I pushed aside my crêpes suzette. Tiffield looked up from his emp­tied plate. “You haven’t touched them,” he said, rather re­proachfully. “Off your food, my boy?”

“I’m not very hungry,” I said. I looked at the dancers; the girls’ skirts were flying up in a rumba. Off your food; a horse is off its feed, an employee is off its feed, a son-in-law is off its feed.

“You should eat it,” he said. “It’s really delicious.” His fork was still in his hand.

“I’m sure it is,” I said. “But I can’t eat any more.”

“You’ve not eaten anything,” he said. “Orange juice and an omelette – that’s not a dinner.” He looked longingly at my plate. “It’ll only be wasted,” he said.

“The waiter will eat it.”

“You don’t mind if I have it?”

I pushed my plate over to him; for the first time I began to like him. There was something endearingly childish about his gluttony; after all, what else did he have? He’d never married, and never had any interests outside his business; and the business now ran itself. He had got into light industry on the ground floor in 1919, and now wherever you threw a stone in East London you were pretty well bound to hit a Tiffield Products Factory.

The particular kind of steel which he wanted was necessary for a brand new process; it was in fact a brand new kind of steel. We’d spent a great deal of time and effort in giving him just what he wanted; but he wasn’t prepared to order enough of the stuff. Enough, for him, was roughly half the amount we needed to sell in order to break even; and we couldn’t sell it to anyone else because there wasn’t anyone else who needed it. But we knew this when we began research, we had set a sprat to catch a mack­erel. My father-in-law had been wrong to describe Tiffield as a big customer; he really meant that he hoped Tiffield would be a big customer. To me it appeared as if he were going to swim off with the plump juicy sprat XA 81 triumphantly between his yellow teeth. And if he did I knew who would get the blame.

Tomorrow I had an appointment with his production mana­ger and he’d ask me questions about XA 81 as if he couldn’t read or as if he didn’t believe what we’d written: yes, I would say it really does resist that temperature, yes it really does resist corro­sion by this that and the other chemical; and blood and benzine and pineapple and chutney, and why the hell are you wasting my time? No, I wouldn’t say that; but I’d want to say it.

Tiffield had finished his second helping; I handed him my packet of cigarettes. If he wasn’t approachable now, he never would be; I wasn’t going to let him evade the subject again.

“We’re rather worried about your order, Mr. Tiffield.”

He finished his glass of Madeira. “You needn’t be, my boy. Of course I’m not an expert, but I know you’ve done a fine job. Mottram – and he knows about steel if any man does – was talk­ing to me about it only the other day. He’s delighted, my boy. Quite frankly, he thought that you couldn’t possibly meet all our requirements. What you’ve done with Z – no—” He snapped his fingers. “XA 81 is to solve a series of technical paradoxes. And you couldn’t,” he said, “be guided very much by previous ex­perience.”