“Whereas, with these card indexes I let you install against my business instincts,” Mr Mead continued, red in the face, his neck congested, “you’ve superimposed them on the drawing office, there’s two checks being kept, your own and Mr Pike’s. So you rely on your own, and it’s let you down. Why has it? For the reason it’s not accurately kept. It’s untrue to the facts.”
Charley could not answer.
“And what’s the outcome? The stuff’s coming along all anyhow. I’ve been into this, Summers. Take the fifth plant now. We’ve got the oven bodies in, we’ve enough of those for the next three consignments, but there’s no trays when we’re gasping for ’em. And why aren’t there any? I’ll tell you. It’s easy. Because on your cards it’s shown that five more sets of trays have been delivered than have actually been received. Yet, on the copy order, there’s the right number given. You’ve fallen down. You’re squint-eyed with your own system, while we get invoiced for goods like those extra oven bodies that we don’t yet require, and shan’t do for another six months. Think of the financial side, man.”
“Yes sir,” Charley said.
“Not to mention the question of storage space. Besides that’s the very job we entrusted you with. To bring the stuff along, as and when it was required.”
There was a long pause.
“What’s that girl of yours like?” Mr Mead asked.
Charley saw again an empty bed, Eton blue in the moonlight.
“Hard to say,” he answered, at last. He was thinking of Dot.
“Is she accurate?”
Charley did not reply.
“Well she can’t be, can she?” Mr Mead answered himself. “No, I’m not altogether blaming you, my boy,” he went on. “These days there’s nobody can get any assistance. And when you came with this idea of yours about a card index, Mr Pike, he did say to me, quite rightly, that his view was you couldn’t always be running into his office to look up the details in the order book. Not while he’s using it making out fresh orders.”
This argument seemed more promising to Charley.
“There it is, sir,” he agreed.
“But dammit, that’s no excuse when all’s said. Two wrongs don’t make a right, do they? We’ve got to take steps. There’s nothing for it but you’ll have to stay late and check through every blessed one of them cards, till you know there’s not an error left. Either that, or we shall be in queer street.”
“I was going to, anyhow, Mr Mead, starting tonight,” Charley said.
“I know you were,” the man replied in a kinder voice. “Knowing you as I do I wouldn’t have supposed any different. But what’s that girl of yours like?” he repeated.
Charley tried to be loyal. He did not reply.
“There’s nothing between the two of you, is there?” Mr Mead enquired.
“How d’you mean, sir?” Charley said, although he knew only too well.
“You mustn’t misunderstand me,” Corker began. “I remember when I was in the Directorate in the last war, we had an instance of that very same kind. The Controller’s personal assistant and his typist. She was an Irish redhead. And the end was, that by 1919 this country had one million more of what we were buying in that office than it needed. Very tricky the situation became for a week or two, after the Treasury jumped on it. They’d been looking into one another’s eyes, those two had, Summers, instead of at the work piled up on their desks.”
“Not me. I …” Charley started, then was interrupted.
“That’s all right, my boy,” Mr Mead was saying, while Charley asked himself if Corker could have got hold of a buzz about their August holiday together. Because this man would never credit the truth, how Phillips had cut him out. “But it’s a bit difficult for you young fellows, I shouldn’t wonder, after what you’ve been through, prisoner of war camps, and all that,” Mr Mead was going on.
“She’s not used to the work,” Charley broke in, hoping to draw a red herring across the trail.
“But is she willing?” Mr Mead asked.
Then, only because she had not gone to bed with him, Charley came right out with it,
“She’s not,” he said.
“I don’t like that, Summers,” Mr Mead announced. “It’s not fair, that isn’t. We’re on important government work here and if she won’t pull her weight, get down to things, then she’s doing her country a grave disservice, Summers. I shall have to get on to the National Service Officer about her, that’s all. I shan’t like doing so, but there it is.”
“Let me have one more try with her, sir.”
Mr Mead ignored this.
“You mean you can’t rely on what she puts down on those cards of yours? What you’re saying is, she plays fast and loose with you, isn’t it? Because that’s not right, that isn’t, not right at all.”
Charley could find nothing to add.
“Why, you’d think a woman who was a woman, coming in to help a boy with your record, over a stile which is a mite too high for him,” Charley winced, “you’d think any decent natured girl would get down to it, and see she did her work honestly. You know what’s in my mind? That it wouldn’t do her any hurt if she got herself put in uniform, scrub floors for a change with the A.T.S.”
Charley felt everything was getting beyond him.
“You send her to me,” Corker demanded.
“Could I have just one more shot at her, sir?”
“Can’t a man handle his own staff in his own office, Summers? You’ll very much oblige me by doing as I tell you. Send her straight in when you get back to your desk and let me handle this. Thank you.”
Charley dared say no more. He did as he was told.
Half an hour later Miss Pitter returned. She was not in tears, as he had expected, but her face was very white, and she was obviously beside herself. She stood just within the door, looking through him as if he was moonlight.
“Well, I’m off,” she said.
He got up, pale as a bed, from behind his kitchen table desk.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“I’ve had plenty, that’s how,” she announced. “I told him so. ‘Very good Mr Mead, if you’ll release me I’ll make my application to the National Service Officer,’ I said. ‘Tale telling, that’s all there is in this blue hole of a firm,’” I said.
He stood silent.
“And no one to speak up for me,” she began again.
He still said nothing. He gaped like those bed clothes.
“D’you know what they call you here?” she went on. ‘“Shoot me’ that’s the name they have for you.” It was a pure invention, which in no way upset him.
“Shoot me?” he mildly repeated.
“Because of your martyr ways, with what you’ve had in the war, and your Rose,” she said.
It was water off a duck’s back, nevertheless he remained wary. She could not now hurt him through the war, or through Rose. Then he denied his love for the third, and last, time.
“Rose?” he said. “Her? Oh, she was just a tale.”
“I’ll be bound,” she replied. “Well I shan’t be seeing you again, thank God,” and rushed out, slamming the door after. He sat down once more, considerably astonished on the whole. Then she put her head in a last time. She was crying so much it made her face look like a pane of glass in the rain.
“I didn’t mean what I said about you with the war,” she said, and was gone. That’s that, he thought, coming alive once more. He turned his mind to the effort he would have to make to go through each one of his precious cards. He dreaded it.
But he did feel somehow ashamed.
So Charley came in for a period of hard work, in which he stayed late at his place of business, kept it up weekends, and quite forgot about life outside the office in an attempt to get straight with his job. Then one afternoon, about the time he was beginning to feel confident he had got the hang of those deliveries again, Miss Whitmore rang him.