The Lemon Tree. Helen Forrester
Forty-Five
‘He’s a woman,’ Mr George Tasker announced lugubriously to Sarah, his wife of thirty years. He pushed the dog off the easy chair by the fire and sat down to take off his boots; they were very wet and were covered with wavy lines of white sediment. He put them neatly in the hearth to dry, as he continued, ‘I’m workin’ for a woman.’ His thick Liverpool accent made him sound as if he had a heavy cold in the head.
‘George, you know better than to walk on me new coconut matting with your dirty boots,’ Sarah scolded. ‘And what do you mean – he’s a woman?’
‘Wallace H. Harding is a woman!’
‘Never!’
‘He is – that is, she is. The Ould Fella’s niece – not a nephew, like we imagined. She come into our department this morning, large as life, with the lawyer, Mr Benson, and Mr Turner, the chemist.’ He stood up and rubbed his cold hands before the glowing fire. ‘She stopped and shook hands with me, seeing as I’m the Soap Master,’ he added with obvious satisfaction.
Sarah Tasker paused in the act of getting a casserole of tripe and onions out of the oven. She looked up at him through a burst of steam. ‘Well, I’m blowed! How queer!’
She turned and laid the casserole on a white-scrubbed deal table. On a wooden board lay a loaf of bread with several slices ready cut; beside it, sat a small dish of butter. She said mechanically, ‘Come and have your tea, luv.’ She picked up a brown teapot from the hob of the kitchen range and put it on the table, beside two heavy pint mugs and a pitcher of milk. Then, from a built-in shelf, she lifted down the pride of her kitchen, a green glass sugar basin won at a fair. She put it by the teapot.
In anticipation of George’s return from his job in the Lady Lavender Soap Works, she had laid his slippers on the fender to warm. George now put them on. He rose and stretched himself, a big, corpulent man, with a ruddy, kindly face boasting three generous chins. He sat himself at the table, surveyed the dish of tripe with approbation, and then said to Sarah, ‘Nobody makes tripe better’n you do, luv. I can always savour a bit of tripe.’
He invariably made a similar remark, no matter what she cooked for this main meal of the day, and, equally invariably, she beamed as if she had never heard it before. It was what made George so nice to live with, she reflected. He always appreciated what you did.
‘What’s she like?’ Sarah asked him, as she ladled generous dollops of tripe onto his plate.
Before answering, he considered the question carefully. Then he said, as he stuffed a forkful of tripe into his mouth, ‘She’s furrin – she’s almost yellow. She int a lady like we understand one – and yet she is, if you know what I mean. And she’s smart, no doubt about that.’
Sarah did not understand what he meant. She served herself, however, and commenced her meal, despite the flutter of worry in her stomach. This woman, whoever she was, could make or ruin their lives, she considered anxiously. When old Mr James Al-Khoury had died suddenly in November, 1885, they had heard that he had bequeathed the whole soap works, in which George had toiled for nearly twenty-five years, to his brother in the United States. Then Mr Benson, the lawyer, had discovered that the brother had also died, leaving everything he possessed to his wife. It had taken him some time to find out that she had moved to Canada, where she, too, had died, leaving as her sole legatee, Wallace H. Harding.
When George Tasker heard the name, whispered to him by Mr Helliwell, old James Al-Khoury’s secretary, he had assumed that the new owner was a nephew of his late employer; Mr Helliwell, priding himself on his secretarial discretion, had not enlightened him further.
And now George was saying that it was a niece!
With a feeling that she was about to choke on her tripe, Sarah realized that this foreign woman from the Colonies, who wasn’t a proper lady, would not, of course, be able to run the works, since she was a woman. Presumably she would sell it – and what happened to employees when a firm was sold over their heads, she dreaded to think. Too often, the older men found themselves out on the street. And then what would happen to them, with George out of work at fifty years of age?
George himself was ruminating over the same threat, but it did not deter him from eating his way steadily through his supper. His silent wife leaned forward and filled a mug with tea. She handed it to him. ‘Like some more tripe?’ she asked mechanically.
George wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said he would. Then, while Sarah served him, he confirmed her fears by saying heavily, ‘Rumour is she’ll sell the place ’cos she couldn’t run it – being a woman, like.’
‘Aye, that’s what I were thinkin’.’ Then she asked warily, ‘Who’d buy it?’
‘Well, it has gone down a bit, since the Ould Fella died,’ George acknowledged. ‘But there’s some as would buy it, I think, though times are bad. There’s that Mr Lever what has started up by Crosfield’s in Warrington. Soap mad, he is. And there’s Crosfield’s themselves. They might like it, seeing as it’s close to the Brunswick Dock and the Brunswick Goods Station – very handy, it is, for shipping and receiving.’ He sipped his tea and moved uneasily in his straight wooden chair.
‘Would you keep your job?’
‘It all depends,’ he answered gloomily. ‘I’m the Soap Master and they can’t make soap without someone like me. But they could buy it and then shut it down – to get rid of a competitor.’
‘Well, we’ll worry about it when we get to it,’ Sarah responded, determined to be brave and not increase her spouse’s misgivings.
She wondered how far their savings, hidden under the loose board in the bedroom above them, would stretch if he were unemployed. With jobs so hard to find, he would hardly be likely to get another at his age, even though his mates always said he had a wonderful feel for soap.
‘What’s she like to look at?’ Sarah felt very curious about this strange woman who had come all the way from Canada. Since she was the Ould Fella’s nearest relative – except for his illegitimate son, Mr Benjamin, who didn’t count, poor lad – she must be an Arab, like he had been. George had told her that James Al-Khoury had come from Lebanon, the same Lebanon that she had read about in her Bible. Did that really make him an Arab, she wondered suddenly, and was Miss Harding, therefore, an Arab lady, for all that she had a Western name? She smiled gently. The Ould Fella had been more like a friend than an employer. Many were the times when he had sat in this very kitchen, talking about the soap works. Always talked to George, he did, before making any changes. George and him got on like two o’clock.
With a sigh she pushed her plate of tripe to one side; she would try to eat it later. Arab or not, Mr James Al-Khoury and George had been happy together. Tears welled inside