Grey Area Read Free

about 900,000 of his people ever said ‘Good morning’ to my people, but now it more or less averages at that level, representing a compound increase year-on-year of over 0.96 per cent. Far greater – it has to be said – than the increase in salutations from Lady Bob’s people.
    It sounds complex, doesn’t it? Quite a lot to take on board. Well, that’s the way I work. But the saddest thing I have to tell you is that I fear it makes hardly any difference to the outcome. Dooley isn’t capable of anything like this degree of foresight and calculation and yet I have to say that all too often as many of his people make it out of the city on bank holidays as mine; as many of his people get late reservations at Quaglino’s as mine; as many of his people get a seat on the tube as mine. It just isn’t fair. Simply by adopting the tactic that is no tactic, a kind of brutish force majeure, Dooley imposes himself on our society.
    He farts – and 4,209 children are beaten and buggered. He coughs – and 68,238 sufferers from emphysema get promoted to cancer. He groans, turning on his day bed – and forty-seven of his people lose control of their vehicles and drive into the vehicles of forty-seven of my people. Dooley is a kind of elemental force. His weapons are pain, suffering, loneliness, and deprivation. He sneezes – and seven junkies overdose in squats off the Caledonian Road. Not for Dooley the subtleties of the snub, the cold shoulder, the dropped gaze and the backbite. He has no need of them, because he has no ambition save to remain as he is: Lord of the Underclass.
    What is it with Lady Bob? Why is it so hard for me to get into work with her? Sometimes, lying awake on stormy nights, with the street lamps outside shining through the raindrops on the window, and making a stippled pattern across the floor of my bedroom, I begin to get the fear. The fear that somehow Lady Bob has mixed me up in her mind with Dooley. That she hasn’t been paying attention to the infinite deference with which I have courted her favour.
    It’s my turn to toss and turn, to knead the duvet with my hands, as if it were some giant wad of sweating dough. Was it the 34,571 Valentine’s Day cards that I sent to several of her many divisions of secretaries and data-processing clerks? Or perhaps the 14,408 ever so slightly forward air-kisses that I bestowed upon 7,204 of her hair stylists, sales assistants and gallery girls? Maybe she felt a deep and lingering rancour when – for reasons that I am unable to divulge – I was obliged to break off 415 of the extra-marital affairs that my people were having with hers?
    Who can say. But the fact remains that Lady Bob consistently invites me to fewer dinner parties than even Dooley. That smarts – that hurts. Only 210,542 invitations to meals of any sort last year – and of those a good 40,000 were children’s parties. Children’s parties! I ask you. Worse still, at anything up to 22 per cent of these parties my kids failed to come away with a party bag. Tears before their bedtime – and mine.
    What can I do? Any overt move would be misinterpreted, of that much I am sure. I can feel in the very limits of my seething collectivity of consciousness the peculiar inlets and isolated promontories of our interaction. The eight of us – the eight that matter, that is – are like the tectonic plates that cover the earth. If one of us rubs up against any other we produce mighty forces that reverberate, affecting the other six. Given this, perhaps I would do better to concentrate my efforts on the Recorder, once more.
    In the past I assiduously courted him. I would even have my people in the City deliberately form shooting syndicates to which the Recorder’s people could be invited. I made sure that the Recorder’s people were always asked to be the godparents of my people’s children. I formed suburban philatelic societies just so as to be able to invite some of the Recorder’s loners along. If