“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.
He imagined he could see her arms without her noticing, so he was more open with these. But he did not touch.
Her arms built great thighs on her in his mind’s eye, while she might be asking him, “About those needle valves in stainless …”, made her quite ordinary calves into slighter echoes of what he could not see between knee and hip, as she might be saying, “Now those break vacuum cocks …”, but which, so he thought, must be unimaginably full and slender, when she wanted to know where the “accessible traps” came from, white, soft, curving and rounded with the unutterable question, the promise, the flowering of four years imprisonment with four thousand twirps. And he would lift his great brown eyes, and say, “They come from Smiths,” while she wondered, “Are my stockings straight, I wonder?”
It made him ashamed the way he felt about her.
But this was the sole promise there was in being alive. Hopelessly turned over to himself, as well as conscientious to a degree, so careful in his work there were occasions she could have shrieked at the way he wrote, time and again, to the same firm holding them to the last promise they had made, so careful with his words, tactfully nagging, letter after letter, never leaving them alone, so Dot was the only carrot in front of his nose, because he found of an evening, when he got back, that he barely existed, lived in a daze now that Rose was over.
Sometimes he would dream of red-haired fat women. But they were not at all like Rose.
As for Miss Pitter, she sniffed when one of the girls back at the hostel asked how her new place was shaping. “I don’t know what they took me away from my old job for,” she said. “This is a Fred Karno war, if you ask me. And the man I work with is dippy.”
She never mentioned his great big eyes.
Nevertheless, she began to get involved with the card index system. The main thing was, she found it dead accurate. She had thought Charley so wandering, the first few days, that she at once did a check through with the order book. There was not an item wrong. Then, as fresh orders were issued each day through the drawing office and she had to enter up the particulars on the cards, together with the details of what had been delivered, which she took from the advice notes, she began to be more and more frightened she would make a slip. Without knowing, she was becoming enslaved by the system.
Until one afternoon it occurred.
He was on the telephone as usual. He was speaking to Braxtons. She turned the card up, on which she had marked the number of items already delivered.
“Is that your ref. BMO/112?” he asked. “Summers, here, of Meads. It’s in connection with our order number 1528/2/1781. We want those joint rings you promised this week. To go to Coventry.”
He waited. He laughed. “No, we shan’t send you there,” he said. He waited again. He closed his eyes. He always did this when hanging on for an answer.
“What?” he said. “We’ve had ’em?” He looked at her. She was surprised at herself. Her heart had given a great jolt. “Oh no,” she couldn’t help saying. “What date?” he asked into the receiver. “Well thanks, old man, I’ll give you a ring back.”
“September the 10th,” was Charley’s reproach to her.
She went out to search through the files. Of course she’d had a bit of a bust up with Muriel, the night before, at the hostel. But when she found an advice note from Braxtons for the joint rings in question, and saw that she had not initialled it, and, therefore, that she had never seen the thing, and consequently, that Mr Pike, the chief draughtsman, must have kept it back on purpose — when she came into his room again she leaned her head on that beastly green card cabinet, and cried.
This upset Charley, because he thought someone might be getting at him by tormenting her. Anyway he felt the whole thing was a shame. So he got to his feet right off and clumsily kissed one of her temples through a drift of yellow hair. But he did not put his hands up. She warmed a bit, blamed herself aloud for being silly, and said no more.