The Typewriter Girl (2 page)

“I’ve but—” Betsey began, but the words were just air, no sound. She swallowed. She did not, would not, look at Avery. “I’ve but three days left to my notice, Mr. Wofford. Perhaps it would be best if I collected my wages and took my leave today.”

His mouth stirred, making her decide seven, not ten days, for the blond whiskers. He liked her offer, just as she’d guessed he would—he hadn’t the authority to dismiss her, but now he could feel he did. She elbowed her way past the girls standing next to her, tugging out of her black smock as she went to her coat peg. Someone touched her arm, murmured a sympathetic
Betsey?
Julia Vane, ever kind, one of the girls who still risked being friendly with her.

She heard Mr. Wofford say, “I suppose we ought to see Mr. Hutchens prior to that. He may be of the same opinion as I as to whether you deserve your wages.”

Betsey’s hands shook over the buttons of her jacket. Only a few minutes ago, the prospect of leaving Baumston & Smythe with less than a full week’s pay and the letter of reference had been unthinkable. That letter had been the only thing Mr. Jones had said was a condition of her hire at the pier company. She had to have rail fare to Idensea, a payment for Richard, money for Grace. Now, suddenly, she might leave empty-handed, a possibility only a hair less terrifying than getting turned over to the law.

She fidgeted over her gloves, grabbed her hat. No one said anything, and as she walked out of the office, she supposed it appeared she had some sort of plan, that she knew what she was doing.

The corridor outside the office, with a great arched window at every landing of the staircase, was filled with May, the light like a remembered dream. Two flights to the street, one to the office where each Tuesday she stood in a queue for her wages.

Mr. Wofford called her name and she halted on the second step down, fingertips on the banister, though she didn’t turn round to him. “I’ve been here more than eight months, Mr. Wofford,” she
said, trying to keep her voice from carrying up and down the staircase. “Never missed a day nor been tardy. I’ve been one of your best type-writers, and I’ve earned three days of wages for which I’ve not been paid. Let me collect them, and I’ll be gone.”

“Ah. I have stated the difficulty with that solution, have I not?”

With some hope in candor and decency, she turned. Mr. Wofford had left the door open, and every face in the office, including Avery’s, was looking out of it. The hope sank, but she told him anyway.

“I cannot go without an entire week’s wages, sir.”

“I imagine not, a girl like you.”

His agreement intended no sympathy. “A girl like you” meant what he knew of her, that she wasn’t like the other type-writers, a girl helping out her family till she married. She was older (four-and-twenty now), unmarried, supporting herself: peculiar. And of questionable morals, of course. The story of her expulsion had only confirmed the suspicions.

“It seems peculiar,” he continued, “you would not have considered that before. It seems peculiar as well, you taking such a foolhardy chance when I did agree to write your character myself.”

“A
qualified
character.”

“One must be truthful in such matters.”

She sprang back up the two steps. “It’s unfair. Everything you would have insinuated had nothing to do with my work here. You couldn’t’ve complained about that; I’ve been a model employee.”

“Until today.”

Betsey felt herself flush. She looked at the window, where there were no spectators.

“Ah, Miss Dobson, what I think you, and a great many others of your sex, misunderstand is the risk a business runs simply in taking you on. You’re an unknown quantity, so to speak, you young . . . ladies . . . in an establishment like this, or like that pier company you mean to go to. Extracted from your feminine sphere, you create a precarious unnaturalness with your presence which can only be countered with the assurance—”

“Do you mean to let me collect my wages, or don’t you?”

His bottom lip wavered as though to respond to this interruption, but he didn’t speak until he turned on his audience suddenly and directed them all to return to work. Avery’s head, Betsey couldn’t help noticing, was already bowed. None of the type-writer girls raised audible protests against the abbreviated rest period.

Cora Lester, apparently the only one to have escaped to the W.C., came bobbing up the steps, hesitating in a kittenish sort of way when she saw Betsey and Mr. Wofford in the corridor.

“Again, Miss Dobson,” he said, “I would remind you there is an order to things in business. It isn’t for me to decide whether you get your wages. It’s for me to take you to Mr. Hutchens so
he
may decide the matter.”

“You could let me go down the stairs.”

He brushed Cora Lester into the office with a wave. He lifted his brows at Betsey.

“Could I? And overlook the proper procedures? There is call for such a thing, on occasion.”

He looked her over. He stood in the open doorway, before everyone and yet unseen by any, and he looked her over. The snaps of the type-writing machines grew muffled as he pushed the door almost shut, one hand curled round its edge. The other hand slipped to the front of his trousers. He gave himself a squeeze. It was a dainty squeeze, and it was the daintiness rather than the squeeze itself that mystified Betsey.

“You should have to convince me the present situation is such an occasion,” he said. He pushed back his coat and hooked his thumb on the waist of his trousers. “You see?”

Mr. Wofford looked her all over.

Concentration, not contemplation.
It was a good motto, and not just for type-writer girls. So many situations in life called for one to pay attention yet not think overmuch. So many times when the proper posture would promote one’s efficiency. Suppose, for example, you wanted to give a bastard his due—why then, it was wise advice indeed.

Betsey nodded once. “I see.” She offered a closed-lip smile, a slow blink. She witnessed the shift, when some of the marbles came rolling her way. “Mr. Wofford, you are . . .
entirely
correct.”

And her breasts were far from ample, but with the proper posture, she could endow them with a certain significance. She did so now, an efficient way of holding Mr. Wofford’s attention as she moved to the doorway and, with an efficient, concentrated motion, kicked the door to its frame, an efficient and concentrated way of telling a bastard to go to hell, especially when the bastard’s fingers were still curled round the door.

And then she concentrated on the most efficient exit from Baumston & Smythe, Insurers.

OBSERVE THE BELL.

The bell rings to warn the writer that he is approaching the end of the line.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

S
he had four shillings in her boot, stashed there the previous payday until she could earn five more to purchase rail fare to Idensea. Above all, there must be the rail fare, Betsey had thought, and so she had done without the meat the shillings would have bought. She’d been comforted by the coins’ hard presence in her shoe the past few days, but now, having fled the City and made the long walk to her sister Caroline’s house in Brixton, they had begun to torture the ball of her foot. Single fares to Idensea cost nine shillings, not four.

Reaching Caroline’s door, she turned the bell and sank down, unable to wait a moment longer to loosen her laces and make adjustments. She cursed softly upon finding the ill-fitting boot had rubbed a hole in her stocking.

“Elisabeth! Come in, for pity’s sake! I’d thought you were coming Sunday!”

Betsey worked her foot back into her boot, not quite ready to look up at her sister. “A change to my plans. I shall leave tomorrow instead of next week, so I’ve come to say good-bye.”

“But why? I thought your notice . . .”

Betsey stood, managing a blithe smile. Caroline noticed nothing but Betsey’s hair, however.

“You’ve got a fringe! And—is your hair cut? Elisabeth!”

Caroline lifted her hand to test the length of Betsey’s hair between two fingers. Betsey intercepted the gesture, tucking up into her hat the strands of hair that had fallen during the walk from the wigmaker’s to Caroline’s house. The strands promptly slipped down again, and she hooked them behind her ear. Ah, God, she would have to buy more hairpins to have any hope of keeping it up. The back almost grazed her shoulders, but the front was shorter, owing to the way the wigmaker’s apprentice had bound her hair before sawing through it with scissors Betsey suspected were less sharp than they ought be. The fringe across her forehead had been the lad’s conciliatory gesture.

“Why?” Caroline wanted to know. “All these years letting it grow again, how could you bear it?”

Her sister regarded her with great compassion, as though Betsey had been forced to sell her child rather than her hair. It had felt like that the first time, back in Manchester when she’d been but seventeen, with nowhere to go, no idea where the next coins would come once those she’d got for her hair were spent.

This afternoon, however, Betsey had sat on the wigmaker’s stool and wished there were some magic potion to drink, some oil or cream to apply that would make her hair grow faster so she might sell it again. She’d wished for hair the color of corn silk, to fetch more coins. “Dull as mud!” the wigmaker had spat, and when he saw the length wasn’t what it ought be, he’d turned her over in disgust to his apprentice.

“Needed money,” she told Caroline. “Why else?”

“But your wages, you said—”

“Got sacked today.”

“No! Why? How could they? What about Richard?”

As if her husband could have, would have helped. Obviously Richard had never told Caroline, as he had Betsey, that helping
Betsey get the position was the extent of his participation in her career. She was to make nothing more of their connection, not even to do more than nod if they met each other at the front doors at the end of the workday.

Richard would be furious when he heard of the spectacle she’d made this afternoon. Thus, she wanted to give her goodbyes to Caroline and the children before he came home. It was late already. She’d lost time at the wigmaker’s and in the walk to Caroline’s house, avoiding the need to turn over any of her few coins to the omnibus company. Richard, she knew, divided his journey from work to home, walking part of the way and then catching the omnibus. No doubt he possessed some formula to calculate the most economical division between the costs of bus fare and shoe leather.

With some vague reassurance to Caroline, Betsey went inside, calling for her niece and two nephews and finding them at games in the back garden. She had sweets for them, not the sugar mice or toffee she’d wanted to bring, only peppermint sticks, and even the penny she’d handed over for those was more than she should spare.

Still, lowly peppermint made the children’s eyes grow wide and solemn with wonder. Dick and Emma, the eldest two, cradled theirs in their hands for a moment, then snapped them and held out halves for their mother to store away. Four-year-old Francis watched them, red stripes melting into his fist.

“No,” Betsey protested. “I mean for you to have it all, right now. A treat, you see. You don’t have to put it away.”

Dick and Emma regarded their aunt as though she’d told them Jesus was a fiction. They looked at their mother: Would she confirm this heresy?

Caroline was uneasy with the burden of such a decision, but with a nod, she told them, “I suppose, since Papa isn’t here . . . if you wish . . .”

But the training ran deep. The halves were relinquished, and as Caroline put them in her apron pocket, Emma wrenched at Francis’s
fist, warning, “You’ll be sorry if you don’t. Me and Dick’ll have some when you don’t, and you’ll be sorry then.”

Francis butted his forehead into his sister’s chin and fell back on his bum as she let him go. They both went to tears, Emma for her stinging chin, Francis for his sweet, broken upon the brick pathway where he had fallen.

As Betsey brushed off the peppermint and set about trying to convince Francis it would taste just the same, broken or not, Caroline suddenly straightened from Emma’s side. “I hear Richard coming in, I think,” she murmured, and rushed back inside.

Betsey looked toward the door at the far wall of the garden. Even if she might have seriously considered it as an escape, there was not enough time. Richard’s children were weepy and sticky, and she was in the midst of it.

“They’re looking for you,” he said to her after he’d directed the children into the house.

Behind him in the narrow doorway, her head not quite clearing Richard’s shoulder, Caroline asked, “Who? Who is looking for her?”

“Some of the Baumston and Smythe managers. Has she told you what she’s done?” When Caroline didn’t answer, and Betsey offered no confession, he continued. “She broke a man’s fingers today in her temper.”

She’d broken Wofford’s fingers? No wonder he’d howled like a lost child.

“I was not in a temper,” she corrected, because truly, it wouldn’t do to smile just now, Richard’s censuring brow directed at her, Caroline peeping over his shoulder with dismay.