The Typewriter Girl (37 page)

John landed against her, greedy and famished. He knew something savage lurked in her play but could not care enough to watch his step, not even when she said, “The Kursaal is almost done. Miss Gilbey is coming. We’d best wind up our contract in a hurry, don’t you think?”

Betsey Dobson and how she used sex. It was her attack, it was her resignation.

His hand beneath her skirts, he reminded her, “It doesn’t matter when she comes. I gave her up.”

“You gave up on her.”

He would not argue over such a scrap of word as
on,
not with Betsey unfastening his trousers. “Mr. Jones,” she was
sighing, “Mr. Jones. So fine a gentleman, he fucks me with all his clothes on.”

There.
The spring of the trap, lethal and true.

Never mind he’d been wary, half-expecting it. Eagerly, the pain flared, and he seized her arm, wresting her hand from his trousers. “What if I do? Here, on this wall, what if I do—will it count second, or third? Because rather muddled you left it, didn’t you?”

Then, under an airless seal of sorrow, his anger died. In all his confusion, in all the ways he was ignorant and blinded and plain garden-stupid in this business with Betsey, he was clear-eyed regarding that limit she’d imposed. It carried more blame for what was wrong between them than did Lillian, present or not. He had never liked it, but only in this moment did he understand why she had imposed it.

“Didn’t you, Elisabeth?” he repeated.

Though she hadn’t been fighting his grip, he felt a give, a release, an expansion of the stillness within her. With the grating whisper of drapery, her skirts fell between them. John pressed his forehead to hers and felt the wings of her pulse as he curved his hand alongside her neck.

It’s no good for you, girl. Expecting nothing better, it’s no good for you.

What place did he have to say it?

She told him, “I’m sorry.”

The next afternoon, they rode their cycles far into the countryside and Betsey let him teach her to swim in the stiller waters of a woodland pool, where the boys who arrived for an afternoon of play were not particular regarding mixed bathing or appropriate swimming attire, though a couple of them did follow, with intense interest, Betsey’s progress when she removed herself from the water, her white underclothes stained with the pink of her skin. John took it as a sign of their health.

They dried off in a mottled patch of sunlight. The boys’ horseplay was so unrelentingly noisy that John and Betsey stopped
noticing it. They talked. She told him a story about her niece that deepened the curls of her mouth. His speech—one good enough to deliver from the stage of the Kursaal’s recital hall opening night, not the wooden thing he’d written out for Tobias to appraise—had rolled out from his brain like a shiny apple as he’d lain with his head in her lap.

If they’d been alone, he would have made love to her there in the wood, surrounded by ferns and an awning of summer-laden branches. He would have kept no tally; he would have let the afternoon drift to infinity, if the choice had been his.

Do not strike the keys as it happens, but strike them systematically, intelligently, and in such a way as to save effort.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

N
ear dawn the day of the Kursaal opening, the last seat in the recital hall was fastened into place, ensuring the Duke of Winchester and all the other guests would not, as John had feared, be viewing tonight’s performance from milking stools.

Laughter and cheers went up when Corbin Ludd plopped down in that last chair and pretended to fall fast asleep to prove the soundness of the installation. John, on the stage reviewing a final few details with some of the workers, turned to the grand piano and struck the cheeriest chords he knew, from that American tune he’d prepared for Lillian Gilbey’s party.

But he’d not committed it to memory as fully as he’d thought. He stumbled through the opening, delighting the men with this opportunity to ridicule him. Laughing, he laid out the opening to “A Mighty Fortress,” the only song besides “God Save the Queen” he and his schoolmates had learned from the wife of the village’s preacher. Within a few measures, the hall was filled with a masculine chorus, and thus was the Kursaal christened with its first
performance. The Spanish soprano entertaining the Duke tonight must settle for second.

According to John’s arrangements, the paymaster arrived. For most of the men, these hours through the night had been their last with the pier company, and another round of cheers sounded when John announced wages would be paid on the spot.

But the queue that formed before the paymaster’s table with such good-natured jostling turned sober as it shortened. John shook each man’s hand. He would see them together again—Lady Dunning and Sir Alton hosted a picnic on the grounds of Iden Hall each September for all the summer employees—but this moment marked a passage, and he wished to acknowledge it, simply, man by man.

“You won’t forget me, Mr. Jones, if it comes you need to hire?” asked Paul Higbee, who had been with John on every work site since he’d come to Idensea, as, indeed, had nearly all of the men remaining now. The ones who’d taken places in the rear of the queue, John realized, included some who’d come on as thin, green youths and now were men, former day laborers who’d become foremen—Mandy Wainwright, whose wedding John had attended, and Iesten Gwyn, who never failed to call him Mr. Iefan Rhys-Jones with a tang of a sneer but who had also turned up in March to deliver John to the rail station the day he left to attend his mother’s funeral. During the drive, Gwyn had sung “Suo Gân” in a voice like an unbroken thread of yellow honey and never once turned his eyes from the horse and the road to notice John’s tears.

“Sure not, Mr. Higbee,” John replied, a knot of emotion threatening to choke and embarrass him. He’d been so intent on getting the building finished, he’d forgotten to put himself here, to picture this moment and anticipate how it would feel:
finished
.
Finished,
one of those words that deceived, sounding so uncomplicated and absolute.

Higbee was local, and with no new construction by Idensea Pier planned for the near future, he would have to find some other employer. But the same was true for the others, like John
himself, who’d come to Idensea for the work and intended to move on when the job was concluded.

From the portico, John saw everyone off into the colorless predawn, breathing in the scent of fresh-turned earth from the flowerbeds, lately made over to include yellow rosebushes. The groundskeeper had had to have his job threatened to be convinced to move and replant a dozen fully blooming bushes, but the Duchess was known to have a partiality to yellow roses, so as long as they were there for her to see Friday, they could die Saturday, as far as Sir Alton was concerned.

Back inside, John gathered his papers, tucked the bench back under the piano. Before he pulled the lid over the keys, he tried the parlor song once more and got through the place that had hung him up without a missed note. But the sound felt overpowering in the empty hall, and he left off at the refrain.

He swiped his coat sleeve across the lid to erase the fingerprints. For sheer luxury, this piano was likely the finest thing he’d ever put his hands on. If Betsey were here, she’d touch it with a single fingertip. The mystery of his confidence in this rolled restlessly in his heart, and he stood looking out into the hall as the Spanish soprano would tonight—as he himself would, too, when he delivered his speech. The newly installed seats would not resemble rows and rows of headstones once they were put to use, filled up with ladies and gentlemen, alive with the stir of fans and flashes of jewels, ears cocking to lips to catch a whisper.

He’d be able to find her, wouldn’t he, when he took the podium?

He walked the aisles of seats, found a spanner and a small dented tin of tobacco. Two pennies, some unused bolts, a pocket comb he was certain belonged to Rafe Dixon, and a red kerchief. He was nearly to the rear of the hall when he heard voices. Expecting the staff who would be doing the final cleaning and decorating, John continued with his inspection of the aisles and was thus surprised when Lady Dunning appeared, her arms full of fresh flowers, the Kursaal manager at her side identically burdened.
They both exclaimed over the transformation of the hall, seeing the seats in place and the chandeliers burning.

“Oh, darling boy,” she cried when she saw John. “You’ve been here all night! You and my husband, no sleep, and such a day ahead.” She allowed John to take the flowers from her, and though she was
tsk
-ing over him and Sir Alton, her eyes held evidence that she’d had little rest as well.

“It’s the
speech
that had him in such a state,” she continued. “The speech! He said he found it less vexing to direct a hundred-piece orchestra in a full symphony than to compose a little welcome speech, which! Which, months ago, from the time the Duke accepted the invitation, I tried in a most loving way to convince him to do precisely that, compose something for the occasion, conduct the performance. ’Idensea Idyll,’ wouldn’t that have been lovely? And if he and Noel could have collaborated in some way, even to the slightest degree, can you imagine the attention that might have attracted? But I never even suggested a title, far less a
collaboration
—the entire notion, well, he simply refuses.”

They’d come to the stage steps, and Lady Dunning paused, her shrug toward John communicating more sadness than resignation. “He won’t think of himself as a musician, not anymore.”

She refused his offer to stay and help, ordering him to at least a few hours’ sleep before the Duke arrived. He could hear her directing the manager in the stage decoration as he made his way out. Cycling toward the hotel, he threw a glance over his shoulder at the Kursaal, still waiting for the illumination of full daylight. He would have ridden past Sarah Elliot’s, but he thought the luck of finding Betsey on the roof, ready for a personal tour, was not likely to strike twice.

•   •   •

Have you slept at all,
Betsey wanted to ask John, but she couldn’t, not here in the busy company offices. She might have managed it if it were only she and he at her desk, but John had dropped in with the Kursaal’s architect, his daughter, and her husband. Betsey swallowed the question down as John glanced through the trials the photographer had prepared for the Duke’s picture at the pleasure railway, testing distances and angles.

“We shall close to the public beforehand,” she said. “No tickets sold for at least an hour, I’m afraid. The photographer insists he needs the time.”

Standing at John’s side, the architect’s daughter pointed her approval of a particular photo. “An hour’s not so long. And one never knows—one might arrive early.”

Her husband plucked playfully at her earring. “One’s husband knows the odds of—”

He interrupted himself to greet Mr. Seiler, arriving with a slim box in hand, which he presented to John. “From Marta and myself.”

“
That
is Meyer and Mortimer wrapping,” the architect’s daughter announced with confident anticipation.

The box contained a simple black silk necktie. Simple, yet Betsey had seen enough gentlemen this summer to recognize its extraordinary fineness. As did John. Visibly moved, he thanked Mr. Seiler with the same spare elegance as the gift itself.

He used the convex looking glass right there in the office to change neckties. Along with everyone else, Betsey watched him, though she guessed she was the only one gripping a desk edge to restrain herself from joining him at the looking glass. She longed to straighten and pat it done, to have that moment of trusted connection.

“Dearest,” the architect’s daughter said to her husband as she moved to assist John, “you should consider yourself fortunate we were engaged already when I met Mr. Jones. One never knows . . .”

She straightened. She patted. The architect’s daughter, whose new husband had been hired into her father’s firm and featured in
The Building News
, fixed John’s tie. John glanced over her head to Betsey, the same
Am I presentable?
question on his brow as she’d once seen him address to Mr. Seiler.

Betsey smiled and nodded, glad she didn’t have to speak, the
longing still digging into her soul. They departed, the father, the daughter, the husband, and John in his silk necktie, off to meet a duke at the rail station.

•   •   •

The closer the carriage drew to the station, the more festive Idensea became, people turned out in their Sunday best, storefronts and lampposts decorated with banners and swags of bunting. John spotted some of the men who’d spent the night at the Kursaal, spruced up and walking with their families or sweethearts, and he felt glad for getting their wages to them early. But it wasn’t truthful, he realized with a wave of weariness, how he’d thought of himself as one of them, out of a job now that the Kursaal was complete. Sir Alton would have him as managing director.