Back by Henry Green

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