A Perfect Christmas

by Lynda Page

  Hilda frowned at her. ‘What d’yer mean?’

  ‘Well, there was this young thing in there, looked no more than seventeen, and I took it that she was a new employee like me who’d got herself lost. I told her where she was and that she’d better scarper quick before the boss came back in, because if she was as snooty as I’d heard she was then the girl would be for the high jump. Well . . . then she started spouting off about me committing treason, speaking about the boss like that, and told me to collect my cards. Luckily for me the boss’s secretary came in . . . the lady who fetched me when I came for the interview. She thanked me for bringing up the tray and told me to go. I didn’t need telling twice and left her to deal with . . . well, I suspect that young girl is an escapee from the loony bin, or if not she needs locking up. She’s obviously not right up top to be thinking she can go around accusing people of treason and believing she has the authority to sack them.’ Jan suddenly remembered where she’d first come across the girl. It had been when she and Glen had stopped in the church to rest on the night they’d first met. The girl had been throwing her weight around then too – she obviously made a habit of it.

  Hilda was looking at her thoughtfully. If the gossip she had heard had an ounce of truth in it, then she feared her new recruit had just come face to face with the owner’s daughter, who was standing in for her mother while she was away. This probably did mean that the young woman was in a position to sack whoever she liked, whether it was justified or not. Judging by her performance up to now, though, Jan looked as if she would shape up to be an asset and Hilda didn’t want to lose her. As it was, no one had officially told her that a member of her staff had been dismissed for what was perceived as insubordination, although to Hilda all Jan was guilty of was passing on gossip to the wrong person – hardly a sacking offence, in her eyes. Until she was told officially, she wasn’t prepared to take action. She decided not to tell Jan who the young woman she had crossed swords with in the office actually was, in case her new recruit decided to leave anyway. In a very short time they would have a horde of hungry workers descending on them and Hilda needed every staff member she could find to help deal with them.

  She told Jan, ‘Well, hopefully, as we speak she’s being carted off back there. Anyway, I’ll send Maggie out with the staff trolley for a week or so until you’ve got your bearings.’ She felt this was best, just in case Jan ran into the owner’s daughter again and she wondered what Jan was still doing here. ‘Can you help Dilys peel the spuds for the chips, and when you’ve done that could you go outside and check all the tables have the right condiments? Salt, pepper, tomato and brown sauce . . . and make sure they’re all filled up. You’ll find what you need to do that in the pantry.’

  On the factory floor, Glen had just finished putting a new belt on a welting machine in the Welting, Rounding and Stitching Department. The operator was a thirty-something man who had just returned from having a cigarette outside while his machine was being fixed. Glen said to him, ‘That’s you as good as new. I can’t find the guard, though. It wasn’t on when I stripped it down to change the belt.’

  ‘That’s ’cos I took it off,’ the man told him. ‘It’s easier to operate my machine without it. It’s just a bloody hindrance.’

  ‘It might be,’ Glen told him, ‘but it’s there for a reason. To save you from getting hurt.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll take me chances. It’s harder to do me daily quota with it on.’

  Glen eyed him closely. ‘Have you any children?’

  His unexpected question surprised the man. ‘What that’s got to do with . . . but, yeah, I have. Five, if yer want the exact number.’

  ‘Not much work going, I wouldn’t have thought, for a man with a mangled hand or worse. So how will you provide for your five children and wife then?’

  The man eyed him blankly. That thought hadn’t occurred to him. Most of the other men, apart from a handful of old-timers, thought guards were for the lily-livered. But now the thought that through his own neglect he could be responsible for ruining his family’s future, all for the sake of being able to ease back a little on his working pace, seemed daft to him. He opened a metal drawer on his machine bench, rummaged around in it until he found what he was seeking, and handed it to Glen.

  He took it and patted the welter on his shoulder, saying, ‘Good man.’

  Having finished his task, and with the man now back working on the machine he’d just fixed, Glen packed his tools away, picked up the metal tool box and made to return to his office. A man of about his own age stopped him, holding out his hand to introduce himself. ‘Alf Bisson, foreman of this department. I’m also the works union representative. I’m very impressed with you. I’ve been trying to get the men who’ve taken off their guards to put them back for their own safety ever since I started here ten years ago. In your first morning as maintenance man you’ve managed to achieve more than I’ve ever done. It’s a big issue with the union, is safety, but trying to get the men to be responsible for themselves when their daily quotas are at stake is another, despite me warning them if ’ote did happen to them while their guards are off there’ll be n’ote the union can do for them by way of compensation. How yer fixed for getting the others to put theirs back on too?’

  ‘I’ll try my best. I’ve witnessed with my own eyes what can happen. When I . . .’ Glen just stopped himself in time from saying ‘when I owned this place’. He quickly changed it to: ‘. . . was working at my last place, I saw a man trap his arm in a machine with no guard on as there weren’t such things in those days. I’ve also seen men chop fingers off. After the incident with the arm, I . . . the firm insisted that all machines where possible had guards fitted to them and they stayed on, whether the men liked it or not.’

  ‘I don’t like talking ill of Reg Swinton as he was a good man to work for but it was his opinion that the men knew what was at stake if they chose to work without their guards on. To me, though, some rules need to be clad in iron, for the good of all.’

  Glen nodded his agreement.

  Alf smiled at him. ‘You’ll do. If you fancy joining my table in the canteen at lunch, I’ll introduce you to the other foremen.’

  Later that evening Glen pushed away his bowl and said to Jan, ‘That soup was good. Thank you.’

  She smiled with pleasure. ‘Yes, it wasn’t bad, if I say so myself. Vegetable soup and bread is not what I’d call a proper meal after a hard day’s graft, but we have to watch the pennies until we both get paid. And our first pay packet will be short three days, being’s we started on a Thursday.’ She gave a chuckle as she added, ‘As my old gran used to say after what she called a make do and mend meal, “It filled the ’ole.”’

  ‘Well, it certainly filled mine,’ said Glen, chuckling. ‘Now why don’t you go and put your feet up while I clear up the kitchen?’

  ‘Sounds like luxury to me. I’m not used to being on my feet all day and my ankles have swelled up like balloons. I’m going to give my feet a soak in a bowl of hot water.’

  A short while later Glen joined Jan, taking a seat in the battered armchair opposite hers next to the fire. Her feet in the bowl of now-tepid water, she was resting her head on the back of the chair and had her eyes closed, appearing to be asleep. Careful not to rouse her, he gently opened out the evening paper he had bought from a corner shop on his way home, but before he could begin reading, Jan opened her eyes and said to him, ‘I’ve been dying to ask how your day went but I thought I’d wait until dinner was past because, you see, well . . . I don’t know whether you’ve heard about Reg Swinton and that the owner’s due in to see to things until a replacement is found? Only the owner’s name isn’t Trainer, apparently, it’s Thomas.’

  ‘My ex-wife’s maiden name,’ he told her. ‘Either it’s a huge coincidence that the person she sold the business on to had the same name or Nerys changed her name back when she obtained her divorce from me. My gut feeling is it’s the latter. She obviously wanted to disassociate hers
elf from my surname in case people frowned on her for being the wife, or ex-wife, of a criminal. Or perhaps she wanted to make it difficult for me to find her when I was released from prison.’

  Jan thought about this for a moment. ‘Or, of course, she could have got married again. I know it would be a coincidence, but Thomas isn’t an uncommon name, is it? One of my schoolfriends was called Diane Brown and she married a man called Archie Brown, so it does happen.’ Jan looked at Glen in concern. ‘So how do you feel about the possibility of bumping into . . .’ she was not sure how to refer to Nerys Thomas – as the ex-wife, that woman, the conniving bitch? So she just said ‘. . . her while you’re going about your job?’

  Glen sighed. ‘Well, it worried me that I might, and if so would she recognise me, but thankfully if she did come in today, she never showed her face where I was working. Although I did hear that in all the time she has owned the firm, she’s never once been seen on the shop floor.’ He thought back to the young Nerys Thomas he had met and fallen in love with. He had found her then to be a warm, caring, honest person, one who had never acted as if she would deem a shop floor as beneath her or its workers as inferior. But from what he knew now, that side of her had been all an act. Of the real Nerys, he realised, he knew nothing at all.

  Jan was sighing with relief to hear that he’d been spared such a shock. ‘I looked out for you in the canteen at lunchtime, to try and have a word in case you hadn’t heard what had gone on, but I didn’t see you at all.’

  ‘I didn’t feel like any lunch today. Was too churned up after hearing about Reg Swinton and the fact that Nerys was expected in. I didn’t know how I felt about maybe seeing her swanning about as the big I am, knowing just how she’d got the business. And I was also racking my brains as to how I could best pick my moment to go and tackle her about seeing Lucy, before she had me thrown off the premises and I lost my chance altogether.’

  At that moment Jan was far more concerned to hear that he had gone for over nine hours without any food inside him. ‘You will waste away if you carry on like that, going without any lunch!’

  ‘I told you, I wasn’t that hungry. And don’t forget, I’m not used to eating three square meals a day yet.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Anyway, as terrible as it is of me to say, Reg Swinton’s death is a Godsend to us.’

  Glen looked at her sharply. ‘It is? How?’

  ‘Well, your ex-wife’s coming in to manage the place until she decides what to do saves us from risking our necks, getting information from the private files. We can just follow her home one night, can’t we?’

  ‘Oh, of course, I never thought of that.’ Then a thought struck Glen. ‘It might not be as easy as it sounds.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s hardly likely Nerys will travel by bus, is it? She’ll either drive herself or have someone drive her. We can hardly follow a car on foot.’

  ‘Oh! How stupid of me not to have thought of that. Do you drive? No, don’t bother answering that as it’s irrelevant. We can’t afford to buy a car anyway.’

  ‘Well, I’ve decided that Nerys actually coming to the works herself is the best opportunity for me to get Lucy back. As soon as I hear she’s on the premises, I shall go and confront her and demand she allows me to see my daughter – and I won’t leave until she does.’

  ‘There is a risk to that. I know how important finding your daughter is to you, Glen, but if you do what you plan to, you’ll definitely lose your job. Nerys won’t allow you to carry on working there once she knows who you are.’

  He nodded. ‘I know. But I can only hope that as Reg Swinton gave me a job, another firm will too if I use the same story about my background.’

  ‘Well, at least I’m earning. It will be very tight but we’ll just have to manage on what I’m paid until you get set on again.’

  He looked at her, stunned. She was prepared to make such a sacrifice for him? She was indeed a special woman. How would he ever repay her for what she was helping him do?

  Jan was saying, ‘Anyway, if she didn’t come in today then it’s Saturday tomorrow so I can’t see her coming in until Monday now. That gives you two days to plan what you’re going to say to her when you go and confront her. I had been going to suggest that we get a tin of white-wash at the weekend and give this place a freshen up, but in light of the fact we might be living on the breadline for a bit, we’d better conserve every penny we can.’

  The water in the bowl was by now stone cold. Jan took her feet out of it, and was drying them on one of the cheap thin towels they had bought from the second-hand shop when she asked him, ‘A walk in the park doesn’t cost anything, does it? Weather permitting, how do you fancy that on Sunday afternoon? Make a change from us staring at these four walls.’

  Glen was thinking to himself. The more he was getting to know Jan, the more she reminded him of his beloved first wife, Julia. Both were caring women, very easy to be around, respected the fact that he was entitled to make his own decisions. He felt so comfortable sitting here with her that as far as he was concerned their living arrangement could go on for ever. But he knew it would end when their reason to be together no longer existed, whether it had a successful outcome or not. She’d want to go her own way then to build a new life, like he supposed he would. This time last week he hadn’t known she existed, but he did know that when it came time for them to part company he would miss Jan. Hopefully she would want to remain friends with him.

  He smiled at her. ‘I’d like that very much, Jan.’

  Very much indeed, he thought.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The following Monday morning Cait studied her reflection critically in the wardrobe mirror. The navy, pin-stripe suit, with its pencil-style skirt finishing just above her calves with a kick pleat at the back, short fitted jacket and crisp white blouse underneath, all made her look much older than she was and feel very sophisticated, so she was happy that she had created the look she had set out to. She did not feel that her hairstyle did her new look justice, though, and decided to deal with that at the first opportunity.

  After her shopping expedition on Friday that had extended into Saturday too, she now had three more suits and a selection of blouses for work, and three evening dresses ready for when she received invitations to the posh dos she was expecting to attend in her newfound position, especially the Christmas ones since the day itself was only three weeks away. All she needed now were shoes and handbags to complete her outfits. She had been tempted to buy those, having spotted quite a few suitable styles, but then it had struck her that as the boss of a company that produced such items, she wouldn’t be perceived as championing them by parading the competition’s wares. She hadn’t paid attention to the make of her mother’s shoes when she’d rummaged through her wardrobe, but she assumed they were all Rose’s.

  A feeling of nervousness rushed through her. She was used to being instructed as to what to do, not instructing others. Then she inwardly scolded herself. What had she to be nervous about? She was the boss, the company figurehead. It was her job to make sure all the workers were earning their pay, keeping her mother’s profits coming in. That was what paid for the big house, the holiday, and all the smart clothes. There was one thing she should do before she went to Rose’s, though, and that was to sever her employment with the wholesale fruit and vegetable company. What a relief that was going to be! And there was part of her that was going to enjoy seeing their expressions when she informed them just what her new position was to be.

  In the kitchen doorway Agnes Dalby did a double take when she spotted Cait make her way across the hallway into the dining room, to take her seat at the table. If she didn’t know better she would have thought Cait had an elder sister she hadn’t known about, and a very smart, sophisticated-looking young woman at that. With a fresh pot of tea in her hand, Agnes hurried after her. ‘Good morning, Miss Thomas. I have to say, you do look extremely smart today. I haven’t seen that outfit you’re in before. Is it new?
’

  Cait had too much on her mind today to question Agnes as to just why she was here when Nerys had laid her off. It would never have occurred to her that it was because she cared deeply about Cait’s welfare. It was nice, though, to be complimented on her appearance after working so hard to transform it. ‘Thank you. It’s one of several I’ve bought since I took over my new position,’ she told the daily.

  Agnes turned the cup over in its saucer and poured a cup of tea for her. ‘Oh, you have a new job, Miss Thomas? Many congratulations. May I ask if it’s a promotion within the company you’re already in or with another firm?’

  Cait opened her mouth to tell her then snapped it shut. For whatever reason, her mother had kept it a secret that she owned a business. What her reaction was going to be when she did arrive back and discover that her secret was out Cait wasn’t sure. Although Cait felt sure that Nerys wouldn’t fail but be impressed with her daughter for having risen to the occasion and stepped into her shoes during her absence, she was fairly confident her mother would not want her blabbing about their private affairs, so she avoided the question.

  ‘Thanks, Dalby. I’ll just have toast this morning.’ Which was more, in fact, than she could actually face given her apprehension about the day ahead, but Cait knew it would be foolish to take on a big day on an empty stomach.

  Agnes registered her evasion of the question about the job and left the room to attend to her tasks.

  A while later Cait alighted from the bus and stood before the building she now saw as her ex-place of work, savouring the thought of what she was about to do before she opened the door leading into reception. She ignored the shocked look that the middle-aged receptionist shot her. Employees, they both knew, were meant to arrive by the back entrance. Instead Cait walked across the foyer to go through to the offices.

  Outside the general office door, she paused just long enough to draw breath before she turned the knob and made her way purposefully inside. She immediately saw that her sour-faced supervisor was at her own desk, taking work to be done out of her in tray to distribute it around the other typists. She must have realised that as it was now approaching nine-thirty Cait wasn’t turning up for work again. By now several of the other clerks and typists had noticed her, staring at her agog as she weaved her way through their desks.