The Quality Street Wedding Page 15

  To Percy it did not seem odd that a churchman should have a comfortable wealth; in Percy’s experience the Church of England was always a useful way in to society circles. He’d never known a Rector to sit on any sort of vast fortune – he did not assume the Dunkleys’ was in the league of the Rothschilds, but he had no difficulty imagining a nice, solid sum of money coming their way. Maybe the price of a motor car, or the membership fees of a good London club.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  A letter from the Home Office lay on a sampling table in the centre of the Confectioners’ Kitchen. It lay open, and Albert and Mary sat quietly looking past it, holding hands. The letter was a reminder: Albert Baum could not bring his children or his sister to England because he was not given leave to remain in England at all. His latest permit would expire on Easter Monday, and he was expected to be on the boat train bound for Paris the following day.

  ‘Why do they need to send you these horrible letters anyway?’ Mary scowled tearfully at the typed communication. ‘They know you’re trying to get a house to lease. Don’t they realise how difficult it is? It’s bad enough without them sending threatening reminders.’

  ‘They hope that I will give up, I think. They hope that I will admit defeat and leave.’

  ‘Why does it need to be a house? Why can’t we find a family who will let you lodge with them and then just get them to sign an affidavit, and then—’

  ‘Because the Home Office don’t want to make this easy. It has to be a house on a lease, somewhere settled.’ Albert reached up and tucked the loose strands of Mary’s hair back over her ears and then leant forward to kiss her forehead. ‘Don’t worry about it today, we have time. Don’t let them steal the time we have together.’

  ‘But time is running out. And who knows if they’ll give you a permit to come back again and sign another lease if you don’t get one this time,’ Mary said anxiously, ‘that’s if they even let you stay this time and don’t cut your permit short like they did last summer.’

  Albert looked around him sadly. ‘We could do such great things here, you and I, Maria. We could do great things for Mackintosh’s.’

  Tears ran silently down Mary’s cheeks and Albert gently rubbed her back with his free hand. It was an odd feature of their situation that all the usual stages of courtship had been hastened over and they had found themselves talking about a future life together before they had had a chance to go to even a dance. Perhaps if there had been no sense of urgency, no sense that they could be separated forever at any moment, they might have spent years tiptoeing around each other, trying to find the courage for a kiss, but as it was, they had been bound by the conviction that their futures lay together and that once Albert had brought his family to safety they might find the time for slow courtship.

  ‘I’ve been reading in the newspapers about other Germans who have come to England, other Jewish Germans.’ Mary looked as though she were trying to find the courage to suggest something which Albert would not want to hear.

  ‘I know that some people stay after their permits have expired, Maria. But they get caught, and they are sent to prison. And then there’s the children. I can’t abandon the children in Germany.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I’d never suggest that! I know that you’re a good father to them – the best father – you’d never abandon them like that.’ Mary struggled to find the words to explain what she wanted to say to him. It was possibly the hardest thing she had ever had to say in her life. ‘No, I read that there’s a way around the permits, a legal way. It wouldn’t solve all our problems, but it would buy time.’ Mary steeled herself to ask the question she’d been burning to ask since Albert had returned to England. She wiped the tears from her cheeks, pulled herself upright on her stool, and took a deep breath. ‘Albert, I’ll be twenty-one the day before your permit says you have to leave.’

  Albert squeezed her hand a little tighter and nodded a weak apology. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not much of a birthday present for you, my dear.’

  ‘No, no, I mean I’ll be twenty-one. I mean that I can marry you; that you can marry me.’

  Albert Baum was silent for a moment. He adored Mary, but he loved her too much to let her give away her life to save his. ‘Maria, you don’t know what you’re saying. You have so much of the world still to see, you are so young to decide such a thing. To decide—’

  ‘I have so much of the world to see and I don’t want to see any of it without you! I’ve read the newspapers and I know that the only way for you to get a permit to stay here is to marry an Englishwoman before you leave. I’d have liked to let you court me a while,’ Mary said, pondering for a moment this other life that they might have had if things had been different, ‘but I don’t think I’d have liked leading you a merry dance like other girls do with their young men. I’d have liked to spend months on end pointing at things in shop windows and telling everyone I’d have them at my wedding, and I’d have liked to have met your children before they greeted me as their new mother, but some things just have to be as they are, not as we want them to be. I’ll love your children because I love their father – and perhaps one day I’ll get to plan them the weddings I wish we’d had – but for the moment I’ll just be glad to have you safe and sound, here at my side with them and your sister, and forget all the worry we’ve had this year, start next year as a family in peace.’

  ‘Are you sure that you want to do this, Maria? You know that I am not your responsibility, you do not have to save me.’

  ‘No, but I want to.’

  Albert did not look at Mary; he looked around the kitchen in desperation, rummaged through his pockets, and then began throwing open drawers and cupboards while Mary sat still in the middle of the room, watching in bemused curiosity.

  ‘Albert, I’ve just asked you a very serious question. I don’t think you’ve realised that you haven’t given me an answer.’

  ‘I cannot allow you to ask it. There is something I need to find!’ He tipped out cartons and threw open cupboard doors until finally he found what he was looking for: a golden toffee wrapper. He peeled the toffee away from the foil and cellophane, leaving the sweet on the marble-topped table, and folding the wrapper over into a band as he returned to Mary. Albert Baum took a deep breath, looked at Mary’s tear-streaked face, looked at the sweet wrapper, and looked at Mary again saying, ‘You know this is not what I wanted for you, but you are everything I could have wanted for me. You are kind and clever and you will make a wonderful mother to my children. Mary Norcliffe, my darling Maria,’ here he knelt before her and offered up the band of golden toffee wrapper which he had folded to form a ring, ‘will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’

  Mary’s tears began again, but this time they were of joy and of relief. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s all I want in the world.’

  But through her happiness Mary felt that little shiver of cold again, that odd foreboding she’d had in the grounds of the library. It was like someone, somewhere, had walked over her grave … and she couldn’t shake off the feeling.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It had started as she was walking home from work the preceding evening. Siobhan Grimshaw had complained about the smell of the tannery, but Doreen couldn’t smell it. Doreen couldn’t smell anything at all. It was odd when she noticed it; it was a chilly spring evening, and she’d have expected the smell of coal burners to be strong, but there was nothing. She hadn’t felt as though she had lost her sense of smell, she just couldn’t smell anything. That night at tea she’d lost her appetite, but she picked at a bit of bread and beef dripping. She thought the savoury tang of the meat fat might nourish her and give her an appetite, but she found the fat coating her tongue tasteless and strange; the bread a cotton-wool wad she couldn’t swallow.

  It wasn’t like Doreen Fairclough to waste good food and her husband worried that she was working too hard, but he made a mental note to talk about it with her once this rush at his own workplace was over and they
could get a day off together.

  The shooting, burning pain in her throat was there when she woke up, but she told herself she had probably been snoring and that had made her throat dry. She knew she snored sometimes when she slept on her right side. She told herself not to make a fuss; she always made such a fuss.

  Her walk to work was an agony of indecision. She knew that if what she had was the septic throat infection, she must stay at home to prevent it spreading to her colleagues and her fellow travellers on the daily tram, and all the people in the corner shop. But what if she was making a fuss about nothing? What if she was crying wolf? What if she went home on the sick but then was all right again by teatime, and then was really, truly ill next week and had to go off properly, and everyone thought she was malingering?

  It didn’t help that she was always late and always having to take a day here and there for her children’s various sniffles and mishaps. And why was that? Why were her children so much more trouble than everyone else’s? She took them to Sunday School, she kept them clean, she fed them healthy food and she kept a healthy discipline in the running of the house; she tried her damnedest. But it didn’t change the fact that her kids were the only kids she’d ever heard of who had shaved their dog and then eaten a bee.

  Doreen was at the factory gate and she turned to leave and then turned back to go in half a dozen times. If she told them she was quite well she would be putting everyone at risk, but if she cried off she risked extending her reputation as a nuisance. And she felt such a nuisance. She wished she was a different person entirely, but it was too late for all that now; the factory watchman was coming out of his cabin at the gate and she’d have to decide whether she was going in or giving a message.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, Doreen, that I am extremely busy at present and that coming out to the gatehouse cabin costs me more than a little time.’ Mrs Starbeck said it sweetly enough, but there was an implicit threat: this better be worth my while, or you will pay.

  ‘I’m s-sorry.’ Doreen’s stammer was partly nerves, but also the awful foggy feeling the cold air had brought with it. She shivered and stammered and felt more ashamed than ever – and then was even more determined to put a brave face on it and work until she dropped.

  ‘Come along, quickly now, I haven’t got all day, have I, Doreen?’

  ‘I-I have a sore throat, Mrs Starbeck.’

  ‘And I suppose you want to take the day, do you?’

  ‘No, no, I-I just thought that I should tell you in case – in case it was … you know …’

  ‘No, I don’t know, Doreen. In case it was what?’

  ‘Well, the scarlet fever. I don’t want to spread the fever.’

  ‘And do you have a fever, Doreen?’

  Doreen sweated with the chill of the morning and her foggy mind told her that meant that she did not. ‘No, I just—’

  ‘And do you have a scarlatinal rash?’

  ‘No …’ Doreen felt humiliated and foolish, and very, very ashamed.

  ‘Then, if we’ve quite finished here, I’d be glad of your presence on the production line which is already short-handed.’

  Doreen mumbled her apologies and followed Mrs Starbeck through the winding factory corridors to her workroom, where the adjacent changing room was already empty but for one or two stragglers like herself. Mrs Starbeck must have been in a particularly foul mood, because she took the time to give the remaining workers a perfunctory lecture on the necessity of ‘working through’ some ailments, inconveniences and challenges.

  ‘We’re all under strain and we’re all feeling run-down. I’m sure half the women in the factory woke up with a scratch in their throat, but fortunately most of them realise that it’s their patriotic duty to press on.’ Mrs Starbeck noticed that Doreen was struggling to remove her coat and dress herself in her overalls. ‘When you’re quite ready?’

  Doreen followed Mrs Starbeck into her workroom where her colleagues were jammed into their high chairs at close quarters. The air felt dry and she coughed into her hand and then pulled herself up into a seat. She was dimly aware of kind faces closing in on her and helping her down, moving her round to the far end of the workroom past all her colleagues, and then came a rising warm fog which took the workroom with it.

  It was at that moment that Doreen fainted into unconsciousness.

  ‘Nurse Munton says we’ve got to keep all the women at their places on the line and not allow them to move. She’s sending for the District Medical Officer.’ Diana kept to the edge of the production room, careful not to get too close to the waiting employees.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Cynthia Starbeck was irritated enough that she’d lost time to a shutdown while ambulancemen removed one of her quickest workers, but to have to tolerate a further disruption while the Women’s Employment Department made a song and dance about it was really too much. ‘Doreen Fairclough was in this workroom for but a moment; it’s highly unlikely that anyone has caught scarlatina from her – and even if they had it’s no worse than a mild case of influenza. I must insist that you vacate my workrooms.’

  ‘The shutdown stands, Cynthia.’ Diana’s voice rang clearly through the production hall and all eyes were upon her. No one could have failed to notice that she used Mrs Starbeck’s first name. ‘This is an Employment Department matter and my authority comes straight from the head of that department. Doreen has been working on this line all week and if she caught the infection here there might be other infectious cases.’ Diana addressed the assembled women who were waiting anxiously at their workstations in grim silence. ‘The District Medical Officer will be coming here with his staff to take medical swabs of the throat. If you’re found to have a scarlatinal infection you’ll be quarantined at home—’

  ‘Miss!’ One of the minnows who had been brought in to work on pallet filling put up her hand as though she were still at the school she had clearly only recently left. ‘If we don’t want to do it, can we go now?’

  ‘If you don’t want to do what?’ Diana asked.

  ‘If we don’t want to do the medical thing and the quarantine. We’ve got to be on the bus at four thirty, and then we need to be back here on shift tomorrow.’ Some of the other minnows muttered agreement; they didn’t mind a shutdown, but they didn’t want to lose wages or miss the bus home to their tea.

  ‘This is compulsory.’ Diana answered clearly enough for all the room to hear. ‘Someone came into this workroom with scarlet fever, and by law that’s a reportable illness. You all have a legal requirement to stop here until you’ve had your test and seen the Medical Officer.’

  ‘Yeah, but hardly anyone ever dies of scarlet fever, do they? It’s up to us if we want to take the risk, isn’t it?’

  Cynthia Starbeck smirked at Diana. She’d chosen these girls for the line herself and they were just her sort.

  Chapter Forty

  ‘Can’t we send them away until morning? There’s nothing to be done tonight, surely?’ Director Hitchens was already pulling on his overcoat and readying to leave his office. It was after office hours and he didn’t like being held up on his way out the door, even if it was by the Head of Women’s Employment.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t have the luxury of sending them away.’ Amy Wilkes was wary of being too direct with her director, but beating about the bush at that time of the evening would only irritate him more. ‘They’ve sent a telegram on ahead to say they’re on the 4.20 from King’s Cross. Someone has to be here to meet them and it can’t be an office junior.’ Amy Wilkes was surprised that the director wasn’t more alarmed at the news that the Ministry of Health were sending officials to their factory to deal with a potentially fatal illness. ‘If we’re employing women and young people then we have to be ready to accept orders to make changes. The new Factories Act is very clear: if we want the cheap labour they provide, we have to invest in the means of making them safe.’

  ‘What time do they get here?’

  Mrs Wilkes handed over
the telegram for inspection. ‘I think it’s unlikely they’ll shut us down completely, but we do need to be ready to make substantial changes to working arrangements for the duration of the outbreak.’

  The director rubbed the tips of his fingers across his weary brow as he reread the telegram. ‘I’m supposed to be in Norwich tonight; they’re planning air-raid precautions. We’ve got the Ministry of War Preparedness at Norwich testing a gas shelter, and the Ministry of Health in Halifax. Why can’t we have one panic at a time?’

  This made more sense to Amy Wilkes; war preparations were an unknown quantity, but to the director she supposed that scarlet fever felt like the sort of thing which the factory ought to know enough about to manage without him. ‘I can telephone your secretary in Norwich with developments as and when they occur, but at present they haven’t asked to see you, which is a good sign. If they only want to see the Head of Women’s Employment then they clearly don’t intend to shut us down.’

  ‘What have we done so far that we can tell them about? We must have made some changes of our own?’

  ‘I stopped all deliveries of milk to the factory canteen, but that’s only cut off one route of contagion – we need to prevent it spreading between the girls themselves and they’re their own worst enemies on that front. A restructuring of the lines might help?’