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. Female Staff a painted sign more ordinarily stated, hidden now beneath the festive card that bore the grander title.
‘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.’
‘He has that reputation.’
‘He screwed her in a store-room. I walked in on top of them.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh in-bloody-deed.’ She laughed. ‘You like gin and t, d’you? Your drink, Miss Machaen?’
‘Please call me Sarah. Yes, I like it.’
‘Whisky mac this is. I love booze. You like it, Sarah?’
‘Yes, I do rather.’
‘Birds of a feather.’ She laughed, and paused. ‘I seen you last year. Dancing with Everend and that. I noticed you.’
‘I’ve been coming for a long time.’
‘How long you been at P-B, then?’
‘Since 1960.’
‘Jesus!’
‘I know.’
‘I was only a nipper in 1960. What age’d you say I was, Sarah?’
‘Twenty-five?’
‘Thirty. Don’t look it, do I?’
‘No, indeed.’
‘You live alone, do you, Sarah?’
‘Yes, I do. In Tufnell Park.’
‘Nice?’
‘It is quite nice.’
Sandra Pond nodded repeatedly. Tufnell Park was very nice indeed, she said, extremely nice.
‘You sit there, Sarah,’ she said. ‘I’m going to get you another drink.’
‘Oh, no. Let me. Please.’ She began to get to her feet, but Sandra Pond shot out a hand, a movement like a whip’s, instantly restraining her. Her small fingers pressed into the flesh of Sarah’s arm. ‘Stay right where you are,’ she said.
An extraordinary thought occurred to Sarah as she watched the girl moving rapidly away with their two empty glasses: Sandra Pond wanted to share her flat.
‘Now, now, now,’ Mr Priddy from Accounts admonished, large and perspiring, staring down at her through thick spectacles. He reached for her, seemingly unaware of her protestations. His knees pressed into hers, forcing them into waltztime.
‘They do an awful lot of good, these things,’ Mr Priddy confidently remarked. ‘People really get a chance.’ He added something else, something about people getting a chance to chew the rag. Sarah nodded. ‘We’ve had a miracle of a year,’ Mr Priddy said. ‘In spite of everything.’
She could see Sandra Pond standing with two full glasses, looking furious. She tried to smile at her through the dancing couples, to make some indication with her eyes that she’d had no option about dancing with Mr Priddy. But Sandra Pond, glaring into the dancers, hadn’t even noticed her yet.
‘Mrs Priddy couldn’t come,’ Mr Priddy told her. ‘Tummy trouble.’
She said she was sorry, trying to remember what Mrs Priddy looked like and failing in that.