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woman was Rose.
    Taut production by Bob, and accomplished acting by the rest of the cast gave the show enough gloss to get by. Men watched it because it had Rose. Women watched it because the contents were skilfully geared to make them think: This could happen to me, or: This might have happened to me, according to their age.
    Many women wrote to Rose, longing to see their own troublesmirrored on the screen. They did not know that she never saw the letters. Many of them could not have been made into plays without violating the moral code, and the others were too dull or esoteric to make good entertainment. Occasionally a sure-fire situation came in, but most of the letters read on the air were composed, to match a play already written, by a morbid man called Bates, who had a flair that amounted almost to genius for sounding like an overwrought but courageous woman.
    The play tonight, however, was based on an actual letter sent in by a homely girl from Wales, who longed to get off the farm and on to the boulevards. Sweating blood, a writer had made a play out of what might have happened if she did, the chief inconsistency being that the girl was now as beautiful as Rose Kelly, which would seem to remove all her problems. The scene had been shifted to Cumberland, so that no one in Wales could point a finger at a neighbour and say: “She wrote that letter.” Television logic reasoned that it did not matter if some lonely girl in Cumberland was stigmatized, since the accusation must be false.
    Ben did not follow the play very closely. When Rose questioned him afterwards about her performances, he could never give a coherent opinion of what had been going on, because he was too busy watching her and hugging to himself the thought: She’s mine!
    Well, almost his. And more his than any other man’s at the moment, as far as he knew. As she moved about the make-believe kitchen, waiting on her father, giving back soft answers to his grumbling, dropping on one knee to bury her sad face in the dog’s coat when the man went out, Ben was not thinking about what Bob had told him.
    He was thinking: This is how she would look moving about my kitchen. Even first thing in the morning, she would look like this. I could buy her a gingham apron. This is how I would see her every day before I went to work. I could get her a dog.
    Watching her, treasuring his plans, he forgot that Rose never got up until ten o’clock in the morning, and that she did not like dogs.

* Chapter 3 *
    It came in a long, buff envelope, with “N.C.W. Branch, Admiralty” stamped in the left-hand corner. Ben did not have to open it to know what it was.
    He kept it in his pocket all afternoon, and when his classes were over he went to his cabin, sat down on the sprucely made bed and slit the envelope with a pen-knife. This was not something that could be dragged open with the side of a thumb-nail. This was something that would have to be preserved, along with his birth certificate and his marriage licence and Marion’s death certificate, until Amy and her children threw it out with the rest of his papers after he died.
    I am commanded by My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to inform you that with regret they find it necessary to terminate your employment on the Active List as a result of the planned reduction in the size of the Royal Navy
.
    Well, there it was, and My Lords Commissioners had apparently decided to cut down on commas as well as commanders.
    It was not a surprise, for he had already had the semi-official letter beginning: “My dear Ben,” from the captain he knew slightly in the Naval Conditions and Welfare Branch. No one could say that the Admiralty did not soften the blow, but for Ben it was still a blow, every bit as painful as if it had come out of the blue. Even after the captain’s friendly letter, there had still been the faint, unreasonable hope that perhaps there was some mistake. The captain had taken his name off the wrong list, a list