Free Concluding by Henry Green Page A

know as well as anyone that I must go by rules just the way you have to. And the regulations I'm under are simply this. That when one of the girls we're in charge of doesn't tell the truth after she's broken her word, we mustn't even question her, and we're bound to report it. And I have to make out a report which must go right away, straight up to the State Board in Government Centre, nothing can stop that. To do so would be an offence," she ended virtuously, and took a good look at the child. Merode was staring, with a completely blank expression, at the dado painted to resemble Roman pavements in perspective, "Then I don't have to tell you the view they'll take up there of a serious thing like this, Merode."
    "But Miss Marchbanks, what have I done?" the girl burst out.
    "Now are you being frank with me, dear? You're not a baby.
    Indeed, after all, you're practically a grown woman, that's just the whole trouble. Because you must see you can't be allowed to career about outside, at dead of night, and in our pyjamas."
    The girl said not a word, kept her face averted. Miss Marchbanks decided what she didn't like was her not meeting one in the eye. "Besides," she tried once more, "there's the two of you. Mary isn't back yet, you know."
    The child, she thought, seemed to turn to stone whenever Mary's name was mentioned. But now that they had the one uncovered, the other could hardly be far away. Yet there was Edge's parting shot. "Safety in numbers, Marchbanks," she had said. And "if it was only the one I would telephone Headquarters at once with her description."
    "Think it over, Merode." The older woman had again suddenly decided there could be nothing terrible, that everything would be all right. Almost as though the child sensed this she at once rose to leave the room.
    "No, sit down, dear, I haven't quite finished," Marchbanks said. "What were you up to? Tell me."
    "I don't know, ma'am."
    "Now really, Merode, I shall get quite cross in a moment."
    "It was nothing, ma'am, really."
    "You'll let me be best judge, if you please," Marchbanks said. There was no response.
    "Come now. Did you go out with a boy?"
    "Oh no, Miss Marchbanks." This, at least, sounded genuine to the older woman.
    "Did you try to meet someone else, then?" No answer.
    "In other words it's simply, Merode, that you won't tell. Isn't it?"
    But the girl had come to be mesmerised by the black and white receding pavements. No longer blinded in sunlight her eyes had caught on one of the black squares, as that pyjama leg had earlier been hooked on a briar. And while her horror at this interview increased, so the dado began to swell and then recede, only to grow at once even larger, the square in particular to get bigger and bigger till she felt she had it in her mouth, a stifling furry rectangle. Then, when she managed to shake herself free, she cleared it out, but only for a minute. After which this process began all over again.
    "Do think," Marchbanks was saying. "My dear, your whole future is at stake. If you set out with such a mark against you, things being as they are these days, when you leave here you'll just have a job on the machines," she said, speaking the brutal truth. "Because you should realise I can't help myself," she ended by falsely admitting. "I'll do all I can, of course. But, as you must get into your head before it's too late, there's Miss Edge and Miss Baker. Oh well, if you really want to know, I'm most afraid of Miss Edge."
    Merode could hardly take this in, trapped, as she now was, by one of the more frightening periods of the dado, that immediately before the black square would begin to swell, when the whole stretch was beginning to billow, as if the painted pavement was carried out on canvas which had started to heave under a rhythmically controlled impulse actuated from behind.
    "Was it a boy?" Miss Marchbanks demanded, her confidence about to evaporate. Then she thought of the child's mother and father. For she had known this come off