“Do you know where these shopping bags come from?”
“They’re mine.”
“I see. They are yours.” Leamas waited. “I regret,” she continued at last, “that we do not allow it, bringing shopping into the library.”
“Where else can I put it? There’s nowhere else I _can_ put it.”
“Not in the library,” she replied. Leamas ignored her, and returned his attention to the archaeology section.
“If you only took the normal lunch break,” Miss Crail continued, “you would not have time to go shopping anyway. Neither of _us_ does, Miss Gold or myself; _we_ do not have time to shop.”
“Why don’t you take an extra half hour?” Leamas asked. “You’d have time then. If you’re pushed you can work another half hour in the evening. If you’re pressed.”
She stayed for some moments, lust watching him and obviously thinking of something to say. Finally she announced: “I shall discuss it with Mr. Ironside,” and went away.
At exactly half past five Miss Crail put on her coat and, with a pointed “Good night, Miss Gold,” left. Leamas guessed she had been brooding on the shopping bags all afternoon. He went into the next alcove where Liz Gold was sitting on the bottom rung of her ladder reading what looked like a tract. When she saw Leamas she dropped it guiltily into her handbag and stood up.
“Who’s Mr. Ironside?” Leamas asked.
“I don’t think he exists,” she replied. “He’s her big gun when she’s stuck for an answer. I asked her once who he was. She went all shifty and mysterious and said ‘Never mind.’ I don’t think he exists.”
“I’m not sure Miss Crail does,” said Leamas, and Liz Gold smiled.
At six o’clock she locked up and gave the keys to the curator, a very old man with First World War shellshock who, said Liz, sat awake all night in case the Germans made a counterattack. It was bitterly cold outside.
“Got far to go?” asked Leamas.
“Twenty-minute walk. I always walk it. Have you?”
“Not far,” said Leamas. “Good night.”
He walked slowly back to the flat. He let himself in and turned the light switch. Nothing happened. He tried the light in the tiny kitchen and finally the electric fire that plugged in by his bed. On the doormat was a letter. He picked it up and took it out into the pale yellow light of the staircase. It was the electricity company, regretting that the area manager had no alternative but to cut off the electricity until the outstanding account of nine pounds, four shillings and eightpence had been settled.
He had become an enemy of Miss Crail, and enemies were what Miss Crail liked. Either the scowled at him or she ignored him, and when he came close, she began to tremble, looking to left and right, either for something with which to defend herself, or perhaps for a line of escape. Occasionally she would take immense umbrage, such as when he hung his mackintosh on _her_ peg, and she stood in front of it shaking for fully five minutes, until Liz spotted her and called Leamas.
Leamas went over to her and said, “What’s troubling you, Miss Crail?”
“Nothing,” she replied in a breathy, clipped way, “nothing at all.”
“Something wrong with my coat?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Fine,” he replied, and went back to his alcove. She quivered all that day, and conducted a telephone call in a stage whisper for half the morning.
“She’s telling her mother,” said Liz. “She always tells her mother. She tells her about me too.”
Miss Crail developed such an intense hatred for Leamas that she found it impossible to communicate with him. On paydays he. would come back from lunch and find an envelope on the third rung of his ladder with his name misspelled on the outside. The first time it happened he took the money over to her with the envelope and said, “It’s L-E-A, Miss Crail, and only one s.” Whereupon she was seized with a veritable palsy, rolling her eyes and fumbling erratically with her pencil until Leamas went away. She conspired into the telephone for hours after that.
About three weeks after Leamas began work at the library Liz asked him to supper. She pretended it was an idea that had come to her quite suddenly, at five o’clock that evening; she seemed to realize that if she were to ask him for tomorrow or the next day he would forget or just not come, so she asked him at five o’clock. Leamas seemed reluctant to accept, but in the end he did.