The Typewriter Girl

by Atlee, Alison

  “The grass makes a nicer landing place when you fall.”

  “I have decided not to fall.”

  “Then no difference it makes, and my way we will have it.”

  Betsey said nothing, not with her mouth.

  “Since I’m the one what’s done it, you see,” he said, his voice low with victory, his Welsh brogue tapping along the tops of the words, vowels like a boot heel cutting into loose dirt.

  “I do see. Mr. Jones, you are . . . entirely correct.” She smiled at him, closed-lip.

  “Ow—damn,” he grunted, the poor thing having rammed his shin into his pedal as he walked. “Learn to balance, you will, but when you feel yourself going over, you must try to remember to put the steering wheel in the direction of the fall. To turn it away will mean a fall for certain. Keep hold of the handlebar, no throwing your arms out to catch yourself. Break your wrist or worse that way.”

  She had no wish for broken bones. She put aside her contrariness and gave him her attention. He was, as Charlie had promised, a fine teacher, especially after he became so engrossed in her progress that he forgot the self-consciousness with which he drew close to her to help her balance, an arm before and behind. By the time she completed her first lengthy run, unassisted and fairly steady, he was jubilant, running to her as she came to a sloppy halt and shouting that he’d known she would take to it.

  How could he have known? She hadn’t. But she, too, was rising in a bubble of elation, amazed at herself, reveling in his approval, as nourished by his confidence in her as by any meal she’d ever eaten.

  He let her practice on the road next, and she readily agreed to his suggestion for a longer ride. They rode toward Castle Hill, where the ruins of Iden Tower overlooked the sea.

  He didn’t stop as the incline steepened. Behind him, Betsey struggled, straining to propel the bicycle, her thighs afire and her previous pleasure waning. When Mr. Jones looked back, she muttered a curse between gritted teeth. He was pedaling more slowly now as well but didn’t appear to be suffering. She pushed on longer than she thought she could, but when her pedaling grew too sluggish to keep the bicycle upright, she surrendered.

  “I’m done!” she gasped, coming off the cycle with none of the technique he’d taught her, scarcely able to keep the heavy machine upright.

  “Bless God!” he shouted, and hopped off. “What is it you’re made of, Dobs?”

  Betsey did not have the breath to answer. She pushed the bicycle to him and then asked, her words coming in gulps, “Why . . . didn’t . . . you stop . . . then?”

  “Determined to go so far as you, there’s sure. Bless God!” He took off his cap to run a hand over his brow, then into his hair. “I didn’t guess you carried a racehorse’s heart in you.”

  She balked when he asked whether she was ready to resume their journey up the hill.

  “We can have a look at the ruins. It isn’t far now,” he said.

  “I can see them from here. I can see them from the hotel. I can see them from nearly anywhere in Idensea, for God’s sake. There’s no reason to send ourselves into apoplexy pedaling up this hill. And I can’t. I simply cannot.”

  “We will have to walk it, but Dobs, if we don’t go up, there’s no coasting down.” He leaned over his handlebar toward her, tilting up a frankly cajoling smile. “You of everyone shouldn’t wish to miss that ride.”

  Betsey contemplated it, losing her breath all over again. A glorious downhill coast on a bicycle, a flight into the green shine of his eyes—she contemplated them both for a moment too long, a moment that allowed the two separate things to become fused into one thing she wanted. Looking away over her shoulder at the road declining away behind her, she worked at unfusing them.

  “I know you’re not afraid,” Mr. Jones said. “Or if you are, it’ll not master you.” He touched her jaw, two fingers that set her face back to the road ahead.

  The touch fired through her, too akin to what he’d done last night, too much like he had the right. Too little of everything else. Something she didn’t know how to refuse, because of her own feelings and because he could finish an argument with because I have said so.

  She moved from the touch diplomatically, by bowing her head and beginning the plod up the hill. “Very well, damn it.”

  Never fail to use Mr., Esq., or some other title when addressing a gentleman.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  Iden Hall you can see now,” he said as they neared the crest, and Betsey paused. Sir Alton’s home nestled on a distant hillside, a gray, symmetrical arrangement of chimneys and columns and rows of windows.

  “I’ll go alone tomorrow,” she said. “You needn’t come.” She had decided this last night as the two of them finished their silent walk to Sarah’s. She’d liked being rescued by Mr. Jones far too much.

  She was prepared to defend her decision. But he didn’t tell her no. He asked, “Why do you want it so?”

  “It’s my responsibility. My position at stake, my bookings. My fault.” She sighed. “I might have placated Avery when he turned up at the pavilion. He wanted to tell me how he’d already spoken to the headmaster at Parkhurst about a job. I might have taken two minutes to listen.”

  “Had time for a chat, did you?”

  The irritation in his voice surprised her. But he meant it for Avery, didn’t he? And yes, Avery’s timing had been wretched. She was absorbed in her duties, dozens of details to keep straight, a hundred mistakes to avoid. She hadn’t time to listen and sort out his intentions, her feelings. He wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. He’d been drinking; his eyes had burned with it.

  “No,” she answered, “I didn’t.”

  “So I thought.”

  He leaned his cycle into a hedgerow of field roses, took hers to do the same, then walked beside her to the ruins, still another steep rise away. No wonder the picnickers and holidaymakers up here appeared so languorous, worn out from the climb, lulled by the nuzzling breeze. You could count shades of green like stars up here, from the glow of the tender shoots at your feet to the earthy burr of the heath far below. Put out your hand for mine again, Betsey thought. She’d take it and tell him her gratitude for putting the world at her feet this afternoon.

  The stones of the tower were so ragged that the broken circle looked like a wreck hauled from the sea, covered in barnacles, frayed scraps of sky showing through vaguely arch-shaped openings in the walls. Out from the tower, foundations and walls breached the ground cover of daisies and grasses, but irregularly, and not by more than a few feet. As they passed one of the taller remnants, Mr. Jones put his hand to it, making such purposeful contact that she felt compelled to do the same. The initial warmth was deceptive; beneath it, inside, the chill and damp of springtime held.

  He reached into his coat pocket. The folded paper he held out to her read “Betsey Dobson” in Avery’s handwriting. “This came to the Swan this morning. Meant to give it to you at services . . .”

  But she’d made certain there was no good time for that. “He’ll be wanting money,” she predicted, managing to sound careless, though her hand rolled into a fist as she took the note. She hurried ahead, lifting her skirts as she climbed the sharp rise where the tower ruins sat. Mr. Jones didn’t try to catch up with her. She wandered alone amongst the ruins—which, thanks to Ethan Noonan, she’d glimpsed only from a distance until now—found a seat on a stone that had once been something grander, and unfolded Avery’s note.

  Twenty-one shillings. He suggested an advance on her wages, or surely she knew someone who would make her a loan. He’d sacrificed everything to follow her to this damned carnival; if she could leave him to rot in a ten-day sentence when it had all been a mistake, an accident anyway, then she was a witch, an icy, vengeful Morgan le Fay.

  So be it. She tore the note in half, then again. She sensed his desperation; she knew that with some alterations to her careful budget, her modest plans, she could, in marked contrast to her situation a fortnigh
t ago, help him. But paper squares collected on her lap in a heap.

  Two children raced past her, chattering of pirates; a third tripped and would have fallen headfirst into stone if not for Betsey sitting there. The tiny girl bounced off Betsy’s skirts; paper flurries swirled into the breeze.

  “Oh, ma’am, won’t you fix it?”

  “It” meant a rapier fashioned from two sticks the child held, along with a bedraggled white hair ribbon intended to hold them together. Betsey took the articles and made a neat job of it, with the child at her knee, breathing heavily.

  “That’s got it,” she said, presenting her handiwork. “Now take care for pirates.”

  “Me, I’m the pirate, ma’am,” she was informed.

  “Oh! Good luck to you, then.”

  The girl ran away. Bits of white paper trailed over grass and stone, rolled over the tips of Mr. Jones’s shoes. She hadn’t noticed him till now, standing a few steps away, framed in a broken arch.

  “Have you brothers or sisters?” he asked as she stood and joined him. They walked out from the ruins, to the grass where a few holidaymakers were lingering over the remains of afternoon picnics.

  “A sister in London. A brother somewhere. Alive, we hope, possibly at sea, but it’s been years and years. You?”

  “Seven sisters,” he said, smiling. “A brother, Owen, to be four soon, and two others passed, though I knew but one: Davey—Daffyd—in heaven since I was twelve.”

  Before she had a chance to express her sympathy, he added, “I am starved! Do you think Sarah will put by some of tea for me, to have before my lesson?”

  His music lesson, he meant, the piece he was learning for Miss Gilbey’s party. Betsey often listened from her third-floor window or climbed out and sat on the roof, especially when he rehearsed the lyrics. His voice, low, lush, and serrated, betrayed no effort of concentration, unlike his playing. But he’d been tenacious these past weeks, apparently determined Miss Gilbey must not suspect what trouble he was taking to please her.

  Betsey could have told him, You’re all wrong about that. All those evenings, listening to him doggedly correct each mistake, hearing him trying to erase the evidence of effort—ah, she could have told him: Had Miss Gilbey been there on the roof, too, each mistaken note could only have made him more and more dear to her.

  “I’m certain Sarah will see to it you have whatever you wish,” she said.

  “And there Dora Pink will be to take back half of it.”

  “Not while you keep leaving a few coins behind. She blesses you frequently for that.”

  “Not before Sarah, I hope.” He settled into the grass, stretching out on a hip and looking down to the harbor. “Someday, I’ll be rich, and I will go to my house, in the middle of Wednesday, to a grand spread of a tea—three, four sorts of jam, and a tower of sandwiches, and boys and dogs tussling on the rugs for the last biscuits.”

  “Boys and dogs,” Betsey repeated, and laughed to chase back a sigh. “Having sisters ruined you for daughters, did it?”

  “Ah, the daughters. They are on my knees with all the sweets they can hold.” He looked up at her, blocking the sun with his arm. “Well you would do to take you a rest, Dobs,” he said, and when she hesitated in joining him on the grass, he added, “You needn’t worry for your frock. The sort that hides the dirt, it is.”

  “A gracious invitation.”

  “Pardons. Thought that was what you must be thinking of.”

  Betsey sat down beside him, and—because a small bit of torture seemed only fair—instead of smoothing out her sensible and perfectly clean brown tweed skirt, she left it rumpled and stretched out her legs, putting her ankles within his view.

  He rolled onto his back. Pulled his cap down to cover his eyes. Betsey counted it on her side of the tally.

  “My mam used to fret over it,” he said. “’Twas how she picked all the fabric for the clothes we had, and my poor sisters despaired of it, always wanting something prettier.” With a soft chuckle, he tucked his hands behind his head. “One Christmas after I’d gone away—I left home young—money enough I had to send back a present or two, and I found a bolt of cloth—only muslin, you know, but pretty. Blue, but the sort that’s in snow of a morning, see?”

  Betsey didn’t think she’d ever seen snow like that. But far below her, the sea was winking white and yellow and lavender at her, so she answered, “Yes.”

  “Thinking of my mother in a new dress, I buy it and send it off to her. In the years after, I go back, and what do you think I find?”

  “She’d used it to make curtains.”

  He jerked, turning on his stomach to look up at her. “Right, you witch. Snow-blue curtains, everywhere in that little house.”

  Betsey laughed. “I’m certain she enjoyed them as much as she would have a new dress. Perhaps more, since they were in constant use.”

  “No, you’re not understanding. All over, they were. Even windows not there had curtains. I paid a call to our reverend and I saw blue curtains. I went to collect the eggs in the henhouse . . . snow-blue curtains.”

  “You exaggerate!” Betsey said, laughing hard now.

  “Do I! No woman in the village had blue thread for six months! ‘Mam,’ I said to her, ‘a dress I was meaning for you, not curtains here to the Bristol Channel.’”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She looked like I’d gone soft. ‘Think how the dirt would show, Iefan-my-boy! Think of the dirt!’” He rolled to his back again, and Betsey watched as one hand, resting on his stomach, moved up and down with the rhythm of his laughter.

  “Bless God!” The rhythm slowed, ending in a deep exhalation. “Bless God, my mother,” he said, in an undertone.

  She plucked a long blade of grass and wove it between her fingers, distracting herself from the impulse she felt to comb them through the black hair touching the grass beside her, shining like silk against the green blades.

  “Did you send her brown tweed next time, then?” she asked, though she believed she knew that answer already, too.

  “No, never any cloth then, but a frock ready-made, for her to wear for my sister Mair’s wedding, and yellow it was, but only a touch, not even as much as is butter.”

  “And did she wear it?”

  “I think so, once and again. I know she had her picture made in it, her and my dad and the little ones. And they buried her in it, just this March that has gone.”

  Betsey started, letting the blade of grass fall into her lap. She pulled her feet up under her skirts. “Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “They, my sisters, told me what they’d done when I came for the funeral, and I just laughed, and good and furious they grew, but I was laughing because all I could hear was my mother railing from her grave, ‘Think how the dirt will show, Iefan-my-boy!’ Then I wept hard, for no one else had thought of it, and I’d come too late.”

  He made a sound as though he would continue, but he didn’t. Again, she resisted the desire to touch his hair, though it sprang from a different source now. If she touched him, it would be for his need, not her own. Only along his temples, only to smooth, simply to say, I understand your loss.

  Voices fluttered from the ruins. A train knocked along in the distance. Over the grass a bee buzzed, rested, and buzzed again.

  “I expect your mother felt like a duchess, the day she had her picture made in that dress.”

  The train continued on, became too faint to hear.

  “Do you think so, girl?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  After a moment, he turned over again, propping himself on his elbow to look up at her. An expansive craving destroyed her moment of altruism, laid it flat under a greediness to answer every wondering question in his eyes. Men looked at her, they looked in all sorts of ways, but this sensation of being seen . . .

  She wanted more. She wanted to be known by this man, this one. She couldn’t help biting her lip, but otherwise, she held still and let him see.

  “
Thanks. For the bicycle. The lesson.”

  “Most need more than a single lesson.”

  “I like it.”

  “I know. Good, I mean. I mean, I knew you would. Believed so, whatever.”

  Yes, he’d said that during the lesson: I knew you would. And last night: I knew what you would be for. The downy, tickling joy in her chest threatened to carry her away.

  “Iefan is your Welsh name?”

  “Iefan Rhys-Jones. Iefan’s John in Welsh.”

  “Iefan.” She hugged her knees and rested her cheek on them, feeling the slubs of tweed against her skin, something like the roughness of his cheek last night. “Iefan?”

  “What is it?” he answered, but really, she had nothing she’d intended to say to him. She only wished to say his name. And kiss him. That was all. Say his name, kiss him, and touch his hair again, that was all.

  She reached out. Her fingers tugged gently at a piece of black hair kicking out from under his cap.

  “Grass,” she explained, and flicked her fingers as if returning some dried blades to the ground.

  He didn’t move. But he asked, “Any more?” and she lied, “Mm-hmm,” and touched his hair again, and then his shoulder, brushing away imaginary bits of grass.

  “You’ve some,” he said, and Betsey didn’t remind him that she’d not been lolling in the grass. He sat up, captured a fallen lock of her hair, tossed away whatever he’d pretended was there, and tucked the lock behind her ear. It fell, and he did it again, taking more time, tucking more firmly.