The Typewriter Girl

by Atlee, Alison

  She did not respond when John answered. He came to the foot of the bed for whatever visual appraisal of Charlie’s condition he could make, but the lamp was low and Sarah huddled next to him, her hand at rest on his cheek. Had he roused? Opened his eyes? What had the doctor said? None of his whispered questions were answered.

  He waited.

  The room wasn’t silent. Miss Everson breathed gutturally, Sarah in staccato sobs. And Charlie—

  Suddenly, John’s heart was pounding in his ears.

  He almost overturned the lamp in his haste to reach it and turn it up. Sarah braced her arm like iron against him when he tried to move her hand from Charlie’s face, grunted and resisted his increasing force, and over the boy’s body, a fierce and quiet war ensued. Finally, John ordered, “Let loose, Sarah, Christ, let loose,” and used honest strength to push her back. She wilted into the mattress, shaking with sobs.

  “Charlie!”

  He shouted an inch from Charlie’s face, where the warmest place was where Sarah’s hand had rested. He remembered how Charlie’s eyes had opened when he’d done that on the shore, so he shouted for a long time. He remembered holding Charlie in the boat, the difficulty of finding that slow, dim pulse, and so for a long time he searched. And then he shouted again.

  Again. How many times?

  Sarah was begging him to stop.

  He sank to his knees beside the bed, Charlie’s wrist circled in his hand. “Sarah.” The word scratched his raw throat. He didn’t understand how she had lain there. He didn’t understand how Charlie had gone, his mother at his side, how there could have been no warning to make her call for help, no time to do anything.

  He felt tension in Charlie’s arm. His mother, pulling his body to her. John let go. He pressed his face into the bedclothes as Sarah’s long, low keen twisted through the room, pulling tight as a rope around his chest. Stop it, he wanted to tell her, stop it, because the sound was killing him, it was worse than a rope, it was burrowing inside him, eating him alive.

  And yet, when the sound did stop, he knew he’d been wrong. What was more fitting, more righteous, than that moan from Sarah’s soul? Not the quiet that came after it, white as a frozen field, a deadness in it that belied the throbbing, twisting growth of this pain.

  Sarah’s voice came, flat, empty, the opposite of her cry. “Was he afraid?”

  Of course. They all were. John had known nothing as sickening as that moment he’d spotted Charlie up there on the pier.

  “He was brave,” he answered. “Prepared to dive off that pier.” John had taught him to dive the year Dr. Elliot had passed. He’d nearly upset the boat, jumping up to get Charlie’s attention and wave him off the dive.

  “I did not ask whether he was brave.”

  John made a fist. He wanted to cover Charlie’s head with his hand once more, but he would have felt like a trespasser, the way Sarah held him.

  “I want to know whether my child was afraid. I want to know why didn’t you—” A sob plowed through her voice, crumpling her words. “You could have—no one else—I was standing there, waiting, and I saw—there was no one else hurt as he was! No one else! Why didn’t you make sure?”

  His head buzzed as he tried to sort out the answer to her question, reviewing flashes of memory as he realized Sarah must be right. He’d been in the water, waiting for Charlie’s jump. He’d swum where Charlie landed; he’d known when it was taking too long for him to resurface. How many times had he gone under to search? Someone had speculated the boy had hit the underside of one of the craft on his way up. Why had John not anticipated that, made certain there was more clearance?

  He left the room because Sarah was telling him to get out. Screaming for him to get out. He didn’t know how many times she had said it.

  Every member of the household huddled in the corridor outside Charlie’s room. Someone brushed past him to tend to Sarah. Weeping, questions. Assurances: The doctor had been sent for; Mrs. Elliot didn’t know what she was saying. He squeezed past, summoning up the responses they needed.

  Betsey slipped her hand into his and did not make him stop until they came to the door.

  “I’ll send the wires to her daughters,” he said.

  “Let someone else. She will want you.”

  He smeared the tears on one of Betsey’s cheeks as he kissed the other. “Send to me if anything’s needed.”

  • • •

  Mr. Fowler still waited on the foreshore, and the vicar with him. John joined them after he sent the telegrams, and the three men sat in the sand, passing barely a dozen words amongst them, moving only as the tide dictated.

  Sunrise bleached the sky.

  The pier looked like a wasp.

  John saw some of his men and, on the spot, hired them to supervise clearing the washed-up wreckage from the foreshore. The act was the initial pebble of responsibility that came landsliding toward him the moment he reached his office.

  He spoke with witnesses and survivors, compiling information for the Baumston & Smythe agent who would arrive soon, as well as for Sir Alton, who anticipated an inquest. All agreed on the source of the fire, a flare-up in the kitchen of the refreshment stand, decorative bunting hanging too near, easy fuel. Precious minutes were lost as the staff attempted to put it out. One man wept, describing how the flames turned from manageable to monstrous between blinks of his eyes.

  Four of the missing were located, safe and sound. The body of Mrs. Fowler was recovered. Her name was added to the list of the dead, along with that of Charles Simon Elliot, who had almost reached his fourteenth birthday.

  • • •

  That afternoon, the Duke presided over a subdued official opening of the Kursaal. John attended because Sir Alton insisted, and found himself swaying in place as the various officials had their say, the exhaustion of three sleepless, pressure-loaded days finally collapsing over him.

  No gala ball, no fireworks, no Spanish soprano. A band played a hymn, and the vicar remembered the victims and their families in his prayer. The afternoon sun bore down on the crowd, which had stretched itself rather lethargically across the lawn, more interested in shade and breezes than in being able to hear and see the program.

  The Kursaal testified to the town’s inspiring growth, and now it also stood for Idensea’s hope and resilience; all of the Duke’s remarks were appropriate. Sir Alton’s followed a similar vein, but they left John cold and unsettled.

  After the ribbon cutting, Sir Alton and the company architect approached him. They’d been discussing the pier. The new one.

  They appeared puzzled when John could only stare. Finally, he shook his head. “I am not speaking of this now, there’s no reason. I am—” He paused, saw their puzzlement grow, felt his own thoughts fray.

  “Done” was all he could think to say.

  Sir Alton followed him beyond the thick of the crowd. “Done? You mean you’re not staying?”

  “I do.”

  “For the opening?”

  Sir Alton’s request for clarification made John halt. “I am your worry?”

  “A great many things worry me just now, Jones,” he snapped in an uncharacteristic display of irritation, no doubt allowed by his own weariness. It was suppressed immediately. “And, yes, you are amongst them, considering your recent efforts to discover what leaving Idensea might gain you.”

  “I’ve made no secret of it.”

  “Nor have I blamed you, a young man making his way. Yet—” A calculated hesitation, then a smile. “Neither have I considered you too thick to recognize a bird in the hand when it lands there. Someone of your background—you ought to hold tight. And the company relies upon you.” He gestured toward the Esplanade. “Idensea herself relies upon you.”

  Suddenly, John’s depleted spirit rallied. “You’ll not put that on me. That is not all mine, and you’ll not put it on me.”

  “For God’s sake—”

  “Did you know every one of the confirmed dead was a local? Our neighbors�
��why could you not say something to them?” John pointed to the podium where the speeches had been delivered. “Up there, why not speak to our neighbors? They came, and only to hear how they will thrive—”

  “Better to expound on failure and defeat?”

  “They deserve to be acknowledged, their part in this! What this company owes them deserves to be said. Why couldn’t you say it, a lifeboat station, something besides a twenty-year-old manual pump for our fire brigade? Some help to the families who . . . Charlie Elliot—his father delivered your own daughter . . . bless the bleeding Christ, it needed to be said.”

  “It was not. The occasion.” The words were heavy with warning, but then Sir Alton sighed lightly. “It will come, I daresay, and I hope you will be there, but for now—go rest, Jones. You look like hell itself, and you’ve done more than your duty today.”

  I hope you will be there. John distrusted the liberality of the statement, sensing Sir Alton was foisting everything to him, all but blackmailing him into staying if he wanted to see things done right. Or was that something he clutched all on his own?

  He went to the hotel, intending to eat and wash and borrow a conveyance, because the notion of cycling out to Sarah’s house brought a roaring protest from his body.

  In the end, his body toppled his will. When he woke, it was dark, and someone was stealing his boots. Between slit eyelids, he registered the glint of brass buttons and was no longer alarmed.

  “I’m going to The Bows.”

  “Sarah is sleeping. Her daughters are there. The doctor gave her something. There is nothing to do until tomorrow.”

  It seemed unlikely. But it sounded true, grounded in the authority of this girl who loved him.

  He slept. Later, he discovered her shoulder, tender and bare, near his own. “I’m sorry,” she said, because he was weeping into her neck. Things were so broken, and he still did not see the way to fix them.

  “Iefan, I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. You loved him, and I’m sorry.”

  Her voice broke with a sob. She took him into her arms as he covered her with his body, kissing her, thanking God she had come to him, thinking, God, what if she had not? Her flesh stole him from despair. Against her cheek, he could leave his tears; beneath his touch, her body quivered and her pleasure was his refuge. Such goodness here. That she should come to him, that their brokenness should make something whole, it was good, and she had brought it.

  He made love to her, whispering, “I love you, Elisabeth. Bless God, I love you so.”

  IF THE CARRIAGE STOPS:

  You may be at the end of your ribbon.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  The plash of water, the press of daylight woke Betsey. The door to John’s bathroom stood ajar; she could see his back, bare, braces hanging from the waistband of his trousers. She smelled his soap and let her eyes close again, permitting herself one more fleeting, indulgent dream of breakfast here in this room, she wearing John’s shirt. Sitting beside him in services. A walk afterward, hands clasped.

  Her lashes were wet when she opened her eyes. She and John had never sat in church without the Seilers or Sarah and Charlie between them.

  Across the room, John was doing up the buttons of his shirt, his black hair lopping over his brow, his shoulders bearing the light from the windows.

  He reached for his necktie draped on the back of a chair, and paused when he realized she was awake. She wished she had said it last night, or even a moment ago. How I love you, Iefan, how I love you. She wished she did not think it too late to say now.

  He draped the tie round his neck. “A fuss it will kick up, me bringing you to the house.”

  “I gave up my room to the grandchildren. No one expected me home.” The few things she had brought with her were stowed under her desk in the company office.

  “Then where were you to be last night?”

  “Here.”

  His jaw was damp, pinked from his shave, and the light caught a ripple of muscle. They’d needed each other last night, but this morning, her choice troubled him.

  She added, “So you don’t have to worry about smuggling me back in place.”

  “I was prepared for the fuss, Elisabeth.”

  Lying on her side in his bed, she gave a one-shouldered shrug, a thoughtless acceptance that the deed was done. Only a few moments later did she grasp his meaning, understand for what he was prepared. To spare her the scandal. To make the sacrifice, complete the rescue.

  He was—he had been—prepared to marry her.

  Beneath the pillow, she opened her hand, felt on her cheek the pressure of her fingertips through the feathers. “You keep mistaking me for some protected virgin.”

  “I see you.” He made a point of it, fixing her with a thorough gaze. “I see you. You are the one mistaking it.”

  “I would never have demanded that of you.” She sat up in the bed as her voice rose, clutching the sheet to her chest. “I never counted on it. We had the contract—”

  “Never you throw up that sham contract to me again—”

  “—and last night finished it.”

  “—do you hear? A matter of convenience it’s been for you, and you’ll not have it—”

  “There are no obligations between us!”

  Silence fell. The room seemed to breathe and blink, light fading and rising again as a cloud passed, a shift creaking somewhere in the floor. John came to the bed, and she drew up her knees to give him a place to sit.

  “Well, I love you, girl. No lie nor passing fancy last night, that.”

  Betsey rested her forehead on her knees. She believed him. She believed she’d known even before he did. In the cocoon of her arms and legs, she saw Tinfell Cottage, blurred by her mocking lie to Sir Alton, by a cynicism all her own and perhaps uglier than Sir Alton’s. Why—what—was she fighting? Why couldn’t she take what she wanted, however it had arrived?

  John found her foot beneath the bedcovers and gave it a squeeze. “Pearse Leland leaves today,” he said, making her lift her head. “I am going to see him, do all I can to get him to hire me for that London job.”

  “Be careful.” She repeated what she had overheard between Leland and Sir Alton at the pleasure railway. “I meant to tell you the night of the ball, but—”

  The ball had never happened.

  John did not show much surprise. “No telling what damage that man has been doing me ever since he decided I ought to be grateful to spend the rest of my life managing his company. But I have board members who will speak for me, enough to undo the slurs, perhaps.”

  “Of course.” She did not doubt that if he wanted it, the job was his. He did want it, obviously; it was the sort of position he had been seeking, before. Now, after, the fire and Charlie . . .

  It settled uncomfortably within her, that he seemed to want it still.

  “So,” she began, “whilst you washed up, waited for me to wake, you—” She bit her lip, afraid how the words would balloon once she spoke them, become urgent and fragile. “You decided we’d marry and go to London.”

  His mouth winced in apology. “You hate London.”

  She shook her head. “I only swore to myself I’d never live there again.”

  “Different, you’d find it, no longer all on your own.”

  Every thought of London was paired with the bleak and often frightening struggle of feeding and housing herself. To imagine herself as a wife there, she had to summon up images of her sister, and Mrs. Dellaforde in Manchester, even Lady Dunning. None of them quite took.

  “Let me say the rest of it.” After a quick glance at her, John studied the carpet, his thumb tracing upon the covers an outline of her toes. “I am for Wales, soon as I can get away. I want to see my family. I mean to speak to my dad, and get Owen, to have him come live with me.”

  Betsey straightened. “Your brother? John, you are going to raise him yourself?” She knew John thought much of the boy, but he’d seen the child only twice in his life. �
��And what of your father, what will he say?”

  “Dad will see. I can give Owen a better life. That he will see, with this job with Leland.”

  “But—”

  She bit down on her words. John plainly did not want to hear but. Despite a full night of sleep, his bath and shave, he looked—

  She thought of her months as a laundress. Mountains of used-up-ness that made you despair if you thought of them all at once.

  Gently: “But you’re an idiot.”

  He smiled. He leaned toward her, and she lay back into the pillows as the deep, deep well of his palm skimmed her body, as his weight came upon her. He kissed her, and she thought, I need him, and also, Isn’t this my trick?

  All done up in his Sunday best, John settled beside her in the spent, tangled sheets, pulling her to his chest, stroking her hair back from her face.

  “Waking up, changing everything about your life?” She spoke softly. She hardly knew whether she wanted him to hear. “Bringing a little child into all that turmoil with you? Iefan.”

  “No turmoil. Putting things back is what it is, I know how it needs be, it is all very clear. I had my plans before, and I have them still. I know how it needs to be.”

  “I wasn’t what you planned.”

  “No, girl. In no way that.”

  She could take that low laugh of his for nothing but appreciation. It was his certitude that filled her with fear for him. “Tell me how you felt this morning. You decided you would save whatever scrap of honor I still have by marrying me, you’d give up your chances for money and connections, and children—”

  “Owen we’d have.”

  “No. He isn’t part of it.” Somehow, it made it worse that John had broken in with that particular justification. “He isn’t—”

  She sat up. His collar looked like a knife-edge cutting into his flesh as he lay on the pillow. She tried to adjust it, then skated her fingertip along the starched crease of his shirtsleeve. On the bureau across the room, a black pasteboard frame barely contained John’s large family, his mother in the center, Owen a babe on her lap. A stray, wild thought of Avery Nash popped into her mind, of that cozy flat he’d had when she first knew him, his type-writer and books.