‘No riots here then,’ whispered Phil. ‘Think we’ve missed our page one lead tomorrow.’
‘Unless it’s “Usherette curbs teenage gang violence with her torch”’, I whispered back. I could just see Phil’s grin in the dark.
‘Good thing our schools aren’t like that, eh?’ he said later.
I thought of the story I’d done on The Meadows before the new headmistress had arrived there. Disaster. Kids on strike, drugs in school, stabbing in the playground. Mayhem. ‘Oh yeah, good thing,’ I whispered back.
When the lights went up, Phil grabbed my hand. ‘Come on!’ he urged and we scuttled out. Odd, I thought, then I heard a creaky rendition of the National Anthem and those people who weren’t leaving, like us, were in their places, standing to attention. Sliding out just ahead of us were Leo/Lenny and Peggy. They must have been sitting a few rows behind us.
‘Well, that’s something I thought I’d never see,’ said Phil. ‘Still, nowt so queer as folk, as they say.’ He looked at me in a sort of knowing way.
I smiled quickly, to show I understood, but after my very awkward conversation with Billy, I said nothing. It was dark now, and the town was quiet. There were just a few people coming from the cinema and leaving pubs, shouting their goodnights. The evening was over, people were clearly heading for home. I wished I was going home, proper home, wandering along the pavement with my arms wrapped around Will, after something as ordinary as a film. Home together. We could have a nightcap, curl up on the sofa together, go to bed …
I missed him so much I almost gasped with the pain of it. Instead, here I was with Phil, who was a perfectly nice, decent sort of bloke. But he wasn’t Will.
I looked at my watch.
‘What time do the pubs shut?’ I asked Phil.
‘Ten o’clock,’ he said.
Too late even for a drink. Probably just as well.
After we left the town centre, we seemed to have the night and the streets to ourselves. Two buses pulled away from the Market Place, but there were only a handful of cars around. It was very peaceful. The noise of our footsteps echoed along the silent houses, until we got to the Browns’.
So what happens now? I wondered. ‘I’m not sure if I can ask you in,’ I said. ‘It’s not my house and …’
‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ said Phil. He too looked hesitant.
‘Well it’s been a nice evening,’ he said.
‘Yes it has,’ I said, and meant it. ‘Thank you very much. And you should definitely have a crack at the Express. Really.’
‘Yes I think I might, but don’t mention it to the others, will you?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘No well, thank you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘See you tomorrow then.’
‘Yes, see you tomorrow.’
He shifted his mac, which he had been carrying, from arm to arm and back again, then said again, ‘Right. Well, see you tomorrow then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Goodnight Rosie.’
‘Goodnight Phil.’
He turned and strode off up the road, leaving me with the key in the lock, wondering about not even getting a goodnight kiss …
Phil was a friendly face around the office, however. Someone to share a joke with, nip out for a coffee with. He was a lovely straightforward sort of chap and easy to talk to. Gordon had been a lech. Henfield still was. Alan more or less ignored me, and after that first disastrous evening, I avoided the sub editors as much as possible. Phil was the nearest to normal I had.
I was into the 1950s way of working now, adapted to a very different rhythm to the one I was used to. For a start, the phones didn’t ring as often. People were more likely to turn up at the office, so I was constantly running up and down the stairs to see them. Or we would be out and about a lot more. Many of the people we interviewed didn’t have a telephone, or wouldn’t be comfortable interviewed that way. It was all face to face.
I didn’t keep stopping to check texts on my phone – still dead and useless. And, above all, there was no internet, no emails, no constant bombardment of information and press releases and news flashes. It was surprisingly restful. You could get on with doing something in your own time without constantly checking your in-box. Getting information was tricky, but up on the top floor, the librarians waded through files and cuttings and found out most of what we wanted.
It just wasn’t instant. No one expected things to be instant. And after a while, neither did I. All our twenty-first-century toys were designed to save us time and energy, so why were the 1950s so much less stressful? Weird. I would love to have talked about it to someone, if not Will, then Phil, but I wouldn’t have known where to begin.
‘You know I’ll be going back home soon,’ I said to him one day as we’d sneaked out for a coffee. ‘And you’ll be off to Fleet Street.’
He looked crestfallen for barely a second as his thoughts of a future with me fought with a future in Fleet Street. To my relief, Fleet Street won hands down. ‘I’ve gathered some cuttings together, to show what I can do,’ he said. ‘I’m going to send them to my mate so he can show them to his editor.’
‘Good move,’ I said.
Phil was straightforward enough. As for Billy … it was tricky being alone with him. I found it hard remembering how to behave, hard to behave naturally. Sometimes I could feel him watching me, but when I looked he was always intent on his story on the typewriter. Until one day I must have been quicker and caught his glance. And what a glance.
We gazed at each other across the newsroom. It was no ordinary look. I could feel myself blushing. With that Phil came in with a bag of currant buns.
‘Feeding time at the zoo,’ he announced, offering the bag around, ‘courtesy of Councillor Armstrong, baker of this parish. Hopeless councillor but, luckily, a very good baker.’
He bowled a bun to Billy who batted it away with a ruler. Instinctively I reached up and caught it, to cheers from them both.
‘Owzat!’ shouted Phil. Billy smiled. An ordinary friendly sort of smile, which was both a relief and a disappointment to me.
A sort of camaraderie developed. But the real breakthrough came a few days later.
Billy was in with Smarmy Henfield. Alan was at a council meeting, and Phil was on the phone. The office was quiet and peaceful. I was typing away at some odds and ends of stories, when a messenger came up from reception to say there were two ladies downstairs who wanted to talk to a reporter. Off I went.
‘Theatricals,’ said the young messenger knowingly. Certainly the girls had stage presence. They were about eighteen years old, very smartly dressed and very heavily made up, with vivid red-painted nails. In the dusty reception area of The News they looked positively exotic.
‘Are you a reporter?’ one of them asked me, eyeing me up and down and not looking terribly impressed. ‘A proper reporter?’
I assured them I was.
‘Well we’ve got a story to tell and we want it told. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.’
‘No he shouldn’t,’ said the other.
‘We’re decent girls.’
‘Never heard of such a thing.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said gently, ‘if you were to start at the beginning …’
Their names, they told me, with perfectly straight faces, were Marcella and Loulou. They were actresses with a touring company that was appearing at the Civic. I’d seen the notices and the reviews. It wasn’t going well. It was a sort of French farce, I think.
‘We play the maids,’ said Loulou, or it may have been Marcella. ‘We wear very short skirts that show off our assets.’
I bet, I thought.
‘But we have a lot of lines to say. We’re actresses.’
‘We can sing too.’
‘And dance.’
‘We used to be Dinky Diamond Dancers, but that was when we were young. Now we are developing our careers.’
‘Good for you. So what’s the
problem?’
‘Mr Hennessey.’
‘He runs the company.’
‘It’s not going well. Hardly anyone in the audience even though he’s given tickets away.’
‘Hardly a snigger when he drops his trousers.’
‘Even though he’s wearing huge spotty underpants.’
‘So he said,’ and here their brassy confidence faltered a little. ‘He told us.’
‘That it would be better if, instead of him taking his clothes off, we did it.’
‘If you did it?’ I looked up sharply from my notebook. ‘He wants you to take your clothes off on stage?’
‘Yes. He says we’ll be behind a screen – sort of hiding –when one of the wives comes in.’
‘Then the juvenile lead rushes in and “accidentally” knocks the screen over. And there we are.’
‘With nothing on.’
‘As nature intended.’
‘My mum will kill me.’
‘My dad’ll disown me.’
‘But he said it will get the audiences in. All the men will come.’
‘Good clean family fun, he says.’
‘But we don’t want to do it.’
‘We’re not going to.’
‘We’ve got principles.’
‘So we’re going home. Leaving the company.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying to sort this out. ‘Your boss wants you to be naked on stage and you don’t want to be, so you’re walking out. That seems sensible. So what’s the problem?’
‘He hasn’t paid us.’
‘Not for four weeks.’
‘Says there’s no money and there won’t be unless we take our clothes off.’
‘No punters, no pay, he says.’
‘And certainly not what’s owed us.’
‘We’re actresses, not strippers.’
‘Why should we?’
Exactly. The phrases ‘constructive dismissal’ and ‘sexual harassment’ floated around in my head, but I didn’t even think about it. Not where we were.
Instead, I got Charlie down to take a picture of the girls who, serious actresses that they were, pulled their skirts up above the knee and puckered up provocatively. I went around to see their actor manager, who was a slimy little beast. It was hard to imagine him as a jovial cove in huge spotty underpants. He was also a calculating old rogue and knew the value of publicity. He said if the girls would come back until the end of the run – another two weeks – even with their clothes on, he’d pay them all he owed them and they would be free to go.
‘And what about some compensation?’
He looked at me angrily.
‘What do you mean compensation?’
‘I mean you’ve upset those girls, bullied them into walking out of their jobs. Not to mention the fact you haven’t paid them for a month.’
‘Upset? Those two? Hard as nails, the little trollops. They’re lucky to have a job at all. Have you seen the way they move on stage? Like baby bloody elephants. No one’s queuing up to give those two jobs, believe me. And don’t tell me that they wouldn’t show all they’ve got if they had the chance. They’d have gone to Fanshaw’s Follies and worn nothing more than a few feathers and a smile if they could. But they haven’t got the ankles.’
I thought ankles were probably the most irrelevant qualification, but no matter.
You could see the actor/manager was dreadfully torn between paying up and the chance to turn bad publicity into excellent publicity. His business brain finally won. Eventually, we agreed that the girls would get all the wages due to them today, and that if they stayed to the end of the run, they’d get an extra fiver each.
‘How can I pay them if the punters don’t come in?’
‘But you can, because they will. And you know that. But you’d better not bully any more young girls.’
The deal was done– maybe I’d missed my vocation as a trade union leader or UN negotiator – and I was quite pleased with myself. The girls were waiting for me in Silvino’s, and they took about five seconds to agree to the deal, so I went back to the office, and shared the story with the others. We were all laughing about it as I typed it up.
‘Good result. Good story,’ said Billy. ‘But you realise that they’d probably have been quite happy to strip off if the price had been right?’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’ I actually wasn’t so sure. ‘But if they’re going to do it, let them do it on their own terms, not bullied by some weaselly little beast.’
The men, of course, were suddenly all volunteering to be theatre reviewers.
‘Boys, boys, what sorry lives you lead,’ I said. I was just typing the last sentence when Billy came over.
‘Phil and I are going over to The Fleece,’ he said. ‘Fancy joining us?’ His eyes were still smiling from our laughter. Phil came and stood alongside him, smiling too.
‘Yes come on, Rosie. I think we’ve all deserved a drink today.’
This, believe it or not, was the first time I had been invited to the pub with the lads. A couple of them went over most days, sometimes after work too, but they had never asked me. I don’t know if they ever asked Marje. She always seemed to be scuttling off with her string bag to do her shopping. And I’d missed it. Not the pub necessarily, but the companionship I suppose, being part of a team.
So yes, I jumped at the chance to go to the pub. I ripped my story out of the typewriter, folded it ready to go to the subs, and grabbed my bag.
‘Afternoon, Jack,’ said Phil as we walked into the small bar. ‘Two pints of the usual, and … what would you like Rosie?’
‘Cider please.’
‘And a half of cider.’
Who said I wanted a half? But I wasn’t going to argue. See, I already knew my place.
‘So who’s this then?’ asked the landlord as he pulled the pints.
‘This is Miss Rosie Harford, a visiting journalist from America.’
‘I’m not …’ and I gave up again.
Phil got some crisps and we all sat in the corner and laughed again at the story of Marcella and Loulou. We had a game of darts and shared the last two curling cheese sandwiches, from under a plastic dome on the counter. Billy bought another and then, when the glasses were empty again, I got up. ‘My turn,’ I said, getting my purse out.
The landlord looked surprised, and Billy and Phil both objected.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I insist. Where I come from, if we work we pay our turn.’
‘Can we accept that?’ said Billy, turning to Phil in mock seriousness.
‘Do you know,’ said Phil, equally serious, equally mocking, ‘I think we can.’ And they took their pints.
‘Cheers,’ said Phil companionably.
Billy raised his glass and said, ‘Your very good health, Miss Harford.’ And his eyes smiled into mine. I leant back, sipping my cider, and a ray of dusty sunshine fell across my face. I relaxed. I almost felt I belonged.
Until I went home alone and Billy went home to his wife.
Chapter Thirteen
Peggy had beaten me to the bathroom. While I was being helpful and taking out the dishes she’d nipped upstairs and was now ensconced behind a firmly bolted door. I could hear the hot water gurgling and could smell Yardley soap and bath salts.
‘She’s got to make herself beautiful for her young man,’ said Mrs Brown equably. ‘She seems to be seeing a lot of him these days.’
‘That Lenny do you mean?’ asked Mr Brown over his copy of The News.
‘Yes. Such a nice young man.’
Mr Brown snorted. ‘Too bloody nice if you ask me,’ was all he said and went back to the paper.
‘Well he’s obviously making our Peg happy and that’s what’s important.’
‘Doesn’t seem very happy to me. Don’t know what’s got into the girl lately,’ said Mr Brown. He looked prepared to put down his paper and discuss it.
‘Oh, you know what girls are like, especially when they’re in love,’ said Mrs Brown, dismissing his conc
erns. She was busy putting her shopping away. Every time she took something out of her basket, she took the brown paper bag it was wrapped in, shook it out, folded it carefully and put it in the cupboard next to the range. The cupboard that smelt of polish, candles and mousetraps.
‘We don’t seem to see her smiling much any more. She’s normally a real smiler,’ Mr Brown persisted. But Mrs Brown had disappeared into the pantry.
‘Now Rosie,’ she said when she emerged. ‘We’re off early tomorrow morning. We’re going to a christening. What a journey it’s going to be. A train and two buses. So you two girls will have to fend for yourselves. There’s plenty of that rabbit pie left, and you can do yourself some potatoes with it. And mind our Peggy doesn’t leave you with all the pots to do.’
I just wished Peggy would hurry up. Phil had said he would probably call round and I wanted to be ready for him.
There was a click of the latch at the back door and Janice appeared to creep around it. Even by her normal small and scruffy standards she looked particularly woebegone.
‘Hello pet,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Why, what’s the matter with you? Lost a sixpence and found a ha’penny, have you?’
Janice came and stood next to the range, as if trying to absorb all its heat. Her hair looked lanker, her face paler and bleaker than usual. Her socks had fallen down her bony grubby legs, and her shoes were so scuffed and battered it was impossible to tell what colour they had been. She looked like a little brown animal seeking shelter.
‘They’ve taken our Kevin and Terry away.’
‘Away?’ Mrs Brown looked alarmed. ‘Where to?’
‘Parkfields.’
‘Ah.’
There was a long silence. The room that had seemed so warm and cosy now suddenly seemed chill.
‘Parkfields?’ I asked hesitantly.
‘The asylum,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘The mad house,’ said Janice.
I realised that they were talking about the huge Victorian mansion I’d passed while in the van with George one day. It had locked gates and a high wall. ‘How old are Kevin and Terry?’
‘Thirteen. They’re twins. They’re the ones that howl,’ said Janice simply, in explanation.
The Accidental Time Traveller Page 15