Polly Pilgrim

by Marie Joseph

  Opening his eyes, he stared at the frantic expression on the face of the young woman as she looked up from her notebook for a brief moment. Putting his hat back on his head again, Robert raised it an inch and smiled.

  ‘A nice afternoon. For the time of the year,’ he said, in his pleasantly deep voice.

  ‘Hush!’

  His pale grey eyes flew open in astonishment as he stared into Polly’s furious face. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Don’t speak! Not a word or I’m sunk!’ Polly flipped over a page, gazed in mute horror at what she saw written, and groaned aloud. ‘Does deliverance of our retinue make any sense to you?’

  Robert blinked. Her eyes were the deep vivid blue of bluebells drenched with dew, and surely those weren’t tears sparkling in their depths? He slid along the bench and saw a page of shorthand. ‘Having difficulty transcribing your notes?’ He rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever exactly heard of anyone delivering a retinue. Not exactly put like that.’

  ‘Retinue could be a collective noun for raincoats. You know. A gaggle of geese, a shoal of fish, a retinue of raincoats?’ Polly gripped her pencil hard so that her knuckles gleamed white. ‘Oh, flamin’ ‘enery, it’s no good. I can’t remember what he said.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Mr Goldberg, the boss of the new raincoat factory. He’s just interviewed me for the job as his secretary.’ She flipped the notebook closed. ‘I was that busy putting pink polish on my nails and sewing a lace collar into the neck of my frock, I never thought to practise my shorthand. And to think I was top of the class in it seventeen years ago!’ She tapped her handbag with a finger and he saw that her nails were indeed varnished a rather pleasing shade of pink.

  ‘And they clash with my coat,’ Polly said, following his glance. ‘The letter I’ve got to type’ll look like the Chinese alphabet when I’ve finished with it.’

  ‘Ara chickara, chickara, roony . . .’ Robert said at once. ‘My father used to recite it to me when I was small.’

  Surprised, Polly burst out laughing. ‘Mine too. And I’ll tell you something else. I believed it was the Chinese alphabet till I was about twelve.’ She made a wry face. ‘If I type this out as it stands and someone from Scotland Yard reads it, I’ll never be able to prove it isn’t a list of military secrets.’ Opening her bag she took out the notebook again. ‘What do you make of “we must fraternize the heinekalls”, for example?’

  All at once she got up to go. ‘Sorry I was rude to you, hushing you up. And yes, it is a nice afternoon, especially for the time of the year.’ She smiled her wide smile. ‘And please don’t look so worried. I wasn’t banking on getting the job.’ She corrected herself. ‘Well, at least, if I was, I’m not now. You can’t win ’em all.’

  He watched her go, long red coat flying open, small heels tapping on the gravel path, the sun making a glory of her corn-coloured hair. Before she turned the corner she looked back, raised a hand to wave, and was gone.

  And immediately he felt a tiny frisson of excitement low down in his stomach, an almost forgotten sensation, catching him unawares.

  Later that evening he sat alone in his quiet house, a glass of beer on the arm of his chair, remembering her.

  Robert Dennis was no defeatist, shrinking into a shell of solitude of his own making. His war service and the death of his wife had matured him to a state of mind where he believed that what would be would be.

  Far from a recluse, he accepted that loneliness and being alone were two different states of mind. He liked his own company, he told himself, and self-pity nauseated him. Just being alive after coming back from France had taught him a sort of contentment, but in every man there dwells a sense of looking out for happiness, and not for a long, long time had he felt so attracted to a woman.

  He found himself wondering just how much the girl in the red coat had needed that job. He wasn’t fooled by her nonchalance, and without even knowing her name he felt a tender protectiveness towards her.

  For the first time since his wife had died, just four months before, he accepted the fact that he was a man without a cause, a man so used to cherishing that, without a woman to cherish, he was in effect merely existing.

  The thought was new and disturbing and he tried to reject it by putting a record on the turntable of his cabinet gramophone. Beethoven had always had the power to soothe, but tonight even the soaring music couldn’t calm him. Tonight he felt his age.

  ‘So what can you do?’ Manny Goldberg asked himself, reading through the typed letter placed in front of him by a very subdued Mrs Pilgrim.

  Strange how he’d found himself almost willing this lovely young woman to succeed. But watching her struggling to type out her notes, sighing when the keys of the typewriter came up bunched together, rubbing furiously with an eraser, forgetful of the carbon underneath, tongue protruding slightly, face flushed, Manny had known she wasn’t equal to the job. He passed a hand wearily across his eyes.

  It would have to be the first girl he’d interviewed that morning. In his mind’s eye he conjured her up. So thin that she’d need extensive padding even to look flat-chested; so keen and efficient, her fingers had flown over the keys like one-day butterflies. Physically so very unlike his Miriam back there in Germany, believing her youth and her beauty would save her from the terrors Manny was sure would come. His Miriam was all rounded curves, like the fine young woman standing at the other side of his desk, cushiony, womanly, her eyes fixed on him with a resigned expression in their deep blue depths.

  ‘I’ve made a right mess of it, haven’t I, Mr Goldberg?’ Polly lifted her shoulders in a gesture of resignation. ‘Ah, well, I suppose it’s back to the salt mines.’ She reached for the red coat hung on the peg next to his black Homburg. ‘I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’

  ‘So who said anything about wasting my time?’ Manny came to one of his quick intuitive decisions. ‘Can you use a sewing machine, Mrs Pilgrim?’

  Polly nodded. ‘I can use one all right, but I have to be honest. Granted we only had one sewing lesson a week at school, but it took me two years to make a pinny, and when I got it home it took my mother an hour to decide what it was. My daughter says she’d rather die a painful and lingering death than wear anything I’ve made for her.

  Behind a well-manicured hand, Manny hid a smile. ‘Which school did you go to, Mrs Pilgrim?’

  ‘The High School.’ Polly shrugged. ‘But I left after I’d got my School Certificate when I was sixteen. They didn’t teach commercial subjects, and all I wanted to be was a secretary, so I went full time to the Technical College for a year. I was good at book-keeping. Double entry, you know? You won’t believe it, but I got good speeds in shorthand and typing, then I got married. Not because I had to,’ she added quickly, ‘but I had a baby in the first year and that put paid to my career.’ She stared straight into Manny’s eyes. ‘Married women up here don’t have careers, Mr Goldberg. Not many of them try to do well at school really, not with knowing they’ll finish up cooking and cleaning anyway.’

  ‘And you say your husband has gone south to look for work?’ Manny pulled Polly’s letter towards him. ‘Has he had any success yet?’

  ‘Not in the way he wanted.’ Polly lowered her voice confidentially. ‘He’s a clever man, Mr Goldberg. A landscape gardener, a landscape architect really, but he hasn’t got the certificates to prove it. He’s been taken on at Kew Gardens. Kew Botanical Gardens down London way. It’ll only be a matter of time before they see his real worth. He can grow a seedling from a lump of granite, my Harry can.’

  Manny was surprised to feel his eyes grow misty. He only hoped this gardener fellow deserved this lovely, frank, open-hearted young woman. For a moment he was tempted to take a chance, then the sight of the letter she’d typed hardened his resolve. Manny Goldberg hadn’t pulled up his roots, started from scratch again, by being a soft touch. He fiddled with a fountain pen, taking off the cap then screwing it back on again.

  ‘There is
a little job I think you could do,’ he said at last. ‘Come with me down the yard into the mill and I’ll show you. It only pays eight shillings a week, but it’s important. In some ways it’s the most important job in the factory. Want to take a look-see?’

  On the way home Polly called in to see her mother. Because it was a Monday afternoon Edna’s washing was piled up ready for ironing, and while the last few things were steaming gently on a clothes horse in front of the fire, she was cleaning her windows with a wash-leather, rubbing them afterwards with one of her old vests to bring up the shine.

  She was wearing a flowered cross-over pinafore topped by a black fent apron used for housework, which in its turn was topped by a sacking one when she mopped her step and her kitchen floor. Edna’s floors were too clean even to eat off, and come the spring Polly knew her mother would lift the linoleum to scrub underneath. On the day she had seen her poking down the spout of a teapot with a little brush to clean it, Polly had given up.

  When they were nicely settled with a cup of tea, she gave her news.

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ she announced, ‘at the new raincoat factory in Holden’s Mill.’

  ‘I hope you haven’t gone and kidded them you can sew?’ Edna’s face was wrenched out of shape as she struggled not to let her daughter see what it meant to her to have Polly dropping in unexpectedly on a Monday afternoon. ‘It’s God help anybody who has to wear any raincoat you’ve made. I remember you twice shortening the same sleeve of a new coat for your Gatty not all that long ago.’ She sniffed. ‘Your father would have taken on two jobs rather than let me go out to work. Bringing you up was my job.’

  ‘And a right mess I made of that,’ her expression said.

  ‘Have another biscuit,’ she said aloud. ‘And take what’s left home for your Martin. He loves custard creams.’

  ‘Folding raincoats,’ Polly told her. ‘They come off the machines finished, buttonholes and everything, then I examine them for faults or loose threads, match the right shade belts to the right shade coats, button them up, lay them flat on a big table, face down, tuck the sleeves over, lop the bottom bit up, then the top, turn them face up, smooth the revers, and bob’s your uncle!’

  ‘And to end up clever enough to do that, you won a scholarship to the High School, learned how to sound your aitches, got certificates in shorthand and typing, and could have gone to the University if you hadn’t gone and got married straight out of your gym-slip.’ Edna reached for a biscuit, then drew back her hand as she remembered they were wrapped up for Martin. ‘He’s brought you down properly in the world, that Harry Pilgrim, and I just hope he’s satisfied.’ She narrowed her eyes into suspicious slits. ‘And who’s going to get your Martin his tea when he gets home from school? He’s that thin now he could drop down a grate without barking his shins on the grids.’

  ‘We need the money, Mam!’ Polly stood up. ‘And anyway a job will get me out of the cottage. I’d go mental this winter up there on me own without Harry popping in and out.’ She smiled mischievously. ‘I’m thinking of going to night school one or two nights a week to brush up my shorthand and typing. Then when Harry sends for us I’ll be a qualified secretary.’ She spread her arms wide. ‘Life isn’t meant to be all scrimping and scraping, Mam. There’s a whole lot more to it than that. An’ doing something off my own bat today has made me feel different already. I’m ready to try my wings, Mam, and if folding raincoats is a start then that’s okay with me. Just now I have the feeling there’s nothing in the world I can’t do if I set my mind to it.’ Devilment shone from her eyes. ‘And do you know what? I got chatted up by a man at dinnertime, on a bench in the park. He had lovely hair with silver streaks in it, and a wavy smile to match, and he talked daft like me. I think he had a secret sorrow in his life, probably a wife who nags and makes him go to church on Sundays instead of haying a round of golf. But he was lovely, Mam. Reely luvelly. . . .’

  ‘Oh, our Polly. . . .’ For an unguarded moment the affection was there on Edna’s face. Then the shutter came down, changing her expression completely.

  ‘You’d best be going if you want to be back for your Martin,’ she said. ‘And it would have served you right if you’d got yourself dragged into the rhododendron bushes and ravaged. Silvery hair, did you say? They’re always the worst when they think they’re getting past it. There’s no fool like an old fool, I’ve always said that.’

  When Polly let herself into the cottage, the bright promise of the afternoon had gone. Through the window she stared out at the hills, shadowed by billowing clouds. Soon Martin would be home, then later Gatty. There were potatoes to peel, and the oxtail simmering in the fire oven to thicken with cornflour. There was wood to bring in and water to boil, and the ashes to scatter on the cinder path at the back. Her expression grew pensive.

  But from today things were going to be different. From next Monday she’d be catching the bus into town, leaving behind the windswept cottage. There’d be the company she’d craved, the laughter she needed, the escape from a loneliness never before acknowledged.

  From next week she’d be reborn.

  Putting out her tongue at the view and the great oak tree, its topmost branches stirred by a sighing wind, Polly turned her back and lifted a sack of potatoes from beneath the sink.

  Frowning she stared at her pink finger nails. ‘I might even start wearing rubber gloves to peel you,’ she told a potato. ‘And that would make your eyes pop out, wouldn’t it?’

  — Three —

  IN KEW GARDENS in the soft sunlight of an October morning, Harry Pilgrim trundled a wheelbarrow along a winding path. There was a rhythm in the way he stopped, bent down and gathered up a pile of leaves between two boards. There was a definite grace in his movements, the slow concentration of a dedicated gardener at one with his surroundings.

  The Royal Botanical Gardens on that mellow misty day was indeed a wondrous place to be.

  Harry had worked since first light, sweeping the fallen leaves into orderly piles with a long birch broom, and now – if a wind didn’t make a nonsense of his toil – he’d be finished before going home at six o’clock.

  Home! What a travesty of the word. Home for Harry during the past month had been an attic room shared with a sick man, a down-and-out, who spent his days in bed, shambling downstairs for the evening meal of watery soup and dry bread, swilled down with a mug of hot tea.

  Harry, his chest tightening with the pain that had bothered him since mustard gas had choked his lungs on the Somme, strangled a cough. He stared for a moment across an enormous lawn patterned in regular stripes, a tribute to the precision by which an under-gardener had guided and turned his mowing machine.

  Once, a long time ago it seemed, Harry had been famed for his lawns back in his beloved Lancashire village. Now his status in the vast organization at Kew was far less than that of a student gardener.

  Straight from school or college they came, walking the paths in groups, smoking – though smoking was forbidden – treating the labourers as less than the dirt clinging to the soles of their swanky knee-length boots. Only that morning one of them had spoken harshly to Harry for daring to approach a visitor.

  ‘I was only putting him right,’ Harry had said innocently. ‘The man was obviously a foreigner wondering why a lilac bush was labelled syringa when what he had thought was syringa is called philadelphus here. And he went on to say that his journey had been well worth the while just to see the sophoria in the Palm House. He was right chuffed with himself about that.’

  The student had scratched his head, bewildered by a labourer with a Lancashire accent who talked like a textbook. One of those working-class amateur botanists he’d read about, he’d decided, kicking out at a pile of leaves, scattering them across the gravelled path.

  ‘You know the rules,’ he’d said, walking away.

  Harry bent down to his task again, muttering to himself. If Polly could write and tell him she was enjoying standing at a table in a factory folding raincoats all
day, then he could surely follow her example and make the best of things. It was just that some people were born willing to make the best of things, while others flaked themselves out fighting against injustice, trying to beat the system. With as much chance of succeeding as Nelson would’ve had trying to get his eye back, he told himself wryly.

  At least he had a job. At least he was outside in God’s good fresh air working in what was recognized as one of the most beautiful gardens in the world. Harry moved on down the path, the sun on the back of his neck like a blessing. He’d find the sort of work he wanted, a proper gardening job, given time. Even if he had to knock on all the doors of the big houses in Richmond and plead with some posh-spoken woman just to give him a chance to show what he could do. There was money down here, right enough.

  Wielding his two boards with dexterity, he scraped up yet another pile of damp leaves, remembering for some reason a potting shed in a garden where he’d worked for years, before the family business went bust and they’d emigrated to Canada. Funny how he could recall every detail of that old shed. . . . Harry wheeled the barrow further down the path, walking with measured tread, soothed for the moment by memories.

  There’d been a high bench under the window with seed boxes set out on it. He’d fixed a cupboard for small tools, balls of twine and catalogues. Even in that harsher climate he’d grown plums and cherries, training them against a south-facing wall. Harry rubbed his chin. Peaches now, they were another thing, but he’d grown them too, as big as apples, in a far from adequate greenhouse heated by a rusty coke stove. He stopped by yet another pile of rotting leaves.