Opening a bank account under a wrong name is a real pain in the neck. I’d managed this one as an experiment when I was working in Cardiff three years ago, in the name of Mary Taylor, but it had meant getting known under that name first, and I’d thought I wouldn’t bother with another. PO Savings Accounts are easier, and they don’t ask for any proof of who you are. I’d simply used this bank account to put money in from time to time, and once or twice I’d spoken to the bank manager about little things, and so I’d built up this background there. I hadn’t used it as a reference before, because you can only do that sort of thing once, and they hadn’t asked for it at Kendalls; but I gave it them here because I got the impression that this job might be worth sacrificing a background for.
The other minor problem is insurance cards, but that’s not really too difficult to get around. I know a place in Plymouth where you can buy them; then all you do is fill in your name and a nice new National Insurance Number, and buy the stamps up to the date you want and stick them on and cancel them. Insurance cards run for twelve months, and of course nowadays they’re ‘staggered’ so that they don’t all have to be in at the same time. The important thing in starting a new job is to start with a nearly new insurance card – it saves you stamps and it gives you perhaps ten months before the card has to be surrendered. The important thing is never to stay in a job until the card has to be surrendered.
I find it all interesting. I like tinkering with figures, and lots of people are such fools with them. I’ve seen one or two clever boys in my life, and some of them were really clever, but once they’ve got the money they haven’t a notion. They’re like children playing in the sand: it just runs through their fingers. You’ve seen films like Grisbi and Rififi. Honestly it’s just like that.
I started at Rutland’s the following Monday week. Nearly as soon as I got there I had an interview with Mr Christopher Holbrook, the managing director. He was a fattish man of about sixty, with big-business spectacles and a smile that he switched on and off like an electric fire.
‘We’re a family firm, Mrs Taylor, and I’m pleased to welcome you into it. I am a grandson of the founder and my cousin, Mr Newton-Smith, is another grandson. My son, Mr Terence Holbrook, is a director, as is Mr Mark Rutland whom you have already met. We have a staff now of ninety-seven and I don’t hesitate to say that we do not work merely as individuals but as a unit, a family, everyone being concerned for the good of all.’
He switched on the smile, which started slowly and warmed up nicely; then just when it began to get really good it switched off and you were left with his face going cold like a two-watt element, and his eyes watching you to see the result.
‘We are expanding, Mrs Taylor, and this year, as an experiment, we have opened a retail department which you will see if you look to your right through the window just across the street. This all means the engagement of new staff. For the moment, for a week or two, we want you to go over to the retail side, but ultimately we hope to have you here in the main building assisting Miss Clabon whom you have already met.’
He picked up the house telephone. ‘Has Mr Terence come yet? . . . No? Well, ask him to come in, will you, as soon as he arrives.’
I said, ‘You want me as cashier on the retail side, sir?’
‘Temporarily, yes. But if our present plans go forward we shall bring in an assistant for you who will take over when you are transferred here. Miss Clabon is engaged to be married, and she may leave us within a year or two. Have you been in printing before?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I think you will find it interesting. We are high-class jobbing printers, as the saying is. We do all kinds of work from expensive illustrated catalogues to publicity posters for British Railways, from menu cards for City dinners to textbooks for schools. Rutland playing cards and diaries, Rutland writing papers, are, I don’t hesitate to say, known all over England. I think you will find, Mrs Taylor, that ours is an enterprising firm and one that it will be rewarding to work for.’
He paused there, waiting for somebody to say ‘hear, hear’, so I said, ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Later on this morning I believe Mr Ward will show you round or he will detail someone else to do so. I always believe that new members of my office staff should be given a general overall picture of the firm’s activities at the earliest opportunity. I feel one can’t afford merely to employ people, one must interest them.’
He switched on his smile as he got up, so I got up too and was going to leave when there was a tap at the door and a young man came in.
‘Oh, this is my son, Mr Terence Holbrook. We have a new member of the staff, Terry, Mrs Mary Taylor, who is coming to us this morning as assistant cashier.’
This one shook hands with me. He looked older than the other young man – probably over thirty – and there was no likeness. He had fair hair, almost yellow and worn long, and a lower lip that stuck out, and beautiful clothes. His look took me in in four seconds flat.
‘How d’you do. I hope you’ll be very happy with us. You wanted to see me, Dad?’
Later I was shown round; but I didn’t get much intake that first morning, except of noise and machinery and new faces and smells of paper and print. The building was on two floors, and the upper floor was where the office staff worked. I liked the look of the cashier’s office, which was the last one before the stairs. It was divided off by a frosted-glass partition, and to reach it you had to pass through the next office where there was only the telephone switchboard, with one girl, and some filing cabinets. I mean, it could hardly have been better.
I’ve got the new-girl approach pretty well laid on by now, and I soon settled in. I thought Sam Ward the manager showed me the sarcastic side of his tongue sometimes, and Susan Clabon, the main girl cashier, took a bit of thawing; but as soon as I went over to the retail side and met Dawn Witherbie I had a friend for life who told me anything I wanted to know.
‘Well, dear, it’s like this. Mr George Rutland, Mark’s father, was managing director when I came, but when he died Christopher Holbrook became MD and Mark Rutland came into the firm. Rex Newton-Smith – that’s the fourth director – he’s just a passenger, turns up four times a year for directors’ meetings. Lives with his mother, even though he’s fifty odd. D’you like sugar? One or two?
‘Of course Christopher Holbrook, he booms away in his office, but it’s the two younger ones and Sam Ward who do most of the work. Terry Holbrook and Mark don’t get on – you noticed that yet? Sticks out like a sore thumb. Damn, this spoon’s hot!
‘Mark’s made such a difference since he came – he’s turned the place upside down. It’s his idea, this retail side, and it’s been making money ever since it opened. You coming to the staff dance? It’s not until May. We usually have a good time. Didn’t get home till five last year. You ought to have a good time with your looks. They all turn up, directors and all. Mark didn’t come last year because he’d just lost his wife; but absolutely everyone else. Terry’s great fun; really lets his hair down. But watch out for him. He’s mustard. He talks rather sissy but that means nothing. Phew, only half eleven; how the mornings drag.’
‘He lost his wife?’
‘Who, Terry? No. He’s married but they don’t live together any more. It’s Mark who lost his wife. A year last January. Kidneys or something odd. She was only twenty-six.’
‘Perhaps that’s why he looks so pale.’
‘No, dear, that’s natural. He looked just the same before. It’s funny how they don’t get on, Mark and Terry. I often consider. Why do two men hate each other? Usually it’s a woman. But I don’t see how it can be in their case.’
It did not worry me how they got on. I didn’t expect to stay that long.
But it didn’t pay to hurry. I opened an account at Lloyds Bank in Swiss Cottage and transferred to it the balance of my account in Cardiff. Then I told them to sell my few little investments and had the money paid into my Swiss Cottage account. Then I began to draw
the money out in cash and pay it into my account under my own name at the National Provincial Bank in Swindon.
I didn’t go down to see Mother during this time. She had an eye like a knitting needle, and sometimes being asked questions got on your nerves. It always surprised me she’d swallowed the Pemberton story so easily. Perhaps I’d cooked up so much about him that I almost believed in him myself. It’s a great help with people like Mr Pemberton, to believe in them yourself.
One day when I’d been with Rutland’s seven weeks I was called into a sort of summit conference and there they all were: Mr Ward, and the progress chaser, Mr Farman, and the sales manager, Mr Smitheram. Newton-Smith, the fourth director, was there too, an enormous great man with a moustache and a thin squeaky voice as if he’d just swallowed his kid brother.
Old Mr Holbrook did most of the talking, and as usual he made it sound like an election speech, but in the end I realized he was saying they were all pleased with the way I’d helped to rearrange the bookkeeping on the retail side, and now they wanted to ask my advice about reorganizing the cash system of the works itself. I was flattered in a way and a bit caught out of step, because the one they should have really asked first was Susan Clabon; and after a minute I suddenly looked up and saw Mark Rutland watching me and knew he was behind this, behind me being invited in like this.
I asked questions and listened, and soon saw there were two opinions about it on the board. Then I gave mine as well as I could, though I sided more than I wanted to with the stick-in-the-muds because on the whole the more machines you have the harder it is to cheat.
In spite of what Dawn Witherbie had said I was quite surprised at the polite nastiness there was under the skin at that board meeting. It seemed to be Mark Rutland against the Holbrooks and Sam Ward, with Rex Newton-Smith acting peacemaker and the other people trying to keep their feet dry.
Just as it was over the bell went for the dinner break and there was the clatter of feet on the stairs coming up to the canteen. I thought as I left I’d walk through the printing shop while it was all stopped. Almost right off Terry Holbrook caught me up.
‘Congratulations, Mrs Taylor.’
‘What on?’
‘Do I need to say, my dear? Not to an intelligent girl like you.’
I said: ‘You should have asked Susan Clabon to come in as well as me. It wasn’t really fair to her.’
‘They did want to,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t hear of it. I said you’d got better legs.’
I looked at him quickly then, like you turn and look suddenly at someone who’s leaned on you suggestively in a bus.
He said: ‘In twelve months you’ll be chief cashier. Twelve months after that – who knows, my dear. You need sun blinkers to look steadily at your brilliant future with Rutland’s.’
We walked down between the litho machines. There were several girls and men still lingering. By now I knew most of them by sight and a few by name.
‘Hullo, June,’ Terry said to one of the girls familiarly. ‘Ready for the dance next week?’
She was one of the girls who worked a folding machine, and the three-sided plywood partition round her high chair was stuck with pictures of Pat Boone and Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele and Elvis Presley.
‘You a jive expert?’ Terry Holbrook asked me, looking where I was looking.
‘I’ve done it,’ I said. ‘But a long time ago.’
‘Blasé, that’s what she is,’ he said to the girl. ‘Hullo, Tom. Back any winners on Saturday?’
‘Yes, one,’ said a young man who was wiping some yellow dye off his thumb. ‘But it was Eagle Star at five to four on, so I didn’t clear anythink by the end of the day.’
Eagle Star, I thought, as I walked on. I’ve seen him. A big brown horse with a spot on his nose. He was at Manchester and ran in the November Handicap . . . The way the posters were printed got me. The ink was brilliant and the machines printed one colour at a time, building up the poster until it was complete . . .
‘Interested?’ Terry Holbrook caught up with me. ‘It’s an Italian machine we bought a few years ago. An Aurelia. Does everything we want slightly better than any other, my dear.’
He wasn’t really thinking what he was saying: he was eyeing me. The place was nearly empty now. I thought, This frock isn’t dowdy enough.
‘Why Italian?’
‘Why not? It was the time of the credit squeeze over here, and the Italians offered us ten different variations of HP. This next one’s a German – pre-war. It’ll have to be replaced soon. Mark – the directors are keen on a new idea that’s just come out . . . these two are English. Aren’t you bored?’
‘What with?’
‘Looking at machines.’
‘No, why?’
‘It isn’t girlish to be interested in machines.’
I looked at him out of the corners of my eyes, and noticed for the first time that he’d got a rather bad birthmark on his neck. That was probably why he wore his hair long. He wasn’t good looking anyway, with his jutting bottom lip. There was a sort of sly smiling wildness about him, though.
‘We’re the wrong way round,’ he said. ‘This is the typesetting room where all the work begins.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Anyway I have to get my lunch.’
‘What do you think of the firm, my dear? I don’t mean the work, I mean the people.’
We were there by ourselves in this room, and the whole building seemed suddenly quiet. I had a feeling he was going to do something, put his hand on me or something: so I moved away, went over and stared at a Linotype machine.
‘One big happy family,’ he said. ‘That’s Dad’s line, isn’t it?’
‘What I’ve seen of the people so far I like.’
‘The important thing is to choose your company. I wonder what sort of company you like, Mary.’
That was making his sordid thoughts rather plain.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘it’s only a few months since I lost my husband.’
That held him. His look changed, but I couldn’t make out what he was thinking. Then I caught sight again of the mark on his neck and for some reason or other I began to feel sorry for him. Feeling sorry for people is something I’ve been able to live without in my life. So far as I recollect no one has ever wept over me, so for me there’s strictly no traffic either way.
But he was out of the run. I wondered if that mark had always pulled him down, if boys had jeered at him at school and teenage girls had sniggered, and maybe he had been let down and was on the wrong side of the fence too.
I went to the door of the composing room. I wondered if that was why he dressed the way he did: yellow waistcoat, chocolate-coloured trousers etc. I wondered what he was like inside and what he thought about me there in that comp room and what he would have said or done if I’d been the easy catch.
I wasn’t the easy catch. I said: ‘I must go and get my bag, Mr Holbrook.’
Every day when the retail department closed, the money taken during the day was carried across the street to the main building and locked away for the night, because there was no proper safe in the shop. This money was never banked because every Friday twelve or thirteen hundred pounds was paid out in wages, and the takings from the retail side went towards this. Takings on the retail side varied a lot; sometimes there was hardly a hundred in cash taken in a week, sometimes four or five, it depended what particular customers we had and how they paid.
On Thursdays before the bank closed the wage cheque was taken to the bank by two men and enough money drawn out to make up – together with what had built up on the retail side – the total wages to be paid on Friday morning. Susan Clabon and another girl then worked making out the pay envelopes. When the change was made I should be one of the two paying out the wages.
The safe was in the cashier’s office, but of course the girls didn’t have keys. Mr Ward kept one set and Mark Rutland another. The managing director, Christopher Holbrook, had a third.
One day Mark Rutland came on me in Mr Holbrook’s office sniffing at the roses on his desk. I’d just got round to the right side of the desk in time. I blushed and said I’d brought the cheques for Mr Holbrook to sign and had got taken by the smell of the roses.
He said: ‘They’re the first of the season. My father was a great rose grower. In fact he was more interested in that than in printing.’
I licked my lips. ‘The only one I ever had was that pink rambler with the white centre. It used to climb all over the gate of our bungalow in – in Norwich. What’s this one called?’
‘It looks like Etoile de Holland.’ He put his sallow face down and sniffed it. ‘Yes. I think it’s still the best of the crimsons . . . Have you ever been to the National Rose Show?’
‘No.’
‘It’s on next month. It’s worth a visit if you’re interested.’
‘Thank you. I’ll look out for it.’
As I got to the door he said: ‘Oh, Mrs Taylor, we’re having our annual dinner and dance next Friday. It’s the usual thing for everyone to turn up, especially new people. But if you don’t feel like it because of having lost your husband let me know, will you. Then I’ll explain to my uncle.’
‘Thank you, Mr Rutland,’ I said, butter hardly melting. ‘I’ll let you know.’
CHAPTER THREE
I suppose I wasn’t the sort of child anyone would ever hold up as an example to others. Ever since I was seven or eight I’ve found myself sharper than most. If I got in a mess I always managed to slide out of it, and most times I avoided the mess. So by the time I was nineteen I thought pretty well of myself.
The twice I’d been caught stealing, when I was ten, was because the other girl had suddenly gone un-brave and confessed all. It was a lesson about working with other people that I never forgot. And the fearful row Mother kicked up when the police came, and then all that stuff with the probation officer, had taught me a lot too. I don’t mean I was a hardened criminal in my teens, or anything like that, but when I did anything I watched out I wasn’t caught. And I wasn’t either.
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