‘Louse?’ he said with a light laugh. ‘I’m just the ordinary criminal type. Somebody’s just told me so in a letter.’

He walked up the steps. Froulish was waiting on the pavement.

The next script conference was fixed for the following morning. Ready for anything, and especially anything unwelcome, Charles entered Mr. Frush’s conference room at the heels of Froulish. With characteristic unpunctuality, the novelist had got them there ten minutes late, and the others had all assembled and were already sitting round a long mahogany table. Mr. Frush himself, a big man who looked like the head of a steel combine, sat at the top of the table. His four hacks, whose dress and deportment suggested that they were trying, with various degrees of success, to parody the appearance of typical provincial bank clerks, sat in sub­missive silence. Terence Frush nodded, curtly and with a trace of irritation, at Froulish.

‘I’ve got him, Mr. Frush. The Seventh Man.’

‘Good,’ said his employer. ‘And you’ve got the current jokes as well, I hope. We mustn’t waste any time to-day.’ He gave Charles a nod, the replica of the one he had given Froulish.

‘I take it my secretary has gone through the usual business details with you,’ he said. (Charles had not yet seen any secretary.) ‘You start at the bottom of the salary scale: forty quid a week for the first three months. Ten minutes’ notice on my side. Two years’ on yours. You’ll find you can make good if you’ve got it in you.’

Charles sat down in the seat next to Froulish. He glanced round the room. It was bare and surgical. The mahogany table seemed to be the only object that was made of a natural substance; the rest of the furniture was tubular steel, fake leather, and glass. The walls were white and had a glazed look, suggesting the tiled walls of an operating theatre or public lavatory. They were bare of pictures, but two large notices, each neatly framed in black, confronted each other across the widest part of the room. One read ‘The Customer is Always Trite’; the other, ‘What He’ll Say Next is Nobody’s Business—and Remember, You’re No­body’.

‘Preliminaries first,’ said Mr. Frush briskly. ‘Who’s been on radio duty this week?’

‘I have,’ said a fat, unhealthy-looking young man with a ragged moustache.

‘Well, let’s hear if you got hold of anything.’

‘What’s radio duty?’ Charles whispered to Froulish.

‘It’s when you have to spend the week listening to all the other shows of the same kind, particularly the American ones,’ the novelist muttered. ‘You have a stenographer with you to take down the scripts entire, but it’s your job to edit it for anything that can be pin—used.’