The sound of something breaking interrupted Rutherford’s thoughts, and he realised that the HB pencil in his hand had broken in half. He looked at the chewed-up pencil in disgust before throwing it in his waste-paper basket, where it joined another pencil that had had a similar fate befall it. Had the ceasefire made him tense, or had the production standards of HB pencils dropped drastically over the war years? Rutherford suspected the latter. He shrugged as he accepted that there was nothing to be done for it. It was either this or he could and would go back to smoking a packet of Everests a day and die prematurely of the lung cancer his doctor had predicted. He had only stopped smoking because he did not want to give his doctor the satisfaction of being correct.

The pencils-for-cigarettes scheme had begun innocuously enough, but Rutherford knew it had long since got out of hand. He went through anything between seven and ten pencils per week, and no one in the office ever complained about it, let alone mentioned it – probably because they were all his subordinates. The only one who seemed to have something to say about his chomping ways was the stern Mrs Belfry who ‘manned’ the stores and supplies room. While she never said anything to him directly, she frowned very deeply at his weekly requisition slips for a box of twelve HB pencils. He agreed with her frown. Two pencils a week seemed perfectly reasonable. Perhaps three … maybe four? A gradual letting go always worked best, so he’d been told.

Had the pencil-chomping habit belonged to someone else in the office, of course Rutherford would not have been so kind as to offer silent observation. He would have found a lot to be mercilessly mirthful about, and he genuinely regretted that he did not have the opportunity to make jokes about this at someone else’s expense. He had once thought of making the pencil-chomper someone else in the office, and sharing his jokes with Emil Coetzee in order to gauge how they landed. But he had remembered the rumours about Emil Coetzee’s son, Everleigh, just in time to realise that the jokes would have been in very bad taste. Normally this would not have deterred Rutherford, but Everleigh had recently died fighting for his country, and even Rutherford knew there were some places that a man should never go.

Truth be told, even without the dead son, Emil Coetzee probably would not have laughed at the joke. Emil Coetzee had not laughed at one of Rutherford’s jokes in a very long while. There had been a time when Emil Coetzee, then known simply as Coetzee, would have laughed at all of Rutherford’s jokes. That had been at the Selous School for Boys when Coetzee, a scholarship student, had been struggling to fit in, and Rutherford had been his entry point into the upper echelons of the school’s society. Given that Rutherford came from connected wealth, while Coetzee came from nothing more than a rented flat at the corner of Selborne Avenue and Borrow Street, there had been an imbalance in their friendship that had lasted throughout their school years and into adulthood. It had only ended after Coetzee married Kuki Sedgwick and became Emil Coetzee, The Head of The Organisation of Domestic Affairs. Emil Coetzee – a man so important that everyone called him by his full name.