appeared at his side and said, in a concerned voice: “Come on, Alan, let’s get you back to your cubicle.”
“Yes, we don’t give a toss for the page 3 girls,” said Hemingway, oblivious to any onanistic irony.
Alan allowed himself to be led to the door.
“Angry Eric isn’t going to let them get away with abolishing us,” said Morton, acknowledging the negotiation skills of their union organiser and resiling, at the same time, from his earlier predictions of a branch laid waste.
“Even if he can’t stop them from abolishing us,” said O’Kane, “he’ll give them what for. Not even I would like an earful from Angry Eric.”
Morton flashed him a look that discouraged further pessimistic talk.
“Yes, Eric will do some sort of deal and we’ll be fine,” said Morton, as they moved along the corridor towards their work area. “There’s always room for negotiation in these situations.”
“This would never happen in a central agency,” said Barbara Best from the rear of the group.
“Psalms 9, Verse 9,” said Trevithick, “The Lord will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in time of trouble.”
“We’ve been caught in some crossfire – something nasty that’s got nothing to do with us,” said Morton, “some skirmishing or score-settling between apparatchiks and journalists … and someone will realise, soon enough, that we shouldn’t be peripheral damage.”
“Surely they wouldn’t abolish our committee,” said Ernest Hemingway, as they reached their own part of the floor. “Haven’t all the major parties had their snouts in our trough?”
Now it was Hemingway who received a warning look from Morton. “It’s true that each of the major parties has had the opportunity to appoint favoured sons and daughters to the committee,” Morton said, “but it’s the ecumenical nature of the membership and the different perspectives that our members bring to the table that makes their work so valuable.”
“And there’s always the possibility,” said O’Kane, hoping to atone for his earlier defeatism, “that the committee members will rally support and use their connections to see us right.”
“That’s certainly possible,” said Morton, settling Alan into his cubicle. “These are early days and anything could yet happen.”
Alan peered sightlessly at his diary. None of the hopeful talk had in any way diminished his perception of the previous near-decade as one of industrious but futile effort. Yet it was the things the committee – his committee – had yet to do that he felt glummest about: the brilliant impossible initiatives that could only be achieved by a politically astute, well-connected group of ex-MPs and party operatives, unimpeded by restrictive terms of reference or partisan concerns, fortified by a generous hospitality budget and supported by a diligent and professional secretariat.
Others might have described the committee members as dissolute, burnt-out placemen, habitual sucklings on the government teat, and quasi-unrepresentative swill. They might, further, have rated the probability of a useful contribution of any sort from the group as “negligible”. But that was certainly not how Alan saw things.
And that was the reason for his mental collapse. His wife could leave him; his dog could burrow to freedom; degraded and immoral persons could even purloin his most intimate apparel – and he could carry on. Yes, he could carry on. But take away his dreams of a brilliant, innovative and purposeful committee – one setting the broader bureaucratic agenda and with the potential to revolutionise public administration – and he had little to live for.
He was unmoored and all at sea. His face left no doubt as to his despair.
Little wonder it thus was that Hemingway was dispatched to get him a cup of strong tea, while the others, at a loss as to further therapeutic steps, drifted away. They settled into their chairs and awoke their computers. And so engrossed were they in their emails that no one noticed when Peaches Trefusis approached and tapped Alan lightly on the shoulder. Only when she spoke, did everyone look in her direction.
“Miserable would like to see you, Alan.”
“Alan isn’t feeling well,” said Morton. “Can someone else assist?”
“Miserable asked specifically for him.”
“I’ll be all right,” Alan remarked, rising to his feet at the same time as a small germ of hope took root in his consciousness – hope that his committee might yet be granted a stay of execution or that he could successfully argue for its retention. With a growing sense of purpose, he followed Peaches to the branch head’s office.
Marcus Mecklenburg was sitting with his back to the door when Peaches knocked. A drip filter coffee machine was sputtering and burbling on the window sill to his right.
“Alan is here for you, Marcus.”
“If only that were true,” said the branch head, rotating to face his visitor and gesturing, with an oversized coffee cup, at the single chair in front of the desk.
Alan sat. More than anything else, now, he wanted to be told that the inclusion of the Committee Support Section in the abolition announcement had been an unfortunate blunder and that the government had since acknowledged as much. If that wasn’t likely, a second-best outcome would be an admission that his component of the branch was to be distinguished from the (doomed) journalistic elements in due course i.e. once the festive season had moved into its final, exhausted and incoherent stage, and the hacks were all resigned to their fate.
However, the determined set of Miserable’ s jaw led Alan to conclude that any hopes of a reprieve were ones held in vain.
“Is there something you know that I don’t?” Mecklenburg asked, without any solicitous preliminaries.
This was a question both unexpected and necessitous of careful consideration, for Alan’s knowledge of his fellow man indicated that there were potentially many things known to him – including the sadness of dashed ambitions and the bitterness of canine disloyalty – that even a person of comparable age and background, from the same workplace and with the same sensibilities, might not know.
Hmm. Something he knew that Marcus Mecklenburg didn’t? He recalled that there were persons with whom he had superficial day-to-day contact who knew little of the Punic Wars, less about the abduction of the Sabine women and nothing at all about the first and second triumvirates – persons entirely unaware of the murder of Caracalla, of the circumstances in which Caesar triumphed over Pompey or of the excesses of Tiberius, Domitian and Nero … but whose lives seemed, for all that, no less ordered, functional or meaningful than his own.
There were individuals he’d encountered, too, who were cheerfully ignorant of the life and works of Brahms, who seemed oblivious to the most fascinating interludes in the history of public administration, and who would, even in the best light, with the most powerful binoculars, have been unable to distinguish a female White-winged Triller from a female Cicada Bird.
He recalled long-standing colleagues who’d acquired no grasp of filing essentials and no familiarity with the Records Management Framework, let alone an understanding of the document security classification guidelines or the secure material storage instructions.
Indeed, it seemed to him that the
