Meanwhile Mr Druce sat up and blew his nose.
‘Got a comb on you?’ Dougal said, squeezing Merle’s hand under the letters.
She said, ‘This place is becoming chaos.’
‘What was that, Miss Coverdale?’ Mr Druce said with as little moisture as possible.
‘Mr Druce has a bad head,’ Dougal said as he left the room with her.
‘Come and tell me what happened,’ said Merle.
Dougal looked at his watch. ‘Sorry, can’t stop. I’ve got an urgent appointment in connexion with my human research.’
Dougal sat in the cheerful waiting-room looking at the tulips in their earthy bowls.
‘Mr Douglas Dougal?’
Dougal did not correct her. On the contrary he said, ‘That’s right.’
‘Come this way, please.’
He followed her into the office of Mr Willis, managing director of Drover Willis’s, textile manufacturers of Peckham.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Dougal,’ said the man behind the desk. ‘Take a seat.’
On hearing Mr Willis’s voice Dougal changed his manner, for he perceived that Mr Willis was a Scot.
Mr Willis was looking at Dougal’s letter of application.
‘Graduate of Edinburgh?’ said Mr Willis.
‘Yes, Mr Willis.’
Mr Willis’s blue eyes stared out of his brick-coloured small-featured face. They stared and stared at Dougal.
‘Douglas Dougal,’ the man read out from Dougal’s letter, and asked with a one-sided smile, ‘Any relation to Fergie Dougal the golfer?’
‘No,’ Dougal said. ‘I’m afraid not.’
Mr Willis smiled by turning down the sides of his mouth.
‘Why do you want to come into Industry, Mr Dougal?’
‘I think there’s money in it,’ Dougal said.
Mr Willis smiled again. ‘That’s the correct answer. The last candidate answered, “Industry and the Arts must walk hand in hand,” when I put that question to him. His answer was wrong. Tell me, Mr Dougal, why do you want to come to us?’
‘I saw your advertisement,’ Dougal said, ‘and I wanted a job. I saw your advertisements, too, for automatic weaver instructors and hands, and for twin-needle flat-bed machinists, and flat-lock machinists and instructors. I gathered you’re expanding.’
‘You know something about textiles?’
‘I’ve seen over a factory. Meadows, Meade & Grindley.’
‘Meadows Meade are away behind us.’
‘Yes. So I gathered.’
‘Now I’ll tell you what we’re looking for, what we want…
Dougal sat upright and listened, only interrupting when Mr Willis said, ‘The hours are nine to five-thirty.’
‘I would need time off for research.’
‘Research?’
‘Industrial relations. The psychological factors behind the absenteeism, and so on, as you’ve been saying -‘
‘You could do an evening course in industrial psychology. And of course you’ll have access to the factory.’
‘The research I have in mind,’ Dougal said, ‘would need the best part of the day for at least two months. Two months should do it. I want to look into the external environment. The home conditions. Peckham must have a moral character of its own.’
Mr Willis’s blue eyes photographed every word. Dougal sat out these eyes, he went on talking, reasonably, like a solid steady Edinburgh boy, all the steadier for the hump on his shoulder.
‘I’ll have to speak to Davis. He is Personnel. We have to talk over the candidates and we may ask to see you again, Mr Dougal. If we decide on you, don’t fear you’ll be hampered in your research.’
The factory was opening its gates as Dougal came down the steps from the office into the leafy lanes of Nun Row. Some of the girls were being met by their husbands and boy friends in cars. Others rode off on motor- scooters. A number walked down to the station. ‘Hi, Dougal,’ called one of them, ‘what you doing here?’
It was Elaine, who had now been over a week at Drover Willis’s.
‘What you doing here, Dougal?’
‘I’m after a job,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got it.’
‘You leaving Meadows Meade too?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘oh, no, not on your life.’
‘What’s your game, Dougal?’
‘Come and have a drink,’ he said, ‘and my Christian name is Douglas on this side of the Rye, mind that. Dougal Douglas at Meadows Meade and Douglas Dougal at Willis’s, mind. Only a formality for the insurance cards and such.’
‘I better call you Doug, and be done with it.’
Dixie sat at her desk in the typing pool and, without lifting her eyes from her shorthand book or interrupting the dance of her fingers on the keyboard, spoke out her reply to her neighbour.
‘He’s all one-sided at the shoulders. I don’t know how any girl could go with him.’
Connie Weedin, daughter of the Personnel Manager, typed on and said, ‘My Dad says he’s nuts. But I say he’s got something. Definitely.’
‘Got something, all right. Got a good cheek. My young brother doesn’t like him. My mum likes him. My dad likes him so-so. Humphrey likes him. I don’t agree to that. The factory girls like him – what can you expect? I don’t like him, he’s got funny ideas.’ She stopped typing with her last word and took the papers out of her typewriter. She placed them neatly on a small stack of papers in a tray, put an envelope in her typewriter, typed an address, put more papers in her typewriter, turned over the page of her shorthand notes, and started typing again. ‘My dad doesn’t mind him, but Leslie can’t stand him. I tell you who else doesn’t like him.’
‘Who?’
‘Trevor Lomas. Trevor doesn’t like him.’
‘I don’t like Trevor, never did,’ Connie said. ‘Defin-itely ignorant. He goes with that girl from Celia Modes that’s called Beauty. Some beauty!’
‘He’s a good dancer. He doesn’t like Dougal Douglas and, boy, I’ll say he’s got something there,’ Dixie said.
‘My dad says he’s nuts. Supposed to be helping my dad to keep the factory sweet. But my dad says he don’t do much with all his brains and his letters. But you can’t help but like him. He’s different.’
‘He goes out with the factory girls. He goes out with Elaine Kent that was process-controller. She’s gone to Drover Willis’s. He goes out with her ladyship toe.’
‘You don’t say?’
‘I do say. He better watch out for Mr Druce if it’s her ladyship he’s after.’
‘Watch out – her ladyship’s looking this way.
Miss Merle Coverdale, at her supervisor’s seat at the top of the room, called out, ‘Is there anything you want, Dixie?’
‘No.’
‘If there’s anything you want, come and ask. Is there anything you want, Connie?’
‘No.’
‘If there’s anything you want, come up here and ask for it.’
Dougal came in just then, and walked with his springy step all up the long open-plan office, bobbing as he walked as if the plastic inlay flooring was a certain green and paradisal turf.
‘Good morning, girls.’
‘You’d think he was somebody,’ Dixie said.
Connie opened a drawer in her small desk in which she kept a mirror, and looking down into it, tidied her
