The phones in both the ad and ed departments barely stopped ringing once the CD story broke, and marketing were inundated with desperate calls from wholesalers and newsagents begging for more copies in anticipation of huge sales to the public. Issues would eventually be sold on the black market for double or even treble their cover price.
Amid all this excitement the team on The Business was dying to hear the music. This had not been possible when the master tape was ready because of its format, and it was only at the beginning of April when the first test samples of the CD turned up that people could at last find out what the music sounded like.
It was James who provided the CD equipment - one of the many technological toys that he seemed to have at home as well as at work. Expectantly the whole editorial and advertising team had crammed into his office to listen one lunchtime. Chris edged away rather nervously when he found a boldly staring Becky next to him, and took refuge among Mr Lubricant's salespeople who were giggling with excitement like the schoolgirls they looked. The CD was called Blowing the Dis-ness and its cover had a fractal design of greens and oranges and blues.
The music began quietly, almost inaudibly, with a kind of gentle pulsing that was progressively overlaid by slowly shifting harmonies. These harmonies finally grew into something like a melody, but less concrete, less assertive. Underneath, a slow, sinuous figure emerged until it too turned into a kind of melody. Then the piece became a duet, an easy-going dialogue, that remained strangely still, and without any sudden outbursts to disturb its underlying peacefulness. As the twin voices rose ever higher, so the misty chords heard at the beginning could gradually be discerned once more, first as if in the distance, and then moving slowly forward. The clear lines circling serenely above everything became fainter and fainter as if floating off into the sky. At some point they faded out completely, leaving just the chords and pulsing that had been heard at the beginning, and which both in their turn gradually dissolved into silence.
Words failed them all when the music had finished; nobody had heard anything like it. And yet it was undeniably relaxing. As proof of this, they were all amazed to find that nearly an hour had passed since they had entered the office, even though it seemed a mere ten or twenty minutes. And despite the constant surges of adrenaline that working in a magazine inevitably produced, they all left James's office with a deep sense of calm.
It was a rare commodity at the moment. For if the immediate anxiety of New Technology had gone away - though it was bound to return in a different form once installation began - there remained others.
For example, there was the illness that was making the rounds of the office, passing inexorably from one person to another, sapping each of them in turn. Though trivial in itself, it was enough to make the deadlines just that little bit harder, and the office that little bit tenser. After Wobs had been ill it was the turn of Tel and Kate - though, like Wobs, they had continued working in their feverish states, partly because there was simply no one to replace them, unlike the writers. And Bernice too was starting to experience hot and cold flushes that did not bode well for her own health.
More serious was the worry about maintaining momentum, of not losing that brightness and excitement in their work now that the initial thrill of creating The Business had worn off. Moreover, the strain born of months of waiting for the launch of New Business was beginning to tell on everyone. A kind of void had opened up in their world, one waiting to be filled by the new rival, a painful absence that the steady arrival of titles like Business Monthly did nothing to alleviate. This made everything seem strangely provisional, even to the extent that the days they spent in producing The Business felt unreal, as if they were just marking time before the main task began.
Things were not helped by Chris's attitude. Whereas he had been an important factor at the start in helping to bring the team together with his jokes and good-humour, he was now increasingly morose and depressed and a corresponding damper on the office spirit. Bernice thought this was simply due to the fact that he was struggling with the work - increased by the sale of the branded products he had to organise - and resolved to talk to him about this seriously. But what with the issues to plan, editorials and case studies to write, advertisers to visit, meetings to attend and the other business magazines and newspapers to monitor, she found that there was never a moment to do so. She resolved definitely to have all this out with Chris at the time of the annual staff appraisals, which were coming up shortly.
In fact she was wrong about Chris. It was not his work that was the main problem - though he was struggling he was also enjoying his task of organising the branded products in the magazine, and these had started to sell quite well now - it was Bernice's work that was annoying him. He was becoming increasingly jealous of James and the fact that Bernice always seemed to be out on the road with him or in his office. He knew that this was ridiculous, that she needed to see the advertisement manager, and that in any case he had no right to dictate what she did. And yet he still felt bad about it and hard done by. He found himself making snide comments about Mr Lubricant whenever he could, but the office wasn't laughing anymore.
One day, while Bernice was out of the office, he went too far. They had started working on the copy for the June issue, and the thought that it would soon be a year he had been toiling and with so little to show for it depressed him even further. He thought bitterly of all his grand fantasies and high hopes that he had indulged in when he started at Wright's. He was also unhappy that he had still not been on an overseas press tip, while Yasmeen had recently come back from her second. Nominally taking place in Paris, this press conference like the last had been the same succession of taxis, airports and hotels, punctuated only by food, drink and the odd bout of propaganda. Paris itself had appeared only as a tantalising blur of pavement cafés and their sophisticated customers outside a taxi window. Despite Yasmeen's by-now thoroughly jaded descriptions Chris clung to his dreams and persisted in hankering after similar jaunts for himself.
It was against this background that one afternoon James came into the office.
"Bernice not here?" he asked.
"Isn't she with you?" replied Chris, barely concealing his feelings.
"Well, I wouldn't have asked if she had been, would I?" said James calmly.
"Oh, I don't know, ad managers are generally not the brightest of people..." said Chris.
One of the problems caused by the still unfilled vacancy created by Pete's departure was that now there was no clear number two in the office when Bernice was out of it. And so it was not apparent who should tell Chris to button it: Yasmeen felt that it would have been improper for her, and Kate was not the type to get involved with this sort of thing. In these circumstances Terence felt his rank of lowly sub keenly and was paralysed by the ambiguity of his position.
Normally James would have just let it ride, but today he was unusually edgy. Cristina had told him the night before that she had decided that she must leave Wright's, that it was the only way for her to resolve her 'impossible position'. She rather hoped that this might provoke James to some passionate declaration, but was of course once more bitterly disappointed. As was James: all the work he'd put in on securing that particular 'base', and now he'd have to start again with her replacement. But what had really riled him was something else.
He had failed to secure a major client's business that morning, and looked like losing it to New Business. Nothing he said or did seemed to make any difference to the client's decision. It was only later that he found out that the one of the senior people at the advertising agency handling the account was the girlfriend of a senior ad rep on the new magazine. Nothing, therefore, would have induced the agency to place the ads with James; but for the moment he knew only that he was failing to get this business, and it was driving him crazy.
"Look, Chris, just go and play with yourself, there's a good boy," said Slide tetchily.
"Hah, look who's talking: the man - I say a man, though its seems unlikely that someone who sports the hairstyle of a pre-pubescent fourteen-year-old girl would have even a drop of natural testosterone in his body - the person, then, who is reduced to the pathetic state of hiring women to sleep with him," said Chris, seeing red. "Are you sure that they are allowable expenses as defined by the company?" he said with withering sarcasm.
"I doubt whether anyone would be willing to sleep with a spoilt skinny schoolboy like you even if you paid them. Or that you'd know what to do with them. And frankly at the rate I earn money it's not worth even filling in my expenses, let alone spending half my working day fiddling them as failed so-called journalists like you are forced to do to make their cheesy, unwashed, whingeing and pathetic ends meet."
Everyone in the office had stopped working, but nobody was quite sure how to defuse the situation. Chris and James were now squarely facing each other, and it seemed only a matter of minutes before they came to blows. This would be unfortunate for Chris, since James was stocky and naturally athletic, whereas Chris retained a boyish slimness that also meant he was physically weaker. But in his wound-up state, Chris was not about to let details stop him. He stood up, raising the stakes in the process. James took a step towards him. At that moment the door opened, and Bernice walked in. She stopped dead, completely thrown by this strange frozen tableau that greeted her: Chris and James staring at each other, and the rest of the office at them.
"What the hell is going on?" she cried as she regained her composure. Both Chris and James looked towards her.
"Bernice, if I were you I'd - " but James didn't say what he would do if he were Bernice. Instead he wisely just left the office, rather annoyed at himself for this uncharacteristic loss of self-control. Chris stood behind his desk looking rather stupid.
Once James had gone, Bernice asked Kate to come with her to the coffee lounge. Before she got involved she wanted an objective description of what had happened. Kate explained, feeling a little guilty that she had not done something.
"Don't be ridiculous," said Bernice, "in your state" - she was starting to swell up with her pregnancy now. "These bloody men," concluded Bernice. And Chris, the fool, she thought. She needed to have a word with him, now.
When she got back to the office with Kate, she asked Chris to have a chat with her. They went across to Achilles', so as not to be disturbed. Chris felt like a little schoolboy being dragged out of the classroom by teacher, and following James' comments this made him feel even worse.
"Why do you treat me like this?" he asked when they got to the café.
"Like what?" asked Bernice, fearing this was going to be a messy conversation.
"Like some little boy," said Chris, his anger rising again.
"I don't, even if you act like one. What the hell do you think you're doing provoking James like that?
"Oh, James is it?"
"It's his name, for God's sake," she replied.
"It's all I seem to hear these days: James this, James that. What's so wonderful about him anyway?"
"He's a bloody good ad manager," said Bernice, annoyed that she had to defend James.
"Yes, anything else?" Chris asked with a sneer.
"As far as I'm concerned, that's enough - God knows the magazine needs it."
"So you approve of him and his methods?"
"It's not my business to approve or disapprove - that's Martin's job," she said rather weakly. She suddenly felt very tired, as if the accumulated burdens of the last few months were descending on her all at once. She felt as if she was a failure, that she had been wasting her time, that everything had gone wrong. She had compromised again and again on the magazine, had sacrificed everything to it, and yet seemed to have so little to show for it. She thought of Kate with her child-to-be and the new life that lay before her with a baby to care for, and she suddenly felt that everything was passing her by. And now all this business with Chris: at the start there seemed to be so much hope in everything, but here they were, so many months later, still such strangers, squabbling away pettily. What had gone wrong?
"Oh Chris, Chris, why are we having this conversation?" she asked, surprising him by the swift change of tone. "Why is it all going wrong?" There was real exhaustion and despair in her voice.
"What do you mean, Bernice, what's going wrong?" said Chris, concerned, beginning to forget about his own minor problems, as his real affection and respect for Bernice won out over his more selfish preoccupations.
"I mean the office, you and me, everything. It just seems to be getting more and more fraught. It should be getting better all the time, shouldn't it?"
"Well, I wouldn't really know," he said, his childish anger suddenly dissipated by the sadness in her voice. "I've never really expected things to get better or worse, just to be." But she wasn't listening to him; she had drifted off into her own dark thoughts. Her eyes filled with tears that ran silently down her face.
"Bernice, please," Chris said, feeling strangely more at ease with the situation now, one that was far more like others that he had dealt with in the past, ones where he had been in control. He moved round to her seat, and put his arm round her. "Come on, now, it'll be OK. Look, don't get upset over it, it's not important enough. There are far more important things in life than offices."
Was that true? she wondered. Well, of course it was true, but what about her magazine, everything she had put into it? Everything was what she had put into it, and she realised that it was unbalancing her, that she couldn't function as an editor if she wasn't functioning as a person.
"Let's go away for the weekend," said Chris, trusting to his intuition and past experiences.
"W-What?" said Bernice, awaking from her reveries.
"Let's just go away somewhere - to a hotel in the country. There's one I know that's really beautiful - it's an old vicarage, converted. You know, grey lichened stones, classical columns, marble everywhere, and glorious rolling English countryside around it. You'll love it. It would be so relaxing."
"But what about the office?" Bernice said, aware that she was being seduced by the idea, that she was feeling too weak to resist.
"We can ring them from here, tell them that we've both decided to go home, that we're tired."
Well, that was certainly true. They both needed a rest, a break. Why not? she thought, they owed it to themselves. And after all the failures before perhaps now was the time to start afresh. She had been neglecting Chris, and not just in his work; she recognised that she was largely to blame for what had happened that afternoon, and that she needed to help resolve things.
"OK," she said, smiling again, if weakly, "let's do it." Chris kissed her lightly on the lips, and smiled in his turn. Achilles looked on benevolently.
Chris drove into work each day in his car, given to him by his parents for his 21st birthday. It was compact, green and sporty, and suited their mood exactly. After phoning the office they roared off down the Surrey back lanes, with Bernice content to just be driven, to cede all responsibility to Chris, to enjoy life as it came. Given her fragile state she might have wished Chris had driven a little more calmly, but said nothing, not wanting to jeopardise this unlooked-for closeness between them.
After about an hour they arrived at the hotel. It was as beautiful as Chris had said, and yet relatively quiet in terms of visitors. It was set on a hill looking out over the Surrey countryside. The fine grey stone had aged gracefully with dabs of orange and green and brown lichen to produce the kind of harmonious whole only Nature can contrive. The entrance hall was small and welcoming, its wooden panelling painted a warm cream colour with fine eighteenth century furniture placed discreetly. They took a room without difficulty, one with a magnificent four poster bed, a great oval mirror, massive antique chests of drawers and wardrobes in rich wood and a stunning view across the darkening countryside that fell away below them.
Bernice had a long hot soak in the luxuriously appointed bathroom's huge tub, Chris showered, and then they went down to dinner. There were a number of house specialities on offer, as well as standard gourmet fare like oysters. They both chose the latter, perhaps hoping that its aphrodisiac properties were not entirely mythical. It was a beautiful meal in a lovely setting. The service was efficient but personal, and the gently flickering light cast by the candle in its silver candlestick between them added to their natural attractiveness. But Bernice was gradually becoming conscious of an overpowering need to sleep. Her head was pounding, she was utterly exhausted: her draining meeting with Chris had brought this out even more. She feared that she might not be able to stay awake much longer, so suggested that they went back to their room.
There, perhaps inspired by the sight of the bed, Bernice found herself almost asleep on her feet.
"Come on, you, to bed - sleep," said Chris, feeling disappointed but preferring to wait until Bernice was in a better state. There was always tomorrow, he said as he helped undress her and put her to bed.
There was indeed, but unfortunately not the kind of tomorrow Chris was hoping for. During the night he woke up feeling incredibly nauseous. He managed to make it to the bathroom before throwing up violently and copiously. Bernice, mercifully, slept on in the large and comfortable bed, so he suffered on his own, preferring to sit in the bathroom in case his stomach started heaving again - which it did, several times that long and lonely night. When Bernice awoke very late next morning, feeling refreshed and happy, she was shocked to find a pale, haggard and hollow-eyed Chris beside her. He explained what had happened, and apologised for sabotaging their idyllic weekend together.
She told him not to be ridiculous, and spent the rest of the weekend nursing him back to health. As she resigned herself to this chaste activity, she wondered whether there was a curse on them. Perhaps she should have passed on that memo about memos she had received a couple of months back after all....
