Peerless pro tempore, together with an hundred of the Paragon, and will endeavour to complete your order at Fox’s earliest convenience. I remain your obedient servant, A. De’Ath, Expediting Clerk, on behalf of Thos. Ince. An initial will suffice, Miss De’Ath – so said Appleby, the crabbed and querulous senior clerk – some of our customers may not be so tolerant when it comes to the matter of female employment . . . More tolerant than you, I’d wager! Appleby is senior only to Audrey, the two occupying the garret above the Bishopsgate premises, he seated on his stool at an old-fashioned high desk under the dormer, while she is thrust under the attic’s slope, up against the mouse-gnawed wainscot. Her Sholes is mounted on its small table, and each time she returns its carriage with the inbuilt treadle mechanism she is forcibly kerchunggg! reminded that this is women’s work: sweated, menial, repetitive . Although the truth is that her actual responsibilities exceed his – Appleby, in his grisly old suit and soured linen collar, is a makeweight , kept on by Ince’s out of gratitude for service tendered long since. He scratches at the accounts, wages and inventory books. Each Friday he totters to the bank accompanied by a sturdy boy armed with a cudgel — and he conveys to Audrey only the faintest outline of the matters to hand, leaving her to endow them with the necessary materiality. All the letters, all the memoranda, all the advertisement copy – such words her hands make, inverted into claws that scrabble about on the keys of the Sholes, over and over, in a pattern that cannot really be a pattern since it is never repeated .
– No, I didn’t mean thoshe wordsh either, Audrey . . . For a man who supposes himself in thrall to the progress of the labouring classes, Gilbert has a most extreme aversion to work itself, in all its forms, except for the production of his own words . . . I meant the wordsh you have sent forth in that frail barque, the Ardent, on to the world’sh watersh. In the shadows of his shirt his penis hunches ringed by rolled skin-folds bamboo stuck in you . At the Ince workshop, in back of Old Commercial Street, the piece workers, Jews and Jewesses mostly , cut the silk and gingham, oil it, stretch it, sew the finicky loops and sleeves, then feed in the ribs and attach the handle – Vwar-la! another Peerless or Paragon or elegant ladies’ walking umbrella. Over and over they do it, their strange and sallow faces also oiled and stretching – hands chapped and chafed , covered with bunions in winter – summer brings the stench from the fish stalls in Black Lion Yard, but always there is the high reek of poultry .
It is a paltry thing, Gilbert, she says, rising to pull up her petticoats and roll up her stockings. Snap! goes one garter. A paltry thing, and taken only by those that assent to its contents already, read, I believe, not even by them. Snap! There is a silver tray with cut-glass decanter and soda siphon. Audrey lightly touches the fluted neck, the cool grooves – she picks up a pin and begins to fold strand upon strand of her red raffia-work . The window is masked by a heavy drape, but beyond it she knows stand the high-gabled houses with their triplets of artistic windows, while beyond them lie the embankment and the river sweating its noxious vapours – she pictures the lurid swirl of tannery waste caught in its sluggish flow. – I shall have to go. – Musht you? – Yes, yes – back to Missus Phelps in De Beauvoir Town, back to tinned Gong soup heated up on the oil stove, back to the airy sensation of falling to sleep without the deadweight of Father, Mary Jane, and the rest . . . She steps into the respectable embrace of her shirtwaist, buttons it, moves to the drapes, parts them. Down below a motor-taxi rattles by the kerb, Venetia Stanley – it can be no other – stands withdrawing coins from the beady security of her purse. She has come from tea at the Dorchester,
– No, I didn’t mean thoshe wordsh either, Audrey . . . For a man who supposes himself in thrall to the progress of the labouring classes, Gilbert has a most extreme aversion to work itself, in all its forms, except for the production of his own words . . . I meant the wordsh you have sent forth in that frail barque, the Ardent, on to the world’sh watersh. In the shadows of his shirt his penis hunches ringed by rolled skin-folds bamboo stuck in you . At the Ince workshop, in back of Old Commercial Street, the piece workers, Jews and Jewesses mostly , cut the silk and gingham, oil it, stretch it, sew the finicky loops and sleeves, then feed in the ribs and attach the handle – Vwar-la! another Peerless or Paragon or elegant ladies’ walking umbrella. Over and over they do it, their strange and sallow faces also oiled and stretching – hands chapped and chafed , covered with bunions in winter – summer brings the stench from the fish stalls in Black Lion Yard, but always there is the high reek of poultry .
It is a paltry thing, Gilbert, she says, rising to pull up her petticoats and roll up her stockings. Snap! goes one garter. A paltry thing, and taken only by those that assent to its contents already, read, I believe, not even by them. Snap! There is a silver tray with cut-glass decanter and soda siphon. Audrey lightly touches the fluted neck, the cool grooves – she picks up a pin and begins to fold strand upon strand of her red raffia-work . The window is masked by a heavy drape, but beyond it she knows stand the high-gabled houses with their triplets of artistic windows, while beyond them lie the embankment and the river sweating its noxious vapours – she pictures the lurid swirl of tannery waste caught in its sluggish flow. – I shall have to go. – Musht you? – Yes, yes – back to Missus Phelps in De Beauvoir Town, back to tinned Gong soup heated up on the oil stove, back to the airy sensation of falling to sleep without the deadweight of Father, Mary Jane, and the rest . . . She steps into the respectable embrace of her shirtwaist, buttons it, moves to the drapes, parts them. Down below a motor-taxi rattles by the kerb, Venetia Stanley – it can be no other – stands withdrawing coins from the beady security of her purse. She has come from tea at the Dorchester,
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