by Janet Tanner
Day by day the feeling of dread grew more intense, even creeping into her dreams so that she woke trembling, her face wet with tears.
Dinah told no one of her fears – keeping her secret seemed the single most important thing. Neil had hardly spoken to her since that afternoon and she was hurt but not surprised. She knew he was embarrassed by what had happened and she blamed herself entirely. She did not want him to realise she was pregnant as a result of that brief encounter; her pride would not allow it. But something had to be done. She could not pretend for ever that nothing was happening to her. At the moment she did not show – her body was as slim as ever apart from a slight thickening of the waist – but she would not be able to hide it for ever.
That lovely June morning Dinah walked by the river trying to clear her head and make plans of some kind. If she stayed at college much longer not only would Neil realise she was pregnant but so would all the others. Dinah was suffused with a hot and debilitating flood of horror at the prospect and she found herself beginning to tremble. She would have to take a year out at the very least and go right away, she decided. But when the baby was born – what then? Adoption was the obvious answer, but that thought was horrific too, making her stomach contract as if to keep the baby safe inside her, and Dinah was suddenly quite sure she could never bring herself to part with it.
If I went right away from anyone I know, maybe I could bring the baby up myself, she thought. She would have to get a job to support them both, of course, and it was unlikely to be the sort of career she had hoped for. But it was the only option that offered hope rather than despair, a positive step. For a moment Dinah felt almost cheerful, as if she were setting out on a great adventure, then, as suddenly, she was terror-struck at the enormity of what she was proposing to do.
But for all her confusion there was one solution she did not consider for even a moment, and that was going home. She would not give her grandfather the satisfaction of knowing he had been proved right. Whatever she did to sort out this mess, Dinah was determined she would do it alone.
Christian Van Kendrick Junior, or Van, as he liked to be known, was not feeling best pleased. It was not part of his brief to have to interview applicants for the more menial jobs in his father’s boot-making factory – at least, he did not consider it was. His father, however, Christian Senior, seemed to think differently.
‘I have to go out,’ he had said. ‘I have to go and see the bank manager. You can do the interviews for me. There are only three of them and they are all after the one operative’s vacancy. You know what we are looking for – someone steady and reliable, a hard worker who won’t go sick for a week every time he has too much to drink at the working men’s club on a Saturday night. A man with a young family is probably best. He will need the money regularly as well as doing a bit extra to make up on the piece work.’
‘Why not let Jim Pratten see them?’ Van suggested.
Jim Pratten was the charge hand. He had been with the company for years – ever since Christian Van Kendrick had come to England from Holland just before the last war and set up his little factory manufacturing industrial safety boots. In Van’s opinion, Jim was the obvious person to conduct the interviews – he was the one, after all, who would have to work with whoever was taken on, and if he couldn’t spot a good operative after twenty-five years he had no business being in the position he was.
But the old man would have none of it.
‘I’m asking you to do it, Christian. It is all good practice for you – for when I retire and you take over. Now, the first interview is at three o’clock, and here are the letters of application …’
Van’s mouth tightened angrily. He knew it was useless to argue – in the end his father would have his way. He was the most stubborn man imaginable; sometimes Van thought of the legend of the Dutch boy who had saved his town from the flood water by sticking his finger in the hole in the dyke, and mused that his father could very well have been that boy – he would have stood there too, hour after hour, with his finger jammed in the hole, if he had made up his mind to it. Perhaps stubbornness was a national characteristic of the Dutch.
Van picked up the sheaf of papers fastened together with a metal clip, which his father pushed across the desk towards him, and slammed out of the office.
As he crossed the machine room Jim Pratten looked up and acknowledged him with a mock salute that reminded Van uncomfortably of a tug of the forelock. He nodded curtly – no point trying to talk over the noise of the machines, and in any case he had nothing to say. He went into his own office, put on the light – a single bare bulb in a plain white plastic shade directly over the desk – and closed the blinds on the window that looked out on to the factory floor.
His father’s office was a mirror image of this one, though with no curtain or blind at his window, but Van could not stand the feeling of being in a goldfish bowl and so he had installed the Venetian blind. Pulled to the right angle it enabled him to look out and watch the operatives at work without them being able to see him.
Van sighed, acknowledging the truth that he had avoided for so long but which was now constantly on his mind. He hated the factory, hated the soul-destroying mundaneness of it, the feeling that Kendricks was a little family concern that would never – could never – grow beyond its humble origins. Most of all he hated the feeling that it had somehow trapped him with tentacles as unyielding as his father’s stubbornness and would never let him escape.
There was no doubt in Van’s mind that Christian Senior intended the factory to be his son’s destiny. Even before he could walk he had been taken there in his pushchair and as he grew older his father would take him on a tour of the cutting room and the stitching lines, holding him by the hand to make sure he did not hurt himself on any of the machinery and explaining what was going on. In those days he had loved the noisy whirr and the smell of leather, loved to hear the stories of how his father had come to England from Amsterdam, fallen in love with his mother, married her and bought the small run-down factory premises whose previous occupant had gone bankrupt during the depression.
‘They laughed at a Dutchman making boots,’ Christian would say. ‘They thought we wore only wooden clogs. But I showed them. Oh yes, I showed them.’
The young Van had listened to the stories and never tired. It was only later that his enthusiasm had begun to wane. It was not easy, he thought, to remain fascinated for very long with safety footwear, and the thick-soled heavy-duty boots which were Kendricks’ stock in trade were unbelievably ugly. But they sold well – and that was what constituted the trap. Cheap, serviceable, unexciting boots were mandatory wear for thousands of working men, and Kendricks had captured a slice of the market with their reputation for value for money. The factory was not making a fortune but it was ticking over nicely; though the Van Kendricks were by no means rich, they were, by any standards, comfortably off.
Van was now thirty years old and he knew he had a great deal to thank the family business for – his comfortable childhood, his education, the standard of living to which he had become accustomed – but it didn’t make him like it, or the part he had to play in it – any better. His father might be content within his limited horizons; Van was more ambitious. He found Christian’s pride in his life’s work faintly irritating, and the expectation that he would simply carry it on, maintaining it on the same lines without expanding or diversifying, was a millstone around his neck.
It was not the long hours that his father expected him to put in that he minded – Van was not afraid of hard work. But if he was to devote his life to the business as he knew his father intended him to, then he wanted to play for higher stakes.
Many times in the last few years Van had tried to persuade Christian to allow him to develop the business, but the old man had reacted with characteristic stubbornness.
‘It’s a good family business,’ he would say. ‘We don’t want it to get too big. Better to be able to run it ourselves. I know everyone who
works for me. I’ve watched their children grow up.’ The Christmas party for the children of his employees, when Christian himself dressed up as Santa Claus to hand out an orange, an apple and a small present from the huge ten-foot Christmas tree, and the annual outing to Weymouth, when Kendricks hired, and filled, two charabancs, had featured in the works calendar for as long as Van could remember.
‘But we need to expand,’ Van argued. ‘Times are changing and we should be changing with them. Big is beautiful these days. There won’t be any more room, soon, for the little man. If we don’t modernise and streamline our operation we shall be squeezed out.’
‘I won’t have a lot of newfangled working practices. Quality is our trademark.’
‘Quality need not be sacrificed.’
‘I have run this factory my way for nearly thirty years. It is doing very well the way it is, thank you.’
‘Well, we really should have another line,’ Van said, changing tack. ‘ If the demand for safety footwear was to disappear we’d be finished.’
‘Tch! Working men will always need boots.’
‘Not to the same extent.’ Van could feel himself losing patience. ‘It’s no use behaving like a dinosaur. Can’t you see times are changing? Men don’t have to walk miles to work any more – they don’t even have to travel there on firms’ coaches. They drive their own cars. And when they get there machines are doing most of the heavy work. Give us another twenty years and people will be more interested in what they wear for leisure than for work. We have to be ready for that.’
‘Kendricks is known for its safety footwear. In this part of the world Kendricks is safety footwear.’
And he had remained unmoved, no matter how persuasive the arguments Van put forward.
On occasions, totally frustrated by his father’s entrenched stand, Van had considered leaving and setting up on his own, but be had no capital with which to do it, and without his father’s support, no collateral for a loan. Besides this he had no idea what product he could launch without the starting point of safety footwear, which was the only business he knew. In spite of an incipient ruthless streak Van could not bring himself to do this. It would break his father’s heart if he set up in competition, and in any case it would be a bad move commercially – as Van had already observed, the market for heavy-duty boots was a contracting one; with both him and his father fighting for a share of it the likely outcome would be that they would both go under.
No, there was nothing for it, Van decided, but to stick it out and continue to try to change his father’s mind. Failing that, he could only look forward to the day when his father retired and control of Kendricks came to him. Then he would be in a position to translate his ideas into action. The old man would probably still try to run the show from the sidelines but Van was determined that when he was in charge he would do as he liked. Just as long as it was not too late – just as long as Kendricks was still solvent and providing a strong enough base to provide him with the launching pad he needed.
For a man of Van’s temperament the waiting was far from easy. The old man was nearly sixty now but he showed no signs of being ready for retirement. He still rose with the dawn and walked the two and a half miles to the factory as he had done for the last thirty years, rain or shine; he still maintained the same paternalistic outlook, fondly watching through the window of his little office as the workers turned out his beloved boots, and frequently touring the factory floor to check quality at first hand or to enquire about the health of the wife and family of one of the hands. And he still issued instructions which amounted to orders to Van, although he had graced him with the honorary title of Factory Manager.
Van sighed, reached for his box of slim panatellas and lit one. Then he pulled the letters of application toward him and leafed through them. Two men and one woman – or, more accurately, one girl, a student. Not a very satisfactory applicant – if he had been running the business he probably wouldn’t even have bothered calling her for interview, but it was his father’s policy to see everyone who wrote in for a job. ‘They took the trouble to apply, the least I can do is give them an interview,’ he would say. As if, Van thought, that was supposed to make them feel better when he turned them down!
Van glanced at his watch. The first of the applicants was due to arrive in half an hour. That would give him just time to get some of his correspondence out of the way. He rang through for the secretary he shared with his father.
‘Could you come in for dictation please, Jean?’
Then he pushed the little pile of job applications to the back corner of his desk to make way for more pressing matters.
Dinah arrived for her interview ten minutes early. Punctuality had always been a habit with her, for it had been drilled into her since childhood.
She sat in the narrow passage outside the receptionist’s office, hands in their black cotton wrist-length gloves clasped in her lap, looking the picture of composure, but feeling utterly sick inside.
Through the window which gave on to the office she could see the receptionist clattering away on her typewriter, never glancing up for even a moment, and though the door, flaking dark-brown paint, was closed, she could hear the constant whirr of the machines, a depressingly monotonous sound. She did not like what she had seen of the factory so far; it was repressive and old-fashioned, a far cry from the future she had imagined for herself, but what choice did she have? She needed a job and this one, if she could get it, would have certain advantages. The pay, though not brilliant, would at least keep her while she waited for the baby to arrive, and sitting at a machine would be better than standing in a shop or waiting at table in a café where she would be on her feet all day. And at least she could sew. She had always been good at needlework and she could not imagine that stitching boots would be so different from making a dress.
The door leading to the factory opened and a slightly built man dressed in a sports coat of cheap tweed material and poorly cut slacks came out. Dinah glanced at him expectantly but he walked straight past her and out through the door. Another applicant for the job? Dinah wondered, and felt her heart sink. Perhaps Kendricks were looking for a man.
The minutes ticked by. Dinah looked at the receptionist, still typing furiously in the little office, but the girl seemed to have forgotten that she was there. Then the door opened again and another man came out, a thickset man with dark springy hair and eyes of such a dark blue they were almost black. He was in shirtsleeves but the shirt was immaculate white, worn with a grey and blue striped tie and dark-grey trousers that were obviously part of an expensive, well-tailored suit. Gold cufflinks gleamed at his wrists. He exuded confidence and power.
Dinah stood up, smoothing the wrinkles out of the pencil-slim black skirt which was beginning to be a little too tight around the waistband.
‘Miss Marshall?’ The man’s voice suited him, low and crisp with just the hint of a West Country burr.
Dinah nodded. The navy-blue eyes ran over her appraisingly. Dinah felt he could see right inside her and know things that were as yet her secret and hers alone. She felt her cheeks begin to grow hot.
‘I am Van Kendrick.’ His eyes came to rest on her face, his mouth, with its full, rather sensuous lower tip, curved into a cool smile. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting. Perhaps you would like to come through.’
‘I don’t quite understand why you want to work for us, Miss Marshall,’ Van Kendrick said. ‘Boot operative seems an unlikely choice of job for someone with your qualifications.’
Dinah swallowed at the lump of nervousness in her throat. She had anticipated being asked something like this and she was ready for it.
‘I can’t afford to stay on at college. I lost my mother recently.’
‘I see.’ He looked at her, saw again the vulnerability behind the composure which had constituted the first impression he had had of her, and understood – or thought he understood. She was hurting inside and the hurt was born of grief and a safe world torn apart.
She was very young, he thought, and also very attractive. Van was a bachelor still but he had known plenty of girls. They flocked to him, drawn by his striking good looks, his money and his personality – that blend of charisma and a ruthlessness which, though not yet fully developed, was there in embryo just the same. But none of them, no matter how pretty or how accommodating, had affected him the way she was affecting him. He looked at her and found himself wanting to please her, wanting to see the way that delicate-boned face would light up when she smiled. But even as the thought crossed his mind he dismissed it, recognising it as nothing but foolish sentimentality which had no place in business.
‘I’m not convinced this would be the right job for you,’ he said. ‘It’s hard work and it can be monotonous. To be frank I should think you’d be bored stiff in no time at all and I can’t afford to have to keep recruiting and training new staff.’
Her face fell; she sat forward in her chair scrunching the little black gloves to a ball between her hands.
‘I wouldn’t let you down. I really do need the job.’
He eyed her steadily. I’m sure there must be others, better suited to your qualifications. What exactly were you studying?’
‘Fashion design. And I’m terribly interested in shoes.’
The first small flame of excitement darted inside him. He tried to ignore it.
‘I’d hardly describe the footwear we make as shoes – not in the sense you mean, anyway. We’re light years away from the fashion industry.’