Back by Henry Green Page 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 ofwhere 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 little 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 drawup 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