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by Henry Green

  “Never knew the two were acquainted,” Charley explained, aghast.

  “What is there strange in that?” Mrs Frazier enquired, irritable still. “Once you start on coincidences why there’s no end to those things. I could tell you a story you’d never believe but it’s as true as I’m here,” and she at once began a long tale. He hardly listened.

  He could not explain it to himself, but the fact that old Mr Grant knew Middlewitch made him deeply suspect. He even asked himself what he suspected, only to find that he could not think.

  He saw round and round it in his head.

  “So I said, ‘it’s the same person,’” Mrs Frazier was bringing the story to an end. “Look out,’ I said, ‘I’m going to faint away,’ I said, and she came forward to take me by the arm. For they were as like as two peas,” she finished, with a glance of triumph at Summers.

  “Good lord,” he said, not taking it in.

  “But you want to brisk yourself up,” Mrs Frazier went on. “There were plenty like it after the last war. Sat about and moped. Of course it was understandable, but then most things are, and when all’s said and done that’s no credit to anyone, to mope,” she said. “Yes, it draws sympathy, going on like that does, but not for long. There’s the rub. Well I mean no one can be expected to put up with it, not for ever. You want to go out and find yourself a nice young lady. There you are.”

  “Talking of resemblances,” Mr Summers suddenly began, and he was still staring at the fire. “Children, and their fathers and mothers. Would you say they looked like?” he enquired.

  “Nothing in it,” Mrs Frazier said, favouring him with yet another long glance of interest, “nothing at all.” She went into a detailed account of nephews and nieces, while he thought of Ridley. And then blamed himself that he did not think oftener of Rose.

  The telephone rang down in the hall, cut Mrs Frazier short.

  “I’ll go,” he offered, for he was willing. Curiously enough, it was for him. Odder still, it was Mr Grant wished to speak.

  “And Mrs Grant?” Charley asked.

  “Mustn’t complain, mustn’t complain at all,” Mr Grant replied. “When you come to consider, there’s compensations in not remembering, as I dare say you’ve found, eh Charley?” His voice was thin. “No, but what I meant to ring you about was this. Did you ever call round on that little lady I mentioned? I’ll tell you why. You’re one of the diffident sort, unsure of yourself. I’ll be bound you’ve done nothing.”

  “It slipped me,” Charley admitted.

  “Look,” Mr Grant said, “I’m older than you. I can put forward things that perhaps you would never allow from a man your own age. I didn’t altogether make that suggestion just casually as you might say. There was a reason behind.”

  “Well thanks,” Charley answered.

  “That’s all right,” Mr Grant ended.

  When Charley got back to his room Mrs Frazier spoke of rising prices. “Why,” she said, “they rose, they’ve rose …” and the words, because he had not paid attention, the words pierced right through. He held his breath for the pain to which he had grown accustomed, particularly in Germany, he waited for it to break over him, as he sat isolated by Mrs Frazier’s voice he did not listen to as she rasped on. For he was as sure he would feel the ache as he had, on his one early holiday before the war, been certain that he would hear a cuckoo each walk he took, each occasion he passed an open window. It had been the right time of the year for cuckoos. And now, it seemed, was autumn, for he felt nothing at all at her mention of Rose. Nothing. He was amazed. He blamed himself. But he felt nothing whatever.

  “No warning,” he brought out in surprise at this new condition in himself, cutting across the landlady’s tideless flow of talk.

  “A warning?” Mrs Frazier echoed, agitated. “I never heard the sound. It can’t be our syrens, then.”

  “My mistake,” Charley Summers told her. “Talking to myself again.”

  She watched him. He was quite unconscious, with a bewildered look on his face.

  “Speaking to yourself?” she asked. “Now Mr Summers, you want to watch out. Not at your age. Why,” she said, “your voice rose,” and again, as this word came through, he not even experienced guilt. “You spoke loud,” she said. “Take care, you can do that when you get to my age, but for a young man like you, well …”

  There was a silence while he sat there, avidly listening now.

  “Take the price of flowers,” Mrs Frazier continued, back to what she had been discussing, “tulips, daffodils, chrysanths, even violets of the field,” and Charley waited, waited for another sign, “why, they’re out of all reason, they’re black market charges right in the light of day. It’s wrong,” she said.

  “There it is,” Charley encouraged her. She thought that, when in the end he did regard you out of those great eyes, they seemed to grow from his head, and float in the air before your own. She was actually breathless with them.

  “Yes well …” she tried to go on, then hesitated. But her subject carried her forward. “Yes, you say that, you’re like all the others, you take it for granted,” at which, still thinking of his girl, he smiled, her last remark seemed so absurd. “But you do nothing, the next pay day you’ll go in and buy her a bunch; when you find her, that is, which you won’t by sitting here listening to me. I tell you, when I saw the prices they charge round the corner, my gall rose,” she said, and he heard Mrs Frazier no more. He fastened on this word. Once more he waited. But he felt nothing, nothing at all.

  Rose was gone.

  So he was in a mood to look about, when S.E.C.O., a government department in charge of the contracts on which he was working, found him Miss Dorothy Pitter as his assistant.

  The other girls in the office had had to do his typing as and when they could, on top of their own work. Through the weeks that he was losing Rose they were continually saying to him, “When is this new one expected?” Or, “Don’t S.E.C.O. take a time?” He was popular because of his leg, but the office was critically short of staff, and he could not always find a typist to stay late. As a result he could hardly trust his ears when, a few days after this last talk with Mrs Frazier, a member of the counting house met him one morning to say, “She’s in.”

  Then, as he went to his room and saw her, he had once again the experience inseparable from government procedure, he had before his eyes the product of a prolonged correspondence; that is, first the discouraging replies, followed by official consent to there being a vacancy, after which a notification that the vacancy would be filled, then, at last, the name of a person to be directed to fill it, then, finally, that wait, a deadly pause of weeks, before, without warning, these letters, these forms and the reference numbers bloomed into flesh and blood, a young woman, with shorthand, who could type.

  She was fair, rather untidy. She seemed absolutely null and void. But he was so pleased to see her, he got almost talkative.

  “Well, Miss, it’s been quite a time,” he said.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “They had me out of where I was working before you could say Jack Robinson. And not a word to warn you.”

  “That’s strange,” he said. “They told us they were sending five weeks ago.”

  “That’s S.E.V.E. all over.”

  “We’re under S.E.C.O. here,” he said.

  “S.E.C.O.?” she gave a little scream. “Are you sure there isn’t some mistake?”

  “Oh no Miss,” he said, and showed her the papers. He’d kept them, as a sort of talisman, on top of everything else, in the left-hand drawer of a kitchen table they’d given him for a desk.

  “That only shows,” she exclaimed. “It’s been going on for weeks, you can see from the dates here, and there’s me been doing everything so I could get forty-eight hours leave, to visit my mum up north.”

  “You’ve got your mother away?”

  “Yes, she’s evacuated with some relations near Huddersfield. You wouldn’t think they’d miss me for that li
ttle time, while I was changing jobs, would you?”

  “There it is,” he said. “But we might be able to manage you the trip. We do a deal of travelling around.”

  “D’you really mean it? Why,” she almost grumbled, “that would be nice.” She did not seem to want to go now. “What are you on here?”

  “Process plants for parabolam,” he replied.

  She did not know what this was, so she tried him out.

  “Why, fancy that, with me that’s been on penicillin.”

  “On the production side?” he asked.

  “I was in the lab,” she said. “With the card indexing. But I’ve never worked with one of those,” she complained, pointing to the two long and narrow steel cupboards that flanked his desk, to the system he had installed, and which had kept him sane throughout the first re-flowering of Rose.

  “That’s my visible system,” he explained. “If you’d like to draw up your chair,” he went on, and did this for her. “It’s like this.” He could always be glib at his work. “We’re a firm of engineers and we’ve no factory, it was burned to a cinder in the blitz. So we have to get everything we do made out,” he said. “Everything, down to the last nut and bolt. Well, of course, in times like these, when each engineering firm’s got more on its plate than it can manage, we’d be out of business if it wasn’t for the Government thinking we’re so important that they make other companies turn out our work for us. So we get S.E.C.O. support, which is pretty high, as you’ve found yourself, for a start. We do all the designing and drawing, and we’re responsible for the performance when the finished plant is installed. Also it’s our end of it to follow up the stuff while it’s being made, to see that things don’t get behind, or that the Admiralty, or M.A.P., doesn’t nip in ahead and put ours back in the list. So everything that we order goes onto these cards, one card to each item, with the due date for delivery, and who it’s to go to.”

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  “And there’s the index. And here’s the cross index. The whole thing’s visible. Tell at a glance, I don’t think. It may seem loopy to you but this is the one way our particular job can be done.”

  “I see,” she said, while he sat back, having talked too much for him. “I wonder if I could meet one of the other girls,” she said.

  “I say, you must excuse me,” he begged. “You want to know where to put your things?” And he took her out to the friendliest typist, in the Board Room office.

  It was a great relief to have her. The main advantage was, it let him get back to his digs at a reasonable hour each night, and that at a time when he had got over Rose, that is to say when he could keep quite a bit relaxed. But he found he never seemed to do much in the evenings, all the same. He had explained it by making out that his staying sorry for himself about Rose, and his being overworked, prevented him going off free at nights. Yet now that he was so much freer, he seemed rather at a loose end.

  So he began to look about him. Even in the office; in spite of the saying, “Never on your own doorstep.”

  It began one afternoon, over the tea and bun at three thirty, as they sat side by side.

  “I wonder if you’d mind,” she said. “I get so muddled. What is what we’re doing for?”

  He took a sip. “Steel,” he replied.

  “Oh, they make steel in them, then?”

  “No. Parabolam,” he told her once again. “Used in special steels.”

  “Sounds strange,” she commented, and sniffed. She was drearily untidy, but there was something there, he thought.

  “What’s parabolam, then?” she asked, to keep the ball rolling.

  “Comes from birds’ droppings.”

  She looked at him, surprised. “Here,” she said, “you wouldn’t be having me on, by any chance?”

  “Word of honour,” he said. She waited.

  Like any silent man he talked technicalities freely, once he got started. “It was an accident,” he began, “like it was with stainless steel, when the heads were on an inspection round the foundry yard and one of ’em spotted something he’d noticed before, a bit of bright scrap through the rain. So they had it analysed, and there you are. Now it’s what you cut your meat up with.”

  “Well, I never knew that,” she said.

  “It was exactly similar with parabolam,” he went on, “only this time it was birds’ droppings. The swallows used to nest under the staging, where they charged the furnace. One day the foundry manager had all the nests cleared out, together with the filth below. And the labourer he gave the job, was too tired to take the mess down, he shovelled it in with the charge into the cupola. And what came out with their molten metal was so hard they couldn’t machine the casting.”

  “I can’t hardly believe you.”

  “Well I may have been exaggerating a trifle. Anyway, they all got to work and it was isolated. In the end, they discovered there was a higher percentage of what it takes where sea birds roost. So we ship it in the raw state from South America, and the stuff is burned in those retorts we buy from Dicksons. In burning, a gas is released, which is treated in the catalysts. From there the vapour passes to those cooling chambers, that come from the A.B.P. people, and then the cold gas deposits its crystals onto what you won’t believe, you’ll think I’m play acting, onto ordinary common or garden laurel leaves they place on those long racks which Purdews make us.”

  “I know a girl named Laurel. Hardy we call her.”

  “I knew one called Rose.” Each time he said her name he noted he felt nothing any more, so much so that he hardly bothered to watch himself these days. He went on. “After which the leaves are washed, and it’s got to be laurel because of the chemical properties in the leaf. Then we take the water out on a Bennetts evaporator. And bob’s your uncle. Sells for £250 a ton into the bargain. That’s roughly the lot. If you wanted it in detail you’d have to question Corker.”

  Corker was the technical director who designed this plant.

  “I’d never ask him in my life,” Miss Pitter said, with reverence.

  “He’s mustard,” Mr Summers muttered, relapsing into silence. But he watched her. In the five minutes they had before the phone began to ring again, she could get no more out of him.

  There definitely was something, he thought.

  That night, she came from the girls’ washroom just as he was on his way out of the office.

  “What’s it like in the air?” she asked.

  “Don’t know yet,” he said.

  “Oh, you are comical,” she laughed, and was really amused. He began to feel excited, nervous in his stomach. He told himself he had never been like this before the war. She was complaining about something in the office. He did not pay attention, he was noting his inside. They came to the bus stop.

  “No one here tonight,” she said. He did not answer.

  “One of the girls told me you had the M.C.?”

  “Me?” he asked. “Not me.”

  She waited. He said no more. They got on the first bus.

  “But they said you’d been a prisoner of war?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It must get you right down, being cooped up like it?”

  He made no reply. She gave in.

  “What number is this?” she asked, when they stopped.

  “A nine,” he said.

  “Gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m sure,” she cried. “See you tomorrow,” and was gone. He thought about her that night as he lay awake for hours.

  The next day, at the first opportunity, she began again. As she started she asked herself, “Well what’s the odds?” After all, she knew she was quite uninterested.

  “That was queer, my getting on the wrong bus with you, wasn’t it?” she said. She was leaning against the card index system. “Since mum’s been evacuated I’ve caught myself doing daft things, really, ever so often. It’s the loneliness.”

  He looked at her.

  “Not that we don’t have good times at my
hostel,” she went on, “but mum and me, we were good companions. You know, got on together. Not like mother and daughter at all.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said.

  “‘Dot,’ she’d say, because that’s my name, Dot and no comma, ‘What’s on round the corner?’ and with that we’d drop whatever it was we were doing, and go out to the movies. But she couldn’t stand the bombing.”

  Charley was spared any necessity to reply because the telephone began to ring. It kept on pretty well all day.

  And he began to notice.

  He was not frank about it, he shied away in his mind, but there were her breasts which she wore as though ashamed, like two soft nests of white mice, in front. Their covered creepiness, in this hot summer, nagged him. And, every time he looked, he felt she knew, as she did.

  Most of the working day she sat at his side marking up the cards, or turning up references as he phoned the suppliers. Often, she had to lean across to get at the second cabinet. He began to take in her forearms, which were smooth and oval, tapering to thin wrists, with a sort of beautiful subdued fat, also her hands light nimble bones with fingers terribly white, pointed into painted nails like the sheaths of flowers which might at any minute, he once found himself feeling late at night, mushroom into tulips, such as when washing up, perhaps.

  He dreaded getting into this condition.

  Or sometimes, while he dictated, it was the softness there must be on the underside of her arms which caught his breath, and that he remembered after, and then the finished round of muscle, where the short sleeves ended, as he read out to her, “Their ref. CM/105/127 our ref. 1017/2/1826,” because he would not leave the girl to copy these from the correspondence on her own.

  Prison had made him very pure. His own name for all this was lust. It shook him. But he did nothing whatever about it. Perhaps because all of her seemed a contradiction. Those arms came out of frocks that did not hang properly, from below untidy hair her blue eyes were sharp, yet worried, and also too self sure; her legs were quite customary, yet the arms were perfect; and ever more uneasily he watched those breasts.