The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

1.

Standing with your back to the Tower of London, looking across the Thames, you might notice a family of new office blocks lined up along the south bank. They took only six months to build – having been assembled out of steel frames sheathed in simple coats of tinted glass – and still do not quite seem to belong to the city, being oddly clean and impervious to the history which surrounds them, conveying a non-native sense of optimism better suited to downtown Toronto or Cleveland. Just to the east of them, in a plaza decked out with privately maintained trees and fountains, groups of foreign schoolchildren arrive by bus to take pictures of the river, while businesspeople, thrown off schedule by the rare boon of a punctual train or a clear road, sit on benches attending to messages transmitted invisibly to their phones through the luminous morning air.

A discreet logo at the top of one of the towers is the only outward sign of having reached the European headquarters of one of the world’s largest accountancy firms. Despite such reticence, the building affords the inquisitive passer-by with notably unguarded glimpses of the goings-on inside. Seemingly more aware of having a view than of being one, the employees rest their besocked feet on boxes of printer cartridges, unselfconsciously consume lunch at the windows, swivel on their ergonomic chairs, stand in semicircles in obscure group exercises and write acronyms on white boards in rooms full of concentrated-looking colleagues – their behaviour unfolding behind triple glazing as if in an eerily silent film, accompanied only by a musical score of seagulls, river traffic and the easterly wind.

On entering the building, one encounters a lobby designed so that the head of any newcomer will ineluctably lean backwards to follow a succession of floors rising up to apparent infinity, and in the process dwell – as the cathedral-builders once invited one to do with their vaulted naves – on the respect that must be owed to those responsible for putting up and managing this colossus. However, unlike at Chartres, quite what one should be honouring is unclear. Perhaps hard work, precision, a certain ruthlessness and the surprising intricacies of the audit process. A plaque affixed to a wall declares, ‘We like people who demonstrate integrity, energy and enthusiasm.’

To judge by the number of people seated on the lobby’s red-leather sofas, it isn’t unusual to be kept waiting awhile for an appointment, surreptitiously to enforce an impression of the importance of one’s hosts on the upper floors. A receptionist, no less aware of the solemnity of her role than a priestess at the Temple of Delphi, is on hand for a short initiation ceremony, handing you a badge and directing you to the sofas with a tenuous promise of rescue. There are free newspapers and bottles of water emblazoned with the firm’s name. Waiting feels like the oldest of human activities, stretching back to the senators pacing outside the emperor’s quarters in imperial Rome and the merchants lined up to see the caliph in the marble-lined palaces of medieval Córdoba. In the background, a bank of lifts emits random pings as security guards patrol the turnstiles, hoping for a confrontation to interrupt the tedium of their day.

As one does in a doctor’s surgery, one may be tempted to look at one’s fellow visitors and wonder about the problems that have brought them here. They are unlikely to be straightforward. The accountants don’t cater to life’s superficial needs. Their jobs did not even come into being until late in the history of business, only after millions of people had gathered in cities and been grouped into industrial phalanxes – for, until then, accountancy merely occupied a few sporadic moments at the ledger by candlelight in a back room. The advent of dedicated financial specialists, who are unable to fish or build a house or sew a coat but are entirely committed to answering questions of amortisation, standard engagement revenue and transaction tax, seems a culmination of a long history of the division of labour, which began in Ancient Egypt three millennia ago and, in oases like these at least, has generated spectacular returns and some distinctive psychological side-effects.

Everything in the accountants’ building appears elegant and well-maintained. There are none of the cobwebs endemic to the ordinary world. People cross the corridors and elevated walkways with purpose. Five thousand employees are split into divisions headed Audit, Tax, Banking, Capital Markets, Real Estate and Risk Advisory Services. They are assisted by two hundred support staff who fix chairs, wheel biscuits into client meetings, reroute emails and clip together identification badges. A basement stationery store, stocked more prodigiously than Aladdin’s cave, boasts a supply of three thousand highlighter pens, which could ring the earth in fluorescent yellow ink and which invite you to think of the many countries and situations they will run out in, for instance, one pen expiring in a hotel in Kiev, after covering the many salient points in a five-hundred-page document headed Weighted Average Cost of Capital in the Copper Mining Industry.

In the wider view of the public, accountancy may be synonymous with bureaucratic tedium, but from close up, this particular conglomeration of numerical talents presents the observer with a case-study of the discrete charms of offices, with their intriguing blend of camaraderie, intelligence and futility. The headquarters on the bank of the Thames is the setting for a range of behaviours at least as peculiar as anything that an ethnographer might uncover among the clans of Samoa.

I resolved to spend time in the accountants’ glass tower, as well as in one or two of their homes, in order to build up a snapshot of an average day.

2.

It is six o’clock on a late-July morning, in a village fifty kilometres from the office, in the Berkshire countryside. To define what is painfully coming to an end, thanks to the pitiless insistence of an electronic chirrup, as ‘being asleep’ doesn’t scratch the surface of what has really been going on for the last seven hours, ever since one of the accountants I am shadowing lost contact with her conscious self while watching a regional news item and was transported off on the back of the swan of sleep. She may only have been lying under a duvet, in a room undisturbed except by the occasional sweep of car headlamps across the ceiling, and yet she was all the while being shuttled on turbulent journeys animated by unexpected faces and emotions.

She was back in the school gymnasium, taking an algebra exam and sitting next to a boy who was also, and without evident incongruity, a colleague from the Retail and Consumer Products unit. Then came a supermarket queue and the Queen shouting that someone had stolen her earrings, a scene which dissolved into a meeting on a ferry with a lover whom she hadn’t seen in ten years, but who spoke of their break-up with an accuracy her waking mind could never have mustered. It is a wonder that we manage to be so outwardly docile, an arm or leg only infrequently stirring, while we travel on such ghost trains.

Once the alarm has rung, the accountant has little choice but to head for the bathroom without doing justice to her visions. Sentimental associations and impossible longings are shut down, and the self is reassembled as an apparently coherent entity, with stable commitments and a prescribed future. Yet in the haze of dawn, she feels for a few moments as if she still had a foot in both worlds, parts of herself holding on to the dreams as others soberly go through the motions with the taps and the toothbrush. But with time, the drawbridge to the night is pulled up, and soon all that is left is the noise of running water and, on a ledge by the window, a bottle of shampoo on which is printed in bold letters, in an implicit assertion of the supremacy of diurnal reality, the familiar yet peculiar phrase ‘All-in-One Conditioner’.

How quiet the nation was only forty-five minutes ago, and yet how much hair-rinsing, necktie-tying, key-searching, stain-removing and spouse-shouting will occur over the next thirty, as the events in the accountant’s house are replicated in a hundred thousand other homes within a gigantic circle drawn around the capital, from Folkestone to Aylesbury, from Haslemere to Chelmsford. Alarms are going off in Rottingdean and Harwich, alarms balanced on pine shelves and on marble-topped night tables, alarms which vibrate and others which set off the announcements of silky-voiced newsreaders detailing the trajectories of cyclones and currencies.

After showering and dressing comes a bowl of Crunchy Nut; then a scramble for a handbag and a raincoat for the walk in the chill air to the train station. Once outside, it seems extraordinary that the natural world should still exist and be so apparently undisturbed and serene, so indifferent to human concerns, with a new sky which has wiped away yesterday’s squalls and holds no grudges, a scene of innocent beauty that bolsters any attempt to search within oneself for reserves of resilience and good humour.

The train will be on time, say the screens at the station, and the accountant walks to the end of the platform under Victorian arches spongy with the paint of decades, past advertisements for West End plays and day excursions to historic castles. A plane crosses high overhead, a veteran of a still earlier departure, perhaps with a child on board at this very moment gazing down and seeing, within the circumference of a window, the full extent of the railway line threading its way from the coast to the city. Back on the ground, from a distance, swaying slightly from side to side, its headlamps on and sparks flashing around its wheels, a green-liveried train comes into view, sounding its toylike horn against a wide horizon.

Entering the carriage feels like interrupting a congregation. The cold air cuts into daydreams which must have begun far up the line and swelled across the wheat fields. The settled passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of taking notice, but they betray their awareness of the new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to allow her to struggle past them to one of the remaining unoccupied seats. The train moves off, resuming its rhythmical clicking along tracks laid down a century and a half ago, when the capital first began plucking workers from their beds in faraway villages whose outlying farms had once marked the boundaries of their inhabitants’ known world.

There is something improbable about the silence in the carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation’s economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper. To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity. Today there is a story about a man who fell asleep at the wheel of his car after staying up late into the night committing adultery on the Internet – and drove off an overpass, killing a family of five in a caravan below. Another item speaks of a university student, beautiful and promising, who went missing after a party and was found in pieces in the back of a minicab five days later. A third rehearses the particulars of an affair between a tennis coach and her thirteen-year-old pupil. These accounts, so obviously demented and catastrophic, are paradoxically consoling, for they help us to feel sane and blessed by comparison. We can turn away from them and experience a new sense of relief at our predictable routines; we can be grateful for how tightly bound we have kept our desires, and proud of the restraint we have shown in not poisoning our colleagues or entombing our relations under the patio.

Familiar vignettes stream by outside: a power station, a patch of waste ground, a postal depot, a copse of ancient trees, a group of schoolgirls in grey-and-blue uniforms, a band of cumulus clouds spreading from the west, a shopping mall across a motorway, some underwear swaying on a line, and then gradually, the backs of suburban villas, heralding the train’s arrival into central London itself.

At the accountants’ building, employees are already beginning to course through the plate-glass doors. They have stepped off railway carriages at Victoria and Farringdon, London Bridge and Waterloo, driven through tunnels, been rattled by diesel buses, run down airport concourses, jogged across parks and cycled over hills and high streets, in each case hiding from the rest of the world the centre of the spider’s web to which they were headed. What varied breakfasts they have eaten, too. Danish pastries, the remains of last night’s curry, sausages, Scotch eggs and bowls of Cheerios and Coco Pops, jauntily named to lend their commuting consumers hope.

The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver sculpture in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.

3.

In a meeting room on the seventh floor, ten people have gathered to discuss the progress of an audit of a company in Birmingham which manufactures plastic packaging for the food industry. They range in seniority from a partner, in shirtsleeves at the head of the table, to a new recruit in an emphatically striped suit, who left university last summer. There is banter and affectionate teasing reminiscent of exchanges between a teacher and a group of cocky but respectful students. ‘Watch the game last night, hedgehog?’ the partner asks the young man to his right, whose hair is artfully gelled into spikes. ‘Naturally, Robinson, but we’ll wipe that smile off your face next weekend,’ counters the latter.

Five junior members of the audit team have been in Birmingham every week for the last month, staying at a motel near the plastics factory, on the southern approach to the city. During the day, they have been working in the company’s finance department, going over files and running data tests on their laptops. In the evening, they have frequented the Star of India, a Bengali restaurant located across the dual carriageway from Colditz (as they have nicknamed their accommodation). Travel policy stipulates that staff below the manager grade will be reimbursed up to £20.50 for the evening meal.

It isn’t easy to encourage the accountants to expand on what they do. They feel that any curiosity shown by a civilian must conceal mockery – yet more of what they have been used to encountering from the wider world since they first announced their career choice at graduation. But with perseverance, their reflexive self-deprecation gradually gives way to a more earnest pride in their mastery of a labyrinthine craft.

I chat with Emily Wan. She is twenty-eight years old and a recent transfer to London from the firm’s Shanghai office, where she found a place after graduating with exceptional grades from Jiao Tong university. She compares the audit process to a piece of carpentry. Capitalism could not function without her, she smiles. The procedures used for audits are identical the world over, enabling accountants to work seamlessly with foreign colleagues, as pilots might. The rules have been codified into a four-thousand-page bible, the Global Audit Methodology, which I take to reading in bed. In Birmingham, every team member has been charged with substantiating a different aspect of the client company’s balance sheet: one investigates its register of fixed assets, another its debt, a third its liabilities, a fourth its creditors and a fifth its provisions. At the close of the process, the senior partner will sign off on six hundred forms which legally underwrite the accuracy of the stated accounts – thereby enabling potential investors to have sufficient trust to let their money sail off on lengthy and intangible digital journeys in the company’s direction.

At present, the team is devising ways to check the reliability of the VAT billing system. They are charting the flow of a hundred million pounds through the client’s internal plumbing in the previous six months. Due to a missing file, there has been an irritating delay in the completion of a Non-Audit Services Annual Independence Continuance Form for Annuity Engagements.

Though the distinction between what is ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ often dissolves on close examination, we are undeniably far from the human condition as it first manifested itself in Africa’s Rift Valley 250,000 years ago. It is hard not to admire the dedication directed towards the small print. Levels of commitment that in previous societies were devoted to military adventures and religious intoxication have been channelled into numerical needlework. History may dwell on stories of heroism and drama, but there are ultimately few of us out on the high seas, and many of us in the harbour, counting the ropes and untangling the anchor chains.

It is apparent that accountancy lends its practitioners a particular way of looking at the world. The accountants ask me not how or why one writes a book, but whether tax on a title is payable across a few years or must wholly be paid at the moment of publication. They are like renal surgeons for whom one is first and foremost always a kidney.

More impressively, they seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. They have the inner freedom to exercise their intelligence in the way that taxi drivers will practise their navigational skills: they will go wherever their clients direct them to. They may be asked to deal with the financing of an oil rig one week, the tax liability of a supermarket or fibre-optic cable plant the next – without being detained by pressing internal projects and the pathologies and suffering these entail. They have no ambition to become known to strangers or to record their insights for an unimpressed and ephemeral future. They are well adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit.

4.

In a ground-floor conference room, twenty-five new recruits are in their second week of a three-year-long accountancy training course. Last week they were given an overview of the principles of financial reporting, and this week they will be walked through the mechanics of company assurance systems. In an attempt to keep up their spirits, the firm has also bused them to an elegant hotel outside London to meet the chairman and to a spa for an afternoon of treatments and massages. They have in addition been introduced to the company psychotherapist, the in-house dry-cleaner, the director of information technology and the head of the accountants’ gay and lesbian association, whose members convene for drinks on the first Tuesday of every month. And now, because the trainees have been listening to a lecture for more than half an hour and many of them are showing signs of fatigue, the course tutor opts to release them early to sample a spread of croissants and Danish pastries outside.

For most of human history, the only instrument needed to induce employees to complete their duties energetically and adroitly was the whip. So long as workers had only to kneel down and retrieve stray ears of corn from the threshing-room floor or heave quarried stones up a slope, they could be struck hard and often, with impunity and benefit. But the rules of employment had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be to a significant degree content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to remove brain tumours, draw up binding legal documents or sell condominiums with convincing energy could not profitably be sullen or resentful, morose or angry, the mental well-being of employees commenced to be a supreme object of managerial concern.

The jobs in the world’s glass office towers cannot be administered by the fear of an external power. Watchtowers are of no use in encouraging staff to engage their higher faculties in the drafting of annual tax-deferment schedules, requiring senior managers to handle their charges with patient and costly respect. These overlords have been deprived of the cavalier attitudes of eighteenth-century ship owners, who were enviably free to propel their slaves into the mid-Atlantic at early signs of scurvy. The new figures of authority must involve themselves with day-care centres and, at monthly get-togethers, animatedly ask their subordinates how they are enjoying their jobs so far.

Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department, based on the sixth floor. She recently organised a landscape-painting competition to help the auditors to release their untapped creativity, and is now, in an effort further to boost morale, engaged in lining the building’s corridors and reception areas with plaques bearing the legend ‘Our Values Statement: Who We Are and What We Stand For’.

There would certainly have been less for a diarist such as Saint-Simon to report on in Louis XIV’s court had Axtell been present at Versailles. Thanks to her, the company now has in place a zero-tolerance policy towards bullying and gossip, a twenty-four-hour hotline for distressed employees, forums in which complaints may be lodged against colleagues and a tactful procedure by which a manager can let a team member know that his breath smells.

Underlying these innovations is the belief that workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.

Contrived as the strategies instituted by the Human Resources department may seem, it is in fact their very artificiality which guarantees their success, for the laboured tone of away-day seminars and group feedback exercises allows workers manfully to protest that they have nothing whatsoever to learn from submitting to such disciplines. Then, like guests at a house party who at first mock their host’s suggestion of a round of Pictionary, they may be surprised to find themselves, as the game gets under way, able thereby to channel their hostilities, identify their affections and escape the agony of insincere chatter.

There are, admittedly, few historical precedents for Axtell’s job title or her professional lexicon (‘client relating’, ‘personal branding’) – a scarcity which may lead one to judge her as an unnecessary sickness. But this would be to misconstrue the sheer distinctiveness of the contemporary office, a factory of ideas dependent upon the ability of tens of thousands of employees to communicate properly amongst themselves in order to fulfil the needs of intemperate and exacting clients and so, by extension, an entity acutely vulnerable to internecine fighting, to the petty withholding of information between departments, to the nurturing of poisonous grudges over inequitable pay scales, to the appearance of dandruff on the collars of managers, to the splitting of infinitives in company releases and to the offering of clammy hands to crucial contacts – and hence an entity not above the communal salve discreetly embedded within karaoke nights and ‘Employee of the Month’ schemes, which reward their winners with river cruises and boardroom lunches with the chairman.

5.

For a long while, I try to meet this chairman, but first he is in Russia, then in India and then in the United States, though during this latter period, I am certain that I see him entering a lift at the London headquarters. Then he is for another interval officially upstairs but too busy to see me, until finally, I am allotted half an hour in which to talk to him about the future of the firm and the challenges facing his profession.

We sit across from one another in a bare room, chaperoned by the head of Public Relations, the purpose of whose presence is unclear, except to reinforce the implication that I should tread with care.

A show of surface geniality barely hides the chairman’s impatience with writers. This morning, as on every other weekday, he was up at five, went jogging for forty minutes and was at his desk before seven. He rules over 12,000 people spread out across offices in Denmark, Cameroon, India, Senegal, Sweden, Scotland, Albania, Northern Ireland, Moldova and South Africa.

Yet despite his remit, he has renounced almost all the instruments and symbols of authority. He is universally known by his first name. He has no jet or chauffeur. He shares a secretary. He takes the train to work. He doesn’t even have his own office. The architects designed one for him, with views of Tower Bridge, but he insisted on sitting in the middle of a regular floor at a desk no different from that of an intern. Its only distinguishing feature is a piece of laminated plastic, to the right of the telephone, on which is printed a quote from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which the president spoke of the need for every man to strive for excellence and, ‘if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat’.

The sight of the chairman’s furniture brings to mind W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Managers’ (1948):

In the bad old days it was not so bad:

The top of the ladder

Was an amusing place to sit; success

Meant quite a lot – leisure

And huge meals, more palaces filled with more

Objects, books, girls, horses

Than one would ever get round to, and to be

Carried uphill while seeing

Others walk…

But Auden knew where leadership was headed. In modern times, he wondered,

Would any painter

Portray one rising triumphant from a lake

On a dolphin, naked,

Protected by an umbrella of cherubs?

Of course, power has not disappeared entirely; it has merely been reconfigured. It is by posing as a regular employee that the chairman stands his best chance of preserving his seniority. His subordinates admire the sincerity with which he pretends to share their fate, while he privately recognises that only a convincing show of normalcy will prevent him from ever having to be normal again.

The chairman has also been forced to surrender his right to bark orders. He cannot scold graduates of INSEAD and Wharton. The one tool left to him is persuasion. Three or four times a month, in various corners of his empire, he therefore steps up onto a podium, takes off his jacket, looks out across an audience of three thousand accountants and, against a backdrop of PowerPoint slogans, tells them what admirable professionals they are, before adroitly slipping in a recommendation for improvements to their methods in the humble and supplicating manner of a preacher in an age of declining faith.

It is evident that success in his job will ultimately depend less on anything he might do than on his relative luck in aligning his reign with auspicious currents in economic history. He is like a general on a battlefield vainly striving to maintain an appearance of control amidst the chaos of sporadically exploding munitions.

Perhaps the chairman senses my concerns. He seems to regard our interview not as a chance to impart useful information but as a perilous test of his ability to avoid saying anything which might return to haunt him – in other words, to be as boring as possible. He persists in speaking to me in the same congenial but impersonal tone he might use to address a crowd. I ask him to expound on the company’s future: ‘No one is under any illusion that we face some significant challenges. However, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that we also have some fabulous opportunities.’ What is his ambition for his employees? ‘All of our people and partners want to be part of a winning, successful organisation, an organisation that is winning market share and is therefore growing opportunities for all of its people.’ Does he like travelling? ‘We are fortunate that we are already part of a successful global business, but we must do more to commit fully to our global organisation and the global market.’ How does his firm differ from its competitors? ‘Our people are our brand in our clients’ eyes, and a differentiated client experience can only be created through our people living our values.’

After twenty minutes of this, I am tempted to ask when he was last troubled by his bowels in a meeting. But perhaps he speaks like this not so much because he wishes to keep secrets as because years of circumnavigating the earth, breathing conditioned air and headlining conferences, have hollowed out his personality. It may have been a decade since he was left alone in a room with nothing to do. I feel my boredom turn to pity for someone who one might otherwise imagine had precious little to be pitied for.

6.

Lunchtime comes around, bearing with it a seductive smell of fried food which rises up through the atrium to the upper floors. Employees can look up the cafeteria’s specials on the intranet. Fridays feature a ‘battered catch of the day, tartar sauce and a lemon wedge’; Wednesdays are for curry; and on Thursdays there is a ‘roast with all the trimmings’. To spare prospective diners any unanticipated delay, a webcam transmits live images of the queue.

However, not everyone is able to relax over the midday meal. At the very top of the building, in a series of executive dining rooms, senior partners are embarked upon the complex task of securing millions in fees from representatives of the country’s largest enterprises, while pretending to be interested in nothing but their recent holidays and their children’s education. Although the sums at stake here are incomparably greater than the ones dealt with by ordinary retailers or telephone salespeople who beg for custom in the soiled world below, the partners have learnt to adopt the serene and detached air of doctors or university professors.

Mark, the partner lunching in the east wing, perfected his approach during a training course entitled ‘Delivery at the Client’, the aim of which was to help attendees to develop their ‘C’ skills: Confidence, Commerciality, Communication, Capability and Commitment. The course was held in a hotel at the edge of a forest outside Northampton where, during an evening session, a pair of foxes peered in through a window at Mark as he sat at a table with his paper plate and plastic cutlery, while rehearsing the proper way to eat a meal with an imaginary client.

Now there is a real one sitting across from him called Arun, the chief financial officer of England’s third-biggest manufacturer of dental equipment. The conversation is halting. The first course has not even arrived yet, and the men have already covered cricket, Lake Como, Formula One racing, the relative ineffectiveness of solar panels and London pigeons. Mark is feeling especially tired today, for he returned home late last night from an oil-industry conference at the Marriott Hotel in Aberdeen, on the mechanics of using forward swaps and options to collateralise loans and advance cash flow to fund development costs. At least there is an impressive view out the window, and several more minutes can be devoted to sorting out which is the Lloyds Building. There is also art on the wall. The company likes art, and when it first moved into its new headquarters, it gave a firm of art-buyers a brief to equip almost every space with provocative and intriguing pieces by young artists. The dining room accordingly sports a large photograph of a cow who appears to be throwing herself into a muddy brown river. The setting may be India; the cow may be committing suicide.

Meanwhile, Guilherme is doing the rounds. Forty-two years old, from Bagé in southern Brazil, he has been employed by an outside catering company to wait tables during the lunchtime and evening sittings. He has in his day met with chief executives from the Axon Group, Braveheart Investments, Dana Petroleum, Indago Petroleum, the Omega Diagnostics Group and Zytronic PLC – though it might be fairer to say that he was in the same room with them for a brief period of time, for they are likely to have no particular recollection of this handsome, brown-eyed father of six, who once bestowed upon them a flour-dusted bread roll from a silver basket.

Today there is a starter of crab linguine, followed by a tuna steak with rösti potatoes. Hiring Mark to think on your behalf will cost you five hundred pounds an hour, whilst Guilherme can be had for just seven pounds – a difference explained not only by the history and relative prosperity of the two men’s native countries, but also by Mark’s three years of studying for a legal degree, a further two years spent at BPP college in King’s Cross to acquire command of PAR (Principles of Auditing and Reporting), his membership in the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and fifteen years’ worth of graft, as he ascended from associate to partly qualified executive, from qualified executive to assistant manager, from manager to senior manager and finally from partner to senior partner.

Many months later, with the help of tickets to Così fan tutti and the opening of a show of Renoir’s landscapes, Arun will at last respond favourably to Mark’s carefully couched entreaties for money. For his part, Guilherme will have been unwillingly repatriated after the expiry of his visa.

7.

The period after lunch is strangely quiet, as if an ancestral memory of the siesta were muffling the normal energies of the day. On the seventh floor, workers sit at their desks, concentrated over keyboards and documents. Printers occasionally whirr into life, ejecting pages which give off preternaturally the intense and lingering heat of newly toasted bagels.

Defying the expansive regularity of the open-plan arrangement, where desks are identified only by stark acronyms like ML6W.246, employees have succeeded in imposing a subtle individuality on their work stations. There are family photos pinned to felt boards, and occasional mugs and trinkets honouring sports teams and holiday destinations. Crouching on the floor, one can see how many people have removed their shoes and are rubbing their stockinged feet back and forth on the carpet, a motion which produces not only the intriguing friction of nylon-rich fibres felt through cotton but also the impression of having in a minor way broken the rules and brought a hint of the intimacy of home into the working realm.

The office veterans are adept at domesticating their environments. They know where to hide their food in the communal kitchens and how to time their bathroom visits so as to reduce the risk of being forced into conversation over the sink with a colleague beside whom they have lately been seated in the redolent and tense atmosphere of a cubicle. Bursts of productive activity are punctuated by arrangements for dinner, updates on love affairs and trenchant analyses of the antics of film stars and murderers. How few are the moments of the day when money is truly being made, and how many are on either side given over to daydreams and recuperation.

Through the windows, people are walking by the river in casual clothes. Their leisure makes one wonder as to the deeper logic of the work unfolding in the building. However, large questions have a habit of feeling irrelevant when one is in the middle of an activity; one is simply preparing a document for a four o’clock meeting, or because André has requested it or Katrin needs it for a presentation in Bangalore. Then again, the accountants are experts at summing up the meaning of our working lives. The company derives the greatest share of its income from its employees’ skill in preparing year-end financial statements which declare, following lengthy preambles about operational assets, capital receipts, loans and liabilities, that the whole point of a year may be summarised as follows:

Current Year (in £)

Previous Year (in £)

Turnover

50,739,954

30,719,640

Gross Profit

10,305,392

7,003,417

Such numbers express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable – yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating – than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes. The starkness of the year-end accounts only emphasises the extent to which generating money is really an excuse to do other things, to rise from bed in the morning, to talk authoritatively in front of overhead projectors, to plug in laptops in foreign hotel rooms, to give presentations analysing market shares and to yearn at the sight of Katie’s knee-length grey woollen shorts. Long before we ever earned any money, we were aware of the necessity of keeping busy: we knew the satisfactions of stacking bricks, pouring water into and out of containers and moving sand from one pit to another, untroubled by the greater purpose of our actions.

8.

About those shorts: Katie is the twenty-two-year-old assistant to the head of the Northern European Retail division. Today she is putting together an itinerary for her boss’s tour of Scandinavia in two weeks’ time. She has a copy of Discover Copenhagen on her desk. She has booked him into a quiet upper room in that city’s Imperial Hotel and scheduled a 7:30 breakfast with key staff from the local office, including Søren Strøm, Lasse Skov Kristensen and Morten Stokholm Buhl.

But Katie herself may be the only person in the vicinity able to concentrate on anything other than the captivating nature of her face and figure. So insistent and inappropriate are the thoughts that her beauty generates, it is easy to slip into a severe, impatient manner with her which may be mistaken for disinterest or even rudeness. Yet the company’s code of conduct explicitly states: ‘We have no tolerance towards sexual harassment in the workplace. Sexual harassment includes demeaning comments about a person’s appearance; indecent remarks; questions about a person’s sexual life; and physical contact that violates a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive working environment for them.’

Superficially, the code seems wholly and admirably concerned with championing the rights of innocent parties. There may, however, be a more cynical and less altruistic aspect to this unsparing paragraph, for what is really being protected is perhaps not a particular individual afflicted by indecent attention so much as the corporation itself. The feelings elicited by Katie’s shorts are incendiary because they threaten to subvert the firm’s entire rationale. They risk bringing to light an awkward truth: how much more interesting we might find it to have sex than to work.

There is nothing surprising about the corporation’s jealousy. Every society historically has had to regulate the sexual impulse in order to get anything done. It is only our naive belief in our own open-mindedness which prevents us from recognising the extent to which an old-fashioned sexual repression has to be buried in our codes of professional conduct.

Yet equally, and paradoxically, such repression has disproportionately sexual consequences, for it is an essential feature of the erotic that it thrives most fully precisely where it is most forbidden. There were few places in the fourteenth century as sexually charged as the convents of the Mother of God, just as there are few settings today as libidinous as the laminated open-plan spaces of our corporations. The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled capacity to excite desire.

If these two institutions have imposed harsh penalties on those who display signs of transgressive behaviour, it is because each is, or was, the locus of its society’s most cherished values: the teachings of Christ on the one hand, and money on the other. Money is to the office as God was to the nunnery – and whether physical desire is condemned in the language of a sexual-harassment policy or in terms of sin and Satan, it stands as a comparable heresy, for it has dared to deny canonical goals, impudently implying that there may be elements more valuable in the world, and more consuming, than the stock price or the Redeemer.

The repression has paid dividends in one area, at least: logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.

9.

The office starts to empty out at six, and an hour later, only those working on urgent presentations and reports are left, some of them facing a long night at their desks, punctuated by the arrival of Cokes and pizzas at around one in the morning.

The sun is nearing the horizon, throwing an orange light across the tower’s glazing. What has been accomplished today? One employee advised a client on the tax implications of importing apples from Slovenia. Another wrote a paper comparing sales taxes in five West African countries. A third handed out name badges and logged in three hundred incoming calls. These achievements will no doubt lose some of their significance with the perspective of time. Three years from now, the diary of the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of July will have become almost unintelligible, when it had once been sharply divided into pressing hour-long increments, devoted to appointments with colleagues whose very names and faces will have grown indistinct.

An employee from Advisory Services heads for London Bridge station and his commute back to Kent, stopping off on the way at a supermarket for a bottle of wine and a chicken breast in cheese sauce. He did not leave the building all day, for he was busy drawing up a spreadsheet analysis of an investment made by an American medical diagnostic firm and responding to emails from colleagues at work on a project in Denver. He is surprised, on stepping out of the air-conditioned atrium, to find how warm it is outside, how immemorial the river looks, how many people there are alive, what varied sizes they are and demeanours they wear.

Exceptionally, the train tonight allows him half a carriage to himself. He has been making this same journey for the past twelve years. In the slanting summer light, when the smell of cut grass enters the windows from across the open countryside, he falls prey to feelings of nostalgia. He puts his feet up on the seat opposite and is carried back to other evenings which looked almost exactly like this one, which were of the same temperature and clarity, but happened when his mother was still alive, before his children were born, when he was not yet divorced. He contemplates all that has been difficult, unnecessary and regrettable but from a position of distance, with a calm and poignant vantage point over his imperfections and missed opportunities, as though his life were nothing but a bad sentimental film and he its half sympathetic, half repugnant hero. He has reached the age of reminiscence, though right now, somewhere in the scattered houses outside, there is a sixteen-year-old boy for whom this will be the one central hot summer of longing and discovery, the one remembered in thirty years on a train which is not yet made and remains as iron ore in the red scrub of the Western Australian desert.

The flat is quiet and guilty. Nothing here moved while, on the banks of the Thames, the accountant was meeting with IT and striving to keep his temper with an intern. He notices the bath towel thrown hastily over the sofa after the morning shower. The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.

For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol. The final approach will be made under the benign guidance of a Chilean Cabernet and the hypnotic, entirely untroubling retelling of the day’s misdemeanours and cataclysms on the evening news.