took another slice of bread and spread it thinly with butter.
Eventually, he replied, ‘Well, she’s tall; same height as me, I should say. Thin as a rake. But when she smiles she’s got a lovely face – and great brown eyes like a young heifer. She don’t smile much, though. She were talkin’ quite sharp to Mr Turner, the chemist. I didn’t hear what she said, but I could see Turner didn’t like it. He can be a bit uppity, and he wouldn’t like being put down by a woman.’
‘What was she dressed like?’
‘Oh, she were all in black, in mourning, with a black veil thrown back from her face. She’d great rings on her fingers, all gold. No stones. She’d a ring on her marriage finger what looked roughly made; ugly, it was – not much polished. Never seen one like it before.’ He picked up his mug of tea and held it between his great hands. ‘She int married, though. I heard her correct old Bobsworth, when he called her Mrs Harding. She’s got a proud, cold way with her and she said as tart as a lemon to old Bob, “Miss Harding, if you please, Mr Bobsworth.”’
Sarah knew Mr Bobsworth quite well and she smiled, despite her forebodings. The strange lady rose in her estimation. Though she would not have hesitated to call Mr and Mrs Bobsworth her friends, they did tend to put on airs, because he was the firm’s head bookkeeper and forwarding clerk. ‘And her only the daughter of a stevedore,’ thought Sarah sourly.
George was speaking again, his heavy, grey brows knitted in puzzlement
‘As I said. Miss Harding shook hands with me, and then with everyone – even Alfie. She asked Alfie if he were born in Liverpool.’
Alfie was the seventeen-year-old mulatto labourer who swept the soap-boiling area. He also fetched and carried for the temperamental soap boilers, who sometimes dared not leave their soap pans, for fear they might miss the moment when the soap must be proved, or brine added or the boiling mixture turned off and carefully left to cool. The soap boilers were like housewives producing fine sponge cakes – everything had to be done exactly right. Sarah knew that a few people still regarded Mr Tasker as a magician, because he said he could feel how his great cauldrons of soap were getting on. He knew, they said. What he knew they did not specify – it appeared to them to be magic.
‘She told me she makes her own soap on her farm in Canada,’ expanded Mr Tasker. He put down his mug, leaned back from the table and belched. ‘She told me as the nearest soap works is hundreds of miles off and there’s no proper roads to it. Proper surprised I was, when she said it.’ His three chins wobbled, as if to indicate agreement with his remarks.
Sarah omitted to remind him that she never used any soap at all on her face, because she believed that soap spoiled her skin. As a country girl, she had always scrubbed her face with a rag dipped in water from the rain barrel at her father’s cottage door, and the present velvety smoothness of her complexion, despite her age, indicated that the natural oils of her skin had never been removed. Her five married daughters thought she was terribly old-fashioned and said that she owed it to her husband to use the soap he made. But she stubbornly refused, and told them that if they followed her example, they would not have to put that new-fangled cold cream on their faces every night. Lucky, they were, she thought, to be married to men with regular jobs, who could afford falderals like an occasional pot of cold cream.
‘It’s terrible she int a man,’ George said with feeling. ‘The Ould Fella was a good master, though he never paid out a penny he didn’t have to. Young Benji takes after him – pity the lad’s illegitimate; he could have followed him very nicely.’ He paused toget a bit of bread from between his stained front teeth with his finger. ‘Now, if she were a man, she’d be the same – a real firm hand on the tiller, she’d have. Backbone, she’s got, by the sound of her. But a woman? What can a woman do? In a soap works?’
He paused, as he contemplated in his mind’s eye the woman who now held his future in her slender fingers. Though she was so thin, he thought, she’d a nice waistline – and breasts like it said in the Bible, like pomegranates. Her long black dress fitted so closely, it stirred thoughts in a man, it did, he chided himself ruefully.
‘What about Mr Benji?’ inquired Sarah, interrupting his contemplation of the new owner’s charms.
‘Well, I’m sure James Al-Khoury were training him up to take his place when the time came, as a son should. But he only made one Will in his life, according to Mr Helliwell, and that were before Benji were born – and he were born on the wrong side of the blanket, so he int entitled to anything by law, poor lad. His dad could have left him everything in a Will and he would’ve got it all right. His mam and him and the lawyer has hunted everywhere, looking for another Will; but Mr Benson told Mr Helliwell that he’d have known if there was another Will – the Ould Fella would have come to him about it, ’cos Mr Benson used to vet all the firm’s legal papers, contracts and such – James Al-Khoury didn’t trust ’is own knowledge of English, so anything major he were goin’ to sign, he got Mr Benson, his lawyer, to check first.’
‘I suppose Mr Al-Khoury thought he’d plenty of time before he’d die.’
‘Oh, aye. He weren’t yet fifty. He never thought of a heart attack, that I’m sure; it come as an awful shock to all of us. Proper sad it is for Benji and his mam. And him a smart lad, too.’
That night, in many tiny homes round the Brunswick Dock, Wallace Helena Harding was the subject of anxious discussion; times were so bad that the very hint of the loss of a regular job was enough to cause panic. Even Alfie, the mulatto casual labourer, who slept in the back hallway of a nearby warehouse, courtesy of the nightwatchman of the building, and who had endured bitter hardship all his life, viewed with equal terror the possibility of starvation or, the only alternative, the workhouse.
The warehouse watchman was an old seaman with a wooden leg who had known Alfie and his slut of a mother all the young man’s short life, but as he sat beside him on the bottom step of the stone stairs of the great warehouse, a candle guttering in a lantern beside them, he could offer the lad little comfort.
‘She’ll ’ave to sell the soapery,’ he said finally. ‘It don’t mean, though, that the new master won’t take you on. Master Tasker’ll speak for you, I’ve no doubt.’ He paused to repack his clay pipe and then pulled back the shutter of his lantern to light it from the candle. He puffed thoughtfully for a few minutes. Then he said shrewdly, ‘A new master could buy it and then shut it down, to put an end to it. Sometimes happens when shipping companies is sold – every bleedin’ seaman that worked for the old company is out on the street – and the company what’s done the buying puts its own men in.’
Alfie, who at best was permanently hungry, sat numbly silent, and then nodded agreement. He foresaw a long vista of petty theft to keep himself alive, unless he was prepared to seek out the homosexuals who roamed the streets in search of entertainment; either way, he could land in gaol. He hung his head so that the nightwatchman could not see the despair on his face.
Unaware of the stir She had caused in the heart of Mr Tasker, her soap master, or the depth of the fears she had raised in all her employees, the thin, yellow woman from the wilds of Western Canada sat at a cherry-wood desk in the bay window of her bedroom in a house in nearby Hill Street. She was in the process of writing a letter to Joe Black, her partner on her homestead in western Canada.
She stared dismally at the soaking July downpour pattering against the glass. The room smelled damp and was unexpectedly cold. What a grey and black city Liverpool was and, yet, how exciting it was with its glittering gas-lamps and heavy traffic. And how alien she felt in it.
This proud Lebanese lady, who carried a man’s name and then the name of the patron saint of Beirut, St Helena, and who normally feared nobody, was, for once, feeling intimidated by men. ‘If you can call them men,’ she muttered. ‘Self-complacent barrels of lard.’
She