By the following June the war had rules, though nobody had written them down.
The chair. Every Tuesday, without fail, Talia's chair in the second-floor room was two inches lower than she had left it. Not four. Four would have been noticeable. Two inches is the exact amount that makes a woman feel slightly, unaccountably small in a conference and go home wondering if she is coming down with something.
The conference rooms. Nate had discovered in October that the booking system did not require a client name, and Talia had discovered in November that it did not require his consent, and by January both of them had standing bookings for rooms they never used, at times calculated purely to be inconvenient to the other, and the senior clerk had stopped intervening on the grounds that it was funnier not to.
The kettle. She had, once, in a moment she was not proud of, moved the kettle.
The pupil. Owen was twenty-four, terrified, and had been reassigned between them four times in six weeks, and had recently developed a hunted expression whenever either of them said his name.
The Nespresso pods. She did not want to talk about the Nespresso pods.
"You've done something to my chair," she said, on a Tuesday.
"I've been in Leeds since Sunday."
"You've had somebody do something to my chair."
"Talia," said Nate, not looking up from a bundle, "if I wanted to make you feel small I wouldn't use furniture."
The thing nobody in chambers could work out — and they discussed it constantly, in the clerks' room, at the coffee machine, in the pub on Fridays — was what had actually started it.
There was no origin story. That was the maddening part. They had not fallen out over a case. Nobody had stolen anybody's client. They had simply, from the first Monday in July, behaved towards one another like two cats in a bag, and had done it with such consistency and at such volume that by the following spring it had become a feature of the building, like the damp.
"It's chemistry," said Frank Dell, the senior clerk, to nobody, on a Wednesday.
"It's not," said Marguerite Achebe, delighted.
"Twenty-two years, ma'am."
"It's professional rivalry."
"Twenty-two years," said Frank, "and I have never once seen two people take that much trouble."