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 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 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.