She giggled. “I expect he means that resistance is hopeless.” She pulled the sheet of paper out of her typewriter. “Here’s the list you asked for.”

“Add it to the pile on the right,” I said.

“Mr. Middridge said he’d like a decision on it today.”

“I can’t give him a decision until tomorrow. Besides, he’s busy with Superman, isn’t he?”

“That won’t take long. You really had better look at it. And then you’ve just got time to have a word with Varney.”

“What has he to do with it?”’

“It’s as much a personnel matter as it is anything else.”

“Or anything worth bothering with at all.”

I picked up the list: the information it contained seemed on the face of it absolutely essential but had in fact never been used. It seemed to me sometimes that as fast as I cut out one unnec­essary piece of paperwork Middridge dreamed up two new ones.

“Your desk is an awful mess,” Hilda said.

“It’s my own system; today’s work on the left, yesterday’s in the middle, Middridge’s lists on the right.”

Normally I took some pride in keeping my desk clear; but for three weeks now the pressure of work had been so high that it wasn’t possible, even when I took a bulging briefcase home every night, to keep abreast of it. It was four-thirty and I’d have to see Middridge very soon; there wouldn’t be time even to begin to deal with the papers in the middle of my desk. And so to­morrow which would be no less busy than today I’d be another day behindhand with the hard thankless drudgery . . .

“You’ve taken a bit too much on,” Hilda said. “Most of that stuff isn’t your responsibility at all.”

“I’m well aware of it,” I said. “It’s one of the consequences of having a broad back.”

She shrugged. “It’s your funeral,” she said. “Are you still going to Leeds tomorrow?”

“I haven’t much option.” Even as I said it I was aware that it wasn’t true: what was true was that in the three weeks since Norah had left Warley I had deliberately drugged myself with work. There was already as much on my plate as I could manage; after my visit to Leeds there would be far more. So much more, in fact, that I would forget Norah without even wishing to, that I would be forced into acknowledging the impossibility of my ever marrying her, indeed of ever seeing her again.

Hilda looked at me curiously. “That’s a phrase you’re using a great deal recently,” she said.

“I’ve stopped trying to make things happen,” I said. “I just let them happen.”