Playing Grace by Hazel Osmond

such as Alistair letting post fall down the back of a piece of furniture or taking it home in his pocket and never bringing it back. Other times he was more imaginative in his stupidity. Once he’d even managed to sandwich incoming letters between outgoing ones and lobbed the whole lot into the postbox together.
    Luckily for Gilbert, Alistair did not hear that exasperated noise, being deaf now to all but his own hysteria. Judging by the way he had screwed up the envelope and thrown it on the coffee table and was using both hands to shuffle through the offending paperwork, that hysteria was on the rise.
    ‘I’ll lose business through this,’ he was saying, ‘and more money because we’ll have to get reconnected.’
    ‘Alistair, I’m sure it’s nothing that can’t be sorted.’ Grace wasn’t sure of that at all, but calming him down was her first priority. Getting out of her prison between the sofa and the coffee table was her second.
    ‘How about we go to your office?’ she said, indicating one of the two doors in the wall opposite. ‘I can’t see what you’re worrying about while I’m trapped over here by the sofa.’
    ‘No, not my office … not just now.’ Alistair looked as evasive as it was possible for anyone to look without actually pulling up a trench coat collar and ramming a trilby down over their eyes. He moved towards the other door in the wall. ‘We’ll go into yours. But it doesn’t really matter where we go, Grace. This is beyond sorting.’
    He opened the door and stepped into her office.
    ‘Why can’t we go to his?’ Gilbert said very quietly. ‘Do you think he’s got a fancy woman in there now? Over the desk?’
    Grace didn’t reply, but she couldn’t help wondering what kind of mess Alistair’s office must be in if he didn’t want her to see it. God knew, she’d seen it in some terrible states.
    Alistair replanted himself, but at least this time there was more space around him. Here too there was room enough for a desk, a couple of filing cabinets, an easy chair in which Gilbert took up residence whenever he was visiting and a wooden table holding everything needed to make tea or coffee, including a battered kettle. There would have been even more room if Alistair had not cut corners,literally, when overseeing plans to have this floor of the building converted. As a result, the place was Partition Heaven, which meant that instead of offering a layout where there was a spacious office leading off the reception area via one door, there were two less spacious rooms leading off the reception area via two doors. Alistair’s office was narrow at the front, but widened out near the back, a feat achieved by nicking a big square of space from Grace’s. Things were further complicated by the fact that the only way to get from one office to the other was to go back into the reception area and start again. Even more inconveniently, the only way to get to the toilet was through Grace’s office, and the only way to get to the kitchen was through Alistair’s. Neither of these arrangements was really convenient, particularly when Grace had to put up with clients trooping back from the toilet, sometimes only a few feet ahead of any smell they had created.
    Grace took off her coat and hung it from the hook on the back of the door and saw Gilbert lower himself into the easy chair. She wondered if sitting at her own desk would give the impression that she wasn’t taking Alistair’s problem seriously enough. She remained standing, but reached over and turned on her computer.
    ‘Don’t fuss with that,’ Alistair snapped, ‘we’re meant to be getting this sorted.’ He waved the papers at her again.
    Alistair’s mood was now morphing from fretting into tetchiness and it was possible there would be a short detour through snitty later. There had been a time when incidents like this one happened only every couple of months and between them he would simply be disorganised with overtones of