The Hourglass Factory (2 page)

The ground floor belonged to the sports reporters and the staffers, who could be dispatched to any part of London at a second’s notice to weasel out a story from the police, morgues, the
divorce courts, loose-tongued pub landladies and vengeful servants. The obituary writers, the political correspondents and the features editor occupied the office above; theirs had the privilege of
a red velvet couch that threw up dust whenever it was sat upon. Up again, the sub-editors worked at desks covered in blue pencils, bottles of paste and scissors, chopping and rearranging the text
given to them by the office boys. And then, at the top sat Mr Stark himself, Editor-in-Chief, with a rickety wooden floor and a great oak desk covered in rival newspapers, scraps of flimsy, and a
whisky glass with a permanent crust of the previous drink left fossilising in it.

Stark also had the prestige of housing the Reuters machine, four pillars topped by a glass box; a tangle of electromagnetic wires that ticked and tapped out a mile a day of news. Horse-race
results, parliamentary speeches, overseas events, shipping news, all came spilling out onto a thin strip of paper which Nobby, Stark’s office boy, would cut with a pair of shears and pass for
Stark’s perusal. Most of Nobby’s offerings ended up in the waste-paper basket under the desk. On her first visit to Stark, Frankie had eyed the basket warily, wondering how many
lovingly typed and hand-addressed journalists’ efforts had been screwed up into a ball and tossed into it like old orange peel.

Just before she hit the landing on Stark’s floor she heard a voice calling out, ‘Oi, Georgie.’

‘It’s Frankie,’ she began to say, turning. She recognised Teddy Hawkins straight away; one of the reporters who had his own desk in the downstairs newsroom. He had a badly
formed mouth, like it had been squashed at some point and never found its proper shape again. In his hands he carried a stack of news clippings. ‘Did you get our telegram?’

‘I got Mr Stark’s.’

Hawkins brushed the remark out of the air. ‘He wants you to do a portrait piece. Half, no three-quarter page.’ He grinned.

Frankie’s pulse sped up a little.

‘There’s a suffragette performing at the Coliseum tomorrow night, an acrobat. Ebony Diamond. Know her?’

Instantly the little drizzle of excitement was replaced by a prickle of annoyance. She was on the verge of opening her mouth to say, ‘Now why would I know her?’ but Hawkins
didn’t give her the chance.

‘None of us have a damned clue who she is. That’s why he wanted you in.’ He skimmed a glance down her trouser suit. ‘You’ll know a thing or two about suffragettes,
won’t you? Anyway, deadline’s tomorrow. He’ll tell you the rest.’ He barged ahead of her into Stark’s office, leaving a reek of stale smoke in his wake.

Frankie heard a rustle of quick conversation then Hawkins re-emerged, winked at Frankie – a gesture that made her feel slightly soiled – and jogged back down the stairs. She was
gratified to see, as he disappeared, that a long streamer of flimsy from the Reuters wires was flapping off his shoe.

She gave her suit a quick brush down and went in. Stark’s huge body was craning over a galley proof, with a single eyeglass wedged in his eye and a blue pencil behind his ear. He was an
oval-shaped man, pointed at the top like an egg, with colossal features; ears, nose, blue bulging eyes that looked as if they had been stuck on with editing paste, and matched his unwieldy manner
with words. He liked to call the lady journalists ‘treacle’, ‘pudding’ or sometimes ‘treacle pudding’.

He didn’t look up. Frankie walked closer, so that her shoes were within his eyeline.

‘Ebony Diamond,’ he said, still poring down the long piece of print. ‘Know her?’

Frankie shook her head, then realised he was waiting for her to speak. ‘No.’ She cleared her throat.

‘She’s a suffragette.’

‘I don’t know her,’ Frankie said, trying to keep her voice even.

‘Well, I want you to get to know her. She’s been in Holloway twice now so make it sharp. Get her to tell you about the matrons and force-feeding.’

She watched his head slide back and forth along the line of text while she waited for more. After a few seconds, he paused. ‘Still here?’

‘Well, it’s just that . . . Mr Stark, I’m not sure a suffragette piece, given my background. I mean there are some news stories I could think of to . . .’

‘This or quoits on Wimbledon Common. You want to cover the quoits on Wimbledon Common?’

Frankie made a quick calculation of the distance to Wimbledon in her head. It was almost worth it. ‘No, sir, thank you,’ she said.

‘Nobby’s got some notes for you, don’t you Nobby?’

Stark’s boy, who had been lurking in the corner, staring at the ticking Reuters machine, leant across the table and handed her a piece of paper. On the top was written in blue waxy editing
pencil in Stark’s florid hand, ‘Olivier Smythe, Corsetier, 125 New Bond Street.’ The rest of the notes were Nobby’s uneven scrawl.

Frankie creased her brow. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. This is the address of a Bond Street corset shop.’

‘Yes.’

Frankie hesitated.

‘Does her costumes, doesn’t he?’ Stark said as if the whole thing should have been quite plain. He went back to scrutinising his galley proof and Nobby shrugged at her and
turned back to the Reuters machine. Frankie sighed, folded up the piece of paper and stuffed it in her pocket before heading back out into the hallway.

She was halfway down the stairs when a man in a brown factory coat came dashing out from one of the side rooms. ‘Hold it, hold it.’ She stopped in her tracks as he thrust towards her
a leather cube. His fingers were grubby with ink and he stank of chemicals. ‘Make sure you get a good one. Get her waist in. Nice and close, mid-body, don’t let her close her eyes.
Plates are already in, quarter plates.’ He pointed to a tube, half a triangular pipe tucked in the back. ‘Lose this and he’ll have your fingers for potted shrimp. If you need it,
you can buy the powder at a chemist’s. Get the Muller’s stuff.’

It was only then that it dawned on her what the box was. ‘I have taken a photograph before, you know,’ she said. She hadn’t, but she had had her photograph taken, which was
near enough the same thing. She carefully lifted the camera out of its box and stared at it. It had stiff red bellows and shiny brass tracks and a yellow enamel circle that said, ‘J. Lizars
Challenge. Glasgow, London, Edinburgh’.

She tucked it away and slid the cracked leather strap of the case over her shoulder, then stepped back into the sunshine, letting the heat soak onto her face. She was trying to sedate the little
prickle that had risen in her outside Stark’s office when Teddy Hawkins told her why she had been offered the job. Of course Teddy Hawkins didn’t interview suffragettes; he topped up
peelers’ ale cups and greased politicians’ hands in the Savage Club.

Suffragette. She’d give him a suffragette. One look at her trousers and everyone just assumed she was a bloody suffragette. It wasn’t even a real word anyway, it was a name someone
at the
Daily Mail
had made up to distinguish Mrs Pankhurst’s hammer-throwers from Mrs Fawcett’s tea-drinkers. There were suffragists and suffragettes and Nusses and Spankers and
Wasps, and they all looked the same in their blouses and tailor-mades, hawking pamphlets on street corners in taxidermy hats.

And now she was supposed to just pirouette along to a corset shop on the look-out for a suffragette acrobat she had never set eyes on before. It was all a big joke to them, with their oiled hair
and their Turkish tobacco. She pictured them all gathered in the newsroom, laughing like monkeys into their coffee cups.

She swallowed and lifted her chin up. It was work, extra work. And portraits were a step up from the column she did with Twinkle, and her odds and sods cartoons. Besides, Audrey Woodford’s
Journalism for Women
said you never turned down work. She ran her fingers through her tufty brown hair, tucking it tightly down behind her ears, hoiked the camera case tighter over her
shoulder, and headed towards the railings. She arrived at them just in time to see a newspaper boy, still crammed between the wooden leaves of his sandwich board, swinging his legs over the bicycle
and wobbling off down the street.

‘Oi!’

The boy picked up speed, knocking his knees against the board as he pedalled. Frankie sighed and drew her grandfather’s old pocket-watch out of her jacket. Quarter past three already. Bond
Street was miles away, the centre of town clogged. If she took the underground, she might just make it.

The tube train was crowded but not unbearable, and Frankie found a bit of standing space against the shaking wall. As the tube skated though pitch-black tunnels its windows
became a mirror, allowing her to see what she looked like for the first time that day, for as usual she hadn’t bothered to check before leaving the house. Her paisley neckerchief was crooked,
her brown eyes shiny round the sockets. The olive oil her mother had given her to cook with was working a treat to keep her hair in check. Her hair had been short ever since her first day as a
compositor’s apprentice at the
Tottenham Evening News
, when the head compositor had taken a pair of shears and without warning sliced off her pigtails. Did her cheeks look chubbier
than normal? She had always taken pride in being lean, but lately her waistband had been feeling tighter. Too many gin sessions with the old girl Twinkle, cooking up the weekly column, and too much
ale in the Cheshire Cheese.

She slunk back against the window wondering how long it would take to find the shop or if this suffragette would even be there. If she could do a good job of the piece, it mightn’t be the
last interview Mr Stark sent her on. It was true, for weeks now she had been pestering him to give her something more than the Twinkle column, something juicier. At the
Tottenham Evening
News
she had covered for staff reporters on sick days, and been sent to court hearings and occasionally the morgue. But it didn’t seem to be the Fleet Street way to let women loose
anywhere other than the opening of tailors’ houses, the launch of debutantes, or sensational exposés inside laundry rooms.

By the time the lift operator at Bond Street underground station had cranked her up to street level, the sun was already beginning to sink. The sky had darkened, giving way to a tea-brown fog
blowing in from the Thames.

Frankie pulled the lapels of her jacket in tight, glad of her tweeds for the first time that day. There were a few trams lined up along the junction with Oxford Street while further down New
Bond Street horse-drawn broughams idled. Gas and electric lights shone from inside the shops, glowing veils of silver and gold around the goods in the windows. Shoppers huddled along, dashing to
make their purchases before the weather turned.

She checked her pocket-watch – quarter to four, still in good time – and took a fat Matinee cigarette and a box of matches from a case inside her jacket. Let herself warm up to it
first. She lit the cigarette and trampled on the match.

Taking the smoke in slowly, Frankie walked between the row of cabs up for hire and the shop fronts. She was halfway between a tall hansom and a snuffmonger’s when a shape in the next cab
window along caught her eye. She walked up to it and leaned closer. At first it looked like a dismembered body, shrunk to dizzyingly small proportions, perching on a shelf inside the cab. She
blinked, then realised what she was looking at and turned around. Behind her, silhouetted by golden gas lamps, hung a mauve silken bodice in a curved shop window. As she moved towards it, peculiar
repetitions of the form began to emerge in the window’s milky light, dangling from the ceiling, poised on wood figurines. She looked up at the sign. ‘Olivier Smythe; Parisian
Corsetier.’ Below it a Royal Crest was lacquered in gold and black relief.

So this was where Miss Ebony Diamond sourced her smalls. Frankie hadn’t known the music halls paid so nicely. Relieved she hadn’t been sent on a goose chase, she peered through the
window. There was a man behind the counter and a tall elderly woman in a pastel flowered hat making shapes in the air with her hands.

How did journalists approach such matters anyway? Audrey Woodford had conveniently forgotten to say. She sucked the last bitter hit of the cigarette then pulled out her notebook and chanced a
glimpse at the leaf of notes Stark’s boy had given her. ‘Acrobat, suffragette, tiger-tamer. Attacked Asquith, April. Works at Jojo’s Cocoa Bar, Soho. Coliseum, Friday.
Wouldn’t pick a fight with her.’ The latter was underlined in blue. She raised an eyebrow.

The customer smiled and accepted her boxed purchase, then glided back out into the street, tinkling the shop’s bell, bundling her furs at her throat. Frankie watched the man, whom she took
to be Mr Smythe, straighten the garments on display in the window. There was something odd about him that she couldn’t put her finger on, a delicacy in the way he held himself. Buttoning up
her jacket, she tried her best to look smart, lamenting the way her shirt never seemed to tuck evenly into her waistband. As she strode towards the shop door, a boy with a large cap tugged low over
fiery ginger hair stepped out of the shadows and pulled it open. Frankie rummaged in her pocket in search of a penny for him, but she could only find one sticky shilling that she wanted to keep
hold of for her tube fare, so she pulled her palm back out empty and smiled instead.

The bell’s jangle set her nerves going. She crossed into the dark panelled sweet-smelling chamber and calmly set about flicking through the racks of fabric, as if shopping for a corset was
the most natural thing in the world. The truth was it all made her feel a little nauseous: the liquid satin, the rough-textured lace. Something about the place reminded her of an effete
butcher’s shop, a slightly creepy hairdressing salon, somewhere Miss Havisham and Sweeney Todd might have set up business together. She had in her hands a cream and caramel number – a
colour combination that reminded her of straitjackets – when she heard footsteps behind her.