I am very pleased to announce that my gruntle has been thoroughly and completely restored.
This is not because of virtuous recollections about what a happy life we are having since there isn’t a war on and other such righteousness. It is because when I got the cake out this afternoon, although it had still failed to set, it was jolly nice in a sticky sort of way, as long as you eat it with a spoon.
Also we have had quite a busy night on the taxi rank and with any luck by the time we go home, we will have earned sufficient to restore Lucy’s car to its respectable state of MOT certification. It is still only Friday, so with any luck by the end of tomorrow night there will be enough for me to get a hangover in Cambridge as well.
This brings me on to the third cause of my newly-restored cheerfulness, because the results for our last assignment have just come out, and I have achieved seventy five, which I have been told is a Distinction.
I have been Distinguished.
I have never been distinguished for anything much in my entire life, and so I am pleased. It is a First, and quite good enough. I would have liked it to be better, but since we were firmly told that we should not expect to score higher than seventy, I suppose it is acceptable enough.
I am so pleased that I have cheated with the rest of this diary entry and instead of bothering to write any more I have just copied and pasted the story in here instead. It is a true story, a love story set in the north of England, young people and people from elsewhere might need to Google it when they get to the end, but the rest of us will manage well enough.
Please excuse my idleness, but at least you get a short story without the bother of Audible or Kindle saying: Since you liked this you might also like…followed by a long list of tedious rubbish that really doesn’t interest you at all.
It is called A True Romance. Here it is:
Mr. Craig stands up when I say yes, and offers me his hand to shake.
He’s smiling, and his eyes are kind, but I’ve said it too quickly, and I bite my lip, because I’ve managed to be calm and sophisticated ever since I came in, and I feel like I’ve accidentally leaked a bit of myself, like a naughty puppy.
I don’t know if he’s seen it, so I let myself hope that perhaps he isn’t a noticing sort of man. His hand is warm and clean, although his fingers are stained so yellow they’re almost brown round his nails. A cigarette burned in the ashtray all the way through the interview and when it went out he lit another and just left it to burn next to it. He offered me one but I knew he wanted me to say no, so I did.
It’s the first time I’ve had to shake a man’s hand, and I don’t know what to do. A tight grip might make me look bossy, or like I’m trying too hard, but if my fingers are limp I might look too weak to be trusted.
In the end the handshake is over in a second and I don’t know what my hand has done anyway.
He comes round to my side of the desk and pats my shoulder. Why don’t we meet the team, he says cheerfully, and he is on his way out of the door before I have said Yes please.
We cross the narrow hallway into what must have been the front room in the days when it was a house. The resin smell is even stronger here, and my nose and eyes sting. I know I’ll have to get used to it, so I don’t say anything, and I can see that Mr. Craig doesn’t even notice it.
In the front room it’s warmer because there’s a paraffin heater in the middle. The fumes bleed into the smell of resin and of men. There are three desks, and underneath the window there are two more barrels, with an untidy pile of papers sliding off the top of them. The big desk belongs to Mr. Craig, and a bald man is sitting at the second, scribbling something in a book. The third desk is empty because the young man is standing at the back of the room, hunting for something in an overflowing drawer in the battered filing cabinet.
His shirt sleeves are rolled up and his tweed waistcoat looks expensive. He has reddish-brown hair which flops forward over his eyes, and he pushes it back as he looks up at us.
The other man stands up politely as we come in. He has a round, pink face, and glasses. Mr. Craig introduces us, except he can’t remember my name, and says that I am Miss Umm, and I will be the new typist when we all come back after Christmas.
Mr. Craig introduces the other two men by their Christian names. They are Bert and Ian. Bert is the bald one, and his face goes very pink as he shakes my hand. Ian doesn’t shake my hand, because the desk is in the way and there wouldn’t be room to walk round it without closing the filing cabinet, but he smiles and says Good Afternoon, and his hair falls over his eyes again.
It makes me think I might like to push it back for him, and I try to make my eyes look friendly and twinkly when I smile back, but he just looks away and carries on searching through the drawer. Mr. Craig waits for a moment, waiting for somebody to start talking but I can’t think of anything to say, and neither can anybody else, so he nods and rubs his hands together and offers to get my coat.
I’m to start in January, for eight pounds ten shillings every week, which is more than anyone gets at Bratby’s, and on the bus on the way home I feel so happy that it’s like I’ve got a little song floating round my heart. May had said Ian was good looking, and he is, a real James Dean type. I know it’s silly to like somebody when you don’t even know if they are kind or clever or if they talk about football all the time, but I think I like Ian, and I know I mustn’t, because of Ronnie.
Even so I can’t help but feel a bit glad inside. I’ll be in the room right next to him and perhaps when he asks me to type his letters he’ll smile and ask me if I like dancing.
I squash the thought down really hard. I won’t see him for three weeks anyway, not until after Christmas. He isn’t married, I know. May said so. He looks gentle, and he has nice hands.
When I come back again it hasn’t properly stopped snowing since I was there last. I wanted to wear the short blue skirt and the black pointy shoes that make my legs look longer, but there’s filthy slush everywhere so it has to be boots. Gran put Grandad’s overcoat on my bed, and it still smells a bit of hair oil and tobacco, but mostly it just smells of mould now. I have to keep washing my hair, in case the smell’s stuck in it, but it takes ages and uses all the hot water.
I’ve got my own office so the men don’t disturb me with the racing on the radio, it’s the little one where I had the interview. There’s no heater, and it’s cold, I can see my breath in the mornings. I don’t mind, though. I keep my coat over my knees, and when I go through to the big office I can get a thorough warm by the paraffin heater. Did you have a nice Christmas, Miss Umm, Mr. Craig says, but he doesn’t listen to the answer, and asks me if I can start organising the pile of invoices he’s left on my desk.
When I go in for Bert to dictate a letter I pull up a chair right next to the heater, and while he’s going on about gallons of turpentine I glance up and see that Ian is looking at me. Our eyes meet for a moment, and I smile, but he doesn’t, just carries on looking.
I don’t know what to do with the smile, and it sort of crumbles off my face. I look back at my notebook, and stretch my legs out just a little, so my thighs don’t look wide on the chair, but when I glance back at Ian, he has looked away. I keep trying to catch his eyes after that, because Bert is still rambling on about some paraffin that hasn’t left the warehouse yet, but he is writing something on a list and doesn’t look up until I get up. His eyes have gone cold and he says Kindly put your chair back in the corner, it’s in the way there, and I say Yes sir, and stalk out.
I don’t see him again for two whole days, except in passing, and maybe he’s got something on his mind, because he hardly looks at me. We had to practically squeeze past one another in the corridor once, but he just said Excuse me, and stepped back into the doorway.
Then on Friday afternoon I’m typing out the invoices when the door to my office clicks open and it’s him.
I haven’t even been thinking about him, because half of the invoices have been missed off the list, and my breath stops in my throat. I feel myself going red, and I want to kick myself, really hard, because I know I must be looking stupid.
He stops in front of my desk and just watches me for a moment, with a little smile just turning at the corners of his mouth. He doesn’t say anything for ages and ages, and when I say What is it, sir? he waits until I have to look back down at my desk before he tells me that there are some figures that have come up from the warehouse which he thinks might be wrong, and he would like me to check them against my ledgers.
He spreads them out on my desk. His nails are very clean, and his long fingers move swiftly and smoothly across the rows of numbers whilst he explains the problem.
He is so close that I can smell peppermint and tobacco on his breath. His voice has the smallest Scottish burr to it, more with some words than others, and I like to listen to it, soft and foreign and exotic beside everyone else’s Manchester growl.
I nod and say Yes, yes, whilst he talks, but I am not really understanding a single word, and after a little while he stops, right in the middle of a sentence, and looks down at me with laughter in his eyes.
Shall I tell you again? he says, and I go so red he could have warmed his hands in the glow from my face, and say Yes please.
He goes through it all, carefully, until I understand what he is asking, and he leaves the papers on my desk and walks out abruptly. He does not close the door, and I hear him in the other office saying For God’s sake, Tom, the typist’s office is freezing. You have to get her a heater. No wonder she’s making so many mistakes.
Mr. Craig’s voice is just a rumble and I can’t tell what he’s saying, but on Monday when I come in to my office there is a brand new yellow paraffin heater standing at the side of my desk, and I feel so grateful it makes my eyes sting.
I try to catch Ian on his own then, to say thank you, but he doesn’t look at me for the whole of the rest of the day, until at the end of the afternoon he shouts for me to come in whilst he is putting his coat on. He shoves a bundle of papers at me and tells me that there were careless mistakes in two of the suppliers’ letters and that he wants them both redone before they go out to the post. Then he shrugs his coat collar into place and walks out, calling up the stairs that he is off home.
I want to cry with humiliation, but I stick my chin in the air and go back to my own office.
It takes so long that I miss my bus, and I have to walk home, but the next morning he looks up when I come in and says Thank you so much for getting the letters done, and my heart beats hard all over again, because he smiles at me.
After a month I am thinking about him all the time, and I know I have to make him love me.
One Friday night in March I tell Ronnie I want to break it off. It isn’t right anyway. He asked me to marry him on my eighteenth birthday last July, and I said yes because I couldn’t see anything else, but I know now I don’t want to, I don’t, I don’t. He wants children and his dinner on the table and his shirts steam-pressed for him, and it’s like looking at a cage. My wife won’t work, he said, proudly, and I smiled and nodded but it made me sick with the smallness of it all, mending socks to put on his fat yellow feet and scrubbing grease off his cuffs and collars at the sink, so I tell him I don’t want to carry on.
He doesn’t believe me at first, and keeps going on that we should get a break, maybe go to the sea or have a day in the country and talk, but I’m not having it. No, I say, I just don’t want to see you any more. He gets really angry then. It must be work, he says, and some dirty names come out of his mouth, so I get up and walk out.
He follows me, and tries to grab my arm, but I keep walking, and on Monday afternoon the phone rings on Mr. Craig’s desk and it’s him, wanting to speak to me, and Bert comes to get me from the other room.
I want to die of shame, because I see Ian grinning, and I know they are all listening while Ronnie shouts and begs on the other end of the phone. I say no, and hang up, and when it rings again Mr. Craig answers it and tells him I’m not available. When Thursday comes and he’s still calling two or three times a day, Mr. Craig tells him he is going to get the police. He doesn’t ring again then, and I feel as though I’m walking differently with the lightness of not having that future to carry.
Ian never says anything about it, but for days his eyes are laughing when he speaks to me, and I don’t know if it’s kindness or contempt. I make my voice cold when I talk to him, as if I don’t care. I do care, though. I don’t know if he likes me. Sometimes I like him so much it makes me feel dizzy and my chest go tight, but other times I want to cry with the hurt of it, and I wish I could never see him again so I could have my thoughts back to myself.
He lives on Westmoreland Avenue. I found that out. When I was babysitting for baby Mike last Sunday I bundled him in his pram and took him for a walk there. We walked all the way down the road and I pretended to post a letter, and we walked all the way back, so we passed his house twice. I thought he might come out and say Hello, and maybe That’s a pretty dress or Whose is the baby? and I could look surprised but pleased to see him and he would see that I have freckles in the sunshine, and maybe even think just a little bit that I would be a good person to have children with, but his house door was closed and the windows looked dark and empty. He still lives with his mother, I know that. If I saw her coming out I could smile and maybe we could be friends, and she might say to him I met a lovely girl in the street this afternoon.
I made May come with me to the pub near his house last Saturday as well, but he wasn’t there. I don’t know where he drinks, and May doesn’t either. He just disappears at weekends. I haven’t ever seen him drinking anywhere in town.
I leave the door open on my office now that the weather’s warm, and I can hear him talking to Mr. Craig and to Bert. Mostly they talk about racing, but sometimes Ian talks about things he reads in the newspapers. I don’t read newspapers, and I wonder if I should try, so that I can say Did you see what the Lord Chancellor said yesterday? and he will think I am interesting.
I know he thinks I’m pretty. He looks at me all the time. He isn’t embarrassed by looking, the way some men are, and I always pretend I don’t notice, but sometimes my face gets hot when I know he is doing it. Then sometimes he smiles, and sometimes he looks away.
The summer is almost over now, and I still don’t know how I can make him notice me. He has looked and smiled at my legs in the short skirts, but never asked if I like dancing or if I might like a drink after work, although I thought he might the day I wore the yellow dress. I wore it again a few days afterwards just in case, but he didn’t say anything, just Please check the spelling before you bring it to be signed, and I wanted to cry.
You have to find out what he likes, May says, laughing, you have to make him think you are interested in the things that interest him, what might those things be? I don’t know, I say, he likes to bet on the horses, and sometimes he plays dominoes with the stockmen but apart from that he just reads in the lunch hour. So there you are, says May, triumphantly. You have to read.
I’ve hardly read a book for years, but I go to the library on Saturday morning anyway, and I get out a book of Wordsworth’s poetry. I feel safe with that because we read it at school so if he asks me anything I will have something to say.
I take it to work with me and pretend to be buried in it every lunchtime. By Thursday I have almost given up, and it is so boring that I think I can’t do it another day, but when Ian comes past my open door he looks across and says What are you reading? so I show him. It’s marvellous, I say, especially the Prelude, all that darkness of thought and things.
He comes across the room and takes the book out of my hands, so they’re empty. I don’t know what to do with them, and I twist my fingers together until they hurt. He sits on the edge of my desk to flick through it and I pretend not to be bothered, but my face spoils it by going scarlet.
When he gives it back he looks at me differently, as if he hasn’t ever really noticed me before, the way you might with a drink you’ve seen on the shelf at the back of the bar but never thought to try until somebody pushes one into your hand.
I might borrow it, he says, have you read William Blake?
Of course I haven’t but I tell him I would like to, and he says I can borrow his copy, so I say what I have practised, which is that I love to read but hardly get chance to get to the library as often as I would like.
He stands up and gives me the book. His fingertips brush against mine, and when he pads to the door his body moves like liquid, as smoothly and easily as the Belle Vue tigers. It’s good that you read, he says, and I feel so happy that my heart might leap out of my throat, and I want to read everything I can in case he asks me about books.
He remembers.
He remembers his promise and brings me the William Blake book, so he must have been thinking about me even when he was at home. I thank him and at lunchtime I open it straight away, so that when he walks past he sees me reading, and his smile is different from usual, because he looks for my eyes.
I read everything I can then. I ask the librarian what might be good, and she wonders if I have read Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I practice reading them to myself out loud in my bedroom, and after a bit I get used to the odd sound and rhythm of the words and start to like it, because it’s a sort of music.
I say this to Ian, because we are talking by then, and almost every lunchtime he comes to sit on my desk to talk about books and poems, and he nods. Music of the intellect, he says, played by the passions of the soul.
He asks about music afterwards, and I don’t know what I ought to say, so I say I like everything. He tells me he does not like pop music much, so I say I don’t either. Ian has a tape recorder, he says, and he tapes things he likes so he can listen again and again. Do I like Wagner, he asks, so I nod, but I don’t have a tape recorder to play tapes, so he promises to lend me a record, which makes me so happy I want to cry. For a moment I think he might lean over and kiss me, but he stands up and stares out of the window instead and says Did you finish the caustic soda order I need it this afternoon, and then nods vaguely towards me before striding off into the other office where I can hear him asking Bert who he has backed in the three thirty.
It goes on like this for months. I’d thought once that I’d be perfectly happy if only he smiled at me, just said my name in his lovely warm voice, but I’m not happy at all, because of course it isn’t enough.
I want him to touch me. I keep looking at his fingers and just imagining them stroking the side of my face, ever so gently and softly. Sometimes when we’re talking he slides the tip of his finger along the edge of the page, patting it and touching it so lightly it’s hardly a touch at all, again and again as if it needs to be soothed, and it makes my throat so tight I can hardly breathe, because I imagine it’s me under his finger, and I can’t speak a word then because my voice would just croak and he would know.
Autumn slides into the first frosts of winter, and in no time it’s Christmas again. The office is going to be closed for two whole weeks and I can hardly bear the thought of it, of being without Ian for all that time. He has hardly spoken to me for the last week, and everybody else is wrapping presents but my soul is as bleak as the winter sky, a great grey void of icy misery. We are having a Christmas party at the office, for everybody, all the warehousemen and the secretaries and the floor managers, and I suppose I will have to go, because Ian will be there, but I don’t know if I can bear it.
I wear my new red dress with the low-cut neckline and the tiny sleeves, and I think when I look in the mirror that at least I look pretty, even if Ian doesn’t look at me for the whole afternoon. The office looks quite big with all the desks taken out of it and the filing cabinets shoved to the side, and Marjorie who helps in Accounts has brought a record player. Ian helps her set it up on a little table by the door, because it has to be on a level surface and near the plug socket, which is in the hallway. He carries it out for her. I can hear her giggling over something he says and I almost go home then and there, but Bert brings me a rum and coke, and says I have been a little diamond this year. He is about to say something else, but somebody puts on Frosty The Snowman and everybody starts to dance.
I don’t dance. I pretend to Bert that I am going to get some crisps and go and stand by myself next to the table at the back. I don’t want to look as though I care, so I smile and tap my feet just as if I am having a lovely time, and whenever I feel my eyes starting to prickle I take another sip of my drink and nobody notices.
Ian is drinking beer and talking to Mr. Craig on the other side of the room. They are not looking at me, but watching everybody dancing and deep in some conversation. I watch Marjorie dance her way over to them and smile, and I feel as though my heart has been torn into pieces when Ian smiles back.
He doesn’t dance with her.
Instead he says something to Mr. Craig and leaves Marjorie to him. He eases his way across the room through the little huddle of dancers, smiling and touching their elbows to pass them until he is right in front of me. He looks down at me with those cool grey eyes, until I feel as if my soul has been stripped bare and laid out in front of him, and I start to shiver.
He reaches out and strokes the skin on my shoulder with the smallest touch of his fingertip, so I know that he has been watching my longing all the time, and for a moment I almost run away, because the need that washes over me is like an ocean of pain. I feel myself quiver, and he reaches for my hand. Time to dance, he says, softly, and he leads me away.
I am enveloped in him, held by him, breathing in the wool of his waistcoat and the clean soap smell of his neck. We sway together, and it is only the smallest moment before my head drops to rest on his shoulder, and I know that I have surrendered my soul.
I do not know how long it is before I realise Mr. Craig is beside us. His voice seems sharp and loud above the music.
Are you ready to set off yet? he is saying to Ian, I can give you a lift on my way if you like.
For a moment I feel Ian hesitate, and I know he is looking down at me.
No, thank you Tom, he says, and his voice is calm and steady. I’m going to take Myra home. We are going out together this evening.
I look up at Mr. Craig, and smile, but somehow I think his eyes look troubled.
Very well, he says. Have a merry Christmas, Ian. Goodnight, Miss Hindley.
