‘Good morning,’ he says, as if we have all been waiting for him and can now get started. He has broad athletic shoulders that manage to make his off-the-peg suit look stylish. ‘Sam Ogilvy.’
And, one by one, he makes his way around the room, shaking hands, moving with the easy confidence of an £80,000 per annum salesman used to getting what he wants–a closed deal, a wage increase, a classy broad.
Ann goes first. She is reserved but warm. It’s a certainty that she’ll find him attractive. Their handshake is pleasant and formal; it says we can do business together.
The Hobbit is next, standing up from the armchair to his full height, which still leaves him a good five or six inches short. Ogilvy looks to get the measure of him pretty quickly: a bright shining nerd, a number cruncher. The Hobbit looks suitably deferential.
And now it’s my turn. Ogilvy’s eyes swivel left and scope my face. He knew as soon as he came in that I’d be the one he’s up against, the biggest threat to his candidacy. I knew it, too. Ann and Matt won’t cut it.
‘How do you do? Sam.’
He has a strong, captain-of-the-school grip on him.
‘Alec.’
‘Have you been here long?’ he asks, touching the tip of his tanned nose.
‘About ten minutes,’ Ann replies behind him.
‘Feeling nervous?’
This goes out to anyone who feels like answering. Not me. Matt murmurs ‘mmmm,’ which I find oddly touching.
‘Yeah, me too,’ says Sam, just so we know he’s like the rest of us, even if he does look like Pierce Brosnan. ‘You ever done anything like this before?’
‘No,’ says Matt, sitting down with a deep, involuntary sigh. ‘Just interviews for university.’
Matt picks up a Sisby booklet from the table and starts flicking through it like a man shuffling cards. For a moment, Ann is stranded in the middle of the room, as if she was on the point of saying something but decided at the last minute to remain silent on the grounds that it would have been of no consequence. Sam smiles a friendly smile at me. He wants me to like him but to let him lead. I stand up, a sudden attack of nerves.
‘Where are you off to?’ Ann asks, quick and awkward. ‘If you’re looking for the toilet it’s down the hall to the right. Just keep on going and you’ll come to it.’
She stretches out a pale arm and indicates the direction to me by swatting it from left to right. A ring on her middle finger bounces a spot of reflected sunlight around the common room.
The loo is a clean, white-painted cuboid room with smoked-glass windows, three urinals, a row of push-tap basins, and two cubicles. Half-a-dozen other candidates are crowded inside. I squeeze past them and go into one of the cubicles. It is 8:40 A.M. Outside, one of the candidates says, ‘Good luck,’ to which another replies, ‘Yeah.’ Then the door leading out into the corridor swishes open and clunks shut. Somebody at the sink nearest my cubicle splashes cold water onto his face and emits a shocked, cleansing gasp.
I remain seated and motionless, feeling only apprehension. I just want to focus, to be alone with my thoughts, and this is the only place in which to do so. The atmosphere in the building is so at odds with the princely splendour of Lucas’s and Liddiard’s offices as to be almost comic. I put my head between my knees and close my eyes, breathing slowly and deliberately. Just pace yourself. You want this. Go out and get it. I can feel something inside my jacket weighing against the top of my thigh. A banana. I sit up, take it out, peel away the skin, and eat it in five gulped bites. Slow-burn carbohydrates. Then I lean back against the tank and feel the flush handle dig hard into my back.
The water has stopped running out of the taps on the other side of the cubicle door. I check my watch. The time has drifted on to 8:50 A.M. without my keeping track of it. I slam back the lock on the door and bolt out of the cubicle. The room is empty. The corridors, too. Just get there, move it, don’t run. My black shoes clap on the linoleum floors, funneling down the corridor back to B3. I reenter, trying to look nonchalant.
‘Right, he’s here,’ says a man I haven’t seen before who obviously works in the building. He has a strangulated Thames Valley accent. ‘Everything all right, Mr Milius?’
‘Fine, sorry, yes.’
Leaning against the window in the far corner of the common room is the fifth and last candidate, Elaine Hayes. I don’t have time to have a proper look at her.
‘Good. We can make a start then.’
I find a seat between Ogilvy and Matt on one of the sofas, dropping down low into its springless upholstery. One of them is wearing industrial-strength aftershave with a curiously androgynous fragrance. Must be Ogilvy. The man hands me a piece of paper with my timetable on it for the next two days.
‘As I was saying, my name is Keith Heywood.’
Keith’s sparse hair is grease combed and badger grey. He has skin the colour of chalk and puffy hairless arms. He looks sixty-five but is probably twenty years younger. Most of his working life has been spent in this building. He wears a light blue short-sleeved shirt and black flannel trousers with meandering creases. His shoes, also black, are at least five years old: no amount of polishing could save them now. He looks, to all intents and purposes, like a janitor.
‘I’m your intake manager,’ he says. ‘If you have any questions about anything at all over the course of the next two days, you come to me.’
Everyone nods.
‘I’ll also be monitoring the cognitive tests. You won’t, of course, be permitted to talk to me during those.’
This is obviously Keith’s big opening-speech gag. Ogilvy is polite enough to laugh at it. As he smiles and sniggers, he looks across and catches my eye. Rivalry.
‘Now,’ Keith says, clapping his hands. ‘Do you have any questions about your timetables?’
I look down at the sheet of paper. It is headed AFS NON-QT CANDIDATES, a phrase that I do not understand. I am known only as Candidate 4.
‘No. No questions,’ says Ann, answering for us all.
‘Right,’ says Keith. ‘Let’s get started.’
Keith lumbers down the corridor to a small classroom filled with desks in rows and orange plastic chairs. We follow close behind him like children in a museum. Once inside, he stands patiently at one end of the room beside a large wooden examiner’s table while each of us chooses a desk.
Ann sits immediately in front of Keith. Matt settles in behind her. He places a red pencil case on the desk in front of him, which he unzips, retrieving a chewed blue Bic and a fresh pencil. Ogilvy heads for the back of the room, separating himself from the rest of us. Elaine, who is older than me, sits underneath a single-pane window overlooking the trees of St. James’s Park. She looks bored. I position myself at the desk nearest the door.
‘I have in my hand a piece of paper,’ says Keith, surprisingly. ‘It’s a questionnaire that I am obliged to ask you to complete.’
He begins dishing them out. Ann, helpfully, takes two from his pile, swivelling to hand one back to Matt. She moves stiffly, from the waist and hips, as if her neck were clamped in an invisible brace.
‘It’s