The Typewriter Girl Page 7

  Her stomach dropped. What had Mr. Jones told him already? Relating Wofford’s vileness in the vaguest terms to Mr. Jones had been awkward; detailing it to the refined Mr. Seiler in his gleaming office would surely take her down to ashes. The unfairness of it bolted through her again, that she had to sit here and admit to failure before she’d even begun, that she’d reduced herself to fare-dodging and asking Avery for money, and nearly let tears fall in public, Mr. Jones looking on. A better woman would feel rueful for inflicting harm on another, but God help her, she could only wish for Wofford’s fingers under her boot heel right now.

  “Yes. I have failed to do so.” She braced for the inevitable question. Mr. Seiler’s silence did not so much surprise her as induce her to add, “I am sorry.”

  “Merci.” He put on half-rimmed spectacles, opened a leather portfolio, and thumbed the pages inside. “It is not my wish to frighten you, Miss Dobson, but I must speak as your supervisor.”

  “Of course.”

  He found the sheet of paper he sought, notes she supposed he’d taken from Mr. Jones. “Type-writing, dictation, composition, bookkeeping, elocution—cookery?”

  “It was a female institute. They were duty-bound to make at least a portion of the education practical. What’s shorthand worth once a girl’s married, after all? But a nice fish cake . . .”

  She left off, letting the lifelong value of a fish cake recipe speak for itself. Mr. Seiler gazed at her over his half-rims for several uncomfortable moments. But then he chuckled down in his throat again, and having gained that, Betsey thought better of expounding on the practical nature of the other courses, how bookkeeping was called “Domestic Accounts” and that elocution had consisted mainly of reciting moral verse which seemed to have been written for children.

  “I did well in all my courses, Mr. Seiler. My instructors said I learned quickly. The headmaster chose me to assist the reading room supervisor—that was an honor he awarded, you see—”

  “But no letter from the school, either.”

  “No, sir.” She could not blame Wofford for that.

  “Mr. Jones still believes we should, as he says, try you on.”

  “And what do you think, sir?”

  “Ah!” He threw up his hands, finding her question facile. “I find you delightful, and I should normally be pleased to give you a trial. However, as you yourself have noted, June is upon us, and our season to profit is fleeting. I have not time for trials. Nor failures. You understand.”

  Betsey flexed the hand resting in her lap, remembering the pressure of Richard’s grip. When you’ve made whatever wreck you’ll make of it, don’t bring it back to my family.

  “Mr. Seiler, I understand you perfectly.”

  • • •

  After providing her with a small notebook and pencil, Mr. Seiler escorted Betsey to the basements via his private stairway, hidden behind one of the panels in his office.

  These basements were a city, the reverse of the leisurely and upholstered world above. The maze of stores and kitchens, of lifts and laundries and staircases could be mastered only with time and familiarity; Betsey reserved her concentration for Mr. Seiler’s directions, furiously jotting notes as he explained his expectations, suggested methods of organization, provided names of staff with whom she’d be working.

  Selectively, he paused to introduce her or take a question, but otherwise, they moved quickly, in a river of pricked attention rippling with curtsies and nods and Mr. Seiler, sir.

  In the lift back up, Betsey confessed she had no idea where in the hotel they would be when the operator opened the door.

  “To be expected,” Mr. Seiler replied. “Do spend time learning your way, avec discrétion—my staff is to be always at hand, never on display. I trust you understand.”

  She did. Moreover, she vowed to remember.

  The rear of the hotel’s main floor opened onto a wide veranda with a lattice roof; from there spread acres of parkland, nothing she would have believed had she seen it in a painting, what she suddenly understood people meant when they used the word idyllic. Every sandy path beckoned with some promised bliss, to shelter in a tunnel of ivy and blossoms, descend between the slopes of a chine for a shaded and fragrant walk to the shore, be soothed by the swans’ effortless passage over the green pond. The more sporting could head for the tennis court or bicycle shelter, or croquet and bowl on a carpet of trimmed grass.

  “Oh, good God.”

  “Miss Dobson.” Mr. Seiler nodded meaningfully toward the guests on the veranda.

  “Such a sweet little garden.” She scanned the property again, this time to find the open-air pavilion where her excursion groups would have their dinner dance. She did nothing so gross as point when she spied a glass-and-iron cupola through a copse of fir trees, but Mr. Seiler confirmed it was her pavilion.

  She wanted to go to it right away, but Mr. Seiler ushered her back inside to a familiar corridor, the one where she’d found Mr. Jones’s office. The hotel and pier company offices were here as well. He unlocked a pair of wide doors, and Betsey felt silly when she realized she had expected to see rows of type-writing machines and tiers of clerking stands. This was a much smaller space, divided by three broad arches, the twilight filtering through a bank of windows and a skylight. A glass partition with narrow doors indicated a few private offices, and the longest solid wall was filled up with cabinets and shelving, two telephones, and a single type-writing machine.

  Mr. Seiler apologized for her desk, clearly a recent addition, squeezed in beside the doorway and stacked with record books and loose papers.

  “You see we have been collecting things in anticipation of your arrival,” he said. “Monday, your first task shall be to . . . ah, consolidate these matters. The excursion scheme has suffered from too many overseers, I fear—we had thought to distribute the responsibilities amongst the staff, but all too soon it became clear that was inadequate. You have here the records and invoices and such from the various departments of the hotel. Once you have sorted them out, let us meet again to discuss what you’ve learned—a quarter past five?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me amend. This is your second task. Your first—” He pulled a silver case from inside his coat and gave her his card. “Prevett’s, King’s Lane. Let them fit you for a suit of clothes to wear Saturdays, something to show you as part of the staff here. Mr. Hamble”—he gestured toward one of the desks—“shall arrange to have half the cost taken from your wages in installments.”

  While the disarray on her desk made Betsey’s fingers itch to be busy, she balked inwardly at this command. She had her gray tweed and her brown tweed; they were decent and had served her well, not to mention that the cost of them was included in the sum she would pay to Richard, regardless of his “forgiveness.” An entire new uniform for a single day of the week!

  “Would not a ribbon or badge of some sort do as well, sir?”

  Perhaps she hid her gall too well. “Not at all,” he responded without a trace of concern. “Mr. Creacy is two shops down from Prevett’s. He will fit you for gloves.”

  She expected him next to tell her where to buy hairpins, but with a check of his pocket watch, he escorted her to the main entrance and arranged a carriage and a staffer to wait with her before she had the chance to refuse. Amidst ladies and gentlemen dressed for the evening, a glowing fountain, and the melody of some unseen violin player, Betsey was handed into a carriage as though she too wore silk and pearls.

  She stripped off her gloves as soon as the door shut. She was diligent about keeping them clean, but they were two years old, and damn it, what a long way she’d come since rifling Avery’s pockets for a pasty this morning.

  Still, Mr. Seiler was right. She needed new gloves.

  And God, she could buy some. He had not sacked her.

  The carriage avoided the Esplanade, taking the road on the cliffs and through the town center. Betsey happened to be looking out when the lights on the pleasure pier below
flickered and lit. How strange and lovely, those burning points over the water. She would never find the sight ordinary.

  She could see them from her windows at the lodging house, she remembered. The windows, not hers. She hadn’t found the right time to ask Mr. Seiler about the staff lodgings, however.

  Perhaps she wouldn’t. If Mr. Seiler was right about the gloves, then perhaps Mr. Jones was right about this lodging house. Alone in the carriage, Betsey relieved her exhaustion with a wild, delicious stretch and drummed her fingertips against the carriage walls, thinking perhaps she would just stay put.

  All ordinary work should be without an error.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  Almost a fortnight since ordering the damn uniform, Betsey was thinking Mr. Seiler might have been right about it, too. For frugality’s sake, she took it from the seamstress to do the finishing work herself, and with her first excursion group arriving in the morning, she stood on an ottoman while Sarah Elliot helped her prepare the hem.

  They worked in the room that had been the office of Mrs. Elliot’s late husband, a physician. Dora Pink, one of the few servants in the household, made her way about the perimeter of the room, needlessly repositioning objects with a dramatic bustle. Betsey recognized this as the tactic of a maid who wanted attention, but Mrs. Elliot, fully absorbed in her task and inclined to be dreamy in any case, failed to notice until the light in the room fell by one lamp.

  Mrs. Elliot sat back on her heels, mystified. Then she caught sight of the maid reaching toward another lamp. “Dora Pink!” she exclaimed, but the lamp was out before the name.

  Dora jerked back her hand, all the way to her mouth, a fair simulation of innocence. “Begging your pardon, ma’am! It’s just they’s lights on all over the house, and somebody’s got to keep on to it, you know. See if the pendant lamp ain’t enough—I’ll wager it is.”

  “My servants think I am a fool, Betsey,” Mrs. Elliot said upon Dora’s departure, and then sighed. “I fear I’m still not terribly clever about treating my home as a business, am I? Turn again, now.”

  Betsey obeyed. She already had noted how the lodging house staff, with amiable stealth, either supervised or ignored Mrs. Elliot, but hadn’t been certain if Mrs. Elliot herself had. She was a distracted mistress and incautious giver, protected by an affectionate collusion between staff and lodgers. At suppers, she insisted plates be refilled, and no one complained when Dora Pink apportioned the extra servings as though they were lifeboat rations. For newcomers, she demonstrated the lighting fixtures in the house, and Dora Pink issued three candles per week per lodger, and it was clear whose lead was to be followed.

  Charlie, Mrs. Elliot’s only child still at home, came to the door, stopping short at the threshold to consider Betsey standing on the ottoman. Betsey gestured at the new skirt. “Will it do, Charlie, do you think?”

  His eyebrows, normally so fair as to be invisible above his deep-set eyes, took on a glow as the skin around them darkened. He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s not that bad. Mum, John’s come for his piano lesson, but don’t hurry, because I’ve got that annual to show him.”

  He was off. He was thirteen.

  Mrs. Elliot finished the pinning, then bade Betsey to make use of all the lamps she needed to finish up. “I know I’ve said you must call me Sarah!” she interrupted as Betsey tried to thank her for her help. She clutched both of Betsey’s hands and squeezed them as she put a quick kiss on her cheek. “You will be wonderful tomorrow, I know it!”

  Betsey would be hosting a hundred employees of Pollit & Company Glassworks. Nervous enough, she could have melted in Mrs. Elliot’s burst of warm encouragement. In her surprise, she faltered for some way to return it and finally managed to say, “I am so glad Mr. Jones made me live here, Sarah.”

  Mrs. Elliot laughed, but Betsey cursed herself for how awkward the comment sounded, how shallowly it reflected her gratitude.

  Mrs. Elliot gone, Betsey changed out of the skirt and finished the hem on the sewing machine, then started for her room, where she would sew the buttons on to the vest. Most of the lodgers were in the parlor, the purr of comfortable chat broken by Mr. Jones’s intermittent plinking on the piano. He’d begun lessons, of all things, coming to The Bows nearly every evening so Sarah Elliot could teach him to play the piano. Or one particular tune, rather. He worked at the same piece, over and over, something he was preparing for a party in London, Mrs. Elliot had told her. Miss Gilbey’s party.

  He sat watching Mrs. Elliot’s hands now, his elbow propped on the piano, his head on his fist. His gaze flicked up as Betsey passed on her way to the staircase, and his smile for her was ready and lavish, and no less stunning for its brevity. By the time she’d returned it, he was looking down again, telling Mrs. Elliot, “Now the difference I hear. Let me go at it once more.”

  Who could learn in such a way? More evidence of his madness, Betsey thought, though all she knew of music lessons came from overhearing the Dellaforde children practice their scales. Mrs. Elliot had tutted upon realizing Mr. Jones had no intention of learning to read the music, that he was certain he could mimic the process of this one piece if she only showed him how enough times.

  Betsey suspected he’d found it trickier than that. Unseen on the steps, she paused with her uniform draped in her arms and listened to him play, stumble, correct; play, stumble, correct. A growled expression of frustration. A jeer from Charlie Elliot. A threat about moving out from one of the lodgers. Mr. Jones, laughing, pleading for mercy; Mrs. Elliot laughing, too, demanding more diligence.

  Half-afraid of her happiness in the moment, she rushed upstairs to her room. Her room, shared with no one but Thief. That she woke with astonishment morning after morning had nothing to do with the unfamiliarity of it all. She knew where she was. She just couldn’t believe it.

  Betsey turned up a lamp and opened the small windows in the dormer, admitting the voices and piano lesson inside. She readied her needle and spilled seventeen buttons from an envelope onto the coverlet of her bed, then grabbed them up and let them sift through her fingers. It felt luscious. A miser with his gold. Her brother-in-law, Richard, with his full bins of flour, or whatever he most adored. For a moment, Betsey understood him.

  A small extravagance, these buttons, only brass-dipped tin, to be sure, but still a dearer choice than she might have made. Adding each one to the vest, however, she couldn’t regret it.

  A final fitting. She tilted the small looking glass on the dressing table, and, alternately ducking and standing on tiptoe, she tried to get a sense of the whole effect. She couldn’t see it, quite. She could feel it, though. She knew how she felt behind the buttons, inside the thin Coburg wool.

  No, indeed, Mr. Seiler. A ribbon or badge would not have done as well, not at all. In this uniform, she could believe the cheery reassurances she’d written to Caroline were more than wishful thinking. She could believe things would go as they ought tomorrow, that she could move past Mr. Seiler’s warning about trials and failures. Tomorrow, in this uniform, with all her preparations in place, she could impress him. Mr. Jones, too. Mad, kind Mr. Jones who’d chosen to be her ally for some reason. Tomorrow, she wanted him to be glad of his choice.

  • • •

  The excursionists’ train was punctual. However, the char-à-banc Betsey had hired was not. It irritated her, but she held her “Pollit & Co.” sign aloft with a smile and greeted the arrivals as they filtered out of the rail station and gathered round her. She gave her welcome speech, distributed the handbills printed with the schedule and a simple map, and concluded with the assurance that, for those who cared to wait, the char-à-banc for the tour to Castle Hill would arrive shortly.

  Most ambled off toward the Compass Walk, but the fifteen or so who remained would nearly fill the conveyance. She waited with them, waited with small talk, waited as the small talk grew halting. However fondly she had regarded Mr. Jones last night, she had a few ill thoughts for him now, for he had recommended this
particular driver as a knowledgeable guide for the tours to Castle Hill.

  The watch Sarah had loaned her (“I never use it,” she’d sworn) weighted Betsey’s pocket as she refused to check it every minute. In any case, the clock outside the rail station was within view, so she knew very well the fellow was twenty-six minutes past due when he at last arrived.

  The excursionists streamed for the char-à-banc before it had even stopped. Betsey let them go ahead and begin boarding, intending to have a private word with the driver before they departed. The vehicle and its team of horses appeared impressively maintained, the harness and wheels clean, green paint glossy, and six rows of bench seats polished. On the char-à-banc’s side, in red and gold letters, “The Sundial” was scripted.

  As she noted this irony, she realized her excursionists were finding something else amusing: their driver, welcoming them aboard with extravagant bows, lurching each time his head went near his knees. “Good Lord, he’s soused,” she heard someone say.

  Suddenly, the horses moved, jerking the char-à-banc and causing a man boarding to fall and all the twittering and guffawing to swoop up in a collective gasp. Betsey rushed toward the fallen man, but someone nearer helped him up. He seemed unhurt.

  Betsey spun on her heel and marched to the driver, who’d taken the bridle of the nearest horse. “Mr. Noonan.”

  She watched his flushed cheeks drain. Squirming beneath her gaze, he drew his coat sleeve over his mouth. “Must’ve something bit. No harm.”

  Her silent response to that made him shrink further. His red-rimmed eyes shifted away, and though he was certainly above forty, he looked like a child about to weep.

  Betsey turned to the excursionists. She already had their attention. “It seems we’ll not get to the castle ruins today, ladies and gentlemen. I’m so sorry—”

  “Here, now, what’s the need—”

  “Mr. Noonan. Mind your horses.”

  To the excursionists, she continued, “You’ve been good to wait such a long time, I know it’s a disappointment, but I must ask you to leave the char-à-banc now.” She reminded them of the amusements awaiting them on the Esplanade and about the photographer who would give them a special price if they came before noon. She heard complaints and regrets and jokes as they filed away, and all of it felt wretched.