‘There is no one,’ he said.

And stuck to it.

Considered from certain angles the situation was unfortunate, Mrs Polkinghorn told Miss Langlands. But she and Charles were very happy together. They had so many interests in common.

In those days Charles Russell Polkinghorn was scrupulously observant once he had made up his mind to a thing. Caught the train every morning to the works. Cousin Ken had explained the plant. The men acted hearty, while they thought it was expected of them. Charles was given an office, not the one which had been his father’s – Cousin Ken had taken over that – but a smaller, no less airy, well-equipped room. At intervals during the day, secretaries placed papers in his tray. Miss Gregson smelled of Ashes-of-Roses. Charles Russell Polkinghorn would take the papers out of his tray, and examine them gravely.

It was the noise which began to worry him. Sometimes Miss Gregson’s lips would move without sound. It was the machinery, at which he never learned to look without wanting to avert his face.

There was the annual dinner and dance, at which his mother put in an appearance. Mr Beddoes would hand her through the waltzes. His wrist-watch was far too small for him.

‘Do you care for Greta Garbo, Mr Polkinghorn?’ Miss Gregson inquired.

‘Enjoying yourself, darling?’ his mother asked.

She, at least, never failed in her performance.

After the first year or two, somebody hit on the idea of introducing paper caps and streamers. To make the dance jollier like.

Charles Polkinghorn suspected a private joke, the point of which he would never see.

Yet, there was his mother, dancing with the toolmakers, too.

He began, worse, to suspect the machinery. How it belted, as he sat examining Miss Gregson’s papers. Voices did not carry. That had a certain advantage. Or most voices would not.

There was that Badgery, though, of Thompson Johnson Constructions.

‘Everything running smoothly, Ken?’

Throwing his gravel into the machines.

‘Smoothly? Couldn’t be smoother. Even with our extra cog!’

The bits almost flew off then, the oily fragments, into Charles Polkinghorn’s office. He put Miss Gregson’s papers into the wrong tray.

On returning home that evening, Polkinghorn stayed away for a week.

‘I must tell you, Ken, in confidence, though,’ his mother rang up the office, ‘Charles is suffering from a slight breakdown ... Yes, rest is what he needs ... I shall keep in touch ... Thank you, Ken, dear. You’re a brick....’

But Charles returned at the end of the week. He would sit it out.

They allowed him to keep his office. He continued to go there to read the Herald, until finally, as Mrs Polkinghorn herself put it, Charles ‘withdrew’.

At ‘Wishfort’ the years turned over quite as regularly as the most merciless machine; the difference was they were oiled with silence. Although he had given up reading, excepting the pamphlets and the circulars, there were lines that troubled Charles Polkinghorn still. De l’amour j’ai toutes les fureurs . . . might sound its muffled trumpet. He would slip out into the shrubberies, there to pick at his more placid thoughts, or the skin that had died at the sides of his nails. Sometimes the knots in his throat would almost soften into words of wonder, images almost crystallize somewhere at the back of his eyes.