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he handed them back to me as he went out for lunch; I folded them into an envelope, addressed the thing—in between two more telephone conversations—and thrust it into the hands of the building’s mail-boy just in time for the mid-morning post.)
    When Hale returned, he carried a grease-stained parcel by way of peace offering and, more to the point, swore a blood oath not to step foot from the offices for five minutes lest the urgent parcel arrive in my absence. When I returned, much comforted by my wash-room outing, he was just ringing off the telephone and three more telegrams had arrived.
    “I have to go out again, Miss Russell,” he announced, picking up his hat.
    “Very well,” I said, ripping open the flimsies. “Would you bring some milk when you come? The bottle’s gone sour. Oh, wait. Do you know anything about a Mr … Can this be right? Pessoa?” Surely not Pessary?
    “Who? Oh, Pessoa?” He pronounced it Pess-wah . “He’s the translator chap, in Lisbon. A friend said he was good. Why, what’s wrong?”
    “Nothing, just a request for confirmation—I did see something about him, somewhere …”
    Hale left; the phone rang. I spoke to a mother of one of the actresses, one-handed, while lifting various elements of the previous day’s avalanche of papers that I had tidied into piles but not yet filed away. Eventually, I unearthed an inch-thick pile of letters and telegrams that Hale had exchanged with a Portuguese translator. The voice continuing to stream into my ear—something about her daughter’s delicate digestion, good luck with that on a steamer crossing the Channel, I thought—I soon had them in chronological order, and read through them, frowning. It was possible that their infelicitous style reflected the inherently brutal prose of the telegraph. However, if the choppiness was a sign of inadequacy on the part of our would-be translator, I should have to do something immediately, since we were going to be heavily dependent on the fellow from the instant we landed.
    I put the earpiece on its stand, wondered vaguely what I had agreed to with the mother, and immediately picked it up before it could sound again. Once I had phoned around to the translator chap’s references, I felt somewhat better: Senhor Pessoa (Pess- oh -ah) had a good enough grasp of English to have published verse in the language, but more to the point, he had attended an English-language public school and worked for a number of English companies in the translation of actual documents. There were going to be enough flights of fancy from my new charges without adding a poet’s nonsense into the mix, and I did not intend to stay long enough to add Portuguese to my store of languages.
    I set that stack of papers aside, wrote a brief telegram confirming the date of our steamer’s arrival in Lisbon and a letter reviewing our needs on arrival, then went on to the next pressing task.
    Clearly, I would not be given more than thirty seconds at a time to question mail-boy, tea-lady, charwoman, or inhabitants of neighbouring offices concerning Fflytte Films’ missing secretary. However, by giving up on a second night’s sleep, I could go through Hale’s files during the night—and I’m sure I would have learnt a great deal, except that at five that afternoon, a team of large men arrived and carted the files off, cabinets and all.

    The advantage of being immersed in a mad flurry of preparation was that I could push to the back of my mind the voyage itself. The disadvantage was that I could push the voyage to the back of my mind.
    My own list of Urgent Tasks was necessarily short to begin with, and of the twelve items on it ( dress footwear, dinner frock, ammunition, hair-cut , and so on) I only managed to check off half, most of which had to do with clothing.
    Hale and I went down to Southampton on the train, he dictating letters to the last possible instant. Which meant that my actual arrival on the docks, standing and