‘He wants someone to type his latest novel. Six hours a day.’ Prue paused dramatically before divulging the next nugget of information. ‘Six pounds a week!’
Jane sat up. Now she was definitely interested! Six pounds a week? Her mind raced back to the magazines she’d been perusing - what would she be able to afford if she was earning that kind of money?
‘He’d like you to start this afternoon. Two o’clock.’ Her mother was ushering her up out of her seat. ‘Come on, come on - you need to get yourself tidied up. You can’t start a job looking like that, with your hair all over the place.’
‘But he hasn’t even met me yet,’ Jane protested, getting up nevertheless. ‘How does he know he wants me?’
‘Darling, I told him you’d been trained by Miss Grimshire. And that you’d got a distinction—’
‘Merit. I only got a merit,’ Jane corrected her. Her mother was prone to exaggeration.
Prue flapped away her objection.
‘He’s hardly going to be spoilt for choice for typists down here. He seemed quite happy. In fact, he said as long as you were quiet and kept yourself to yourself . . .’
Jane was already at the sink, washing the dust and sand from her hands and face, doing rapid calculations. By the end of the summer she should have over thirty pounds left to take up to London when she went to look for a job. There certainly wasn’t going to be anything to spend it on down here. Thirty pounds! What heaven, what bliss!
Half an hour later, with her mother’s grudging approval as to her appearance, she walked halfway down the beach, and then took the steep path up through the dunes that led to the back road which served the houses where Mr Shaw lived. The marram grass slapped at her legs as she walked, and the sand insinuated its way into her sandals. She took them off and emptied them out before she walked up the drive. She wondered what he would be like to work for. She imagined a little old man with spectacles and a woolly jumper, a little bit absent-minded, but essentially quite kind. She would have to bring him tea, which he would forget to drink. And eventually she would tidy his office for him, thereby transforming his life, and he would be awfully grateful. Miss Grimshire talked a lot about how to manage your employer. It was best if you went about organising them without them noticing you were doing it. An efficient secretary could make her own and her boss’s life so much easier, if she knew the little tricks.
She had arrived at the front door. There wasn’t a bell that she could see, so she rapped her knuckles as hard as she could on the wood. There was no answer, so she tried again.
And again.
Jane reckoned that after three knocks either there was nobody in or the person inside didn’t want to answer, and so she turned to go, relieved but at the same time not entirely thrilled at the prospect of going to sit on the beach again for another day. At least a tedious typing job would have given her money—
The door was jerked open.
‘What?’ came a bark.
Jane turned to see a wild-haired, bare torso-ed man. He was over six foot and as brown as a berry, wearing a pair of baggy khaki shorts, nothing on his feet. He had dark curls that were swept back off his face, and eyes that looked as if they had been burnt into his face with a branding iron - dark, deep-set.
He didn’t look pleased to see her. She felt tempted just to run and avoid any sort of confrontation, but he could probably catch up with her in two strides.
‘Hello,’ said Jane brightly. ‘I’m Jane Lowe.’
He looked at her with annoyance.
‘Who?’
‘Your typist?’ She corrected herself. ‘The typist.’ She wasn’t his typist, exclusively. ‘My mother spoke to you.’
‘Oh yes.’ He still looked annoyed, but he stood to one side to let her in.
‘Were you not expecting me?’
He gave a small sigh of annoyance and made a dismissive gesture with his hand.
‘I suppose so.’
Jane felt as if she was a huge inconvenience, like someone who had come to read the meter. She followed him into the house, through a cool dark hallway and into the living room.
She had seen the house so often from the outside. They walked past it whenever they went to the best rock pools at the far end of the beach - it loomed rather menacingly over the sands, the signs at the bottom of the garden warning ‘Private Property - Keep Out’ in red letters. It was strange, now being inside. The living room was vast, the floor made from polished wood, and the entire wall overlooking the sea was made of windows. She was used to seeing the sea from the hut, of course, but from here the view seemed even more spectacular, winking and glittering for miles.
‘Whatever you do, please don’t say what a wonderful view,’ he warned her. ‘It’s been said once or twice before.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ she retorted. ‘I see it every day. I’m sick of the sight of it, if you must know.’
He looked at her, and she thought she detected the hint of a smile on his rather cruel lips.
There was a large desk in front of the windows, smothered in paper and books. And empty mugs and glasses, as well as a bottle of brandy. An ashtray overflowed with cigarettes, some half-smoked, perched on an open dictionary. Jane itched to whisk the mess away and make everything tidy, but somehow she didn’t think Mr Shaw would take to interference kindly, just yet. Miss Grimshire had explained that it often took time to lick an employer into shape. She suspected Mr Shaw would take longer than most.
‘I was going to wait till I went back to London to have it typed up,’ Mr Shaw was explaining, ‘but my editor wants the manuscript sooner than I thought. Are you fast?’
Jane nodded.
‘And accurate?’
Again, she nodded.
‘Good.’ He scooped up a bundle of papers. ‘Follow me.’
She followed him obediently out of the room, disappointed that she wouldn’t be working in there. Instead, he led her up the staircase and down a corridor into what had been a bedroom but was now a study. Apart from one small window that looked over the front of the house, the walls were lined with more books than Jane had ever seen outside a library. There was a small table with a typewriter and a stack of fresh paper.
‘I’ve put you here because I can’t stand any noise. Keep the door shut. If you want a drink or something to eat, just help yourself from the kitchen, but don’t bother me.’
He dropped the papers on the desk and gave her a nod.
‘Ten till four, I told your mother. I can’t have anyone in the house for longer than that. The important thing is not to interrupt me. On pain of death.’
He looked at her, his eyes boring into her. She managed a smile.
‘Of course not.’
He gave a curt nod and left the room.
Jane raised her eyebrows. He certainly wasn’t what she had expected. Much, much younger than the crusty old Mr Shaw she had imagined, probably in his mid-thirties, she thought. And incredibly rude. In fact, she suspected he might have been a tiny bit drunk - she thought she had caught the smell of brandy as he left. Well, she would certainly do her best to keep out of his way. She didn’t need to be spoken to like that by anyone.
She sat down tentatively at her new desk. It wobbled slightly. She looked at the pages of manuscript he had given her. Black slanted writing swirled over the paper in an indecipherable tangle, interspersed with angry crossings-out and arrows and asterisks.
Halesowen, she read, was the sort of town that made you want to slit your wrists. Unless you had the misfortune to be born there, in which case you didn’t know any better. But if by some cruel twist of fate you ended up there, having enjoyed the pleasure of some other part of our sceptr’d isle, eventually you would start to look longingly at the blue road map on the inside of your
arm, wondering just how much it was going to hurt.
On a stifling
summer’s evening, Anita Palmer was asking herself just that.
Jane made a face. Where on earth was Halesowen, she wondered? And was that where he was from? He had a slight accent, a twang she couldn’t place, but then Jane wasn’t strong on accents - most of the people she came into contact with spoke just as she did, unless they were staff.
She shrugged, and put a piece of paper into the typewriter, turned it until it was exactly so, then carefully began to type.
An hour later she felt filled with frustration and a slight sense of panic. His hieroglyphics were so hard to decipher, it had taken her this long to type a single page, and even then by the time she had reached the end she realised she had left out a line. She gave a little cry of annoyance and crumpled the paper in her hand, then inserted a fresh piece, starting again at the beginning. She felt slightly panicky. At this rate she would never get to the end.
Before she knew it, it was four o’clock. She had managed to produce three pages of typing. She wasn’t sure what to do, whether to leave without saying goodbye, or to tell him she was going.
In the end, she decided she would show him what she had done. When she walked into the living room, he was leaning back in his chair, his hands hooked behind his head, staring out of the window. He turned to her, and although he didn’t smile, he didn’t snarl either as she proffered her efforts of the afternoon.
‘Will you want to check it?’ she asked.
He took it without looking and put it down on his desk.
‘I’ll read over everything you’ve done each night. If there’s any corrections you can do them first thing, before you carry on. That’s how I used to do it with the previous typist.’
The Previous Typist? Didn’t the poor girl have a name?
‘Fine,’ said Jane. ‘I expect I’ll get faster. It takes a bit of getting used to, your writing.’
He gave a little nod, as if in agreement, then turned away from her, back to his work. She left the room. As soon as she got out of the front door, she breathed a sigh of relief. She felt as if she had been holding her breath all afternoon.
Just think about the money, she told herself. Just think about all the dresses you can buy. And she kicked her shoes off and ran, all the way down the path and down the dunes, getting faster and faster until she reached the beach.
The next day she had a good look around the room she was working in before she started.
There were rows and rows of his books. Hardbacks, in pale colours. Some in English - she counted eight different titles. And all the others in every other language you could think of. Some she could discern - French, Italian, German - but some she couldn’t, though she suspected some were Scandinavian, and some in Chinese and Japanese. She leafed through them in wonder, thinking how fantastic it must be for someone in another country to want to read what you had written. She read the reviews on the flyleaves. He was certainly highly thought of, if they were to be believed.
She hadn’t really taken in what she was typing the day before, but he had left her work on the table, with just a couple of alterations, and she read it through again. This time she took in the narrative. It seemed to be about a middle-aged woman, the Anita Palmer of the first paragraph, a well-to-do but bored housewife to whom nothing much seemed to happen. She wondered how on earth he knew so much about middle-aged women - the details he had included seemed accurate, what she was wearing, what she was cooking. And he seemed to understand what was going on in her head. The fact that she was bored. Screamingly bored. And that she was irritated by her husband. Jane had seen her own mother react in the same way to her father.
As she began typing the next chapter, the point of view changed to a young lad who worked in Mr Palmer’s factory. Entirely different to the woman, but they both shared a certain disillusion with life. Boredom. They both seemed to be asking themselves the question, ‘Is this it?’
His language was spare, the dialogue sparse, but somehow the words seemed to draw a very vivid picture of the world he was creating. She found herself totally drawn in, wondering about the fates of the characters. Her fingers moved faster and faster over the typewriter as she raced to the next chapter.
It wasn’t what she expected him to write at all. She’d expected something manly and thriller-ish, involving espionage and murder and the Iron Curtain, something she wouldn’t understand. Certainly not something that she would be interested in. And not something so . . . emotional. The characters were both so unhappy; they both felt so trapped. She found herself longing to know what happened next.
From Terence Shaw she heard nothing.
By one o’clock she was starving. She crept into the kitchen and picked a dusty glass off a shelf, then ran the tap. It came out more forcefully than she expected, spattering back up at her and drenching her blouse. She gave a cry of annoyance and stepped back, then stepped forward again to try and turn off the tap.
Terence Shaw was standing behind her.
‘I suppose you’re hungry.’
He said it as if it was a huge liberty, to dare to need food.
Jane bit her lip.
He strode over to a small fridge, yanked the door open and pulled out a plate. On it was the remains of a large pork pie. He rummaged about and produced a handful of tomatoes.
‘Come on, then,’ he said to her, and she followed him obediently, through the palatial living room and out of the French windows onto the terrace outside. There were a couple of old chairs and a rickety table. He put the plate down and went back inside, returning with a bottle of wine and two glasses.
‘I don’t think I should . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘I won’t be able to concentrate.’
‘Rubbish. A good Chablis focuses the mind wonderfully. ’
He poured a substantial amount of straw-coloured liquid into a glass and pushed it towards her. Jane sipped it tentatively; Terence Shaw took a slug of his and smacked his lips in satisfaction.