The Blackpool Highflyer (28 page)

I was looking through the door at the same thing done over and over again: row upon row of crashing looms, each row under a drive shaft, all the looms connected to this shaft by rolling leather belts, so that the machinery on the floor was tangled with the machinery on the roof, as though a giant spi­der had climbed over everything making a web as it went. The walls were white; the white was light, and everybody inside looked as though they'd just seen a ghost. Margaret Dyson, the woman I'd killed, had worked in there. No won­der she'd been so keen to get away to the sea, if only for a day.

The long blister under the bandage had burst, and there was coal dust inside the wet remains. The wife was shaking her head over this as Cicely Braithwaite came back, shutting the door behind her. The silence was beautiful.

'Was it Michael you were speaking to?' Cicely said to the wife, handing over a length of bandage.

'It was,' said the wife, 'and he's having to take one thirty- second of a penny on the -'

'Not on the twelve-ounce?' Cicely Braithwaite put in.

'Yes,' said the wife, 'on the twelve-ounce.'

'I
knew
it would be the twelve-ounce,' said Cicely, as we all went from the space between the offices into the wife's office proper. She took me over to a desk and made me rest my hand on top of a
Kelly's
Directory. Nearby were many other books lying open, with pages made of different kinds of cloth. I knew what they were: sample books, of the kind seen in draper's shops.

'What's the twelve-ounce?' I asked, as the wife poured on the stinging stuff and set to with the new bandage. Every so often she would flash a glance over at the telephone, as if expecting it to jump.

'Twelve-ounce suiting,' said Cicely. 'What do you think about that?'

I didn't think anything about it, so I just shrugged. It was Clive knew all about suits.

'Have you not told him about the twelve-ounce?' Cicely Braithwaite asked the wife, who did look a bit embarrassed over this. There was a kind of force about Cicely Braithwaite that could make you feel a stranger even to your own wife.

'I'm only just beginning to understand it myself,' said the wife.

'It's the biggest disaster going,' said Cicely, very happily. She turned to me. 'Let me put you straight, Mr Stringer. Now look at your coat. A lovely bit of worsted, that is. It's quite filthy, and it's full of burn holes but it's a lovely bit of worsted underneath. I reckon that would be about a twenty-ounce cloth. Most suiting is from twenty to twenty-eight ounce. Well, Mr Peter Robinson, the gentleman I worked for in that office over there -' she pointed in the direction of the second office he had the notion of making something much lighter than your common run of summer cloth: twelve- ounce suiting. Light green suiting.'

'But do you mean light, green suiting, or light-green suit- ing?'

'Why, both,' said Cicely, 'when all our suiting up to now has been normal weight and blue.'

'Well it sounds a perfectly
good
notion,' I said, as the wife wound the bandage. 'I'd feel a lot brighter in a thinner suit.'

'I daresay,' said Cicely, 'and in some spot like Italy, where it's stifling the year round, it would be just the thing. But they can't
give
it away here, and they're saddled with miles of it.'

'Well,' the wife put in, 'have they not thought of trying it in Italy?'

'Whatever do you mean?' Cicely asked.

'It would go perfectly well in Italy,' said the wife, 'and would do here too, especially in summers like this, if they just once gave it a starting shove.'

'How do you mean by a shove?' asked Cicely.

'Advertising,' said the wife.

Cicely nodded. 'You would have liked having Mr Robin­son here, dear,' she said to the wife, 'if you'd got to know him properly, got to know his ways. He was go-ahead like you. Have you told Mr Stringer of your programme for the filing?'

'I've not,' said the wife, 'because he is not particularly inter­ested in filing.'

I finished off my glass of water and gave Cicely a grin.

'In fact he doesn't even file his own nails,' said the wife.

'Tell me of your programme,' I said.

'Very well,' said the wife, who was finishing off my ban­dage with a pin. 'When I come to take dictation from Mr Hind, he always ends, "Kindly acknowledge in due course", which means that for every letter sent out we get one back, and half the time the other person puts "kindly acknowl­edge" on their letter of acknowledgement, so you can see that the smallest little bit of business does rather go on for ever. But when I mentioned it to Mr Hind, and suggested that he stop writing "kindly acknowledge in due course", he said, "It's quite impossible. How can you be sure you've sent a letter if you don't have a reply?'"

'Mr Hind is
not
go-ahead,' said Cicely, turning to me.

'So,' the wife continued, 'I said you must just put a little trust in the Post Office, and that way you could save pounds every year, to which he replied, "How am I to finish my letters? What am I to put instead?'"

'Well, what
is
he to put instead?' I asked the wife, after a little while.

'"Yours truly’" said the wife, and she stepped back from me, for the bandaging was now done.

'He'll never do it,' said Cicely.'No,' said the wife. 'But I will. He never reads over the correspondence after dictation.' 'You can't’ said Cicely. 'You'll be stood down if he ever finds out, and -' She suddenly gave it up and stopped, saying directly to me: 'I'm expecting that buzzer any minute.'

I nodded at her.

'That's to tell us to stop working,' she added, although she had in fact not done a hand's turn since I'd arrived.

'The weavers
clock
off’ explained Cicely, 'we
book
off, and where Mr Hind Senior has got to I really don't know.'

'Will the weavers be coming through this way?' I asked, for I didn't want to clap eyes on the woman who'd all but accused me of murder.

Cicely shook her head. 'They leave through the main doors. They only come through this way on Thursdays.'

'Pay day,' put in the wife.

Then the telephone did start ringing. The wife answered it very smartly, saying, 'Hind's Mill, Office of Mr Hind', and fell to discussing a sale of looms.

'Mr Stringer,' said Cicely, who seemed to have no inclina­tion to stop doing no work and go home, 'your suit has more scorch marks on it than my uncle Jasper's tab rug, which is always getting burnt on account of him piling too much free coal onto his grate.'

I frowned at her.

'My uncle Jasper works on the railways,' she explained, climbing up onto one of the high stools.

'Well then’ I said, 'so do I.'

'Lydia never told me’ said Cicely.

'She doesn't really care for the job’ I said. 'She thinks it's mucky and dangerous and not, you know . . . Well, it is true that you can't be an engine man and not be bowed down by it.'

It was the first time I had admitted anything of that sort, but nobody was really listening. Cicely had a faraway look, and the wife was still talking into the telephone.

'Mr Stringer -' said Cicely again.

'I was firing the Highflyer’ I cut in. 'I mean the engine that carried this mill's excursion to Blackpool: the one that got stopped.'

'Oh’ she said, except that it was really only half an 'oh', about the smallest sound you can make while still speaking. Climbing down from the high stool, she said: 'Would you care to see the weaving room, just while Lydia's busy?'

We walked along the wooden corridor between the offices, and I tried to collect my thoughts together. Why had the wife not let on that I'd been firing the engine on Whit Sunday? Well, she would not be popular if it was known she was married to one of the men who'd kept the whole firm waiting in a field for half a day. We'd promised them a holiday, and then made a smudge of it. Or maybe Cicely
had
known that I was part of that show, but didn't let on that she knew, so as to save embarrassing me.

Cicely opened the heavy door to the weaving room for the second time, and now I was ready for the noise. There must have been four hundred looms, and every one rocked and buckled as the shuttle inside it was pitched back and forth. The weavers were mainly women. They would dart in and trim at the cloth in the thrashing machines with tiny scissors, then stand back, looking over all parts of the contraption before swooping back in again with the scissors.

There were five rows between the lines of looms and men walked along these, pushing trolleys on which were spare bits of kit for the looms, to be stopped as needed.

Most of the lot in this room would have been on the excur­sion. Cicely was standing next to me, with a handkerchief in her hand, looking along the middle row of looms. She looked quite grave, which did not suit her. It was getting on for five o'clock on a roasting hot day, but the inside of the mill had a feeling of near-dawn on a cold day. I looked up at the sky­lights, but they weren't sky
lights,
for they'd all been white­washed to keep out the glare.

'Which loom did Dyson, the girl who died, work at?' I shouted to Cicely.

She leant towards me and I shouted my question again. She heard it this time and pointed. My eye flew from her finger end to a loom in the centre of the weaving hall, where stood the superannuated fairy, my accuser. She was looking straight at me once again, as a great scream came in on top of the clattering of the looms. It was the buzzer, and even as it continued, the place wilted, the machines wound down, and all the madness came to an end, for the steam had been turned off.

But the woman was still staring.

I turned to Cicely and said: 'Who is that woman?'

'That's Mary-Ann Roberts,' said Cicely.

As Cicely looked at her, Mary-Ann Roberts finally left off staring at me and turned away to join the crowd moving towards the door at the opposite end.

'She knew Margaret Dyson, the one that died, didn't she?'

Cicely nodded. 'She was her elbow mate: worked at the next loom. She's moved along now to take Margaret's. She didn't want -'

Cicely was looking up, and now she was crying. All the weavers were walking out of the weaving room at the other end, and I was alone with this crying woman.

'. . . The ladies with her in the compartment,' Cicely said, 'they thought at first she was getting on nicely, but -'

And she was off again. I just stood there like a mule. My programme was to get her back to the wife, because the wife would know what to do. An idea struck me - not a very good one. 'Do you want a cup of tea?' I said. 'Come this way.' I didn't know where any kettle was, leave alone tea, and Cicely Braithwaite
knew
that I didn't know, but she followed me back to the wooden corridor between the offices. The wife was still talking on the telephone. Cicely was sniffing mightily as she walked, and starting on a speech.

'I've worked here five year,' she was saying, 'five
years,
I mean. I was taken on as a weaver and a friend said you should go typist because there's better prospects, so I did my typing course. In my first year, the Whit excursions for this mill started: it was to be an extra treat in advance of the Wakes Week trip to Blackpool. It was Mr Robinson's idea - he's the fellow that's gone now. He said it had to be Blackpool of course, and everyone from the mill was to go, and there was to be a tea at the Tower. Well, when we came back it was always given to me to write to the Blackpool Tower Company, and it was always the same letter.'

She took a big breath, and I was afraid of another big crying go, but she carried on, just as if reading this letter she'd spo­ken of: '"On behalf of the work-people and officials of Hind's Mill, I beg to thank you for the excellent manner in which you catered for our party of five hundred.'" A
very
big sniff here.

I could hear the wife, through the wooden wall, saying: 'You must telephone later when Mr Hind himself is here, or can you not write a letter?'

'"The tea'", Cicely was continuing, '"was admirably served, and the attendants left nothing to be desired . . . and
...
the fact that we have not had a single complaint out of the very large number -"' Another mighty sniff. '"- speaks for itself.'"

That last part did it. She was off crying again, saying how the tea was never served that day; and how it was to have been such a spread, how it had been the thing Margaret Dyson had been looking forward to most particularly; how the Wakes Week holiday that was coming up really would be a wake. But now the wife, having at last finished with the telephone, was stepping out of the office and putting her arms about Cicely, and things were set to rights while I was sent outside to wait.

I walked around to the side of the mill and stood between the chimney and the mill pond. They made a silent pair as always. The sunshine was sending a golden V shimmering out across the water. My heart was beating fast, just as after the smash. What I wanted was another smash, and there would then be a person lying down in a carriage, having taken a concussion. I would go in and I would not attempt to lift their head.