The Factory Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Tony had bought her the dress for Christmas, spending far too much money on it. She hadn’t dared to wear it at Mum’s and draw disapproving looks at such a daring thing – the back of the heavy silk satin in electric blue draped so low that it was a marvel, even to her, how it didn’t slip off her shoulders but for the skilled cut of it, the draped edges held together by a huge bow resting on her left buttock. Harry Sullivan’s roving hands had almost had it off one shoulder at one time, her breast in danger of exposure, such a plunging back not tolerating a brassiere.

  Managing to get away from him, she’d been glad Tony hadn’t seen him, though Tony had gone missing much earlier, spark out on the bed Di had already found, or so she’d assumed at the time. It was Harry Sullivan following her everywhere that had made her go seeking protection from Tony, only to find him fast asleep with that Diana Manners beside him.

  Again, thinking back on it, she hated this constant agonising over whether what she’d seen hadn’t been as innocent as it had first appeared to her. Over these months the question had raised its vile head more than once and more than once had been dismissed as foolish. It was wrong. She had nothing to suspect Tony of. He was always attentive, so nice, so generous, bought her little presents, took her out and about. He hadn’t changed towards her.

  True, they didn’t make love as often as once they had but that was how marriage became, and when they did make love she always hoped that this time she would become pregnant. So far that hadn’t happened and she now wondered if perhaps she couldn’t have another baby, that something might have gone wrong when she’d given birth to Caroline. The fall she’d had prior to giving birth, had it done something inside?

  True also that Tony was away from home even more often than he used to be. It was the growing frequency of demands being made on him, he told her. More than any other suspicions she might have had that concerned her, the dowdy Kate Meyrick’s sinister hints concerning Tony, which should have faded long ago, still surfaced from time to time though Kate had never spoken of it since.

  Chiding her vivid imagination, Geraldine spent the rest of the summer determinedly shrugging it off as she shrugged off thoughts of any possible infidelity on Tony’s part.

  ‘Gerry, darling, there you are!’

  The voice assailed her from a little distance away, necessitating Geraldine, with her cloche hat pulled low over her eyes both for fashion sake and to protect them from the bright sunshine, to tilt back her head to see who was calling her.

  It was Easter. She and Tony were at Brooklands for the motor racing, picnicking with friends beside their two cars, as was everyone else. Family tourers were everywhere, their tops down on such a lovely day, parked higgledy-piggledy on the grass by the stand, picnic tables set, cloths spread, their owners lolling contentedly eating the goodies they’d brought along.

  It was good being with the two they were spending the day with. Rex and Maggie Drake weren’t of the usual crowd Tony mixed with, the man merely in the same line of business as he, a jeweller. They’d met them last year at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games. A casual exchange had revealed the man’s business and naturally he and Tony, discovering a common bond, had struck up a friendship that still continued. Rex Drake’s business, however, was in Birmingham so the friendship was mostly by telephone or letter. The couple, who had two growing-up children, had come down on a visit a couple of times since, and she and Tony had gone up there once. Today, Rex being keen on racing cars, they had met up for a picnic here at Brooklands. An extremely nice couple, Geraldine was sure they were 100 per cent above board, totally honest. Completely at ease with them, she wished all Tony’s friends were like this.

  It was Tony who by stretching his neck caught sight of Paula Griggs, the one who had called out, dragging her new husband along behind her. Now Paula Alcott, she and Jimmy Alcott had finally got married the week before Christmas, a wedding that she and Tony had attended, the whole thing very Christmassy.

  The usual crowd had been there. The usual crowd seemed always to be there no matter where she and Tony went: at every house party, at nightclubs, at functions, at the Grand Prix motor racing circuits abroad, abroad again to spend a fortune in the casinos in the South of France after bathing, sun-lounging and wolfing down heaps of food.

  Being summoned to a huge Christmas party last year had prevented her going to her parents, to their chagrin, which still rumbled on a good three months on. But Tony had been firm on that, they were expected to be with their friends for once, which had meant Christmas Day itself.

  Paula, coming up to them, flung herself down beside the four of them uninvited while Tony got up to stand beside an impassive-faced Jimmy Alcott who appeared to see it beyond his dignity to squat on the grass.

  ‘I was told you were here, Gerry darling,’ Paula gushed. ‘William Schulter and Sam Treater are here too with their wives. Cynthia said she caught a glimpse of you earlier on but you disappeared … Do you mind if I have one of your delicious sandwiches, my dear?’ She was helping herself even as Geraldine glanced across at Maggie for confirmation.

  Taking a large bite, Paula closed her eyes in pleasure. ‘Mmm! Smoked salmon. Jimmy and I had such a silly little luncheon, all salad and airy-fairy egg-things – cost him the very Earth but couldn’t have sustained a flea!’

  She was settling herself down for a long session. ‘We’re all going on to a restaurant after this.’

  ‘What, now?’ exclaimed Geraldine, which caused Paula to laugh raucously.

  ‘No, my sweet! After the racing’s finished. We’re all planning to eat there this evening – a rather delightful old hotel place down the road from here. I forget which village it’s in, but it’s there. You are coming, aren’t you – you and Tony and your friends? We haven’t been introduced yet, have we?’

  ‘Paula, this is Rex and Margaret, Maggie,’ Geraldine leapt in. ‘We met last year at the Olympics. This is a friend of me and Tony’s, Paula Alcott, and,’ she looked up at the thin, dour figure standing over her, ‘this is Paula’s husband, Jimmy.’

  There came nods and how-d’you-do’s, Rex smiling, about to stand up to offer the man a sociable handshake, but his smile falling away as it was met by a curt nod and an unbending expression. So Rex stayed seated, resuming his earlier position of one knee bent, one arm resting on it, the other supporting himself in a sitting position on the grass. Geraldine noticed him give Jimmy Alcott a bewildered look that he switched to Tony and herself as though he was deducing what Jimmy Alcott was and searching his thoughts as to why she and Tony associated with such a person. As Paula prattled on, Geraldine felt herself grow hot with embarrassment, knowing exactly what the Drakes thought of these interlopers to their erstwhile peaceful picnic.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be coming,’ she burst out on impulse. Paula’s grey eyes widened in a somewhat offended way. Above her Jimmy Alcott cleared his throat in a small double cough, the cough sounding significant.

  ‘Oh, but you really must come,’ Paula was saying. ‘You’ll be the only ones out of us all not there.’

  ‘Yes, of course we will,’ came Tony’s voice from above her.

  Paula’s eyes resumed their normal size. ‘So that’s settled then. We’ll be off around six after a drink at the bar here.’

  She gave a glance at the other two, though refraining from addressing them to their face. ‘You can invite your friends along as well, of course. The more the merrier!’

  The Drakes having left earlier than intended, saying they had enjoyed their day and hoped to do it again but needed to get home to their family and it was a long drive back, the evening was spent at the restaurant Paula had indicated. Last to arrive, the others there already, immediately put Geraldine ill at ease.

  She had been sorry about the early departure of their Birmingham friends, feeling they might have felt a little put out, though their goodbyes had been cheery enough. They’d been a breath of fresh air in the dim world she had come to know. Now she was again with people she held m
istrust for, especially Jimmy with his narrow, immobile features and eyes that had a tendency to hint at unremitting hostility, unless he was cracking jokes of which he had a vast store, most of them crude. Even then there was never a smile as everyone else dissolved into laughter and to which his diminutive wife squealed with merriment, crying as she clung to his arm at the table and later at the bar, ‘Isn’t he a scream?’ then kissing him in full view of them all.

  Watching him, Geraldine experienced an inward shudder. Not a man to be crossed was Jimmy Alcott, for all his jokes. It was towards the likes of his sort that Tony, to her shame, seemed to act as though the sun shone out of their arses. Or was Tony also afraid under his show of chummy bravado? Whatever, he never let on to her, scoffing if she so much as even partially admitted to uneasiness about these so-called business friends. How deeply he was involved with them sometimes seemed to her more than she knew.

  Jimmy was telling one of his jokes, hunched over his brandy at the round table where the eight of them now sat in the bar after their meal, the joke crude in the extreme. Geraldine, appearing to listen intently, had her mind more on her life, on a year that had simply sped by.

  Where had the last eighteen months gone? Hers was a life many a woman might envy yet even the wild social round could become humdrum by its very frequency. Then there were the evenings of real boredom when Tony was away, doing business from which she was excluded – in the way, not to be trusted, the less she knew the better, and so on. If only she had a child it might be easier to bear, someone for company. Why had all the times she and Tony made love never produced a baby?

  Geraldine let her mind wander dismally. It seemed she lived two lives, divided between the normality of her own family, and this swaying tightrope life on the edge of a society with its probably dishonestly come-by wealth, looking to ape the real elite yet never quite succeeding. The real cream of polite society, the nobility, the upper crust and famous names, the well brought up to wealth rather than the suddenly rich, would never have tolerated people like these. They too knew how to kick up their legs, did things decent common people would never dream of doing, maybe there even existed an undertow of illegal dealings, but they had real elegance, good manners, whereas the people of money she knew didn’t even profess to loyalty except that which crime and crooked dealings no doubt held together.

  The company exploded into laughter, pummelled her from her thoughts and, thus prompted, she laughed along with them, despising the wide-open red mouths of the guffawing women, lips no longer the rosebud shapes the rouge had painted them.

  The men were beginning to sweat a little after the heavy meal and too many brandies and glasses of champagne. Tony had loosened the knot of his tie for coolness. He was still grinning away at the last joke. Cynthia, patting her prominant collar bones to cool herself down, gave a little hiccup.

  ‘I simply must go off to the ladies. If I’m not careful I shall wet myself. Anyone coming with me? Lily? Paula? You, Dolly?’

  Each in turn shook her head, Paula again convulsing into laughter at an aside from Jimmy whose own face remained immobile. Cynthia’s eyes switched to Geraldine. ‘How about you?’

  It would be good to escape the incessant laughter, the men’s sweaty faces, Jimmy’s steel-eyed stare. Tony must never get on the wrong side of him.

  Only two other women were in the large, ornate cloakroom with its pink and gold décor, but they very soon went out. It was peaceful in here after the roars of inane laughter that had invaded the other bar users’ quiet conversations.

  Geraldine drew her powder compact from her bag and dabbed the puff around her nose while Cynthia went off to relieve herself. Geraldine had been earlier, needing only to escape. The chain was pulled and Cynthia emerged to wash her hands, dry them on a pink towel, then to plaster more rouge on to her already bright red lips, carefully tracing the cupid’s bow shape.

  ‘We should have worn something nicer to come here, had we known,’ Geraldine said, staring into the mirror at her outdoor clothes.

  One of the most enjoyable things she knew was dressing up in the lovely clothes Tony gave her, latest fashions complementing her now almost Eton-cropped hair, jewellery, long ropes of pearls, dangly earrings, those new slave bracelets, the best his own shop provided and often admired by others.

  Cynthia nodded concurrence to Geraldine’s statement, if somewhat absent-mindedly. Leaning closer to the large gilt-framed mirror the easier to study the rouged cheeks and painted eyes, the reflected eyes switched to the mirrored ones of Geraldine. There was a light of admiration in them.

  ‘I do think you carry it all off so marvellously well, Gerry,’ she said in reply to Geraldine’s questioning look.

  ‘Carry what off well?’ Her mind half on clothes, she automatically assumed her companion had referred to style, fashion.

  There came several rapid blinks of the reflected blue eyes. ‘Why, the way Tony’s carrying on with that Manners woman. I do admire you your composure over it all. Some wives would have gone berserk, darling.’

  The regard slowly grew cautious, guarded, almost seemed to shut down as Geraldine’s stare continued somewhat uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Darling, you must know!’ Cynthia burst out, and then, realising the faux pas, whispered, ‘Oh, God, you don’t! Surely you must have suspected. It’s been going on for over a year. Everyone knows about it.’

  Cynthia seemed fixed in her bent forward position, her stare now completely confused. ‘Hasn’t anyone so much as hinted? Oh, Gerry, I’m so sorry. I don’t know where to put myself, I’m simply devastated, really I am.’

  She wasn’t the only one. Geraldine could only stare at her as though mesmerised, at once overcome with disbelief and shock, even to returning her powder compact to her bag as though it had to be the most important thing to do. Then without warning came anger, a flood of anger, like a river bursting its banks.

  ‘How can you make up such lies?’ Fine words fell away. Tears of rage filled her eyes. ‘You’d all love me and Tony ter fall apart, wouldn’t yer?’

  ‘No, darling!’

  ‘Yes you would. Well, I don’t believe one word of it. They’re rotten lies. Tony’s—’

  The door bursting open to admit a diner stopped the flow, but the woman had already heard the raised voices. With awkward glances towards Geraldine’s flushed and contorted face, she hurried on past the two of them and into one of the toilets. Reluctant to be overheard, Geraldine closed her mouth as Cynthia lowered her painted eyes.

  ‘I had best be getting back to everyone. They’re most likely thinking we’ve both fallen down the loo.’ She gave a nervous half laugh then stopped and looked directly at Geraldine. ‘Are you coming, Gerry?’

  Without knowing why, Geraldine nodded, picking up her little bag from the shelf under the gilt-framed mirror and following her out as though she were some little puppy called to heel.

  Mum was glaring at her. ‘Why come ter me? I could of told yer so, Gel. Yer made yer bed, love, an’ yer messed it up. What d’yer expect me ter do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered lamely, then in renewed anger, at herself, at Tony, at Mum for taking it all so calmly, not one hint of sympathy, only blame, condemnation, a shrugging of the shoulders, burst out, ‘I don’t know what ter do, where ter turn.’

  ‘So yer come cryin’ ter me,’ Mum was going on. ‘Don’t want us when things is going on orright. Ain’t got time for us. But the second yer get a spot of bother, its, “Where’s Mum?”’

  ‘That’s not true, Mum. I do come to see you, any time.’

  ‘When it suits.’

  ‘And this ain’t a spot of bother, Mum. Tony having it off with another woman ain’t a spot of bother. It’s the end of our marriage. He’s been lying to me all this time. He’s been unfaithful.’

  ‘It takes two, my gel. And I don’t mean another woman, I mean the person what could of drove ’im away in the first place.’

  ‘How could I have driven him away? I’ve been a good
wife to ’im. I’ve never gone off the rails.’ She thought suddenly of Alan and how easily at one time she could have done just that except that it never came up, he’d never approached her in that way, merely said he loved her and always would. It broke her heart thinking of the way he’d said that. ‘I’ve been loyal and loving and caring – what more could he have asked for?’

  ‘Fer you to of give ’im a baby.’

  ‘I did. But she died, Mum, remember?’ Fresh tears collected in her eyes but her mother didn’t even blink.

  ‘Then yer should of tried again instead of gallivanting around dressed up like a dog’s dinner, stinkin’ to ’igh heaven of scent, yer face all plastered with paint, you drippin’ with jewellery, yer ’air cut like you was a boy because it ’appens ter be the fashion.’

  She hadn’t paused to think that Evie too had cut her hair almost as short. ‘Too blessed ’igh an’ mighty ter go in for a family. Would of clipped yer wings too much, spoilt yer enjoyment.’

  Anger was bringing more tears. ‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ she was blubbing. ‘God knows I’ve pleaded and prayed for another baby but it just ain’t happened. I don’t think I can ’ave any, Mum. I ’ad that fall just before Caroline was born. Maybe it twisted something inside me – I don’t know. But it ain’t my fault I ain’t had another baby. And I’ve tried so ’ard to.’

  Mum was regarding her with just a fraction more sympathy, was even looking surprised. ‘I didn’t know you ’ad a fall. Yer didn’t tell me.’

  Geraldine too had calmed a little. ‘I didn’t give it much thought at the time. It wasn’t a bad fall and I forgot about it, until much later, until I never seemed to get pregnant. Then I began putting two and two together, and that’s all I can think of – the reason why I ain’t been able to start a family.’

  Mum’s shoulders appeared to drop as though the short moment of sympathy had already drained away. ‘Well, it could be one reason, I s’pose. Maybe it ain’t your fault not ’aving babies. But when a woman can’t keep ’er man, somethink’s wrong somewhere.’