Bea thought she was early, but these women have been here some time. The pins are coming out of their hair and the room is stuffy with breath and concentration. There is something comic to the scene, as though she’s in a coop of flustered hens.
There are no introductions.
‘Can you type?’ asks the woman who let Bea in.
Bea is almost too surprised to reply. She had not imagined being asked to work as a secretary, but rather to be selecting content, proofreading, discussing views to be held. Celeste, however, is not here yet to sort this out, and it would be churlish of Bea to refuse
the first task she is invited to do. She’ll just sit down and get on with it until Celeste arrives. Bea’s tried a typewriter a couple of times beforehand and it can’t be that hard to pick it up.
‘Slowly,’ Bea replies, a trifle optimistically.
‘There’s a machine here.’
Bea looks at the other women and copies them, removing her jacket and hanging it over the back of her chair. She sits down and pulls herself in; at least her embarrassingly out-of-place skirt is now hidden under the table.
The woman has vanished and immediately Bea’s neighbour to her left leans across. She’s in her thirties and there are a few neat waves in what’s still pinned up of her hair. Her cheeks are flushed, which is unsurprising given the temperature in here. She passes Bea a bundle of newspaper cuttings with ribbon-ink-stained fingers. Stories here and there are circled, part-crossed out and then apparently rewritten in a scrawl across the columns next door.
‘Knock these up. Use a carbon. I’ll have both copies. It’s going out this afternoon, so you’ll need to be quick.’
The carbon paper doesn’t want to lie still on the sheet Bea has laid out on the table beside her. She positions it but, as she brings the second sheet of white paper over it, the featherweight carbon flutters out of place. After this has happened three times, an arm reaches out from Bea’s left and moves the unused paperweight sitting by her onto the carbon. The arm disappears again. This time, Bea succeeds in sandwiching the dark sheet between the white ones. She picks them up. A black fingerprint appears on the top.
At last she is ready to type. She leans over to the papers she was given and has put to the right of the machine, and flinches. Her elongated steels are digging into both her armpits and the flesh around her hips. Oh, vanity. If she’d worn something shorter, then … but she needed the longer corset for the blasted skirt. Anyhow, on with the job, only, in order to decipher the scrawl on
the sheets, she really does have to lean forward to look closely. Headline, it says here, with a large circle around a couple of short sentences,
Mr Churchill
, Bea reads,
compelled to listen. Car held up by Suffragettes …
All right, here goes. At least she knows how to type capital letters. It would have jolly well blown her cover to have to ask that …
w-h-o f-o-r-m-e-d a b-a-r-r-i-c-a-d-e a-c-r-o-s-s t-h-e r-o-a-d w-i-t-h t-h-e-i-r b-i-c-y-c-l-e-s
… Aim, drop, aim, drop. Or rather, thwack. It needs a hell of a push to get the letter right across to the paper, let alone make an imprint on it, and how on earth are you supposed to hit the keys any faster without missing and slipping to the one at the side?
g-r-e-a-t a-g-i-t-a-t-u
Blast, she’ll have to start all over again. She winds in the third clutch of new sheets in what must be fifteen minutes.
‘Good God, what are you doing?’ That neighbour again. ‘If you’re not up to it, just come out with it. This is not the day to dawdle.’
Not up to it? Bea’s never not been up to anything. ‘Not my usual machine, just warming up,’ she replies as she feels herself pinken. I’ll show her, she thinks. I’ll show the lot of them. The words ‘top drawer’ are still irritating her, ‘entertainment’ not far behind them.
‘Well, cross those out and keep at it, the typesetters will decipher. And double-space.’
Bea turns to stare at the woman but her neighbour’s eyes are fixed on Bea’s emerging sheet of paper and are held so strainingly wide that they look as though they might pop out of her head. Gorgon, thinks Bea. What is it with the women here? She speeds up, but the mistakes come thicker and faster; if a key sticks, her finger seems to slide to the side. But back a space, cross it out, and on. Engine oil is what this machine needs and the smell might be a good deal better than it is in here at the moment. Nobody, it appears, has thought of opening a window.
It slowly comes to her that what she is typing is good: a sort of compendium of the week’s activities. Well, it will be a compendium when she has finished, if she finishes. No, Bea, you jolly well will. Not up to it? Bea is no longer embarrassed but beginning to seethe
and it makes her type faster.
Scene at a Glasgow theatre. Speech from a box … At the end of the first act of ‘A Little Damozel’,… addressed the audience … banners were unfurled … Let Scotland protest against torture in English prisons
… I’ll bet, thinks Bea, that the Scots enjoyed that. On it goes, forcible feeding the issue of the day, disruptions at the Garrick Theatre, St James’s Theatre, Liverpool Picture Palace, Bristol Cinema. Of course Bea has known this for a while; it’s not possible to go to a show without wondering whether a side act will rise from a seat in the dress circle and scatter leaflets over those sitting below. It happens in restaurants, too. Even the most stylishly dressed woman can stand up at a table and begin to speak as a small swarm of purple, white and green-sashed women appear from every corner brandishing leaflets. Would she ever do that?
An hour and a half later Bea’s forefingers feel bruised and little of the compendium is typed. Her shoulders are stuck around her ears and her stomach, where the steels have been digging in, has gone from painful to numb. She has forgotten to double-space. She wants to slide her chair back (silently), retrieve her coat and umbrella and hail the first taxi she sees, and find Edward, whose path she hasn’t crossed since Monday. She could bury her head in his shoulder, confess all, and never come back. Nobody, she is sure, would notice.
‘Cup of tea?’ The words wake her. Her neighbour is talking to her again. Cup of tea, oh yes, thinks Bea, that would be a godsend.
‘Yes, please.’
‘End of the passage on the right. Mine’s strong, black, sugar. Plenty of it.’
Bea doesn’t move. She’s not here to make tea, she doesn’t make tea, she can’t remember ever doing so. And the tone, my God, Bea wouldn’t speak to a servant like that and expect her to do anything well. What’s more, it is Bea’s first morning, and you would have thought they could damn well be civil.
Bea looks around her. Heads are down, keys thumping. No time
to be civil. After the emotion of Campden Hill Square, Bea imagined they would be in a state of near-constant embrace, but open affection or warmth appears not to be done. To hell with them, Bea’s not going to put up with it. If this is what they are like, then she’s off. The options of where she could go instead run through her mind. That lunch party again, then perhaps a ride in the park … Bea hesitates for a moment, then decides upon tea.
Bea did not realise a kitchen could be so small. There’s barely a yard to pass between the table and the stove, and that has a couple of kettles almost rattling off the top of it. The way is blocked by an older woman, a few streaks of grey in her chignon that match the walls, leaning across the table to empty a large brown teapot into some incongruously dainty pale pink china cups. Without looking up, she tells Bea that there is a queue. A queue? Where? There’s not another soul in here.
‘A queue for what?’
‘Hot water, tea, cups. But they come in all the time. I’d grab a couple, dash them under the tap then go for the tea. Hurry, though, it will be filling up in here soon when the sandwiches arrive. We’re all so starving by noon that we have a workers’ lunch. Dinner, we should call it.’ She looks up at Bea, and smiles, the first Bea has had all morning. Bea could almost kiss her. ‘You’re new here.’
Bea nods.
‘Welcome to the madhouse. Josephine Meldon. No hands free, I’m afraid.’
Bea finds that balancing teacups on saucers while you’re walking in a skirt that pins your knees together is not easy. She pauses to steady herself outside a closed door that she didn’t notice on her way in. She can hear voices coming from the other side and is tempted to stop and listen but years of a nanny’s strictures stall her. As she treads carefully back along the passage, hoping that nobody bursts out of a doorway, a grey-haired woman slides past and knocks on the closed door. Bea turns, tea lapping onto the
saucer and scalding her thumb. Better have that cup for herself, or no doubt she’ll be sent back again. The woman grasps the knob and puts an ear to the door; there’s clearly no problem with eavesdropping for her, if listening before you go in is still eavesdropping. The door opens and Bea can see a wing chair in front of the window, a slip of a woman in it, and the door is shut again so fast that it bangs. Beatrice, she tells herself, back to the typing room. She turns and finds the passage is blocked by a tall, well-built woman, who is standing as though she’s been waiting for Bea. Below the woman’s thick black hair are thick black eyebrows to match, which arch sharply. Vaguely, thinks Bea, satanic. The woman looks Bea up and down, pausing at the tight skirt around Bea’s ankles.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Tea.’ She feels her cheeks redden.
‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’
This is clearly the refrain for the day. Bea nods carefully, mustn’t spill any more tea, even though she now feels so hot she’d barely notice.
‘Where are you working?’
Her mind is jelly. What’s the room called – the room where nobody has a smile?
‘Typewriters,’ she hazards.
‘The engine room of this battleship. Get on with it then, it’s Thursday. And this is not a place to stand around.’
Bea nods again.
As she returns to her seat Bea can see an empty teacup between the piles of paper. She replaces it with the full one she has not yet spilt.
‘You can leave the old one. Someone will come scavenging for a spare. Meant to tell you to have the same, if I were you. Strength and sugar. You’ll need it.’ She pauses. ‘If you stay the course.’ Bea chooses to ignore this, forcing herself to try to invent some excuses for her tormentor. There must be something to pity her for. But the thought that she might not prove her wrong pulls Bea upright
sharply, and now the numbness in her fingers is lessening they hurt more, but she pounds away. At least double-spacing takes you down a page faster.
Bea is not sure how much later it is when she looks up again. The chairs around her are empty and pushed back from the table. She did not hear the machines stop and she wonders whether it is already lunchtime, teatime even. Maybe she’s been here all day. She fumbles with her cuff to find her wristwatch. Quarter to one, and as she looks back up the others are returning. They sit themselves down slowly, draw their chairs in quietly, shake the papers beside them into neat piles; they are calmer now. Sated by sandwiches, Bea suspects, and servants’ lunch indeed, to be finished as early as this. Uncertain as to whether she should now go along to the kitchen herself, or whether she is even hungry, Bea stays put.
She smells the cigarette smoke behind her. Celeste’s voice is a throaty whisper in her ear. ‘The sandwiches are nearly all gone. You’d better get a move on or you’ll be left with paste. Revolting.’ Thank God, thinks Bea, and she’s up and out of her chair, just stopping herself short of embracing Celeste, who is standing there in a flowing cream silk blouse, cigarette in her hand. She is looking at Bea as though she is sizing up a challenge and just as Bea starts to worry, Celeste breaks into a grin. ‘Why, you’re beetroot, my dear.’ She walks Bea back down to the kitchen and as they pass the closed door, she catches Celeste’s eye. Celeste shakes her head gently from side to side.
The kitchen is empty, save a handful of small triangles of sandwiches. Celeste is right, they are paste, and they are revolting. Bea manages four of them.
Celeste has ‘gathered’ that typing isn’t Bea’s thing. Hell, thinks Bea, they’re going to turf me out already, but Celeste isn’t saying this. It would be good, her aunt continues, if she practised. She can’t occupy a machine unless she can get the words down fast enough; there’s no time to waste, especially today. On reflection, Thursday might not have been the best day to start, although
there’s never any time, not just in getting the newspaper out every week, but every day another prisoner starves a little more. Bea doesn’t want to be taken for a girl who cares only about her fingernails, Celeste tells her. She needs to do her bit until she is known a little. Then … How, thinks Bea, am I to be known a little when nobody either gives me their name or asks mine? In the meantime, continues Celeste, there is plenty more to do. ‘I’m afraid that the bottom of it, old chap, is that if you have a leg-up, then you have to work at least twice as hard to prove yourself.’
They turn into a faded pink room next to the dining room. A handful of velvet armchairs and a couple of sofas are pushed back against the wall. Half a dozen card tables have been carried in, put up and set side by side to make a single large central platform. Some of the women in here are older, perhaps in their fifties or sixties. It’s not some fad of youth, is it, being a suffragette, and Bea wonders whether, the older a woman grows, the more she cares about the vote. Maybe each year of minding adds up.
The women here have perfectly pinned hair, their buttoned-up shirts pale. In front of them, beside them and in piles by their feet are cascades of large brown envelopes. The window beyond them is wide open. It feels several degrees cooler in here than in the typewriter room, and Bea shivers.
‘It’s not that hot in here since Mrs Montague chiselled that open yesterday,’ says Celeste. ‘Block heating, you see. Nobody has an iota of control over it. Fetch your coat if you like but I’d stick in your shirtsleeves, it’s easier to move your arms, and you will heat up as you go along. There’s a space on the table just over there, you’ll want the draught. I’ll bring you a pile, and stamps. You’ll need a pen. Oh, and the list.’