‘Thank you,’ Mr Collinge called after her.

As Mrs Crosby left the room, a faint ‘Huh!’ from her emerged from behind the closing door.

‘I think I’ve just put my foot in it,’ Simon chuckled, and his eyes were full of amusement.

‘It’s cold out there,’ Katie said. ‘And she’ll have to queue – if there’re any cigarettes to be had.’ Although she couldn’t help noticing his expectation that someone would wait on him in this way, he was one of the bosses, however young, and she didn’t feel sorry for Mrs Crosby. She was too mean-spirited and vinegary. ‘I expect she just wanted to huddle up in here.’

‘Well, she’ll be back soon enough.’ He shook his head. ‘Not a great one for office banter, is she?’

‘Her husband’s a prisoner-of-war, apparently,’ Katie said.

‘Oh, is that the trouble? I hadn’t realized. But all the same . . .’

He picked a slide-rule up from the work table and turned it round in his hands in his usual restless way, pacing around the office until he somehow ended up perched on the edge of Katie’s desk. Finding him suddenly so close to her set her heart beating hard in self-conscious alarm. Don’t be silly, she told herself. He’s just being chatty.

‘So – how’re you liking it here?’

‘It’s nice. I like it better than my last job.’ It felt like a silly answer, but what more was there to say?

‘Why’s that then? The stimulating company?’ He threw the rule up in the air and caught it just above her head, making her jump, then laugh.

Should she tell the truth: Because you’re here, because the pay’s better . . . ?

‘Well, it’s more interesting,’ she floundered.

He seemed to find this funny. She found that he was looking straight at her, interested, his grey eyes intent on her face as if he was looking right into her.

‘Tell me a bit about yourself,’ he said. ‘About Katie O’Neill – and not about work, I mean.’

Katie froze. All her life she had been conditioned to not telling people things. ‘There’s nothing much to tell. I just live with my mother. It’s all very boring, not like you, going to the university and everything.’

‘Well, yes – that was all right. I know I was lucky – but I was a complete flaming disaster when I got there.’ He started telling her jokes about things he’d done wrong or misunderstood; technical things. Katie didn’t really know what he was talking about, but she enjoyed his infectious laughter and, above all, that he wanted to talk to her. ‘Anyway, they let me stay on and finish, even though the war had started by then – I s’pose they thought we might all be useful for something when we came out the other end. I mean, going there was a privilege, I know that, but in the end it was lots of blokes and machine tools and engineering. Nothing glamorous about it – and no nice girls like you. Not in engineering.’ He winked. ‘And in the end I knew I’d be back here, family firm and all that. Lucky again, I s’pose most would say.’