The Factory Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Much to her surprise it had been a year of fun, 1922 simply flying by. But it would soon be September and Geraldine found herself hard put not to dwell on thoughts of the anniversary of the loss of her baby.

  To some extent memory had dimmed where once she’d thought it never would. She’d hoped they’d start another family in the spring but it hadn’t happened. Maybe because she’d tried too hard, on edge, which some maintained could prevent a woman conceiving, or maybe Tony’s heart hadn’t quite been in it. He was often distant towards her, though she put that down to work – perhaps a hidden tension that what he did at times could rebound on him one day. It had to be a worry for him though he never shared it with her.

  She would take over during those frequent absences of his, he saying it was business. There was never any need to question him. She knew full well what he did and what could she do but accept it, grateful for the lovely life it afforded them as she mused where they’d have been without it. So it wasn’t kosher, but not exactly criminal, those who stole were the criminals, and what Tony didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. In the meanwhile they lived well.

  There had been the New Year party, she and Tony and some friends joining the jam of revelling bodies at the New Year Ball at the Albert Hall. She felt she hadn’t a care in the world as they milled around with crowds in fancy dress, streamers trod underfoot or entangled around necks and heads, balloons bursting continuously as twelve o’clock chimed until the air seemed filled with explosions – drunk on brandy and champagne and cocktails with by then unpronounceable names, cavorting with men divested of their once immaculate evening shirts, while quite a few girls boldly displayed a bared breast or two, men leering, sidling up and maybe sneeking off with them.

  Too tiddly to care, she had come home asleep on Tony’s shoulder in a taxi. She thought he’d made drunken love to her because next morning, awakening with a thumping headache, she noticed the signs on the bed clothes, and not once had she thought of her family and their own humble celebrations. Only the next day, with her brain finally unscrambled, did she wonder if they had thought of her.

  March saw her in Paris, her very first trip to that lovely city that had her giddy with adoration as well as with the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower, blushing at scantily dressed artistes and naked statues at the Folies Bergères and at the strange behaviour of some Parisians in that quarter.

  In June there had been another trip abroad, to Deauville, to sit under a sunshade on the beach in a bathing costume, test the warm sea or join in beach recreations.

  At home more parties, more balls, vying with other women to appear the best dressed, the most elegant, the liveliest, the most brilliant in a new age of escapism, kicking over the traces in the question of morals, manners and taboos. All so marvellous. How could she have ever dreamed of all this only a year or two ago? This year she was soaking it up, a once dry sponge wallowing in the moisture of wining and dining and rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous.

  She may not have spoken with any of them but at times was close enough to feel their breath on her bare shoulder or draw in the smoke from their cigars and cigarettes, she puffing her own cigarette smoke in their direction, sporting the perfumed cylinder on the end of the long, ivory cigarette holder that Tony had bought her, jangling her long earrings and ropes of pearls while striking fashionable poses.

  She said nothing of this to Mum when she found time to visit. Mum would have been horrified, seeing her as little more than a social climber – to those of her part of the world not far removed from the women who paraded the streets. She was critical of her daughter’s rise in circumstance instead of being pleased for her; what would she have said had she known of the escapades she and Tony were indulging in?

  Of course, Wally and Clara’s wedding was in May, and for a while, attending the church and reception in Clara’s parents’ house, she became once more part of that old life she’d known. After a couple of false starts, at the church having to meet sidelong glances at her splendid beige outfit and Tony’s well-cut suit, she was soon letting her hair down with the best of them at the party afterwards in the parents’ house, drinking gassy beer, sherry and the odd gin, while Tony sat apart, isolated for most of the time, glancing again and again at the clock on the mantelshelf.

  With the others she saw the happy couple off to their honeymoon in Margate, Wally having been able to save well in his new job as a stevedore in the docks. Tom’s luck too had taken a good turn and he was in steady work at last.

  At Wally’s wedding, plans had been laid for the whole family to have a day in Southend on August Bank Holiday. ‘Just like old times,’ Mum said.

  ‘Shall we?’ Geraldine later queried of Tony but he shook his head.

  ‘Too much business to do.’

  ‘Not on a bank holiday, darling.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  When nothing would persuade him to join her family, she grew angry. Too beneath him, she interpreted, though she didn’t say so, except to snap, ‘Then please yourself! But I’m going!’

  That was it. He was sullen, she was stubborn as she packed a picnic lunch on the day to eat on the beach along with the others who could never afford a meal in a restaurant. Cups of tea from a beach kiosk was their limit, all they needed brought along with them – sandwiches, cake, lemonade, biscuits, a bit of chocolate, a few apples, a flask of tea already sugared and milked so as not to have to lay out on another cup of tea – the money going instead on the luxury of an ice-cream cornet or even a wafer.

  The day was warm and sunny, and even though it clouded around late afternoon, nothing could dampen the Glover family’s fun.

  ‘Fancy a paddle?’ suggested Mum to Mavis, sitting on a coat on the gravelly sand, wiping chocolate from little, nine-month-old Barbara’s mouth with a soiled hanky. Evie and Fred were already in the sea, Evie’s all-enveloping bathing costume, knitted by Mum, sagging a little with the weight of water so that she was spending most of her time up to her waist in the sea while wringing out the waterlogged knitwear in case it revealed her young breasts to the general public. Fred in a shop-bought bathing suit had no qualms and with one foot on the bottom made an effort to look as though he were swimming.

  Dad was standing at the water’s edge in his shirt sleeves, his trousers rolled up to his calves to avoid getting wet, his head shielded from the strong sun by a knotted handkerchief. Wally and Clara, who’d also come along, had gone off together along the promenade with plans to look in at the Kursal funfare.

  Mavis stopped wiping Barbara’s face clean, jumping up at Mum’s suggestion. ‘Why not? I’ve bin longing ter get me feet wet. Let’s see if the kids like it. I ’ope they do. If they don’t, I’ll ’ave ter take ’em back up.’ She already sounded prematurely disappointed.

  Mum glanced at Geraldine, still sitting on a small beach rug. ‘Ain’t you goin’ ter put yer toes in the sea?’ she queried. ‘Or don’t yer do them sort of things now?’

  But it was too nice a day to let such remarks offend her. She should know Mum by now, and, ‘I think I will, Mum,’ was all she said.

  With Mum beside her and Mavis carrying Barbara on one arm while dragging a toddling, half-reluctant two-year-old Simon by the hand, she made her way painfully and gingerly barefoot over the stones to the warm, brown wavelets with their mottled yellow lines of foam that had a doubtful look as to cleanliness. But wiggling her toes in it, the sand here and the first traces of mud uncovered by an outgoing tide soft underfoot there, gave pleasure in the sensation.

  Little Barbara, her tiny dress held high, took like a duckling to water and to having her bottom without its napkin dipped into the briny, gurgling with delight, although Simon at the first touch of a slightly larger than usual wavelet on his legs, yelped and backed away and there was nothing Mavis could do to persuade him to go back in. Finally she took them the few yards back to where their towels and other paraphernalia lay unattended, to rub both her children dry.

  Later, wit
h Dad watching the kids, they walked out onto the mud after the tide had receded to almost a mile from the shore to do a spot of cockling, digging toes into the clinging, black mud where a tiny jet of water was seen to spurt to ease up the small, fan-shaped shellfish to fill their buckets and be taken home to be boiled for tea – delicious, if slightly gritty, cockle meat, straight from the sea to be eaten with bread and marg.

  Dad came out from another dip of his toes to help eat the sandwiches and cake and drink hot, Thermos-flask-tasting tea, later to go and pay out for fresher stuff from the nearby kiosk with hard-earned money. Evie and Fred had dried and changed under towels held up by Mum, then went off to buy an ice cream. Wally and Clara returned after a while, obviously weak from laughing and bearing a little, garish, pink, celluloid doll, a cheap prize from a shooting gallery, while Mum, Mavis and Geraldine spent a frustrating ten or so minutes trying to dry wet feet and wipe the clinging sand from between toes.

  There had been a frantic five minutes looking for Simon who had wandered off unsupervised for a moment. They found him with another toddler in a shallow pool some child had dug in the flattest, muddiest piece of beach, his clothes grey with mud, he in his element with no waves to scare him. It had taken ages to get him clean, using buckets of whatever cleanish seawater they could find in different pools left behind by the receding tide until he was relatively decent again. All the time Mavis was screeching at him, he bawling out crying in protest with the whole beach looking on. It was a dishevelled, grubby child they took home that evening, Mavis explaining the reason and her resultant shame of him to everyone on the train interested enough to listen.

  The hem of Geraldine’s dress had got wet in looking for water and all the while they were on the beach kept clinging uncomfortably to her legs, even when she eventually got back into her silk stockings, in the process noticing Mum’s askance glance at their richness.

  ‘Make an ’ole in them and that’ll cost yer a pretty penny,’ came the acid remark, going on when Geraldine gave a small grimace of agreement with, ‘Don’t suppose that means too much ter you. Lucky ter be able ter afford ’em, I s’pose.’

  But she was still enjoying her day out too much to care to retaliate. Nothing Mum said could have spoiled her day, for the first time maybe since her marriage feeling one of them, and Dad had been really friendly towards her, as if Tony didn’t exist.

  A month had gone by since then but the joy of that day remained with her as sharp as if it had been yesterday. They’d laughed at characters paddling: thick-waisted, middle-aged women with their dated dresses held high, so that the elastic hems of their knickers showed; men revealing bow legs normally disguised by decently rolled-down trousers in the street; picture postcards of roly-poly, shiny-cheeked women and equally roly-poly men with glowing red noses and leering expressions at the near-the-knuckle captions beneath; kids on the promenade roundabouts and swings, young girls in summer dresses and little else on the bigger see-saws, the wind blowing their skirts up above their knees, the men, especially the older ones, ogling them; kids’ faces smothered in ice cream, kids laughing, kids crying, getting a smack and told they’d come here to enjoy themselves and enjoy themselves they would, if it killed their mothers!

  It had been so like old times when she’d been younger and that one day out in a month of Sundays something to recall for the rest of the dreary winter. All the jaunts to Paris and Deauville, the house parties, the race meetings, the air shows she’d attended, couldn’t hold a candle to that Bank Holiday Monday, and it was just as well Tony had cried out of it, not only because he would have made her feel silly, but when she got home with them all, weary and satisfied, Alan had popped round. He’d become very much a friend of the family, whether by their design or his own, she didn’t know or care to ask, but these days he seemed to be included in much of what the Glovers did.

  Much against her better judgment, seeing him had been like the icing on the cake of her day out. They had talked over a tea of bread and cockles and some shrimps Dad had bought on the way home, and it had been like talking to an old friend. She told him about her day from beginning to end and he had seemed so interested, saying he wished he’d taken up the offer to come but had felt he might seem to be pushing in. If he’d known she would be there he would have definitely come along.

  He’d popped round all dressed up for visiting and he had looked so nice. He had smelled nice too from the brilliantine on his smoothed-down hair, though no amount of brilliantine could keep down its persistent waviness. She’d felt a distinct reluctance to leave.

  To get Alan out of her mind, when she did arrive back home she tried telling Tony about her day but it seemed he didn’t want to know and went off to bed early, leaving her to stay up for a while longer on her own to think about it all, but most of all to think about Alan and how nice it had been to see him after such a wonderful day.

  Chapter Twenty

  She should have learned by now not to spoil a quiet evening at home with Tony by alluding to their dead daughter. But it seemed so right, playing dance tunes on the gramophone, in fact getting up to dance to the last one, the tune a bit old now, two years old in fact, but one of his favourites: ‘I Left My Heart In Avalon’, a smooth, smoochy, love song.

  The music coming to an end, he’d chosen another, something brighter, and had come to sit down in the armchair. Beyond the closed curtains a motor car or two rumbled their way faintly to wherever they were going or coming from, adding to the peace within the flat.

  Contented, drawing slowly on his cigarette while she fitted her own into a long ivory holder, they were both in casual evening garb, the first time in weeks that they’d shared an evening like this together, just the two of them. And then she had to say it, didn’t she?

  ‘Do you realise, darling, it’s thirteen months since we lost Caroline.’

  She hadn’t mentioned it on the anniversary of that dreadful day. It had been too painful. But now she felt she could, it being no special time. But as soon as she came out with it, she knew she’d said the wrong thing.

  She saw him wince, not with pain but irritation. But thirteen months on – surely she could speak of it without seeing his lips grow tight and his expression harden. A stab of anger made her plough on.

  ‘I was thinking, darling, why don’t we try for another baby? This time in earnest.’ They had tried, he only at her insistence, but so far nothing – almost as though he had no enthusiasm for it, or secretly had no wish to have children.

  The tight expression had become one of impatience. His tone when he answered had grown harsh. ‘I’ve got more on my mind just now. We’ll talk about it some other time.’

  Her anger too was up. He’d hedged on this matter long enough. How much longer were they going to go on, no family, just the two of them? How could he be so selfish? Him and his work! That’s all he cared about, that and enjoying himself, dragging her along with him, going here, going there, in the company of this friend and that, not one of them genuine, not one as good as they ought to be; they with whom he did his shady deals, who used him, and if one day they were done with him would drop him like a hot potato, or – she dreaded the thought – would shop him at a moment’s notice if they looked like getting into trouble, leaving him to carry the can.

  He couldn’t see it, refused to see it. He thought he was in the money forever, seeing himself as well in. He’d play cards with them, well into the early hours, leaving her alone while he gambled. There’d been a number of times too when he had shut her out of a conversation with someone, making her feel she was not to be trusted, an outsider. Sometimes she felt so alone. If Caroline had lived she wouldn’t have felt so alone. She wanted a baby, wanted it desperately, and this hedging of his served to infuriate her, and frustrate her, as it was doing at this moment.

  ‘No, Tony, I want to talk about it now!’

  Startling her he leapt up, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray on its stand beside him. In a split second their pleasant evening
had changed.

  ‘I’m sick of hearing about babies!’ came the roar. ‘Can’t you ever be satisfied with what we have? I do all I can for you, work myself into the ground for you, even put myself at risk and all you do is carp. I’m sick of it!’

  Before she could stop him even to say sorry had she wanted to, he’d stalked out of the room. She thought of following him either to have this thing out with him or make some sort of appeasement but instead continued to sit there seething. He wasn’t worth trying to appease.

  She listened to him moving about in the bedroom. Later, dressed for outdoors in overcoat and trilby, he passed the lounge without glancing in. The door of the flat closed with a thud, his footsteps raced down the stairs to the shop and then came a fainter thud as that door too shut behind him.

  Where he was off to Geraldine had no idea. Maybe to see some friend, someone she didn’t know, maybe to join a card game in that person’s home – not a club, for gambling was illegal though she wouldn’t have put that past him, his life so on the edge of the law since their marriage. He seemed always to have enough money to gamble with, to take her places with. But it did worry her, his apparently bottomless pit of ready money. How much longer could it last? Would it all come to an end one day? Suddenly, perhaps with him being caught and found guilty, sent to prison. What would she do then? How could she ever face her family knowing what they’d say – have to hear those inevitable words, I told you so.

  She sat surrounded by thoughts while the gramophone played the cheery one-step ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me’ running down for the want of winding, the lively song falling in pitch to become a dismal, diminishing wail, then a growl, finally falling silent before the record had reached its end.

  Tony glanced at her over the newspaper he was reading at the breakfast table.