The Fancy (10 page)

When he went back into the living room the air was heavy with what they had said about him. After tea, they played cards, so he was unable to settle down to
Backyard Breeding
until the following evening. Mr. Gurley had been at the Air Ministry all day so his weekly talk was postponed until tomorrow. Reading the advertisements for rabbits, Edward realised with a shock that he had never done anything about that doe in kindle, although his increased pay quite justified it. “There’s something wrong with you, my lad,” he thought. “This job’s getting on your nerves.”

It was. He woke in the middle of the night to the sweating remembrance of having told Reenie provisionally that ten thousand endfloat on the control shaft was passable, and of having forgotten to look it up before her report went through. Well, that was nothing to wake up about ; he would put it right tomorrow. It showed what a state he was in, when the job began to prey on his subconscious. Silly of him to forget that though, his head was like a sieve these days. Lying awake, Reenie’s endfloat kept coming round as the events of the day circulated in his brain. If the A.I.D. caught him out again, they would and there was nothing .pabe sure to report him to Mr. Gurley—if they hadn’t already. Perhaps he had better make a note to remind him in the morning, then he might be able to stop thinking about it and get some sleep. He listened for a moment to Connie’s breathing. Yes, she was asleep all right. Before the excuse of the Doctor’s veto, she used sometime to pretend to be asleep, when she sensed him turning towards her in the big bed, but he had always known when she was pretending, because she clicked in her nose when she was asleep.

The black-out was not up, so he couldn’t switch on the light, but it was a clear night and four squares of moonlight lay on the carpet and across the peak of Connie’s long foot under the counterpane. Cautiously, he swung his legs to the floor and crept barefoot to the chest of drawers where his watch and his money lay with the oddments from his trouser pocket. He took pencil and paper to the window, made his note and stood for a long time looking out at the unfamiliar beauty of Church Avenue. The little, bitty houses opposite were dignified chunks of blackness topped by shining roofs and chequered chimneys. Their solid shadows filled the front gardens and ended in a sharp outline on the road which looked like white, untrodden sand.

Edward had the idea of going out for a moonlight walk. It might clear the muddled worry of his head, but he would never get dressed without waking Connie. Looking back at her lying uncomfortably, well on her side of the bed, sleeping competently to the measured click
of her breathing, her hair pinned up under a thick hairnet, Edward felt a sudden surge of loneliness and misery rush to his eyes in a pricking of tears. He had an impulse to make a noise so that she would wake and he could cry out : “Oh Connie, I’m so unhappy!” and in a luxury of tears, fling himself upon her to be cuddled and comforted. He longed with a physical ache for bare arms closing round his back, a soft, breathing breast and long, heavy hair that would fall suffocatingly round his face.

But of course, it wouldn’t be like that at all. The moment had passed and the tears receded without ever reaching the surface of his eyes. Thank goodness he hadn’t acted on that impulse and done anything silly. That’s what came of prowling about in the moonlight ; it made you hysterical. He tiptoed round to his side of the bed, holding his breath as a board creaked, and slid carefully under the clothes. As he lifted the sheet to cover his shoulder, Connie muttered impatiently and turned, dragging the sheet away with her. Edward didn’t pull it back. She was the last person he wanted to wake and talk to him. He lay very still, with his eyes open. He wasn’t going to go on like this. He was going to turn in the job. He hated it.

The next day, he looked up the control shaft endfloat, retrieved Reenie’s report from the typing office, and put her in a whirl by making her alter it with much sucking of pencil and smudging of a dirty rubber. She didn’t know what endfloat was and it was no us trying to explain to her, because instead of listening, she would merely stare and repeat : “I’m sure I don’t know why they want to make it all so complicated.”

“Ledward!” shouted somebody, and Edward looked round to see Mr. Rutherford beckoning from another bench. “Here, you explain to her, Dinah,” he said. “What you want to do?” said Dinah, “give the poor girl a brainstorm? You leave her alone. She’s done very nicely up to now without knowing what endfloat was, haven’t you, dear?”

“I should say,” said Reenie stubbornly.

He had covered that mistake, anyway, but Mr. Rutherford had discovered another, really.”an along, so Edward might have saved himself his midnight worry.

“How long have you been on this job?” asked the older man, taking off his horn-rimmed spectacles in the way he had, like a prosecuting Counsel.

“Only two weeks.”

“Must be damned hard to pick up at first, if you haven’t had the experience,” said Mr. Rutherford, putting the spectacles on again, so that his eyes dwindled behind the thick lenses.

Damned hard for a fool like me, he means, thought Edward moodily, watching him make for the Old Man’s office.

At lunch-time, he ate overdone mutton, two hard potatoes, a mound
of cabbage, followed by steamed date pudding and custard sauce, not because he was hungry, but because there was nothing else to do until one o’clock. He didn’t want to go down to the Sports Club Canteen and drink beer and be pally round the dart board. He couldn’t remember having been so depressed as this for years. He was tired too, from lying long awake. He took the folded magazine out of his pocket and re-read Allan Colley on winter feeding.

How simple to be Allan Colley and to know where you were—at the top. It must be very contenting to be sure that you knew enough to be able to lay down the law to other people. Edward at the moment had gloomy doubts even about the Ledward Strain, which had seemed such a winner. He was probably quite mistaken about the likelihood of size in Queenie’s family. Who was he to judge?

At tea-time that afternoon he sat on a vacant stool next to Paddy King. She was less off-hand than usual, and when he made a joke, she laughed as if she were really amused, and repeated it across the bench to Dinah, who laughed too.

Well, he could make them all laugh if they would give him a chance. He saw himself for a mad moment as the wit of the bench with people repeating his latest
bon mots.
Perhaps he’d give the job another chance before he told old Gurley he wanted to chuck it. Perhaps they were going to accept him after all.

It was not Ivy this time, but Paddy whom he overheard saying : “Honestly, as a charge hand, he’s a dead loss. Whoever put him on this job must be a fifth columnist.”

Without thinking twice about it, Edward walked straight through the double doors on to the track and in again at the next door which led to the passage between the glass offices. Mr. Gurley was sitting on the edge of his desk telephoning somebody called “Cartwright Old Man.” Edward waited, feeling sick.

“Yes, Ledward, want me?” Mr. Gurley was wiry and brisk, with a bony jutting forehead and a face full of energy. He walked about the office, opening and shutting filing cabinets, picking up a damaged gear that was lying on his desk and playing with it while Edward talked.

“So you see, Mr. Gurley,” he concluded, “I’d like to resign from the job before you ask me to. I know as well as you I’m not making a go of it.”

“My dear Ledward,” said Mr. Gurley, tossing the gear up and down with little flicks of his wrist, “I never heard one man talk more rot in one minute than you. What’s the idea? Don’t you like the job? Girls too fresh?” He winked and began to roll the gear along the desk, snatching it up and rolling it again.

“Oh no, but——” said Edward, “but after what the A.I.D. have reported about me—and they’re quite right, I have made a lot of mistakes— Well, I knew you’d be and there was nothing .pachucking me, so I thought I’d save you the trouble.”

“A.I.D.?” said the Manager irritably. “What the devil are you talking about? As far as I know, they don’t know you exist. If they did, you don’t suppose I care a damn for their opinion? And if you think we’ve got nothing better to do all day than take down our back hair over people like you—well, God help Russia, that’s all. Get out on the bench. You’re doing a good job of work. Mistakes? Of course you make mistakes when you’re new to the job. If Bob Condor wasn’t such a drip, he’d have helped you a bit more.” The telephone rang and he stretched across the desk to pick up the receiver. “And listen,” he said, as Edward was going out of the door. “Get some work out of those girls. Get them cracking ; that’s what I put you there for.” He tossed the telephone receiver and caught it up by his ear. “Gurley here. … Now look here, old man …”

Edward went groggily back to the bench. He felt stunned. Had no one really noticed, then, what a mess he had made of the job? Did they understand how difficult it was at the beginning and expect him to make mistakes? Perhaps other people had done the same. Perhaps even the girls’ beloved Tom Presser had muddled his way to omniscience. He had imagined so much that now seemed unfounded, perhaps he had also exaggerated the girls’ hostility. Not Ivy’s—she would be hostile to anyone—but perhaps the others had been just taking the mike out of him to see how he would stand it.

Well, he’d show them. He straightened his shoulders and made for the bench, fully prepared to bellow : “Come on, you lazy women! This job should have been done an hour ago!” It was just as well that Dinah interrupted him as soon as he opened his mouth, because his voice had emerged several keys higher than he intended.

“Shut up, Ed,” she said, “and come round here.” She planked a bearing into his hand and goggled up at him while he looked at it. Miraculously, he knew what to say. “Scrap it,” he said, without hesitation.

“Thanks, darling,” she said, “
I
couldn’t make up my mind about it. I say, can I have an early pass to go at five?”

“No, “Edward heard himself say. “You’ve got another engine to do tonight.”

“Oh, but Edward, my old man’s coming home and I must get, you’ll

*

“Where on earth is Edward?” said Paddy peevishly. “He drives you mad hanging around you fiddling with studs, and then when you do want him, he’s disappeared.”

“
Ed-ward!
” Dinah sent a hoot into space. They whistled for him sometimes, as if he were a dog, and once Dinah had put two fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing blast, which brought Bob Condor bustling up with his pigeon-toed gait, one eye apprehensively on Mr. Gurley’s open window, to ask her if she knew where she was.

“Eddie!” she shouted on a rising note, which cracked into her morning smoker’s cough.

“Never mind, Di,” said Paddy. “He’s deaf as a post anyway.” She was cold. The chill of her walk to work through a raw, drizzling morning was still on her, and the Shop was always colder on a Monday morning, after a Sunday free from breathing bodies.

They had not started the heating yet, although the weather had decided that the end of October was the beginning of winter. People would keep leaving the double doors open. Twice Paddy had got up to shut them and each time a triumphant labourer had opened them again immediately to wheel in a trolley, righteous in the execution of his duty. Charlie was one of the astutest shirkers and managed to spend hours in undiscovered sleep behind the spring-testing machine, so that when he did happen to be working, he made a lot of show.

“Mind your backs!” he shouted hoarsely—the early morning was death to his catarrh—deliberately steering his trolley down the gangway where the girls were sitting.

“Mind your backs!” chorused his two henchwomen, one young and grubby in dungarees and the other older and grubbier in a long black overall and derelict shoes. They both strained behind the high trolley, providing the motive power, while Charlie, as the master mind, pushed with one hand, directing its course.

“Mind your backs, darling!” shouted the younger propeller, visible only as a straining blue behind and rounded back, her head buried in a tray of sparking plugs.

“Oh, curse you,” said Paddy, getting up and shoving her stool under the bench, “why don’t you go down the other gangway? And
you might shut the door, Charlie. There’s a frightful draught.”

“If you worked a bit harder, you wouldn’t feel no draught,” said Charlie. “Mind your backs there!” sharply, to Grace, concentrating so earnestly on an overheated valve that she was about to be run over.

“All very well for you,” said Paddy, sitting down again as the trolley passed her. “You’re moving about. We have to sit still and shiver.”

“Now look here, girl,” said Charlie, abandoning the trolley and coming back to frown at her censoriously from under the cap that never left his head all day and possibly all night. “Mr. Condor he cockatoo’s crest“ly. He had says to me, he says : ‘I want ten engines over from the dismantling before dinner time.’ I’m rushed off me feet as it is, without playing nursemaid to you girls.” Deep down in his throat began the preliminary gurglings and hawkings that brought a chorus from the bench: “No, Charlie! Not in here! Charlie—no!” Unperturbed, he spat deliberately, plumb in the middle of the gangway. Someone threw a rag down on top of it and he ambled away after the disappearing trolley.

Would this war never end? thought Paddy. “Oh, where
is
Edward?” she wailed. “I don’t know what to do about this race.”

“Let’s have a look,” said Dinah.

“No, thanks. The last time you had a look, I got a black mark from the A.I.D.”

“Considering I taught you the wheelcase——”

“Yes, just how badly I’ve since discovered. Another black mark, that was, for a missing roller on the cam bevel, when you told me the gears always made ‘that funny noise’ when they were dry.”

“Well, damn me——”

“Oh, shut it, you two,” said Freda, her legs astride, swinging the heavy supercharger over as if it were made of cardboard. “Anyway, I think the whole system of black marks is grossly unfair. I’m going to bring it up at the next T.U. meeting. We’re all supposed to be working together for the War, so why should some people have the right to get us into trouble? We ought to be allowed to black mark them at that rate. And if they fine us, as they talk of doing. … It ought to be exposed, you know. There’s something radically wrong with the whole system.” Freda was a Communist. That is to say, she had been to two meetings in Trafalgar Square and had a small hammer and sickle pasted on the lid of her tool box.