Chapter 13
When she got home, Victoria asked Patrick to make a dish of haggis the next day and bring it to her at the office. She said she was taking it to a friend in the hospital. He was delighted to do it. She had a full day of meetings scheduled.
She was determined to get her mills back on their feet after four years of making military uniforms. Her old workers had lost some of their skills, and the new ones never had them.
She didn’t just want to do cotton, she wanted to do wool and silk too, and adjust her factories accordingly.
She wanted to compete in the international trade, not just locally, and they weren’t there yet.
She was struggling and impatient to make it all happen.
She had big ideas, and the workers would have to catch up to them.
Victoria brought Thor the haggis Patrick had dropped off, and he grinned broadly when he saw it. She had brought him a knife and fork and a napkin, and he ate while she talked to him about the business, and what she wanted to do with it now.
“Do you ever think about anything else?” he asked her, in heaven with the delicious meal she had brought him, after months of hospital food. He felt as though his muscles had melted.
“No.” Victoria answered him honestly. “Work has gotten me through all the hard things in my life. It’s something I know I can count on. People come and go, and they die,” like her father and Bert.
“It’s not healthy to think about work all the time.”
“I have to. Thousands of people depend on me. I have responsibilities.”
“You have to have fun too. You’re too young to only think about work.”
“I want the business to grow. Speaking of which, I had an idea today.”
“Not that again,” Thor said, rolling his eyes.
“Some of your ideas are pretty good, some make me nervous.” He smiled at her.
He looked better, and she could see that he’d shaved.
He looked more like himself. Her visit the day before had done him a world of good, even more so today with the delicious food. He needed nourishment of body and soul.
“Do you remember Hubert Maddox?”
“Of course, he ran the place. Well, no, your husband did, and then you did, but Maddox was never far behind.”
“He died at Ypres,” she said sadly, “four years ago. No one took his place when he left. He was my teacher when I inherited the business. His office is empty, the job isn’t filled.
What about you doing that? His title was administrator.
Bert used to say you could run the factory, better than he could. ” Thor was staring at her.
“Are you crazy? I was a foreman when I left. And you want to make me administrator? Are you drunk?” He was surprisingly comfortable with her, and they spoke like friends.
“How long did you work for the company?” Victoria asked him, and he thought for a minute.
“Twenty-one years, when I left. I came up through the ranks.”
“Exactly. You know every aspect of the business, from the inside. You understand the workers, you know the administration, you know the industry, the product, the market. You could be a liaison between all of those things. I don’t have time to keep an eye on everything, and Bert trusted you completely.
So do I. If you want, you can do it from that chair, if you prefer. That’s up to you.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I think you’re capable of it.”
“What if I can’t do it? If I’m no good? If I’m not smart enough?”
“Then we’ll figure it out. I think you can. You deal with the union well too. All of that’s going to be harder now with men and women working together. It’s a big job.”
“I know,” he said seriously.
But she didn’t think it was too big for him.
“I believe you can do it. I want to start traveling. I want to go to France and China to learn more about silk. There’s an owners’ conference in Virginia, in the States, in May, organized by a man that Bert respected, and I’d like to go.
If you’re keeping an eye on things here, I can do things like that.
” She had been tied to the factories for the entire war. And she wanted to get out now.
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course.”
“Can I have haggis again sometime? Your chef is a genius.” And so was she.
Thor didn’t say it, but he thought she was the most remarkable woman he had ever met.
She had a vision and a plan, she made things happen, and she wasn’t afraid to try new paths, new directions, new ideas.
She was the future of the industry, not a relic of the past, as most of the mill owners were, steeped in tradition and archaic ideas. “Why are you trusting me?”
“Because I think you’re very smart, and a good person. That’s a combination I like.”
“Me too,” he said simply, meaning her.
“Where are you going to stay when you get out of here?” she asked him practically.
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
“If you take the job, the salary is pretty respectable. You could get a better place than your cabin that I saw.”
“True,” Thor said. “I haven’t seen you in four years, and you just drop out of the sky, reorganize my life, and offer me a big job and a salary that’s probably more than I deserve.
” Suddenly the leg he had lost didn’t seem quite so tragic, and the prosthesis seemed like a good idea.
He decided to try it. It would look better at work if he had a big job, and would make it easier to get around.
“I think I’ll try the prosthesis,” he said casually, not wanting to admit he’d been wrong about it, and feeling sorry for himself.
“When do I have to start the job?” he asked her.
“When you’re up to it.”
“I think I am up to it. I was just depressed.” Victoria looked serious then.
“You had plenty of reason, from everything I’ve heard about what went on in France.” Too many of the men who’d come back had returned broken, unable to recover from what they’d seen and lived through at the front.
“It was pretty horrendous,” Thor admitted with a thoughtful look. All the men he had fought with had died. He had been one of the few survivors. “We all have bad memories to deal with,” he said quietly. He knew she had hers too, and she was going full force. Listening to her inspired him.
“Have you thought about the job?” she asked him, wrapping up the casserole dish. He had eaten it all, and seemed stronger.
“I have. I’ll do it, but if I’m terrible at it, you can put me back as a foreman.”
“You won’t be terrible at it, and most of our foremen are women now.”
“Oh God. What happened to women at home, cooking in the kitchen? Or teaching in school like my mother, if they have to work?”
“Women staying at home ended with the war,” Victoria said seriously.
“It’s different now. A lot of women want to have real jobs, they don’t want to go back to the kitchen.
That’s what the men at the factories are upset about.
It’s not entirely a man’s world anymore.
These are new times. It’s a hard change for the men coming back. ” He nodded.
“I’ll get used to it,” he promised. She left a few minutes later and he went back to bed and thought about her.
She wanted to change the world, and he wondered if she was right.
It felt like a roller coaster to him, but he was willing to try.
For her. She made him believe in himself again, a lot like Bert.
* * *
Victoria visited Thor in the hospital every few days, and brought meals that Patrick had made.
Two weeks after she’d found him, he was practicing with the prosthesis, looked healthier and felt stronger, and moved to a first-rate boardinghouse near the office.
She had given him an advance on his salary, and he said it was the nicest place he had ever lived, thanks to her. She was pleased.
She was struggling with all the challenges of her business after the war.
The tension remained between male and female workers at the mills.
The women were very decently paid but still wanted higher salaries, and equal pay with the men, which wasn’t possible yet.
The men wanted their jobs back and didn’t want the women there at all.
Victoria was struggling to reinstate the kind of quality the mills had produced before the war, being made now by workers with less experience than the ones who hadn’t come back.
She wanted to diversify what they did and not concentrate only on cotton, which was a more international point of view.
And she was still determined to visit mills in China and France and the States.
She was hungry to learn more about the business.
She was never satisfied to settle where she was.
She always wanted to improve and grow and expand the business. She wanted to do and be more.
Thor started his new job a week after he left the hospital and it was exhausting at first, with the new prosthesis.
What he had been through during the war was arduous physically, but his new job was mentally taxing, and he loved it, and loved the challenge, and seeing Victoria all the time.
They talked like old friends, and she invited him to dinner at the house for one of Patrick’s meals. He looked dazed at the end of it.