Free Dark Places by Kate Grenville Page A

as well know from the start that the new Mr Singer was not in any respect to be confused with the old.
    I resolved there and then on a posthumous portrait of Father: in a pink jacket and puftaloon pants, perhaps, dressed for the hunt, being handed up a glass of champagne as he sat on a horse with a big bottom. There would be a conspicuous contrast with his up-to-the-minute son at the desk beneath him, with his smart narrow lapels, making large sums at the stroke of a pen!
    When I suggested to Rundle that he might like to show me around the place, he seemed surprised, but led the way down into the back regions. Here I was introduced to the dark underbelly of the prim shop I had always known. No one had told me that quite so many clerks would be packed into quite such a low-ceilinged room, scraping away into ledgers; no one had prepared me for the rows of peaky-faced women making up parcels in an airless room that smelt of the privy; no one had told me of the splintered floorboards, the unpainted walls, the pervasive smell of ink and paste, the cockroaches running over the piles of stock. It was a relief to stand again out in the yard, where there was a breath of air, and where the men cranking open boxes with crowbars had some blood in their faces.
    But I flinched from none of it: I was determined to impress on all of them—Rundle and the sallow women in Packing, the pinheaded men in Despatch, the pimply clerks in Accounts—my rock-like indifference to mere discomfort, and the fact that, although the new Mr Singer was a gentleman like his father, he was a different kettle of fish altogether.
    I had a continuous stream of shrewd questions for Rundle, and did not forget any of the answers. Females in the Packing Department were paid one pound four shillings and threepence a week, they were allowed twelve minutes for a morning-tea break, thirty minutes for lunch, and eight minutes break in the afternoon; the hours were from eight in the morning until seven at night Monday to Saturday, and any breakages were to be paid for from wages. The youngest employee was thirteen, the oldest claimed to be seventy. Smoking was not permitted by staff, nor was spitting, coarse language, or sitting down. In an average year, Singer & Son sold forty-three thousand envelopes, one thousand and ten reams of best bond, seven hundred fountain pens, and, in the month of December, one hundred and twenty tooled-leather desk-sets.
    I could see various shortcomings in the system, and a good number of my questions related to the prevention of pilfering and other abuses, and I made sure the workers heard me ask Rundle about these things. I wished the word to get around among the workers that the new Mr Singer would not be unfailingly blind and smiling as the old one had been.
    In the shop itself, our last port of call, the air was sweet and calm, the various females very pleasing of aspect in their black, and one or two had a glance that I thought a bit on the saucy side as they stood behind their counters waiting to attend on customers, and sizing up the new Mr Singer out of the corners of their eyes. ‘This is where your father spent a great deal of his time, Mr Singer,’ Rundle said. ‘He often said he loved to watch all the activity here, the dance of the shop-girls, he called it.’
    Apart from the females, the shop interested me much less than those odorous regions behind: with Father I had spent many weary times here as he gazed complacently about at the long wooden counters, the high ceiling supported by nymphs and curlicued pilasters, and the upholstered chairs where customers rested between purchases. This was the sedate world he had enjoyed, the world of the end-product, but to me it was mere decoration, the showy icing: the real cake was behind, where objects were negotiated over and bought from sharp-eyed suppliers, where numbers were added and subtracted, and where unpleasing human types sweated and laboured, and a man such