by Marie Joseph
For a startled moment he thought she was going to go over – faint dead away. The blood drained from her face, then she swayed, clutching her throat.
‘You can’t sack me! You mustn’t sack me!’ White to the lips, she stood her ground. Through a window, slightly open at the top, came the familiar market-day sounds: the clatter of trams, rumbling of lorries, hooting of horns, footsteps on the pavements, a child’s loud wail.
Mr Mott looked trapped. Never in the whole of his natural would he have dreamt that quiet polite little Mrs Battersby could display such behaviour. It couldn’t be the money, oh dear me no. The Battersbys wouldn’t be going short, not them! He would actually be easing his social conscience by giving his corset fitter’s job to a younger girl, or an unmarried woman. As a matter of fact, his niece would jump at the chance of working here, mixing and talking with nice people all day. Since her husband had died things hadn’t been easy for his sister.
‘My mind is made up,’ he said, with as much dignity as he could muster. Just as, like a gift from God, the downstairs assistant came in to say the traveller in belts and scarves was waiting for his order.
Amy’s legs trembled so much she didn’t know how she found herself outside the shop, breathless and bewildered by the confrontation which seemed to have erupted from nothing. What had got into Mr Mott? And what was wrong with her? There they’d been, the two of them, overwhelmed by emotion, saying little, but meaning a lot more. At one point Mr Mott’s pleasant features had been contorted with a rage so immense she had thought he would have a stroke. What had brought all that on?
The gnawing pain in her stomach reminded her that all she’d had that morning was a cup of tea at breakfast time and now, as she turned into King William Street, the smell of ground coffee, of hams and cheeses, brought bile up into her throat, sour tasting. It was the kind of day that whispered spring might not be too far away, and to go to work that afternoon she had decided to wear her best coat, a fawn knock-about with matching hat, and her best fleecy-lined gauntlet gloves. For the first time in weeks it was neither windy nor raining, and the soot-blackened buildings were washed to a warmth by the pale sunshine. On a day like this, if you sniffed hard enough you could almost smell the salt in the air, wafted over thirty miles of fields and woods from Blackpool.
Amy caught sight of herself in a shop’s long mirror and immediately perked up. Wesley had always liked her in that outfit, said that fawn was always classy, and that the little hat with its piping of scarlet suited the shape of her face.
‘Pansy-face,’ he’d called her long, long ago.
Knowing she looked good, she felt decidedly more cheerful – wasn’t losing her job a sign that something better was around the corner? Might it not, in the long run, have been all for the best?
Amy turned and retraced her steps.
‘Wasn’t that your daughter-in-law?’ The woman in the squirrel coat, walking down Church Street to the arcade, turned to Phyllis. ‘I thought she worked at Mott’s Emporium in the afternoons? Fitting corsets.’
‘She does.’ Phyllis stopped at the hand-made chocolate shop, determined to change the subject. ‘If I go home without a quarter of coffee creams for Edgar he’ll never forgive me. I forgot last week and he actually sulked.’
‘Men!’ said the squirrel coat. ‘Is he any better?’
‘He has his off days,’ said Phyllis.
‘Don’t we all?’ said the squirrel coat.
At the Labour Exchange Amy went straight through the door marked Women. There was a long queue but she didn’t mind. She was already glad to her very soul that her days of touching soft billowy flesh as she measured and fitted pink brocade on middle-aged matrons was finished. There would be something far more suited to her personality. Things were often meant to be.
‘You are wasted in that shop,’ Wesley had often said, but he had never suggested she leave. Amy looked round quickly as if she had spoken such disloyalty aloud and smiled at a girl with bright red hair.
‘Your first time?’ the girl asked.
Amy nodded.
‘Well, a good tip is to say you are experienced at anything they come up with.’
‘Such as lion taming?’
‘Even that. I’ve come prepared to accept a job in a brothel if the pay’s good. I’ve got a degree in Philosophy but as far as they’re concerned that qualifies me for exactly nothing.’
‘Wesley often said that there are plenty of B.Sc.s sweeping the streets. Bits of paper, he called qualifications.’
‘Wesley?’
‘My husband.’ Amy blushed and turned round again.
She was given a form to fill in, and by the time it was her turn to move into the interviewing room her mood of optimism had evaporated. The clerk had a dark fringe of pit-black hair and an incipient moustache, and looked as if she was expecting it to rain.
‘Your age is against you, of course.’ She glanced at the form. ‘I see you’re married. Hubby out of work?’
‘No.’
‘Children?’
‘No.’
The clerk bent her head over a pile of cards, riffled through them. She had the widest parting Amy had ever seen. It ran like a white arterial road across her scalp.
‘Typing?’ she asked, without looking up. ‘Shorthand? Book-keeping? Filing? Adding machines? Duplicating? Calligraphy?’
Amy said she was good with people.
The clerk spoiled the set of her thick fringe by poking it with a pencil. Here was yet another of them. A bored housewife looking for a little job that wouldn’t chip her nail varnish. One that gave her a nice little bit of pin money for crêpe-de-Chine camiknickers, pure silk stockings, Elizabeth Arden face powder at twelve shillings and sixpence a box. She stared belligerently at Amy’s coat and matching hat with the thin band of scarlet petersham ribbon round the brim. She took in the gauntlet gloves, and the way Amy’s hair waved softly beneath the stylish hat. Shiny, toffee-coloured hair, like a Devon cream caramel. She herself was going home after work to old parents who got on each other’s nerves. She had never once in the whole of her fifty-four years strayed from the straight and narrow for the sad reason that no one had ever asked her to. And here was this well-dressed woman thinking she could just walk in here and waste her time!
Amy wished she had worn her old raincoat, and tied her hair back with string. She wished she could open her mouth and explain that she was a deserted wife, that after her nest egg was spent there would be no money coming in unless her faithless husband came to her rescue.
She stood up, bringing the interview to an end herself.
Deeply upset, filled with a renewed sense of outrage, she set off for home, ignoring the smells of food from the market stalls, averting her eyes from the shrimp ladies sitting in their poke bonnets at their little tables. Wesley had loved potted shrimps with their yellow lids of butter, expecially with brown bread cut thin. If Wesley hadn’t gone away she would already be rehearsing in her mind how she was going to tell him the story of her double-edged rejection, first by Mr Mott, then by the witch-like clerk at the Labour Exchange.
By the time she had acted out both scenes – ‘Typing, Mrs Battersby? Shorthand? Book-keeping? Filing? Adding machines? Duplicating? Calligraphy?’ – each word fired like a pistol shot from beneath the heavy fringe of hair – Wesley would be laughing, enjoying her being in this mood, taking none of it seriously. Except himself, she thought bleakly, crossing the road by the Majestic Cinema, turning into Town Hall Street.
But Wesley wasn’t at home, was he? And what had happened that afternoon wasn’t funny at all. She stopped outside the library. Oh, dear God, if she couldn’t find a job soon she didn’t know what she would do. Waves of totally unexpected panic beat at her brain. She looked up at the sky and her legs went to blancmange. She forced herself to cross the road, taking deep breaths, putting one foot in front of the other. Seeing a terrible picture of herself collapsing on the pavement with a crowd gathering round; seeing herself wrapped in a r
ed blanket being whipped into an ambulance; seeing herself in the end bed of a ward in the infirmary, her name in the paper: ‘Woman collapses in street, malnutrition suspected.’ Somebody help me please . . . Was that in her mind, or had she said it aloud?
A fat woman with two library books in her shopping basket stared at Amy strangely. ‘Are you all right, love? Are you lost?’
The voice was kind, the woman’s expression full of concern, but Amy backed away from her touch.
‘I’m going in here,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I’m perfectly all right.’
The Education Office had a window on the right of the entrance hall with ‘Inquiries’ written above it. Amy pressed the bell.
‘I’d like to see Mr Dale,’ she told the girl who appeared. ‘Could you tell me the way to his office, please?’
Bernard was dictating a letter to the secretary he shared with the Assistant Director of Education when Amy was shown in. His eyes widened slightly but, showing no sign of the astonishment he was feeling, he motioned to the girl to close her notebook and go away.
‘Later,’ he said. ‘We’ll finish off later.’ As she was about to close the door he said, still in the same quiet unhurried way, ‘Bring two cups of tea, please, Marjorie, and biscuits if there are any left.’
Amy stood rooted to the spot. What on earth was she going to say? What had possessed her to do this? Mr Dale looked so different behind the big leather-topped desk, so prosperous, so important, so apprehensive of what she was going to do or say. Who could blame him? Not once had they had what could be termed a normal conversation. He was a virtual stranger, and yet he had seen her at her very worst – dazed with shock on the night Wesley left her, straight out of bed when there hadn’t been a comb near her hair, opening the door in her birthday suit, throwing Wesley’s pullover through the window. If he had any opinion of her at all, which she doubted, it must be that she was . . . that she was . . . She swayed as the faintness came over her again.
‘Steady on, lassie.’ He came round the desk, pushed her gently down on to the chair his secretary had left placed at right angles to the desk. ‘Now . . . take your time. There’s no hurry. Just take your time . . .’ As if sensing her embarrassment, he went back round his desk to sit with his hands clasped on the blotter in front of him.
Amy lifted her head, blinked hard to stop tears from filling her eyes, let out a deep sigh. ‘I . . . I was just passing,’ she said, then had to stop as the distress deep inside her welled up into her throat. ‘Just passing.’ She choked back a sob.
‘I’m so glad you came to see me,’ he was saying, recognizing deep despair when he saw it. ‘It isn’t very often that a friend drops in to see me during a working day. We are friends, aren’t we? I’d like to think so.’
Amy nodded, staring down at her hands, twisting them together. ‘You must think I’m a very foolish, silly woman.’
‘No, just an unhappy one. With something on her mind that would be better for the telling. Am I right?’
She nodded again. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve lost my job this afternoon because I asked for a rise. I didn’t say the right things, you see. I gave in too easily. My blood was up because he, my boss, looked at me as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me.’ She frowned. ‘An’ that’s not all. I went to the Labour Exchange and when the woman there looked at me in the same way, I got up and walked out.’ Her voice rose. ‘Like I said, I don’t know what to do.’
She was crying inside now, gulping back the sobs, determined not to make a fool of herself again, staring hard at the floor as the girl came in with two cups of tea and four marie biscuits on a thick white plate.
He waited until the door closed behind her. ‘Did the way they looked at you make you feel rejected?’
She inclined her head.
‘Unloved? Unwanted?’
‘Hated,’ she said firmly.
‘So one more rejection was too much to bear?’
Her eyes, wet with tears, widened. She knew exactly what he was getting at. ‘You mean that coming on top of Wesley walking out on me . . .? That I’m too touchy because of it?’
‘Understandably so.’ He passed the plate of biscuits. ‘I can’t guarantee that they won’t be soft.’
He saw the way she nibbled round the edges, trying not to cram it into her mouth. To make her feel better he took one himself, bit into it vigorously. What was it Dora had said? ‘I think she’s stopped eating.’
‘Would you mind if I called you by your first name, Amy?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Here, have another biscuit. How do you see yourself, Amy? Do you like yourself?’
‘Like myself?’
Bernard was all at once very sorry for her, but he persisted. ‘You see, if we don’t like ourselves, we make it very hard for other people to like us. Drink up your tea before it gets cold. Have you ever evaluated your good points? Considered what makes you the person you are?’
Stung by the suspicion that he was patronizing her, Amy told him that she too had once read a book on psychology.
‘There you are!’ he said at once, laughing. ‘There’s one asset you have that’s a gift from the Gods.’
‘Surprise me.’
‘A ready wit, a way of flashing out with funny remarks. A sense of humour.’
‘As well as all that, I can see straight through people who are trying to patronize me.’
‘And your blood’s coming to the boil again?’
‘On the simmer.’
He saw the way she visibly relaxed. The tea had brought the colour back to her cheeks and the sparkle to her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Now I’m fighting with you. These days I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’ She stood up.
‘And right at this moment you’re going.’
They smiled at each other, and she thought how much younger he looked when he smiled, how quite good-looking really, not in the least handsome like Wesley but a lot more than passable with his twinkly grey eyes.
‘Yes, I’m going,’ she said, and held out her hand. ‘Thank you for giving me so much of your time.’ She felt comforted, as if she had passed some of her mixed-up feelings over to him, as if he had taken the burden of them from her. She knew in that moment that he cared what happened to her, not about her, of course, but what became of her.
His eyes never left her face. ‘I would like to help you,’ he said quietly. ‘I think I can . . .’
At once Amy snatched her hand from his, her face flaming. She remembered Dora sitting there describing how it had been between them – ‘Then he took the duster from my hand and led me upstairs’. Amy could still hear her saying it.
‘I’d like to talk to you more privately.’ The door opened an inch and he called out for someone hovering outside to come in. ‘Yes, that would be much better.’
As she walked towards the door she could feel his eyes on her back, on her legs. She walked stiffly, trying not to wiggle her bottom.
On the way home she called in at her mother’s to tell her about losing her job and the unsatisfactory visit to the Labour Exchange.
‘Did she have a ring on her finger?’ Gladys wanted to know. ‘Civil servants are all like that. Frustrated crab apples. Run a mile if a man winked at them. Cracking on they have a sweetheart lying in a foreign grave somewhere in France. I know civil servants all right.’
‘She thought I was a pampered wife looking for a nice little job because playing whist every afternoon was beginning to bore me.’
‘How do you mean, playing whist? You don’t play whist! We could have gone to many a whist drive together.’
‘But you don’t play whist either, Mam.’
‘What has that got to do with it?’ Gladys had never seen her daughter look so beat, so defeated. That fawn coat and hat didn’t suit her neither. Drained her. Made her look as if she was sickening for something. Not that she would tell her mother if she was. Look at the times in her marriage when she was in the fa
mily way but not letting on till she’d miscarried. Look at that time she’d gone to work and bled all over the floor. Never once had she run to her mam and said, ‘Mam, I need you. Mam, help me.’
‘You can stop to your tea if you want.’
‘I’d like that,’ Amy said, and took her hat and coat off.
In the back kitchen Gladys stared at the two ounces of boiled ham pieces, the cheap off-cuts from the giant slicer in the Home and Colonial. Spread out on a plate and garnished with a few slices of the beetroot she’d boiled that morning, together with bread cut thin, followed by a couple of coconut macaroons . . .
‘I’d just had my meal when you came,’ she lied, ‘but I’m always ready for a cup of tea.’
‘You can see the pattern on the plate through this ham. What did he shave it with, Mam, a razor blade? If I sat on a slice of it my feet would still dangle.’
Gladys was well content. Amy wasn’t going to open up any more, but then she never had. It was enough that she was sitting there coming out with wisecracks and getting some food down her.
‘I never liked that Mr Mott neither,’ she said, putting the top of the milk in Amy’s tea. ‘His eyes are too close together. Ee, but it’s a long time since you came to your tea, like this.’
‘Wesley liked me to be in when he came home,’ Amy said.
‘Mrs Battersby will have a pink fit if she comes back from town and finds you’ve gone out,’ Dora said, looking up from polishing the silver spread out on newspapers on the kitchen table. ‘You don’t look fit enough to go further than the gate. I know you went out last week without telling anybody, but you won’t get away with it every time.’
‘I’m taking the car, Dora.’ Edgar put a finger to his lips. ‘I’ll be back long before Mrs Battersby. You know what you ladies can be like when you get behind the silver teapots and buttered teacakes in Booth’s cafe.’
Dora didn’t know, but what she did know was that Mr Battersby Senior was a very, very sick man. In the past weeks the flesh had dropped from him, leaving him stringy-necked and hollow-cheeked. There was a yellow look about his skin, and sometimes when the pain was on him it was as much as Dora could do not to fetch the doctor herself. She didn’t like to use the dreaded word for what she thought was wrong with him, but in her opinion her employer should be seeing a specialist from Manchester, not that doctor in the tweed plus-fours who seemed to spend most of his time on the golf course. And where was the wonderful Wesley when all this was going on?