‘Cousin Sophie —’
‘You won’t really leave us, will you, Cousin Oswald? You would be in complete control of the corned-beef side of the business. Miss Thwaites will just have a general role as chair, like my father had.’ Which had been, in fact, complete control — but only when Jeremiah Higgs felt like taking it. But appearances mattered now, more than the reality. Sophie could trust Miss Thwaites’s tact when it came down to making decisions.
‘Johnnie Slithersole will be in charge of the new lines — he’s been setting up a canning factory for a village in Belgium. I’ll be “research and development —”’ a new phrase she had acquired via America, and wonderfully vague it was too “ — and the title of president, everyone knows that the general manager is the heart of Higgs Industries, and you are general manager of Higgs, Cousin Oswald. I just inherited it.’
‘But the investors?’
Were in fact only one man, who owned only ten per cent of the company, and so had no say in how it was run. But the opinion of the Earl of Shillings mattered, as Nigel had suspected it would. Sophie opened the desk drawer, and handed Cousin Oswald the letter in its embossed envelope.
Cousin Oswald opened it cautiously, a man not used to linen paper, with an earl’s seal.
To Whom It May Concern
Miss Sophie Higgs has operated three hospitals, two refugee centres, and undertaken the restoration of the Shillings estate in the months before I was demobilised. Her business acumen is unrivalled. If our generals had her organisational skills, the war would indeed have been over by Christmas, or, more likely, never fought at all.
It would be a pleasure and privilege to serve with her in any capacity whatsoever.
Yours faithfully,
Nigel Vaile, Earl of Shillings
‘My word,’ said Cousin Oswald.
Sophie grinned. ‘Would your wife enjoy a few days in the English countryside at Shillings before she sails?’
Trevor Scales, manager of the Darlinghurst factory, was not as easily swayed. Nor would a title have impressed him. Sophie did not even try.
He stood, arms akimbo, built like an outback dunny, looking down at her in what was now decidedly her desk at the factory. ‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen. And what’s luxury fruit cocktail when it’s at home?’
‘Delicious. I’m sorry you feel like this, Mr Scales.’ In that moment she tired of playing games with sulky men. ‘I will not insist on two weeks’ notice.’
He stepped back in shock. ‘You’re firing me! A chit like you. We’ll see what Mr Oswald has to say about this.’
Cousin Oswald would back her, of course. But for this to work she had to be able to give orders without the backing of someone whose only real claim to greater authority was the ability to grow a moustache, at least before the age of fifty.
The easiest solution was to fire Mr Scales. Now, and very publicly. There were lines of men who’d take his job in a trice, she thought.
But Trevor Scales had served at Gallipoli till he’d lost two fingers in a Blighty One, said a whisper that sounded almost like Miss Lily’s voice. He won’t find it easy to get another job, and certainly not one that paid as well as this. You owe him tact and kindness.
Sophie sighed inwardly, smiled, and began again. ‘It is good to be home again, isn’t it, Mr Scales?’ She imagined Miss Lily’s laughter as Mr Scales automatically smiled back.
Chapter 34
26 MAY 1920
My very dear Nigel,
It was so good to get your letter. I am very glad you and your colleagues finally convinced the government to let the Irish hunger strikers go. Their cause is a just one, as you showed me in my ignorance all those years ago.
Thank you for your Luxembourg recommendation. I would never have thought of contacting them. I think the connection is going to be a useful one. I would very much value your advice again, this time on a business matter. It probably has not reached the English papers, but the Arbitration Commission here has informed women workers they should not receive the same pay as men do for equal work the commission says this is for their own good, as it would result in women being replaced by men. The National Council of Women in Victoria has asked that female public servants receive four-fifths of the male wage, instead of just over half.
I would of course like to give all the women in our employ equal wages, but Miss Thwaites pointed out that, although unjust, the Arbitration Commission had a point. Neither she nor I hire the factory workers, but depend on the factory managers to do so, and equal wages might deprive women who desperately need the work. Do you think four-fifths is an acceptable compromise?
It took a year for Sophie to visit each factory, unaccompanied by Cousin Oswald or Johnny Slithersole, and to convince managers and staff to treat her as a businessman, not a woman. One day, as Maria said, the term ‘businesswoman’ would not sound ridiculous. But just now the mere task of establishing herself as her father’s heir took work, especially as she was taking Higgs Industries far beyond corned beef.
It took another year to set up reliable supplies of fruit for the new ‘luxury fruit cup’ line, travelling by ship up the coast of New South Wales and Queensland to deal directly with the farmers herself, instead of depending on the wholesaler markets in Sydney where neither supply nor price were under her control. The system of buying directly from the farmers had worked for corned beef, and she saw no reason to change it. By the third year she had her tomato supplies, and a new factory at Thuringa as the soldier settler blocks were taken up, their fences and their Spartan houses built, their crops put in, the wallabies and cockatoos and bower birds deterred, and the remnant after the January hail storms finally harvested. But the price per pound was good. The crop may have been far less than expected, but the profit was enough for the new farmers to survive, and hope for more next year.
The profit was enough for Higgs Industries, too — just enough. Sophie was glad the Luxury Fruit Cup had been such a success. It gave her the confidence to extend the loans to soldier settlers willing to take the long-term risk of planting asparagus.
The challenge of widening Higgs Industries beyond corned beef, as well as proving to the business world that she indeed ran the company and was not just a decorative adjunct for Cousin Oswald and Johnny Slithersole satisfied her intellectually, and emotionally as well. She was indeed what she had longed to be — her father’s daughter. She was glad he had known it too, in the end.
Personally, she supposed that she was happy. The ‘suitable friends’ had melted into lives that did not mesh with hers. But she had Maria’s friendship, conversations over dinner that might range from widows’ pensions to Xenophon’s retreat from Persia two and a half thousand years before, a curiously relaxing way of applying the strategy she had learned in the last war to ancient battles. She wondered if her father had found the same in Maria’s company.
Green now took the position Maria Thwaites once had, existing in a never quite defined world between servant and friend. It would not work in most homes. It did in Sophie’s. Green had even been to Persia, though she was tactfully silent about the reason why. She and Maria discussed the ruins of Babylon, the latest Paris fashions, and even, on quiet nights before the fire, stories of grandmothers knitting secret codes on Belgian railway stations, adding a knot for each carriage of troops. Maria Thwaites was a woman who understood how an organisation like La Dame Blanche might achieve so much, and yet be so forgotten.
Sometimes, in the candlelight Sophie almost felt she might look up and see Miss Lily sitting with them, or would hear her voice, rich in insight and amusement. Each time she felt the cold leagues of ocean between them. And yet even if she had stayed in England, would Miss Lily have been there? Perhaps if she had married Nigel their marriage would have banished her forever . . .
Dinners with Georgina and Timothy were more lively. Georgina played well, not just piano concertos but music-hall numbers. Green taught Timothy to dance the polka, and country dances she had danc
ed as a child and young woman at Shillings.
Georgina and Timothy and Mrs Brown still stayed at the house when they were in Sydney. But Georgina had taken with unsurprising ease to a managerial role at Thuringa, three times its pre-war size since Jeremiah Higgs had bought the Overhills’ neighbouring property, Warildra. Mr Overhill, senior, was still MP for Bald Hill. His wife and son now lived with him at their Melbourne house to be close to Federal Parliament, still based there while the new capital city of Canberra was being built. There was no flaunting of Sophie’s dinners and even breakfasts with the queen to Mrs Overhill on the rare times Sophie had time to visit the property now, nor the chance to impress her by introducing, ‘My dear friend, Lady Georgina and her son the viscount.’
Indeed Bald Hill had seemed to quickly forget Georgina’s ‘ladyship’, except when introducing her to strangers. She was Georgie to the stockmen, and Gina to the vicar’s daughter. Australians had a way of using nicknames to make people their own. Timothy was Tim, his chief claim to fame not his title but his amazing ability for one so young to bat. He’d be playing at Lords one day, gossip declared, and none even thought of the House of Lords as they said it.
Sophie missed Giggs’s company. She loved Timothy as well; he was questing and enquiring and, to her and Georgina’s relief, nothing in temperament like his father, loving animals with a deep and fascinated gentleness. At times she woke, feeling her arms empty, admitting at two am that she would like a child herself. But how could she explain Sophie Higgs to a prospective husband, even if there had been one, which there was not. Theirs was a household of women, each of whom had their own reasons for not marrying, or in Georgina’s, not marrying again, and none of whom quite fitted the role of a woman of the 1920s.
This was a decade of serious gaiety, not fulfilment in work. The young women of Sydney cast themselves into the new decade by flattening their chests and wearing jazz garters. They danced the Black Bottom to forget the boys almost every family had lost and the marriages one woman in three of them would never have. More than sixty thousand young men lost from one small nation at the end of the world.
Women danced in the new nylon stockings even a shopgirl could afford while jazz bands played, even if it meant a four-hour walk home after the trams stopped running, carrying their dancing shoes in brown paper bags. Polyester dresses aping silk, gaily pretending joy. Young people pretending war had not happened, would not happen, trying to forget, forget.
Sophie could not forget. Work saved her. Her father’s challenge, to feed the world with good corned beef, now joined with canned tomato soup, chicken and vegetable soup — chooks at least survived on the miserable soldier blocks — as well as canned luxary tomatoes and Her Luxury Fruit Cup and, by 1925, canned asparagus spears, exported, via England, to sixteen countries.
Each time she wrote to Nigel she was proud of the achievements she could list. He, at least, understood that contracts did not just mean money for those associated with Higgs, but that new enterprises meant food and jobs for those who needed them.
Her world was strangely simple now, despite letters and telegrams and business dealings across the world; living once again in the house she had grown up in; working each day in the office with Cousin Oswald; and supervising her factories with young Slithersole, a century older than his father in terms of anguish watched and endured, happier here at the end of the earth, far away from the mud of the Somme.
In dreams, her feet still walked in blood.
Sometimes, after a ‘push’, twenty thousand killed, the laden ambulances rumbling back and forth in journey after journey, the operating theatre floor so slippery with blood and pulped flesh it seemed impossible that any man could be left alive.
And yet they had saved men. Many men. She must hold on to that. Move on from that . . .
A choko factory . . . there had to be something you could do with choko. Not chutney, that needed pre-cooking — and vats of boiling jam or chutney made for a dangerous factory. There had never been a death at Higgs, which no other factory could boast.
Mock Turtle soup, perhaps, with tarragon for flavour, cream for succulence and choko for bulk . . . plans for choko blocked away four am memories more securely than dance clubs or ice-skating rinks or the flickering of phantom shadows at the pictures.
At other times she dreamed of waltzing with Dolphie in a forest, the music beating time with both their hearts — but monsters lurked among the branches. Despite the joyousness of the dance she was glad to wake. Often, sitting at her desk in what had been her father’s office, or his study at the Sydney house, she imagined Nigel with her, or Miss Lily, held silent conversations with them, was comforted by Miss Lily’s laugh, or Nigel’s conviction Sophie Higgs could achieve whatever she determined she would do. Then once again she would turn to work.
There was always a job for an ex-serviceman at Higgs factories. A man could sweep a factory floor with one leg of flesh and one of wood, could check labels with a good hand and a hook, could breathe in the clear air of Bald Hill if his lungs would no longer survive the smog of Sydney, for even Sophie could not create a factory that did not make too much foul smoke.
And if there were no jobs she would create another factory and another. Sophie Higgs could not save the world, or ten thousand men from mustard gas.
But she could do this.
Friendship and the world beyond Australia came in letters during the first half of the 1920s, in Nigel’s elegant hand — which was not quite the same as the writing in the few notes Miss Lily had sent her, and which she’d kept. Ethel sent letters that did not quite hide her envy at Sophie’s freedom in the business world — her father and brother still denied her any role in Carryman’s Cocoa — as well as details of her journeys on motorbike through England, Wales and Scotland, and even Ireland despite the growing violence. Sophie read the adventures aloud to her companions, but not the passages of regret. Hilarious screeds from Sloggers, at Oxford, letters she read out in full at breakfast. Even the first cemented Sloggers’s place in Maria’s and Georgina’s hearts.
Darling Soapy,
Well, I am finally in residence! Oxford is full of demobilised officers with scholarships, moustaches and a mighty disdain for any female who dares to don the robes of an undergraduate. Most of them were on the general staff and the nearest they came to a Hun was a spot of lunch in Paris. I imagine we’ll get the real soldiers in a year or two, when they feel up to creating new lives for themselves, the men with nightmares and that look of wondering what danger is over their shoulder.
Did you read that glorious speech by the Bishop of London, officially giving the church’s blessing for higher education for women, but reminding us we are ‘all destined to be the wives of some good man’? He didn’t specify which man is to be blessed with five thousand well-educated wives or where he is to be found, so let me know if you hear of him. None of the blighters here is worth a second look. It is a good thing I actually want a career, though I have to admit, just sometimes, the thought of a career AND a loving husband would be nice. But then one can’t have both, so the career it must be.
Fascinating philosophy lecture yesterday . . .
The letters from the Dowager Duchess of Wooten were written by her secretary — as her arthritic hands could no longer hold a pen — about the estate, the family, about darling little Sophie, whose exploits also reached her in Doris’s carefully written notes. Increasingly the Dowager wrote as if Sophie shared the memories of long ago. ‘Do you remember when Alison fell out of the tree? Such a to do . . .’ Sophie did not correct her in her return letters, for who else had the old woman now to share her memories with? The curse of old age, as the companions of your youth left you. Did the Dowager still write to Miss Lily? She could not ask — misplaced words to the wrong people from a confused old woman might irreparably damage Nigel’s reputation. But she hoped that, just perhaps, the Dowager still recieved notes from Lily, and that Miss Lily too could sometimes exist in letters to her oldest frie
nd.
James Lorrimer wrote, as he had promised, impersonal letters that she treasured for the insights — and inside information — the newspapers could not provide, not even the English papers she now had delivered. Now newspaper would risk worrying its readers and advertisers by describing how the 1920 Treaty of Trianon had not just re-drawn the map of Europe, destroying four empires, the German, Russian, Austrian and Turkish, removing old boundaries, but had bred new resentment. ‘We are still essentially at the November 1918 ceasefire,’ wrote James. ‘Too tired to keep fighting, but a long way from peace. France will not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of all German industry and armaments, and as you saw, Germany has been left with nothing but dreams of revenge. One day those dreams will be made real, not this year, or next year, but in our lifetimes.’
Both Nigel’s and James’s 1920 letters described the Polish army finally turning back the Bolsheviks at the gates of Warsaw, and the Indian National Congress’s vote to follow Mahatma Gandhi’s policy of non-violence, a concept that Green, Georgina and Maria agreed was both deeply interesting (if it worked), while Timothy wondered if Gandhi had his own elephant.
The letters of 1921 were about how the billions of pounds demanded of Germany, plus the tax on German imports, had driven the Bavarian extreme nationalists and the communists into an alliance calling for union with Soviet Russia against the Western powers. Each man spoke of the same events, and the same political viewpoints, but neither mentioned the other’s name. Had James Lorrimer only known Miss Lily, the useful ‘cousin of the Earl’?
‘Probably,’ said Green, when Sophie asked her. ‘Nigel told precious few about him and Lily. I doubt James Lorrimer was one of them.’
Sophie had thought that Green might be bored with sedate Sydney life, without even the challenge of claiming and expanding a business to occupy her. She waited all that first year for Green to resign. But Green seemed content, even happy. Perhaps her own nightmares were as strong or worse than Sophie’s. Sydney might be limited, but it was a long, safe way from the land of war and memories.
The Lily and the Rose Page 18
