The Factory Girl

by Maggie Ford

  By now she should be coming to terms with her loss but really she was no better than the day he’d brought her home from hospital, her face expressionless with grieving, and should he mutter so much as one word, be it in sympathy or sorrow, her face would close and become vaguely hostile as though she were entirely alone in her grief.

  Couldn’t she see how keenly he felt it too? When they’d come home from the hospital he’d expected it to be in joy and triumph, she seated next to him, her face radiant, tender, bending over the little bundle she held so lovingly, so proudly. No one could begin to know that feeling of coming home that day – the emptiness, the silence cocooned only by the low rumbling of the car’s engine as he drove.

  But all that had been a month ago. It was time she made some effort towards recovery. She wasn’t the only one grieving. He was as disappointed, as devastated as she, but it wasn’t as though they’d known the baby. She should never have begun choosing names before it was born. Arthur it was to have been called had it been a boy, Caroline for a girl. He’d been happy to let her do the naming, himself having none in mind. She’d said that giving it a name made her feel as though she knew it already.

  ‘Almost,’ she’d said, ‘as if she’s already a little person,’ having made up her mind it would be a girl. No doubt that too had added to her grief. And now look at her.

  He felt angry, frustrated, impatient, not knowing how to deal with her. Life had to go on. He was learning to face it and so should she; he needed to get on with his business.

  Seated opposite her in the quiet sitting room, taking a moment after breakfast to be with her before leaving for work – she had eaten nothing – a thought made him pause. He had his work. What did she have? Nothing. Nothing to help her combat her loss.

  She saw little of her family and that was her fault, cloistering herself in this house day after day. They saw nothing of his, had received but one card of condolence, leaving him to rage silently against his father and to harbour contempt for his mother who followed her husband in every way.

  Only Fenella had visited, several times, and once with her husband; and even with her, Geraldine’s only friend it seemed, she was distant, cold.

  Maybe if he gave her something to do, something connected with the business, to keep her mind occupied. Provided it were harmless, it would make her feel needed and useful while not bringing her into too close contact with the seamy side of what he did. She knew of course, for he had told her that once, but not so as to frighten the life out of her. All she needed to do was manage the shop once in a while. And she’d look good behind the counter: she was attractive, had a good figure – a bit thin of late but the current fashion called for a slim figure – had a pretty smile, when she began to learn to smile again of course. People liked being served by an attractive person, especially in the jewellery trade.

  Maybe she could do some bookkeeping as well, at home, the set of books he kept for his legitimate trade. She needn’t know much beyond what he had told her some time ago now. If he remembered rightly, what he’d said to her had only been in the form of a brief confession, a little vague even. She still didn’t know the real extent of it, that it could increase as time went on if he was lucky. What was the saying? Least said, best mended. And now that he had his smelter outside London where it was safe, not far from East Ham, he’d need an assistant he felt he could trust. And who better than his wife?

  The smelter had been set up in an unused, derelict, single-storey building that had once been part of a farm, long since gone, and more or less hidden away on a piece of marsh waste ground with no one interested in it but himself. The position was just right for what he did. But he couldn’t be there and in the shop, and Geraldine was perfect for the job, not asking too many questions, prying into things she shouldn’t know about. On top of that she’d have his best interests at heart. After all, if he went down the pan, so would her fine lifestyle and she’d be well aware of that. It was just perfect.

  He would suggest it to her, say in a couple of weeks, after she’d had a little more time to get over the loss of the baby so that she wouldn’t turn him down out of hand because she couldn’t think straight.

  He now had his new shop, not very large, not too pretentious, in Old Bond Street, the slightly narrower extension of New Bond Street before meeting Piccadilly. It wasn’t much larger than his old shop with just a single window, but the glass display unit on one wall, the narrow glass display counter on the other side and a shorter one at the end held far finer merchandise, much of it the genuine article.

  It had been a struggle, the rent asked for this site as well as that being asked for the place he’d bought to live in. Despite coming up in the world with the help of his other dealings, as he preferred to call it, he was finding it a struggle. How he was going to afford the upkeep of this place in Mecklenburg Square was becoming a real headache. He should have thought it all out more carefully but he’d been carried away by success, by the lure of what he could see coming in from his other dealings. He now knew he had stretched himself too far and was becoming a worried man.

  Last week, however, Geraldine herself had solved his problem.

  ‘I don’t think I can stay here any more,’ she had wept in one of her more grieving moments. ‘I want us to move, darling. Everywhere I go here I keep seeing little Caroline, and it’s so lonely here, no one to talk to, no one here of my sort, all of them stuffy and terribly correct. I wish we could move away, Tony. I know you did your best but since losing Caroline I hate this place.’

  He’d tried to reason with her, but now, growing alarmed at his dwindling resources, it was a wonderful chance to get himself off the hook.

  The premises above his shop had become vacant some weeks ago – two storeys and not bad-sized rooms. She’d said how she felt lost in that large place where they lived now that there were no little feet to run around in it. He would suggest they give it up and take possession of the premises above the shop. That way there’d be more money to spend on finery for her, taking her out and about, and maybe she’d put her loss behind her. It was a wonderful idea. She’d said herself on the rare occasion she put more than two sentences together that already mid-September was driving indoors those few people she did see.

  He’d leave it a few more days then pop the question. How would she fancy moving in above the shop premises? Two floors, good-sized rooms, windows looking down on busy Bond Street, a far cry from the quiet square where they now lived, he with her most of the time, his shop just below – she would have to agree it was far better than here.

  Tonight he rose from his armchair. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  That evening, as he closed up for the night, there had been a visit from an impeccably dressed man in a dark overcoat, homburg hat, spats, gloves and carrying a heavy-looking black bag. Experience told Tony that his caller was no rep eager to display gold chains and the like nestling in that large bag in the hope of securing orders. Tony had said nothing, but guided the caller to the rear of his shop, having first securely bolted the front door and pulled down the blind. The bag being opened, he’d glimpsed the glitter of gold ornaments, cutlery and place settings before the bag was closed again.

  Nodding to the instructions given him, the lot to be melted into ingots, the caller returning in a day or so to take away the results – where it all went after that was none of his business – he’d be well paid for a job well done.

  Coming back from the hall in hat, coat and gloves, mid-September tending to be chilly in the small hours with a creeping dampness rising from the East Ham marshes, he bent to kiss her cheek. It felt stiff and cold. Straightening up, he gave her a final glance, aware of a small stab of impatience, laced with resentment when she did not look back at him, and went downstairs to his car sitting at the kerbside.

  Seven-fifteen. He’d eaten out before coming home. There was a woman, Mrs Stevenson, who came in to clean, to make a meal, Geraldine still doing little these days, and certainly
not up to cooking. Mrs Stevenson was always gone by the time he got home, so he’d taken to having something to eat out – more pleasant than having to stare across the dining room table at his wife’s bleak face, she merely toying with her food.

  In the car he stashed the heavy black bag in the rear and pushed the starter button of the still warm engine. It would be dark by the time he reached East Ham. He would spend his time there turning the contents of the bag into small ingots, no doubt to be sold in Hatton Garden by a purported dealer in gold and silver bullion. Its many workshops turned precious metals into beautiful jewellery, all meticulously worked by hand and soon there’d be nothing left of the booty to be traced. He never asked questions, did his job, kept his mouth shut, received his share and got on with his legitimate trade until next time. Whoever these people were, and however they came by the stuff they brought in at night, was nothing to do with him, and the less he knew about it the better.

  When he got back home after his night’s work as dawn was coming up, Geraldine was fast asleep. She did not stir at all when he crept into their bedroom and for a moment he gazed down at her, her features in repose, which they never were when awake.

  She looked like a child, her face smooth, her eyelids gently closed, her mouth soft and untroubled, and for a moment his heart leapt with love, but then hardened with the knowledge that on waking in a couple of hours’ time, that mouth would adopt a thin, hard line, the eyes with the lids now covered so gently would stare into nothing, would flick towards him should he speak as though resenting the very sound of his voice; the face would work as though she were about to burst into tears, though tears seemed now to have dried inside her, and he would crab up inside, hardly able to wait to get away to his shop. Breakfast would be eaten in silence unless he spoke, to be responded to monosyllabically and in a monotone, until he wanted to shout at her to buck herself up for God’s sake! Sometimes he didn’t even stop for breakfast but fled the moment he was washed, shaved and dressed.

  Geraldine watched him go without bothering to acknowledge him. It was an effort to do anything. Only occasionally was she given to an outburst of any kind such as last week when she had told him vehemently how much she hated this house with its big rooms and its isolated position.

  She had recollections of when she lived with Mum and Dad, the poky little two-up-two-down house when as few as three people together made it seem crowded; the comings and goings of family and other relations, the back door ever open to anyone calling in; its scrubby back garden, its tiny three-foot patch of grass out front; the noise from the other rooms travelling through the walls, including every bump, every word uttered from the house next door. How she longed for that life now, but she’d moved on.

  Sunk in the armchair where she’d been most of the afternoon, she hadn’t even looked up when Tony told her he’d be going out for a while, promising not to be too late. She knew he would be, returning in the small hours. She’d be asleep by then, having dragged herself to the bedroom, not bothering to wash or tidy her hair, the effort of undressing for bed enough in itself.

  Odd how she could sleep so soundly. She’d not had to take medicines to make her sleep except for the first two days after coming home. She had never needed it again. Needing to mentally flagellate herself, it disturbed her that her sleep was never fraught with dreams of her poor dead baby coming to further torment her already guilty conscience in not looking out properly the day she had fallen, practically killing her child by her very own carelessness. Instead hers were sweeter dreams: of pushing Caroline in the park or of her running around on the grass; of holding her in her arms one minute, a tiny baby with trusting blue eyes, the next a young girl full of vitality, glancing at all the boys and they glancing at her. Geraldine knew she smiled in her sleep and a joyous voice would tell her that losing a baby had been the bad dream. She was unaware of the reversal for those sleep-visions had such reality that, on waking, the real world would assault her like a clenched fist so that she was never sure whether sleep was a curse or a blessing.

  The memory of her stay in hospital was still vague, as was the one of seeing Mum there, holding her hand, her thin face gaunt with sorrow for her. Tony had telegraphed her parents about her being taken into hospital and Mum had hurried to be with her. She remembered Mum’s voice coming through the cotton-wool world in which her loss had left her suspended, talking trivia as though to fill a void by the sound of words – something about already having been alerted to her urgent and premature rush to hospital; something about Alan Presley having come to the house to say that he had met her daughter Geraldine in the street, that she had been crying and that she had looked terribly ill.

  Through a pall of grief, Mum’s words had drifted on, saying how concerned Alan had been, how he had urged her to go and see her daughter straight away but to her shame she had ignored that advice until Tony’s telegram had come.

  Geraldine stirred herself briefly. She thought of Alan Presley. That he should put himself out going round to her house – her old house, she corrected – to tell her mother of their meeting. Somehow it seemed he had been affected by seeing her. Geraldine found herself smiling. He was the nicest man she had ever known. Of course she loved Tony, couldn’t imagine life without him and appreciated all he’d done for her, and thought that no one could be nicer than Tony, yet a small admittance crept into a tiny corner of her brain that the man she had turned down might have been the one to make her happier for all his lack of money. Geraldine pulled herself up in the realisation that she hadn’t been thinking of Caroline, her lost baby, for at least several minutes, knowing a surge of guilt at the fact.

  She became aware of someone ringing on the newly installed doorbell. Mrs Stevenson no doubt, come to do her morning chores and cook lunch for her, a lunch she would toy with before pushing away, barely nibbled at. Mrs Stevenson would be gone again by then and thankfully wouldn’t see her culinary efforts thus wasted.

  With an effort, Geraldine got up and went to let the woman in, turning away with a desultory good morning when a voice in the street hailed her.

  ‘Don’t close the door, darling!’

  Glancing towards it she saw Fenella flying down the street towards her, a bright vision under a leaden sky, brown and orange umbrella flapping wildly and almost hooking off her low-brimmed hat; below the French seal-fur coat with its snug collar and huge cuffs, slim legs going like pistons while Cuban heels echoed like castanets tap-tapping on the shiny wet pavement.

  She arrived with a final flourish of silk-stockinged legs at the top of the three stairs. ‘Darling, simply couldn’t find one taxi in Oxford Street that wasn’t being used.’ She sounded as breathless as if she had been running the entire length of it. ‘It’s this atrocious weather, my sweet, everyone using them. So I thought I’d walk – I had an umbrella – and walking helps keep one slim, darling. Then down came the rain again, and I had to run for it.’

  Inside she pumped the umbrella vigorously, flapping the silk in and out, then closed it, dumping it in the hall stand to drip to its heart’s content. Geraldine had leapt back to avoid the cold splatter of rain on her legs from the flapping of the brolly. Mrs Stevenson with hers had already gone towards the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll have Mrs Stevenson make up some coffee,’ Geraldine said.

  ‘Oh that would be absolutely divine on a day like this!’ Fenella replied a bit too loudly so that Geraldine felt the curl of her lips in an amused smile.

  Fenella was at last making this happen; had ploughed through many a dreary visit with the tenaciousness of a farmer ploughing some claggy field by hand, and was finally reaping the results: to see her smile, no matter how brief or thin.

  Coffee brought in, and a plate of small, assorted sweet biscuits from Harrods, Fenella continued talking. For the most part Geraldine listened, aware of life seeping back into her as it always did when her sister-in-law was here. Fenella was life. She felt its gradual transference into her as one hour went past, then a second and it
was time for lunch. She was even joining in the light conversation: how the décor of the living rooms in this house could be made far more modern at little cost, ‘unless you use the services of a really good designer – I mean art deco is all the rage and these rooms are so old-fashioned!’; the growing problem of keeping domestic staff happy, ‘They walk off the moment you’re horrid to them, not like when I lived at home, servants knew their place, but now … so independent!’; the cost of house repairs, ‘Simply soaring through the roof since the war – skilled labour demanding enormous fees, yet there are still hundreds of ex-soldiers parading the gutters – one would think some of them might turn their hands to something or other!’

  Geraldine, remembering her own background of struggle and poverty, merely nodded as she had more or less nodded to everything Fenella had said, too weary to argue but content to draw strength from her prattle. Sometimes Fenella could prattle endlessly, other times she could be quiet and thoughtful. Obviously this morning was one for prattling.

  So Fenella continued bounding from subject to subject: her husband, Reginald, came under fire about his work, a solicitor like her father, ‘That’s how we met, you know, Gerry’; the clothes she’d just bought, taking them from thick paper bags with names of well-known shops to display a green tweed skirt, fashionable jumper, maroon and white-striped cardigan. Geraldine hadn’t noticed the additional encumbrance of bags as well as the umbrella.

  ‘I need a complete new wardrobe with winter coming on,’ Fenella chirped. ‘And look at this, Geraldine dear – don’t you think it’s simply marvellous?’ She unfolded layers of tissue paper to reveal a gold-embroidered, taffeta evening dress, the skirt cut to resemble the petals of a flower, the hem at least eight inches above the ankle.