The Fancy (5 page)

Meanwhile, he had the day to get through. Up till now, his concern for Queenie had taken his mind off his new job, but as he stepped out of the fresh cold of the morning into the metallic cold of the Inspection Shop, his apprehension returned. It was all so different from the friendly Fitting Shop where one section was on top of another and the noise spread over everything. It was quieter here and tomorrow night.” aaf more spacious. The two lines of benches stretched into perspective, strewn with the dismantled units of aeroplane engines. At the far end, the high trolleys were drawn up neatly, each stacked with an engine waiting to be spread on the benches. There were girls everywhere. There were even women labourers pushing the trolleys along the gangways. It was early yet and only a few of the girls were perching at the benches, powdering their noses or reading the paper. Others were chatting by
the coats, or arriving, looking unapproachable in their outdoor clothes. Thank goodness he had only got to deal with ten of them.

That must be his bench ; he recognised the sleek, red-haired girl with the sulky orange mouth. He was scared stiff of her. And there was that mannish one with the short thick legs and the bristly shingle. He couldn’t see Dinah anywhere, or that funny little girl with the ashcoloured hair who had reminded him of the grey doe in the end hutch.

He didn’t know where to hang his coat. He hung it tentatively on an empty peg, but a fat red-faced girl swept it off with : “No you don’t, cock, that’s little Hilda’s peg.” He tried another peg. “Christ, Ted,” said Dinah, appearing under his arm, “don’t hang it there, that’s her Ladyship’s peg.”

“Who?” asked Ted.

“Oh you’ll find out, but that’s not the way to start” She knew Edward quite well ; she had often come and talked to him in the Fitting Shop. She liked to get about the place and see people, so she made excuses of dirty bearings to be cleaned out, or a nut to be removed with a special spanner. She would go and look up drawings in the drawing office so that she could visit an old bent man in there who could whistle two notes at once, or invent some reason for going up to the Hardening Shop so that she could talk to a knotted man called Albert, in the glow from his hellish ovens. Bob Condor would sometimes go after her to chase her back to her own section and although she would come docilely enough, he was never sure that she was not laughing at him.

“Morning Dinah.” He came up now, regretting that it was not correct to pinch her bottom. He had pinched it before now when the opportunity arose, and he had tried to kiss her once behind a stack of cylinder liners. Instead of being angry, she had laughed at him, and had walked calmly away while he was wondering how to proceed.

“Come into my office, Ledward,” he said, “and we’ll just run through the routine. Get out on the bench, Dinah, and start work.”

“I’ve got nothing to do. We’re waiting for another engine.”

“Well, go and look as if you were working. Supposing somebody came round? Come on, Ledward, let’s get this over and then we can get these girls organised. They got hellishly slack under Tom Presser ; they did what they liked with him. I’m counting on you to get a bit of discipline.”

Bob Condor had an unctuous face with prominent eyes and ears and an egg-shaped profile. He had a bald spot like a tonsure at the back of his head and he talked as if his tongue were too big for his mouth. Words like “shupercharger” and “shlipper gearshe” had difficulty getting past it into the open air. Noticing this, Edward found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying, just as he never could attend to Connie’s mother for looking at her teeth.

In any case, the more he heard of his job, the greater his apprehension. There were certain units of the engine on which he had never worked. Let this cup pass from me.an alongBob Condor’s remarks on the roller lift of the moderate speed gear were as Greek. He began to wonder why he had been picked for the job. Perhaps the Fitting Shop were dissatisfied with his work and had fobbed him off on the Inspection by way of a smart deal. He would have to get hold of a text-book and do a lot of swotting up at home and meanwhile rely on the help of the charge hand on the other bench. He was a decent chap, but it was the girls! How could he set himself up as supervisor of a girl who had worked for two years on a unit whose details he was hearing now for the first time?

“Well, I think that should give you a pretty good idea,” said the foremen. “Come on out, and I’ll introduce you to your bench.”

Edward was depressed as he followed the tonsure out of the office. He already saw himself passing something faulty that would pack up in mid-air and cause the death of a pilot. He would give the job a trial and then ask for a change before he did any harm. He didn’t want the job. He didn’t want to meet the girls. He wanted to go back to the Fitting Shop.

The girls had started on a new engine. They looked up from their work and stared and said things as he and Bob approached. At the nearest corner, the red-haired girl was brooding over the wheelcase. She sat round-shouldered on her high stool, her long back curved like a sapling.

“This is Mrs. King,” said Bob. “Paddy—your new charge hand. You’ll find sulks don’t have the same effect on him as they did on Tom.” Paddy looked at him from under her lashes. Owing to the lines of her mouth in repose, she had suffered all her life from being told not to sulk when she was perfectly happy, which immediately made her feel sulky.

“How do you do,” she said, hoping Edward was not as earnest as he looked. He might get interfering. If she was allowed to get on with the job in her own way, she was all right.

Madeleine sprang off her stool and beamed at Edward. “How do you do,” she said, and laughed nervously, pushing back her hair.

“Mrs. Tennant does the pumpsh,” said Bob. “Oil, fuel and coolant. She’s very good at the job.”

“It’s very nice of you to say so,” said Madeleine seriously, “but I’m afraid I make an awful lot of mistakes. What about that time I passed a cracked casing and it wasn’t discovered until the whole pump was assembled? That was terrible.” The lapse had passed almost unnoticed, but the memory of it had haunted her for months. She had worked with desperate concentration ever since, convinced that it was being held against her and that she was being watched for the slightest slip. She woke sometimes in the night, thinking about what
would have happened if the crack had not been discovered. She saw the whole fuel pump disintegrating in mid-air like a rotten apple, heard the engine stutter, cough and then cut out completely as the plane hurtled to earth. But most clearly of all, she saw the face of the pilot, blackened and charred sometimes, sometimes floating, flat and pale, just under the surface of the sea.

“And this is Kitty,” said Bob Condor with relish. He liked her tight young satiny skin and the unused look about her. Edward liked her too ; he liked her friendly, guileless smile. He could imagine her curled up on the floor in front of the fire, prattling. She looked like a prattler. She was working on a box of oil pipes and it was with a shock that he noticed an engagement ring on her filthy left hand. He saw her then as a child bride, going sacrificially to the altar in cloudy white, without knowing what it was all about. with the flat of his hand. p along Kitty liked him too ; she liked everybody.

Sheila was working next to her on the reduction gear, an enormous wheel and a little wheel that reduced the crankshaft speed to a suitable speed for the airscrew. Edward felt at home here. He had worked on this unit for a long time.

“This is the reduction gear,” Bob was saying, ignoring Sheila, who he knew didn’t like him. “There’s a grinding scheme on the front of the shaft here you’ve got to watch out for.”

“R.S.C. 119,” murmured Edward casually. “Er—how do you do, Miss, er——”

“I’m Sheila,” she said, wishing she couldn’t see her nose shining out of the corner of her eye. Not that this man was attractive or anything except that the structure of his face was like Conrad Veidt, but you should never let anyone think of you as a girl who shone. You should never shine, anyway. You never knew—supposing some pilot came round. When Bob had moved on to the next girl, she turned her back and took her flapjack out of her overall pocket.

Grace Matthews was checking valves with speed and efficiency. She was homely and house-ridden. Her hands were not cracked and calloused from valves, but from cleaning behind the wardrobe and under the kitchen stove and all sorts of places that nobody would ever see. “Mrs. Matthews is one of our good, steady workers,” said Bob, as if she were a cart-horse. Edward was glad, because he didn’t know much about valves.

“How do you do,” said Grace. “I’m awfully worried because there isn’t an engine number on this set of valves. Supposing they’ve got mixed?”

“Make a note to see about that, Ledward,” said the foreman. “Take it up with George Dove in the Dishmantling Shop.”

“Righto,” said Edward, wondering who George Dove was and following round the end of the bench to where the rabbit-girl sat, smaller than ever, counting bolts.

“This is Wendy Holt,” said Bob. “She’s just been put on to the camshafts and rockers. She’ll be all right, but she doesn’t know much about it yet, do you, Wendy?”

“I’m afraid not,” she whispered shyly.

Well that was all right. Edward could teach her a lot about rockers. She wore her pale hair drawn back and tied in her neck with a ribbon. She had long, scared-looking eyes, just like the does when a cat got into the garden and pretended it could get into the hutches if it wanted to. He wondered how Queenie was getting on. Wendy got back on to her stool and went on counting bolts attentively.

Bob had told Edward about the girl next to Wendy. “Ivy Larter. You want to watch out for her ; she’s a trouble-maker.” Edward vaguely remembered having heard some gossip about her and one of the labourers, but he hadn’t listened at the time. He looked at her now, with a sinking heart and hoped she wasn’t going to make trouble with him because he would never know how to deal with it. She was a thin girl, with dry, dyed hair and a spiteful mouth, distorted by the stridence of her cockney accent. Her eyes calculated Edward and found him contemptible.

Dinah was working just beyond the next girl and she leaned over and said : “Hullo, this is Reenie. She’s not as dumb as she looks.” She couldn’t be, thought Edward.

Reenie giggled. “Oh, Di-
ner
, you are awful!”

n Fridays and Tuesdays, . b“How do you do,” said Edward kindly.

“How do,” said Reenie, goggling.

“Mrs. Streeter does the nuts and bolts and the controlsh,” said Bob Condor, watching Dinah.

“That’s right,” said Reenie. Every time she finished speaking, she let her mouth fall open, because she couldn’t breathe through her nose.

“Dinah you know,” said Bob, going on past her. “She does the shlipper gears.” Thank goodness for that, thought Edward, because she’ll know all about them. She’ll be able to teach me something. Dinah winked at him. The last girl was the mannish one he had seen yesterday. She was standing up, running her eye down a line of studs on the carburettor. She put a dirty hand into Edward’s and shook it frankly.

“Freda does the shuper and carburettor,” said Bob, which was obvious, Edward thought. Come to think of it, the whole round of introductions had been rather silly. He could perfectly well see for himself what units the girls were on. He could have trickled in among them, without this pompous business of having to think of something to say to each.

“Yes,” said Freda, “I’m the blower wallah. Been on it a year now.” Edward knew quite a lot about the blower too and was prepared to assert himself on any question that cropped up. Freda looked as though she were prepared to assert herself too, but he
didn’t mind. He could deal with girls with moustaches and weather-beaten skins. It was the ones that smelt like flowers who put him off.

There was a Trade Union monthly general meeting after work, but although Edward usually liked to go and listen to the talk, Jack Tanner himself could not have kept him from Queenie tonight. He always walked home briskly, shooting out his legs to give each one the maximum amount of exercise, but tonight he went like a man making the record to Brighton, heel and toe, elbows working. On the little hill that curved down to Church Avenue and the Lipmanns’ corner, he broke into a trot, jogging springily on the balls of his feet, head up and breathing through his nose. Behind the dominating thought of Queenie, which drove him forward, a jumble of impressions of his bewildering day surged in his head. Faces, odd remarks, isolated pictures kept coming to the surface like bubbles in a simmering pan, but he paid little heed to them, concentrating only on getting home. Time enough later on to try and sort out his confused thoughts into a clear picture of the job.

At the cross-roads, the church clock showed that he was five minutes earlier than usual. David Lipmann, coming out of the side door of the shop in a blue suit and a white polo sweater, grinned at the earnest, hurrying figure. People missed an awful lot by not relaxing. He passed a hand over his black hair which was brushed back without a parting, hitched up his belt and sauntered across the road towards Collis Park High Street.

“David!” yelled Mrs. Lipmann from the shop door, “Where are you going?” She was a finely built woman with muscled arms and a strong face under hair that was gathered up all round her head into a knob on top, like a brioche.

“To Mr. Hillary’s to get some books!” called David without stopping.

“You going after a girl, I’m going to tell your father!” screamed Mrs. Lipmann. A customer came out of the shop behind her and stood wagging her head approvingly. David shouted something unintelligible.

“You come home late and you’ll find the door locked!” yelled his mothern’t.”an along, who would have sat up all night to let him in if necessary.

Edward heard the shouting still going on behind him as he turned in at his gate. He always thought the Lipmanns added something continental to this corner of Collis Park. It reminded him of that woman at Wenduyne who used to scream out of her top window when the vegetable man came round. Connie had said it made her sick to see the two big dogs drawing the cart, but they had seemed quite happy with their plumy tails always waving. But Connie suspected all animals of suffering. When a car had run over Bob’s paw, she had taken him straight to the Vet’s to have him put out of his misery
without waiting until Edward came home. They had never had another dog ; Connie was dead set against it.