‘You see what I mean?’ said Ruth.

  ‘This is an extreme instance,’ said the dentist. ‘God moves in a mysterious way, that’s all.’

  There was a yelp from Nurse Hopkins as Wendy turned her teeth on her helpers, and a rush for syringes, and after that they were too busy to resume the conversation.

  When work in the dental department slackened Ruth would help out in the occupational therapy department. Here half the classes made raffia baskets, which the other half would then unravel. Union regulations forbade the selling of goods made by prison labour, and the argument, frequently offered, that this was a hospital, not a prison, cut no ice. Every home where there was a sick-bed, or even a case of measles, would qualify for exemption, once Lucas Hill Hospital was allowed indulgence. Besides, who out there in the outside world wants raffia baskets? Better unwind, unravel. Occupation is all: possessions meaningless.

  On Saturday afternoons visitors were allowed in, and on Saturday evenings the prison officers would hold a party with the fruit, cake and wine the visitors had left behind. The inmates could not, for the most part, and in the opinion of the officers, appreciate these delicacies, and experience showed that if given them they became restive and given to complaint. Some even cried, which was an act of regression, and put the day of their release yet further into the future.

  To cry in Lucas Hill was a sign of both ingratitude and madness, and was frowned upon. Lucas Hill was a particularly pleasant place the feeling was, staffed by people trained and anxious to help, and to be sane was to be grateful for being there.

  Sometimes inmates would escape; they would be promptly brought back by the police and locked into the quiet cell, to teach them gratitude. This special cell was padded and contained nothing except a lidless lavatory bowl. There was a grille in the door, through which cheese sandwiches and cartons of rather good orange squash could be pushed, and a glass panel which the staff could see through, but the inmates not. Patients often stayed in the cell for a week before the door was opened. When it was, they were indeed grateful for what they had and seldom ran away again.

  In Ruth’s spare time she went to secretarial and book-keeping classes in the city. These were offered almost free by the government to women and girls. The work was not popular with men, who prefer to dictate letters and spend money rather than account for it. Ruth was a hard-working pupil and progressed rapidly in her studies.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ Nurse Hopkins asked.

  ‘Because I am ambitious,’ said Ruth.

  ‘But you’re not planning to leave Lucas Hill?’ Nurse Hopkins was worried, but not, Ruth thought, worried enough.

  ‘Not without you,’ said Ruth, and Nurse Hopkins shivered with pleasure, and Ruth was gratified.

  One Tuesday evening, when Ruth felt that she had sufficiently mastered the basics of accountancy and book-keeping, she took the bus into the city. She got off at Park Avenue, where Bobbo’s office was, on the tenth floor of a new office block, marble-halled, and with its vestibules alive with the sound of splashing fountain water. Opposite this building was a fast-food restaurant, and here Ruth sat, taking care to be in a dark corner, eating baked potatoes, sour cream and chopped chives at her leisure. She watched and waited for Bobbo to emerge. She had not seen her husband since the day she took her children to the High Tower.

  Bobbo came out with a young blonde girl, clearly not Mary Fisher but of the same type, and presumably some kind of secretary or assistant, since she looked both adoring and diffident. He kissed the young woman very lightly and casually goodbye, and they parted their ways, but for a little while she stood looking after him, with longing and love. He did not look back. Bobbo seemed confident, prosperous and well, able to inspire love. He hailed a taxi and, running back across the road to catch it, seemed for a moment to look straight in at Ruth. But he failed to recognise her. Ruth thought that after all that was not strange: they now inhabited different worlds. Hers was unknown to him: those on the right side of everything take care to know as little as possible about those on the wrong side. The poor, exploited and oppressed, however, love to know about their masters, to gaze at their faces in the paper, to marvel at their love affairs, to discover their foibles. It is, after all, the only return they can extract from the daily brutal using-up of their lives. So Ruth would recognise Bobbo, lover and accountant; Bobbo would not recognise Ruth, hospital ward orderly and abandoned mother. Convenient, indeed essential, as it was to her plans not to be recognised, still she resented it. Any lingering spark of compunction, any trace of those qualities traditionally associated with women — such as sweetness, forgiveness, forbearance, and gentleness — were at that moment quite obliterated.

  Bobbo caught his taxi. Ruth waited until all the lights on the tenth floor were extinguished, and then made her way to Bobbo’s office. She let herself in with the master key she had taken care to pocket before setting fire to No. 19 Nightbird Drive. Her plans, vague then, centred mostly around the notion that she must practise doing what she was not allowed to do, were now fully formulated.

  Bobbo’s office had lately been redecorated in tones of buff and cream. Ruth thought that was Mary Fisher’s taste. Bobbo’s own room seemed more like an hotel lounge than an office; it contained a sofa long and soft enough for agreeable dalliance, with, presumably, such members of Bobbo’s staff as took his fancy. That would not be to Mary Fisher’s taste. The staff themselves—some six of them—shared, with many filing cabinets, rather more crowded quarters than Bobbo himself enjoyed. But that was the way of the world.

  Ruth drew the blinds and lit a single spotlight and with the aid of this and one of Bobbo’s pens began work on the files marked ‘Clients’ Account’ and listed under ‘A’. She moved theoretical sums from one ledger to another, signed a cheque for $10,000 payable to Bobbo and made out on his business account into his personal account, typed an envelope to his bank, enclosed a compliment slip, and added it to the pile of letters awaiting postage. It was the custom of Bobbo’s office to post letters in the morning, not the evening, since they were then less subject to loss and delay. She made herself a cup of office coffee, tried the sofa for comfort, tidied up after herself, adjusted the photograph of Mary Fisher, went through the personal drawers of the staff and discovered a love letter or so, kept in the office no doubt to be safe from husbandly eyes, left, locked up properly, and went back to Lucas Hill and the room she shared with Nurse Hopkins.

  This process she repeated every week, peacefully working through the files from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ until a great many dollars indeed had been transferred into Bobbo’s deposit account from his clients’ account. She removed any reference to these transactions on Bobbo’s bank statements by simply removing noughts with Tipp-Ex. It had always been Bobbo’s custom to file his bank statements unread, apart from a glance and a groan at his current account. Those who deal professionally with the affairs of others seldom pay proper attention to their own. Nevertheless, Ruth wanted to be on the safe side, although it seemed unlikely that he had changed in this, any more than in his amatory habits: the love of a woman, given and received, will do so much, no more. Bobbo loved Mary Fisher, but liked giving and receiving pleasure from passing strangers, as many people, female as well as male, do.

  It was from the same motive, the need to be on the safe side, that Ruth presently suggested to Nurse Hopkins that it would be more comfortable if they slept side by side rather than toe to toe. Ruth could put up with uncovered feet, since summer was coming, and would keep Nurse Hopkins warm enough by simple body heat. Nurse Hopkins agreed. The beds were moved, and there was much cuddling, kissing and sexual experimentation between the two women.

  ‘Women like us,’ said Nurse Hopkins, singing around the hospital, ‘must learn to stick together. People think because you’re not the same shape as other people you’re not interested in sex, but it isn’t so.’

  Sexual activity seemed to have a tonic effect on Nurse Hopkins: her menstrual cycle became regular, her eyes brightened, she lost weight, divested herself of many layers of woollies and moved briskly about the hospital.

  When Ruth had worked through Bobbo’s files, and put ‘Z’ firmly and gladly back on its shelf, she had the following conversation with Nurse Hopkins:

  ‘My dear, don’t you ever get bored here? The same screams and yells day after day; the same manic strugglings; the same injections; the same frog-marches to the quiet cell. Nothing ever happens! For the patients it may be eventful, too eventful even: for us it is not.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Nurse Hopkins.

  ‘Out there in the world,’ said Ruth, ‘everything is possible and exciting. We can be different women: we can tap our own energies and the energies of women like us — women shut away in homes performing sometimes menial tasks, sometimes graceful women trapped by love and duty into lives they never meant, and driven by necessity into jobs they loathe and which slowly kill them. We can get out there into the exciting world of business, of money and profit and loss, and help them too —’

  ‘I thought all that was supposed to be very boring,’ said Nurse Hopkins.

  ‘That is just a tale put about by men to keep the women out of it,’ said Ruth. ‘And there waiting too is that other world of power — of judges and priests and doctors, the ones who tell the women what to do and how to think — that’s a wonderful world as well. When ideas and power go hand in hand — I can’t tell you how exciting they find it!’

  ‘I daresay,’ said Nurse Hopkins, ‘but how do the likes of us get into it?’

  Ruth whispered into Nurse Hopkins’s ear.

  ‘But that would take money,’ said Nurse Hopkins.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ruth.

  The farewell party for the two nurses was gratifying; tears and laughter flowed free, and wine was rather rashly offered to the patients. A general over-excitement throughout the hospital kept the ETT busy, and Nurse Hopkins’s replacement, a Haitian lady, knelt on a patient so hard that she broke a rib; but the other members of the team thought that no bad thing. If their arrival was feared, rather than looked forward to, they might have to work less hard.

  Ruth and Nurse Hopkins found empty office premises down at the far end of Park Avenue, where those at the top end seldom go, for here the tall new gracious towers give way to shabby buildings, and the street narrows and is lined not by the awnings of smart restaurants, but by garbage bags piled high against dirty shop fronts. The telephone exchange is the same, however, at both ends of the avenue, so callers cannot tell whether they are speaking to the rich end or the sleazy end. Here, with Nurse Hopkins’s money, Ruth started the Vesta Rose Employment Agency.

  The agency specialised in finding secretarial work for women coming back into the labour market — either from choice or through necessity — women who had good skills, but lacked worldly confidence after years of domesticity. Those who signed on with the Vesta Rose Agency would receive retraining in secretarial skills and what Ruth called ‘assertiveness training’. The agency also organised crèche facilities for the babies and young children of those on its books, and a shopping and delivery service for their convenience, so that workers did not have to shop in their lunch hours, but were able to rest, as male workers are expected to do, and even go home on the bus unencumbered by shopping bags. For these privileges they paid dearly, but were pleased to do so.

  Nurse Hopkins ran the crèche on the top floor of the agency building, and if from time to time she used tranquillisers on the more obstreperous children, she was at least trained and qualified to do so, and knew what side-effects to look out for. She and Ruth shared an apartment a block away from the agency.

  ‘Wherever you go,’ said Nurse Hopkins, ‘I will follow. I have never been so happy in my life.’

  Within a month or so of its opening the Vesta Rose was functioning efficiently and was even in profit. The women on its books — and they emerged out of the suburbs on bus and train by the hundreds — were grateful, patient, responsible and hardworking; and for the most part, after a little training by Ruth, regarded office work as simplicity itself; as should anyone who has dealt daily with the intricacies of sibling rivalry and the subtleties of marital accord, or discord. Vesta Roses, as they came to be called, were soon in great demand by employers throughout the city; the agency even enjoyed a little fame; it was held up as a success story; an example to the weak-willed and complaining, what women could do if they really tried, if they hadn’t been fortunate enough to marry well! Vesta Rose herself remained elusive, and although she was prepared to give an occasional telephone interview to the press, she would never appear in person, nor permit herself to be photographed. Nurse Hopkins did all that part of it, and did it very well.

  ‘You see!’ said Ruth, ‘how little need there was to hide yourself away from the world.’

  ‘But I needed you,’ said Nurse Hopkins, ‘before I could do it People aren’t meant to be on their own.’

  Within six months Ruth had placed typists, secretaries, bookkeepers and catering staff in most spheres of city life. Clients appreciated her guarantee to replace unsatisfactory staff at two hours’ notice but seldom had to make use of it, so dutiful and grateful were this new breed of Vesta Roses. The agency took only five per cent of their wages, plus additional charges for child-minding, shopping — and, as time went on — a laundry and dry-cleaning service. There was no suggestion that they should claim their rights as Women with an upper case ‘W’, and insist that their menfolk take an equal share in child-minding and household chores — merely an understanding that this end, though laudable, was for most women too remote to be attainable, and that in the meantime practical help was essential, if the woman was to continue with her traditional role of homemaker and also earn. Their husbands would come home from work, dinner would be set before them, clean shirts laid out for them, the television set to the programme of their choice, and the flow of the household continue as it had always done. That way contentment lay, if not justice, and the turning of the man to the woman in the peace of the marital bed, and her to him, was perhaps all the compensation required for the evident injustices of married life in the modern world.

  Every week, when her staff arrived to take their wages, minus five per cent — or sometimes as much as fifty per cent if they had made use of all the agency services — Ruth would chat with them, one by one; discuss their troubles, try to solve them: find out a little, or sometimes a lot, if she was interested, about the firms they worked for. Sometimes she would ask for a few discreet services which they were happy enough to fulfil, and which could reduce the commission payable quite substantially.

  Ruth had to wait eight months before someone rang from Bobbo’s office. She used the time to start what banks call a ‘little healthy movement’ in the joint account which she and Bobbo had once enjoyed, until his removal of all but a few cents of the funds therein shortly before the burning of the matrimonial home, and which had lain quiescent since. That is, she paid in, sometimes by cheque, by post, and sometimes in cash, and in person, a hundred dollars here, a thousand dollars there, out of funds legitimately hers and raised from the Vesta Rose business, and would on occasion withdraw twenty dollars here, fifty there, in cash or by cheque, using Bobbo’s name. Once she withdrew two thousand dollars from Bobbo’s deposit account, signing in his name, and paid it into the joint account; that required further nocturnal visits to Bobbo’s office, and more work with Tipp-Ex when his three-monthly bank statements came through. However, the office junior at the bank was a pleasant young woman, Olga, from the Vesta Rose Agency, who had an autistic child in the crèche cared for by Nurse Hopkins, and so was anxious enough to be helpful: it was she who moved Bobbo’s current account statement card from the once-monthly section to the three-monthly, thus saving Ruth considerable work and anxiety. It was Olga, also, who ensured that the joint account statements were simply lost from the post and never reached Bobbo.

  When Bobbo’s office rang the agency it was to require the services of two reliable, well-qualified women — a part-time secretary for Wednesdays, and a girl to help out on Mondays and Fridays — days spent by Bobbo at the High Tower. Could the Vesta Rose Agency, with its reputation for reliability, help?

  Of course! Ruth sent Elsie Flower for the Wednesday job. Elsie was little and sweet and, in looks, rather similar to Mary Fisher. She had little hands which flew over the typewriter, and her neck bent prettily over the machine. She bowed her neck as she bowed her mind, as if for ever expecting some not altogether unpleasant blow to fall. She was bored with her husband — she had told Ruth so. She was in the mood for adventure. Ruth thought Elsie would do well enough for Bobbo.

  For the Monday and Friday job, Ruth sent Marlene Fagin. Marlene had four teenage sons by three different fathers, all disappeared, and so was particularly grateful for the agency’s shopping and delivery service. The sheer weight of food for five — and they were particularly fond of Coca-Cola, which is a heavy substance to carry about in quantity — had exhausted her as no office work ever could. She was perfectly prepared to render whatever small book-keeping adjustments in Bobbo’s books Ruth required, especially as sometimes Ruth remarked that delivering to the outer suburbs — where Marlene lived — could never be economically sound.

  On the first Friday when Elsie came to collect her wages, Ruth asked, ‘And how was your employer?’

  ‘Saucy,’ said Elsie. ‘And with his lady friend’s photograph looking on!’

  ‘How saucy?’

  ‘He put his hand through my hair and said how silky it was.’

  ‘Did you mind?’

  ‘Should I have?’ Vesta Roses liked to take instruction from Ruth. It paid. Sometimes she would waive commission altogether.

  ‘I always think,’ said Ruth, ‘one should meet experience as it comes, and not turn away. Life’s short. The things one regrets, I find, are not the things one did, but the things one didn’t do.’