her to help them along: "You know, Achilles' Heel and all that."
"Oh right," said Janice, laughing slightly, still afraid that she was missing the point. George smiled weakly.
"A bar for heels indeed," added Dave somewhat blackly, dragging on one of his cigarettes. Ah, well, thought Bernice, a little cynical, but better than nothing. And after these first attempts from Chris to break the social ice that was clogging the group, she felt she had another reason to be glad she had taken him on.
