The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘Mr Stark will love it.’

  ‘Twinkle, please.’

  ‘Well what? Have you got any better ideas? Next you’re going to be suggesting we write about Lloyd George’s budget or national pensions. How about the death of the House of Lords or the rise of trade unionism?’ She reached for her gin glass. ‘Come on, they’re all bats. What do you care?’

  ‘But Ebony . . .’ she tailed off.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She’ll kill me.’

  ‘Since when was Frankie George frightened of a suffragette? Do you remember that day we dressed up my cockatoo to look like Christabel Pankhurst?’

  ‘It’s different, that didn’t offend anyone.’

  ‘Well why do you care?’

  Frankie fiddled with her pencil.

  ‘Come on, spit it out, or you shan’t have any more gin.’

  Frankie sighed. ‘Ebony Diamond. She had this huge argument today with the man who makes her costumes. Right in front of me, got proper violent. I’m not sure what about, but she’s big in the suffragettes and I just, I don’t know. If I can get her trust I might be onto something. You know how desperate I am to get into reporting. Proper . . .’ She suddenly stopped herself.

  ‘Proper reporting,’ Twinkle said dryly.

  ‘I don’t mean like that. I mean—’

  ‘Puss, you want to watch that mouth of yours. It’s going to get you in trouble one of these days.’ Her hand roamed the covers until she found the head of a dead mink to fondle. ‘You know you’re not really a woman of independent means yet and let me tell you it takes a lot of hard work and quite a bit of doing things you don’t like very much to get there. Greasing men’s beards. Massaging gouty knees.’ She smiled an eerie, indulgent smile. ‘Do you think I bought all this by only working jobs I felt like?’

  ‘I was only hoping . . .’

  ‘You think that because you don’t dress like the rest of us you are above all this froth and nonsense.’

  ‘Don’t think that at all,’ Frankie muttered.

  ‘The roaring girls were trussed up like that three hundred years before you. You sound as snotty-nosed as those self-righteous suffragettes you’re so eager to stick up for.’

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. Frankie sipped the dregs of her gin glass. She didn’t dare pour another.

  ‘Purple then?’ she said after a few moments.

  Twinkle was still in a sulk. Her gnarled pink hand fingered the rim of her glass.

  ‘Twinkle, you know I only brought it up because I thought you’d know a thing or two about her. You know all the society girls.’

  Twinkle smiled weakly at the flattery. Newspapergirls, Frankie thought, were nursemaids as much as anything else. ‘And,’ she continued, ‘I thought if anyone would know what men in toppers were doing going into a corset shop after hours it would be you as well.’ She tossed it out like fish bait. Twinkle suddenly looked sharply at her. Frankie couldn’t be certain but she thought she saw a frown momentarily crease her forehead. Encouraged, she went on. ‘Oh, crazy it was. I thought I was seeing things. You must know Smythe’s, Bond Street. I’ll bet you’ve got a couple of his in that wardrobe.’

  Twinkle’s eyes had fogged over again with the gin. At length she said slowly, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t go digging around either that girl or any goings-on at Smythe’s. You might find yourself learning things you rather wish you had left alone.’

  Frankie sat up. ‘So you do know the shop I mean?’

  ‘Olivier Smythe’s? Any woman worth her flesh knows that shop.’

  ‘So why is it so special?’ She inched forward. ‘What do you know about it?’

  Twinkle was silent for a moment, then looked at her coldly. ‘Nothing I would dream of sharing with you.’

  Frankie felt her organs beginning to boil.

  Twinkle went on, ‘You know I really do feel better after that Turkish bath. I think there’s still enough fuel in the spirit lamp for you to have one too. You don’t mind going after me, no of course you don’t. Perhaps we’ll write about it after all.’

  Six

  The wind beat Inspector Primrose’s face as the constable drove, dodging horses and carts and electric trams and white-gloved policemen directing traffic along the Mall. The Westminster sergeant, Price, tried absurdly hard to keep up a shrieked conversation from the back seat. They approached Old Bond Street from Piccadilly where two vans were parked blocking the turn off. The constable reared the car up onto the pavement; a group of onlookers dashed for cover as it grunted to a halt next to the Royal Arcade. Primrose clung to the dashboard, slamming into the side of the door. On the opposite side of the road, the Fenwick’s side, a line of gaping shattered windows ran as far as the eye could see. The hundreds of police seemed equal to the number of women, voices and catcalls pierced now and then by a single scream.

  ‘It’s like dominoes the way they do it,’ Price was saying to the other officers. ‘I’ve seen them. They line themselves up. One goes first, then the next.’ They climbed out of the car, walking apace. Price demonstrated in the air the movement of a hammer on glass. ‘That way they only get fined one window each.’

  The doors of the Black Marias across the street were open and Primrose saw that already there was a cuffed woman in each cubicle, shouting through the wires.

  ‘I pay taxes, I pay your wages, you criminals!’

  ‘This is the work of that devil Asquith, let him draw our blood, you’ll never make us stop.’

  ‘Finger your wife with those hands, do you, sergeant? She’s an unlucky lady.’

  In the cubicle nearest the door a woman was weeping. Another reached a hand though the wire towards her. ‘Hold on in there, lovie, don’t worry, they might smell like dogs but their bark’s worse than their bite.’

  Primrose shuddered, watching Price wade into the scene as if it were nothing more than unruly traffic. In the distance towards Oxford Street a breakaway group had pulled out hatchets and rocks in stockings and were attacking a police car. Other suffragettes were trying to hold them back, calling for just the windows of shops to be smashed, while a group of women with Freedom League posters were demonstrating, calling for an end to the vandalism. It was all a gigantic mess, Primrose thought, and in the middle of it, green coppers fresh from Peel House were grabbing the arms of women older and more respectable than their own mothers. All of a sudden Price was behind him again, snapping his fingers. ‘Inspector, Inspector. Look.’

  Primrose turned back to where the sergeant was pointing. At first he only saw a woman in a suffragette sash blowing a kiss to her friends as she was led off, cuffed. It was a scene being repeated the length of the street, ladies in furs calmly being arrested. But beyond the woman a crowd was growing. Bodies were moving in a scrum towards one of the shattered shop windows.

  ‘Something’s not right there. Why aren’t they on it?’ Price gestured to a couple of constables up the road, whispering and turning a blind eye to the fight. A chant was creeping steadily from the core of the group, but with all the knotted bodies tangling for the centre it was hard to tell what they were shouting. Primrose pushed forward, Price behind him. Feathering the group’s edges, small tussles were breaking out, men on men. They were working men, not police, by the look of their neckerchiefs and flat caps, their brown jackets and shirts open at the neck. Primrose wondered who had alerted them to the smash. Two were at loggerheads, clutching one another by the shoulders, rutting like stags. ‘Call them off,’ the smaller, stockier one was shouting while the other man grunted and sweated and wrenched him to the street.

  ‘Here, watch it!’ a tea girl in a pinny cried, as Primrose dug into the clutch of bodies, parting the crowd like a bread roll.

  ‘Scotland Yard,’ he snapped back.

  Her eyes flamed. ‘Well get in there and call off your dogs!’

  He heaved his way into the mess leaving Price hovering at the edges. There were some shopkeepers nearby, still in their aprons and overalls. Fists were bei
ng thrown towards the centre, people were shouting. The light was so dim it was hard to see where bodies ended and shadows began.

  ‘Mercy! Mercy!’ one woman cried. A suffragette in a sash tried to fling in her hammer. Primrose caught her arm just as it flew at him. A flat-capped man turned and snarled in his face, ‘Get out of here. On police orders.’

  ‘I am the police.’

  The punches were still beating inwards. Something was desperately not right at the centre of the commotion and the crowd outside it was growing larger. As bodies knocked against each other, people lost their balance and dragged others to the ground by their knees. Primrose flung a boy out of the way and he landed in the stomach of the tea girl, sending her backwards. She screamed. All of a sudden with the sweat and the bodies bashing against each other he was finding it hard to breathe. Then he saw the legs.

  Two white-stockinged pins lay like birch saplings across the pavement. One had lost its boot and been stabbed in the foot with a shard of glass. A little streak of blood ran down the white silk. Primrose rammed the final few men out of the way, until he saw the rest of the figure lying in a heap.

  In front of him two men were pinning her to the ground. From the shape of her body she looked barely older than a teenager, though he couldn’t see her face, obscured as it was by mounds of shredded petticoats lifted high over her head. She was clinging desperately to a suffragette sash as if it would protect her, screaming blind, her arms held fast above her head. The two men bent about her were tickling her stomach, pinching her thighs, laughing hysterically. Suddenly a jolt in his back threw Primrose toppling into the girl, sending the two men sideways off their haunches onto the pavement.

  ‘Watch it,’ one snarled, turning.

  Primrose froze. He knew the voice. But it couldn’t possibly be. He squinted in the dim light, until he was able to focus on the two faces. The crowd suddenly simmered to a hush, interested now in the men in the centre squaring up to one another.

  ‘Make up your mind,’ a woman cried scornfully, ‘Either kill us or protect us, don’t pretend you can do both.’

  In front of Primrose, smiling sheepishly, as if they had been caught with their fingers in the jam jar, were Wilson and Barnes. Barnes’s lips curled underneath his thick moustache, not a bit embarrassed, while Wilson looked at his scuffed shoes. ‘Advice we got was to be a bit rough with them, Inspector, make an example.’

  Primrose stayed immobile for a second. Then his reason found him and he rushed to cover the girl’s bleeding legs, pulling her skirts back into place.

  ‘Inspector.’

  ‘I don’t want to know. This woman needs a doctor.’ Two suffragettes came forward and helped her sit up. Her face was swollen from crying. With her shoulders slumped forward and her legs sticking straight out she looked horribly young.

  Barnes swayed on his feet. ‘There is hysteria bacillus in every case of suffragitis. Think of us as doctors, Freddie-boy.’

  He looked Barnes in the eye. ‘Chops, was it? On a Wednesday?’

  Barnes looked confused. Then a noise in the middle of the road distracted them. The crowd, already dispersing, were turning their attention back to the street.

  ‘It’s her. Mrs Haverfield,’ whispered one of the suffragettes on the ground.

  Primrose turned to watch. With the majority of the window-smashers rounded up, the centre of the road was now clear and was being patrolled by three constables on horseback. As the onlookers stared, the three horses tentatively stopped, then stepped backwards, swayed, arched their necks, and slumped full force to their knees. The officers on top clutched the reins and their helmets, kicking the horses with the spurs on their boots, trying desperately to regain control over the animals, who were suddenly behaving as if they were spellbound.

  ‘What is it?’ Primrose murmured. Barnes nodded towards a woman straight ahead of the horses, kneeling on the dirty, glass-flecked street before them. She wore a top hat and black velvet-collared coat, a long tweed skirt spread around her on the ground. The horses lowered their heads as if bowing to her, paying homage to the smile on her face. All around had hushed. In the queer twilight breaths were frozen. Even the police officers had stopped short, prisoners still attached to them by the cuffs.

  Barnes leaned closer and Primrose could smell stale beer on him like old garlic. ‘That’s Mrs Haverfield. She charms police horses. It’s witchcraft, pure and simple, that’s what it is, Freddie. And if we don’t put a stop to it, right now, tonight, who knows what they’ll do next?’

  Seven

  A gust of air greeted Frankie as she opened the door onto the street, cold as buried bones, but a welcome relief. She drank it in. After being stewed in the gem-wood cabinet, she had been scrubbed with boiled almond bran, rinsed in orange-scented vinegar and doused by Gracie in the bathroom with borax water. The wretched machine had been about as comfortable as sitting in a coal scuttle. Twinkle of course wanted it lauded as the greatest invention since buttered toast, along with purple suits and starvation fashion.

  Frankie shook out her arms and legs and gathered the broken camera back onto her shoulder. Anger and disappointment tugged viciously at her, her stomach raged with hunger. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, except for a few claggy sickly rose creams Twinkle had popped in her mouth while she was in the cabinet. Her blood was starting to feel weak. She fought against it. This was what she had chosen, and she always knew it was going to be harder than fitting machines up in that stinking composition room. She pulled out her pocket-watch. Half past eleven. There was one last thing she could try before the day was spent. Bending down, she poked a finger into the side of her brogues and sure enough there was the spare half crown that always lived there in case of emergencies or pickpockets, something her father had shown her when she was a little girl, the place he kept his winnings when he had been at the bookies.

  Soho would be alive at this hour.

  She doubled back on herself until she came to a junction where omnibuses were still roaring about the empty roads, their golden lamps lighting up the faces of the passengers inside: evening workers, waiters in white shirts, warehouse men in factory aprons. She thought about taking a motor bus but settled instead for a pirate horse-drawn for the cheaper fare, hopped on the back and paid her penny. For the first time that day her limbs gave way to the rattling, comforting movement of the bus, the solitude it gave its passengers, all soaked in their own private worlds.

  Some still said Soho was the devil’s haunt. The City Council’s twenty-year crusade against ‘disorderly houses’ had cleaned up some of it, cleared out the slums and set a programme of eviction on the brothel madams that saw them shift their business down Piccadilly to congregate round the little statue of the Angel of Christian Charity (now nicknamed Eros). But there were still some landlords that preferred the rent a red-light worker could pay, compared to a family of tailors or cobblers. It was its own enclave, a village where the children were smart, and the shadowy figures of illegal bookies talking in unfamiliar tongues could be taken for menace. Frankie’s father, who had been born and bred in Tottenham, couldn’t wait to drag her Italian mother out of Soho. Visiting it always had the uncomfortable feeling for Frankie of going somewhere she felt she ought to know but didn’t. Whenever she saw Wardour Street she would think of her grandfather Lucchese’s funeral, the blurred memory of a gun cart, an open coffin and black horses with sinister plumes.

  She hopped off the bus at Leicester Square and made her way up Greek Street, where the markets were still going, auctioneers selling off the last of their antiques, costermongers tossing half-rotten veg to children with wicker baskets. French laundresses walked the streets with panniers of pressed linen bound to their hips. The public houses spilled out onto the streets, and the steamed windows of French bistros and Hungarian restaurants were full of well-dressed men being served rich-smelling stews. There were men and women of all hair and skin colours bustling about, speaking a mixture of languages, that seemed to shift with each st
reet corner you turned. Tailors’ houses and patisseries of sweets and cakes had closed their doors for the night. A man in a chef’s hat was smoking in the doorway of a trattoria. Frankie asked him in broken Italian if he knew Jojo’s Cocoa Bar. He gestured down the street, pointing away from Soho Square towards Duck Lane.

  Several slick-dressed men were smoking clove cigarettes and laughing on the corner of the junction, and because of them she almost missed it. They were standing in front of a painted sign with an arrow pointing down the lane. Beyond them, a curved staircase led down to a basement door, open just a chink, where warm red light spilled up, deep and inviting, A glazed poster flapped against the railings in the night breeze, showing a carnival of harlequins, tumblers, exotic barely-clothed people, bearded ladies and a woman with two heads, all clustered around one figure hanging in the centre, as if her trapeze strings were being held up by the clouds: Ebony Diamond.

  A sweep of wind pushed the basement door open and Frankie blinked as two figures standing beside the poster were suddenly lit up. She recognised the shape and stance of one of them, an older woman, and her mind cast back to the previous summer. She had seen her outside the Palace Theatre. Lady Thorne, leader of the National Vigilance Association, notorious for causing fuss outside theatres with her pamphlets. She wore a long blue cloak with a fur-trimmed hood, showing off her sharp little features. She was waving a bunch of papers in the other woman’s face.

  The other woman, as Frankie clocked her, was slight and young, shiny with greasepaint and shockingly, or so it appeared from the back, wearing nothing at all on her top half. Frankie did not consider herself a prude and knew that strange things went on in Soho – she had once seen a gentleman in a shirt and morning coat and nothing else running down the street howling for his breeches – but she blushed and looked at her feet as soon as she clapped eyes on the muscles of the girl’s back. As the girl shifted, Frankie saw that in fact a looped bunch of shells and coins was just about protecting her modesty. Her hair was covered by a velvet turban. The girl launched a hand for Lady Thorne’s face, making the shells on her top hiss. The old lady darted backwards with impressive speed. Now the men who had been lounging at the sidelines were taking an interest.