by Stan Barstow
I remember now that she has a sister, another Miss Price, who’s Domestic Science mistress at the Grammar School. She’s come since my time.
‘Was it a white wedding, Vic?’ Ingrid asks, and I see I’ve got her interested now, anyway. Funny how birds are interested in weddings, even when it’s somebody they don’t know. ‘What did your sister wear?’ she says, wanting to know all the details. I’m a bit out of my depth here and I flounder about for a minute till Miss Price comes to the rescue.
‘My sister and I went to the church.’ (Funny, but I never saw them.) ‘She was so keen to see young Mr Lester marry, and I love a wedding at any time.’
There – even the ones who’re past it!
Anyway, she trots out all the gen Ingrid wants and she says, ‘I’d love to see the photos, Vic, when you get them.’ We’re just inside the door of the office building by now and Miss Price says, ‘Cheery-bye,’ and stalks off down the long corridor.
Ingrid giggles. ‘Isn’t she a case?’
I say, ‘Hmm.’ I look after her where she’s walking away. I don’t know, I always feel a bit sorry somehow for people like that.
The bell rings while we’re standing there and Ingrid says she’ll have to go.
‘Yes, okay. I’ll try to get hold of the photos when they’re ready.’
‘Yes, do. I’d love to see them.’
She walks away after Miss Price and I go up the stairs. Bringing the photos will give me another chance to talk to her if I can’t manage it any other way before then. I want to lean over the rail and watch her go, but there’s too many people about and Jimmy Slade, my mate at the office, comes up with a muffler on and bike clips and carrying his bike pump that he doesn’t leave in the shed for fear somebody pinches it.
‘Now then, cock.’
‘Now then, Jimmy.’
‘Back to it, eh?’
‘Aye, back to it.’
We go up the steps together.
II
Whittaker’s is about the biggest engineering works round Cressley. All down the side of the erection shop there’s the name spelled out in white bricks – DAWSON WHITTAKER & SONS, LTD, ENGINEERS. This is so when you’re on the train you’ll know what that big mucky place was you passed just before Cressley junction.
The first thing you think when you go into the offices is that whoever built them meant them to last a while. There’s solid oak doors all over the place and a lick of varnish every ten years or so is all that’s needed to keep them in trim. The top halves of most of the office walls are glass and when you stand at one end of the ground floor you can see right down through office after office where people are working at their desks or talking to one another with maybe their hands going, but you can’t hear a thing, like watching television when the sound’s gone. The drawing office is the biggest and it takes nearly all the length of the upstairs floor on one side of the building. There’s more glass here than anywhere else. It’s half glass on the corridor side and there’s big windows out on the lane. Then the roof’s half glazed and there’s this big window, like a church window but with plain glass, up in the end wall. You’ve got plenty of light to work with all right but it’s like a greenhouse in summer and a refrigerator in winter. The boards are in three lines and there’s enough for thirty-five draughtsmen and designers. At the side of every board there’s a plan press which gives a flat top for your drawings and filing room for all the old drawing that have been piling up since the firm began back in eighteen-seventy something. You have a drawer for yourself as well where you put your own stuff, such as sandwiches, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Mirror, Snappy Nudes, Sporting Pink, and even reference books and drawing instruments, all depending what sort of bloke you are and what you’re interested in. There’s three smaller rooms open off the big office, one for the estimators, one for the tracing lasses, and one where the prints are done. The print machine’s a carbon arc job and it looks a bit like one of them mechanical pianos where you put a penny in and it plays a tune that was in the Top Ten during the Boer War. The prints are done by a young lad called Laisterdyke and a lass called Phoebe Johnson. Then at the top end of the office there’s two glass cubicles, one belonging to the assistant chief, Miller, who everybody likes, and the other to the chief, Hassop, who nobody much cares for.
The real boss is Mr Althorpe, the Chief Designs Engineer, and he has his own office (private – no glass) with his name on the door along the corridor. The work comes from him and Hassop and Miller pass it out to the section leaders. Each section leader has a team and this can vary from two or three to a dozen blokes depending how big the job is they’re doing. You’d think in an office this size there’d be bags of chance for experience but each team specializes and once you know a particular job you can find yourself stuck with it year after year. Anyway, that’s the D.O. at Whittaker’s.
I’m not sorry to be back because I quite like both the office and the work. I don’t like either as much as I did the first two or three years I was here but I haven’t got to the stage where I can’t stand it any more so I don’t mind. And besides, I’ve got another interest at work now.
I don’t see her again till dinner-time and then it’s in the canteen with three tables and about thirty people between me and her. She’s sitting facing me and though she doesn’t look at me I can’t keep my eyes off her. She has a way of breaking off what she’s saying to throw her head back and laugh (she’s got rather a carrying laugh actually), and as I watch her I see how her neck curves and I wonder what it would be like to run my hand up over it and under her chin. There’s a scar on her neck under her left ear and I want to put my fingers on that as well because I can’t bear the thought of the knife cutting into her.
Ken Rawlinson’s sitting next to me with enough fountain pens and propelling pencils for half the office in his top pocket. He asks me to pass the water and this takes my mind off Ingrid for a minute. He’s wearing that tie clip again. There’s a few things about Rawly that get on my wires and this tie clip’s one of them. It’s one of these glider clips with a bit of fine chain on it. The idea is to slide the clip on to your shirt and let the chain hold your tie; but Rawly always wears it with the clip on both his tie and his shirt and the chain hanging down for fancy like. I’ve often wanted to put him right but I always think why should I? He’s one of these blokes with ten bob each way on himself and so why should I care if he looks a clot?
He fills his glass up and says, ‘I saw a very good French film last night.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Gervaise,’ Rawly says. ‘Based on a novel by Zola.’ He pokes about on his plate as if he expects to uncover something nasty. ‘Do you know his novels at all?’
‘’Fraid not.’ Zola? Sounds like a game, like bingo or ludo or canasta.
‘An excellent writer. Surprisingly modern to say he wrote sixty or seventy years ago.’
‘Oh?’
‘Very outspoken for his time. They banned his books in this country. Wouldn’t wear them.’
‘Sexy, eh?’ This is more like it.
‘Shall we say “direct”?’ Rawly says and I think he can call it any name he likes as far as I’m concerned. I decide to take the mickey a bit.
‘Was this picture hot stuff?’
‘Oh, X certificate and all that,’ he says. ‘Nothing pornographic about it, though. An adult film.’
‘Be in French, I suppose?’
‘Oh yes. Subtitled, of course, for those who don’t know the language.’
I gather from the way he says this that he doesn’t include himself in this lot of ignoramuses.
‘Well I don’t mind these foreign films when there’s a bit of tit or summat to see,’ I say, watching his face out of the corner of my eye. His nose curls as though he’s just noticed a bad smell and he blushes ever so slightly. ‘But I can’t stand having to read what they’re saying at the bottom of the screen. Give me the good old English language any day.’
‘Everyone to his tas
te,’ Rawly says, and turns and says something to the bod on his other side.
I’m a bit sorry now that I’ve gone out of my way to make him think I’m just another cloth-head. But then, I think, what do I care what a nig-nog like Rawly thinks about me anyway?
The waitress puts a plate of sponge pudding and custard in front of me and I’m just going to start in on it when I hear chairs squeaking and see that Ingrid and her pals are leaving. She passes so close to me her sleeve brushes my shoulder but she doesn’t flicker an eyelid to show she knows I’m there. So much for that. I don’t know what I’m flogging myself to death for. But it’s getting worse. Only just before the holidays I put eight-foot-two over a row of dimensions that totted up to nine-foot-seven and Bob Lacey, my section leader, pointed it out to me in a friendly way and told me to watch what I was doing. It’s a good job Bob did spot it or there would have been a lot of angle-iron cut and wasted in the shop. I’m getting so I expect to drop clangers now and I nearly always check my drawings myself before I pass them on to Bob. But one of these days I’ll slip up and we’ll all miss it and the next thing I know I’ll be called down into the Works to look at a pile of scrap iron worth maybe hundreds of pounds. Then I’ll have really had it.
I’m nearly sure that Hassop’s got his eye on me as well. He seems to be always nosing round, creeping up like he does, in these school-issue glasses he wears, and breathing his bad breath all over you. He’s a littlish bloke with ginger hair. He hasn’t all that much left on his head now but there’s always a fair amount sprouting out of his nose. He always wears the same kind of bluish grey suits that look neither new nor old, and he just seems to wear one till it gets too shiny and then comes in another just like it. You wish sometimes Hassop would get his hair off and really bawl you out, but he never does. If he gets really mad he goes white, but he hardly ever lets go except on the younger lads. He daren’t, that’s his trouble, and everybody despises him for it. But nobody goes too far because right behind Hassop there’s Mr Althorpe and he’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Tell anybody to go to blazes, Althorpe would, and make no bones about it. So everybody respects him, even if they don’t like him like they like somebody like Miller, for instance.
So it seems to me that sooner or later, the way I’m going on, I’ll wind up on Althorpe’s carpet, and I can’t see any way out of it because I just can’t get my mind off Ingrid. It’s this not knowing. If only I knew one way or the other just how I stand…
III
First you take an old knife (I used the broken one the Old Lady scrapes potatoes with) and get rid of all the mud, doing a bit of prising if it’s caked up solid under the instep. Then when you’ve given them a good going over with a stiffish brush they’re ready for the polish. (You really should take the laces out but I can’t always be bothered going to that trouble, even though tonight I’m doing a special job.) I like to clean shoes, especially when I’ve got something on my mind, because giving your hands something to do kind of helps you think and sometimes it even takes your mind off things. I like to poke into the waxy polish and spread it all over the shoes and go at them like mad with the brush and watch the shine break through and deepen; then finish off with a velvet till the toecaps are like black glass. Tonight I’m cleaning the shoes because I’m going out; but I’ve got something on my mind as well; and every now and again I have to stop and tell myself it’s true and it’s really happened to me.
It was the same day I borrowed the bus fare from Ingrid. I got the feeling stronger than ever in the afternoon that old Hassop had it in for me and when he sidles up at ten to five and tells me a drawing I’ve had on the board since a week before Christmas is wanted first thing in the morning, I’m more sure than ever. It means I’ll have to work over, and bang goes my chance of seeing Ingrid on the way home. Well, I have to do it whether it’s really wanted or Hassop’s keeping me back out of spite, so I settle down to it and hope it won’t take me long. There’s plenty of work in the office and one or two sections stay behind most nights of the week. But tonight being the first day back after the holidays nobody’s in the mood and at half past five everybody packs up to go. The board lights click off as they all slope out in ones and twos. The tracers come through, wafting face powder all over the place and chattering fifty to the dozen like birds do. Then by twenty to six there’s only me left besides Hassop and Miller, who always leave after everybody else. At five to six I unpin the sheet and take it up to Hassop’s office. Another five minutes goes by while he reckons to look it over and drops hints right left and centre about my work. Then I’m free to go.
Half the lights are out in the corridors and I can hear the cleaners’ buckets clanking somewhere. I go down the stairs and I’m pushing on the big door when I hear these high heels come tapping along the corridor behind me. I must go psychic for a minute because I know straight off who it is and my heart gives a little flutter. I turn round and she flashes a smile as though she’s glad to see me.
‘I’m going your way,’ she says.
I hold the door open for her and get a gorgeous whiff of her scent as she goes by. We say good night to the commissionaire and walk off down the lane. It seems she’s feeling a bit peevish.
‘Some people…’ she says. ‘They don’t think of starting their letters till everybody else is going home.’
‘You’ve got one an’ all, have you?’ I say.
‘Have I got one!’
‘An’ who’s yours?’
‘Leslie Felton… You’d think some people hadn’t got homes to go to. Not that you can blame him, I suppose, with a wife like he’s got.’
‘What’s wrong with his wife?’
‘Oh, she’s a real shrew, by all accounts. Don’t tell me you didn’t know? I thought everybody did.’
It seems there’s a lot I don’t know and she starts to bring me up to date. I don’t have to make the conversation tonight; she just rolls it out. She’s as full of scandal as the Sunday papers and by the time we get to the bus stop I know more about the people who work at Whittaker’s than I’ve learned all the time I’ve been there.
I get both fares into town and she says, ‘That makes us quits,’ and smiles.
She picks up where she left off and starts chattering again; but I’m not really listening now. My mind’s working like mad on how I can make the most of this chance. I try to think of a way to get started and all the time the bus is tearing down the road into town. When I see the Grammar School sail by I kind of panic because we’ll be in the station any minute now.
‘Look, there’s something I –’ And she starts talking again at the same time. We both stop. ‘Go on,’ I say.
‘I was just going to ask you if you’d seen that new musical Rise and Shine at the Palace,’ she says. ‘I was wondering what it was like.’
I haven’t a clue what it’s like, to be honest, but I say. ‘I think it’s good,’ and I’m thinking, Now, now, now: What are you waiting for? ‘I was thinking of going to see it myself one night this week, as a matter of fact,’ I say. This is another fib, but I don’t care. I have to clear my throat. ‘P’raps… er mebbe you’d like to come with me… see it together…’
She says, ‘Oh!’ just as if it’s the last thing she’d have thought of and I begin to think how I can pass it off if she turns me down. ‘Well, when?’
I can hardly sit still in the seat. I want to jump up and shout, I’m that excited. ‘I’d thought of going tomorrow, but any night ’ud suit me really.’
‘Tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve,’ she says, ‘and I’m going to a party. Can you make it Wednesday?’
‘All right.’ Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I can make it any night or all of them. I just want it to be soon.
‘Wednesday, then,’ she says, and I nod. ‘Wednesday.’
Before the bus pulls into the station we’ve fixed up what time we’ll meet and where and everything. And to think, only this morning I wouldn’t have given a bent penny for my chanc
es. But that’s how things work out sometimes. Wednesday… I just don’t know how I’ll live till then.
But course I do, and now here I am waiting on the corner at twenty-five to eight. She’s late, but only five minutes, and I was here ten minutes early to make sure I didn’t miss her so that makes it seem more. The weather’s gone all soft all of a sudden. It’s rained pretty hard today and though it’s stopped now you can still feel it in the wind. The roads and pavements are shining in the lights and the car tyres sizzle as they go by. A black Super Snipe slides up to the kerb and I step back smartish as it throws water up out of the gutter. I look after this car and watch it stop and let a bloke out. Then I watch it pull away and pick up speed with exhaust smoke curling in the tail lights. Now if I had a car… Dames go for bods with cars. It’s only natural. And having a car would give you confidence, a sort of air, like. I imagine myself behind the wheel of a snappy little two-seater convertible – no need for anything big and swanky – rolling up to the kerb where Ingrid’s waiting and enjoying the look on her face as I open the door and tell her to jump in. ‘Where d’you fancy going tonight? What about nipping over to Leeds or Bradford to a show?’ That’s the way to take a bint out on a first date. And after the show, parked in some quiet spot and me with my arm round her listening to her say she’s been mad about me all the time… I can’t even drive a car. I suppose I could learn soon enough, though. And I could probably afford to buy one if I saved up for about fifteen years and packed in smoking.
I’m all wrapped up in this and I don’t see this other car whipping up for a stop till it goes by with a whoosh and shoots water all over my shoes and trouser legs. Bang goes the shine I spent so much time on till the Old Lady was getting suspicious. I think the creases in my pants will be all right, though, because my suit’s Terylene, my new clerical grey that I got for Chris’s wedding. And she won’t notice my shoes in the dark. I’m pretty presentable otherwise, I think. I saved my shave till after tea and finished off with the aftershave lotion I paid six bob for on the way home from work so’s I’d smell nice. And I’ve taken special care over brushing my teeth, making sure there was no tea-time sausage and chips stuck in the cracks. I reckon I couldn’t do more for Diana Dors.
