Smallbone Deceased (4 page)

“I never really know the difference between principal and principle,” said Miss Glittering apologetically. “It's often been explained to me, but I just never seem to pick on the right one.”

“Oh, and another thing,” said Mr. Birley. “You do
not
address a man as Thomas Smallhorn, O.B.E., Esquire.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Birley.”

“It's not that I object myself, of course. Miss Glittering, but the recipient might imagine that I was unaware of the commoner usages of polite society, and the reputation of the film would suffer accordingly.”

Mr. Birley tore both pages of the letter slowly across and dropped them into the basket – which Miss Glittering felt to be rather mean, since the top page could quite easily have been salvaged, and attached to a new second page, which in any case only had three lines on it, besides the offending address.

“I sometimes wonder what we pay you such a princely salary for,” went on Mr. Birley.

This might conceivably have been intended as a joke, and Miss Glittering rewarded it with a nervous titter.

“If you are uncertain about these things, ask Miss Cornel or someone who knows her job—”

This was definitely unkind, and Miss Chittering flushed, but was spared the responsibility of answering by the arrival of Mr. Craine with some papers.

She made her escape.

“I don't know if you've got a moment,” said Mr. Craine.

“What is it?” said Mr. Birley, in a far from gracious tone.

Now the real trouble was – and it is pointless to pursue this narrative further without being quite honest about it – that the two partners disliked each other; and the reason for it was inherent in the characters of the men themselves, which were as immiscible as oil and water.

Mr. Craine had performed throughout the 1914 war with some credit in an infantry battalion. Mr. Birley had evaded most of the war with an allegedly weak heart. Mr. Craine was a cheerful little extrovert, and a heavily married man. Mr. Birley was a confirmed bachelor, who had bullied his adoring mother into the grave and was now engaged in nagging his elderly sister in the same direction.

Even the type of work in which each specialized reflected their discrepant natures.

Mr. Craine was a devotee of a certain swashbuckling sort of litigation; with occasional forays in the direction of avoidance of death duties and evasion of income tax; twin subjects exceedingly dear to the hearts of the firm's exalted clients. One subsection of the 1936 Finance Act, it may be mentioned in passing, was thought to have been drafted expressly to frustrate Mr. Craine's well-meant efforts.

Mr. Birley, on the other hand, was a conveyancer. A peddler of words and a reduplicator of phrases. A master of the Whereas and Hereinbefore. He was reputed to tie a tighter settlement than any conveyancing counsel in Lincoln's Inn.

Both men were very competent lawyers.

“I've had a letter from Rew,” said Mr. Craine. He referred to Mr. Rew, General Secretary of the Consequential Insurance Company, one of their biggest clients.

“What has he got to say for himself?”

“You know what Rew is. He never says very much. But what he seems to want to know is, can Bob Horniman look after their business as his father used to.”

“I thought we'd argued all this out before.”

“So we did,” said Mr. Craine. “So we did. And in principle we all agreed that we'd keep the division of work exactly as it was—Bob taking on all his father's clients with Bohun to help him. But I must admit, I'd forgotten about the Consequential—”

“What about them?”

Mr. Craine nearly said: “You know as well as I do what about them.” Instead he kept his temper and merely remarked: “Well, we aren't bound to them in any way, you know. Neither side is under any obligation to the other. They used to give us their business—a lot of business—because Abel did their work as well or better than anyone else could do it. I'd hate to lose them.”

“Do you mean that Bob doesn't know his job?”

“No, I don't. I mean that he's young—and, well, Abel taught him a lot about filing systems and the Horniman method of office management, but I sometimes thought he kept him a bit in the dark about the clients themselves.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Birley. “Well, what do you suggest?”

“I don't suppose you could—”

“Certainly not. I've got more than enough work as it is. I think you're worrying unnecessarily. He'll pick it up as he goes along. By the way, how's Bohun shaping?”

“He could hardly be said to have shaped yet,” said Mr. Craine. “since it's his first morning in the office. He's got a remarkable record.”

“First-class honours in his Final, you mean.”

“Not only that. It's the speed he did it all. He only took up law just over two years ago, you know. He got a special exemption to sit the exam early. He was a statistician before that, and a very brilliant one, I believe. And he holds actuarial qualifications.”

“Well, then, he ought to be able to deal with insurance work.”

“I expect he will, eventually,” said Mr. Craine. “I'll try and make time to keep an eye on him and Bob—”

“Hrrmph!” said Mr. Birley. Having got his own way he became a shade more amiable and the conversation turned to other topics.

Meanwhile both subjects of this conversation were experiencing their own difficulties.

Henry Bohun, having dismissed Mrs. Porter, was once more staring thoughtfully at the little stack of cards on the desk in front of him, trying to relate them in some comprehensible manner to his allotted share of that morning's post. The more he read them the less they seemed to mean, but finding that there were fifty-two of them he dealt out four bridge hands and came to the conclusion that he could make three no trumps without difficulty on his holding, which included such obvious winners as “The Duchess of Ashby de la Zouche—questions relating to her claim for Dower,” “Lieutenant—General Fireside's Marriage Settlement No. 3” (his third marriage or his third settlement, Henry wondered) and most promising, “The Reverend the Metropolitan of Albania—Private Affairs.” He reshuffled the cards and started a card house, which was destroyed at its fourth story by the interruption of Miss Cornel in search of the Law List.

“Never mind,” he said, “it couldn't have gone much higher. We shouldn't have got planning permission for more than six floors. Now that you are here perhaps you can help me to sort things out a bit. Only start from the beginning and go slowly.”

Miss Cornel suspended her search in the Law List and said:

“Well, it would take all morning to explain the office system in detail—”

“Horniman on Office Management I have already had from John Cove,” said Bohun. “What I really want to know are the more practical points. Who works for who? Who am I under? Who signs my letters for instance—”

This simple question seemed to give Miss Cornel considerable food for thought. “I'm not sure,” she said. “In the old days it was quite straightforward. Mr. Duxford—I don't think you've met him—works under Mr. Birley. John Cove with Mr. Craine. And young Mr. Horniman, of course, worked under his father. If they're going on with that. I suppose you will be working under Bob Horniman.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“You must forgive an old retainer's license,” said Miss Cornel. “I've known Bob since he was a prep-school boy in shorts when he used to come up here on the day he travelled back to school, and swing his legs in the waiting room until his father was free to take him out to lunch—”

“Those awful last-day-of-holiday lunches,” said Bohun. “Indigestion tempered by the hopes of an extra ten shillings pocket money.”

“Yes—well, he came in here as soon as he left his public school which, in my humble opinion, was a mistake. Then he'd only just qualified when the war broke out, and he went straight into the Navy. So what with one thing and another he doesn't know all he might about the practical side of a solicitor's work. He did very well in his exams, I believe—but that's not quite the same thing—”

“You're telling me.”

“If it hadn't been for his father. I think he'd have stayed on in the Navy. He was doing very well—”

Miss Cornel broke off rather abruptly – possibly with the feeling that she had said more than she intended. (“He's got such a damned insinuating way of saying nothing,” she confided afterward to Anne Mild – may, “that you find yourself telling him the most surprising things.”)

“I see,” said Bohun. “But look here, if Bob's taking over his father's work, and I'm taking over Bob's work—what are all these cards? Are these the things Bob used to do himself, because if so—”

Miss Cornel picked up some of the cards and ran an expert eye over them. “Well,” she said. “You've got some soft options to start with. There's nothing much here to worry about. ‘Lady Buntingford—Affairs.' That practically only means we pay her laundry bills once a month. ‘The Marquis of Bedlam, deceased.' That's a probate matter, but the accounts have all been settled. If you really want some stuff to get your teeth into, I'll slip you some of Bob's. He's got some matters there that—why, they even tied his old man up—”

Something in the tone of this last remark led Bohun to say: “You liked working for Abel Horniman, didn't you?”

“Well, yes, I did,” said Miss Cornel. “He was a great man, he really was. And a good man to work for, too. I ought to know—I was his secretary for nineteen years.”

“He certainly seems to have been a man of method.”

“Now you're laughing at him,” said Miss Cornel. “Perhaps he did overdo order and method a bit. Usually it made things easier. Of course, it didn't always work that way.” She gave a particularly masculine chuckle. “I expect you've grasped that we've got rather a peculiar type of client here—upper five hundred and so forth. When Abel or his partners were dictating the letters themselves it was all right. They put in all the correct little twiddly bits and personal touches. Some of the assistants we had didn't quite get it—I mean, their law was sound enough, but you need something more than law when you're writing a personal letter to a duke. Of course, Abel tackled the problem in his own unique way. He sat down and made out a list of suitable sentences for ending every letter with—you know the sort of thing: ‘I hope the pheasants are coming over strongly this year,' and ‘Did you have any luck with your runner in the National?' and so on. Of course, the first thing John Cove did when he arrived in this office was to include the whole boiling lot in all the letters he wrote—and it just happened that Mr. Craine was away that day, so John signed his own letters and sent them off. When Abel saw the carbons next morning he nearly had a fit … Well, I mustn't stop to gossip. Ask me if you want anything.”

“Right,” said Henry. “Yes, I will.” After she had gone he sat for some time, then resummoned Mrs. Porter from the typists' room and dictated a vigorous letter to Lady Buntingford's laundry.

III

Bob Horniman was reading slowly through a letter and frowning as he did so. When he had finished it, he pushed back his rather long black hair and read it through again. Then he placed it in the In basket, regarded it with distaste, transferred it to the Out basket, where it looked no better, and rang the bell for his secretary.

“This Anthrax-Plumper insurance, Miss Cornel,” he said.

“I'll get you the file,” said Miss Cornel, lifting down a fat-looking folder.

“I don't think I'll tackle the file yet,” said Bob hastily, “it looks a very complicated business. I wondered—I mean, you used to look after these things for my father—”

“I just wrote down what I was told,” said Miss Cornel dryly.

“Oh, quite. Yes, of course. I just thought that perhaps father might have said something—given some opinion—”

“The only thing I can remember him saying about Mrs. Anthrax-Plumper was that she was a woman who would mortgage her own virginity, if she could persuade anyone she still possessed it—”

“She certainly mortgaged everything else,” said Bob, running a finger distastefully through the bloated file. “It's this reversionary business I can't quite get hold of. Perhaps I ought to go to Counsel—”

“You could do that, of course,” said Miss Cornel. “But the Consequential are very stingy about paying Counsel's fees unless they have to.”

“Oh, well,” Bob sighed again. “I'll see what I can ferret out.”

Miss Cornel turned to go, but relented at the last moment and said: “I seem to remember the same problem on double reversion cropping up—oh, about ten years ago. The client was Lady Bradbury. And that time, we
did go
to Counsel. There's a copy of his opinion in the 1937 file.”

“I don't know what I should do without you,” said Bob. He took a key flap from his pocket. “What's the number of Lady Bradbury's box?”

“Seventeen.”

Bob thumbed through the ring. “Why the deuce they all had to have different keys!” he said. “Here it is.” He snapped the box open and picked out the file while Miss Cornel withdrew to the secretaries' room to try and make up on her morning's work. Five minutes later the bell went again. She suppressed an unladylike exclamation and picked up her shorthand book.

Bob had apparently abandoned Mrs. Anthrax-Plumper and was reading another letter.

“What do you think of this?” he asked.

Dismissing the temptation to say that she wasn't paid to think, Miss Cornel dutifully perused the letter which was from Messrs. Rumbold & Carter, solicitors, of Coleman Street, and was headed “Stokes Will Trust.”

“According to your request,” it said, after the usual preliminary flourishes, “we endeavored to contact Mr. Smallbone to secure his signature to the proposed transfer of stock. We wrote to him enclosing the transfer form (in duplicate) on the 23rd February and sent him a further communication on the 16th ultimo and the 8th inst, in all three cases without receiving any answer. If Mr. Smallbone is absent abroad or indisposed possibly you could so inform us—”