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for someone,’ she called out, ‘or are you lost? This is staff only.’
    ‘I am,’ said Lisa. ‘I mean, I’m staff. I’m a temporary.’
    ‘Gawd strewth,’ said Patty sotto voce to Fay. ‘Have you got a locker number?’ she asked Lisa.
    Lisa told her the number she had just been given at Staff Reception and Patty stared.
    ‘Oh, that’s just along here. Gawd,’ she said again to Fay. ‘That must be our new temp. Now I’ve seen everything. Come along and get changed then,’ she said, raising her voice again. ‘It’s time to go downstairs. There’s no dawdling here, you know,’ she added, sternly.
    It was wonderful how assertive Patty could be when she had no fear of serious opposition, and for the next week she made Lisa’s hours of work just as frantic as she knew how.
    It was Miss Jacobs who had the seniority and therefore strictly speaking the right to harry Lisa, or at least to make sure that she learned the routines and made herself useful, but what with Christmas and New Year and all the parties coming up, and consequently all the cocktail frocks vanishing off the rails and into the fitting rooms quicker than you could say knife , Miss Jacobs had her work cut out with pinning up the alterations; Patty had virtually a clear field for the exercise of her power and she grew into the role most famously.
    ‘Just left school have you, Lisa?’ she asked. ‘Just done the Inter, eh? Did you pass?’
    ‘I’ve just done the Leaving,’ said Lisa.
    ‘Well!’ said Patty, disconcerted and even appalled. ‘ The Leaving.
    Well. I thought you were fifteen, or about that. The Leaving!’
    Patty looked incredulously and even fearfully at the wunderkind . ‘You want to be a teacher, do you?’ said she.
    ‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ said Lisa. ‘I’m going,’ she said, believing that she was obliged to offer a truthful account of herself, ‘to be a poet. I think,’ and she trailed off vaguely, noticing now the horrible effect of her candour.
    ‘A poet!’ exclaimed Patty. ‘Jeez, a poet!’
    She turned to Fay, who was spiking a document at the conclusion of a sale.
    ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked. ‘Lisa here is going to be a poet !’ And she smiled evilly.
    ‘No, I mean,’ amended the confused girl, ‘I’d like to try to be a poet. Or perhaps,’ she added, in the hope of deflecting Patty’s amazement, ‘an actress.’
    ‘An actress!’ cried Patty. ‘ An actress !’
    And Lisa saw at once that she had only magnified her initial error, and that she was now suddenly an object of open ridicule; for the appearance she presented in her black frock and utilitarian spectacles, thin and childish, was so far from their conception of the actress that the two women both now burst into laughter. Lisa stood helpless before them, and began to blush; she was even on the verge of tears.
    Fay was the first to compose herself; she at any rate had recollections of her own attempt at a stage career to still her derision.
    ‘It’s real hard to get into the theatre,’ she said kindly. ‘You have to know someone. Do you know anyone?’
    ‘No,’ said Lisa in a small voice.
    And then she had a sudden and brilliant inspiration.
    ‘Not yet ,’ she added.
    Miss Jacobs had overheard this conversation without appearing to do so, standing a few yards away from the group writing out an Alterations Ticket. She turned around.
    ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘She’s still young. She doesn’t know anyone yet . She’s just a slip of a girl.’
    Miss Jacobs turned her back on the astonished silence which her utterance had created, and walked slowly to a nearby rail of cocktail frocks, which were meant to be arranged by size.
    ‘I think some of these frocks are out of order,’ she said, turning back to Lisa. ‘Would you look through them, Lisa, and put them right? That’s a good girl.’
    Lisa, reading the sizes on the labels of the array of cocktail frocks, XSSW, SSW, SW, W, OW, (there were only two OWs