by John Masters
‘You go and read the paper,’ Jane said. ‘I’ll look at the joint. We’ll have our dinner at half-past one sharp … Nellie!’
Bob pulled his watch from its fob and checked it against the grandfather clock in the hall. In the kitchen, he heard Nellie washing dishes. Jane had gone up for her usual Sunday afternoon nap. He himself had dozed, as always, in his favourite chair in the parlour. Now he walked down the passage and let himself out of the back door. The back garden was twenty yards long and ten wide. On each side a creosoted wooden fence seven feet high separated it from the neighbouring back gardens, of No. 84 on one side, No. 86 on the other. A narrow gravel path ran down the right hand fence, of No. 84, all the way to the end, where it led to a shed and to a gate in the back fence. Between the path and the fence of No. 86 the ground was covered with grass, not as thick or as well kept as Bob would have liked to see it. Jane’s interest lay in the flower bed in front of the house, and his own in the shed. It was in that shed that he was building Victoria. Victoria had been his mother’s name. He had worshipped her.
The shed was seventeen feet by ten feet six inches, one long side against the back wall of the garden. The door by which Bob had entered was in two equal parts; when both were open, he could wheel out the machine which, raised a foot off the floor on a steel trestle and supported on either side by wooden props, dominated the room, not by its size but by its sheer presence. It was a motor cycle, but as the sun shone on it through the door as Bob went in, a man with eyes half open could believe it was St George … shining, brilliant, burnished steel.
It was lean and low, the saddle set back over the rear wheel, handlebars curved downwards and tucked in close against the front fork – for this was Victoria, which existed only to reach 100 miles an hour over a measured mile in two directions; and to achieve that the rider had to flatten himself along the machine and cheat the wind. None of the metal work was painted, and never would be. The only dark parts of Victoria were the brown leather of the saddle, the grey-black of the tyres, and the matt black of the two cylinder barrels.
She occupied the middle of the floor, crouching, heading for the now-closed doors. Along the back wall was a Drummond precision lathe, and a larger lathe for rougher work, both driven by belt from a 1½ hp electric motor. To one side stood a piece of apparatus, heavy-set bearing brackets supporting a shaft on which ran a flat-faced pulley wheel; shaped wooden blocks pressed against the pulley’s edge, and a long steel balance arm projected beyond the upper of the two blocks: this was the Prony brake, used to measure the power output of Victoria’s engine. Above the workbench, and all along the other wall, were wooden racks of screwdrivers, spanners, hand drills, and files – bastard, half-round, needle-nose, riffler … each with its own part in Bob’s great task.
After looking round, breathing deep of the mixed smells of worked steel and clean oil, he removed his coat and waistcoat and hung them on a hook behind the door – the bowler hat never left his head except in chapel, and in private houses. Working carefully, he disconnected the flexible coupling between Victoria’s driving shaft and the Prony brake, and refitted the engine sprocket and primary drive chain. Removing the props from either side, he lowered the back wheel on to a broad rubber wheel set in the floor, and connected a thick rubber tube to the exhaust, to carry its fumes to the outside through a hole in the wall.
Then he placed a pair of filled sandbags across the machine’s saddle to represent a rider’s weight, restored the props, making sure that the machine was now upright and steady, and checked the clamps that gripped the front wheel. He poured a pint of petrol into the fuel tank, gave the plunger of the hand oil pump a couple of hefty shoves, adjusted the setting of the air, magneto, and throttle levers, pulled the half-compression trigger and kicked the engine into life. Gradually he let in the clutch, and ran up through the gears – first, second, top – opening the throttle lever until the back wheel was rotating on the floor wheel at close on twenty miles an hour; then he stood back a pace, listened, and watched. The engine ran smoothly, the machine vibrating slightly but evenly, restrained by the props. Yet, last time he ran her, he was sure the vibration had been uneven. That was after he had fitted the first of the pair of Rudge rear wheels which Collis had tuned for him in Rowland’s wheel shop – after working hours, his time paid for by Bob – all with Mr Harry’s blessing.
He stepped forward, increased the speed to thirty miles an hour, and stepped back again, watching and listening, his head cocked. Still nothing.
He pulled back the throttle lever a little more, watching the needle of the Stewart speedometer climb to forty … fifty … sixty … ah, now he was getting it – faint but clear. At seventy it became definite to the eye as well as the ear – a rhythmic vibration that coincided with the speed of the rotation of the wheel. At seventy Victoria trembled in short bursts to that periodic rhythm. It would be bad on road or track, really going this fast … but at a hundred, what then?
He stopped the machine, detached the driving belt, slipped out the rear wheel and, in its stead, inserted the second of the Rudge pair that Collis had tuned.
Ten minutes later he started the engine again, and again ran the simulated speed up to seventy miles an hour. There was no vibration, no audible thrumming. The driving vee-belt ran true, the motor cycle remaining steady on its mount.
He sat down, staring at Victoria, thinking. Collis had tuned both wheels, and he was a good man, steeped in the art of spoking. He was getting a little old perhaps, but no older than himself. He’d have to take the faulty wheel back and have Collis mount it in his trueing jig, there to adjust each spoke nipple delicately until both belt rim and wheel rim ran in perfect alignment. He could do some balancing himself, by wrapping lead wire round a pair of adjacent spokes, close to the rim, and taping over the wire so that it wouldn’t come adrift at speed … but the final balancing would have to be done with the tyre in place, the wheel held firm by its three evenly spaced security bolts.
Well, he couldn’t do any more there now. He decided to spend the rest of his time working on the inlet tract of a spare cylinder. At everyday touring speeds the internal finish of the passageways for the petrol and air mixture was relatively unimportant, but when an engine was demanding all that the carburettor could supply they had to be smooth as glass, to cause no turbulence in the flow. He held the cylinder up to the shed window. Yes, there was a rough patch just behind the valve guide. He picked out a riffler file – narrow, its point curving upwards like the toe of a Turkish slipper.
He stood a moment, file in hand, thinking. When he began to feel the onset of a slight tremble, he groaned, put down the file, opened a drawer in the workbench and pulled out a battered piece of cardboard some twelve inches long by eight or nine inches high. On the cardboard was pasted an advertisement for Rowland cars, showing specifically the 1910 four-cylinder Ruby tourer, which he had cut out of the magazine where it had appeared. He propped this up in the window that looked out on the lane, the picture side outward, against the glass, then he drew the curtain behind it, set the cylinder on the bench, picked up the riffler file and began to work slowly, carefully, and with love. He was waiting and listening, too, but they were not uppermost in his mind, as long as he was at work.
Jane Stratton awoke, yawning and stretching luxuriously. Warm air blew gently through the open window, stirring the lace curtains, bringing with it the sound of boys playing in Jervis Street outside. She had slept an hour, as she always did, secure in the knowledge that Bob was in his shed, Nellie reading a love story in the basement, and nothing to be done in the kitchen or anywhere else in the house. Later, Bob would come in for his tea, with bread and butter and perhaps a boiled egg or some cold meat left over from dinner, and then they’d walk out of the house and to the chapel for evening service.
She liked to spend this half-hour thinking of her house and family. During the week she felt that she never had a minute for thinking, because she was always doing. As soon as one job was done, the ne
xt was there, waiting. So on Sunday afternoons she tried to look a little further ahead and around. Frank and Anne were the easiest: never anything to worry about there, except perhaps that Anne worked too hard, what with the two little girls and another on the way. She’d be better off when Frank took his father’s place. Then she could afford a harder working girl than that useless Clara, or perhaps have Clara work longer hours … Fred ought to get married. The widow he was seeing was a hussy – had been a hussy before she ever married, and her husband’s drowning hadn’t changed her – why should it? The only good thing about her was that she lived here in Hedlington and Walstone was fifteen miles away by road. The foreman of a farm didn’t have much spare time to go gallivanting after women. But she ought to find a good woman for Fred … not too young, certainly not flighty. She ran pictures of girls and young women of her acquaintance through her mind, like one of those new moving pictures: Mary Dale … too young; Jane Moody … too old – why she must be four years older than Fred; Annie Kingston … a flibbertigibbet – she’d have Fred in the poor house in no time; Jill Parsons … ah, there was a nice young woman, twenty-four or -five to Fred’s thirty-one; good family, well set up, took care of herself, worked hard in her father’s drapery shop, always polite to customers … the only snag was, Jane had heard that another man was courting her – Michael something … And how could Fred be persuaded to come to Hedlington to do his courting if he had so little spare time? She’d have to speak to Bob about it … Bob … she acknowledged that she was dreading the moment when he retired, and she’d have him about the house all the time. He’d spend most of the day in the shed, of course. With luck, he’d just treat the shed as though it was Rowland’s; go down there at seven-thirty sharp, with his lunch pail, work till the whistle went – he could hear the whistle at Rowland’s if he left the windows open – eat his lunch there, then back to work again till he’d walk up the path and in at five o’clock. The only difference in their lives then would be that he’d leave and return by the back door instead of the front.
She got out of bed and stood up, yawning. She was wearing her chemise and nothing more – a pigeon-like woman with a big bust, blue eyes, and greying brown hair. She washed her face and hands in cold water at the wash-handstand and began to dress, paying no attention to what she was doing, for her thoughts were still elsewhere … on Ruth, so proud of that coarse husband, and of the baby she was going to have. Well, that was all right. The world would be a sorry place if women didn’t love the babies they carried under their hearts … except perhaps if they’d been forced on them, like. Ruthie was so sure it was going to be a boy and would grow up to be just like Bill Hoggin. God save us all from that, and him a bastard into the bargain! Well, a Christian shouldn’t hold that against a man, as Frank said. It wasn’t his fault that his mother was a slut that drank gin and went with sailors down narrow alleys by the docks – for money, no doubt … Ethel ought to stand up more to Niccolo, that was a fact. Fred had said he’d speak to him, and that was good; it had to be done. But someone ought to speak to Ethel, too. It was all right for a husband and wife to make love – though her Bob had never been much of a one for that, to tell the truth – but when it came to a woman being hurt, the way Ethel said Niccolo hurt her, down there, always on her, not caring how she was, all hours of the day and night that he was home, and then talking about divorcing her because she hadn’t had a baby! It wasn’t always the woman’s fault. She should go to the doctor … and suppose it turned out that Niccolo was the one who couldn’t make a baby? What a disgrace that would be for Niccolo! That’s the only thing he had any sense of shame about – he certainly didn’t have any about beating Ethel, or spending his wages on gambling, and heaven knew what else. It came of being a foreigner. Bob despised all foreigners. He’d certainly been right about Niccolo …
She went downstairs, puffed up a few cushions in the parlour and sat down to read the juicier items of scandal in The News of the World … Then he made a certain suggestion to her … What did he do then? He removed a portion of her clothing, m’lord … intimacy was committed. It must have been in the motor car! Disgusting! She read on for twenty minutes, then turned to the society pages. The Duke of Aviemore had the honour of an audience with His Majesty … The Right Honourable Sir George Meanwell and his party are sailing to St Malo in Sir George’s yacht Temptress. A nice gentleman, Sir George, and a pillar of the Conservative party, to which Bob belonged, of course. Though Mr Harry was a Liberal … not much to choose between those two parties, to tell the truth, though, gracious, there’d be an uproar if you said so out loud. The Socialists now, they were different … they ought not to be allowed, the way they tried to upset the working men, and …
The front door bell rang and she heard Nellie scurrying up the basement stairs. Then she heard Harry Rowland’s voice, ‘Good afternoon … it’s Nellie, isn’t it? Is Mr Stratton at home?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Jane went out into the hall, ‘Come in, Mr Harry. Good afternoon, Miss Alice.’
‘I’m afraid we’ve brought the dogs, Mrs Stratton … Down, Bismarck!’
‘Come into the parlour. Would you care for a cup of tea?’
‘Not now, thankee. Alice and I were walking the dogs – Mrs Rowland’s not feeling so well today – and I thought we’d come by this way, as I’d like to have a word with Bob.’
Jane called, ‘Nellie! Go and tell Mr Stratton that Mr Harry’s here.’
Harry Rowland said, ‘Oh. that won’t be necessary. I’ll walk down. I know the way.
‘All right then, Mr Harry. Miss Alice and I can have a nice chat.’
He went out and the women heard his tread down the hall. then the opening and closing of the back door.
The three dachshunds pushed and played the leads tangling round the legs of the parlour’s polished and aspidistra-crowned table. ‘They’re nice dogs’ Alice said ‘but, oh, they stray! If I let them off the leash for a minute it takes me five minutes running and calling to get them back …’
‘Oh dear. What a worry that must be.’
Alice sighed. ‘One day we’re going to find one in the street, run over by a motor car. They don’t realize how fast the motor cars go.’
Jane Stratton settled herself more comfortably. Frank’s wife, Anne, had told her yesterday that she’d seen Miss Alice on Thursday last, walking in Hedlington High Street with a man – a gentleman. Now would be a good time to find out who the gentleman was, and whether there was any hope of a husband for her in that quarter. Might as well go at it direct. Miss Alice knew how much she, Jane, hoped for her to get married. She said, ‘Anne – our Anne – saw you with a gentleman …’
Bob heard the crunch of boots on the gravel, stopped his work, quickly took the picture out of the window and put it back in its drawer. He felt empty for a moment, but immensely relieved. Going to the door he saw Mr Harry coming down the path wearing his usual dark Sunday suit and his old square-topped hat, and carrying an ivory-topped gold-banded cane and a pair of kid gloves. Bob rubbed his hands on a piece of waste, and then stepped out.
Harry Rowland stopped and said, ‘Hope I’m not disturbing you, Bob, but I’d like a few minutes of your time.’
‘Come in, Mr Harry. There’s the chair and it’s clean.’
‘I’d have telephoned, only you don’t have one. We’ll put one in for you, if you like. At our expense, for the business, of course.’
‘I’d rather stay as we are,’ Bob said. ‘Those telephones are always ringing, interrupting a man when he’s thinking … And it’s not me that should have it, if anyone does, but Frank, now.’
‘Ah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, in a manner of speaking, just between ourselves. Not in the office, where those girls always seem to have their ears against the wall … and the partitions are too thin. Never thought we’d have women and typing machines when we started there, did we, eh?’
‘That we didn’t.’ Bob stood against the workbench, resting one hand on i
t, waiting for his employer to come to the point.
Harry said slowly, ‘Our time’s coming to an end, Bob.’
Bob indicated Victoria on her stand. ‘I’ve plenty to keep me busy.’
‘I was thinking of the factory … The Rowland Motor Car Company. Mr Richard has different ideas from mine. Things are going to change.’
‘I reckon so. Frank thinks different from me, too.’
‘But I don’t know that I approve of what I believe Mr Richard’s going to do – follow Ford’s example, mass produce, install a moving assembly line perhaps. The cars will not be hand-crafted any more, the responsibility and pride of a particular team. They’ll be cheaper. The Rowland name will lose its reputation.’
Bob thought, he doesn’t want to go. No more do I; but he promised, and if he goes, I go.
Harry said after a long pause, ‘Do you think we ought to reconsider – stay on another few years, perhaps?’
It was Bob’s turn to pause, to weigh his words carefully. At last he said, ‘Mr Richard would take it hard, very hard, Mr Harry. He’s been working and planning a long time to be ready to do what he thinks ought to be done. My Frank’s the same. And sometimes I think I don’t understand the world any more, nor the people in it. They don’t think the way I do, and I don’t like the way they do think.’
‘Nor I.’
‘So how can I make motor cars for them?’
Harry swung his cane intently, frowning at the floor. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘I promised, and I ought to keep my word … But, Bob, it’s going to be hard, to stand by, to see what we made, you and I, changed, destroyed perhaps … I can’t sleep at night, thinking about it.’