A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas

it, that must be designed and proofed and then printed. The cost of quality colour printing had startled her more than anything else.

      At last, when the components were all ready in their plastic trays, the instructions, and the bright, beautiful boxes must all be brought together and shrink-wrapped ready to be sold.

      But none of this could be done until she had orders from wholesale and retail buyers, and perhaps only firm orders would enable her to raise the money to start a production run that would allow her to meet those orders.

      It was like a shivering house of cards, in which the collapse of one corner would bring down the whole shaky structure. Wearily, Harriet rubbed her eyes.

      She had come this far. She was going to show Morton’s that, if only they would back her, she would go much further. There would have to be no shaky corners, that was all. She returned her attention to her papers. The manufacturing details wouldn’t interest the money men, only the figures at the bottom of the neatly typed pages. At the wholesale price she had established, not quite as low as she could have pitched it because she wanted her game to appear a quality product, and assuming that she could get all her thirty thousand units into the shops in time for Christmas, she could accommodate a start-up loan of one hundred thousand pounds, and clear another hundred thousand for reinvestment, expansion, overseas sales. Break-even point was fifteen thousand units.

      The prospect glittered at her.

      But again, her card house trembled. To get the games into the shops in time for Christmas selling, the manufacturing must be completed by July, August at the latest. The buyers would place their basic orders at the Toy Fair in London at the end of February, and reorder later when selling got under way. Harriet had booked a stand at the Fair without any certainty that she would have anything to display on it except a split packing case and a lonely slab of black plastic adorned with white wishbones. And it was already mid-January.

      The urgency of her need to raise capital gnawed at her all day, every day, but now it gripped her like a physical spasm. Harriet got up from the table, stretching her stiff limbs, and went over to the window. She hadn’t bothered to close the curtains before sitting down and she looked out at the dingy basement area and the railings above that separated it from the street. She rested her forehead against the cold glass and breathed slowly, reassuring herself. She would get the money. She would get the orders at the Fair. The game would be in the shops by the autumn. And her own efforts would make sure that it sold out of the shops again.

      Harriet looked up and saw the two cats winding in and out of the railings, mewing at her. She had forgotten to let them in, forgotten to feed them. Stricken with guilt she went to the door and opened it. The cats bounded down the steps and streaked between her legs and into the kitchen. Harriet followed them and spooned meat out of a tin into two bowls. The yelping subsided at once into satisfied chewing, punctuated by bursts of purring. Harriet absent-mindedly cut herself a slice of bread and ate it leaning against the kitchen table, watching the cats’ complete absorption in their food. If she could only bring the same attention to setting up her company, she thought, the obstacles would probably melt away.

      The tea had gone cold in the pot, but she poured herself another cup anyway and settled down to her figures again. Replete, the cats followed her to her seat. One settled itself like a hot cushion against her feet, and the other launched itself into her lap. Harriet stroked the soft fur. She was glad of the company of the cats. They didn’t distract her, as Charlie Thimbell would have done.

      Beyond the practical details of manufacturing and sales, the bank would want to know about the structure of the company they were being asked to invest in. Weighing up her requirements very carefully, Harriet had concluded that it would be best kept very small. She calculated that at the beginning she could run it herself, as the sole proprietor. She would need a secretarial assistant, and a part-time book-keeper. She would also need an accountant, the best possible accountant. But in her card-house world she would need to raise the capital before she could appoint one.

      With clear sight, Harriet knew that she was really asking for investment in herself. It was her own energy, her own selling skills, that would make her venture work. From careful analysis of her market – not at all scientifically done, but with the intuition that she would have to let herself rely on – she believed even a bad game could be made to sell well. If it was packaged right, and cleverly marketed, and if it was enough talked and written about where people noticed such things, then it would sell. It might only be played once or twice, but the price would still have been paid for it.

      Harriet was convinced that she could package and sell and promote as well as anyone else; better, even, because it was all she had to concentrate on. There were no other demands on her, she had nothing else to give herself to. She would present herself to Morton’s.

      And she had the added satisfaction, the added insurance, of knowing that her game – Simon’s game – was good. It was better than anything else she had seen or could remember.

      The rain cleared overnight. Harriet reached the bank’s new black-glass building in thin sunlight, seven minutes early. She stood looking at the City edifices rearing up around her, at sooty stone and concrete and glass, feeling her irrelevance in their weighty shadows.

      Of course, she told herself. What else should you feel?

      At exactly two minutes before the appointed time, she presented herself to the receptionist at a desk in the marble lobby. Behind Harriet’s back a fountain expensively trickled amongst green fronds. As the receptionist telephoned to announce her, Harriet thought about the different languages that money spoke. This soft one, of quiet voices in harmony with polite water and smooth, cold stone, was becoming familiar to her. She was aware that if she penetrated further she would have to learn to interpret other, coarser tongues.

      Following the receptionist’s instructions she took the polished box of the lift to a lofty floor. Up here there was a long carpeted vista and a plate-glass sweep at the end that gave a further vista of towers and blind eyes of glass. It was quiet, like being in the nave of a church, looking towards some vast altarpiece. In the distance, yet all around her, Harriet could hear a low humming. She knew that it was machinery, the bank’s electronic heart, but it reminded her irresistibly of the murmur of prayer.

      A man came out of one of the doors that opened, like pew-ends, into the nave. In his dark clothes against the bright glass he seemed featureless, an acolyte.

      ‘Mrs Gold? Would you come this way, please?’

      Obediently she went with him. Beyond the door there was a conference room. It was so ordinary, with its empty oval table and glass ashtrays and unmemorable pictures, that Harriet felt momentarily disorientated. The acolyte had become a middle-aged man in a conservative suit. There were two other men waiting in the room, surprisingly young, in just the same clothes. All three of them had pink, smooth, pleasant faces, as indistinguishable one from the other as the pictures on the walls.

      Harriet made an effort to collect herself. Unthinkingly, she smoothed the hem of her own plain, dark jacket. The skirt of her suit was narrow, but not too narrow, to the knee. Her shoes were plain, dark and low-heeled. She was dressed right, reflecting the bank men exactly.

      ‘Won’t you sit down?’

      The youngest of the trio held out a chair. Harriet sat. She smiled at each of them but she refused the formal offer of coffee.

      ‘Well, Mrs Gold. Won’t you tell us about your project?’ The invitation came from the oldest one. He rested his wrists on the table, hands clasped, ready to give her his full attention. The other two, on either side of him, adopted almost the same position. Harriet looked at each of them in turn, remembering the names by which they had introduced themselves, and then she began.

      Softly, without emphasis, she told them, ‘The game is called Conundrum.’

      It had taken her a long time to fix on a name. Simon had never called it anything. For a long time, in her own head, it had just been Simon’s game. After meeting the logician bus conductor she had thought about his pathways, and his theory of predestination, and also of Simon’s words, It’s a