Free Fanny and Stella by Neil McKenna

were excellent. In due course, Stella would become a fully fledged counter clerk and might eventually rise to the dizzy heights of a senior clerk. Stella could barely repress her yawns. If Mr Lewis, the chief clerk at the Islington branch, was anything to go by, she would rather die, she was sure, before turning into such a fussy, fiddling, pernickety dried-up stick of a man. She was bored and exhausted by the time she arrived in the morning, and she could hardly wait for the majestic mahogany timepiece to chime six times and let her make good her escape from the terrible clockwork monotony of the bank.
       
    M  rs Mary Ann Boulton blamed herself for Ernest’s illness. It was really very extraordinary that Ernest’s ill-health should have so exactly coincided with his work at the bank. The hours were far too long, and there was that terrible journey, there and back, five – sometimes six – days a week, and in all seasons. It was all too much for him. He was delicate. ‘He was consumptive – three doctors had said he was consumptive – and he had a constant cough,’ she said. It was no wonder that Ernest was so continually absent from the bank. And if the cough and the colds and the weakness of his chest were not enough, he developed that terrible abscess, that fistula, in such an unfortunate and indelicate area, which caused her poor boy so much pain and discomfort, so bravely borne.
    In the end she put her foot down and insisted that Ernest could not continue. Which was just as well, because Mr Lewis had written a very serious letter to Mr Boulton about Ernest’s absences and even suggested, none too tactfully, that he might be temperamentally unsuited to the London and County Bank. From the very moment he resigned, Ernest’s spirits soared and he declared that he would devote his life to the theatre. There was little they could do to dissuade him.
    ‘I was always rather opposed to his acting,’ Mrs Mary Ann Boulton said later, her voice thin and querulous. ‘But I did not forbid it. I would rather he would have done anything else, but he always had such a penchant for it that I was almost compelled to give my sanction.’
       
    F  or as long as Stella could remember men had always taken notice of her. In school and out of school, at the theatre and at concerts, in church on a Sunday, on the streets, out shopping with Mamma, sitting on the omnibus and walking in the park, she had felt the hungry eyes of men of all types and all conditions upon her. There were the usual sniggerings, catcalls and whistles, and a quite bewildering array of lewd and shocking suggestions and gestures from the army of coarse and common young men thronging the streets as she made her way to and from the London and County Bank. She had been mortified at first and had cried into her pillow at night, but her Mamma had comforted her, smoothed her brow and lulled her into sleep.
    And then she had started answering the rude men back, and sometimes she made them laugh. It did not take long to learn the difference between the hostile men and those whose suggestive banter was nothing more nor less than flirtation. She could see and feel the shiver and ache of desire in the flashing eyes of these young men. And some of them were quite handsome, really very handsome, in a common sort of way, and she was sometimes surprised to find that they provoked an answering shiver, an answering ache within herself.
    Then there were the respectable men, mostly married, who would fall quite naturally into polite conversation with her at the bank and on the bus and in the park and at the concert hall. One thing would lead to another, and she would accept their invitation to luncheon, to tea or to supper. She would be modest and polite and smile boyishly or girlishly and sometimes look at them intensely from the depths of her blue-violet eyes and, when she saw them tremble, she knew what it was that they wanted.
    And often, quite often – in fact, more