The Typewriter Girl Page 8

  “You won’t need to call off the afternoon tour, ma’am,” Mr. Noonan said in a low voice. “By then I’ll be—”

  “Less drunk? Never mind. You needn’t come back this afternoon. I’ll not be requiring your services at all this season, so pickle yourself at any rate you desire, it’s no more my concern. Good day.”

  “But I come today.” He tore his cap from his head and gestured toward the char-à-banc. “Took days gettin’ it ready for you. Painted the gig and all.”

  She understood him suddenly. “You want to be paid! For what, a performance? If you think you’ll do a bit of good—”

  Something made her stop. His jaw jutting forward, a deflation under his coat. Something stung her with guilt, and she felt stupid and weak for it, because she was doing what was required, what was black-and-white right, for God’s sake.

  “There’s nothing I can do about it, Mr. Noonan.”

  He knew she was right, too. He was giving up as she spoke. Betsey moved from him quickly, only to realize one of the excursionists had been waiting for her.

  Or no, not an excursionist.

  Avery Nash. With baggage.

  He smiled. “At last, the little manageress notes my presence.”

  Betsey could only stare, overcome with the confused pleasure of seeing the familiar in a foreign place, with the thought, incredulous but not yet skeptical: He’s come after me?

  With a laugh, he took her elbow and kissed her cheek. “My darling Lizzie.”

  “What in hell . . .”

  Avery, for all his admiration of theater that held an unblinking mirror to an imperfect audience, now proceeded to spin an awfully sweet tale, beginning with his missing her—“You always woke me in time for work, you know”—and raveling its way to a happy conclusion that hinted a return to London at summer’s end: “Once everything shutters here for the season, you’ll be ready to go back, and I’ll certainly have my play finished, perhaps even another one started. You were right, I’ve realized . . .” He paused to lift his face toward the sky and take in a deep breath. “I can heal here. I can work here.”

  Certain details remained ambiguous. He’d left Baumston & Smythe—what good could clerking do him?—and exactly how, or whose idea that had been, was unclear, though it seemed to have originated with Betsey herself, who had failed to wake him for work, she being, of course, gone.

  “And when Mrs. Bainwelter came round for the rent sometime after that, I was still gone,” Betsey pointed out.

  He wondered what he should do with his bags. Betsey offered no suggestions. “I’m working, Avery, and I shall be working until late this evening. Tomorrow, perhaps, we may meet, but I cannot be distracted today.”

  He called after her, told her to be fair. He’d come all this way to declare his affections.

  Over her shoulder, she remarked, “Is that what you’re doing?”

  Both of the morning’s encounters left her more rattled than she hoped she’d shown. As she had planned to accompany the tour to Castle Hill, the cancellation left her with some open time; she might have spared Avery a half hour or at least directed him to an inn. But it was too shocking. She didn’t know what to do with him.

  She headed for the hotel, darting past holidaymakers leisurely admiring the tall pines and small parks along the Compass Walk, until she brushed by Mr. Pollit, the owner of the glassworks. He recognized her. He and his wife had already heard about the char-à-banc incident.

  “I was thinking of everyone’s safety,” she explained. Channeling Mr. Seiler’s calm demeanor, the way he never let people believe they’d interrupted something important, she walked alongside the Pollits to the Esplanade, turning the conversation to the private tour of the Swan Park that she’d arranged for him and his managers that afternoon. “I can scarcely think of anyone who will appreciate the stained-glass dome more than you, Mr. Pollit.”

  She found them shady seats by the bandstand where they could enjoy the forthcoming performance. Mr. Pollit and his wife seemed content enough when she left them, but Betsey disliked the blemish on the day. She spent the remainder of the morning at the pavilion and in the kitchen and stores of the hotel, making certain all was in place for the dinner dance. In the afternoon, when she went to the office, she was cheered to find letters on her desk. More bookings, she hoped.

  But no, they were bills, one she’d been anticipating, from an advert she’d placed in a weekly magazine, and the other already opened. Flowers.

  She glanced about the office. It was a half-day for nearly everyone but her. Most of the workers were leaving, but Arland Hamble, the bookkeeper, was still at his desk.

  She went to him. “I don’t understand why this has come to me.”

  He flipped a glance over the bill. “Your accounts. See. For. Pavilion.” He pointed at each word as he slowly pronounced them.

  “I’d meant to make use of the old bouquets from the dining rooms.” She felt queasy. She’d just come from putting arrangements on the tables at the pavilion, where she and her assistant had remarked to each other how fresh they were. “I didn’t order flowers. Why, it’s dated before I arrived.”

  “Someone did it. See. For. Pavilion.” Again, he pointed at the words. “Your accounts.”

  She gave the moonfaced prick credit: He condescended to everyone alike, not just to her because she was new or a woman.

  “It will put me over budget! There must be something to do about it.”

  “I suppose I can ask Mr. Seiler—”

  “No.” No time for failure. With Ethan Noonan and his char-à-banc hanging over her head, she felt desperate to find some alternative.

  Unfortunately, she needed the cooperation of a moonfaced prick.

  Never allow yourself to strike a wrong letter . . . Criticise, correct, and rewrite until you get a perfect copy of each exercise.

  —How to Become Expert in Type-writing

  Here, between emaciation and emanate, ought to be something like emaculate. Or so it seemed to John.

  A few pages over, perhaps? E-m . . . m? Two m’s was not entirely outside the range of possibilities.

  “Good Lord, why don’t you simply ask me?” Noel Dunning, all but horizontal in one of the visitors’ chairs, stretched up a leg to give John’s desktop a kick. “Do you know what torture it is to watch you wade through that dictionary?”

  “Never mind, I’ve got it.” John scribbled in his best guess for the company secretary to sort out. The poor fellow was used to it, God knew. “As for whatever torture you experience whilst watching me work . . .” Over his spectacles, John looked at Dunning, shrugged, and returned to his letter.

  “Fair enough,” Dunning said. “But it would be all to your benefit, you know—imagine the time you would save. You might even find yourself able to take advantage of what is, in theory, your half-day.”

  “And ‘take advantage’ means a round of golf with you,” John said, since that had seemed to be Dunning’s original purpose in dropping by. More than half an hour had passed since John had told him he couldn’t go.

  “We could take the Scherzando out if you’d rather.”

  Sir Alton’s racing yacht. John’s pen hovered over the paper, a moment of someday. Dunning saw the hesitation and stood, coming to ease a hip on the corner of the desk. He picked up a seashell kept in service as a paperweight and put it to John’s ear. “The Scherzando, Jones. The wind wants her.”

  “Sunday, eh? I’m promised to tour Rolly Brues round the Sultan’s Road this afternoon.”

  “Ah. That is why I can’t tempt you. Such a penchant you have for magnates, Jones. Too many readings of Samuel Smiles, or is it their daughters you find so fascinating?”

  What John liked about men like Rolly Brues was learning how they’d made their fortunes, and since he hadn’t heard a story yet that included spending a fine Saturday afternoon on a golf course or a racing yacht, he kept his head down over his work.

  Dunning failed to notice he was being ignored. “Horace Gilbey,
for example. Is it his carpet empire or his daughter’s fair face?”

  At this, John glanced up, but Dunning appeared intent on the seashell, holding it aloft as he studied its clean spiral. “This ought to be the inspiration for every building that goes up in Idensea,” he mused. “Not all this tired Neo-Renaissance rubbish.”

  John valued the shell as a gift from young Charlie Elliot, and because it fulfilled its function as well as any other heavier-than-paper object might have. There had even been moments when he had paused to pick it up, admire it, and marvel a little at nature’s design. But as architectural inspiration? Dunning probably had something.

  “You ought to have met the plasterer with your father and me this morning,” he told Dunning. “He would have appreciated the artistic advice on the moldings.”

  “Father? I think not. Though . . .” Dunning’s lifted hand dropped and curled around the shell, his thumb pressing on the narrow point. “He didn’t always used to play so careful, you know. I remember more than he’d like about Alton before his Sir, and he never appreciates it when I remind him of it. Anyway, he caught me at the piano with his whiskey last night and didn’t seem to appreciate that at all, either. Thus, I’m little inclined to trot along after him as he sees to all his projects.” Dunning put down the shell and reached inside his coat. “Mind?”

  “No. But off my desk now, won’t you?”

  Dunning made a perfunctory offer of the cigarette case. He remained on the desk, tapping an unlit cigarette against the case. John slipped back into his work and forgot him until Dunning said, “I heard you’ve been on the piano some yourself lately. Preparing for Miss Gilbey’s soiree?”

  John grunted. Noted the second reference to Lillian.

  “I’d have helped you, you know.”

  “Have I hurt your feelings, young Noel?”

  “Bugger yourself.”

  “Off my desk.”

  Dunning went to one of the wall sconces to light his cigarette. He had been John’s first thought for a cram-course music teacher. Dunning might be oblivious to many of life’s realities, but in music, he was gifted. But then, at the tea, Lillian had invited him to the party as well, and John had immediately revised his strategy. Too much information in the hands of the competition.

  Whether Noel Dunning intended to be competition, or even if Lillian’s intention went no further than to make him jealous, hardly rated. The cultured, educated son of a first baronet was competition for Iefan Rhys-Jones.

  A knock sounded at the office door. The papers that would have been under the seashell, had Dunning returned it to its proper place, took flight in the crosscurrent created by the open window and opening door. John grabbed for as many as he could as he greeted Tobias Seiler, come to tell him that Rolly Brues wanted John to join the dinner party he was holding in the hotel’s dining room tonight.

  “Rolly Brues,” Dunning said from where he was crouched on the floor, collecting papers. “Unlikely name for a millionaire.”

  “Those damn Americans,” John agreed drily. “Let anyone who can make money, they will.” More than one of the volumes of The Building News and The Engineer stored in the bookcases opposite his desk referenced Brues’s work in the States. Being asked to show him around Idensea was one kind of honor; an invitation to eat with him and meet the hotel’s wealthiest guests was something else altogether.

  He caught Tobias’s pleased expression as he removed his spectacles. Likely, the invitation was the result of some deft finagling on Tobias’s part, done in such a way that Brues thought it his own fine idea.

  “Marta says I must order you to send her at least two of your neckties for the laundry to prepare,” Tobias said. “Brues has two daughters of marriageable age.”

  The Seilers—much interested in seeing John marry well, and soon—kept him apprised of this sort of information, though this reminder of the Brues daughters was likely habit, as they had both spoken highly of Lillian after her visit. John started to tell Tobias to remind his wife he had but the one neck, but raised voices drew Tobias out into the corridor. John stood up to gain a better vantage point past Dunning, who had also moved in order to see what was happening.

  “Bless God,” John murmured.

  “Quite,” answered Dunning.

  A thrill kicked through him. It was wrong. The sight of Betsey Dobson standing next to one of the pier company’s bookkeepers, her jaw set like a cornerstone and her brows pulled together more fiendishly than usual, could mean only trouble, but there it was anyway: a tug of anticipation, as though a stage curtain had begun to part.

  And on the topic of parts—Miss Dobson’s. Hips, waist. A bosom that seemed like it should have been more thoroughly noticed before now. And where had all that neck come from?

  “Nothing would do her but to sit over my arm and tell me how to go about my job,” the bookkeeper was saying to Tobias. His name was Arland Hamble. Married not long ago. Whenever John remembered that fact, he experienced a general sympathy for Mrs. Hamble and any future Hamble offspring, as well as anyone they happened to marry when they grew up.

  “Mr. Seiler, I was not trying to meddle,” Miss Dobson said. “I only wanted—”

  She hesitated, drawing her bottom lip into her mouth as she glanced into John’s office, obviously discomfited by his and Dunning’s observation of the scene. Yet enough authority rested in that glance to prompt Dunning to make haste in removing his cigarette from his lips. “Forgive me,” murmured the baronet’s son to the type-writer girl.

  Her bottom lip escaped, a symptom of her unease. “I wanted his help in working out payments. So there would be a—”

  Again, she glanced into the office, a pensive aspect about her eyes. Which were brown. He’d noted that before. But they were quite brown, weren’t they? Brown looked well with blue—gorgeous, really, with the sort of blue Betsey Dobson wore just now, the same rich blue found in the Swan Park’s carpets and wallpapers and glass dome.

  “A solution in place before we came to you,” she finished.

  Solution. Required only in the presence of a problem.

  “I see,” Tobias said. His tone was mild and confident, assuring all involved he truly did see, even if he hadn’t yet made up his mind on anything. He pulled out his pocket watch and interrupted Hamble’s protests with concern for the bookkeeper’s loss of his half-day, and while his sacrifice was appreciated, what a shame, for surely Miss Dobson and he himself could sort it through in a matter of minutes, and it so happened he had a few right now. “No more, no more!” he insisted when Hamble tried to go on, and he sounded at once like Hamble’s superior and his guest, unable to accept such excessive hospitality.

  John would have smiled to witness such grace, but Tobias’s expression turned grave as Hamble departed for the day and he and Miss Dobson started for the company offices, located farther down the corridor. John rubbed his thumb along the side of his forefinger. He smelled a fresh waft of tobacco as Dunning returned to his cigarette.

  “Who,” Dunning said on a subsequent exhalation, “is your she-general there, Jones?”

  Miss Dobson. He began rifling through the papers on his desk, the ones that had gone flying when Tobias had opened the door. He went through them twice before he noticed Dunning’s arm extended, the papers he’d collected from the floor still in hand. There it was. He saw it before he snatched it from Dunning, a letter from some clerk at Baumston & Smythe, making the most outlandish claims against one Miss “Elizabeth” Dobson. Assault? John had said, skeptical, to the company secretary who’d brought the letter to his attention, and the secretary had replied, I can hardly credit it, either, sir.

  Well, John could credit it now. By God, he could give it all degrees of credit, having seen that creature who’d come ripping down the corridor after Hamble.

  He headed for the company offices, the letter tucked in his coat.

  He hoped to make a quiet entrance, but he had forgotten Miss Dobson’s desk, squeezed into the office last week, exactl
y where the door would strike it if one opened it too far.

  Which John did. With the rest of the staff gone for the day, the noise seemed tremendous. Tobias and Miss Dobson, standing at Hamble’s desk, looked up from the ledger they were studying.

  She-general. The aptness of Dunning’s word registered suddenly. This was Betsey Dobson in her uniform, the one Tobias had told her to get.

  It fit. It fit so well he’d scarcely noticed it earlier. It was a feminine nod to military wear, with an open bodice jacket that revealed a sort of waistcoat whose banded collar stood stiff and high. Yet, somehow, a column of milky flesh still showed above it. A procession of brass buttons traveled down from there and braved the swell of her breasts, and where other women’s skirts surrendered to surges of flounces and gathers, only stripes of dark ribbon and razor-sharp pleats were permitted on hers. The entire getup was frill-less and direct, nothing but proper, and it beckoned, decorously, to be rumpled up.

  Tobias was saying something about Miss Dobson’s budget, how something was wrong with it, and he was saying it to John, who, despite his determination to rid Miss Dobson of any more of these surprises that kept popping up around her, hadn’t been paying the strictest attention.

  “I’d understood her—” He checked himself. It felt ungracious to talk about Miss Dobson when she was so fully present. “I’d understood you to have a bookkeeping course at that institute of yours.”

  It rather hurt him, the way she narrowed her eyes at him, as if trying to make out whether he was trying to aid or to sabotage.

  “The course was—well, it had a strong domestic bent,” she said. “The instructor seemed unable to imagine that we’d ever account for much more than the pantry stores in a modest household.”

  Tobias shook his head. “Viele köche, that is the cause of this predicament, more so than your training, Miss Dobson. One broth and too many cooks, do you agree?”