The Apprentices

by Leon Garfield

  So he covered it up in his heart and referred to “the family leather business,” in tones of immense refinement. In consequence of this, he couldn’t help feeling angry and bitter whenever he called and saw that his ma was making a liar of him.

  Similarly, Mrs. Gully resented her son, not because of his pride, but because of her own. Having represented him as being in the jewellery line, she was offended that he never brought her the gifts that would have been proper to that exalted trade.

  Nevertheless, she felt a certain regret, and, with the approach of each Mothering Sunday, she felt a warmth coming on and made sundry vows to herself that, this time, “things would go better.”

  “’E’ll be comin’ tomorrer of course,” said Mrs. Gully, with a sudden rush of gentleness that encouraged the new neighbour.

  “The lady what I worked for—”

  Then the hammering started up again, and Mrs. Gully had to shout.

  “Tomorrer! My son! For tea!”

  “Tomorrer!” swore Gully to himself as he stalked along Shoemaker’s Row on the Saturday morning. “Tomorrer I’ll reely try to make things go with a swing!” He, too, couldn’t help feeling sorrow for the rift between himself and his ma.

  “Yes,” he murmured as he turned down Puddle Dock Hill in order to avoid passing too close to Labour-in-Vain Yard, “tomorrer I’ll reely go out of me way!”

  He was on an errand to Janner’s of Trig Lane to buy some silver thread and was dressed in his best clothes and wearing his new black shammy gloves. They’d been given to him (together with a black silk hatband which he’d given his ma) last month when he’d gone to old Mrs. Noades’s funeral, and every time he put them on, he thought of deaths of mothers and resolved, before it was too late, to heal the breach with his own.

  For this good intention he’d even bought her something—something he knew she’d like. Every year, on the Friday before Mothering Sunday, Mr. Noades put up a notice in the workroom reminding everyone of the custom of taking gifts to their mothers and offering, at greatly reduced prices, various items of stock that had been hanging fire on the shelves. Gully, at considerable expense, had bought a pair of pinchbeck buckles ornamented with brilliants that, in the gloom of the cobbler’s shop, could have passed as gold and diamonds. They’d been made up into the initial of a lady who’d never come back to claim them; and although they were plainly D’s, Gully felt that it was not beyond human ingenuity to represent them as an elegant form of G’s.

  “Tomorrer,” he repeated as he turned into Trig Lane, “things will reely be good!” He thrust his hand in his pocket to feel the sharp little parcel, and he smiled so that his plain, small-eyed face looked almost handsome.

  He was still smiling when he stopped outside the silver-thread spinners.

  “Went to Janner’s, yesterday, Ma,” he rehearsed to himself, knowing how she liked to hear about the noble metals. “You know . . . in the precious line. Gold an’ silver ’eaped up with no more regard than you’d ’ave for old boots!”

  He went into the shop and stood politely before the trade counter.

  “Six ounces of silver thread for Mr. Noades’s of Shoemaker’s, miss.”

  It was Miss Janner herself who greeted him. She did not look pleased. She had been told to work on this Saturday morning, and she was nursing a strong sense of injury. She compressed her lips and sniffed.

  “You can go and ask my pa. First floor. Workroom. I’m not a servant in this house.”

  Gully went, feeling in his present mood not a little shocked by this sample of a child’s pride.

  He climbed the stairs and, reaching the workroom door, knocked. There was no reply, so he knocked again and began to turn the handle.

  “Come in quick and shut that murdering door!” shouted an angry voice. “Before you blow me bankrupt!”

  Used to folk in a big way, Gully made himself as thin as a piece of paper and slipped inside.

  The workroom was tremendously long and low, extending the whole width of the house. At one end it was lit by a window and at the other by the red, watchful eye of a fire.

  Nor was the fire the only watchful thing. Mr. Janner himself—a bulky, long-limbed person—stood in the middle of the room with a look that crawled unceasingly along the shimmering threads that were stretched between the spindle women by the window and the silver women by the fire. His was the voice that had greeted Gully, but after one hasty glance he paid no further attention to him. His eyes returned, with a mixture of hunger and dread, to their previous scrutiny.

  As the spindle women turned their wheels and drew the valuable thread towards them, he sucked in his lips warningly; and as the silver women at the other end of the room paid out their silk, deftly binding it with wisps of silver as fine as hair as it passed through their palms, he blew out his lips menacingly as if to say, Watch it! Watch it! I know you’re trying to nick me silver; but just you try it! That’s all—just you try it!

  Gully stood stock-still. The atmosphere of suspicion, watchfulness, and value in the long room was the most solemn thing he had ever known; he was in the presence of many hundreds of pounds. It was another world. He struggled in his mind to come to terms with it and find the words that would conjure it up for the pleasure of his ma in Labour-in-Vain Yard.

  But it was quite beyond him, and, try as he might, the only image that came into his head was the eerie, slightly unpleasant one that Mr. Janner looked like an enormous spider in the midst of the silver strands, brooding hungrily on the seven or eight pitiful female flies that were trapped in the suburbs of his web.

  “What is it, lad?”

  “Six ounces of silver thread for Noades’s of Shoemaker’s, if you please, sir. The lady downstairs—”

  “I know.”

  Mr. Janner frowned and nodded, then left his web by way of holding down the threads and climbing over them with his long, flexible legs—which made him look more like a spider than ever. He had very small feet and wore buckles that, by daylight, looked brass and, by firelight, gold.

  He went to a shelf, while the threads continued on their ceaseless, quivering journey from the light of the fire to the light of day. A vague sensation of easing and murmuring sprang up at either end of the travelling threads.

  “I’m watching you,” said Mr. Janner, beaming round suddenly at the spinners. “I’m still watching you, ladies!”

  He beckoned to Gully.

  “Here, lad. Come over here and take a look at the back of me head.”

  Gully obliged.

  “Now—you tell them ladies what you can see.”

  “I—” began Gully.

  “That’s it!” cried Mr. Janner triumphantly. “Eyes! Eyes in the back of me head! So watch out, ladies! Just because I turn me back, it don’t mean I can’t see you!”

  Then he murmured to Gully, “Watch ’em for me, lad. Make sure they don’t wet their hands!”

  With this curious injunction, Mr. Janner turned his back and, visibly trembling with anxiety, lifted down a spindle and began to weigh out the precious thread.

  “Don’t take your eyes off ’em, lad,” he muttered. “Watch what they do with their hands. It’s all right if they warm ’em . . . to keep ’em dry . . . but nothing more than that. There’s eyes on you, ladies!” he shouted out. “There’s eyes everywhere!”

  Obediently, and with a sense of the trust put in him, Gully watched the spinners as, with dull faces and incredibly rapid fingers, they continued their glittering toil. Then once again an eerie image drifted into his head, and he couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that flies should be set to spinning the spider’s web for him.

  Little by little, as he watched—for Mr. Janner was taking his time and weighing was a tedious business—he found his gaze drifting helplessly from hands to faces, and to one face in particular till it was fixed upon it to the exclusion of everything else.

  It was the face of the girl who stood closest to the fire, and such was the illumination that she seemed like a f
lame herself; her hair was reddish and her eyes flared and sparkled as she turned her head.

  Then, suddenly, one of these little blazes seemed to be put out as she winked at Gully. Eagerly he winked back. She smiled, and he smiled back. She blew him a quick, secret kiss, and he blew one back.

  On the way out of the workroom, after his business was concluded, he managed to linger by her.

  “When d’you finish?”

  “Dark.”

  “Doin’ anything tonight?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Meet me outside?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Go on!”

  “All right, then. Outside—at dark.”

  The kiss! Gully couldn’t get over it. It had happened so suddenly: the raised hand, the lowered face, the pursed lips, the quick, fiery smile—and then, puff! Though it had been lighter than the wisps of silver that rustled through the girl’s hands, it had struck Gully with the force of a cannonball and blown a hole through his head and heart.

  He was fifteen and she was fifteen and she was his first real girl. He went back to Shoemaker’s Row like a lad apprenticed to the trade of sky and stars.

  “I thought you mightn’t come,” she said. She’d been waiting for him in windy Trig Lane, with a wild yellow cloak blowing all round her as if she’d brought an unwilling friend. She looked agitated.

  “And there was me thinkin’ you mightn’t,” said Gully, which really didn’t do justice to the heartaching fears and doubts he’d gone through during the long afternoon.

  “I said I’d come, didn’t I?”

  “So did I.”

  They began to walk down towards the river. She told him her name was Daisy LaSalle. . . .

  “That’s French, ain’t it?” he asked, a shade uneasily. Anything French he knew was costly, and the buckles he’d bought his ma had left him in reduced circumstances.

  “From Spitalfields, where the weavers live,” explained Miss LaSalle. “You know, them huge knots.”

  Gully, not knowing that this was Miss LaSalle’s effort at “Huguenots,” nodded in a baffled fashion.

  “Me ma was an actress.”

  “I s’pose it was your pa what was in the rope business,” said Gully, dimly pursuing the notion of knots.

  It turned out that Miss LaSalle wasn’t any too sure about her pa. So far as she knew, he’d been either a beadle or a lamplighter from Bishopsgate who’d been very sweet on her ma and had told her he’d never lit lamps half as bright as her eyes.

  “I expect it was ’im,” said Gully—and meant it. Miss LaSalle really looked luminous in the dark March night. Gully could have walked by the light of her anywhere.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I thought we might ’ave a bite of supper at the Three Cranes.”

  “I don’t want you to spend all your money on me,” said Miss LaSalle, giving his arm a quick squeeze and, at the same time, bestowing on him a nervous smile.

  “That’s all right,” said Gully, and went on to explain that, although he was only Mr. Noades’s apprentice, his ma looked after the family leather business and was in quite a big way. . . .

  “Making shoes?”

  “N-not reely,” said Gully, thinking of the ancient journeyman and his shameful trade. “We don’t ’ave much to do with—with feet.”

  Miss LaSalle gave his arm another squeeze, and Gully, over the worst, went on to say that his ma didn’t actually work herself, but looked after the staff.

  “They’ve been with ’er a long time, of course. It’s a real family trade. Old-established, y’know . . . in one of them quiet parts off Old Change.”

  They came to Trig Stairs, from where Gully insisted they take a waterman’s boat to the Three Cranes. A friend of his—a clockmaker’s apprentice from Carter Lane whom he’d consulted—had advised this. He always did it himself when he’d got a new girl, and he wasn’t sure if the game would turn out to be worth the candle.

  The river unsettled their stomachs, so they didn’t want to eat much. Under the influence of the wind, the water turned out to be choppy enough to slice onions. They both started off cheerfully enough, with Gully waxing expansive about his ma’s circumstances, when, after a dozen black and awful yards, he found he had to shut his mouth to stop everything inside him coming up and flying out. By the time they reached the Three Cranes, Miss LaSalle had to help him disembark and, to his dazed shame, pay the waterman herself, as he was too ill to do more than moan.

  The landlady found them a table in a corner, removed from all sight of the river.

  “Brandy and port wine,” she said, eyeing Gully sympathetically. “That’ll settle his stomach. Just half a pint taken straight off; then he’ll be fit and ready for mutton chops and kisses for afters, eh?”

  She proved only partly right. He drank down the potion, and, sure enough, he fancied kisses for afters and made several attempts to claim them, but he couldn’t quite manage to keep down the mutton chops. Repeatedly he slumped back in his corner; he was a much divided apprentice: his heart was in the right place, but his stomach was most definitely not.

  Nonetheless, as long as he stayed perfectly still and didn’t breathe too heavily, he felt quite well. He was with his girl and she was shining in front of him like all the lamps in the Strand. Carefully he told her over and over again about his ma, as, somehow, she seemed interested and he felt it peculiarly important for her to know.

  “We’re reely in a big way, y’know . . . leather an’ all that. . . .”

  “I suppose you’ll be taking it over when—when your ma gets too old? You’ll be following in your pa’s footsteps. . . .”

  “I thought I told you,” said Gully carefully, “that we don’t ’ave all that much to do with feet.”

  They left the Three Cranes at ten o’clock and walked arm in arm along the river, back towards Trig Lane. Gully was feeling much, much better. The worst of his experience was over, and he felt only a little lightheaded. He assured Miss LaSalle that there was no need for her to walk nearest the river, as he was in no danger of falling in. He was, he said, as steady as anything. . . .

  Just to prove it, he managed to kiss Miss LaSalle three times; but on the third occasion he was dismayed to feel that her cheek was salty and wet with tears.

  “I—I ain’t ’urt you?” he asked anxiously.

  “N-no. Not really.”

  “Was I ’oldin’ on to your arm too tight?”

  “N-no. It wasn’t that.”

  “Was it—was it the mutton chops and . . . and all that?”

  “’Course not!”

  “Was it—was it me kissin’ you so soon?”

  “’Course not!”

  “Then what is it? I ain’t done nothing else!”

  “It’s just that I lost me place. At Janner’s. I’ve been turned off.”

  “Was it on account of me? Was it because I talked to you?”

  “Not really. It was . . . that kiss I blew you. He saw me. I’ll swear he’s really got eyes in the back of his head! He saw it. He shouted and swore I’d licked me hand. Came up and felt it just after you’d gone. It was wet all right. I was sweatin’ with fright!”

  “But what was wrong in that?”

  “Wet hands. It’s a trick of the trade. That’s why we got the fire . . . to keep drying ourselves off. If your hands are wet, you can damp the silk and make it weigh right. Then you can nick his silver and no one finds out till it’s too late. But there’s not much chance at Janner’s. He’s that careful he won’t drink a drop all day, ’case he has to go out for a pee. He’ll die in that there silver harness of his . . . and his last words will be, ‘I’m a-watching you, ladies!’ That’s why he’s in such a big way. . . .”

  Gully stood as still as nature would let him, while the black winds roared down the lanes and alleys that led to the river and threatened to topple him over the low embankment. He was deeply moved by Miss LaSalle’s tale, and he was even more moved by her wondrous beauty. He screwed up his f
ace as he thought of avenging his girl by squashing the spidery Mr. Janner with a huge cobbler’s hammer.

  “You shouldn’t have had that mutton chop,” said Miss LaSalle with concern. “Put your head down between your knees and you’ll feel better. Honest, you will. . . .”

  “It—it’s all right,” mumbled Gully. “Reely.”

  “Go on. I won’t watch, if you like.”

  She turned away, and her yellow cloak blew out and smacked Gully in the face. He tottered and sank down till he was able to rest his cold, wet forehead against the cold, wet stones.

  “Feeling better, now?”

  He opened his eyes and saw Miss LaSalle’s worn old shoes shifting in front of him. He stared at them as if with deep interest. . . .

  “I’ve had ’em a long time,” she said awkwardly. “They was my ma’s. They used to have pretty buckles. . . .”

  “I got something,” said Gully impulsively. “Specially for you.”

  He stood up and fumbled in his pocket.

  “’Ere,” he said. “They got D’s on ’em. D for Daisy.”

  He brought out the little parcel containing the pinchbeck and brilliant buckles and tore it open.

  “Oh! Oh! You shouldn’t!” cried Miss LaSalle. “You shouldn’t spend your money like that!”

  “Don’t you like ’em?”

  “Oh, yes, yes! They’re beautiful! They ain’t gold, are they?”

  “They’re for you,” said Gully, declining to commit himself.

  “I could wear them as brooches,” said Miss LaSalle, crying and wiping her eyes on her cloak. “It seems a shame to put ’em on me shoes where nobody can see ’em.”

  “Yes,” agreed Gully. “In our line, we don’ go much on feet.”

  “I’ll wear them tomorrow!”

  “Tomorrer?” repeated Gully with the vague chill of half remembering something.

  “When—when we go to see your ma,” went on Miss LaSalle, breathing rapidly and holding on to her young man’s arm with a fierce, despairing grip.

  Gully stared at her in terror.

  “It’s all right, ain’t it? I can come?” pleaded Miss LaSalle, her voice trembling. “It’s just that I was wondering, hoping you could ask your ma if—if she’d let me work for her . . . in the leather line. I’m very good with me hands, and everyone says I’m quick to learn. I did a bit of leather stitching before I went into the spinning line. Only—only you see, after tonight, I got nowhere to live. So I thought, seeing how your ma is in a big way, she’d give me a chance?”