“What a terrible expense, all that ice cream,” she finally said. She was thanking him.
“Enjoyed it, you did.”
“More than anything.”
“Then.”
A starry night, better than a board meeting for wistful thoughts. The music had halted. Sarah and the others were starting to gather things into their arms, as what belonged indoors must be returned there. Betsey threw a handful of cloverleaves at him.
“You want me to go to bed with you.”
She meant to tease, to be playful, but he turned his face out of the firelight, and she knew she’d been cruel. Challenged, demeaned his gift. Offered an invitation she was not sure of. She wished he would not answer.
“I do. Just about mad with it, I am thinking.”
Low in her body, something pulsed like a tide. She had not expected him to be so direct.
The fire popped, sending up sparks like skylarks startled out of their ground nests.
“But make you no mistake what this was for,” he added, then rose to help carry furniture.
Polish your type-writer with a soft cotton cloth and cover it.
—How to Become Expert at Type-writing
Summer deepened. It seemed intent on erasing the memory of all other seasons, and sometimes, coasting down the last hill between the hotel and Sarah’s house or in the midst of a long, long Sunday afternoon, Betsey indulged in the fancy that summer was patient, and offered all the time she needed to prepare for the frost.
In truth, there was little she could do but act as though that were true. Her best chance of saving the excursion scheme and her position was to make this season as successful as possible, so when Arland Hamble, the bookkeeper, informed her that her budget had been reduced, she bit the inside of her cheek and nodded. Mr. Hamble might have smirked as he told her, but she knew he merely was passing on Sir Alton’s orders. She reworked her expenditures and smirked a little herself as she realized that, with every Saturday to the middle of September booked, her advertising funds could be redirected.
The board had denied her request to host groups on Sundays, but on Saturdays the pavilion sat empty until the dinner dance in the evenings. With Mr. Seiler’s approval, she began booking Sunday schools and women’s groups for refreshments or light teas during the day. The commissions would be small, and the mad busyness of her Saturdays would increase, but it was money coming her way, and she anticipated making her final payment to her brother-in-law at the end of the summer.
Betsey hoped this would happen when Baumston & Smythe came to Idensea for the company outing, but Caroline’s letters continued to report that she’d had no luck in persuading Richard to attend. As the company was covering the costs for transportation and the dinner dance, Betsey knew, even if Caroline would never say so, that Richard must have no wish to witness the reunion of Betsey Dobson and Baumston & Smythe, Insurers. She could not blame him. Wofford’s pink fingers wiggled at her each time she imagined meeting the train, and whether she’d broken them or not, the image never failed to make her queasy.
She willed such weakness away. Sometimes she saw it, how tightly she clung, how she fretted to keep all the parts together, the way she’d tried to keep her butchered hair contained with one penny’s worth of pins at the beginning of the season. These moments of clarity came not at work as she managed dozens of loose threads, but after she’d edged out Charlie in a cycling race, or on Tuesday evenings, when there would be a stack of fresh linens on her dresser, or at supper as she slipped into her chair, her place at the table in the house she increasingly called home.
One evening, on her way from work to one of those suppers, she slowed her pedaling as she noticed more and more visitors on the Esplanade looking in the same direction, up to the Kursaal.
The lamp was lit, she realized as she came to a stop. The centerpiece of the Kursaal was a hexagonal tower topped by a light, an artistic interpretation of a lighthouse. The long summer day drained the brightness, but it glowed, and for the first time.
She cycled up to the site and found the same expanse of chaotic activity as the first time she’d come here, men shouting over the thumping hiss of steam engines, horses straining at loaded drays, the black smoke of waste fires and mountain ranges of gravel and sand. The work would carry on till dark, she guessed. Mr. Jones arrived at The Bows later and later these days, if he came at all.
She spied him huddled over the back end of a delivery wagon, scribbling across a stack of papers and handing them off to a man in a fresh-looking suit, who kept trying to find a tidy way to balance in the deep ruts of crusted mud.
Unable to summon any excuse to interrupt him, she was about to depart when a laborer elbowed Mr. Jones and gestured toward her. Mr. Jones removed his spectacles, then strode her way. She might have met him halfway. But he looked like a king traversing his ramparts, or a commander the battlefield, dust billowing at his boot heel with each sure and purposeful step, and it would’ve been a shame to spoil her viewpoint.
But his expression, as he drew nearer, was sober. “Something happen, is it?”
“No. Only . . .” She gestured over the cliff to the Esplanade, feeling foolish for alarming him. “People are noticing the light.”
The transformation of his face banished her embarrassment. He grinned up at the tower. “Quite a cheer up here when it knocked on. A view it is, Betsey, up in the lantern room. You’ll go up?”
“May I?”
He steered her to the portico, avoiding the busiest areas of construction. “We’re readying for the landscaping and the installations in the winter gardens—paths to wander, footbridges, all the greenery and flowers, of course. And statuary, Sir Alton has said.”
“And how many waterfalls?”
“Only the one in the dome round back. The glass rises thirty feet there.”
Inside, a forest of scaffolding presently occupied the entrance hall, which soared over a grand double staircase and several gallery floors. The space reverberated with the rumbling voices of the laborers and the plinks and scrapes of their tools. “The faience going up,” Mr. Jones explained, indicating the colorful glazed tiles. He sounded satisfied, as though the ratio of tiled walls and columns to blank ones was not as dismal as Betsey herself reckoned.
“A refreshment lounge and reading room that way,” he said as they approached the staircase. “Below us is the skating rink. I can’t take you round everywhere just now, but I’ll teach you and Charlie skating when we open, shall I?”
She agreed, and did not say that Thomas Dellaforde had taught her already, one stolen Sunday afternoon.
Though the lantern room was their destination, he could not resist showing her the recital hall, where, aside from eight hundred missing seats, work had been completed. Their place in the rear balcony offered a complete view of the stage, its proscenium ruffled and rounded like an oyster shell. Indeed, the entire hall seemed shell-inspired, a cool and dreamy composition of pinks and whites.
Though he’d meant to be showing off the space, his inspection turned critical. He frowned at the empty floor below. “A call on the factory is in order, I am thinking, or else the Duke and Duchess will sit upon milking stools opening night.”
“The speeches best be brief if that happens.” She knew he would take the stage as an orator on opening night and imagined the hall filled with seats, those seats occupied. A dining table full of board members had been enough for her. To speak to hundreds, nobility amongst them . . .
Her stomach shuddered on his behalf. “It will be quite a moment for you, won’t it? Will any of your family come?”
Mr. Jones locked his elbows against the balcony’s low wall. The open doors permitted the noise of the workmen to bounce around them faintly.
Betsey guessed, “Too much of a journey for them?”
“Never taken a train, my dad. I asked him. Said to bring the little ones and my sister Dilys.” A soft grunt nearly passed for amusement at himself. “My mother two days in the ground
, and I’m asking a man who’s never taken a train to leave work and cross the country with three little children to see a nob cut a ribbon. Owen was weeping so, though.”
Something raw crouched in the last remark. Owen was his youngest brother, not more than three or four, if she remembered correctly. Betsey didn’t follow the connection, but she knew, “It wasn’t wrong to ask him.”
“There’s dense it sounded, and I knew it soon as it was out. But I needed something to say to Owen, some promise for when I’d see him again.”
“Ah. He didn’t want you to leave.”
“That’s it.” He paused, and above the echoing sounds of the workmen, she heard something new, a peculiar, rasping sound between his body and her own.
His thumb. That broad, hard pad taking a meditative path along the callused side of his forefinger.
He said, “What I did, I missed my train. So he’d hush at last, I stayed another night and left the next morning. Early, him still sleeping.” The rasping stopped. He pushed off the wall, taken from his story by someone appearing on the main floor. He called, “You wanting me, young Clayton?”
The boy twisted, finding Mr. Jones above. “Sir, Mr. Jones, it’s Sir Alton’s carriage coming.”
“I’ll meet him, thanks.” As the boy ducked out, Mr. Jones told Betsey, “Sir Alton’s here for the lantern room as well. Make it a group?”
Involuntarily, Betsey’s nose wrinkled.
“I’ll bring you another time, then,” he promised, but the laughter that accompanied the promise halted in a correction. “You and Sarah. Charlie, too.”
“Fine,” she answered, before he could invite the whole damn lodging house and make it thoroughly proper and well within the limits she herself had imposed.
She had hoped to get away without Sir Alton seeing her, but he and Lady Dunning were alighting the barouche as she and Mr. Jones exited the Kursaal. Mr. Jones made her even more conspicuous by walking her to her bicycle. Just like she was having her first lesson again, he held the handlebar while she mounted. She touched her foot to the pedal, poised for motion.
Still he held on.
“What do you think, girl? Was it the right thing?”
Betsey glanced over her shoulder, trying to make out where his gaze had fixed. Nothing in sight helped her make sense of the question.
She turned back. He looked down to the handlebar as though he knew he should release it, but he didn’t. “How I left Owen,” he said. He lifted his gaze again, his need for an answer so naked it jarred her. “Was it the right thing?”
Tears scalded her eyes without warning, the only ready answer that she possessed. What would she ever know of children? She suspected Owen woke to distractions of food and play and family routines, that his brother was the only one yet haunted by that day, but was that comfort? He came to her with the question that undid all his confidence, and she didn’t know what to tell him.
“That child loves you, John.” She had at least that truth to share. “How could he help it? No matter how you had to leave, that is what he’ll remember, that he loves you.”
• • •
“Lady Morey—she finds the reading material in the ladies’ lounge is too much of the edifying strain and not enough of the entertaining.”
Mr. Seiler reached for the cup of coffee sitting on the corner of his desk, and his glance over the top of the complaint book fell upon Betsey. No longer just an observer, she was expected to supply an idea now and then.
She knew she had the space of a single sip to offer a remedy for Lady Morey’s dissatisfaction, and after attending these complaint book meetings regularly over the past few weeks, that should not have been so great a challenge.
But before today, Sir Alton had never been present. He hadn’t seemed surprised to find her there, only greeted her with the comment that he’d heard she was making herself useful round the hotel in any number of ways.
The rim of the cup lingered at Mr. Seiler’s lips. He graced her with another sip, forgoing his customary practice.
One submanager suggested, “It will be a simple matter to ask the lady what she prefers. A porter may bring it from town, or if it is very extraordinary, we may send to London.”
Mr. Seiler nodded. “Very well. For you.”
The submanager made a note. Proceeding to the next item, Mr. Seiler turned a page in the complaint book.
“She has a companion,” Betsey said in the pause. She was not certain Mr. Seiler would appreciate this addition. Going to the companion would be more discreet, and he preferred complaints to be resolved with minimum fuss, but once the “for you” order had been pronounced, the matter was considered finished, and Mr. Seiler did not revisit it. But having begun, there was nothing to do but finish. “Lady Morey has a companion with her, Miss Thee. She would know Lady Morey’s reading preferences.”
Mr. Seiler’s hmm was brief but thoughtful. “For you, then, Miss Dobson.”
The submanager struck the task from his list, Betsey recorded it in her notebook, and Mr. Seiler went to the next item, all as if Mr. Seiler asked her to resolve guest complaints every day. What did Sir Alton think of it? There had been none of his previous failure to recognize her when he’d joined the meeting this afternoon.
Mr. Seiler’s ritualistic precision meant his two cups of coffee were drained and the complaint books shut by five to three—that was, unless Sir Alton attended, a submanager had once warned Betsey. He had come often in the early days of the hotel, and still was likely to drop in now and again, and his questions and concerns could lengthen the meeting considerably.
Betsey saw no sign of that today. Indeed, at ten of, Sir Alton took his leave, having said very little. Betsey noted the glances exchanged amongst the remaining men after the secretary closed the door. Mr. Seiler shook off his puzzlement and returned to the groundskeeper’s complaint book. It was still possible to finish on schedule. “Mrs. Guy—roast pheasant with plum jelly served on a chipped plate, sans jelly.”
Betsey left the meeting with an armload of complaint books to return and a plot to chance upon Lady Morey’s companion. Mr. Seiler was preparing her, she thought to herself as she turned into the corridor of offices. Once the season was over, if the excursion scheme were canceled, he could still find a place for her here at the hotel, something besides a chambermaid or laundress. If she could learn enough and prove herself—
Had she heard her name? She stopped, looked about.
It was Sir Alton.
If a machine has been properly cared for but the carriage sticks, the trouble almost always is with the dogs.
—How to Become Expert in Type-writing
He stood beside one of the half-columns protruding from the corridor walls, gloves draped over his hand in a way that reminded her of a portrait, impossible to miss if she’d been outside her own head a little more. Startled, disconcerted, Betsey reverted to her years as a housemaid at the Dellafordes’ and curtsied.
Two of the complaint books she was carrying slipped from under her arm as she did so. She hesitated awkwardly. Was he greeting her in passing, or did he mean for them to converse? About what? And oughtn’t he offer to collect the books for her?
Involuntarily, her eyes turned to John’s closed door.
“I startled you,” Sir Alton said. “Such absorption. Head full of business, Miss Dobson?”
Betsey forced herself to meet his eyes, then glanced down to the fallen books. And then at Sir Alton again.
This seemed to amuse him. “Allow me, do.”
He stooped at her feet. Betsey put out her hands for the books when he rose, but he held onto them, inspecting the spines.
“Seiler entrusted these to you.”
Betsey remained at a loss. The books were not especially confidential; any page in the hotel might have been given the task of returning them to their respective departments. The advantage was Betsey’s, that she had the opportunity to move about the hotel and interact with the heads of each department.
“He likes you. Decided to groom you, as it were. He’s done so before—he is an excellent judge of potential, generally.”
She did not feel safe to thank him for this oblique praise. His smile held as he offered the books. John claimed the ability to interpret the subtleties of Sir Alton’s expressions, but she saw nothing in his face to help her deduce his purpose or feelings. She took hold of the books, and was not much surprised when he did not release them. He nodded in the direction of John’s door, and a warmth grew in her, as though she’d been caught doing something she oughtn’t.
“Jones, for example. He learned well under Seiler’s guidance. I’ve noticed . . . he likes you, too.”
A pair of staffers passed on their way down the corridor, assiduously restraining any show of curiosity.
“Rather more than Seiler, even,” he added, so very softly.
She guessed he was having a bad time of it, trying to identify what John might find attractive in her. She thought of helping him, thought of dipping her chin and looking out from beneath her lashes, of letting her lips curl, sounding biddable as she spoke his name.
Instead, she pulled the books into her possession, which surprised him. Still, he made the sparest gesture with his arm, and her intention to continue to the office died. She was not dismissed.
“Yes, Jones learned well. And, in turn, has done well for the company, all things considered. I know Web Fawcett thinks so.”
Betsey couldn’t help it. She frowned at the name, unable to place it with either a face or a reason for Sir Alton to mention it.
“Surely you’ve heard Mr. Jones mention Web Fawcett? Of Reading? A rather substantial property there he’s preparing to develop.”
Fawcett was staying at the hotel at present, she remembered. She could have heard the name from John, but also from Mr. Seiler or any of the staff if he were an impressive enough guest.
“He’ll need a contractor.”
Understanding at last what Sir Alton was after relieved her to some degree, though it provoked her more than anything. She wished she did know John’s interests regarding Web Fawcett just so she could keep the information from Sir Alton.
The Typewriter Girl Page 21