Shuttlecock by Graham Swift

hasty assumption that would catch me out? I responded judiciously. I pretended to chase up the contents of the files – or rather I genuinely looked for some hidden meaning behind the unrelated items. I wrote at the end of a rather garbled report: ‘the evidence is fragmentary and justifies no significant conclusions’ (my pompous style again) and I returned it to Quinn. No comment. But when, after another three weeks or so, I received a seconddossier of a similar kind, I knew this was not a matter of some chance error or quirk. I began to think twice about the files I had already occasionally, but without leaping to any conclusions, found missing, but which now I felt must be obscurely connected with these strange dossiers. Quinn was up to something. Perhaps it involved the whole department. But why was Quinn, as it were, letting me know about it? Why was he daring me to enter in on it – or expose it? I looked around at my colleagues for any signs that their suspicions had also been aroused or that they had been given similar inquiries to work on. But the papers I sometimes surreptitiously leafed through on their desks, their unchanged, unconstrained chatter in the pub at lunch-times, made me sure that I was alone. I began to draw apart from them at this time – from Vic and Eric, with whom I used to discuss marital ups and downs, plans for summer holidays – and no doubt they noticed it. But they knew vaguely what had happened to Dad and they put my reserve down to that.
    I handled the second dossier in the same way as the first. I spread the items out on my desk and pretended to be engrossed. But I remember that while I was ‘busy’ at it I looked up once, and there was Quinn, at his glass panel, staring down, not at our office at large, but directly at me. He was wearing a black pin-stripe, with a small flower – a little pale yellow rose – in his lapel. I’d never seen Quinn wear a flower before; he wasn’t the sort of man to wear flowers – though quite often, after this, I noticed he wore one. When I looked up he didn’t even turn his head away till some seconds had passed. He had a fascinated look on his face; and I’d swear he was simply relishing my perplexity.
    And another thing. It was at this time too that therumour got around – it was one of those rumours that come down slowly from high places; it wasn’t given out by Quinn himself, though he never denied it – that Quinn would be retiring the next summer but one, when, so we learnt, he would be sixty-four. This was a new retirement scheme to allow fresh staff into higher positions. Quinn still had the option of working on till sixty-five – or even longer – if he wished. Naturally, I had an interest in this. There was a chance – a very slim and remote one – that I might be offered Quinn’s job, but this would depend almost entirely on Quinn’s own recommendation. I was now in the quandary which I have described already. If I challenged Quinn over the mysterious goings-on in the office, would that instantly ruin my promotion chances? Should I hold my tongue and knuckle under? Or was it conceivable that those mysterious goings-on (one couldn’t deny how they coincided with the retirement rumours) were some elaborate test of my initiative: if I
didn’t
take some stand about them would I then wreck my chances? And yet again, didn’t my duty lie outside the whole self-interested field of my promotion prospects? If I suspected something untoward in the department, shouldn’t I act promptly to denounce it? You hear about corruption in official places – about mismanagement, leaks of information. You hear all sorts of stories.
    Would I be writing all this down now, trying to clarify matters in words, if I had acted on any of these assumptions? No. The question of Quinn’s retirement only added to my existing confusion. Sometimes – usually in that brief, green breathing-space on my way home, between the Underground station and our