The Factory Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘What would you say to a trip to Egypt, darling?’

  The suggestion, coming out of the blue, made Geraldine look up from her own meal.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Egypt. Let’s say sometime in April.’ He leaned forward and passed the newspaper to her, now folded at the appropriate place for her to read.

  ‘They’re saying that people are flooding out there to see the tomb this Howard Carter chap discovered last November,’ he went on as she read the piece indicated. ‘Said to be filled with treasure from this pharaoh, what’s-his-name, Tutankhamun. Everyone wants to see it. So what d’you say, shall we? Can’t find ourselves left out in the cold when others start asking if we’ve seen it when they already have.’

  That was Tony these days, killing himself to keep up with others. Of course she wanted to go. Who wouldn’t? But all this spending as if money grew on trees, it worried her.

  ‘Can we really afford it? It could be awfully expensive. Should we be spending out so much?’

  A peeved look had come over his face. ‘Of course we can afford it!’

  ‘Well, we do get through quite a bit. Too much. I just feel it can’t last.’

  Reaching over he grabbed the paper from her in a small show of temper. ‘You let me be the judge of what we can and can’t afford. Trouble with you, Gerry, you’ve never got over those penny-pinching times you used to know. It’s about time you forgot all that.’

  ‘Old habits die hard, I suppose,’ she snapped, though she hadn’t intended to retaliate with quite that sort of retort, practically affirming what he’d said. Any reference to her upbringing rankled and made her say stupid things.

  It seemed unbelievable that in three days she and Tony would be sailing off to Egypt. April already, April 1923, so much had changed in her life since marrying him two and a half years ago. She had only two regrets: no children, and the gulf that still lay between her and her own family. In a way she was glad that a similar gulf lay between Tony and his, for the very opposite reason to hers, but in a way they were both in the same boat. He’d not had a peep from either of his parents last Christmas, and one would have thought being so estranged from them, he might have looked to hers to compensate, but he seemed not one bit inclined to.

  At her insistence they’d spent Christmas Day with her family, but he had been so cold and distant, his all-too-obvious, bored manner making the atmosphere so uncomfortable that all she wanted to do the entire day was to sink into the ground with mortification.

  He had wanted to go to a party where it had been planned for them all to listen in to this new fad, the wireless. He’d been so eager but she’d played up, insisting in no uncertain terms that it was time her own parents had a look in until he finally conceded with a churlishness that foretold the sort of day she would have and she had ended up wishing to God that she’d gone with him instead.

  That had been almost sixteen weeks ago and she hadn’t seen them since. Just after the New Year she’d gone to Mum’s on the off chance, looking to make up for his behaviour and for going with him to a New Year’s Eve house party instead of to them. Mum hadn’t been in.

  Going on to see Clara, not daring to face Mavis although her sister seemed to be doing better these days for money and was expecting her third baby, she at least found Clara at home.

  With no axe to grind with Geraldine’s more than generous wedding present to them of a whole year’s rent in advance on a little terraced house in Belhaven Street, just the other side of Grove Road, her sister-in-law had welcomed her warmly.

  She had gone there a few days after they’d moved in to find it in a dreadful state, the previous tenants not at all finicky as to cleanliness. She’d taken off her coat and hat and got down to help with the scrubbing of floors, washing of walls and windows, even to cleaning a most revolting outside loo, all the while trying not to retch at the sight and smell of it. Clara had been so grateful, and in her she knew she had an ally against Mum’s constant insidious remarks that had never really diminished in their smarting results.

  With Clara’s house, the first time she’d been there since helping to clean it, as neat a little home as anyone could wish for and as bright as a new pin, even to the well-scrubbed window frames and door as well as the doorstep, Clara had told her that Mum was at Mavis’s where she always went on Wednesdays. Geraldine had forgotten that but was glad she hadn’t chosen to go to Mavis’s and have the two of them to cope with.

  It was a nice afternoon with Clara offering a lovely cake she had baked and her tea like nectar. She promised to tell Mum that she had gone there and Geraldine had no reason to doubt that she wouldn’t, but Mum had never responded, hadn’t come nigh or by her flat. Over the weeks of silence Geraldine experienced a rebellious reaction. Why put herself out to go and see Mum again if Mum couldn’t be bothered to come and see her?

  Even a little note to Mum had reaped no response, probably still seething over Tony’s attitude on Christmas Day. But surely such a small scratch should have healed by now. It was typical of Mum to pick and pick at it until it continually bled! Thus with her nose put out of joint by those weeks of silence, the weeks had blossomed into months and the gulf had grown wider.

  She hadn’t even told Mum she and Tony were off to Egypt, something she would normally have ached to spread around and see eyes open with envy and awe. The eyes of those friends she imparted it to in this present existence of hers wouldn’t widen a thousandth of an inch. They’d all done it at some time or other – going abroad to those of the giddy set to which she now belonged was completely commonplace, perhaps only to awaken interest if one said one was off to chart some new undiscovered jungle or follow in the footsteps of Scott or Amundsen across the still much-uncharted Antarctic.

  It seemed no matter who she spoke to, they had all either been already or were about to go and discover Egypt. To be in Egypt had suddenly become fashionable. But wasn’t she too about to join in the fashionable rush for the place? She could hardly wait, and Mum, if she continued to be the way she was, would be the loser by not being told!

  It was the first time she’d ever sailed on a proper ship. There had been those bobbing little packets going between England and France, the route to Paris or one of the resorts popular with society types.

  This huge ship had her in awe, filled with excitement, hardly able to believe that she was about to travel in it to somewhere she’d never even dreamed she’d ever see. It was like a great floating hotel. The grand, ornate, central staircase you could watch people ascending and descending all day long. The high-ceilinged, brightly lit ballroom with its magnificent clean lines of art deco echoed dance music from an impeccable orchestra while men in their evening clothes and women in fashionably short, glitteringly beaded dresses that far outdid hers glided about the small dance floor or else kicked up their heels to the brand-new dances like the Black Bottom, the Jog Trot, the Vampire and the Shimmy.

  There was the most fantastic lounge and an almost intimidating dining room where cutlery tinkled gently and voices droned with such a richness of quality that she felt she only dared to whisper to Tony in case her humble origins were detected, despite the odd explosion of some light ripple of laughter or high-toned, refined exclamation. There were people who milled about with names like Ponsonby and Fotheringay and Lord this and Lady that. And all the while came the regular thumping of the ship’s engines until finally she got so accustomed to it she forgot to hear it, the only time to be aware of it was to lull her to sleep at night, listening to its subdued beat with knots reduced for the benefit of slumbering passengers.

  Of course they were well segregated from third class – Tony had seen to that, spending money on this trip that had frightened the wits out of her and made her wonder just how much money he did make other than legitimately, and again what would happen to her if he ever got caught at what he was doing. But she forgot all this once on board, the big ship gliding out into the English Channel and on to the Bay of Biscay.

  Sh
e’d heard ghastly tales of the Bay of Biscay ever since Tony had decided on this trip, of storms that induced violent bouts of seasickness. But it seemed almost for her benefit alone that those terrible waves remained virtually pond-like the whole way, giving her not one single moment of discomfort.

  There were parties and dancing, the Captain’s Dinner, deck games by the score, endless entertainment, then relaxing in deck chairs, a continuous round of eating such delicious food as she had never before tasted that she was sure she would be quite fat by the end of the trip with her breasts far larger than the accepted flatness of the day. But for now she would enjoy every second and everything that was thrown her way and damn the pounds she put on and damn the cost of it all. It seemed the motto ‘Live for the moment and forget tomorrow’ was the normal pursuit of everyone on board, so why not join them?

  With the ship moving steadily towards the Mediterranean, there were warm night breezes that merely ruffled the hair so long as one kept well out of the stiff wind created by the ship’s own progress and she felt like a film star. Again and again she needed to pinch herself to see if this was really her participating in all of this, and every now and again a twinge of utmost excitement and elation would deal an unexpected punch deep in the pit of her stomach until she wanted to leap for sheer joy, though of course she never did. And show herself up among all these seasoned travellers to whom sailing the high seas was probably commonplace? Never.

  Tony, however, was treated to it nightly in the privacy of their cabin and took great delight in hearing her explosions of joy.

  ‘I just can’t believe it’s me here,’ she trilled, cuddling up to him as they lay in the somewhat narrow bed of their cabin, its narrowness bringing them closer together.

  ‘You wait until you see Egypt,’ he promised as though he’d been there before, although he hadn’t.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ she sighed. ‘To think – me going to Egypt!’

  They made love as they had almost every night on board, with pleasurable abandonment, like during those early months of marriage. Unless too weary from dancing and parties so that they fell straight to sleep on hitting the pillows, they continued making love with such passion as the ship sailed on its way she was sure she must conceive, then wondered if she really wanted to – a baby would put a stop to all this sort of life, enjoying it so much that all she wanted at the moment was for it to go on and on. They could always have a nanny, but there’d be months during which she would slowly get fatter, finally too fat to go anywhere. She decided it be best left to fate and to make the most of what she had, as Tony had so often advised in his more provoked moments.

  Egypt, when they finally reached it, took her breath clean away. The heat was so dry it was like the heat from an oven. Wearing a sun helmet and needing the constant shade of a parasol, she began to wonder what mad idea had made her want to come here, except that both she and Tony had been totally innocent of what this sort of heat could be like.

  Consuming what seemed to be virtually gallons of water from leather bottles, they motored from Alexandria in convoy for more than one hundred miles between a vast expanse of dun-coloured desert with often hardly any horizon and nothing to see but dust devils and occasionally incongruous and wavering glimpses of distant water, seashores and green trees which their Egyptian escorts said were mirages – illusions she’d never bothered to think of, far less expect ever to see – on a road that was almost dead straight all the way to Cairo and often narrowed by blown sand. The journey had begun late in the day, necessitating they bed down for the night in tents. Then at last Cairo itself.

  What a contrast to the silent majesty of the desert with just the odd camel caravan being passed or passing in the other direction. The din of Cairo was alarming, everyone seeming to need to yell above everyone else, whether talking, arguing or bartering, all against a background of a strange wailing of flutes supposed to be music.

  There were so many people, so many beggars, so many starved-looking children with tangled hair and sore mouths and wide black eyes around which flies congregated for the moisture they contained; so many women shrouded from head to foot in some strange, shapeless garb; so many carts pulled by camel, donkey or human-power, the men as well as the poor creatures so thin that Geraldine felt her stomach turn as she wondered what sort of place Tony had brought her to.

  And the smell! Invading her nostrils, an overpowering miasma of sickly perfume, strange cooking and, in passing many a back alley, stagnant odours of both animal and human excrement. As her dad often remarked at any not-too-pleasant smell: ‘What a rotten effluvia, what an ’orrible stink!’ Amid the sights and sounds and smells of this city, Geraldine had to smile.

  After a trip to view the Pyramids they were soon boarding the paddle steamer taking them down the Nile to Luxor, once more back to serenity and peace as Egypt seen from midstream regained its romance.

  Even so there were still the flies, millions of them, tiny, tormenting little horrors that seemed to follow the boat, and her in particular, with vicious glee; she wielded without mercy the flywhisk she’d bought, or during the evening fluttered a fan. There were the mosquitoes too, whining beyond the netting put up around their bed at night. But having brought along medicines lest she got bitten, she had no fears of malaria.

  The food, though, was sumptuous, the staff soft-footed and polite-toned, the accommodation, though hot even at night, was spotless with cool white sheets and crisp mosquito netting, and the double doors leading to a tiny veranda could be opened to a pleasant breeze created by the boat’s progress upstream.

  Once again she began to relax and enjoy the sparkling company, the good food, the soporific rhythmic pulse of the engine turning the paddles, the romance of slowly passing banks with their ever-changing scenery. Here groves of date palms, there huge, deep-green trees she was told were mangos – she’d tasted these the first night on the boat and wasn’t too impressed, the taste strange with a slightly, somewhat unpalatable creosote flavour.

  On deck, under a sunshade, sipping tea from fine china cups, she’d watch a finger of desert probing down to the very water’s edge, or some local village sliding by with the faint, excited cries of children at play drifting over the river towards her. Now and again would be a drifting mass of lotus plants with a few flowers sprinkled among the light-green fronds, or a low bank of reeds among which people laboured, at what she didn’t know. All so removed from the elegant and civilised life on board this sedate paddle boat, a world away, and again she must pinch herself to be sure that she wasn’t dreaming all this.

  It took days of leisurely gliding to reach Luxor and the Valley of the Kings where Carter had made his wondrous discovery. Here Europeans appeared to outnumber the locals at last, a couple of hotels brim full of visitors and she and Tony – he with his quiet wit, his natural charm and his ease of conversation – began rapidly to make friends as people will on holiday.

  They went the next day in a fleet of cars bearing a horde of visitors, first stopping off to admire the Colossi of Memnon, taking turns posing for photos dwarfed by the huge, crumbling statues, the men hardly reaching above the plinths. They spent so much time there that by the time they arrived at the Valley of the Kings, Geraldine already felt worn down by the heat.

  She’d never seen anything like those towering cliffs of sand, brilliant under an unforgiving sun. Standing about as the marvellous discovery of the boy king Tutankhamun’s tomb was explained to them all, Geraldine began to feel strange. Not exactly sick or faint, but that the brightness of the sand began to grow brighter, more glaring, almost white, the heat more intense. Despite her sun helmet, her parasol now wavering a little, despite drinking desperately from her water bottle, the glare grew in strength before her eyes.

  ‘I’ve got to find some shade, darling,’ she whispered to Tony. The heat was battering her body. Her breathing had grown rapid and oddly shallow, yet she seemed not to be sweating though tiny shining particles of salt on the back of her hands when sh
e looked at them told her she must be, the moisture drying as fast as it seeped through her pores, its salt loss betrayed by those tiny crystals on her skin.

  ‘I have to sit down.’

  The way she panted her request brought Tony’s gaze. ‘Are you all right, darling?’

  She tried to focus on him. ‘I – don’t know. I feel … funny.’

  As her body gave way she felt herself being lifted, carried, aware only of shade, of the heat of the sun diminishing as people bent over her, but she felt no better for it.

  ‘The heat has got to her,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘She has been drinking properly, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Of course.’ This was Tony’s voice. ‘Just as we were instructed.’

  ‘It could be heatstroke. We must find somewhere cool. Let’s splash her face with water. It might help cool her. Look, use my handkerchief. It is clean.’

  After a while, with cooling water dabbed on her forehead, the back of her neck, the backs of her hands, she recovered slightly to find herself in the shade of a kiosk that had been set up by wily locals to dispense soft drinks to wealthy foreigners flocking there in their dozens these days, foolish people with more money than good sense, paying more than such drinks were worth – piastres simply for the asking – and these people called them foreigners and natives!

  A drink of indeterminate flavour in a cool glass was being applied to Geraldine’s lips. She drank a little then opened her eyes to see a pretty young woman kneeling over her, a glass of pale liquid in her hand. Above her stood Tony with a lost if concerned expression.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ queried the woman.

  Geraldine sat up slowly, needing to gather her wits, needing to dispel the embarrassment she felt. ‘A lot better. I’ll be all right in a minute.’

  The woman laid a gentle hand on her shoulder to prevent any attempt to rise to her feet. ‘Don’t hurry. Just stay sitting for a moment.’

  ‘I just came over all unnecessary,’ she excused herself in confusion of having a complete stranger seeing her in this state, and saw the woman smile at her colloquialism, but it was a smile that also carried a look of recognition.