Somehow they seemed to express her personality; for Miss Foulkes was meticulous. She was so meticulous that when she found a halfpenny one day upon the office floor she put it into the Petty Cash and now, three years later, that tiresome halfpenny still appeared in the monthly totals, in the annual balance, and even in the audited accounts. John Handiman loathed the sight of it.

“You haven’t allowed for this week’s wages?” he said.

“No.”

“Then unless some money comes in soon we’re going to be in a jam. And we can’t hope for anything much before the beginning of July.”

Miss Foulkes promptly handed him two typewritten sheets headed respectively “Creditors” and “Debtors,” each heading being underlined in red. There was not much comfort to be found in them; and it ran through John’s mind that the adventure which he had embarked upon so eagerly after the war, which had seemed almost like another Commando operation because Jim and Joe were in it with him, was likely to end, as adventures so often did, not with a bang but a whimper. There would be no sudden and startling bankruptcy; but the orders would dwindle away, the profits would gradually contract, the chatter and the laughter at the long bench would die down, and one morning Miss Foulkes would rule a treble red line, just a shade thicker than usual, at the bottom of the last page in the ledger. When that happened she and Jim and Joe, Mrs. Greening, Edna, and the rest would have to look for new jobs; and he would be back in his father’s little shop selling fishhooks to urchins.

He said:

“Look here, Miss Foulkes. You juggle with figures eight hours a day. Tell me frankly, what’s going wrong with this show?”

She answered without hesitation: “Too small a profit-margin on a small output.”

“Exactly. But we had to accept that in order to export at all.”

“Then why export?”

“To earn dollars. It seemed a good thing to do.” And indeed he had done so for the same unformulated reason that in 1939 he had joined the Army.

But Miss Foulkes clicked her tongue. She disapproved of dollars.

“And look where it’s got us,” she said. “We missed the home market when the home market was good, and now the Americans don’t want our stuff any more. So we’ve made the worst of both worlds.”

“Yes, I’ve been a mug, I dare say.” He grinned wryly. “I’ll have to tackle the dear old Bank again.”

“The Bank!” That was another thing she disapproved of. Every Monday she had to go to the Bank to pay in; every Friday she went there to draw the money for the wages: and on these occasions she entered the place with the air of a teetotaller who is compelled to visit a pub or a very Low Churchman whose painful duty of sightseeing takes him into Saint Peter’s at Rome. As such a one would sniff the incense, so sniffed Miss Foulkes at the odour of high finance. Disdainfully she stood at the counter with her sharp nose in the air, disdainfully and without a word of thanks she received the packets of notes and the paper bags of coins, deliberately counting them three times as if to demonstrate her mistrust of the whole capitalist system.

“The Bank!” she repeated, in that superior and dismissive tone which she reserved for the objects of her ideological disapprobation. John had once amused himself by mentally making a catalogue of them: Banks and Yanks, foxhunting, debutantes, Punch, Boy Scouts, beefsteaks, Saint George.… He suspected that she secretly disapproved of balloons also, since it was frequently their destiny to be popped by drunken revellers at night-clubs, and of beach-balls, since the Idle Rich were apt to play with such idle toys when they disported themselves on the Riviera.

And yet, oddly enough, he liked her. The complexities and nuances of character, which he didn’t understand, always puzzled and disquieted him; so he would pick out from a person’s make-up some simple virtue and cling to his belief in it for dear life. In Miss Foulkes’ case the virtue was loyalty. It was a loyalty, he knew, which he shared with the Communist Party; and this amused him, since he didn’t take politics very seriously. If at some time in the fantastic future the Communist Party should take it into its crackpot head to order Miss Foulkes to blow up the factory, then poor Miss Foulkes, he imagined, torn asunder, schizophrenic, would probably go mad. Meanwhile he found a strange comfort in her loyalty, and now that things were going badly he relied upon it more and more.

“Bank or no Bank,” he said, “we’ll carry on, shall we, until we’re down to that last halfpenny in the Petty Cash?”

She nodded, unsmiling, for she didn’t think there was anything funny about the halfpenny.

“We’ll make a few thousand elephants on spec,” he said. “Elephants always do go well at Christmas. Or shall it be pigs?”

“Pigs were more in demand last year.”

“Shall we put a squeak in them?”

“It adds to the cost, but they go better with a squeak.”

“Our last dying squeak.” Still she did not smile. “Now I’ll go and tell Jim to change the formas. You’d better put those roses in water,” he said.

The salmon-pink blush rose like a tide up her neck and arms and he hurried to the door, aware once again of her vulnerability, puzzled and embarrassed by it because it didn’t fit in with the rest of her, it was one of those complexities which he didn’t understand.

V

The Committee Meeting, that typically and terribly English thing, had been going on for nearly two hours, and Stephen’s wounded knee, cramped under the table, was nagging him like a toothache. The end was not yet in sight.

Originally the Committee had consisted of eight; but its membership had been doubled by the co-option of people who were said to have “felt hurt.” To-day there were several new members whom Stephen did not even know.