The Doorkeepers

One

Julia typed Yours in anticipation, F.G. Mordant, and tugged the letter out of her typewriter. She slipped the letter into Mr Mordant’s red signing folder and dropped the pink and yellow copies into the box file next to her. She returned the carbon paper to her second drawer down.

It was five thirty-two p.m. and the office was bright with the last marmalade-colored light of the day. Julia put the lid on her typewriter, not knowing that this was the very last time she would do it, and that once the sun had sunk below the rooftops of the factories opposite, she would never see it come up again.

Alexandra put her head round the office door and blinked at her through owlish glasses. “Haven’t you finished yet? David’s offered to give us a lift to Hammersmith.”

“David? Oh, yes please! Just give me a minute, will you? I have to take these letters into Mr Mordant.”

“You should complain, you know. He’s always keeping you late.”

Julia gave her a dismissive pff! The idea of complaining to Mr Mordant was out of the question: especially if you wanted to keep your job. Alexandra had told her that it was highly unusual if any of his secretaries survived for more than six months. Some of them had stayed for only a week.

Julia opened her oak-paneled filing cupboard. There was a mirror on the back of the door and she gave her hair a quick brush. She pushed her tongue under her upper lip. She wasn’t sure if she was getting a cold sore or not.

She was a pretty girl, a little plumpish, with a heart-shaped face that made her look much younger than twenty-three. She had short blonde-streaked hair with a fringe, and wide brown eyes. She had been living in England for ten months now. She had lost all but the faintest ghost of her California tan, and acquired a pale blue twinset, but her accent had hardly changed. Everybody at Wheatstone Electrics called her “Yankee Doodle”. Americans were a rarity, except in films, and her friends never tired of hearing her talk about luxuries like washing machines and supermarkets.

She walked along the echoing linoleum-floored corridor to Mr Mordant’s office. All through the building she could hear doors slamming and people calling out “g’night” and clattering downstairs. Mr Mordant’s door was open but she still gave a little knock. He was sitting at his desk, talking on the phone and cat’s-cradling elastic bands between his fingers as he did so.

“Well, I’m sorry, Ronald, you’ll just have to buck your bloody ideas up, won’t you?” His accent was clipped, like a BBC wireless announcer. “If you can’t let me have those insulators by the end of the month, we’ll have to start looking for a new supplier. No, Ronald, I don’t care tuppence how long you’ve been dealing with us. Today is what counts.”

He noisily cradled the phone and said, “Idiot. He couldn’t organize a beetle-drive.” Then he looked up at Julia and gave her an unexpected smile. “Well, Julia, what have you got for me?”

Frank Mordant was handsome in a sharp, slightly Brylcreemy way. He had a finely chiseled forehead and a straight, thin nose, and his eyes were piercing blue and hooded like a hawk’s. His brown hair was brushed straight back, and he sported a thin, clipped moustache. He was always immaculately dressed in gray three-piece suits and starched white shirts with double cuffs and a separate collar. Wheatstone’s kept their offices warm and by the end of the day he always smelled faintly of body odor.

Julia put his signing folder down in front of him. He unscrewed his fountain pen, but before he opened his folder he leaned back in his chair. “How long have you been with me now, Julia?”

“Ten months next Wednesday. I started here May eleventh.”

“Doesn’t time fly! But let me tell you something, Julia, no word of a lie – I’ve never had a secretary anything like as good as you. Not even a secretary from … well, where you came from.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I wonder if you could sign your letters now, please. Some of my friends are giving me a ride home.”

Frank Mordant opened the folder and wrinkled up his nose at the letters inside. “These aren’t all that desperate, are they? There’s only this prospectus to the Air Ministry, isn’t there? And if they want that in a hurry you can send it up to Whitehall by taxicab.”

“Well, if it’s OK with you, Mr Mordant …”

He screwed the cap back on his pen. “Of course it’s ‘OK’ with me. But listen, instead of going into town with your friends, why don’t you let me take you? I’m going that way myself. I’d enjoy a chinwag.”

Julia couldn’t think of anything less appealing than driving into Hammersmith with Mr Mordant, especially since she had a severe crush on David and hadn’t seen him since Tuesday lunchtime. But Mr Mordant was her boss and it was very difficult to say no.

“I, ah—”

“Fine! That’s settled then! Why don’t you go and fetch your coat and I’ll meet you in the lobby in five minutes.”

Alexandra was waiting for her in her office. “Come on, Julia! We’re going to be late! We’re all going to go to the Corner House for tea and cream cakes!”

“Sorry,” said Julia. “I’m going to have to take a raincheck. Darth Vader wants to drive me home.”

“Who?”

“Mr Mordant. He says he feels like a chinwag.”

“Oh, God. You poor thing! Can’t you faint? Can’t you stick your finger down your throat and pretend that you’re sick?”

“I wish.”

“Oh, well. C’est la vie. You can still meet us at the Corner House later.”

“I’ll try. But if I can’t, look, I’ll see you tomorrow, OK?”

“All right,” said Alexandra. “But just you be careful. You know what they say about accepting lifts from strange men, and you couldn’t find anybody stranger than Frank Mordant, could you?”

He was waiting for her in the gloomy hexagonal lobby, with its pale-faced illuminated clock and its polished marble floor and its bronze statue of the goddess Electra. He was wearing a Homburg hat and a long black overcoat, and was buttoning up his black leather motoring gloves when she entered the room.

“Goodnight, Sheila,” called Julia to the receptionist, a curly redhead with a high, silly laugh. The lobby rattled with the footsteps of Wheatstone employees going home.

Frank Mordant gave Julia a slanted smile. “You look … splendid,” he complimented her, looking approvingly at the dark brown hooded coat she had bought in Bloomingdale’s on her stopover from Los Angeles. “I suppose it would be more circumspect of me not to ask where you got it.”

They pushed their way through the bronze and glass art deco doors. The sun had set and although the sky was still light there was a nip in the late-February air. Their breath smoked as they walked across the forecourt to Frank Mordant’s long navy-blue Armstrong-Siddeley. He opened the passenger door for her, and she climbed into a black leather interior. It smelled of cold cigars and motor oil. Frank Mordant settled himself beside her, turned the keys, and pushed the starter button.

“So, Julia, how do you see your future?” he asked, as he nosed the car out into the rush-hour traffic along the Great West Road. “You’re not going to stay a secretary for ever, are you?”

“Actually I was hoping to get into television production.”

“Television production?” he said, with obvious surprise.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, quite frankly, we don’t have much room for women on the television side. Not unless you want to sit on the production line all day, plugging in valves. I suppose I could always have a word with Bill Harvey down at our Bristol plant.”

“I was talking about television programs, not television sets.”

“Oh, I see,” he nodded, and thought about that for a while. Then he said, “So that’s it, you’re thinking of spreading your wings. Goodbye Wheatstone’s, hallo fame and fortune?”

“I’ve had a great time at Wheatstone’s, don’t get me wrong. It’s really helped me to get my head together.”

“Well, good. Good. I’m glad about that. I wouldn’t like to think of your head being … you know. Apart.”

They stopped at a red traffic signal and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Here, do you think, or there?” he asked her.

“Oh, there, of course. I mean, what do you have here? Black-and-white, seven-inch screens, and less than three-quarters of a million viewers in the whole country. Back there, whole series get canceled if they can only attract an audience of three-quarters of a million.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Frank Mordant. He pulled out and overtook a crowded double-decker bus. “Still … there’s a lot to be said for staying here, isn’t there? It would be very much easier for you to make your mark in television here, knowing what you know. Having that … background, as it were. I mean, look at me. I only got a ‘D’ in physics, but look at me now. Production director of the second-largest electrical company in Britain. Four thousand pounds a year. Plus perks.”

They crawled at two to three miles per hour through the tangle of traffic that would take them in to the Chiswick roundabout. It didn’t help that a baby Austin had broken down in the outside lane, and a young man in his shirtsleeves was frantically cranking the starting-handle. Up above them, autogiros swarmed through the evening sky like fireflies, their engines droning, carrying scores of wealthy businessmen home to Windsor and Lightwater and Sunbury-on-Thames.

“Look,” said Frank Mordant, “why don’t we stop for a quick drink? There’s a jolly little pub just along here.”

“Really, Mr Mordant, I have to be getting back.”

“Come on, one drink won’t hurt! You deserve it, after everything you’ve done today. All that filing. I know you think I’m a slavedriver, but your efforts don’t go unnoticed, you know.”

Julia felt desperate, but she couldn’t say no. She had refused Frank Mordant’s offer of a mint humbug once and he seemed to have taken it as a personal affront, keeping her working till well past six o’clock. “OK, then,” she agreed. “Just one drink.”

“That’s the ticket!” He steered the Armstrong-Siddeley into a side street and did some very complicated parking behind a rusty Wolseley. On the corner stood a small Victorian pub, The Sir Oswald Mosley, with cream-painted walls and maroon woodwork. Frank Mordant ushered Julia in through the engraved glass doors into the saloon bar. It was thick with cigarette smoke but it was almost empty, except for a spotty youth in a green tweed sports jacket playing the fruit machine and an elderly man with a beetroot-colored face and a mournful Staffordshire bull terrier lying by his feet.

The landlord appeared behind the curved mahogany bar with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, and one eye scrunched up against the smoke. “Your usual, Mr Mordant?” he said, reaching up for a bottle of Glenlivet malt whiskey.

“Thank you, Norman. And what would you like, Julia?”

“Oh, just something non-alcoholic for me. Maybe an orange juice.”

A television was flickering on a shelf behind the bar. The sound was turned down but Julia could see what was happening. Hordes of people in sarongs were pulling down barriers and burning British flags. More trouble in Burma.

They sat down at a small marble-topped table and Frank Mordant raised his glass and said, “Cheers, m’dear.”

Julia took a sip of her warm reconstituted orange juice and tried to smile.

Frank Mordant looked around. “This isn’t a bad little place, you know, especially when it livens up a bit. You should come in here for Gold Cup day. Norman lays on quite a spread. Sandwiches, pork pies. That kind of thing. I call it my secret headquarters.”

Julia shook her head to show that she didn’t understand.

“Well, all of us have to have somewhere, don’t we? You’ve got somewhere, surely, even if it’s only a cupboard?”

“I keep some stuff in a drawer, sure. My Walkman, you know, and a whole lot of photographs.”

Frank Mordant nodded. He took out a packet of Capstan cigarettes and tapped one on the table top. “I don’t miss it, you know. Life’s been much too good for me here.”

“Don’t you miss anything, or anybody?”

“Oh, yes. I was married, you know, believe it or not. Pretty girl, Daphne, met her in Brighton. We had a daughter but she was a spastic and we had to put her in a home. Then I got into trouble with my car business. Cars, that was my line.”

He lit his cigarette and blew long funnels of smoke out of his nostrils. “There was a silly business over another woman, too. In the end, I thought, why not? Start all over again. Start afresh, if you know what I mean.”

Julia didn’t have to say anything. She knew exactly what he meant. It was the chance to start over that had attracted her to stay here, too. She had been halfway through a TV production course at University of California at Santa Cruz when she had fallen for Rex Pittman, and she still couldn’t think about Enya’s Orinoco Flow without a shiver. That was the music he had played when they had first made love: the 48-year-old professional TV writer and the deeply impressionable 21-year-old student. “Whenever you hear this song, you’re going to remember this night,” he had told her. But here, of course, nobody had ever heard of Enya.

It had all ended badly. Rex’s neurotic wife Nessa had found out about Julia and deliberately walked through a plate-glass door at Julia’s parents’ house. Rex had left Nessa and taken Julia to Baja for a week. Swimming, talking, sailing, drinking tequila sunrises and making love. But in the end they had to go back, and when they went back they discovered that Nessa had critically injured their three-year-old son James by pouring scalding water over him. James died two weeks later, in terrible pain.

That was why Julia was here. Mostly, anyhow. It was a way to begin her life all over again, where nothing and nobody could reach her.

Frank Mordant finished his whiskey and nodded toward her glass. “Fancy another?”

“No, no thanks. I really have to be getting home.”

“How is it, your flat?”

“Well, to be honest, it’s far too big for just one person. Way too expensive, too. My landlady just put it up to £2.17s.6d a week.”

“I say. That’s a bit steep, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I know. But I don’t know if I ever want to share again. I liked Mary, but I always felt like I had to be on my guard. I think she suspected me, you know – but of course she never knew what it was that she suspected me of.”

“I’ve got a flat here,” said Frank Mordant, quite matter-of-factly, blowing smoke, and nodding his head up toward the ceiling.

“You have a flat here? You mean here, over this pub?”

“That’s right. I’ve had it for five years now. My secret headquarters. Sitting room, bedroom, bathroom. I suppose an estate agent might call it bijou, but I scarcely use it these days so it does for me.” He paused, and blew some more smoke, and then he said, “I was wondering, you know. Perhaps you might like to take it over.”

“What about you?”

Frank Mordant shrugged. “As I say, I scarcely ever use it. Only when a wave of nostalgia comes over me. I’ve got a bit of stuff up there but you’re quite welcome to use it, too. A color TV with a video recorder and a stereo system and a pile of CDs. Do you like Abba? I used to love Abba. Dig it, the dancing queen … Those were the days. Oh, and a deep-freeze, too. Not a big one, but it’s got fish fingers in it, and pizza, and some chicken balti, too.”

Julia couldn’t help smiling. “I thought you were so acclimatized. Your accent, you know, and the way you dress.”

“Oh, I am. But you know what it’s like. If you want to live here happily, you have to edit things out of your mind, and after a while you begin to think that perhaps they didn’t happen at all. That stuff upstairs … that’s just a little reminder that I’m not dreaming, after all.

He stood up and patted his pockets to find his keys. “Why don’t you come and take a shufti at it? It’s a jolly sight nearer to work than Lavender Hill, and I’d only charge you £1.15s.0d a week.”

“I’m not sure …” said Julia. “I’ve already made quite a few friends in Lavender Hill.”

“Nonsense, you can make friends anywhere. Personable young lady like you. There’s no harm in taking a look, is there?”

Julia glanced toward the landlord. He was polishing pint glasses and watching her with a dull, fixed stare, the cigarette still hanging from the side of his mouth, as if he wanted to remember her for ever. “Well … all right then,” she agreed. “But then I must get home.”

Frank Mordant’s flat had a separate front door at the side of the pub. It was painted maroon and it had no number on it, only a small bronze knocker in the shape of a grinning imp’s head. Frank Mordant gave it a rat-a-tat-tat and said, “Cornish piskie. It’s supposed to bring you luck.”

Inside, there was a damp coconut mat and then a steep flight of stairs. Frank Mordant switched the light on and said, “Good exercise, stairs. Up and down here a few times a day and you won’t need to worry about jogging.”

“I don’t jog, not any more. People used to stare so much.”

“Yes, I suppose they would. Here – watch your step at the top here, the carpet’s loose.”

At the top of the stairs there was a small brown-wallpapered landing with two doors leading off it. A damp-rippled reproduction of Damien Hirst’s Chinese Lady hung at an angle between them, and one of them bore a ceramic plaque saying The Smallest Room.

Frank Mordant unlocked the other door and led the way into a narrow corridor. On the left there was a small kitchenette with a gas water-heater and fitted cupboards in lime-green Formica. It was obvious that he didn’t use the flat very often: there was a stuffy, sour, closed-in smell, and all of the dried herbs in the spice jars that hung on the wall had faded to pale yellow.

“Needs a woman’s touch, really.”

The sitting room was surprisingly large and light. It had a high ceiling and all the walls had been painted white and the light gray carpet wasn’t luxurious but it was fairly new. There was a plain couch covered in black cotton fabric and a large brown 1930s armchair. A large television stood in one corner of the room, as well as a video player and stacks of labeled videotapes. There was a video camera, too, tilted on top of a tripod.

“A few pictures on the walls,” Frank Mordant suggested. “Scatter cushions, that kind of thing. You could really make it quite homey.”

A plain white calico blind covered the window. Julia went over to it and tried to release it, but it was fastened to the window frame with thumbtacks. She lifted an edge of it and peeked out. It looked right over Chiswick High Road, still crowded with buses and cyclists and homegoing cars.

“Want to see the bedroom?” asked Frank Mordant. “The bedroom’s nice. Only had it redecorated in September.”

He opened the door that led to the bedroom. It was just large enough for a double bed covered with a pink candlewick bedspread, a wardrobe and a chair with a leatherette seat. The walls had been stippled with pale blue distemper. Over the bed hung a fan-shaped mirror with two picture postcards stuck in it, and on the pillow lay a defeated-looking golliwog.

“Well …” said Julia. The flat wasn’t as seedy as she had expected it to be. Frank Mordant was right: one or two colorful pictures would make the whole place look much more welcoming, and she could cover that deadly black couch with the sunflower-patterned throw she had bought from Habitat. Living here would save her more than one pound a week on rent, and nearly as much as that again on bus fares.

She came back into the living room. She found Frank Mordant tinkering with the video camera. He swiveled around like a floorwalker in a department store and wrung his hands together.

“What do you think, then? It’s really quite cozy, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t get too noisy, does it, with the pub downstairs?”

Frank Mordant shook his head. “I won’t lie to you, there is a bit of a racket at closing time. Car doors slamming, everybody saying goodnight, things like that. But it doesn’t last for long. And here’s the secret ingredient.” He knelt down and lifted up one corner of the carpet. “Underfelt, double-thick, almost completely soundproof. I had it laid so that I could play my music as loud as I liked. You could scream your head off in here and nobody would hear you.”

Julia took another look around. “It’s interesting … I’d like to think it over, if I may.”

“Of course. Take as long as you like. Before you go, though, there is one thing you might like to consider.”

He went to the kitchenette. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to follow him or not, so she waited. She lifted the edge of the blind again, and looked down into the street. The road was noisier here than her terrace in Lavender Hill, but she didn’t really mind the background jostle of traffic.

“Do you know which bus—?” she began; and then she was suddenly aware that Frank Mordant was standing right behind her. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t even sensed him approaching.

Without a word he clamped a thick white cloth over her nose and mouth, as thick as a muslin diaper. It reeked with a pungent, chemical smell – a smell that seared her nostrils and burned her eyes. She gave a panicky snuffle and breathed it in. She staggered against him, tried to struggle, and managed to snatch at his wristwatch. But he kept the cloth pressed firmly against her face, and as she tried to pull away from him the room tilted on its end and the floor came toward her like a dark, silently slamming door.