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thick cables met in a writhing tangle. Bob caught at his arm to steady him, and turned him round again.
    “Don’t you know about Rose, then?” he asked, not spitefully, but with a sort of baffled surprise that Ben found more unnerving than spite. “Rose thinks that a naval officer is a pillar of respec-ability. That’s why she thinks she’ll marry you. Poor darling, she’s never really known many respectable people. Her family is—well, my God! —and Rose was Well, my God too, until some boy friend pushed her out of Canvey Island and into a modelling job. She came here as part of a shampoo commercial. You know, the girl who’s disgusted with one side of her hair and delighted with the other half.” Bob pulled two faces to illustrate. “Somebody spotted her and tried her in a small part, and she was just so damned beautiful that she never looked back until she found herself where she is now.”
    If Bob had intended to spoil Rose for Ben, he had failed. Ben was experiencing a feeling of tenderness towards her that had never been engendered by the fancy little life history she had thought up for him. Suddenly he wanted more than anything to marry her and make her feel secure.
    “Our Rose may not have much above the ears,” Bob went on, “but she’s cute enough to know that her kind of success doesn’t last long in this game. Television audiences get sated. They get sick of their dream girls and lover boys because they see too much of them. And Rose has no talent. It’s my job to make sure that the dim-wits out there are too dazzled by the looks of her to spot that. But I can’t go on doing it for ever. That’s why she wants what she thinks you could give her. Mrs Commander, Mrs Captain, Mrs Admiral. It wouldn’t be much use to her to be the Mrs of an ex-N.O. who’s out there grubbing for jobs with the rest.”
    As Ben opened his mouth to speak, Bob held up his hand. It was a white, fleshy hand with a huge amber signet ring on one of the fingers. “Don’t curse me,” he said. “You’ll live to thank me. What do you want with Rose for a wife? You won’t be able to look at her all the time, you know. The lights will be out. Haven’t you found out yet that she’s as cold as a witch’s———”
    “Shut up,” Ben said roughly. He felt himself growing hot and shivery at the same time.
    “Well, it’s true,” Bob said calmly. “I’ve tried. But Rose———”
    He made a face. “She just wants to play around a little to satisfy her ego that she’s desirable. Nothing more.”
    “By God,” said Ben, his anger mounting in him like a fever, “if you were in the Navy, I—I’d axe you.” It was the worst thing he could think of at the moment.
    “I’d be delighted. I was, for four years in the war. They couldn’t let me out fast enough. I got as far as leading seaman,” Bob said. “Not bad, considering that all my officers loathed me.”
    “Bob!” A disembodied voice materialized through the talk-back. “Are you coming up?”
    Bob snapped his hand to his eyeshade in an impeccable salute. “I might add that the loathing was mutual.” He walked away, weaving a path through the cables and cameras and perspiring men with the neatness of habit.
    Ben sat down on a chair. His legs felt weak, but he was not angry any more. The man’s a swine, he told himself, but his inner voice lacked conviction. For no reason that Ben could understand, there was something about Bob that was beginning to be faintly likeable. Rose liked him too. Perhaps they would all end up in a furnished flat south of the river, with Bob as the friend of the family keepingRose company while Ben was out pounding the pavements in search of a job.
    The tempo of the studio suddenly quickened. Ben had seen enough television shows produced to recognize that swift transition from “Loads of time before we’re on the air” to “This is it, chaps.” People who had been lounging stood up straight. The cameraman with the broken