Looking quickly at the Palace bill for that week, I saw the word 'Ventriloquist', and resolved to go along later. After comedians, ventriloquists were my favourite turns; there'd been one on at the Palace just recently, and I'd meant to go along. A good show would be just the tonic I needed.
Next to the bill, another of the advertisements for the 'meeting to discuss questions' had been pasted up. I pointed it out to the wife, and she said, 'Why do they ask: "The Co-operator… Does He Help?'"
'How do you mean?'
'Why "he"', said the wife, 'and not "she"?'
'Well,' I said, 'it's mankind, isn't it?'
The wife snorted, and turned away from the poster, saying: 'They don't like excursions.'
I stopped and looked again at the poster. 'Blackpooclass="underline" A Health Resort?' I read. You could tell they had a down on the place. I wondered what they thought of Scarborough, for that was the same thing on the other side of the country. 'Wakes: Curse or Blessing?' I read once more. 'Mr Alan Cowan, founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers.'
'Mr Robinson,' the wife was saying a moment later, as we waited for a gap in the traps and wagons racing along Fountain Street; 'that's the gentleman at the mill who gave me the start… He said that he would prefer me a little faster at the keys, but that I was the only one he'd seen over the position who knew what worsted was.'
The wife looked at me, but I was miles off, thinking of Mr Alan Cowan and the Socialist Mission.
'What?' I said.
'Mr Robinson' she said, 'who interviewed me for the job, said I was the only applicant who knew what worsted was.'
'Doesn't say much for the others' I said.
'How do you mean?'
'Well, they must have been a lot of blockheads if they didn't know what worsted was – and them living in a mill town, too.'
'What is it then?'
'What's what?'
A tram was coming along Fountain Street, keeping us pinned to the kerb. The driver standing in his moving pulpit – for that's how it always looked to me – had been burned by the sun.
'Worsted' she said.
'Worsted?'
'Worsted, yes.'
'Well… it's a sort of cloth.'
'Cloth made of what?'
'Wool.'
We were dodging through the traffic now. Happening to glance backwards I noticed that all the little high back windows of the Palace were open on account of the heat – a sight I had never seen before.
'What sort of wool?' the wife was saying.
'Well, you know… sheep's wool.'
'Long staple' said the wife. And she looked away, and then she laughed. 'Eh, you daft 'aporth,' she said. She was practising her Yorkshire. 'You wear it every day but don't know what it is,' she said, straightening her white bonnet with her thin, brown hands.
'You could have said something quite clever there you know,' I said.
'I believe I did,' she said, smiling at me. The hat was righted now.
'You could have said you'd worsted me over worsted -' I said.
'You're loony,' said the wife.
'- if you really had done of course.'
We were now outside the Hemingway's Music Shop in Commercial Street. It was the wife's favourite shop, along with the Maypole Dairy at Northgate, where they had very artistic cheeses, kept cool by fans, like the drinkers in the Imperial Saloon. The Maypole could draw quite a crowd in the evening, although whether it was the cheeses or the fans that did it, I never knew. At Hemingway's, the wife always liked to look at the Hemingway's Special Piano they had in the window that was?14. She wanted to have only the best items in our home, and the Special Piano was on the list and some money towards it was in the tea caddy. Meanwhile we had no items, or very few. Whenever we struck this subject of furnishings I always pictured the shop in Northgate that had the sign in the window saying: 'homes complete from?10 to?100'. It was the ten pound part that interested me, but the wife would have none of it. 'I will not equip the house from a cheap john,' she would always say.
'The marvellous thing' she said, still looking in the window, 'is that it looks just like any other piano.'
'That's one of the things that worries me,' I said.
'But for fourteen pounds' she said.
'That's nigh on three months' wages,' I said. 'There'll soon be two of us earning' the wife reminded me, 'and now that the room's let…'
'But what about the extras… tuning it, and the two of us learning to play the piano.'
The Top Note Dining Room was two doors up from Hemingway's Music Shop, which might have explained the name. Nothing else did. The tables went the whole width of a wide room, and the people eating at them looked like workers in a mill. But they would give you ice in a glass of lemonade without waiting to be asked. The wife and I took our places. We both had steak and fried onions with chipped potatoes. It was the first good meal I'd had since the smash, which had put me off food in lots of ways.
'You see it's not that I don't like Cape gooseberries,' I said, 'I just don't want to eat them for tea.'
'Well,' she said, 'it's just that I've had so many interruptions.'
'I would be willing to make my tea for myself,' I said, 'I would… almost.'
'Oh, we can't have you living on Bloody Good Husband Street' said the wife, 'you the dolly mop!' Then: 'Would you like to see the mill where I'm to go on?'
It was one of those lonely ones up on Beacon Hill. The trams couldn't get up there, so we took one as far as the Joint, sitting on the top for a bit of a blow. The sky was a greenish pink with the sunlight leaving it only slowly, and the smoke still coming out from the mills, snaking into the sky, adding to the heat and weirdness of all as they made their slow S's. The smell in the air was twice burnt.
We passed Thomas Cook's excursion office in Horton Street. It was still open for business. The people of Halifax could not do without their outings. I couldn't imagine for a minute how they'd got on before the railways and the excursions started.
'I could make a stew at the start of the week,' the wife was saying, 'and it would keep. Do you like stews?'
'Yes,' I said firmly.
'What kind? What do you like in them?'
'I'm not faddy. Anything at all. You should buy the meat on Saturday night.'
'Oh' she said suspiciously. 'Why?'
'It's cheaper then.'
She said she'd think it over.
The wife was smiling. She had taken off her hat, and as we came to the tram halt, I thought: she looks still more fetching without it, and will look more fetching again when she puts it back on, and so on for ever. She was wrong over trams, however, which were forever either racing or jerking to a dead halt. They seemed to go on by jumps, and I found myself – for the first time ever – a little anxious riding one.
We got off at the Joint, and as usual the wife paid no attention. She did not like railway lines, partly because her house in London had been underneath one. When I first took up lodgings there (for she was my landlady before she was my wife) I used to say: 'What do you expect, living in Waterloo?'
We took the little stone tunnel that went under the platforms of the Joint, and under the canal basin, and under the Halifax Flour Society mill, and a good deal else beside. We came out and began climbing the Beacon, going by the one zigzag lane – half country, half town, with rocks lit by their own gas lamps, and sometimes black thin houses like knives along the way. There was one mill above us all the time as we walked, and this was our goal.