A Single Thread Read online

  For a moment she considered joining her colleagues in the kitchen. O and Mo were two local girls in their early twenties, and although they were nice enough to Violet, they came from different backgrounds, and treated her like an African violet or an aspidistra, the sort of house plant a maiden aunt would keep. Both lived at home and so had a more carefree attitude towards money – as Violet herself had once had. One sexy, one plain, they wore new dresses as often as they could afford to, and lived for the dance halls, the cinema dates, the parade of men to choose from. There were plenty of men their age; they didn’t walk into a dance hall as Violet had done a few times after the War to find the only dancing partners were old enough to be her grandfather, or far too young, or damaged in a way Violet knew she could never fix. Or just not there, so that women danced with each other to fill the absence. As they typed, O and Mo talked and laughed about the men they met as if it were assumed men should be available. They had each gone through several boyfriends in the six months Violet had worked with them, though recently both had become more serious about their current beaux. Sometimes their high spirits and assumptions made Violet go and boil the kettle in the kitchen, even when she didn’t want tea, waiting until she had calmed down enough to go back and carry on with her rapid typing. She was a far more efficient typist than the girls – which they seemed to find funny.

  Only once had Mo asked her if she’d had a chap, “back then.” “Yes.” Violet clipped her reply, refusing to make Laurence into an anecdote.

  This week had been worse. Even the prospect of tea and a biscuit did not outweigh the dread Violet felt at having to watch tiny, buxom Olive straighten her fingers in front of her face for the umpteenth time to admire her engagement ring. On the Monday she had come into the office walking differently, pride setting her shoulders back and lifting her tight blonde curls. She had exchanged a sly, smug smile with Mo, already installed behind her typewriter, then announced as she shook out her chiffon scarf and hung up her coat, “I’m just off to speak to Mr Waterman.” She pulled off her gloves, and Violet couldn’t help it – she searched for the flash of light on O’s ring finger. The diamond was minute, but even a tiny sparkle is still a sparkle.

  As O clipped down the hall in higher heels than the court shoes Violet wore, Mo – smarter than her friend but less conventionally attractive, with colourless hair, a long face and a tendency to frown – let her smile fade. If she were feeling kind at that moment, Violet would assure Mo that her current boyfriend – a reticent bank clerk who had stopped by the office once or twice – was sure to propose shortly. But she was not feeling kind, not about this subject; she remained silent while Mo stewed in her misery.

  Since that day and O’s triumphant display of her ring, it was all the girls talked about: how Joe had proposed (at a pub, with the ring at the bottom of her glass of port and lemon), how long they would wait to save up for a proper do (two years), where the party would take place (same pub), what she would wear (white rather than ivory – which Violet knew was a mistake, as white would be too harsh for Olive’s complexion), where they would live (with his family until they could afford a place). It was all so banal and repetitive, with no interesting or surprising revelations or dreams or desires, that Violet thought she might go mad if she had to listen to this for two years.

  She lit a cigarette to distract herself and suppress her appetite. Then she fed a sheet of paper through the typewriter rollers and began to type, making her way steadily through an application from Mr Richard Turner of Basingstoke for house insurance, which guaranteed payment if the house and contents were lost to fire or flood or some other act of God. Violet noticed that “war” was not included. She wondered if Mr Turner understood that not all loss could be replaced.

  Mostly, though, she typed without thinking. Violet had typed so many of these applications to insure someone’s life, house, automobile, boat, that she rarely considered the meaning of the words. For her, typing was a meaningless, repetitive act that became a soothing meditation, lulling her into a state where she did not think; she simply was.

  Soon enough O and Mo were back, their chatter preceding them down the hall and interrupting Violet’s trance-like peace. “After you, Mrs Hill,” Mo stood aside and gestured Olive through the door. Both wore floral summer dresses, O in peach, Mo in tan, reminding Violet that her plain blue linen dress was three years old, the dropped waist out of date. It was difficult to alter a dropped waist.

  “Well, I don’t mind if I do, Miss Webster – soon to be Mrs Livingstone, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Mo looked eager, though.

  Olive set down her cup of tea by her typewriter with a clatter, spilling some into the saucer. “Of course you will! You could marry sooner than I do. You may end up my matron of honour rather than my maid!” She held out her hand once more to inspect her ring.

  Violet paused in her typing. Mrs Hill. It was a common enough name. Still … “Does your fiancé have a sister?”

  “Who, Gilda? What about her? She’s just a warped old spins—” Olive seemed to recall whom she was talking to and bit her words back with a laugh, but not before Violet took in her dismissive tone. It made her decide to like Gilda Hill.

  Chapter 2

  VIOLET LIVED FIFTEEN MINUTES from the office in an area called the Soke, on the eastern side of Winchester just across the River Itchen. On a single typist’s salary, she could not afford the nicer areas in the west with their larger houses and gardens, their swept streets and well-maintained motor cars. The houses in the Soke were smaller yet had more inhabitants. There were fewer motor cars, and the local shops had dustier window displays and sold cheaper goods.

  She shared the house with two other women as well as the landlady, who took up the ground floor. There were no men, of course, and even male visitors other than family were discouraged downstairs, and forbidden upstairs. On the rare occasion there were men in the front room, Mrs Harvey had a tendency to go in and out, looking for the copy of the Southern Daily Echo she’d left behind, or her reading glasses, or feeding the budgies she kept in a cage there, or fiddling with the fire when no one had complained of the cold, or reminding them to be in good time for the train. Not that Violet had any male visitors other than her brother Tom; but Mrs Harvey had given him this treatment until Violet showed her a family photo as evidence. Even then she did not leave them alone for long, but popped her head around the door to remind Tom that petrol stations shut early on Saturdays. Tom took it as a comic turn. “I feel I’m in a play and she’ll announce a body’s been found coshed over the head in the scullery,” he remarked with glee. It was easy for him to enjoy Mrs Harvey as entertainment since he did not have to live with her. Occasionally Violet wondered if in moving to Winchester she’d simply exchanged her mother for another who was equally tricky. On the other hand, she could go upstairs and shut her door on it all, which was harder to do with her mother. Mrs Harvey respected a closed door, as long as there was no man behind it; in Southampton her mother had sometimes barged into Violet’s bedroom as if the door did not exist.

  Back now from work, she declined tea from her landlady but smuggled some milk up and put the kettle on in her own room. This was her seventh cup of the day, even having been out part of the afternoon at the Cathedral. Cups of tea punctuated moments, dividing before from after: sleeping from waking, walking to the office from sitting down to work, dinner from typing again, finishing a complicated contract from starting another, ending work from beginning her evening. Sometimes she used cigarettes as punctuation, but they made her giddy rather than settling her as tea did. And they were more expensive.

  Sitting with her cup in the one armchair by the unlit fire – it was not cold enough to justify the coal – Violet looked around her cramped room. It was quiet, except for the ticking of a wooden clock she’d picked up at a junk shop a few weeks before. The pale sun sieved through the net curtains and lit up the swirling red and yellow and brown carpet. “Thunder and lightning ca
rpet,” her father would have called it. Fawn-coloured stockings hung drying on a rack. In the corner an ugly battered wardrobe with a door that wouldn’t shut properly revealed the scant selection of dresses and blouses and skirts she had brought with her from Southampton.

  Violet sighed. This is not how I was expecting it to be, she thought, this Winchester life.

  Her move to Winchester last November had been sudden. After her father’s death Violet had limped along for a year and a half, living alone with her mother. It was expected of women like her – unwed and unlikely to – to look after their parents. She had done her best, she supposed. But Mrs Speedwell was impossible; she always had been, even before the loss of her eldest son George in the War. She was from an era when daughters were dutiful and deferential to their mothers, at least until they married and deferred to their husbands – not that Mrs Speedwell had ever deferred much to hers. When they were children, Violet and her brothers had avoided their mother’s attention, playing together as a tight gang run with casual authority by George. Violet was often scolded by Mrs Speedwell for not being feminine enough. “You’ll never get a husband with scraped knees and flyaway hair and being mad about books,” she declared. Little did she know that when the War came along, there would be worse things than books and scrapes to keep Violet from finding a husband.

  As an adult Violet had been able to cope while her father was alive to lighten the atmosphere and absorb her mother’s excesses, raising his eyebrows behind her back and smiling at his daughter, making mild jokes when he could. Once he was gone, though, and Mrs Speedwell had no target for her scrutiny other than her daughter – her younger son Tom having married and escaped years before – Violet had to bear the full weight of her attention.

  As they had sat by the fire one evening, Violet began to count her mother’s complaints. “The light’s too dim. The radio isn’t loud enough. Why are they laughing when it’s not funny? The salad cream at supper was off, I’m sure of it. Your hair looks dreadful – did you try to wave it yourself? Have you gained weight? I am not at all sure Tom and Evelyn should be sending Marjory to that school. What would Geoffrey think? Oh, not more rain! It’s bringing out the damp in the hall.”

  Eight in a row, Violet thought. What depressed her even more than the complaints themselves was that she had counted them. She sighed.

  “Sighing makes your face sag, Violet,” her mother chided. “It does you no favours.”

  The next day at work she spied on the notice board a position for a typist in the regional Winchester office, which was doing well despite the depressed economy. Violet clutched her cup of tea and closed her eyes. Don’t sigh, she thought. When she opened them she went to see the manager.

  Everything about the change was easier than she had expected, at least at first. The manager at Southern Counties Insurance agreed to the move, Tom was supportive (“About bloody time!”), and she found a room to let at Mrs Harvey’s without much fuss. At first her mother took Violet’s careful announcement that she was moving to Winchester with a surprising lack of reaction other than to say, “Canada is where you should be going. That is where the husbands are.” But on the rainy Saturday in November when Tom drove over with Evelyn and the children and began to load Violet’s few possessions into his Austin, Mrs Speedwell would not get up from her armchair in the sitting room. She sat with a cold, untouched cup of tea beside her and with trembling fingers smoothed the antimacassars covering the arms of the chair. She did not look at Violet as she came in to say goodbye. “When George was taken from us I never thought I would have to go through the ordeal of losing another child,” she announced to the room. Marjory and Edward were putting together a jigsaw in front of the coal fire; Violet’s solemn niece gazed up at her grandmother, her wide hazel eyes following Mrs Speedwell’s agitated hands as she continued to smooth and re-smooth the antimacassars.

  “Mother, you’re not losing me. I’m moving twelve miles away!” Even as she said it, though, Violet knew that in a way her mother was right.

  “And for the child to choose for me to lose her,” Mrs Speedwell continued as if Violet had not spoken and indeed was not even in the room. “Unforgivable. At least poor George had no choice; it was the War, he did it for his country. But this! Treacherous.”

  “For God’s sake, Mum, Violet’s not died,” Tom interjected as he passed by with a box full of plates and cups and cutlery from the kitchen that Violet hoped her mother wouldn’t miss.

  “Well, it’s on her hands. If I don’t wake up one morning and no one discovers me dead in my bed for days, she’ll be sorry then! Or maybe she won’t be. Maybe she’ll carry on as usual.”

  “Mummy, is Granny going to die?” Edward asked, a puzzle piece suspended in the air in the clutch of his hand. He did not appear to be upset by the idea; merely curious.

  “That’s enough of such talk,” Evelyn replied. A brisk brunette, she was used to Mrs Speedwell, and Violet admired how efficiently she had learned to shut down her mother-in-law. It was always easier when you weren’t related. She had sorted out Tom as well, after the War. Violet appreciated her sister-in-law but was a little too intimidated to be true friends with her. “Come, give your Auntie Violet a kiss goodbye. Then we’ll go down to the shops while Daddy drives her to Winchester.”

  Marjory and Edward scrambled to their feet and gave Violet obedient pecks on the cheek that made her smile.

  “Why can’t we come to Winchester?” Edward asked. “I want to ride in Daddy’s car.”

  “We explained before, Eddie. Auntie Violet has her things to move, so there’s no space for us.”

  Actually, Auntie Violet didn’t have so very much to move. She was surprised that her life fitted into so few suitcases and boxes. There was still space on the back seat for another passenger, and she rather wished Edward could come with them. He was a spirited little boy who would keep her cheerful with his non-sequiturs and shameless solipsism. If forced to focus on his world, she would not think of her own. But she knew she could not ask for him to come along and not Marjory or Evelyn, and so she said nothing as they began to pull on their shoes and coats for their expedition in the rain.

  When it became clear that Mrs Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye, Mother,” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”

  Mrs Speedwell sniffed. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”

  One of Tom’s best qualities was that he knew when to keep quiet. On the way to Winchester he let Violet cry without comment. Cocooned by the steamed-up windows and the smell of hot oil and leather, she leaned back in the sprung seat and sobbed. Near Twyford, however, her sobs diminished, then stopped.

  She had always loved riding in Tom’s handsome brown and black car, marvelling at how the space held her apart from the world and yet whisked her efficiently from place to place. “Perhaps I’ll get a car,” she declared, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief embroidered with violets – one of Evelyn’s practical Christmas presents to her. Even as she said it she knew she could afford no such luxury: she was going to be dreadfully poor, though as yet that felt like something of a game. “Will you teach me to drive?” she asked, lighting a cigarette and cracking open a window.

  “That’s the spirit, old girl,” Tom replied, changing gears to climb a hill. His affable nature had helped Violet to cope with her mother over the years, as well as with the War and its effects. Tom had turned eighteen shortly after news of his brother’s death came through, and joined up without hesitation or fuss. He never talked about his experiences in France; like Violet’s loss of her fiancé, they took a back seat to their brother’s death. Violet knew she took Tom for granted, as older children always do their younger siblings. They had both looked up to George, following his lead in their play as children. Once he was gone they had found themselves at sea. Was Violet then meant to take on the role of the eldest, to
assume command and set the example for Tom to follow? If so, she had made a poor job of it. She was a typist at an insurance company; she had not married and begun a family. Tom had quietly overtaken her – though he never gloated or apologised. He didn’t need to: he was a man, and it was expected of him to achieve.

  After they had moved her things in under Mrs Harvey’s watchful eye, he took her for fish and chips. “Mum’s a tough old boot, you know,” he reassured her over their meal. “She got through George, and Dad too. She’ll survive this. And so will you. Just don’t stay in your room all the time. Don’t want to be getting ‘one-room-itis’, isn’t that what they call it? Get out, meet some people.”

  Meet some men, he meant. He was more subtle than her mother about the subject, but she knew Tom too wished she would miraculously find a man to marry, even at this late age. A widower, perhaps, with grown children. Or a man who needed help with injuries. The War might have ended thirteen years before, but the injuries lasted a lifetime. Once married, she would be off Tom’s hands, a niggling burden he would no longer have to worry about. Otherwise Violet might have to live with her brother one day; it was what spinsters often did.

  But it was not easy to meet men, because there were two million fewer of them than women. Violet had read many newspaper articles about these “surplus women”, as they were labelled, left single as a result of the War and unlikely to marry – considered a tragedy, and a threat, in a society set up for marriage. Journalists seemed to relish the label, brandishing it like a pin pressed into the skin. Mostly it was an annoyance; occasionally, though, the pin penetrated the protective layers and drew blood. She had assumed it would hurt less as she grew older, and was surprised to find that even at thirty-eight – middle-aged – labels could still wound. But she had been called worse: hoyden, shrew, man-hater.