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    ‘Mr. Shaw must be making a lot of money, Laura?’
    Stella Vaizey and her daughter were sitting together on the small back balcony. Laura was drying her hair in the sun, and shelling peas into a pot.
    ‘He is. I think he must be.’
    ‘Aren’t there any restrictions on that stuff he uses?’
    ‘He has a friend who gets it for him. All the men who come in to see him say he should expand, butI think he’d rather sell out to Mr. Roberts.’
    When Laura saw the two men together the following day, however, she wondered if Mr. Shaw did not want more to please Mr. Roberts than to sell him the business. A long-faced morose-looking man with lank brown hair, and perhaps ten years younger than Felix Shaw, Jack Roberts appeared to have appropriated the vacant position of boon companion to her employer. They held muttered conversations in the corner of the room for hours on end. Mr. Roberts was an excellent listener, but occasionally he put in a dry-sounding remark that brought on one of Mr. Shaw’s spasms of laughing. Yet even when Jack Roberts was being (presumably) funny, Laura thought he had an almost dangerous, unamused look in his eyes. Mr. Shaw once remarked to her with heavy pride, ‘Mr. Roberts is pretty high up in the black market, you know.’
    Ron Moffat, the bank manager, was walking past the factory on Monday morning when Laura and Felix Shaw emerged with armfuls of airy cartons to stack in the car.
    ‘If you sell this concern, Felix, I’ll pay for you to have your head examined. It’s the coming thing! The coming thing! After the war—plastics, all these new materials. You’re in on the ground floor. God knows where you get your stuff, and I’m not going to ask you. But hang on to it!’
    Jack Roberts pulled a dog-eared contract of salefrom his pocket that very afternoon.
    Mr. Shaw said, ‘Oh, a handshake on it’ll do me, Jack. A gentleman’s agreement. I trust you!’ He laughed very much saying this, and his eyes were moist.
    Jack Roberts grinned. ‘No, you don’t! Strictly legal. You might try and back out. I’ve got my boy lined up for eleven tomorrow morning.’
    A great excessive shrug of acquiescence was torn out of Mr. Shaw. He hardly knew what to do with himself. His smile was unhappy, his eyes searching. ‘Right! Right you are, then!’ He was asking for a ludicrously small sum which he had agreed, in effect, to lend Jack Roberts, on ludicrously easy terms.
    The factory girls went with the stock, but Mr. Shaw said, ‘Reckon I might keep the typist. Got her trained to my methods.’ He was combing the city and suburbs for a broken-down business to build up.
    ‘Sure, sure. You’re welcome.’ Jack Roberts slid his cold gaze over the unsophisticated typist.
    ‘You’re a grown woman now, Laura, and you can please yourself whether you look for a new job or go with him,’ her mother said. ‘Mr. Shaw’s always been kind to you.’
    ‘How?’ Clare asked, turning aside from her homework, looking at them out of her light-grey eyes, and using the end of her long plait as a shaving-brush against her chin.
    Laura grimaced uncertainly, meeting her eyes. (‘You can please yourself!’) Mr. Shaw—She didn’t know him. He never had much to say. He had never once called her Laura. ‘ You ,’ he said. She was considerably more surprised than flattered that he wanted her to remain with him, though she was flattered. (‘You can please yourself!’) And then, surely, if he had sold the box factory, it was to invest in some pleasanter, more inherently interesting business?
    ‘How?’ Clare asked again, lightly crunching the end of her plait between her front teeth.
    ‘Unless there’s anything about the man you haven’t mentioned to me, Laura?’
    ‘No. What do you mean?’
    ‘He gave you stockings and chocolates last Christmas. Admittedly, he gave the factory girls a cash bonus, but you wouldn’t have wanted to be on the same footing with them.’
    Mr. Shaw—Laura stood thinking inside