Chapter 21 A Well-Turned-Out Little Thing #2
“Mm-hmm,” the girl was saying to her interlocutor.
“All right, then.” She rolled her eyes at Honor to indicate that whoever it was, they were tiresome.
When she hung up, she sighed cheerfully and handed Honor a clipboard and a ballpoint pen.
“You’re new, aren’t you? Fill this in—don’t worry if there’re bits you can’t answer, just leave them blank—and then I’ll send you in to do your typing test.”
For some reason the possibility of a test hadn’t crossed Honor’s mind.
Oh well, she thought, the worst that can happen is they’ll turn you out.
She filled in the form carefully. Her handwriting had always been decent, at least. Then she was taken into the main office and placed behind a monstrous Imperial contraption with large round keys.
She’d never actually touched a typewriting machine before; her correspondence course had only required her to move her fingers across a diagram printed on cardboard. It took surprising strength to press down the keys. She managed only twenty words per minute, with fifty percent accuracy.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she told Mrs. Grey, an older lady with stiff white hair and a yellow sweater. “I haven’t had much practice. I’m sure I’ll improve.” She had seven pounds and six shillings to her name.
But Mrs. Grey seemed unconcerned. “We’ll find you something where typing isn’t the main task,” she said, running an evaluative eye over Honor’s outfit. “You’re a well-turned-out little thing. Decorative. And”—she put on her spectacles and looked at the filled-in form—“you must speak French.”
Oh God, thought Honor. Please don’t ask me to demonstrate.
“Marjorie,” said Mrs. Grey, turning her head. “Is the file for that publisher, the one on Vigo Street, on your desk?”
Marjorie (presumably Mrs. Lawton) was a younger, plumper woman with a well-powdered face and an Hermès scarf knotted around her neck. She strolled across the room, holding a buff-colored folder. As she returned to her desk, she trailed a faint, delicious cloud of Femme Rochas.
“Ah yes,” said Mrs. Grey, glancing through the file’s contents. “You might do very well for this. Do you like reading?”
“Adore it,” said Honor.
“I’ll give the chap a ring. But I’m sure he’ll consider you more than suitable. His firm isn’t exempt from conscription, so he’s lost several young men. We’ll be in touch.”
“Hilda Grey tells me you speak French,” said Gerald Wilson. “I was stationed in N?mes, you know, during the Great War. Votre internat était-il francophone?”
Honor smiled and nodded, panic in her eyes. Ah, thought Gerald. Either she or Mrs. Grey had exaggerated. He wondered what else she’d lied about. “Not married, then?” he asked. “Any boyfriends?”
Back on safer ground, Honor told him no.
“I’ve not been in London long, you see. My parents are still on the Continent.
” Con-ta-nint. “So I’m trying to make a go of things by myself.
People have been so kind. Like Mrs. Grey.
And I’m awfully keen to get to work. I’m sure I can turn my hand to anything you need me to. ”
Gerald was a man of the world. He’d striven far from less-than-ideal beginnings and knew rank desperation when he saw it.
Poor wretch. He hadn’t the heart to disappoint her.
She’d find other work, of course, there was no question of that.
But the idea of this fragile girl in a bustling typing pool or, worse, on a factory line where she’d be sitting prey for men less cultured, less scrupulous than himself—well, it was somehow not to be borne.
She wore a tiny ruby around her neck; it rested on the dip of her clavicle and emphasized the whiteness of her skin.
He’d never seen skin quite like it. Not a mark or a freckle, no suggestion of a flush nor the tint of a vein.
Her hair was cut severely above her ears, not a style that generally met with his approval.
Barbara had long blond hair that he enjoyed unpinning, winding around his hands.
Yet looking at this child, with her elongated neck and sharp jawline, he suddenly understood the appeal of the gamine.
“Why don’t I start by organizing things a bit in here?” said Honor, looking around at the mess of books and papers in Gerald’s office. He realized he hadn’t spoken for several moments, and that she thought he was mulling over whether to employ her.
“Goodness me, no,” he said. “No need for that. Can you start on Monday? Mary, my secretary, will be here then. She’ll show you the ropes.”
I’m a soft old fool, he thought. But the expression of pure relief on the girl’s face was all the reward he needed.
Or so he’d have sworn. A sense of paternal responsibility, nothing more, guided his thoughts during Honor’s first weeks of employment.
Protecting her innocence seemed a duty commensurate with his worthiness as a man.
Only upon war—upon history itself—was that worthiness wrecked.
When David and Michael went MIA, only a month apart, Honor was a fount of sympathy and selfless tender ministrations.
His wife, Barbara, white-faced and mute with grief, turned in on herself.
She was unable to process the enormity of it.
Her beautiful sons, aged twenty-three and twenty-one, wiped out senselessly.
As she raged silently against the universe, Gerald sought solace in the only way he knew how.
But if that was how Gerald and Honor’s relationship began, it soon became a true love affair, at least for Gerald.
And the depth of his passion for Honor, he discovered, all but eclipsed any guilt.
I’m only human, he told himself. What man of nearly sixty could resist this exquisite raven-haired creature, who at twenty-two had the body of a fourteen-year-old girl and yet somehow possessed a bedroom repertoire as heady as the coquettes in the blue-lamp brothels on the Western Front?
Such gifts, he had supposed, were uniquely French. He was very happy to be proven wrong.
It was perhaps to Gerald’s greater astonishment that Honor’s editorial knack, and her eye for sellable work, emerged as quite superior to the Oxbridge fellows who used to work for him.
She absorbed his teaching with almost masculine facility, soon becoming indispensable.
When it was announced that young unmarried women were to be called up, she pointed out an obvious solution.
She could be strangely forthright in that way.
But Gerald didn’t have to think about it.
That very lunchtime, he went out and bought a two-carat diamond ring from Hancocks, conveniently two doors down from their offices.
With scarcely a hint of guile, Honor declared herself the happiest girl in the world.