Neither did she want to lose this position. She mulled the matter over for a week, and it was a second wintry walk to the little park and the spilling-out students that decided her. She said to her employer the next afternoon, when he had finished his playback and she was ostensibly dusting a table in his study, “Do those tapes last?” Except when guests were present she had dropped the “sir” insensibly; her deferential tone implied it. “It would be a shame if anything happened to them, and you had no record.”
“Oh, they last. For as long as I’ll want them,” said Mr. Tomlinson briskly, and Celia made no reply except to whisk her cloth assiduously over the covered and ancient typewriter on a stand in one corner. Something used by his long-dead wife, she wondered, or a trophy from some distant office?
Mr. Tomlinson was preoccupied at dinner. In the morning, he folded his napkin as Celia was clearing the breakfast dishes away and said with shyness, “I don’t suppose you type, Celia?”
Tm afraid not. I took it in high school,” said Celia carelessly, waggling her agile fingers which had never touched a keyboard, “but I’ve forgotten all I ever knew. It’s something you have to keep practicing at—there are all kinds of exercises,” she added in case she should be invited to sit down there and then.
In a zeal he thought to be entirely his own, Mr. Tomlinson pursued her into the kitchen, an area he usually left austerely to women. “But if you’ve had the rudiments, it wouldn’t be quite like starting from scratch, surely. You’d be able to more or less brush up, wouldn’t you? I wonder if there’s a place in town that offers courses?”
Fennimore Business School, Celia wanted to say sharply, but she only glanced at him noncommittally as she slid his breakfast dishes gently into hot water and suds.
“It has occurred to me that it might be wise to have a written record,” said Mr. Tomlinson, “because that way, if it seemed like a good idea, I could always have a few copies printed and send them to old friends in other parts of the country.” He tugged excitedly at his vest. “Would you make some inquiries for me, Celia? I’m not very good on the telephone.”
It was a dignified understatement; he could not hear a single transmitted word. Celia finished the dishes, to drive home the impression that any eagerness over this project was on the part of her employer, before she dried her hands and went to consult the telephone book. She informed Mr. Tomlinson presently that the Fennimore Business School had evening classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and told him the fee.
It didn’t seem to take him aback in the least, afire as he already was with the notion of a manuscript. “But it would mean giving up your time on those evenings.”
“Well . . . I wouldn’t mind that. But—I know it’s none of my business, but do you think Mrs. Cannon . . . ?”
It had the expected effect. “I am naturally very fond of my niece. However,” said Mr. Tomlinson magnificently, “she is not my arbiter. Would you make the necessary arrangements?”
Celia’s hands were as deft at a typewriter as they had been at Mrs. Stevenson’s sewing machine, and after the first two bewildering sessions she was able to take a look at her fellow students. Except for a few obviously expectant young wives she could not place them with any accuracy, but she knew intuitively that they had nothing to give her. She knew too that theirs was a world which would never impinge on that of Mrs. Cannon or Mr. Tomlinson, and when a blond young man with a wavy profile invited her to have a drink after class she accepted.
His name was Willis Lambert, and he told her over a Tom Collins in a smokily lit lounge that he was a trainee for Temple Insurance; he hoped to be a claims investigator, and although there was no official policy, the company worked you up that much faster if you took any outside courses on your own. This little exposition was followed by an expectant pause, which Celia filled by taking a sip of her drink. Her lowered gaze caught the edge of Willis Lambert’s dashingly checked coat sleeve and the massive gold ring with a tiny speck of diamond on his little finger. It was a near-certainty that Willis Lambert would have nothing further to do with anyone in domestic service.
“Actually,” said Celia—this was a word Hugh Stevenson’s girls had used a great deal, and it gave her confidence —“I’m not doing anything at the moment, just sort of looking around.” She took refuge in another remembered pause-filler, lifting a hand to trace her already smooth coil of ashy hair. “But typing ought to be good training for something.”
“It comes in real handy in an office,” agreed Willis Lambert with an appreciative grin. He tapped her glass. “Finish that and we’ll have another to relax the old finger muscles.”
“Thank you, but I can’t, I’m late now,” said Celia, feeling a rush of resentment at Mr. Tomlinson and his clockwatching friend who came to play backgammon on her evenings off.
“See you Thursday night,” said Willis on the sidewalk, and the interlude after class was plainly included.
Mr. Tomlinson’s impatience to commence on what he had begun to call his book grew in direct proportion to Celia’s progress at the typewriter—he had had the ancient machine cleaned and to her surprise it actually worked— and her job, and her position in the house, underwent a subtle change. The first manifestation of this was Mr. Tomlinson’s decision to have Mrs. Meggs come three days a week instead of two, in order to allow Celia more time at the table in his study. And, like a bat operating on radar, Hester Cannon
