Something Wholesale by Eric Newby

however unskilled, that kept Lola at Lane and Newby’s at all.
    ‘You’re in the wrong business,’ Mr Wilkins used to observe with relish on these occasions to no one in particular, expressionless behind his spectacles. ‘You’re wasting your energy putting them on at all. Huh, Huh, Huh!’
    In those early days, whether by accident or design I was never wholly sure, I was treated to what were by no means fleeting glimpses of Lola’s thighs over which were stretched suspenders in shades which varied between puce and viridian according to the colour scheme she was adopting; delectable buttocks which the bright, frilly underpants she wore did little to conceal – underpants bought at a shop at Shaftesbury Avenue on which were embroidered the words ‘my defences are down’; and perhaps most disturbing of all, her breasts, fantastic, unnatural protuberances that were in fact natural but which seemed to be constantly pointed in my direction. Her skin was of such a ghastly transparency that when I just saw her take a bite from a bun stuffed with synthetic cream I half-expected to see the fragments in shadowy outline, travelling down her gullet to the unseen regions below. But in the weeks to come Lola’s digestive tract was one of the few parts of her anatomy that I was not given the opportunity to view at close quarters.
    She even managed to impart a degree of significance to the eating of her revolting ‘elevenses’. Taking a bite at a banana, at that time an article of diet ‘in short supply’, she used to lean across the table towards me at a moment when the Stockroom was temporarily empty, wearing a tight white sweater that made me feel as if I was on the face of the Finsteraahorn and ask me in a voice in which even in my disturbed state I found it difficult to detect any passion, whether I wanted ‘a bit off the other end’.
    I was more disturbed by Lola than I was at first prepared to admit, even to myself. The years I had spent in prison had been celibate ones; living on a diet of six hundred calories a day, except on the wonderful occasion when each of us had received two Red Cross Parcels at the same time, the lusts of the flesh were scarcely even a memory. Our dreams had been of great mounds of pudding; even the worst of us, rake-hells and near sexual maniacs, thought only of their mothers – and then only in the nicest possible way.Lola was nothing like the widows amongst whom I had been suddenly pitch-forked and for whose protracted ministrations I had been ill-prepared. Now, eating four good meals a day, like some Desert Father of the Fifth Century fallen from his pillar I found myself in torment and without the machinery of whips and hair shirts with which those early sufferers had attempted to rid themselves of a complaint that is almost always incurable, except by death.
    My parents had led me to believe, when they had carefully steered the conversation into these channels, that the temptations to which I would be subjected at Lane and Newby’s were similar to those experienced by doctors and could be resisted by something equivalent to the Hippocratic oath. ‘They’re a nice, sensible lot of girls with no nonsense about them,’ my mother said firmly on the day before my induction into the Stockroom. After my first encounter with Lola I came to the conclusion that either my mother had a different conception of nonsense to mine or else she had deliberately obliterated the image of Lola from her mind.
    It was slight comfort to know that my father was also conscious of Lola. Every morning and afternoon when he was on the premises he used to pass through the more lowly parts of his little kingdom in order to satisfy himself that all was well. On one occasion he discovered her wearing nothing but a red underslip and red shoes, like a demon queen in pantomime who had just emerged from a trap-door in the floor-boards.
    ‘That’s a finely developed girl you have in your department,’ he said, looking