The Typewriter Girl (28 page)

The water in her washbasin was nearly as warm as her tears, but it provided some refreshment as she splashed it over her face.
No more of that,
she told herself, and self obeyed, even when she spied the letter Dora Pink had left on her bed. The letter would be from her sister, and full of tender reminders of a household that had fallen short of home and refuge for her, despite Caroline’s best hopes. And her brother-in-law intended even that to be denied her, she thought. He’d forbidden her from the house that was his, even if he was only one of its residents.

Neither she nor Caroline would allow that to stand, but Betsey wanted more than brazen defiance on her side. She put away the gray tweed jacket she’d worn today next to the brown one she would wear tomorrow. Both suits of clothing had come from Richard, same as the money to pay her course fees at the Institute. As long as that debt was riding her, she wouldn’t be able to stand up to him.

And what if, come the end of the season, it was as Richard and Avery had predicted, she in the same desperate, jobless state as in May? It frightened her more now than before. In May, she had not loved her work.

The clock in the corridor chimed. To come late to the supper table would be to put Dora Pink in a mood that would punish everyone in the house, and to not come at all would bring knocks at her door, worried demands to know what was wrong.

That, at least, was a change from a few months ago, Betsey reflected as she started down the stairs. Not a bankable one but worth something, and another reason for her fears.

But while she’d been having her cry, pandemonium had overtaken the household. Lodgers, servants, dishes, furniture—all were heading out the door to the back garden, supper shanghaied, Dora Pink’s schedule flouted, Mr. Jones at the center of it all.

He stood behind a tub of ice, coat discarded and sleeves rolled. Laughter filled the air, and when Sarah announced Betsey’s appearance in the doorway, applause erupted, and Betsey passed through a gauntlet of congratulations, at the end of which waited a dish heaped with more ice cream than she would have seen in her lifetime had she never come to Idensea. Mr. and Mrs. Seiler were there, too, and when everyone, servants and all, had been served, Mr. Seiler raised a bowl and toasted “Miss Dobson,
l’astucieuse, la douée, la belle
.”

In any language, she knew it for nonsense. But she ate the entire bowl, and when Charlie came to her and claimed he could not finish his second serving, she ate that as well.

Someone pushed the piano near an open window. Out to the garden came the supper dishes, and all order and convention remained suspended for the evening, servants and guests dancing together, dessert before dinner.

Mr. Seiler brought her lemonade and joined her on the ground under a tree. To him, she confessed, “I was not the resounding success everyone wants to say.”

“I dozed off, then, when they suspended the scheme?”

“Yes, it could be much worse. But they would not even discuss the expansion.”

With a sigh, Mr. Seiler rolled his eyes to the evening sky.

“You warned me not to count on that. I tried not to.” She watched Mr. Jones and Charlie tend the fire they’d built and added softly, “I want to stay.”

“
Tu veux toutes les fleurs dans le jardin à fleurir au même moment.
You want every flower to bloom at once.”

Mr. Seiler’s departure with his wife left Betsey sitting alone beneath the tree, but she felt too comfortable to stir. Mr. Jones joined her. He stretched out on the ground much as he had the day on Castle Hill.

“What a terrible expense, all that ice cream,” she finally said. She was thanking him.

“Enjoyed it, you did.”

“More than anything.”

“Then.”

A starry night, better than a board meeting for wistful thoughts. The music had halted. Sarah and the others were starting to gather things into their arms, as what belonged indoors must be returned there. Betsey threw a handful of cloverleaves at him.

“You want me to go to bed with you.”

She meant to tease, to be playful, but he turned his face out of the firelight, and she knew she’d been cruel. Challenged, demeaned his gift. Offered an invitation she was not sure of. She wished he would not answer.

“I do. Just about mad with it, I am thinking.”

Low in her body, something pulsed like a tide. She had not expected him to be so direct.

The fire popped, sending up sparks like skylarks startled out of their ground nests.

“But make you no mistake what this was for,” he added, then rose to help carry furniture.

Polish your type-writer with a soft cotton cloth and cover it.

—How to Become Expert at Type-writing

S
ummer deepened. It seemed intent on erasing the memory of all other seasons, and sometimes, coasting down the last hill between the hotel and Sarah’s house or in the midst of a long, long Sunday afternoon, Betsey indulged in the fancy that summer was patient, and offered all the time she needed to prepare for the frost.

In truth, there was little she could do but act as though that were true. Her best chance of saving the excursion scheme and her position was to make this season as successful as possible, so when Arland Hamble, the bookkeeper, informed her that her budget had been reduced, she bit the inside of her cheek and nodded. Mr. Hamble might have smirked as he told her, but she knew he merely was passing on Sir Alton’s orders. She reworked her expenditures and smirked a little herself as she realized that, with every Saturday to the middle of September booked, her advertising funds could be redirected.

The board had denied her request to host groups on Sundays, but on Saturdays the pavilion sat empty until the dinner dance in the evenings. With Mr. Seiler’s approval, she began booking Sunday schools and women’s groups for refreshments or light teas
during the day. The commissions would be small, and the mad busyness of her Saturdays would increase, but it was money coming her way, and she anticipated making her final payment to her brother-in-law at the end of the summer.

Betsey hoped this would happen when Baumston & Smythe came to Idensea for the company outing, but Caroline’s letters continued to report that she’d had no luck in persuading Richard to attend. As the company was covering the costs for transportation and the dinner dance, Betsey knew, even if Caroline would never say so, that Richard must have no wish to witness the reunion of Betsey Dobson and Baumston & Smythe, Insurers. She could not blame him. Wofford’s pink fingers wiggled at her each time she imagined meeting the train, and whether she’d broken them or not, the image never failed to make her queasy.

She willed such weakness away. Sometimes she saw it, how tightly she clung, how she fretted to keep all the parts together, the way she’d tried to keep her butchered hair contained with one penny’s worth of pins at the beginning of the season. These moments of clarity came not at work as she managed dozens of loose threads, but after she’d edged out Charlie in a cycling race, or on Tuesday evenings, when there would be a stack of fresh linens on her dresser, or at supper as she slipped into her chair, her place at the table in the house she increasingly called home.

One evening, on her way from work to one of those suppers, she slowed her pedaling as she noticed more and more visitors on the Esplanade looking in the same direction, up to the Kursaal.

The lamp was lit, she realized as she came to a stop. The centerpiece of the Kursaal was a hexagonal tower topped by a light, an artistic interpretation of a lighthouse. The long summer day drained the brightness, but it glowed, and for the first time.

She cycled up to the site and found the same expanse of chaotic activity as the first time she’d come here, men shouting over the thumping hiss of steam engines, horses straining at loaded drays, the black smoke of waste fires and mountain ranges of gravel and
sand. The work would carry on till dark, she guessed. Mr. Jones arrived at The Bows later and later these days, if he came at all.

She spied him huddled over the back end of a delivery wagon, scribbling across a stack of papers and handing them off to a man in a fresh-looking suit, who kept trying to find a tidy way to balance in the deep ruts of crusted mud.

Unable to summon any excuse to interrupt him, she was about to depart when a laborer elbowed Mr. Jones and gestured toward her. Mr. Jones removed his spectacles, then strode her way. She might have met him halfway. But he looked like a king traversing his ramparts, or a commander the battlefield, dust billowing at his boot heel with each sure and purposeful step, and it would’ve been a shame to spoil her viewpoint.

But his expression, as he drew nearer, was sober. “Something happen, is it?”

“No. Only . . .” She gestured over the cliff to the Esplanade, feeling foolish for alarming him. “People are noticing the light.”

The transformation of his face banished her embarrassment. He grinned up at the tower. “Quite a cheer up here when it knocked on. A view it is, Betsey, up in the lantern room. You’ll go up?”

“May I?”

He steered her to the portico, avoiding the busiest areas of construction. “We’re readying for the landscaping and the installations in the winter gardens—paths to wander, footbridges, all the greenery and flowers, of course. And statuary, Sir Alton has said.”

“And how many waterfalls?”

“Only the one in the dome round back. The glass rises thirty feet there.”

Inside, a forest of scaffolding presently occupied the entrance hall, which soared over a grand double staircase and several gallery floors. The space reverberated with the rumbling voices of the laborers and the plinks and scrapes of their tools. “The faience going up,” Mr. Jones explained, indicating the colorful glazed tiles. He sounded satisfied, as though the ratio of tiled walls and columns to blank ones was not as dismal as Betsey herself reckoned.

“A refreshment lounge and reading room that way,” he said as they approached the staircase. “Below us is the skating rink. I can’t take you round everywhere just now, but I’ll teach you and Charlie skating when we open, shall I?”

She agreed, and did not say that Thomas Dellaforde had taught her already, one stolen Sunday afternoon.

Though the lantern room was their destination, he could not resist showing her the recital hall, where, aside from eight hundred missing seats, work had been completed. Their place in the rear balcony offered a complete view of the stage, its proscenium ruffled and rounded like an oyster shell. Indeed, the entire hall seemed shell-inspired, a cool and dreamy composition of pinks and whites.

Though he’d meant to be showing off the space, his inspection turned critical. He frowned at the empty floor below. “A call on the factory is in order, I am thinking, or else the Duke and Duchess will sit upon milking stools opening night.”

“The speeches best be brief if that happens.” She knew he would take the stage as an orator on opening night and imagined the hall filled with seats, those seats occupied. A dining table full of board members had been enough for her. To speak to hundreds, nobility amongst them . . .

Her stomach shuddered on his behalf. “It will be quite a moment for you, won’t it? Will any of your family come?”

Mr. Jones locked his elbows against the balcony’s low wall. The open doors permitted the noise of the workmen to bounce around them faintly.

Betsey guessed, “Too much of a journey for them?”

“Never taken a train, my dad. I asked him. Said to bring the little ones and my sister Dilys.” A soft grunt nearly passed for amusement at himself. “My mother two days in the ground, and I’m asking a man who’s never taken a train to leave work and cross the country with three little children to see a nob cut a ribbon. Owen was weeping so, though.”

Something raw crouched in the last remark. Owen was his youngest brother, not more than three or four, if she remembered
correctly. Betsey didn’t follow the connection, but she knew, “It wasn’t wrong to ask him.”

“There’s dense it sounded, and I knew it soon as it was out. But I needed something to say to Owen, some promise for when I’d see him again.”

“Ah. He didn’t want you to leave.”

“That’s it.” He paused, and above the echoing sounds of the workmen, she heard something new, a peculiar, rasping sound between his body and her own.

His thumb. That broad, hard pad taking a meditative path along the callused side of his forefinger.

He said, “What I did, I missed my train. So he’d hush at last, I stayed another night and left the next morning. Early, him still sleeping.” The rasping stopped. He pushed off the wall, taken from his story by someone appearing on the main floor. He called, “You wanting me, young Clayton?”

The boy twisted, finding Mr. Jones above. “Sir, Mr. Jones, it’s Sir Alton’s carriage coming.”

“I’ll meet him, thanks.” As the boy ducked out, Mr. Jones told Betsey, “Sir Alton’s here for the lantern room as well. Make it a group?”

Involuntarily, Betsey’s nose wrinkled.

“I’ll bring you another time, then,” he promised, but the laughter that accompanied the promise halted in a correction. “You and Sarah. Charlie, too.”