It wasn’t long before she and Robin were holding hands, and being of a yielding and generous nature she didn’t leave his studio until long after nightfall. But that, too, was “only for a lark.” She wasn’t going to fall in love with Robin, oh dear no, not after seeing all those sketches of women without any clothes on decorating the studio walls. She had found it difficult to believe his protestations that he had painted them out of his head.

Joe said: “Here’s the last: batch of mucking old beach-balls, and then we’ve finished.”

“Finished?” said Edna. “What’s the next job?”

“Kaput. Finished,” croaked Jim. “No more orders for nothing, that’s what the Boss said.”

“No more export?”

“The Yanks,” said Joe, “’ave got tired of poppin’ balloons at Christmas parties. Likewise the Aussies and the Argentinos. But we’re going to make a few fancy lines on spec, like, teddy-bears and jumbos, and then it’s curtains unless something turns up.”

“One thing,” said Mrs. Greening, “he won’t put us off, not until he got to.”

“Not him,” said Joe. “When he was wounded at Walcheren, wounded and very near drownded he was, the first thing he wanted to know was about us chaps. Was Jim and Joe all right, he said. And shot through the stummick!”

Just then the big creaking double-doors opened—the tumbledown place had been a warehouse, and long ago a tannery, before John Handiman the ironmonger’s son converted it into a balloon factory in 1946—and there entered a very small messenger-boy carrying a very large bunch of flowers. “For the office,” he said, and marched through the shop towards the door marked “Private,” at the far end. All the women at the bench turned round to peer at the dewy pink petals just showing above the tissue paper.

“Roses this week,” sniffed Mrs. Greening. “Must ’ave cost a packet.”

“It was tulips last time,” said Joe.

Mrs. Greening gave Edna another friendly dig in the ribs.

“Ain’t you jealous, ducks?”

“Good luck to her,” laughed Edna. “But I do wonder who her boy is.”

Jim’s voice like a saw cutting a rough piece of wood grated through the whole shop:

“Must be rich, must be crackers, must ’ave plenty of guts.”

He peeled off the last batch of beach-balls and tossed them to Edna. Adroitly she stuck the valves in and slipped them over the air-nozzles, plugging each ball in turn as it was blown up. The sunlight coming through the open double-door fell on her as she held a whole bunch together, like giant grapes, and for a moment she ceased to belong to the dingy factory with its leprous coating of french chalk, she was a Bacchante strayed there, a vision of the vineyards glowing and shining, a beaker full of the warm South.

It was a fault inseparable from Miss Foulkes’ colouring that when she blushed she went salmon-pink, arms, neck and face, and when the flush subsided it left her unnaturally white, with the freckles standing out against her pallor like specks of sand. She always blushed when the flowers arrived, and there was always an uncomfortable silence in the office afterwards.

John Handiman busied himself ostentatiously with his letters. Miss Foulkes said to the messenger-boy: “Put them down there,” and he laid the roses on the filing-cabinet next to the bowl of fading tulips which he had delivered last week. The week before it had been anemones, and the week before that hyacinths. Whoever the sender might be, he was a most faithful and persistent fellow, and John was profoundly puzzled, because however hard he tried he could not for the life of him imagine Enid Foulkes with a young man.

But why not? he asked himself. She was only twenty-nine, her flaming hair was a challenge, she was not at all bad-looking, she was clever—and yet there was something which seemed to obviate the very possibility of courtship, it was a sort of angularity, he decided; her bare elbows lying on the desk were little sharp nobbles, and her shoulder-blades showed like knife-edges through her thin dress. Perhaps that was because she lived chiefly on nuts. But hers was not simply an angularity of physique, but of disposition. Her character was all sharp corners; there was no smooth side to it, no place for compromise, it would cut a man to pieces, thought John oddly, to match his mind to hers. Perhaps the unknown suitor had learned this lesson, and was trying out the softening effect of roses.

“The debit balance at the Bank,” said Miss Foulkes, white-faced now that her blush had faded, “is two hundred and seventy-three pounds eight and a penny; leaving two hundred and twenty-six pounds eleven and eleven pence to carry on with before we reach the limit of five hundred.” She ruled a neat red ink line at the bottom of the sheet of paper. Miss Foulkes’ accounts, even when they were only memoranda, were always decorated with red lines, single ones and double ones and in certain complex cases treble ones, and these lines were never smudged or crooked, but were as thin as hairs and as straight as ramrods.