The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  Milly seemed to sense that the letter was bad news for she stood up and wrapped her cold fragile fingers round the back of Frankie’s hand. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you how to hop a bus fare.’

  The inside of Milly’s lodgings on Talgarth Road looked like a Parisian boutique dumped on the floor of a shed. The boards were bare and dusty except for two rugs; one a Persian carpet in red and gold, the other the skin of a lion with its mangy head still attached. Piles of silk gowns in pastel colours were scattered in various corners, draped over lampshades and hung on the backs of chairs. There were brassieres on coathooks, furs on tables and beaded scarves hooked over the corner of canvases leaning against the wall. A bookshelf was piled full, almost to toppling. Frankie cast her eye discreetly at the volumes. A picture book on Toulouse-Lautrec, a torn copy of Anna Karenina. A volume of Sophia Poole’s An Englishwoman in Egypt lay on its side, and placed reverently on top of the case, a copy of the Qu’ran. Anywhere there wasn’t a picture or piece of furniture there was a mirror, either hanging or standing, echoing repetitions of the room. Cold air rippled in great tingling waves through a wall of lead-framed windows overlooking the street and beyond where London stretched out in a labyrinth of bronze and gold dots.

  ‘It’s to maximise the light,’ Milly said, nodding first at the mirrors and then at the wall of windows. ‘She’s an artist.’ She whipped the cloth off a huge canvas that was braced against the wall. ‘Boo.’ The picture was a full-length likeness of herself, naked in the pose of Botticelli’s Venus, her hair unloosed, looking down at a snake wrapped round her waist. Frankie cast her eyes round the room with sudden nerves.

  ‘It’s not here. I keep it at Jojo’s. And it’s had its teeth pulled anyway. They do that to all the snakes over there.’

  Frankie breathed out and Milly smiled cautiously. ‘They’re not actually the best dance partners, you know. I’d get rid of it if I could. They can be very stiff, very clumsy, I don’t know if you noticed when I was holding it. They form shapes of their own, you have to copy them, they won’t copy you. And you spend the whole time worrying they’re going to throw up on your costume. But I don’t think Jojo would have taken me without one.’

  She gave a huge satisfied sigh, contented to finally be in her den, and looked around at the selection of chairs and couches before taking one, clearing the clothes off it into a crumpled ball.

  ‘There you go. I’ll get the fire on.’

  Frankie perched on the edge of the velveteen divan at first, but after a few seconds she felt herself sinking into it and couldn’t help but lean back, letting the stuffing take the weight of the day off her. Her eyes wandered lazily round the room, watching Milly on her knees scrabbling with the coal scuttle, unfazed about the dust muddying the front of her dress. By the window lay a strange pair of drums, an Arab tea set balanced on a leather pouffe, and next to it the same kind of water pipe she had seen at the Barclay-Evanses.

  ‘I could put a record on. Or do you just want to rest?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Frankie watched the fire slowly grow from a red shivering line on the kindling paper into a hissing, scratching glow, eating each coal slowly in turn.

  ‘If you’re fine there, I’ll stay here.’ Milly pulled the lion rug over the hearth. ‘You can join me if you want.’

  Frankie smiled stiffly.

  ‘I know. It’s comfortable that divan.’ She watched the fire for a few minutes, following wisps of smoke up with her eyes. Abruptly she turned. ‘How did you meet Twinkle?’

  ‘She knows the paper. It was chance. Luck, misfortune, black magic. I was looking for work, sending articles here and there, cartoons, bits of satire.’

  ‘You can draw?’

  ‘A bit.’ Frankie said, squirming under the scrutiny for reasons she didn’t quite know. ‘They published a cartoon of mine and I suppose Mr Stark, he’s editor there, I suppose he was looking for someone with the right temperament to work with her.’ She gave a small snort of laughter. ‘Not that I have; I could poison her gin some days.’

  Milly coughed and looked at her hands.

  ‘I didn’t mean – I’m not being flippant. About poison.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. You’re right about Twinkle. I mean, about the poison.’

  They settled into silence for a while, the sounds of the street coasting through the window. The heat of the fire warmed the room quickly. Milly got up from the rug and wedged a record onto a dusty gramophone with an enamel green and cream horn. Everything about the place stank of luxury. But a careful selection of chosen luxury and a disregard for all else. There were no electric lights, no comfortable carpets, no polished furniture. No polished anything and no maid to polish. But there were expensive trinkets, goodies gathered from travels, family heirlooms in shrouds of dust.

  A quiet opera crackled round the room. Milly flopped down by the fire again, tucking her legs under her, and played with the lion’s fur in her long white fingers. ‘So what, did you just send your pieces in, in little brown envelopes? How did you start?’ She flashed her eyes wide.

  Frankie snorted. She had never told the truth about how she became interested in newspapers to anyone at all and didn’t know if she should now.

  ‘Come out with it, you’re hiding something, are you going to tell me a lie?’

  ‘I was an apprentice in the foundry, for a printer. Used to pour lead casts for the rolling cylinders. Man used to come to my father’s veg barrow.’

  ‘That sounds like a boy’s job.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’ She tugged her fingers through her hair. ‘He cut my plaits off on my first day.’

  Milly rolled onto her stomach. The silk at her ankles rode up a little revealing a few inches of flesh-coloured grubby stocking. ‘That’s not the truth though, Frankie George. Printers are mechanics. I know a little about the press. My father’s–’, she hesitated, ‘– he sort of dabbles in it. You don’t jump from being a foundry apprentice to being a newspaper-girl. Your mouth is twitching, you’re itching to tell me.’ She leaned off the rug and grabbed a small copper jug. ‘Would you like some sherbet?’

  Frankie peered across. ‘I suppose. Is it legal?’

  Milly grinned wickedly. ‘Is that what worries you, what’s legal and what’s not? It’s what they serve in the harems. The fancy ones.’ She collected a couple of short thin glasses and blew the dust off them, then wiped her fragile finger round the rims. ‘But don’t let’s change the subject. Why did you decide to be a journalist? What brought Frankie George to the London Evening Gazette? What created that fine marriage?’ She laughed, a gentle tickling sound.

  Frankie prickled again, feeling as if she was somehow being put to a test in this bohemian den, as if she might be found out for a fraud any second and sent packing. But she was too exhausted to make up a lie. ‘I don’t suppose you had an outdoor lavvy when you were little?’

  It was Milly’s turn to blush. ‘No, we didn’t.’

  ‘Well, I did. And my father, or next-door’s, they would cut up newspaper to put in there. Bumf. Bum fodder.’

  Milly tilted her head to the side curiously as she poured the pinkish liquid.

  ‘There were all kinds of stories in there. Mrs McGunnery’s divorce goes all the way to the High Court as she battles to out her husband as a white slave trafficker. A woman in Bristol gives birth to three brown rabbits. Dairy cow learns to tell the time.’

  ‘Tit-Bits common in your street was it?’

  ‘I think that one was News of the World. And then the theatre reviews. The West End, Shaftesbury Avenue, The Strand. Shows my family never could have afforded to go and see. But you could read about it while you were spending a penny.’

  Milly handed her a glass. It smelled like Turkish delight.

  ‘You are joking, Frankie George. You decided to be a journalist because you fell in love with newspapers while in the privies?’

  Frankie shrugged. ‘Believe it or not.’ There was a pause while they sipped their drinks
. The sherbet was sweet like lemonade but more pungent, strong with rose water. Frankie sighed looking round the room. She had heard of women like Milly but never thought they really existed. She thought of her dancing in the baths in Cairo the way she had danced at Jojo’s, thought of her and Ebony backstage at Jojo’s, eyeing up each other’s talent.

  Milly was stretching her back out on the rug. It cracked musically and she winced.

  ‘So go on then, if we’re sharing secrets: do you ever miss Cairo? Do you ever wish you were back there?’

  Frankie watched her tip the dregs of her sherbet into her mouth.

  ‘Miss it, yes, but I would never go back. I took everything I wanted with me.’

  ‘What was that?’

  She rubbed her lips together and put the glass down on the hearth. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Why you’re looking at me like that. You’ve read about the harems, you think women are kept under lock and key. Well, they are in a sense. But you will never know freedom until you have travelled down the street in a riding cloak, veiled from head to toe. Even your hands. You could be anyone underneath it. No one to judge who you are, what class you come from, how high your cheekbones, how thin your waist. It is the most exquisite disguise.’

  ‘But don’t you take . . .’

  ‘My clothes off when I dance? Is that what you were going to ask?’

  Frankie shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem like much of a disguise tonight.’

  Milly took a few moments to answer and Frankie thought for a minute she had said too much. Then she cracked her neck to both sides and stared frankly at her. ‘Well, you would think that. But something comes over me when I dance and I’m damned if I can explain it. When I start up, when I hear that particular kind of drumbeat, it feels, don’t laugh, but it feels like I’m being uncrumpled. Like paper has been curled inside me for a long time. And it slowly unfurls and straightens out as the drumbeat goes on and on until it’s tingling every nerve of me, and the more it tingles the more like myself I feel than I have ever felt before. I feel happy. There aren’t many things that have ever made me that happy.’

  ‘I should try it.’

  ‘Everything is funny to you.’

  ‘Well, it’s just that you don’t look happy when you dance.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ Her gaze was more than a question, it was a challenge.

  ‘No, you look fierce.’

  She looked at the fire. ‘Perhaps I’m concentrating.’

  Frankie let her bristling subside and felt guilty for saying anything. But Milly seemed to brush it off quickly. ‘Doesn’t anything make you feel like that, like you have been lying asleep and someone has suddenly woken you up?’

  Frankie’s eyes shifted from the fire to Milly’s curled legs, which she was now hugging close to her, and back again. She shrugged.

  The fire had calmed down a little and Milly reached for a cashmere shawl by the hearth. She wriggled her feet out of their slippers so they could be closer to the glow. ‘I was given this on my wedding day by a woman who lived opposite us. She was a lay judge. People would come to her to solve their disputes. And she would stay behind her latticed windows and whatever judgement she made had to be stuck to. People respected her. She was a spinster. Do you think anyone in this country respects a spinster?’

  Frankie was silent for a moment, feeling her untravelled unworldliness creeping in on her, making her feel both insecure and defensive. ‘Who knows how people feel respected? Everyone has their own ideas. Is it having your own money, not being tied to a husband, not having to scrub floors for a living, scrubbing floors to make your own living?’ She shrugged. ‘Having the vote. That’s certainly what Ebony thinks.’

  Milly was quiet for a moment. She began to play with the lion’s scrappy mane between her toes. Wrapped up in the shawl she looked somehow wise, like the old woman in a fairy tale, the light picking out the lines curling round her mouth and across her brow. ‘I think Ebony wants people to respect her. All the girls who have a trade in the circus are independent, and they’re stronger than half the men. Some of them could lift a donkey. But when you come to a city like London and you suddenly find you don’t have equal rights to the men, the wages are unequal, mothers don’t have rights to their children, I mean you can’t even drink port in the dining room after a meal or whatnot, what can you do?’ She tilted her head. ‘Is that why you’re so interested in what’s happened to Ebony? You want to get involved in the votes movement?’

  ‘I’m interested because a woman and a man died and another might be in danger.’

  Milly looked taken aback and Frankie realised her tone had been spiky. She sighed. ‘But yes, perhaps I ought to become more involved. Afterwards.’

  ‘You certainly look like a suffragette.’

  ‘What, these?’ Frankie gestured to her trousers. Despite her usual feelings about that statement there was something innocent in Milly’s tone. ‘They’re comfortable. I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘You get involved with who you fall in with, don’t you? Pick your battles. I ended up busying myself making my own way on Fleet Street.’

  ‘But you agree that it’s important?’

  Frankie bit her lower lip. ‘I used to think you just had to look after yourself and if everyone did that we’d all be hunky-dory. But I’m learning.’ She met Milly’s eyes and sunk back into the divan. Her hand went unconsciously to the back of her head, where the ache was. She peered into the bottom of the sherbet glass and saw that the mixture had formed a lump.

  Milly looked across. ‘Would you like a spoon?’

  Frankie stared down into her glass.

  ‘For the bottom. It’s the best bit.’ She began rummaging in a copper pan by the fire and pulled out a little silver ship with engravings carved all over its hull. Small thin-handled pieces of cutlery were strung from the rigging on hooks. She extracted a spoon and tossed it through the air. Frankie caught it and began to churn up the clogged sugar. There was a few minutes awkward silence, then she said, ‘So what about this marriage? Who was he? An Egyptian?’

  Milly watched the fire, her lips poised to curl either way, into a smile or a frown. When she looked back at Frankie her eyes were drained, the crease on her brow had deepened. ‘A Frenchman. An archaeologist. Dr Frederic Barton. I daresay you would have heard of him if you moved in those kinds of circles. I was in the middle of a world tour by ship and he took me to see Heliopolis, just outside of Cairo. The old city of the sun. We’d docked for a few days to give us the chance to see the citadel and the pyramids, but I didn’t fancy the pyramids. I’m claustrophobic; I think Doctor Freud would say it probably stems from that evil nanny. Anyway, along comes a handsome Frenchman speaking perfect Turkish and Arabic and whisks me away.’

  ‘And you stayed.’

  ‘To the horror of my family. Yes I did. I think the tour was supposed to iron out my wayward tendencies. My terrible latchkey girl ideas.’

  Frankie swallowed the last of the syrup. Her thumb moved comfortingly back and forth over the pattern on the spoon’s fine handle. Another family heirloom, she thought to herself.

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘My husband.’ Milly picked at a thread on the shawl with her slender fingers. Fingers meant to wear rings and droop languorously around a necklace or lace collar, or a well-groomed hound. ‘You’re looking at me in that way you do. Your face is creased up at the eyes. Trying not to judge.’

  ‘I’m just concentrating.’

  ‘I don’t really have a problem with infidelity. People think that children don’t know what goes on in their own houses. When I was little I knew fine enough when the room-swapping was going on overnight. At breakfast time it didn’t make a difference. It happens, Frankie, maybe not in your world, but it happens in mine.’

  Frankie felt a prickle but she bit her tongue. She was watching Milly carefully, observing the fresh violence in her voice. Her shoulders propped the shawl round her, her jaw was set, her mouth moved in a little pout. She looked as defensive
as Ebony had when she doused perfume on the camera and set it alight. Frankie played with the handle of the spoon, sticking it between her fingers. She had managed to lick most of the residue off but there was still a little stickiness. Annoyed, she looked down to see if she could pick off the sticky patch and when she saw the pattern on the handle she started.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quickly. ‘So what did go wrong?’

  ‘Bad luck comes in threes.’ Milly didn’t elaborate at first, going back to stroking the lion’s head. Then she leant back, opening out her torso and propping herself up with her elbows. ‘As well as being a cheat, he was selling artefacts to the British Museum, creeping into certain kinds of bath houses, that sort of thing.’

  Frankie swallowed. ‘Did you divorce him?’

  ‘No. I left in the night. I packed quietly, caught a boat to Alexandria and the next merchant ship to Dover. And on the boat there was a man with a basket of toothless snakes.’

  ‘So you bought one?’

  ‘To remind me. Better to share your life with a snake than with Frederic Barton.’

  Silence settled in the air between them. The opera had come to an end and the record was clicking round the turntable. Milly reached across and slipped it off. Frankie didn’t know how she was expected to react and no words came naturally to her so she said nothing. The noises of the street had died down, the gaslamps beginning to fade out. It was late. She thought of the day ahead of them tomorrow and wondered whether Liam had gone back to Jojo’s to sleep.

  Milly dragged herself to her feet and rummaged in the open trunk. She pulled out another cashmere shawl and tossed it at Frankie. ‘I hope the fire stays warm enough.’

  ‘I’ll load it with coal if it goes out.’

  ‘Usually I’m on the divan too but I suppose if Lilian’s not here—’

  Frankie looked at her empty face. She didn’t know how she was meant to reply so she just nodded. ‘All right.’

  ‘Right. I’ll use her room.’ Milly scratched her head through her bundle of hair. ‘You’ll wake up with the sun. Through those windows.’