Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan

Author:Gertrude Trevelyan [Trevelyan, Gertrude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913861865
Publisher: Boiler House Press
Published: 2022-08-26T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

1 A commercial dirigible first flown in December 1929.

Chapter VII

Katherine wouldn’t believe it. “They can’t possibly mean they want to get rid of you, after all they said.”

“It rather looks like it.”

“Besides, they’ll have to pay you the two pounds a week they owe you for the formula.”

“Oh, well,” he said.

“Instead of the sum down, I mean.”

“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact…”

“Of course you had an agreement, that they’d have to go on paying it for a certain time?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I didn’t think of it.”

Katherine went pink. She thought it was incredibly stupid of Robert, but she didn’t want to think that because things were bad enough already. “It’s the Grahams,” she said angrily. “They must have worked it. Nobody could possibly imagine Ted Graham’s work was more valuable than yours. Of course not.” She was never going to see Vi Graham again. After all they’d done.

“Well,” he said, “Graham’s cheaper of course.”

“In any case,” she said, trying to see the best of it, “they’ll have to pay you the commission on sales of the solvent.”

“Doesn’t come to much. Still, it’s better than nothing, and I’m sure to get something soon.”

He went out and cleaned the car to have something to think about, and so that it would be ready for him to drive round and apply for jobs.

Katherine went into the kitchen and began to prepare a meal. She came back to the living-room and turned the wireless on, loud, so that she could hear it in the kitchen. She didn’t want to think about how stupid Robert had been, and there was no point in worrying because he would be sure to get another job soon. He ought to get a better job, too, with his experience, and that would teach the Grahams. It wasn’t that Robert was stupid, it wasn’t that a bit; it was just that he was too bright to have the kind of low cunning of a man like Graham. She took several tins, vegetables, fruit, and galatine in a glass, from a store in the white enamelled cupboard, and prepared a more elaborate meal than usual. When it was ready she looked through the advertisements in the day’s papers to find a job for Robert.

Robert came in with his hair ruffled and his cheeks pink under his glasses from cleaning the car.

“There doesn’t seem to be much going,” she said, putting the paper back in the rack.

He washed his hands and came and sat opposite her in the narrow high-brow dining-room with the plates of shining galatine and tinned pears on rush mats between them. “Nobody’d advertise to-day, couldn’t apply Saturday afternoon. We might as well take the car out,” he suggested, “now it’s clean.”

He cleaned the car again on Sunday afternoon and took it out on Monday to apply for a job over in Essex. Katherine knew he couldn’t be back until tea-time. She was ready for him in the living-room,

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