The Typewriter Girl

by Atlee, Alison

  “I was instructed to wait here until I was wanted,” she explained, keeping her voice low.

  His lips parted, then met again in a line of grim understanding. He looked at the empty space on the bench beside her, then selected a chair from a separate grouping of furniture, moving it so they would face each other. Very appropriate.

  “I’m sure you are meant to go right in.”

  He sat down, defiant, needlessly loyal, faintly ridiculous, for the chair was dainty and he was not. Betsey bit the inside of her cheek.

  Inside the dining room, the topic had turned to ordinances and the county council’s hesitation in limiting the number of licenses issued to entertainers.

  “Why does it matter?” she whispered to Mr. Jones.

  He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, the distance he’d put between them unwieldy for a hushed conversation.

  “’Twill be competition for the Kursaal, when it finally opens, so some think. And atmosphere, too. Sir Alton will take that pulpit in a moment, how it lowers the tone of the entire town to allow a license to any jack with three pounds and an instrument or a trained animal.”

  And indeed, in another moment, all the other voices died away and the room took on that stillness Betsey recognized as Sir Alton speaking. She couldn’t make out a single word, but she knew Mr. Jones had predicted aright and stifled a snicker. Mr. Jones chuckled aloud.

  A number of voices started all at once, and the discussion seemed to fragment. Mr. Jones’s gaze shifted, and following it, Betsey saw that Sir Alton stood in the doorway. He returned Mr. Jones’s greeting, but his gaze scanned the drawing room. Her bench next to the doorway behind him was the last place he looked, and again, Betsey felt his confusion: Who in the hell is that?

  The answer came to him more quickly than it had before. He bade her good day, most cordially, then turned his back on her to address Mr. Jones.

  “Noel is not with you? I thought . . .” Another quick inspection of the corners and settees.

  “Lady Dunning will send him when he arrives, she said.”

  The pop of a pocket watch shutting. “Poor Noel has such ill luck with the London trains. Always one running behind the concert schedule, or derailed by a late round at one club or another. And you’re out here awaiting a personal invitation, I suppose?”

  “As seemed to be the procedure for today.”

  Past Sir Alton’s arm, she saw Mr. Jones nod his head ever so slightly toward her. Sir Alton’s smile, when he turned it on her, was the same bland thing it always was, but it chilled her.

  “By all means, see our manageress into the board meeting, Jones.”

  When addressing a young unmarried lady, the salutation is often omitted.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  Board members filled the table. Chairs along the wall provided seating for everyone else. A few men noticed her entrance and stood; the action eventually rippled across the room. Mr. Jones found her a place next to Mr. Seiler, then took a chair on the wall opposite. One of the directors telegraphed a subtle greeting to him as he passed. Matthew Munsell, she guessed, the tom turkey from Animal Grab, who had given Mr. Jones his first contracting charge years ago and recommended him to the pier company.

  As she followed the discussion, Betsey found it calming to try to match the directors with the cards—the toad, the crow, the rooting hog. The sharp-clawed pussycat at the head of the table.

  Across the room, Mr. Jones gave her a fine, wry smile. It was how they’d met, wasn’t it, a business meeting like this, him smiling, seeming to know her thoughts. She’d found it alarming to be observed so astutely, to feel noticed and known in the same gaze. This time, though, she was not so skittish. She touched the paper frame inside her engagement book, thinking again of Animal Grab and dominoes.

  Sir Alton called Mr. Seiler to the table for the hotel summary, and then Mr. Seiler introduced Betsey. Awkwardness ensued as some judged the etiquette to be to stand, others the opposite, leaving those inclined to take cues completely flummoxed. Betsey remained calm. The first part of the address was easy; she had delivered it to Sir Alton already, and the board members had printed copies of her figures.

  However, she’d just begun when the Crow interrupted. “Miss . . . Dobson, correct? Why in the name of heaven is this bagatelle on our agenda?”

  His irritation, so ready and undisguised, staggered Betsey and rendered her mute, a condition more problematic to her present task than the fact she didn’t know what the hell bagatelle meant.

  But had Crow spoken rhetorically? He dashed a glance up and down the table. “The excursion scheme was settled months ago. A one-season trial. Do I mistake my calendar? Have I gone to sleep in May and waked in September?”

  Betsey had never heard such diction. The table would be under a shower if not for the fellow’s mustache. She found it so dramatic she thought, Yes, rhetorical questions.

  Except Crow appeared expectant, cocking his head thus and so, most crowish.

  He thumped two fingers on Sir Alton’s side of the table. “I ask you.”

  Sir Alton’s lips thinned by a fraction.

  Someone said, “The riot has added some urgency to the matter.”

  “Riot, my eye.”

  “A riot is what the papers say it is.” Sir Alton sounded like a Sunday school teacher, gently reminding a child of the Golden Rule. “If the public reads ‘riot,’ then that is what happened.”

  “Riot-my-eye. The Times gave it a line, ‘riot’ appearing nowhere within. Mischance and false steps are to be expected as part of the trial period, and may be reviewed in context once the agreed period is concluded. Until such a time, I cannot but be affronted, seeing this girl dragged here before us to waste this board’s time, answering objections we have already heard and—do you not recall?—overruled.”

  Whoever at the table might have agreed with him, none comfortably witnessed this challenge to Sir Alton, at least by Betsey’s accounting with breath held and eyes darting. She herself might have enjoyed seeing Sir Alton put to the screws if not for her confidence that she’d be the one to suffer for it. She stood there, well aware her sanction to speak had been usurped but lost as to what she could, or should, do about it.

  Sir Alton gave Crow nothing. “I’m grateful for the reminder and hope it comforts you to know I do recall, with admitted disappointment, being outvoted. It pains me to think my concern for the Swan Park affronts you, but on one point we agree. Dragging this girl into our discussions is a shameful waste of our time.”

  “Upon this topic, there is not one damn thing—”

  “Mr. Herries, a female is present—”

  How touching, Sir Alton’s care for her feminine sensitivity. Betsey feared she was about to be dismissed with no opportunity to speak.

  “Gentlemen, my goodness.” She smiled up and down the table so neither Sir Alton nor Crow would feel reproached. “I can only hope I don’t appear as though I’ve been dragged anywhere.”

  She lifted her hands, proving the absence of shackles, posing, inviting them to a good look, praying her hair was in place. Mr. Jones could accuse her of flirting later. Behind her, she heard dear Mr. Seiler’s low chuckle. One or two others joined him, thank God.

  “Let me assure you I’m pleased for the opportunity to address this board, though I must agree with Mr. Herries that the excursion scheme has hardly been given the opportunity to prove its value. The figures I provided you show our expectations. Worth bearing out, I think. Indeed, I confess my belief that the board’s time would be better used discussing not the suspension of the scheme but its expansion.”

  Murmurs. Matthew Munsell, the tom turkey, spoke for the table and asked her to explain.

  “Saturday is but one of a week. Some organizations have already expressed a willingness to book on Fridays when a Saturday is not available. Also, our concentration for the excursions has been the London catchment, but a more local trade could be developed through a Sunday scheme, soci
al groups and private gatherings. Sabbatarian criticism might be avoided by engaging clergymen and orators rather than musicians—”

  “Do we see the slippery way this wends?” Sir Alton’s soft voice hushed her and stole all the eyes from her. “I had thought we built the pier for the public, and the pavilion for guests of the hotel. By ‘guests,’ I mean those with the means to stay there, not day-trippers.”

  Several heads nodded, but some had done so while she spoke, too. None voiced his opinion yet. Betsey seized this as permission to continue.

  “Christmastime offers another opportunity to make the most of the hotel’s resources, and at a time when they are not utilized enough. One of the two ballrooms is closed at the end of the season. Converting wasted space to profitable space is but a matter of promotion—everything else is already there and awaiting use.”

  Down the table, Sir Alton emitted the merest purr of a laugh and seemed almost to whisper to himself, “In the hotel now.”

  A board member began a question. Crow interrupted. “The trial period, gentlemen. Miss Dobson. Why is that thrown wayside? Did we not have the wisdom to conceive it? Then why not the fortitude to stick by it? I ask for sober, rational decisions based upon indifferent facts, obtained quite simply—not instantly—by honoring our original plan. It was a good one. It will protect us from rash, imprudent action, if only we let it.”

  Another board member said, “Still, Herries, to look down the road a bit, get an idea of what’s possible. Cannot hurt to be mulling it over in the meantime.”

  “Assuming that is both useful and possible, let us consider that road looked down and move to pressing matters. Miss Dobson, please conclude in due expediency.”

  “Certainly.” Her sharp disappointment tempted her to let that be her final word, to sit down and have done with it, her whole purpose here thwarted by Herries the Crow. But there was no one here, from Sir Alton to Mr. Jones, she could stand to witness her surrender.

  “If there is one thing I’d have you mull over, perhaps it’s the picture of that dark ballroom, sitting there like—” She directed an especial smile to Mr. Herries. “I was about to say a locked treasure chest, but that’s too fanciful for you, isn’t it? I’m the same.” She fingered the frame peeking out from her engagement book, debating still whether she should use it. “But you don’t pack your cash into your mattress, do you? You have it out earning more for you.”

  Mr. Herries gave her a shrewd look. If they met again, he would remember her. With the same feeling she’d had boarding that southbound train from London, she took out the frame. How far could she go on this ticket?

  “We give each excursionist a favor at the end of the night. The ladies in the party receive these frames—I picked them, I think, because my mother had one something like it.”

  She had to stop, paralyzed by the unexpected terror of self-revelation before these men. Better to have hopped upon the table with a cancan. What would it matter to these men, anyway? Below the tabletop, needles of fear pricked her calves and the backs of her knees.

  “It held a photograph of us, her three children, from a day out at Blackpool. I was small, too small to remember much of it. I know it was a singular occasion—we never went again.”

  A restless movement came from Sir Alton’s end of the table just as Mr. Herries spoke her name. The needles now worked at the soles of her feet, and heat engulfed her as though she stood tied to a stake. She shot a glance at Mr. Jones, part anguish, part accusation, for it was his fault she stood here in the first place, talking of her mother. She wanted to murder him, or take shelter under his arm.

  He met her eye, prepared for either event. He sat casually, ankle crossed over knee, but he was there, with her, for her; she felt it palpably and thought one bright, wistful thing better suited to starry nights than board meetings.

  A more grounded thought was that having begun this, she had to get through it. She could. She gestured for Mr. Herries’s patience, then drew her hand back to her side, hoping the trembling she felt was imperceptible to the rest of the table.

  “That singular day meant something to my mother, though—that’s why she kept that picture above the hearth. Sir Alton, pardon me, but you are mistaken to assume the excursionists haven’t the means for the Swan Park.”

  Sir Alton would know her, too, next time their paths crossed. That was evident.

  She spoke to the table. “Some of them do. Some will. Not a great many, of course. But whatever their means, their employers have seen fit to dignify them with a singular day. It dignifies this company to help them do it. Gentlemen, will you let me tell you what your business is?”

  A dangerous question, she knew, dangerous to leave the door wide for either Sir Alton’s sarcasm or Mr. Herries’s rabid enunciation. But Mr. Munsell answered her, and if he sounded a trifle amused, at least he’d been good enough to repress it some.

  “I for one would be most intrigued to hear your perspective, Miss Dobson.”

  “Thank you, sir. Perhaps it isn’t so different from your own. Simply that this company dignifies leisure. Declares it worthy of a family’s wages and the trouble they go to enjoy it. I don’t fancy I’m telling you something new, only perhaps that you didn’t realize—my mother valued it as much as any lady in the Swan Park’s best rooms.”

  She nodded her conclusion. Another stir ensued as they decided whether Miss Dobson leaving the table called for standing or remaining seated. It made her feel her defeat more keenly. Before she and Mr. Seiler had reached the door, the next agenda item was under discussion.

  • • •

  She waited to cry. At the hotel, she immediately posted the stack of inquiries she’d prepared and held in hopes the board would approve them, but the task was done without the sense of victory she’d anticipated. She conferred with the chef on the upcoming menu, answered telegrams, sent payment for an advert in the Times. She got herself through the afternoon, accomplishing all that was expected of her and a few things more no one would have suspected as part of her duties, rode the bicycle-that-wasn’t-quite-hers to the lodging house, felt grateful that Sarah was always busy with supper preparations this time of day and that Charlie was out and that she met no one on the stairs as she went up to her room, and then she closed her door, stripped off her jacket, and permitted herself a few tears with Thief as the only witness.

  She’d thought she’d kept her expectations reasonable, her hopes grounded. But her disappointment exposed the fact that on some level, she’d been wanting too much, spinning fairy tales for herself.

  The water in her washbasin was nearly as warm as her tears, but it provided some refreshment as she splashed it over her face. No more of that, she told herself, and self obeyed, even when she spied the letter Dora Pink had left on her bed. The letter would be from her sister, and full of tender reminders of a household that had fallen short of home and refuge for her, despite Caroline’s best hopes. And her brother-in-law intended even that to be denied her, she thought. He’d forbidden her from the house that was his, even if he was only one of its residents.

  Neither she nor Caroline would allow that to stand, but Betsey wanted more than brazen defiance on her side. She put away the gray tweed jacket she’d worn today next to the brown one she would wear tomorrow. Both suits of clothing had come from Richard, same as the money to pay her course fees at the Institute. As long as that debt was riding her, she wouldn’t be able to stand up to him.

  And what if, come the end of the season, it was as Richard and Avery had predicted, she in the same desperate, jobless state as in May? It frightened her more now than before. In May, she had not loved her work.

  The clock in the corridor chimed. To come late to the supper table would be to put Dora Pink in a mood that would punish everyone in the house, and to not come at all would bring knocks at her door, worried demands to know what was wrong.

  That, at least, was a change from a few months ago, Betsey reflected as she started down the stairs. Not a ban
kable one but worth something, and another reason for her fears.

  But while she’d been having her cry, pandemonium had overtaken the household. Lodgers, servants, dishes, furniture—all were heading out the door to the back garden, supper shanghaied, Dora Pink’s schedule flouted, Mr. Jones at the center of it all.

  He stood behind a tub of ice, coat discarded and sleeves rolled. Laughter filled the air, and when Sarah announced Betsey’s appearance in the doorway, applause erupted, and Betsey passed through a gauntlet of congratulations, at the end of which waited a dish heaped with more ice cream than she would have seen in her lifetime had she never come to Idensea. Mr. and Mrs. Seiler were there, too, and when everyone, servants and all, had been served, Mr. Seiler raised a bowl and toasted “Miss Dobson, l’astucieuse, la douée, la belle.”

  In any language, she knew it for nonsense. But she ate the entire bowl, and when Charlie came to her and claimed he could not finish his second serving, she ate that as well.

  Someone pushed the piano near an open window. Out to the garden came the supper dishes, and all order and convention remained suspended for the evening, servants and guests dancing together, dessert before dinner.

  Mr. Seiler brought her lemonade and joined her on the ground under a tree. To him, she confessed, “I was not the resounding success everyone wants to say.”

  “I dozed off, then, when they suspended the scheme?”

  “Yes, it could be much worse. But they would not even discuss the expansion.”

  With a sigh, Mr. Seiler rolled his eyes to the evening sky.

  “You warned me not to count on that. I tried not to.” She watched Mr. Jones and Charlie tend the fire they’d built and added softly, “I want to stay.”

  “Tu veux toutes les fleurs dans le jardin à fleurir au même moment. You want every flower to bloom at once.”

  Mr. Seiler’s departure with his wife left Betsey sitting alone beneath the tree, but she felt too comfortable to stir. Mr. Jones joined her. He stretched out on the ground much as he had the day on Castle Hill.