The Outer Office, by Margaret Rathbone
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
There were four of us on the bench in the outer office of Hallam and Pryor, and I knew within a minute that I was the worst. The girl at the end had a hat with a pheasant feather and gloves the colour of milky coffee. The girl beside her was reading a book in French, or pretending to. The third had her shorthand certificate on her knee, in a frame. I had my mother’s handbag, polished the night before, and a ladder in my left stocking that I had stopped with nail varnish on the tram and that was now, I was certain, climbing steadily towards my knee.
Through the frosted glass of the inner door came a man’s voice, low and unhurried, and then a girl’s laugh. A laugh. I could not imagine laughing in there. I could barely imagine speaking. I went through the answers I had rehearsed in front of the wardrobe mirror: my speeds, my school, my reasons for wanting the position. Each time I reached the end, the beginning had gone, like water running out of a cupped hand.
Fifty words a minute, I told myself. Fifty words a minute, and I had come top in commercial arithmetic, and Miss Rendle had said I had a tidy mind. A tidy mind. It sounded like something you would say about a drawer.
The clock on the wall said ten past eleven. My appointment had been for eleven. Perhaps they had forgotten me. Perhaps they had seen my name on the list and drawn a neat line through it, and the woman at the desk was only waiting for a kind moment to tell me so. I felt my face grow hot at the thought, and then hotter because I was blushing at nothing, in a room full of strangers.
The girl with the feather went in, and came out after six minutes, smiling. The French girl went in, and came out after four, not smiling. I counted every second of the shorthand girl’s interview, and it was eleven minutes, and I hated her quietly and completely for every one of them.
‘Miss Pennock?’
I stood up. My knees did a strange thing, as though they had been unscrewed and put back by someone who had lost the instructions. I held the handbag in front of the laddered stocking like a shield, and I walked towards the frosted door with my chin up, because my mother had told me to keep my chin up whatever happened, and it was the only advice I could remember.
How does the writer show the narrator’s thoughts and feelings as she waits for her interview?
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You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.