a relationship with a man, but shyness had always held her back. The shyness had to do with not knowing enough, with having so little experience, the very opposite of Anne. Yet once, when they’d both had quite a lot of wine to drink, she’d almost asked her what she should do. ‘Just because I’m so wretchedly plain,’ she’d almost said, ‘doesn’t mean I can do without things.’ But she hadn’t said that, and now Anne was gone and there was no one else who wouldn’t have been just a little shocked to hear stuff like that. Not in a million years could she have said it to Elizabeth.
And so it remained. No widower, elderly or otherwise, proposed marriage; no blind man proclaimed love. What happened was rather different from all that. Once a year, as Christmas approached, Pollock-Brown held its annual staff party at the factories beyond the Green Belt. Executive and clerical staff from the building in Kingsway met the factory workers in their huge canteen, richly decorated now with Christmas hangings. Dancing took place. There was supper, and unlimited drinks at the firm’s expense. The managing director made a speech and the present chairman, Sir Robert Willis, made a speech also, in the course of which he thanked his workers for their loyalty. A thousand Pollock-Brown employees let their hair down, typists and secretaries, directors, executives who would soon be directors, tea-women, mould-makers, van-drivers, lorry-drivers, warehousemen, finishers, polishers. In a formal manner Mr Everend always reserved the first dance for Sarah and she felt quite proud to be led on to the floor in the wake of Sir Robert and his secretary and the managing director and his secretary, a woman called Mrs Mykers. After that the Christmas spirit really got going. Paper hats were supplied to everyone, including Sir Robert Willis, Mr Everend and the managing director. One of the dispatch boys had once poured a little beer over Mr Everend, because Mr Everend always so entered into the spirit of things that horseplay with beer seemed quite in order. There were tales, many of them true, of sexual congress in out-of-the-way corners, particularly in store-rooms.
‘Hullo,’ a girl said, addressing Sarah in what for this one evening of the year was called the Ladies’ Powder Room.
‘Hullo,’ Sarah replied, unable to place the girl. She was small, with short black hair that was smooth and hung severely straight on either side of her face. She was pretty: an oval face with eyes almost as black as her hair, and a mouth that slightly pouted, dimpling her cheeks. Sarah frowned as the dimples came and went. The girl smiled in a friendly way. She said her name was Sandra Pond.
‘You’re Everend’s girl,’ she added.
‘Secretary,’ Sarah said.
‘I meant that.’ She laughed and the dimples danced about. ‘I didn’t mean nothing suspect, Miss Machaen.’
‘Suspect?’
‘You know.’
She wore a black dress with lace at her neck and wrists Her feet were neat, in shiny black shoes. Her legs were slim, black-clad also. How nice to be so attractive! Sarah thought, a familiar reflection when meeting such girls for the first time. It wouldn’t even matter having a slack, lower-class accent, as this girl had. You’d give up a lot for looks like that.
‘I’m in polishing,’ the girl said. ‘Your plastic lampshades.’
‘You don’t sound as if you like it.’ Sarah laughed. She glanced at herself in the mirror above one of the two wash-basins. Hurriedly she looked away.
‘It’s clean,’ Sandra Pond said. ‘A polishing machine’s quite clean to operate.’
‘Yes, I suppose it would be.’
‘Care for a drink at all, Miss Machaen?’
‘A drink?’
‘Don’t you drink, Miss Machaen?’
‘Well, yes, but –’
‘We’re meant to mix at a thing like this. The peasants and the privileged.’ She gave a rasping, rather unattractive laugh. ‘Come on,’ she said.
Beneath the prettiness there was something hard about her. There were flashes of bitterness in the way she’d said ‘the peasants and the privileged’, and in the way she’d laughed and in the way she walked out of the Ladies’ Powder Room. She walked impatiently, as if she disliked being at the Christmas party. She was a prickly girl, Sarah said to herself. She wasn’t at all glad that she’d fallen into conversation with her.
They sat down at a small table at the edge of the dance-floor. ‘What d’you drink?’ the girl said, immediately getting to her feet again in an edgy way. ‘Whisky?’
‘I’d like a gin and tonic.’
The dimples came and went, cracking the brittleness. The smile seemed disposed to linger but did not. ‘Don’t go away now,’ the slack voice commanded as she jerked quickly away herself.
‘Someone looking after you?’ Dancing with the wife of the dispatch manager, Mr Everend shouted jollily at Sarah. He wore a scarlet, cone-shaped paper hat. The wife of the dispatch manager was eyeing, over his shoulder, a sales executive called Chumm, with whom, whenever it was possible, she went to bed.
‘Yes, thanks, Mr Everend,’ Sarah answered, waving a hand to indicate that he mustn’t feel responsible for her.
‘Horrid brute, that man,’ Sandra Pond said, returning with their drinks. ‘Cheers,’ she said, raising a glass of what looked like whisky and touching Sarah’s glass with it.
‘Cheers,’ Sarah said, although it was a salutation she disliked.
‘It began last year here,’ Sandra said, pointing with her glass at the dispatch manager’s wife. ‘Her and Chumm.’
‘I’ve never met her actually.’
‘You didn’t miss nothing. That Chumm’s a villain.’
