I was enduring the effects of a potentially fatal accident, yet forced to stand in the capricious moral light of acknowledging that I was alive. Unlike the other three occupants of the car, I had not been wearing a seatbelt when the car crashed headlong into the pole: the seat in front had stopped me, rather than the windscreen, the road, or the telegraph pole itself.
Missing lectures and deadlines, I had to make some adjustments. I converted to part-time study, and found a day job. This only increased my hours but I figured, correctly - or as a precocious eighteen-year-old - that a lowly but paying office job bore fewer mental rigours than full-time academic study.
And so began - as Tennessee Williams once wrote* - ‘a short career in the telephone business’ (he was referring to his father).
The telephone business - mine, not the playwright’s father’s - was in the London Stores building, a 1925 cube on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth streets. It was one of those buildings architecture fanciers like to identify by tags, a bit like dog breeds; commercial palazzo, classical revival, beaux arts etc. The office from which I would take home a fortnightly cash wage for nearly three years was on the first floor, reached by a wheezing elevator and a return ramp. The place had an old-world smell of tea trolley, rain-spattered overcoats and sharpened pencils. But it had a rare beauty: the vast western windows - classical, revival, post-gothic, whatever, they were massive - let in a golden diagonal light that during long afternoons suffused the office air; while outside, on the Bourke Street corner, the town hall clock conversely and ruthlessly signalled the quarter hour, as if urging time to ignore the golden afternoon reverie and march faster out of 1975. Eventually it did.
At the dark end of the floor, in her own cubicle, sat Mrs Myrtle Doig, the office manager, whose erect bearing, predilection for prominent buttons and helmet-like hairstyle gave her the air of a general. Her male assistant, an almost elderly secretary and tea-fetcher whose nickname was Fish, sat at an ante-desk, and they discussed politics loudly through the common doorway. The farrago of names, roles and sets gave the place a Shakespearean atmosphere; or was that just in hindsight, like remembering that a child never cried as a baby?
In the avenue of desks under the shaft-of-gold windows, a congregation of itinerant clerks with their lives in front of them sat alongside lifelong public servants, whose schooldays and childhoods were now just tattered stories. In one corner, slightly removed from the clerks, and just past the end window, sat a middle-aged but not old typist, Audrey, whose coat, shoes, and faded-actress but contented face set her apart, or above, the crudities and banter of the younger clerks. Every night this Diana Barrymore reincarnation donned her coat and caught the tram home to Preston, as she had since the war, from which her husband had not returned.
* * *
*Memoirs, Tennessee Williams. Doubleday New York, 1975
Comments
Post a Comment