Chapter Twelve: The Typed Page

The request came from Dame Eleanor in the way her requests always came, which was as a small, courteous, unarguable order.

"Your company," she said, at the end of a long call on the twenty-third of February, "did the first brochure my father ever printed. Nineteen sixty-three. I was ten. It had a drawing of the house on the front, and a line inside that I've never forgotten, though I couldn't tell you a word of it. I should like to see it before the launch. If it still exists."

"I'll find it," said Poppy.

"You will," said Dame Eleanor. "I have every confidence. You're the sort of girl who looks."

There was one person in the building who knew where everything was, and she was not a person to be asked lightly. Imogen Pryce kept the archive the way some people keep a cathedral. It lay two floors below the street, down a service staircase that smelled of damp concrete and floor polish, behind a steel door that opened only to a brass key on a chain around her neck. Imogen said she had worn the key for thirty-eight years, and that it had on one occasion been requested by a managing director and refused.

"Marlowe, 1963," she said now, standing at the foot of the stairs with her half-moon spectacles on her nose and her cardigan buttoned to the throat. "I can put my hand on it. I filed it myself. Well, not myself. I was born in 1963 and I filed it in 1987, but I did put it back."

"You've never lost a thing."

"I lost a stapler in 1994," said Imogen, "and I still think about it."

---

The archive was larger than Poppy had imagined, and much quieter. It ran back under the building in long grey aisles, each lined with sliding steel shelves, each shelf stacked with flat cardboard boxes in a faded blue-grey that had once, she supposed, been a fashionable colour. A single fluorescent tube ran along the middle of the ceiling and made everything look like an old photograph. At the far end, on a wheeled trolley, sat a black typewriter with a ribbon still in it, a machine so heavy and purposeful that it looked less like an object than a decision.

"That's the original," said Imogen, following her glance. "Or so I'm told. The founders' typewriter. Mr Ellison senior kept it in his office until the day he died, and it came down here afterwards. I dust it on Fridays."

They found the brochure in the third aisle, in a box marked CLIENTS: HOSPITALITY, 1960–1969. It was a thin, creamy booklet printed in two colours, with a drawing of Larkhill House in pen and ink, long-limbed and a little crooked, on the front. Inside, under a charming picture of a girl on a pony, there was a line of copy in a typeface that had gone out of fashion before Poppy's mother was born. A house is only as good as the people who know your name.

Poppy read it three times. Then she put her hand over her mouth.

"What is it?" said Imogen.

"It's the same idea." She laughed, a little wildly. "It's Be Known. It's sixty years old. I've been so proud of that line, and somebody wrote it in 1963."

"Then somebody was right in 1963," said Imogen gently, "and you were right in this one. I wouldn't be too distressed. There aren't many new thoughts. The rest is whether you've the nerve to say them."

It was in the same box, folded in four and tucked behind the brochure like a letter somebody had meant to post, that Poppy found the page.

It was a single sheet of thin foolscap, brown at the edges and soft as cloth. It had been typed, by a person who hit the keys hard, on a machine whose lowercase e had a small defect so that every one stood a hair above the line. Across the top, in capitals, it said:

RULES OF THE HOUSE

Under it were five numbered lines.

1. Every name, every day.

2. Say the true thing before lunch.

3. The most junior person speaks first.

4. Nobody eats alone at their desk.

5. If you are ashamed of it, don't send it.

At the bottom, in blue ink that had faded to the colour of a bruise, was a small, upright, careful signature. W. Crane. And beneath it, in the same hand: Lumen & Crane, Easter 1961.

Poppy did not breathe for some time.

"Imogen," she said.

Imogen came and stood at her shoulder and looked. She did not say anything. She looked for a long while, and Poppy, glancing sideways, saw an expression move across the older woman's face that she couldn't have named: not surprise, exactly, but the particular stillness of someone who has been carrying a heavy object for many years and sees, quite suddenly, where it was meant to be set down.

"There's a photograph," said Imogen at last, rather quietly, "in the lid."

There was. It was pinned inside the cardboard flap with a rusty drawing pin, a small square print gone yellow, of two men outdoors on a cold bright morning in their shirtsleeves, squinting at the sun. Between them, on a folding table, stood the black typewriter. The man on the left was tall and fair and grinning, with a cigarette and a loosened tie, and he had, Poppy realised with a jolt, Theo's mouth. The man on the right was shorter, dark, serious, with his hands in his pockets and a look of wary pride. On the back, in pencil, someone had written: W. Crane & J. Ellison. Easter 1961. The day we typed the rules.

"Walter Crane," said Imogen, touching the shorter man's shoulder with the tip of her finger, very lightly, as if he might feel it.

"It says we typed them," said Poppy. "But Theo said— He told me his grandfather used to walk the floors at lunchtime and know every name. He said it like it was—" She stopped. "He said it like it was his."

"I know he did," said Imogen.

---

They went looking for the rest. It seemed a thing one had to do.

It was Imogen who took her to the end of the fifth aisle, to a shelf so dusty that her fingers left tracks, and who stopped in front of it with her hand half-raised. Between a box marked 1972 and a box marked 1975, there was a gap. A space the size of a large shoebox, perfectly clean, with a pale rectangle on the metal where something had stood for a very long time. On the edge of the shelf, in a small brass holder, was a typed index card. It said: 1974. CRANE: DEED & CORRESPONDENCE. CLOSED.

The box was not there.

"That's always been here," said Imogen. Her voice was very even. "In thirty-eight years I've never moved it. I never opened it. It was closed, you see, the card said so. One didn't." She stood looking at the pale rectangle. "It was here last time I did the inventory. I'm nearly sure it was. I would have noticed."

"Nearly sure?"

"I'm sixty-two," said Imogen. "One is nearly sure of a great many things."

They stood in the long grey light with the hum of the fluorescent tube. Somewhere in the building above them a lift sighed, and a door shut. Poppy found she was holding the typed page in both hands the way you hold a bird you've found on a pavement.

"May I tell you something," said Imogen, "that I've never told anyone?"

Poppy waited.

"I started here at twenty-two. The old gentleman was still in charge. He wasn't old then, only elderly, and rather magnificent, and I was the girl they'd put at the bottom of the typing pool. One evening I was working late, and I'd typed a letter that went into a box marked Crane. He came by, and he saw the box. And he stopped, which he didn't do, and he said, quite suddenly, quite harshly: If anyone ever asks you about Walter, Imogen, tell them to ask the sofa."

"The sofa?"

"I thought he was joking. I thought it was one of those things old men say." She took off her spectacles and polished them on her cardigan. "I've thought about it perhaps once a year for thirty-eight years. I never asked. It wasn't my place."

"Theo's sofa," said Poppy slowly. "The mustard one."

"It was his grandfather's. It's been on the forty-first floor since I arrived." She put the spectacles back on. "I should say, my dear, that I don't want to alarm anybody. I don't suppose it's anything. Old men have their little mysteries."

"Imogen," said Poppy. "I'm going to tell Theo."

The older woman looked at her for a moment. "I rather thought you would," she said. "I'd think the less of you if you didn't."

---

She waited until Thursday, because Thursday was when he cooked.

It was a joke between them already. Theo made one meal, a kind of lentil stew that took three hours and tasted of nothing in particular, and he made it every Thursday at his flat in Clerkenwell with enormous ceremony and a tea towel on his shoulder. She arrived at ten past nine. She'd been up since five and her feet hurt, and the typed page lay in a clear plastic sleeve in her bag like a thing she had stolen.

It was twenty to twelve before she found the courage.

They were sitting on his kitchen floor, because he had lately decided that the floor was where the important things got said. He had a bowl of cereal in his hand and an air of ease that she hated to disturb. She took out the sleeve. She held it for a second against her chest. Then she gave it to him.

"I'm telling you now," she said, "because it's twenty to twelve."

He looked at her. He looked at the page. He read it, and she watched his face as he did. First there was puzzlement, then a laugh, short and surprised, as he got to every name, every day; then the laugh went out like a candle.

"Where did you get this?"

"The archive. It was behind the Marlowe brochure. Theo, it's signed."

"I can see that it's signed." He turned the sleeve over in his hands. "It's his handwriting. Not— It isn't my grandfather's. It's too neat." He read it again. "My grandfather used to say this. Every lunchtime. Every name, every day. He said it was the first thing he'd ever decided about the company." His voice had gone strange. "He told me it was his."

"There's a photograph, too."

She gave him her phone. He looked for a long time. He touched the screen with one finger, very slightly, on the shoulder of the dark-haired man.

"The day we typed the rules," he read, almost inaudibly.

The flat was very quiet. Outside, a taxi hissed down the wet street. The clock on the cooker said 11:51.

"There's one more thing," said Poppy. "Imogen told me that your grandfather once said that if anyone asked about Walter, she should ask the sofa."

Theo did not move.

"I don't know what it means," she said. "I don't think she does. I just thought you should know. Because of the rule."

He put the sleeve down carefully on the lino between them. Then he took her hand, and held it, and she felt that his was cold.

"Thank you," he said, very quietly. "For telling me. At twenty to twelve."

"It's what we said."

"I know." He tried to smile. "I don't think I'd have done it. If it had been me. I'd have waited till the morning and told myself it could wait." He looked down at the page. "I'll look into it. I want to. Honestly. Only there's a great deal on at the moment, Poppy, with Hugh, with the board, and I can't— After things calm down. I'll give it proper time."

"Of course," said Poppy.

She meant it. She sat on the lino with her hand in his and watched his thumb move over her knuckles, and told herself that a man who has just been told that his grandfather's story might be a lie is entitled to need a little time. She did not notice, until later, that his other hand had gone to his phone, which lay face down on the floor beside him, and rested there lightly, the way a person rests a hand on a sleeping dog.

---

She went up to the forty-first floor the next morning at ten to seven, before anyone was in.

She didn't know why. It wasn't what you would call a plan. The corridor was dark, and Imogen's desk was empty, and the glass door to Theo's office stood ajar with the grey London dawn coming in behind it in long cold bars. The sofa stood where it always stood, an ugly, huge, mustard-coloured thing, plump and unashamed. There was a dent in the cushion where she had sat in October and been swallowed whole.

She walked round it. At the back, under the left arm, she found what she half expected: a seam that had given way, years ago, and been tucked in rather than mended, so that a long dark slot ran along the lining, big enough for a hand.

She stood looking at it for some time. The sky behind the window was going from grey to pale gold. A cleaner's trolley rattled somewhere far down the corridor.

It would have been the work of a moment. She knew it. She could have put her hand in and found out whether it was nothing or something, and it would have been, she thought, exactly like going through his pockets.

Ask the sofa, she thought. Not like this.

She left it. She went downstairs without touching it, and sat at her desk with her tea, and told herself she'd done the right thing.

It would be seven months before she found out what it cost.