The Typewriter Girl (16 page)

Why hadn’t he said
something
to Lillian? They’d stood here along this railing, and he’d felt grateful for the distraction of the children and their picnic, glad to dash after the rock vendor rather than have that moment with her.

The wife mattered. She didn’t have to; he knew it was possible, provided she were a certain sort of female, to keep her under glass and do little more than tend her. But she could matter, and it was better when she did. He’d learned that much in his life from his mentors, even from Sir Alton and his own father.

One week to the opening of the Sultan’s Road. It would be ready. A day shy of that week, he would see Lillian. He would practice; he would go to Lillian’s party and not embarrass either of them; he would speak to her and not change his mind about what he needed to say.

•   •   •

In her room at The Bows, Betsey cut the buttons off her vest, letting each one fall to the floor. They landed with tawdry-sounding clicks, lacking the weight of real brass, and she went to bed, leaving them where they had scattered.

A little later, she was on the floor, gathering them up, not crying. She put them with her mending notions, in a dented biscuit tin that featured an image of the house where supposedly the biscuits had been made with care by a Mrs. Knight of Derbyshire. She pushed the lid shut, then lingered over it, tracing the embossed details of the house. She used a single fingertip, the way she had ventured to touch the furnishings in Miss Elizabeth Dellaforde’s doll’s house when she first went to work—almost twelve years old, and tall enough for her and Caroline to safely lie about her age. That toy had looked so true Betsey had imagined it something like a seed: Planted streetside, it would sprout a real-sized house occupied by a complete family a few weeks later.

Later, she’d sought solace before that seed of a home, even though she’d grown too old for such fancies. After Caroline married Richard and moved away to London, she would slip to the nursery, long empty of Dellaforde children young enough to inhabit it, to sit on a low stool before the doll’s house. She came there to cry one night, holding a letter from Caroline, a letter too similar to its predecessors:
Only another few months, dearest, and
we’ll send for you. Richard tells me the household expenses are simply too close now, but soon . . .

But the nursery had not been empty that night. Thomas Dellaforde, home from university, was there hiding his smoking from his father.

Stay and have one. It will distract you from whatever’s made you cry.

On a tiny stool, she’d sat and pretended this was her first cigarette, shocked to discover Thomas Gregory Dellaforde already knew her name.

“But it’s not a very nice name, anyway, is it?” he’d said. “Lizzie? You’d be better with Liza, or Beth.”

“My mum always called me Elisabeth. Elisabeth with an
s
. Mrs. Filgage called me Lizzie when I come here, though, and I was too timid to say different, so everyone else says it, too, now.”

But his sister was Elizabeth. “Let it be Betsey between us. Awfully pretty, I’ve always thought. Very—”

He had said a word she’d not known back then, and couldn’t remember now, but she’d liked the sound of it. She forgot her desolation over Caroline’s letter. She forgot the doll’s house, only a few feet behind her. She didn’t think of it again for a long time after that, even when she and Thomas went back to the nursery sometimes.

Still, as the tin house on the biscuit container warmed beneath the tip of her finger, she remembered it clearly, more clearly than she remembered Thomas’s face.

Sit in an erect and comfortable position close to the machine.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

Y
ou are aware, Miss Gilbey, Lord Tennyson has a poem named for you.”

Lillian continued leafing through Mr. Dunning’s sheet music, pleased to think of him brushing up his Tennyson just for her. They were using this Sunday afternoon to rehearse their duet for her music society party, though on a break for tea at the moment.

“Yes. Papa used it to scold me when I was a very little girl, if he thought I was sulking.”

Mr. Dunning turned from the table to speak to Mama and Aunt Constance, chaperoning from a distant corner of the drawing room. “Ladies, you must tell me the greater fiction, that little Miss Gilbey sulked or that her father ever had need to scold her?”

“Horace Gilbey cajoles his daughters into obedience,” Aunt Constance said. “I’d be surprised if he knows the meaning of the word
scold
.”

Mama smiled. “Little enough reason for him to.”

“As I suspected.” Mr. Dunning rapped Lillian’s knuckle with a single finger. How exquisite, his musician’s hand. “You fabulist. Poetic justice is one thing, but whoever heard of poetic scolding?”

“‘Airy, fairy Lilian’ is hardly a pleasant girl. I should have to change my name if I truly had inspired such a deplorable depiction.”

“Deplorable!”

Lillian laughed, supposing him surprised that she could find fault in her beloved Lord Tennyson. But genius was not infallible. Witness Mr. Dunning’s music collection, whose only standard for inclusion appeared to be notes on a staff. Hymns and drawing-room ballads and operettas were as likely to appear as Schumann or Handel. At a chance meeting at Albert Hall last week, he had confessed a penchant for the music hall, and just now, she had come to a piece titled “Oh! Angelina Was Always Fond of Soldiers.” The lack of boundaries perplexed her.

“Mr. Dunning, your indiscriminate assortment of music here worries me enough. Please don’t say you admire that poem.”

“I found it . . . well, lovely, rather. I suppose.”

They had often sparred like this, debates that enlivened them both, but he was giving up now—his single fault, to Lillian’s observation, this diffidence to which he surrendered occasionally. He must learn to manage it if he hoped to get anywhere; it only required the right sort of discipline.

Thus, she pressed, “But so trivial and obvious! No theme but a coy and guileful female, do you not agree?”

The tips of his ears turned pink. He pulled his portfolio of music from her, thumbed to the back, and removed a manuscript.

“I suppose I don’t—that is, I set it to music, you see.”

Lillian froze, envisioning herself having to strike Noel Dunning from her List tonight, and not because she wanted to. If he learned something of the perils of beating round the bush, fine, but that good lesson was no use to
her
now. How was she to repair this insult?

She began by sniffing at the manuscript, a skeptic. “Well, I certainly must hear it. If you can make something bearable of those verses, Mr. Dunning, I shall avow your genius far and wide.”

With an air of challenge, she directed him toward the piano,
prepared to rhapsodize over any old thing he mashed out. But within the first measures, she knew no playacting would be required. Under the spell of his melody, doggerel became achingly beautiful, and “cruel little Lilian” seemed worthy of the heartache the speaker lavished on her. Lillian halted the maid entering with tea with an upraised hand and went like a sleepwalker to the piano, where she leaned, transfixed, until the final note faded.

Mama and Aunt Constance applauded, but Lillian could only sigh, “Oh, Mr. Dunning, oh.
Mr. Dunning.
”

After a bashful glance, he started to fold the manuscript. Lillian snatched it from him.

“No, no, no, Mr. Dunning! It is . . . exquisite, extraordinarily exquisite. Did you hear it, Mama?” Her skirts swished as she twirled to her mother, then again to the piano. “You must play it at the party. Tell me you will, you must.”

“But our piece . . .”

“Yes, yes, the duet—you’d have two pieces in the program, if you’re willing. You are, aren’t you?”

“I’m grateful to possess the means to grant any of your wishes, Miss Gilbey, but I shouldn’t impose—you were remarking upon how crowded the program is already.”

Mama brought Mr. Dunning a cup of tea. “Dearest, it’s true. You spent the whole of yesterday afternoon putting the performances in an order that suited you—it is all ready for the printer’s. You’d undo all that?”

Lillian waved away this question. She had slaved over the program not to suit herself but to create sensations and transitions and moods, not to mention balance politics and protocol. Mama little understood the complexities.

Nor how they signified nothing. The very theme of this gathering was new pieces: a composition never yet published nor played in public, performed by the dashing son of a famous composer who happened to be a baronet . . .

Coup
was the word. Sydenham Music Society would get a notice in the papers, which would open the door to who-knew-what-number of new invitations.

And it was a gorgeous, gorgeous piece of music.

She would have too many performances, though. But someone might develop laryngitis, or stage fright, or magnanimously step aside to make room for Mr. Dunning—

John. Surely by now he was regretting the task he’d set for himself. He would be positively relieved for a way out. Not to mention how it would ease her own mind. She’d already had a nightmare of John taking the stage with something appalling, even worse than “Oh! Angelina Was Always Fond of Soldiers.”

She didn’t voice her idea. Mama was partial to John and wouldn’t like it. And Lillian and Mr. Dunning no longer used John as a topic of conversation. It was uncomfortable, and besides, they’d found so many other things to discuss.

She offered Mr. Dunning the plate of biscuits. “It will work itself out. Nothing to bother over now.”

She persuaded him to play his song again before he left for the afternoon. She declared it perfect, absolutely perfect.

“Except . . .”

She hesitated, certain Lord Tennyson would condemn this request. But with phrasing like “love-sighs” and “crimson-threaded lips,” and John, not Tennyson, in company, did she have a choice?

“Might you use another name, Mr. Dunning? Marian? Gwendolyn?” To protect him from insult, she dropped her gaze sideward—her modesty could not bear such attention, he must understand.

A true gentleman, he did. “Marian it is. But will you grant me a similar favor? A change of name?” Into her ear, he whispered, “Noel. If only now and then, Noel.”

Success. Desperately, she wished for privacy, having hypothesized lately that John’s kisses were not as singular as she’d thought, that other men might like to kiss like that. Perhaps the son of a baronet?

Revising the program after Mr. Dunning departed took only a moment. She could hardly cut the regular society members, and John, he could not care so much. And if he did—well, he would forgive her. He’d just have to forgive her.

•   •   •

“He must be mad for you,” concluded Sarah as she and Betsey gathered herbs from the kitchen garden Sunday afternoon. “To come from London, to fight for you. One could almost pity the man”—she smiled self-consciously as she reached up to place her cuttings in the basket Betsey held—“if you would let one.”

Betsey put a sprig of rosemary to her nose. She couldn’t join Sarah in fantasies of Avery’s unrequited love for her. Nor could she begin to explain the prosaic arrangements of her life to someone like Sarah.
A way of going along.

More than that, she’d told Mr. Jones last night, and what had she meant? A type-writing machine to practice upon? Extra writing lessons? A reminder of Thomas Dellaforde, with those lines of literature Avery carried about in his head and the books stacked up in his flat once upon a time?

She wouldn’t risk an alteration of Sarah’s soft warmth toward her, and thus, she spoke of last night’s events in the most general terms possible.

Laughing, Sarah stood and tucked a flower behind Betsey’s ear. Sarah’s haze of curls was already strewn with tiny blossoms and leaves. “All right, then, he is the lowest sort of cad, and I shan’t waste my pity on him.”

“He could have—he still might—cost me my position, Sarah.”

“I meant to say ‘villain,’ of course. The seedy variety, without a trace of romance.” She frowned with renewed concern as she considered Betsey. “Your poor mouth. How did you ever—”

She interrupted her own question to cock an ear at the house, and Betsey was glad, for Sarah’s curiosity about Avery had been driving toward increasingly difficult-to-dodge questions.

“I shall absolutely wring his neck.” Sarah dropped her shears
into the basket and started to pull off her gloves. “A thousand and one times I’ve warned him about his noise in the house, especially when there are boarders at home.”

But when her son burst through the door that led to the back garden, he got no more than “Darling, hadn’t you best stay out of doors if you want to make such a racket?” The fist planted on her hip was very stern, however.

Charlie, who appeared ready to take flight, such was his excitement, failed to notice it. “John’s come back with me—he’s waiting out front.”

“I’ll take these cuttings to the kitchen,” Betsey said. She had managed to avoid Mr. Jones at church this morning, keeping Charlie and Sarah as a buffer between them, distancing herself from the groups of chatting congregants after the service. With luck, she could escape to her room without seeing him now.