The Fancy (43 page)

“What at lunchtiman along really worries me,” said Edward, suddenly deciding to lay his cards on the table, “is that I’m not certain that he’s keeping to the rules of the Club. You see, we’re all supposed to make a return of our stock eligible for a share of the bran ration.” She was only half listening, but he told her of the suspicions which he had already voiced to Dick. He told her about selling half the young stock for flesh, stressing its patriotic significance, and how suspicious it was that E. Dexter Bell chose to deal with his own butcher rather than the Club’s.

As she made no comment, he was emboldened to hazard the suggestion that he had been wanting to make for some time : “Look here, Con, you’ve got the opportunity. You’re always in and out of his house since you’ve got so friendly with Miss Bell. Couldn’t you possibly do a bit of sleuthing for me? I could tell you some questions to ask, and perhaps you could have a discreet look round the rabbits. He’s put me off every time I suggested coming up to see his stud, but you could do it without rousing any suspicion ; they know you’ve got no interest in the Club. Be a sport, Con. If you won’t do it for me, you might at least do it for the Government. What do you say?”

As soon as he had said it, he realised what a crashing
faux pas
it was. She had been pressing the baby’s clothes, banging away on the ironing board without looking at him as he spoke, and now she set down the iron with a crash on its stand and faced him across the board to give him the full force of her scorn.

She was right. How could he have thought it of her? He must have been mad to suggest it.

“And I warn you, Ted,” she concluded. “Don’t you dare go trying to make trouble with Mr. Bell just because you’re jealous of him and want to get rid of him so that you can have more importance in your potty little Club. Not that you’d succeed—I never heard of anything more preposterous than accusing him of dishonesty—but if you go making a fool of yourself, what sort of a position d’you think that would put me in? It wouldn’t be very nice for me, would it, holding the position I do in his office, while my own husband was scheming behind his back? Whatever Miss Bell would think I simply dare not imagine.”

No, there was nothing he could do. In the matter of E. Dexter Bell his hands were tied.

“What did old Marchmont want?” asked Dick, prizing himself
into the secretary’s tent and once inside, filling it as if he were wearing it. “He went stumping past me muttering like an old bear.”

Edward told him.

“Silly ass,” said Dick. “He’s jealous because he didn’t win a prize.”

“Oh, I dare say,” said Edward wearily.

“By the way, Ted, I’m glad you’ve given up that nonsense you told me once about Edgar fiddling the bran ration and so on. I must say it wasn’t like you. You must have been tired or something—needing the holiday.”

“I expect so.” But Edward had not given it up. He was more suspicious than ever and nothing that Dick or Connie or anyone could say could convince him that he was wrong. But what could he do? He had just got to go on treating the man as a friend of the family, while all the time his precious Club was crumbling to atoms before his very eyes.

This was later in the evening, this lugubrious thought, after his third whisky at the Saturday supper dance at the Four in Hand, I met a chap the other day p along where Mr. Bell was giving a small party to celebrate the Show.

Mr. Bell, sweating from a jolly romp in the Palais Glide, brought Connie back to the table. She was flushed and pretending to be all of an unusual dither. He was a terror. He had nearly dragged her off her feet. She declared she was quite winded.

Silly, thought Edward sourly, how could anyone be winded by the Palais Glide?

“Lordy, Lordy,” panted Mr. Bell, downing somebody else’s glass of whisky, “that certainly was
hot.
You shouldn’t have missed that, Ted. Even old Richard took the floor like a good ’un. Look at him!” Dick came through the crowd with glazed eyes and heaving chest. “How did you fare, Richard?”

We had a wonderful romp,” said Miss Bell, answering for him, as he was speechless. Not a hair of her head was disturbed. She had gone through the dance as if it were a minuet, pointing her toe like a dancing mistress when you were supposed to swing one leg in front and bending one knee slightly when it came to kicking out behind.

Mr. Bell was in great form. “She’s my lady love——” he kept singing. “What’s the matter with you, Ted, boy? Young chap like you should be out on the floor, and you’ve hardly danced once all evening. What’s the matter with you tonight?”

“Yes, you are a regular sobersides, Mr. Ledward,” said Miss Bell, sipping tonic water, with little finger arched.

“What you want’s another drink. We all do,” said Mr. Bell, clapping his hands. “Boy! Chota Peg, quickee, quickee.” Many men in that crowd could not get served, but Mr. Bell could always get a waiter, even when he called for them like that.

After teasing Edward for a while, they forgot about him, and he sat on, drinking as much whisky as he could get—he never got a chance
to stand drinks because he could never get served—and brooding on the Irony of Life.

“Troubles,” said Edward to Wendy in the morning break a week later, “never come singly.”

“What do you mean?” She lifted her head from her mug of tea. “You’re not in any trouble except this silly business here?” For life at the factory had chosen to go wrong too.

“Oh, no, it’s nothing really,” said Edward. “I was only thinking aloud.”

“Do tell me—unless you’d rather not.”

“No, I want to get this business straightened out first. Time enough then to worry about other things.”

This business had started with the quarterly interview with which Mr. Gurley sought to keep up the standard of aero-inspection. One by one he summoned the girls to his office, conducted a post-mortem on their black marks and told them what he thought of their work, and one by one they cams cut looking tearful, encouraged or defiant, according to what he had told them. He did not just curse them impartially as Jack Daniels did, or appeal to their sense of honour, like Bob Condor. Mr. Gurley fancied himself as something of a psychologist and used this opportunity to warn the careless, to bolster up the timid and to take the over-confident down several pegs. Madeleine, for instance, whose space in the black-mark book was always virgin, was told what a grand war effort she was making.

“I wish they were all like you,” said Mr. Gurley this time. “Then we should see results in this section. Still, shrugged his shouldersI s.I suppose we must be thankful for one bright spot ; I don’t know what we should do without you, Mrs. Tennant, I really don’t.”

Madeleine fiddles with the belt of her overall. “You’re very kind, Mr. Gurley,” she said, “but I’m afraid I don’t do more than do my work as best I can——”

“Ah, that’s the point,” he gave her his quick, lively smile. “You do your best, but that’s more than you can say for all of ’em. Some of these girls’ idea of a day’s work is to clock in on time and spend the rest of the day looking, decorative.”

“You mustn’t be too hard on them,” said Madeleine earnestly. “After all, most of them are quite unused to factory life. I always feel that it’s a little bit easier for me because of what I went through in the last war. I’m an old factory hand, you know, Mr. Gurley.”

“Oh yes, of course, you were in munitions then, weren’t you?”

“Shell-filling,” said Madeleine, “at Coventry.” As soon as was politely possible, he cut short the recital of the camaraderie and the community singing and the brown overalls. He had all the other girls to see yet.

“
Well
, I won’t keep you from the bench any longer,” he said,
getting up from behind his desk. “I’ve got no list of crimes to go into with you.” He flipped the black mark book with the back of his hand.

“Oh, but,” said Madeleine masochistically, “what about that dreadful slip I made on the scavenge pump casing? Surely I got a mark for that?”

“Don’t be absurd,” he said, steering her gently but firmly towards the door. “Nowhere near one. This factory isn’t quite inhuman, you know.” He opened the door. “Right you are then. Send me Miss Dale, would you?”

Reenie had a lot of black marks, but as she did not understand what half of them were for, it was not much use cursing her. One simply had to explain patiently the more elementary points which one had been explaining regularly every three months and hope that she was absorbing something through the open mouth if not through the ears.

He began the interview in his chair, but was soon up and round his desk, walking about as if he could instil some of his own abundant vitality into her. She stood on one spot with her hands hanging uselessly, following his pacing figure with slow eyes without moving her body. The questions with which he tried to probe her intellect bounced off her like bullets off armour plating. However, she seemed a little better this time. She had actually mastered at last the right type of levers to fit with Rotax Magnetos, and he was encouraged to say : “Let’s see, you’ve been here—a year, isn’t it? You should be getting top rate by now, but I can’t give it until you learn one of the skilled jobs on the bench. How would you feel about learning the wheelcase, say? We could do with another girl on that.”

“I don’t mind,” said Reenie.

“You should be able to manage it. You must have picked up something after all this time by watching the other girls, haven’t you?”

Reenie shook her head.

“Well, have a shot at it, at any rate. Your charge hand’ll help you.” Poor old Ledward, it was rather a shame to land him with this, but if he didn’t at least give the girl a chance t, as a matter of fact.”. bo earn her top rate, he would have the women’s Shop Steward on to him again, and he really couldn’t be doing with that red-haired Higginson harpy coming in here and blowing off at him as if he were Colonel Blimp and Simon Legree rolled into one.

When he had got rid of Reenie he had a short, man-to-man session with Freda, who admitted to her few mistakes and was damn sorry about them.

“Makes me feel a worm,” she said. “The least one can do is keep one’s end up here if one can’t be shouldering a gun.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Mr. Gurley. “You want to feel that every crack you find in that supercharger is a bullet in the body of a Nazi.” He knew this had more effect on Freda than calling them merely Germans. “Send me in Miss Blake, would you?” he said as she squared her shoulders and went out.

He had had to change his policy towards Sheila recently. She used to be one of the ones who had to be taken down a peg, countering each reminder of a black mark with stubborn hauteur.

“The reduction gear’s a tricky job, you know,” he used to say. “You can’t take chances with it and she would smile and pretend to be indifferent to his recital of her black marks, implying that she was too good for the reduction gear and the whole place and everyone in it, including himself. He would have to tell her pithily what a little fool she was, gauging results, if she were wearing her hair on top of her head, by the flush on the back of her neck that betrayed her brazen expression. The interview had always ended by her banging the door as she flounced out.

But today she did not bang the door. Today he had no need to go behind her to see how he was doing. He had no need at all to take her down a peg, because she seemed recently to have taken herself down several pegs of her own accord.

He talked to her as if she were grown up, which she seemed to be at last. She had been making a lot of careless mistakes about two months ago, but when he mentioned them she was not up in arms as she once would have been. She actually blushed all over her face instead of only on her neck and said that she was sorry ; she would try to be more careful.

They had quite a pleasant talk about all sorts of things except work. She reminded him very much of his own daughter, who had only just emerged from the stage of thinking her whole family impossible and rushing away from meals to lock herself in her room, and was now a delightful companion, unscarred by the farouche period which had once been his despair. He realised now that all girls had to go through it. He wished he had another daughter ; he would have known better how to treat her.

Wendy entered the office stiff with fright and left it scarcely less stiff in spite of his efforts. The little mouse seemed to have something on her mind, but it was more than he could do to make her disclose it. He had a dull session with Grace, during which he sat in his chair and fiddled with a pencil, a fatherly one with Kitty, and a lively one with Dinah, who treated him as an equal and made him laugh. It was not worth while lecturing Dinah about black marks. Any that she did make you felt she was entitled to. Dinah was a law unto herself.

He asked her to send in Rachel. “Better leave the door open,” said Dinah, “and call me if you want any help. That girl would rape the recording Angel to get herself off a few days hell.”

He had no sooner begun : “That was a pretty good brick you dropped, over the upper vertical shaft,” than Rachel’s willing eyes brimmed ovem;
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. blyher and she took a step forward as if she would have cried on his very waistcoat. He kept the desk between them.

“Don’t start that yet,” he said tersely, “I want to talk to you about
that overheated spring drive, too. You’d better save a few tears for that.”

“Oh, Mr. Gurley,” faltered her luscious, trembling lips, “you are unkind. I don’t know why you should go on at me like this, when I don’t make any more mistakes than anyone else. How can you be so unfair?” She rested her inappropriately clean hands on the edge of the desk and leaned towards him so that he should get the benefit of her perfume.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “If you make mistakes, you’ve got to be pulled up for them, same as everyone else. You can’t get away with murder, you know, just because you’re rather attractive.” Damn, damn, damn. He wouldn’t have said that if she hadn’t been so overpoweringly close. He got up from his chair hastily as her face brightened to a melting smile, and walking towards the bookcase, took out a technical book at random and pretended to look through it while he talked with his back towards her. She had come up behind him. He could feel her radiating sex like a gas stove radiating heat.