A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas

reflected an urge to be kind and encouraging, or to play devil’s advocate for her own good. She liked it best when strangers became instantly engrossed, as Sandy and Nicky had done. Their bony shoulders were hunched over it, and the plumes of hair sparred with a life of their own. There was a yodel of triumph as their second attempt was successful.

      ‘But your score’s too high,’ Harriet said. There was another outcry, and then they set to work again. The reaction was beginning to be familiar.

      Harriet had done her research. She had spent two entire Sundays riding on the top deck of a 73 bus, north to south London and back again, through the dim streets at either end of the route and along the great channel of Oxford Street in the middle. Sunday was a good day for the buses. They weren’t too crowded, the passengers were bored by the slow journey and glad to be distracted. They only bothered to climb up to the top deck, Harriet discovered, if they were travelling some distance. She attracted their attention with the rattle and plop of the balls.

      It took some courage, at first, to approach people and ask if they wanted to play. But they almost always agreed. Soon she had developed a professional patter. I’m doing some informal market research. Do you mind if …? Harriet enjoyed her encounters on the isolated, swaying top deck. She played with gangs of teenage boys, with pairs of old ladies, mothers and children and solitary middle-aged men. Once, on the last leg of her last journey on an empty bus, she played with the West Indian bus conductor. She thought that in a fairer world he would have been a professor of logic. He set the paths unhesitatingly, even for the hardest of all the permutations.

      ‘It’s good,’ he told her. ‘It’s fun. My children would like this.’

      ‘Would you buy it?’ Harriet asked, as she always did.

      ‘Maybe.’ He patted his ticket machine on its worn leather strap. ‘We’ve all got a path to follow, haven’t we?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Harriet answered quickly, thinking of Simon’s path. All the gates closed. Or were they?

      ‘Would you buy it?’ she asked Nicky and Sandy.

      ‘Might do, for Christmas or something,’ one said, relinquishing the smooth discs.

      The other added, ‘If it was cheap. We’ve got to go, Sand. You promised your Mum.’

      They scuttled out of the shop with their silver bag, promising Harriet that they would come back another time. When they were gone she packed the game away in its box.

      She knew it was good. Sometimes her earliest conviction of how good it was came back to her, and she shivered down the length of her spine. She had only to convince the cold men who had money to lend of the same thing. She had to show them how the game had been enjoyed on the juddering buses. And she had to convince the money men that she could sell it to the bus passengers, and those people multiplied by thousands. Perhaps tomorrow, Harriet encouraged herself. She felt the bite of adrenalin in her blood.

      Harriet locked the shop and began to walk towards the tube station, turning the familiar equations over in her head as she went. When she was buying into Stepping, Harriet had found the shop and Ken had bought the lease for her. She was paying him back but the property still did not belong to her, and so she couldn’t offer it as collateral for a bigger loan. She would have done so if it had been possible; as she felt now she would have done anything, she wanted the money so badly. But the lease belonged to Ken, and although he had listened sympathetically to her proposal he was too careful to advance her the money for a second, much riskier enterprise. She needed too much money, in any case.

      She wanted to launch her game in the way it deserved. With a splash, with sumptuous packaging, with advertising, and with piles of it in every window, in every outlet. The figures were set out, with the rest of her calculations, in the proposals she had spent the last four months poring over. The equations had become very familiar, but the size of them still daunted her.

      Harriet had just under twenty thousand pounds of her own, her share of the proceeds from the sale of the flat she had owned with Leo. She had managed to add to her capital another pitifully small amount, by living on air in Belsize Park.

      Almost as soon as she reached her rented flat and unpacked the prototype once more, the telephone rang. It was Charlie Thimbell.

      ‘Harriet? Jenny’s up in Newcastle for a publication party tonight, and I’m not going home to cook for myself. Let me come over and take you out to eat. We can go to the Chinese place.’

      Jenny was back at her job as a publisher’s editor. From time to time she had to spend a night away, and Charlie was famous for his unwillingness to fend for himself. Harriet knew that there was nothing in her own fridge, and that even if there had been she probably wouldn’t get around to eating anything. She thought longingly of the little Chinese restaurant that Charlie was fond of, with its tasselled lanterns and kitsch mural.

      ‘Charlie, I can’t tonight.’

      He made a disgusted noise. ‘Why not this time?’

      ‘I’m working. I just want to go through it all one more time. I’m seeing the venture capital division at Morton’s in the morning.’

      ‘Are you, now.’ Charlie was professionally interested. ‘What d’you reckon?’

      ‘I’ve got a feeling this could be just the right connection, at long last. They’re funding a lot of other small ventures, some of them just as much long-shots as mine.’

      The notion of small amused Harriet now as it had done before. Small in the vocabulary of a big merchant bank like Morton’s meant a loan of less than a quarter of a million pounds. In her fruitless rounds of the banks and other funding institutions Harriet had been told more than once that she would find it easier to raise money if she was looking for a million or more. And yet she was shaking at the notion of a hundred thousand. She caught herself wondering if she had the right entrepreneurial qualities.

      Firmly, she told Charlie, ‘I want to be word-perfect.’

      ‘You can over-prepare, you know. Come on, let me take your mind off it.’

      ‘Thanks. But not tonight, honestly. You can take me out to celebrate when they agree to fund me.’

      ‘OK, OK,’ Charlie said, and rang off. When Harriet refused, he knew that she meant it. He left his office and went to the newspaper’s pub instead, where he had several drinks with two sports writers.

      Harriet made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the table she used as a desk. She set out the glossy black board beside the cracked packing case, and sat looking at the two of them for a moment. She had studied them so hard and for so long that she wasn’t even sure that she saw them clearly any longer. The numbers, the patterns and permutations, made long chains in her head.

      Impatiently, she drew a sheaf of papers towards her. Everything was there.

      The production estimates came first. Working with Mr Jepson, she had established the unit cost of each game, based on a first production run of thirty thousand. Thirty thousand was ambitious, but Harriet was convinced that to aim high was the only way. It would be cheaper to manufacture in the Far East, but from the other companies whom she had persuaded to talk to her, through a mixture of bluff and guile, Harriet had gathered that these sources were not all reliable. She calculated that it would be better, in the beginning at least, to pay for reliability and proximity. She could always drive up the motorway to see Mr Jepson at Midland Plastics. And she was sure that, on the spot, she could get what she wanted.

      In fact the board itself had been the least of her problems. The balls and counters could be bought in from another company who specialised in such things, and the spring mechanism that released the balls would come from yet another source. It was the packaging that had troubled her most. During her four-month crash course in manufacturing methods, Harriet had learned that all her game components must be assembled for sale in a moulded plastic tray. An injection moulding machine would have to be specially built to produce it, and that alone would cost her nearly twenty thousand pounds. And after that came the cardboard box