The Typewriter Girl Read online

  “Because?” Don’t lie.

  “I—I left on bad terms, at the very end. My supervisor refused to write a fair reference—the reference I deserved—and . . . it was a bad scene, rather.”

  “Why should he refuse?”

  “He is a pri— He didn’t like me.” Her eyes dropped. “Or perhaps he did. So to speak. In either case, it was bad.”

  Again, John recalled that meeting at Baumston & Smythe, this time how every eye in the room had followed Miss Dobson’s entrance and her exit. A great beauty she was not. On the street, in an emporium or church services, she mightn’t get such notice (though with her height, and her . . . something . . . she could scarce be overlooked), but in that room of men at their business, Betsey Dobson was a wrapped package, novelty and mystery and possibility.

  What was it for her to work in that building each day? No wonder she’d aborted their exchange of smiles, or that she recoiled when she had discovered him following her.

  “That is why I hadn’t all the fare for the train,” she was saying. “I didn’t get any of my wages. I hadn’t enough money, either to stay or to come, so I came, because I had nowhere else to go. And I wanted to.”

  The breeze blew wisps of hair across her mouth, where they stuck. She used her little finger to try to remove them, discovering in the process the rest of the fallen locks. With a puff, she set down her birdcage, took off her gloves, and went to the task of pushing the hair back under her hat.

  She removed her cloak when she finished and draped it over her arm. She wriggled her shoulders, put them back, then faced him as though to re-present herself, her chin tucked slightly down, giving the effect that she was looking up at him. A disarming ruse there.

  “You know Baumston and Smythe has a company outing here in a few months?” he asked, and she nodded. “How will that be for you, meeting up with them, that supervisor, again?”

  Miss Dobson’s demonic brows rose. “If I am a manager, Mr. Jones, I imagine it will be very sweet.”

  John turned to smile broadly at the seafront. It would be raining in ten minutes. He’d start with the hotel tour, then, when he rejoined the Gilbeys. He said, “Here it is, Miss Dobson. Sir Alton, who owns much of the land you’ll walk upon in Idensea and who sits in the director’s place at the company board meetings, doesn’t want this excursions scheme. He wants to keep Idensea very posh, and day-trippers don’t suit his idea of it, especially company outings such as you would be managing. He’ll be seeking any reason to persuade the board of directors to call it off. So we need it to go well, you see. So well it’s irresistible, to the board if not to Sir Alton himself.”

  “I see.”

  Perhaps she did. No doubt she understood there would be no need for an excursions manager if there were no excursions scheme. Here came a tram in the opposite, wrong direction. John considered it. He and Miss Dobson could cross the Esplanade and take it, and he could see her to Sarah Elliot’s, where he had arranged a room for her. That would take longer than to drop her at the hotel, but he could still make his half-hour deadline with Lillian. He’d told her thirty minutes so he could easily exceed her expectations.

  Taking this tram would be a decision, however. A manager could afford room and board at Sarah Elliot’s. A hotel laundress, say, much less so.

  “Did you try the lock?” he said. “Back there in the stationmaster’s, on the window?”

  “Did I . . . ?” Miss Dobson lifted her chin a touch, insulted. “Just what do you take me for?”

  Eye to eye, they both made grabs for their hats in defense against a sudden, violent gust from the sea. John was laughing. He touched Miss Dobson’s back, urging her to hurry across the Esplanade. They needed to catch this tram.

  • • •

  Such a sky. The widest she’d ever seen. Even more than the long bow of the shoreline and the eternal spread of the sea, it was the sky Betsey could not fold into her understanding, the cliffs and hillocks of the land overturned, sculpted into the stony clouds and softened with the promise of light. She almost laughed with the exhilaration of it, how something so unfamiliar could feel like a part of her, call to her from a place deep inside. Had it been like this at Blackpool, all those years ago? If she couldn’t recall that, no wonder she’d conflated her father’s hazy figure with that stranger’s.

  Her gawking caused a gap in the tram queue; Mr. Jones touched her arm to move her forward.

  Thief’s cage got her dubious inspection from the tram conductor, but with Mr. Jones at her side, nothing came of it but a mild directive to “take it up top.” Resigned to Mr. Jones’s guardianship for now, she added the fare he paid to the list of debts she would settle this summer, provided she had a job. Despite his burst of good humor, she wasn’t taking that for granted, especially since she believed she’d glimpsed the Swan Park Hotel opposite the tram’s current direction.

  She felt like a pebble under a pillow, a hair in an iced cake, her worry a bit of nastiness at odds with all the holiday-making around her, day-trippers debating whether the German band played rain or shine, a young couple with their heads together, shuffling through a set of postcards. Mr. Jones beside her, in his Norfolk, impatient to return to his sweetheart.

  Through music-laden wind, the tram broke the sea of promenaders. Betsey folded back the cage cover. Could Thief smell the change, the absence of London’s dense and practical air, sense the wideness of the sky? She fingered the latch of the cage, tempted.

  She, Thief, and Mr. Jones rode with the sea at their backs. Below, along the Esplanade, a row of shops and eateries nestled against the cliffs, and terraced above was Idensea itself, the weathered brick of the original village a frayed strand amongst furrows of dark gables and fresh, deep reds. Mr. Jones pointed ahead. “The Sultan’s Road is there. Open next month.”

  Betsey squinted. The Sultan’s Road was plain and clear, being enormous, but she could not make sense of it immediately, a Sphinx of a structure, part fanciful palace and stage-scenery mountain range, part utilitarian tracks—impossible to follow, given the peculiar fashion in which it emerged and disappeared.

  “A switchback?” But she knew the guess was wrong.

  “Pleasure railway. Not a thing its like in Britain.”

  As they passed, everyone on the tram turned to look at the facade, where colorful arabesques embellished an arcade between two towers with tops like sugar kisses.

  “You built this?”

  “Not alone,” he replied with a smile, but she sensed his pride, how he enjoyed the stir of excitement and speculation amongst the passengers. She begrudged him none of it. A mountain range rising up from the English sand, that dainty pier holding against the sea—she would have called it magic if the word did not seem to discount the work.

  The yawning central arch of the pleasure railway echoed the shape of the towers, four or five stories at its kissed peak. It appeared to be the entrance, but the view was hidden by a painted canvas curtain with lettering that promised ADVENTUROUS & EXOTIC SCENES OF THE EAST! ALL-MODERN LIGHTING & MUSICAL EFFECTS! A THRILLING COAST OVER THE GRAVITY TRACK!

  And: “6d Admission.”

  Betsey multiplied that number by her rough estimate of the crowd at hand. “What a shame it could not open for Whitsuntide.”

  He laughed as though this pleased him. She took the opportunity to ask, “Are you taking me to the hotel?”

  “The Bows, you’ll stay there. Tobias—Mr. Seiler—hasn’t time to see you today.”

  She disliked both nuggets of information. “The Bows” sounded like a lodging house, and she’d expected to live in the cheap staff quarters at the hotel. Nor would she be at ease until the hotel manager himself assured her of her position. She held her tongue, however; she’d left her power to argue along with her wages at Baumston & Smythe.

  She felt a raindrop on the brim of her hat and had begun to unfold her cloak when Mr. Jones sprang from his seat with fingers in his mouth to deliver a piercing whistle over the side of the tram. He shout
ed to someone, then urged her off the tram, and they ran to an empty dray headed away from the Esplanade. Before taking a place on the dray’s end, Mr. Jones handed her up to the driver, who took one look at her and said, “You ain’t his London girl, not you.”

  The sprinkles ended, and the rain began. They drove up into the yellow heath, a mile or two from the Esplanade, and Betsey’s spirit turned as soggy as her cloak. These were homes along the lanes, real ones with property, tended gardens inside cast-iron fences, places where families grew, not make-do housing for transient holidaymakers, or anyone else who might be moving on soon.

  And The Bows, indeed, was one of these homes, its name true to the matching pairs of broad bow windows on each side of the house, both the first and second stories. Mr. Jones seemed to notice her sluggishness in climbing down from the dray, the trouble it was to keep her under his umbrella as they walked to the door, but aside from assuring her this was a fine house, he ignored it.

  A discreet plaque at the door stated “The Bows, Mrs. Elliot, Proprietress.” The maid let them in and promptly harangued Mr. Jones as to his purpose here—how could he bring Miss Gilbey without notice, or was that Miss Gilbey, couldn’t be, and did Mrs. Elliot know what scandals he was up to now? Through it all, it was plain no better treat existed than to have Mr. Jones turn up at the door of The Bows.

  Betsey half-listened as Mr. Jones explained his errand and her identity. With increasing panic, she looked into the parlor at her left, which, with the dull light from the overcast day and the absence of any occupant, should have seemed forlorn. It didn’t. It looked inviting, and . . . pretty. Pretty green wallpaper and hooked rugs and gilded picture frames, groupings of pretty chairs for conversation, a pretty bowl of peonies sitting on a cottage piano.

  Pretty. Far, far too pretty.

  “Dora Pink,” Mr. Jones offered to Betsey as explanation for the maid, now off to find her mistress.

  Betsey coughed to clear her throat of the thick and mortifying rise of tears. “I won’t—I cannot stay here.”

  “Sarah’s held a room. You’re lucky to—”

  “I want to stay at the hotel, in the staff quarters.”

  He was shaking his head as she spoke.

  “Why not?”

  “Tobias would never approve, not if you’re a manager. And it isn’t right—we’ve people leaving their families, counting on those quarters so they can have wages to take home at the end of the season.”

  “It’s too far—I’ll have to pay for the tram every day, to say nothing of the price of the room—it’s just too dear, I’m sure, too—it’s too good.”

  Her voice cracked over that last word. Mr. Jones’s impatience fell away, as palpably as if he’d dropped her valise, picked up a book, and begun leafing through the pages to the one he wanted. Her composure would be a damn bloody stump by the end of the day, the way she’d sunk her teeth into it and held, but she wouldn’t let go now. She would not be the object of this curious, perceptive sympathy. She met his eye.

  “It won’t do, Mr. Jones.”

  He didn’t stop it, that reading. After a moment, Betsey realized the proprietress had come.

  “Sarah,” he greeted her, “Here’s Miss Dobson. She may stay, I don’t know. I do know where she’ll not stay, but the rest I leave to her. You and Charlie still for tea?”

  She would not miss it, the proprietress said, and swore to be quite prompt. Mr. Jones put on his hat and took his leave, his guardianship concluded.

  “Well.” Mrs. Elliot smiled and nervously passed both hands down the blond hair over her shoulder, a thick, rough braid of curls threatening to explode. She wore widow’s blacks but could not have been much more than forty. “You don’t have to stay on, naturally you don’t. But the holiday, you see. You may find it difficult just now to find something else. As for . . . Well, I don’t think my rates are— Mr. Jones helped me set them, and no one’s complained . . .”

  Landlords and landladies, in Betsey’s experience, never shied of speaking of money, but Mrs. Elliot’s embarrassment prompted Betsey to be blunt. “I haven’t a thing to pay you, Mrs. Elliot.”

  “Oh!” She laughed with relief. “That! That is quite all right. I mean, you must have wages first, mustn’t you? You’ll be paid soon enough, and then we will—ah! May I see your bird? He must need water, and you? An easy journey, I hope. But your cloak all wet . . .”

  Hot tea, a bite to eat, a look around the house, introductions to other boarders along the way. Betsey treated it all as she would a pretty flowerbed marked off with round stones.

  She was shown a room on the third story. Mrs. Elliot’s son, Charlie, had already brought up Thief and the valise. Betsey turned the mended part of Thief’s cage to the wall. The valise, sitting on the white coverlet of the bed, looked dark and shabby, and when she unwound the twine and opened it, London and Avery and the tiny flat rushed out to her in scent. Betsey moved it to the floor.

  The picture rails were intact. They’d been stripped in her other place, used for fuel by some previous tenant. Botanical prints hung from these, and the room held other superfluous items, a wool rug beside the bed, a rocking chair with a needlepoint pillow. As she walked to the windows, she dragged a fingertip along the curve of the iron bed frame. Cool, smooth, never chipped and repainted.

  The windows looked down on the front garden and hedgerow lane before the house. Below, left and right, were the wide canopies of the bow windows, connected by the roof of an upper-story porch—almost a private balcony, if one was willing to brave climbing out the windows. The rain had stopped, and over rooftops and hills knobby with yellow furze, she had a view of the pleasure pier and sea. From here, the waves were only long rents in the water’s fabric, and it all looked . . . yes, majestic and grand and all that, but manageable was what Betsey thought. Manageable, comprehensible.

  A flowerbed, this house, this room. Not for her to cut from or wallow in or even sniff at too deeply. Still, she was here till tomorrow, perhaps even Monday. If she used a drawer or two, she could hide that ugly valise under the bed until she needed it again.

  She unpacked. Three or four minutes that took.

  Now what?

  None but clean fingers should ever touch even the margin of the paper. (Alas! that it is necessary to say this.)

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  Lillian Gilbey was no longer a committed diarist; diaries, she’d concluded, were the province of little girls and middle-aged men, and in any case, her life as a young lady who was Out provided far more riveting material than it did time to actually record or reflect upon it.

  Therefore, her current diary, when it was filled, would be her last. It had been languishing since she’d left finishing school, and as much as Lillian Gilbey loved beginning projects, she abhorred languishing, incomplete ones. She conceived a plan to finish it off, dividing the blank pages by the two years until she planned to marry, with a dozen or so pages reserved at the end for wedding details. No more by thee my steps shall be, she would write her final night in her parents’ home, and thus would she close the literal covers of her girlhood.

  Just now, however, she mentally composed a more prosaic notation for the half-completed volume. John Jones, she would write this evening, inattentive at the worst possible moments.

  Here he idled, one foot propped on the balustrade that fronted Idensea’s Esplanade, his elbows at rest on the top rail. His gaze had been fixed upon the gray sea and foreshore longer than the view really merited. Did he not realize here lay the opportunity he’d been awaiting the day through—her mother and sisters gone for another stroll down the pier, his final chance to be alone with her today? After all these months, did he not wish to say something to indicate his intentions toward her?

  He’d been about to. At least, Lillian had thought so for a moment, and she’d dropped her eyes, as she believed she ought in such a situation, and reminded herself how far she would allow him to proceed. Not all the way to a proposal, certain
ly—there were too many diary pages yet to fill before that event could occur—but she needed some sort of something to help her decide whether his name should progress from Candidate to Contender.

  She’d surprised herself the night she’d added his name to the Candidates, crossing off Patrick Markwell to make room in her list of ten. John Jones, she’d written, potential.

  Not that you’d know it now, the way he was slouched over the railing, practically with his back to her, leaving her with nothing to do but twirl her parasol.

  But then—

  Then he looked over his shoulder and smiled at her, and she could not regret the lines through Patrick Markwell’s name. Lillian did not think John’s face very refined. It was too full and boyish for that, but when he smiled, it almost completely disguised the scar that made his eye droop and she could admit him good-looking, if somewhat raw. She scarcely registered what he was saying to her, something he’d noticed down on the shore.

  She nodded as if she’d been joining him in his contemplation all along. For herself, even as a child, what she had found most remarkable in her seaside visits was how people lolled on the beach, quite as if they were home in their beds rather than in public. Idensea did not permit mixed bathing, and today’s weather gave the sea a foreboding appearance, so most of the bathing machines and their horses stood unused on the beach, but all along the shore, men and women cozied right alongside each other.

  Lillian found it difficult not to stare. Because it was so vulgar. Many of them were only laboring types, come on cheap rail fares for Whitsuntide, so such unfortunate vulgarities must be expected. From them.

  “They are having a fine time, aren’t they?” John said, just as Lillian had caught sight of three full-grown women sitting in the sand, not a one of them in a proper bathing costume, their bare toes pointing to the water. Each time a wave thrashed them, they squealed with the thrill of the cold and the rush, careless (or perhaps perfectly mindful) that the water had thrown their skirts well above their knees, putting all that flesh on display to whomever cared to look.