Colonel Daventry laughed. ‘Out of your wages, Miss Calvert. Your wages to come.’
Miss Spall of the Misses Spall and Benn called me her Halley’s Comet. ‘Here you come blazing out of nowhere, Miss Calvert. From your farm office.’ She said the words with the scent of slurry flaring her nostrils. ‘But there we are.’ She handed me a stiff cream card. ‘Necessity, in this case, has evidently bred resolution.’
I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t even claim the security of a farm office. Simply looked at the card, which stated in copperplate, under the stamp and seal of Spall and Benn’s Secretarial College, that Ellen Calvert had obtained a Preliminary Certificate in Typing and Shorthand, Grade One, on 29th November 1935. ‘There’s a post opening up at the town hall,’ she went on. ‘In the typing pool. Don’t get your hopes up. June Broad is also applying.’
Smug June Broad of the blooming bustline. I had no idea she was even training. I’d never seen her here. But then I’d been coming to the evening class, full of yawns and wet umbrellas and work-worn faces, older people by and large.
‘Do I have to pay to apply for the job?’
Miss Spall’s lips disappeared entirely as she smiled. ‘You do not. And I’ll put in the application for you.’ Her grey, small-pupilled eyes flicked to my feet. ‘You’ll go to the town hall for a test along with all the others. You’ll have to lay your hands on some decent shoes, however.’
Elizabeth went to see Deirdre Harper at the village post office. Mrs Harper’s daughter Patricia had a pair of black shoes with a low heel. ‘They’re still in their tissue,’ Patricia told me. ‘Don’t bend your toes. I don’t want a crease in them.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
Patricia sniffed, and handed the box over.
I walked together with Lucy down the lane. ‘Would you like to come and have tea with me at the Dawes’?’
I pranced over the puddles. I was full of life today. All that ran in my mind were the words, Dear God in Heaven, please let me get this job. ‘I’ve got to get across Waltham Square without bending my toes!’ I burst out joyously. ‘Patricia’s shoes have to be kept pristine!’ I crossed my fingers behind my back in hope, and let the giggles stream out.
‘I shan’t be able to, I don’t suppose.’
I turned. Lucy was dragging some way behind me, swishing a stick in the hedge.
‘To what?’
‘To come to your Mr and Miss Dawes. You just invited me, remember? Anyway, I can’t. I’ll be taken up with my job, you see. It’s not just you that’s busy,’ she added.
The string broke. My exhilaration was whipped away, a kite in the wind.
‘Well.’ My throat was tight. ‘Be like that, then. After all your kindness, your family’s kindness …’ For there had been a fair few teas and suppers at the Hornes’ over the years. ‘I wanted to repay you, that’s all. But have it your own way.’
‘It’s all right for you.’ Her stick slashed at the verge. ‘You, with your full set of teeth and your fair hair and blue eyes, and all the rest. You’re tall. You’re clever. And off you go now, and never mind that Lucy Horne is shovelling—’
‘Oh, Lucy,’ I cried, ‘it’s not my fault! What else should I have done? Tell me!’
But she turned away, raising one hand daintily, palm outward, as if to shield her face from my outburst. I saw Mr Babcock approaching, wheeled in his wicker chair by Marcy Berry. ‘Some people have no manners,’ Lucy said to Marcy, who then tutted at me as she passed. She was a tall girl with many moles. Mr Babcock, stone deaf and dozing, was undisturbed.
The morning of the test was fresh and we felt the breath of winter as we boarded the bus. It arrived late, and the clock hand sprang to the top of the dial as I started across Waltham Square. The sky was bright blue but the cobbles in the square still shone from the rain, and in the lower corner by the chemist’s each cobble was ringed by cold blue water. The sharp new heel of Patricia Harper’s right shoe clipped my left ankle as I stepped forward; a tiny sting. I tried not to bend my toes.
I took a breath as Lucy’s voice grated again on my inner ear. All right for you. Off you go now. I shook my head. I didn’t blame her for her resentment and fury but I couldn’t afford, today of all days, to be upset by it.
‘Ellen Calvert to see Mr Renfrew,’ I announced to a secretary.
She gave me an owlish look and put a tick next to my name. ‘Please take a seat.’
I turned to see, appearing out of the dimness, several girls on a polished bench at the back of the lobby, handbags on knees and feet together. I perched on the end of the bench. We were jammed like roosting hens but my neighbour surged back and forth in her seat for a few seconds, as if she were making room, to show willing. ‘Have you got your piece?’ she asked, and I was hit by a blast of halitosis. ‘They’ll make us do another,’ the girl added, and I swooped forward to duck the second wave of odour, as if to brush something from my shoe. When I saw the blood on my ankle I remembered the sting as I crossed the square.
‘Of course. Otherwise we might have cheated.’ My voice on the word ‘cheated’ rang out. The other girls breathed, and fastened their stares on their handbags.
‘None of us would cheat,’ said someone and, straightening up, I saw June Broad. Her large, puffy face was impassive. ‘Your hair’s sticking out something shocking.’
It had grown well since Elizabeth’s shearing, back in the early summer, but still it could barely be called a bob. I raked my fingers through it, to little avail. Just then the secretary beckoned for us to follow her to a bright, high-ceilinged room set out with six tin tables. Six tin tables and six typewriters: we were going to wake the dead. I sat down, June in front of me and the girl with the monstrous breath behind. As soon as we were seated, the secretary began. ‘Travelling in South America … requires a strength of constitution …’ A battering cacophony as I had predicted, gone in an instant. One girl sobbed as her sheet was ripped from the roll by the secretary; another gasped, ‘I put the wrong there, all the way through …’ We sat, wondering, until it became clear that the secretary, as she went through the texts, was separating the wheat from the chaff.
‘June Broad. Elspeth Dixon.’ A pause. ‘Ellen Calvert.’
We followed the secretary up the stone steps and into an unlit corridor. The door of Mr Renfrew loomed at the end. I sat as June, and then the unknown Elspeth – a pole-thin pigeon-toed girl with a great tuck in the back of a vast sky-blue frock, her mother’s without a doubt – went in by turn. June whistled and simpered behind the oak door; Elspeth was inaudible. June did not pause as she left, passing me without lowering her eyes, which I was astonished to see were glassy in the half-light, as if welling with tears. Elspeth said ‘Good luck’ cheerily, as if she had the job already, and sailed off with her dress bagging out behind her.
The door opened once more, four inches. Light lay behind. A male voice said, ‘Miss Calvert.’
Remembering afterwards my own typing test thrust into my hand, remembering the dizzying white light in the room, full sunlight streaming in through two immense windows, and glimpsing the square below, the expanse shrunken from this height, the drenched cobbles no longer intimidating, the shopfronts on the far side neat and domestic in scale. Just a glimpse; one second for each thing: light, typing test, windows, square—
And in the corner of my vision, the pillar of a man, grave, unspeaking. It was the secretary who said, ‘Take a seat, my dear,’ and I did so, unfolding the test to see a single fault, atmisphere for atmosphere, circled in red crayon. Right ring finger straying inward. How elementary.
‘You went to the Misses Spall and Benn, I gather,’ came the voice, after a long, quiet, light-filled expanse of time.
‘Yes,’ I said at last.
‘Take some shorthand, please. Miss Moss, give her the necessary.’
A pad and pen were thrust into my hands and I seated myself on a stool indicated by the secretary.