After Charles's speech they had sat around despondently in the office while the first Exit Interviews were carried out in Personnel, and then gone across to Achilles' for an early lunch. It had been a very subdued affair. They were still trying to take in the enormity of fact that The Business, their magazine that they had all given so much to, no longer existed, as of a few hours ago. It seemed such an easy matter destroying what had taken them such supreme efforts to create.
The memories that returning to Achilles' brought back to them added to the weight of the occasion. Even Wobs was unusually restrained in his choice of sandwich, opting for a simple peanut butter and anchovy concoction. The mood was not helped by the increasingly strident cries emerging from the kitchen where Achilles would disappear periodically to engage in a further bout of prickly Greek dialogue. It was almost as if something were in the air which Achilles' maidens had picked up and were now responding to.
Bernice insisted that this final lunch at Achilles' would be on her. The others protested but she was adamant. She went to pay, but Achilles was still in the kitchen. She told the others to make their way back so that they could start packing up their possessions in the office before leaving that evening - it was all over tonight. They had agreed to hold a wake in the Dog and Duck later that afternoon.
So Bernice waited alone in the café as the sounds from the kitchen grew wilder and wilder, with the women now screaming at the top of their voices while Achilles tried to calm them. Eventually he emerged, his face flushed and sweat on his brow. He took Bernice's money in a distracted sort of way, and then went back into the kitchen.
As Bernice returned to the office she was surprised to see Mowley in the entrance.
"Dave," she cried out to him.
"Oh, hi, Bernice," he said slightly shyly. He had not changed. He still looked as shabby as ever, as if he were acting in some black and white film set in the Eastern Bloc at the height of the Cold War, playing some minor and expendable spy.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
"Oh, nothing, just sorting out some, er, personal matters - pensions, that sort of thing, you know," he said rather sheepishly.
"Have you heard about The Business?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm sorry -" he replied as if he would have said more.
"Listen, we're having a bit of a wake in the Dog and Duck this afternoon, why don't you come along?" she said.
"Thanks, Bernice, but I'd rather not." She did not press him. He went on: "How about a quick coffee, though - in Achilles'?"
She had just drunk two cups, but after her experience with Pete she was not going to turn Dave down on this. "Sure, she said, "love to."
So they made there way back to Achilles, which they found strangely silent. Achilles himself was standing behind the counter, looking pale and worried. He served Bernice without commenting on her sudden return.
"So, she began, "how are things going? What are you up to?"
"Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that," he said vaguely.
"Who are you writing for?" hoping it wasn't something too terrible like the Southdon Chronicle.
"Well at the moment I'm just doing some more pieces for The Economist," he said as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
"The Economist? More? - so you've written before?" she said with genuine admiration.
"Yeah, a few pieces here and there," he said diffidently.
She was about to say that she hadn't seen his byline, but stopped herself in time. Besides, Dave was not the type to lie. She was sure that he really had written for them.
"But why haven't you done more for them - I mean the power it must give you ringing people up and saying you're doing a piece for The Economist?" A power she only dreamt of, and one that old Holy Mowley had possessed for who knows how long.
"True; they wanted me too, in fact. But they pay so badly, it's not really worth it."
Amazing, she thought, the different scale of things. She would have paid The Economist for the pleasure of writing for them, and here was Dave giving them the brush off. She couldn't resist asking him one thing:
"But they must have a tremendously strict style-sheet to produce that particular tone - so knowing and yet so easy to read."
"No, they don't in fact. The only instruction they gave me when I started writing was to 'Simplify, then exaggerate.' Seems to work quite well."
What an extraordinary person, she thought, and what a tragic waste.
"But one thing I never found out: what was the big story that you were working on - all those calls to Panama?"
"Well, you know now," he said with sad smile.
"No, I don't...what - Oh my God, no, Mowley, you knew, you knew before it happened," she said utterly flabbergasted. "You knew about the merger."
"Not for certain, and only at the end," he said as if dismissing his work as yet another near-miss, still not good enough.
"But how?" she couldn't believe it all.
"Oh, well, it was obvious if you thought about it. Look: why did we have to do the launch in that crazy time-scale?"
"Because Charles or someone had promised it?" she said, recalling Martin's later explanation of the crazy schedule. She felt like a little schoolgirl with a teacher.
"Wrong: Charles was told when to launch it from further up they line. They had heard about Morgan-Banacek's intention to enter the market. They knew that if Wright's entered fast enough that Morgan-Banacek being predictable, programmed types would do further market research before deciding whether or not to go ahead with their launch, which might well be cancelled with another major player in the market."
"But why would our management want to stop the launch?"
"To protect Business Monthly as much as possible."
"Because they had already secretly arranged a merger with Panglom," said Bernice, finally understanding. "The bastards. We were just pawns in their bigger game," she said furious at being duped.
"We are all just pawns," Dave said sadly.
"But what put you on to the merger?" she asked.
"It was the whole New Technology thing; it stank from start to finish. After all, why would the company give in so easily to union demands?"
"They wanted the technology in place for the merger?" asked Bernice.
"Quite - in fact they had several reasons for this. The first, as you say, was that they needed micros on everyone's desks for the kind of changes they had in mind - which are going to be pretty stunning from what I've been able to gather."
"Like?" asked Bernice, just amazed that Dave could be so good and yet so hopeless - it seemed to fly in the face of everything she believed about professionalism.
"Like losing entire tiers of management, like de-centralising all functions, splitting up the merged company into tiny units, spread all over the place - throughout the world - and linked together using computer networks - part of the new tech agreement if you read the small print."
"And how have you found all this out?"
"By ringing up the IT Director at Wright's, saying I was writing a piece for The Economist on the 'Virtual Company' - which was true, actually. Like all senior managers, he was totally unable to restrain himself when confronted with a journalist from a well-known title - told me all about the exciting new plans, and how WPG - that's how he referred to merged Wright's and Panglom Incorporated - would be at the forefront in the publishing and corporate revolution."
"You said there was another reason for wanting to get new tech in."
Dave paused for effect.
"Yes, bit harder to find out about this one, but it's even sneakier. Putting my Economist hat on again I rang up the Personnel Director of Wright's and said I was writing a piece about executive bonus schemes - which wasn't quite so true, but by then I felt I was justified in a little underhand tactic or two given the Machiavellian stuff I was uncovering.
I was trying to understand in part why they were bothering with the merger in the first place. A natural place to start was to find out how the top people were going to be rewarded for making it work, and how they were going to measure its success of failure. Needless to say, the personnel bloke was delighted to pass on all sorts of confidential information - it's amazing how nominally hard-headed business people can be hypnotised by the word 'journalist': all you have to do is ask, and they tell you."
Bernice remembered her Chief Executive's incredible indiscretion to Business Monthly. "And?" - she asked, thinking: this was getting like a detective story with the final unveiling of the killer.
"And it turns out that the senior managers are basically going to be given a bonus on the basis of next year's profits as against the combined figures for the last year, ending April 5."
"Still not quite there, Dave," she said, frustrated that she couldn't quite keep with him on this.
"Well, another thing I was very struck by was the fact that the lump payment for technology - that is, payment in one year only - was so high, outrageously so - and that it was paid not just immediately, but in cash - on 3 April."
"In the previous financial year...so...the bastards were artificially taking all the costs for the equipment and the lump payments last year, inflating them to make the figures even worse so that in comparison this year's figures look even better."
"And their bonus even bigger," said Dave.
"Bloody hell, is there anything they wouldn't stoop to?" she asked rhetorically. She felt as if she understood nothing of real business.
"But all this Virtual Company stuff, will it happen?" she said finally.
"It already is," Dave said. "That's what was really interesting about the stuff I was researching: it showed me that I'd underestimated the potential of technology to change the way we work - but fundamentally. All these huge companies in office blocks with vast tiers of management - they're dinosaurs. The pyramids are being flattened, companies fragmented, and the workers scattered to the four winds. Soon offices will no longer exist. That sense of community we had - no more. People will work from home, society will become more and more isolated even as populations grow."
"You sound pessimistic," said Bernice, "but look at all the amazing other changes that are taking place: don't they give you hope - I mean there's Gorbachev changing the Soviet Union - pulling the troops out of Afghanistan - Botha's gone in South Africa...."
"Ha!" said Mowley with scorn, "If I'd had a pound for every cheery prognosis that I've read about the break-up of the Evil Empire, I wouldn't have to write all these bloody freelance pieces for The Economist.
OK, let's look at what's going to happen," he said as if Bernice had personally offended him with her simplistic analysis. "Let's just say that the Soviet Union changes. What happens: at the merest whiff of loss of will at the centre the whole thing will fall to pieces. All of these Islamic states will blow up, fundamentalism will zip through central Asia like a steppe fire - perhaps even into China, and we've just seen what they've done in Tibet.
Look at Eastern Europe: suppose, just suppose, the Berlin wall came down" - she thought this was a bit far-fetched, as did most commentators, but OK, she'd go along with it - "liberation for Eastern Europe? Not a bit of it. Same as in the Soviet Union - huge outbreak of ethnic unrest - the Balkan problem again - flood of refugees, mostly towards Germany. However, the cost of reunification will bring that country to its knees, and hence Europe's economy too. That in turn will pull the US and Japan down. What people do not seem to understand is that the Iron Curtain doesn't just keep nasty western influence from the pure Eastern communists," he said, almost annoyed at how dumb the world could be, "it also keeps all the bloody impoverished socialists out of the filthy-rich West. As well as literally, the West also needs the Wall metaphorically to define a difference, to provide a sense of moral hierarchy. Without it there can be no Baddies - which means that we're no longer the Goodies. Everything merges in one huge mess.
Believe you me, the next ten years are going to blow everyone's mind - the revolutions to come - technological, geo-political, sociological - will make the French Revolution everyone will be celebrating on the day our August issue was due to come out look like a tea party."
Bernice was quite take aback by the vehemence and bleakness of this vision.
"And it's already started for us - takeovers, magazine closures - it's the end of the world - our cosy, familiar world at least." Dave couldn't stop himself. "Well, you must feel that particularly," he added, as if clinching the argument by moving from the general to the specific, "what with losing your magazine, your job, Pete, Chris - "
"What about Chris?" she asked suddenly.
"Well, about him and Yas...I thought - you didn't know....I'm sorry. This...I'll go now," he said angry at himself for his own stupidity. But when he had heard, he assumed that everybody knew - including Bernice. He got up and left.
She did not stop him, but sat there, the last standing element of her world now knocked over. It was obvious, of course - she had been blind. That new Yaz, after the victory dinner, Chris's subdued mood, due not to Pete but to his own feelings of guilt. God, she thought, what a shambles. What a total bloody shambles. She was glad that it was all over. She just wanted to get out of the place now, with all its memories and pain. She wondered whether she could just forget about the wake, and go straight home. But her residual self-respect and loyalty to her friends and colleagues forced her to see it through to the end.
