The Palace of Strange Girls (24 page)

“Do you speak the lingo?”

“Do I hell! A pint is a pint wherever you are, isn’t it?”

“Well, in the meantime your dining room looks to be filling up nicely.”

“That’s due to casuals. That’s what I’m down to. Accepting any passing trade in order to keep the hotel looking full. It’s
a case of keep up or go under. Stop by the bar tonight and we’ll have a drink.”

“I take it it’ll be on the house.”

“Go on, then. Seeing as it’s you.”

Jack makes his way to the dining room. He sits down at the usual table and hides behind a copy of the
Daily Herald.
Every time a waitress passes he slides lower in his chair, anxious at all costs to avoid Connie. When she does appear she
comes up on him from behind and places her hands over his eyes. “Guess who, lover,” she whispers as she kisses the back of
his neck.

Jack pulls her hands away from his eyes and turns in his seat. “Stop it, Connie! Are you mad?”

“I was only teasing,” she protests. “Anyway, what can I get for you this morning, lover.”

“Nothing. I don’t want anything. I’m waiting for Ruth and the girls.”

“OK, keep your hair on! We can always talk later.”

Connie pulls her order pad and pencil out of her pocket and moves on to the next table. As the dining room fills Jack sinks
further into his paper, keen to escape the attentions of his fellow guests. When she finally appears, his wife is accompanied
by Beth and she’s in no mood to exchange pleasantries. Jack looks at Ruth and reflects that he may have had sex for the first
time in over a year but last night with Connie is neither adequate comfort nor suitable revenge for the present state of his
marriage. They might as well be on different planets for the difficulty he has trying to reason with his wife. “Where’s your
sister, Sputnik?” he asks. He is unsure whether or not Ruth is prepared to speak to him following their argument.

“She’s coming in a minute,” Beth replies. “Can I have cornflakes today instead of porridge?”

“If you like, Sputnik,” Jack replies.

Beth, keen to make the most of her mother’s refusal to speak, adds, “And orange juice?”

Jack pours her a glass and returns to the shelter of his paper. With the arrival of a tearful Helen some minutes later the
family is ready to order. Connie is all smiles, anxious to know how Jack wants his scrambled eggs (runny or set?), how many
pieces of fried bread (one or two?), tomato (fried or grilled?). And so the inquiries would have continued had Ruth not intervened.
When Connie returns with the plated breakfasts she serves Jack first, placing the Full English Breakfast before him like a
sacred offering. “I’ve managed to sneak you an extra sausage, Mr. Singleton,” she says, bending over him, her left nipple
inches away from his lips.

Breakfast is consumed in complete silence. Only Helen looks up from her plate, still hoping to have a word with Connie. She’s
keen to hear all about her friend’s night out with the bloke she and Beth spotted from their window.

Jack eats his breakfast in record time and escapes to the Residents’ Lounge, but Ruth waits for Beth to finish her scrambled
eggs. Neither mother nor daughter will leave until the plate is empty.

Meanwhile Helen hangs on until the dining room is almost empty and the waitresses have started clearing the tables. She finds
Connie sitting in the corner having a black coffee and a Pall Mall cigarette. “Hiya, Connie!”

“Hi, Helen.”

“Did you have a good time last night?”

“Great.”

“Where did you go? Yates’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, go on, what happened? Did Doug turn up like he said he would?”

“No.” Connie adopts a deliberate vagueness. “I don’t think so.”

“So did you meet up with the lads from the kitchen, then?”

“No.”

“So who were you with? Me and Beth were looking out of the window and we thought we saw you coming back with a bloke.”

Connie gives Helen a narrow look. She puts down her coffee cup and stands up and starts to move away.

Helen catches her shoulder as she passes and says, “It must have been someone exciting. Who was it?”

Connie looks Helen in the eye, opens her mouth and then appears to change her mind. At last she says, “Now that would be telling,
wouldn’t it?”

Florrie meanwhile takes advantage of Jack’s absence to occupy his seat at the Singletons’ table. “Mornin’, Mrs. Singleton,”
she says and, receiving no reply other than a small tilt of the head, adds, “My but your little girl is looking tired out
this morning. Hasn’t she slept? She’s as pale as a sheet. She could do with a bit of color in her cheeks, couldn’t she?”

Beth silently snarls and, beneath the cover of the damask tablecloth, curls her fingers into claws.

A couple of miles south along the coast Cora Lloyd has awoken to an empty bedroom and an immediate sense of profound relief.
She is alone. Granted this state of affairs is not one normally associated with pleasure in any previous occupants of the
Excelsior Suite, especially when they are as young and attractive as Mrs. Lloyd. But Cora is no ordinary woman, not by a long
chalk. Cora Lloyd is a very fortunate woman, the envy of her friends and proof, if proof were ever needed, that there is no
limit to what a pretty figure and an engaging smile can achieve. Mrs. Lloyd is heralded to the daughters of ambitious mothers
as a glowing example of what heights might be scaled by the simple expedient of a “good marriage.” Cora Lloyd (Blake as was)
used to run a set of six looms at Prospect Mill—not, it has to be said, the fastest weaver but by far the most attractive.
She was out dancing most nights and was known to travel any distance with any man if there was the prospect of some fun.

Cora dresses carefully this morning. This is important. The slightest mistake in her appearance—a button left undone, a stocking
seam not quite straight, the careless migration of powder from face to collar—could have serious consequences. Mr. Lloyd,
deputy manager of the local bank, requires his wife to attend to her appearance. He is easily raised to fury by mistakes.
However, he is not an unreasonable man; that his wife should maintain her appearance is not a lot to ask. After all, as he
would be the first to admit, this was the whole reason he married her. Appearance, the presentation of a public face, the
maintenance of a certain standard is entirely right when one considers the style in which Cora is kept. Other lesser women
may fill their lives with shopping, cleaning and cooking, but this is not the life Ronald Lloyd has chosen for Cora.

Ronald observed from early in life that love was a greatly overrated consideration when it came to marriage—it’s a mistake
to imagine there is any observable financial gain to be had from such emotional decisions. It is as great a mistake for a
man to marry for money. Some of his acquaintances had done this and quickly discovered that there is nothing so uppity as
a woman with her own income. Given these considerations, no one was more surprised than Ronald when the answer came to him
through the letter box of The Hallows with the delivery of the local paper. Cora Blake’s trim waist and pretty face smiled
out from the front page under the banner headline this year’s cotton queen. She had, he read, already attended the annual
Cotton Ball in London, where she met several sour-faced minor royals, the Lord Mayor and Lloyd-George, who marveled at her
cotton dress and promptly invited her to Downing Street.

In that moment Cora’s future is decided and Ronald Lloyd’s courtship begins. It is not an easy task. The angular beauty of
Ronald’s early teens has long since disappeared under the daily onslaught of school puddings, a taste for which accompanies
him throughout the rest of his days. He derives a similar pleasure from rough sex, with the added piquancy that only violence
can afford. The passing days of the courtship are marked by increasingly large bouquets of flowers, culminating in a basket
of sixty “crimson fire” roses the day Ronald proposes marriage. The appearance of his wedding ring on Cora’s finger signals
the closing of the deal. Ronald has removed from Cora the necessity of carrying a key to The Hallows and the tiresome responsibility
of handling her post office account. No longer tied to her six looms at Prospect, she is, to all outward appearances, as free
as a bird. Free to be immaculately groomed, free to keep her mouth shut in company, free to stand beside her husband whenever
and wherever required, free to await his return home every evening, to serve him with food and drink at whatever hour he pleases,
and free at last to kneel at his feet and remove his shoes.

Beware if you’re paddling in shallow water at low tide looking for shrimps—you may find this little fish instead. It buries
itself in the sand and you won’t know it’s there until it stings you! Score 20 points for a painful experience.

M
rs. Clegg asked me what I want to be when I grow up and I said I want to be a weaver and she said, ‘I don’t think your mum
will make much of that idea’ and then laughed. Why did she think it was funny? What does a weaver do?”

Father and daughter are in the Residents’ Lounge waiting for the arrival of the rest of the family. They have already been
sitting here for ten minutes and Beth is getting bored. Since there’s no immediate answer from her father she asks again,
“So what does a weaver do?”

Jack Singleton looks at his younger daughter and smiles. “A weaver makes cloth.”

“What kind of cloth?”

“All sorts. Everything you’re wearing has been woven. Those curtains have been woven too—and the chair covers, and carpets,
and the tablecloths in the dining room and all the napkins.”

“But how do they do it?”

“Spinners spin a long piece of thread and then the people who run the looms weave it.” Beth looks blank. “Like this,” Jack
offers. He takes the ribbon from his daughter’s hair, undoes the knot and stretches out his left hand, splaying his fingers
wide. Then he threads the ribbon over one finger and under the next. “See? My fingers are the warp threads and this ribbon
is the weft.” Jack wraps the ribbon round his thumb and weaves it back towards his little finger. “Can you see the pattern?
This is a plain weave but you can make the weave as fancy as you like.”

Beth runs her fingers across the weave and says, “What is a fancy weave, then?”

“Oh, I haven’t enough fingers to show you a really fancy one. But I can show you a twill. Stretch out both hands like mine
and I’ll weave your fingers together.”

Beth holds out her hands and Jack takes the ribbon. “With a twill the weft goes under two warp threads and then over one.
Under two and over one. On and on like that until it makes a pattern.”

“Like my blouse?”

“No, your blouse is a seersucker.”

Beth laughs. “A what?”

“A seersucker.”

Beth runs her fingers across the stripes in her blouse and says, “What’s a seersucker, then?”

“You change the weave so that one stripe on the cloth is a loose weave that lies flat like this.” Jack points to the smooth
stripe in Beth’s blouse. “And the next stripe is woven very tight so that it crinkles. That’s the way a weaver would make
seersucker. But if it’s a cheaper cloth it’s all woven at the same tension first and then it’s put through a machine that
puts stripes of a special acid paste down the material that makes the alternate stripes wrinkle up. But the best seersucker
is woven in—the other kind will lose its crinkle when it has been washed a few times. It’s the same with patterned cloth—the
best patterns are woven in, not painted on afterwards.”

“So what sort of weave are the curtains?”

Jack walks over to the window and takes the edge of the curtain. “That’s a brocade.”

“How do you know?”

“You can tell when you run your thumb over it. See, these twill flowers stand out from the flat satin-weave background.”

“How do they make the flowers do that?”

“They use a loose weave and a different kind of thread. The flowers are made in silk and the background is cotton. You need
a special kind of loom to weave brocade—a Jacquard. But that kind of loom is very complicated and expensive.”

“And what kind of weave are the chairs?”

“They’ll be chintz.”

“They’re pretty, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but those roses are printed, not woven.”

“And they’re shiny too.”

“That’s a special glaze they put on the material after it’s woven and printed. It’s a shiny coating that stops dust and dirt
getting into the fabric. It’ll wear off in time.”

“Do you need a special loom for chintz?”

“No, just an ordinary one will do.”

“Like the ones you bring home?”

Jack looks puzzled for a moment. “Loom? Oh! You mean the loom drives I sometimes bring home to mend. I seem to remember I’ve
caught you fiddling with the machines more than once.”

Beth blushes at the memory. The machines are irresistibly shiny and complicated. There are wheels that cry out to be pushed,
screws that are made to be turned, handles that are meant to be pulled. Her father brings loom drives home on Friday night
and puts them in the front room where they stay all weekend hidden under an oily rag. No one is allowed to go near the machines,
let alone touch them. But the lure of the screwed knobs, the shiny brass bezels and turning wheels is too much for Beth to
resist. As a result when her father turns his attention to the machines on Sunday he is faced with the sight of tiny fingerprints
that race all over the brass balancing wheel and the odd neglected nut or refugee screw rolling around the base plate. Beth
is still too young to hide the evidence of her mischief and too distracted to remember to dry her oily fingers anywhere other
than down the front of her dress. When her father finds her meddling with the machine he sends her out to the backyard to
play with her ball. If her mother discovers the crime there is uproar—fiddling with the machines is a punishable offense equal
only in wickedness to running across the road without looking, or sneaking food upstairs.