The Governor's Lady Read Free Page A

been in such circumstances, and so did not know. Pressed to amplify an answer, quite so disastrous, he had mumbled something about supposing that things would sort themselves out in the end somehow because they usually did; worst of all, and he had been content to leave it at that.
    It was not until the observer from Finance and Estimates asked the other key-question, ‘Are you afraid of figures?’, that the interview really-cameto life at all. For the answer came back as an uncompromising ‘No’. The observer became interested and began to probe. Series, it turned out, were Harold Stebbs’s speciality. Not series of anything in particular; just series. Numbers in the abstract; the very purest of pure mathematics. His last year at Cambridge, he explained, had been devoted to them.
    Because the Finance Observer felt himself getting out of his depth, he switched the conversation to statistics. Was Mr. Stebbs interested in anything so ordinary as statistics? he asked. And again the answer came back promptly. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘They’re the raw material.’ The observer felt that he had got him there. ‘Isn’t it the
figures
that are the raw material, Mr. Stebbs?’ he asked in a voice that carried with it just the right note of superiority and rebuke. ‘Aren’t the statistics the finished product?’
    And once more there came the prompt, singularly mannerless reply. ‘Statistics are just tables,’ he said. ‘A clerk can get out statistics. They don’t necessarily mean anything. It’s only when you begin to analyse them they become interesting. It all shows up in the presentation. With figures…’
    The Establishment Officer coughed. He did not like conversations that were conducted across the chair. ‘And are you interested in people as well as figures, Mr. … er … Stebbs?’ he asked.
    Not that people apparently mattered for the job. Sir Gardnor had made that perfectly plain in his last memorandum. ‘I am not looking for a leader of men, a Milner,’ he had written in his elegant, only mildly undecipherable longhand. ‘I am not searching for a District Officer, or Chief Magistrate or even an observant Tax Collector. All that I require is an intelligent, educated assistant with a good head for figures to work beside me for the next twelve months. I have already indicated that the Chief Secretary can spare no one. If the Office is unable to provide such a clerk, possibly one of the Merchant Banks…’
    It was because the Appointments Board, sitting there in that quiet room in Whitehall, had decided that Harold Stebbs was not a leader of men, that he now found himself somewhere on the Equator, standing in the shade of the Chevrolet, scratching his ankle where he had just been bitten, and watching while the native driver and his assistant changed the wheel.
    Like the boatmen, they were tremendous hammerers. The din alerted the whole countryside. A flock of white egrets mounted frantically into the air from the adjoining marsh like disembodied spirits; and soon an entire rose-garden of flamingoes joined them and moved off as well. The sky became carmine, striped with black, as they passed over.
    The hammering continued. When one engineer got tired, the other took over. From time to time, their attention strayed. They hammered out dents that they had just noticed in the wings. They removed deposits of rock-hard mud from under the chassis. Somewhere underneath they found a small angle-bracket. They hammered that, too. It broke. They threw it away. They returned to the rear-axle. They hammered even harder. The hammer broke. They rested.
    Because the tool-kit was open, one of them tried the wheel-brace. As a make-shift hammer, it was no more than second-rate. It bent. But as a wheel-brace, it was perfect. They tried fitting it into one of the nuts. Then onto all the nuts in turn. It matched. They tried turning