Fire
This one is for Kim Reilly, August 1961-December 2005, a talented artist and a true friend.
W
hen Isobel and Edward Dunbar emigrated to New Zealand in 1874 to escape what Isobel considered to be a grimy and depressing life in Manchester, Edward was unwittingly carrying the seeds of a malady that would eventually ruin him. Isobel was twenty and Edward was twenty-four.
They settled in Wellington, where Edward did various jobs and spent increasing amounts of time in drinking establishments, while Isobel made hats for a well-known milliner. One day in 1878, Edward overheard a group of men talking about the gold strike at Waihi. Seduced by the lure of untold riches, he informed Isobel that the Coromandel was where their fortunes lay.
Edward didn’t strike it rich, however, and before long he was working at the Martha Mine, spending most of his pay and all of his spare time in one or other of the town’s numerous hotels. Isobel, who found Waihi even less appealing than Manchester, concentrated on making hats, which she sold to flush miners’ wives, and a handful of local whores with an eye for fashion. It wasn’t long before Edward was fired for being drunk on the job, and the couple packed up their meagre belongings and moved to Hamilton.
Naturally, Edward’s problems went with them, and by the following year Isobel was wishing that he would either quietly disappear or die. Edward obliged her one night in 1881 by staggering home from the Hamilton Hotel, falling off the Union Bridge and drowning in the Waikato River.
Isobel moved to Auckland in 1882 and set up as a
milliner in Victoria Street, where she caught the eye of draper Horace Jones, a widower with three young children. He wanted a wife and she wanted a business partner, so they married in 1883, although Isobel refused to take his name. Their first real argument occurred over the title of their new, bigger and better, store in Queen Street: in the end, Isobel was forced to tell Horace that if he declined to call the store Dunbar & Jones she would not consent to sexual relations with him again. He capitulated and Dunbar & Jones it was.
They diversified quickly. To their stock of basic fabrics and Isobel’s very popular hats, they added a range of mercery and fine laces, hosiery, mantles and shawls, footwear for men and ladies, haberdashery, umbrellas, manchester and soft furnishings. All imported, of course: Isobel had determined very early on that her store would stock nothing but the finest of products.
By the turn of the century, Dunbar & Jones was one of Auckland’s most exclusive stores. Ten years later, in a new building towards the lower end of Queen Street, its only North Island rivals were Smith & Caughey’s, unfortunately also located in Queen Street, and possibly Kirkcaldie & Stains in Wellington.
After Horace died in 1922, Isobel was free to run Dunbar & Jones completely unfettered. She began to import a selection of very fine furniture, china, silver and crystal from England and Europe, linens and tweeds from Ireland, Belgian lace, Oriental silks, cosmetics from America, men’s and women’s clothing from Paris and London, and a line of luxury continental chocolates and condiments. She also purchased the buildings on either side of Dunbar & Jones, and added another two floors to the lot. This gave her two
cavernous basements for storage, three floors of retail space across three buildings, and a large uppermost floor to accommodate administrative offices as well as dressmaking, tailoring, millinery and soft furnishings workrooms, and a staff cafeteria. Beneath the gleaming panelling and new paint, however, many of the interior walls were little more than flimsy matchlining, and the various stairwells and narrow, behind-the-scenes passageways created a rabbit warren in which even longtime staff could become disoriented. But the buildings were essentially sound, and Dunbar & Jones continued to present the elegant, sometimes almost magical, environment to which its customers had become accustomed.
When Isobel died in 1928, the business went to her eldest stepson Charles and his younger brother James. To celebrate, Charles went out and purchased a brand-new Stutz Vertical 8 motor car, which mildly annoyed James and turned Charles’s friends green with envy. Two weeks later, however, Charles killed himself in the car on the way to the Ellerslie races, leaving James the sole owner of Dunbar & Jones.
Under James’s management the store continued to prosper. He enlarged the first-floor tearoom, redecorated it in white with gold accents and rechristened it the White Room. The dinner menu was extensive, and the morning and afternoon tea selections were said to be the finest in the city. A tiny salmon sandwich, a miniature brandy snap filled with chantilly cream, and a steaming cup of fragrant imported tea were just the thing to round out a day’s shopping.
When James died in 1950, the business passed to his eldest son, Maxwell, who soon decided that Dunbar &
Jones was becoming a tad old-fashioned, and set about modernizing the interior. He replaced the rather antiquated Lamson wire cash-delivery system with a pneumatic one that made satisfying whooshing sounds as the capsules whizzed through a maze of shiny brass tubes around the store, and a year later he installed Auckland’s first escalator, a novel device that would be sure to attract even more customers. He left the stately, brass-caged lifts at the rear of the store, however, aware that his more staid customers might be uncomfortable with the moderate level of agility needed to ride an escalator. He also altered the layout of the store, allocating to the ground floor departments for tableware, china, glass and silver, linens and manchester, gifts, menswear, boyswear and school uniforms, men’s shoes and hats, and women’s accessories, cosmetics and jewellery. The first floor housed, as well as the White Room, ladies’ fashions, shoes, hats and lingerie, dress fabrics and patterns, Mother-to-be and Young Miss, and children’s and infantswear, while the second floor was dedicated wholly to furniture, flooring and soft furnishings. The third floor’s administrative offices, staff cafeteria and workrooms remained unchanged.
And, because customer service was still of paramount importance at Dunbar & Jones, the personnel department took on more staff, including four girls—Allie Roberts, Louise Taylor, Daisy Farr and Irene Baxter.
This story is about them.
Monday, 14 December 1953
T
he staff cafeteria was particularly noisy—people chattering and laughing, cutlery clattering against plates, chairs scraping across the linoleum floor. The girls at the table behind Allie burst into raucous laughter at a shared joke, and she had to lean forward to hear better.
‘Sorry, Daisy, what was that?’ As if she couldn’t guess, because Daisy’s wide grey eyes had gone all dreamy again.
Her friend sighed and said for the umpteenth time, ‘Do you think she’ll be wearing her crown when she gets off the ship?’
Allie smiled, because Daisy was doing what she did best—being sweet and unsophisticated.
Unlike Irene, who snorted.
‘Well, she might,’ Daisy countered, not at all offended. ‘She is the new queen, after all, and queens always wear their finery in public.’
‘Only in
The Big Book of Children’s Fairy Stories
,’ Irene said.
‘What’s that about a fairy story?’ Louise asked as she slid her lunch tray on to the table and sat down.
Like Allie, and because she worked in the lingerie department, she wore the uniform of a Dunbar & Jones sales assistant: a plain, fitted black dress that zipped up the side with three-quarter-length sleeves and a small white collar, nude stockings and low-heeled black court shoes. Irene wore street clothes because she was a typist in accounts, and so did Daisy because she worked behind the scenes in the millinery workroom. There was a small, green feather clinging to her sleeve, which indicated she must be doing ‘embellishments’ that day.
‘Daisy’s telling us one,’ Irene said, reaching for the salt. But she smiled to show she wasn’t being deliberately mean.
Daisy shrugged. ‘I was only saying, I wonder if the queen’ll have her crown on when she arrives.’
Louise thought for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t think so. They’re priceless, those royal crowns. Imagine if it fell off halfway down the gangplank and ended up in the harbour!’
Daisy shook her head, loosening the hair clip that was holding her white-blonde curls off her face. ‘She won’t come down a gangplank,’ she said, sliding the clip back in. ‘She’ll come down a…well, something much more grand than a gangplank, anyway. And she’ll be wearing all her jewels and a purple velvet cloak trimmed with ermine and a gown encrusted with precious stones and she’ll be carrying that ball thing with the cross on it.’
Allie swallowed a mouthful of fly-cemetery biscuit. ‘It’s an orb.’
Daisy frowned. ‘Pardon?’
‘It’s called the sovereign’s orb,’ Allie elaborated, ‘and it’s part of the Crown Jewels.’
Daisy extended her left hand and appraised her engagement ring, a tiny diamond set in a narrow platinum band. ‘Well, it’s not as nice as my jewels,’ she said as her other hand crept down over her belly, over the secret she had so far shared only with Allie. And her fiancé Terry, of course. Oh God, and sort of with her parents.
The wedding was set for the end of January. Daisy’s mother had given her a shocked and very suspicious look when she’d told her about the engagement and the early wedding date, but Daisy had been too scared to tell her the truth outright. Agnes Farr was a proper sort of woman but not at all stupid, and there was now an unspoken agreement between them—if Daisy wasn’t going to mention the reason for the hasty wedding out loud then her mother certainly wasn’t, and that way Agnes could pretend to herself and everyone else that her daughter was legitimately entitled to walk down the aisle wearing white.
Daisy tried not to think about her mother’s silent recrimination, preferring to daydream about her new life with Terry. He worked in the Dunbar & Jones despatch office, and because it was only down the corridor from the millinery workroom they saw each other frequently. So far they hadn’t had a single argument and they’d been going out now for a year. And if their first baby was arriving a little earlier than planned, it didn’t really matter because they would have got married anyway. Daisy was sure of that and knew without a doubt that Terry was too.
‘I still think eighteen’s too young to be getting married,’ Louise said, frowning at the tissue-thin slice of ham in her sandwich.
But Daisy only smiled.
Irene nudged Allie’s arm. ‘There he is, staring at you again.’
Allie, who was surreptitiously eyeing Daisy’s rounded stomach and wondering how long it would be before people started noticing, glanced up. ‘Who is?’
‘That boy from stores, the smooth one,’ Irene said, nodding towards a group of young men at a table on the other side of the crowded cafeteria. Above them on the wall hung a huge tinsel star with two of its points missing, clearly deemed too tatty to make an appearance this Christmas on the shop floor. ‘Don’t look, he’ll see!’
But it was too late—Allie
had
looked and he was now waving cheerily back.
He was handsome, dark-skinned and had the sort of hair that behaved at the roots but obviously got out of hand towards the ends, because he’d wrestled it into submission with a generous application of Brylcreem. The resulting quiff sat softly gleaming above his forehead, over laughing brown eyes and a very wide smile. He reminded Allie of Montgomery Clift. No, his cheekbones were broader than that—Frank Sinatra perhaps, but with a browner face. But not as shifty-looking. It was a bit long really, his hair. No doubt Keith Beaumont, Dunbar & Jones’s not particularly popular manager, would be having a word to him about it soon.
‘What’s his name, do you know?’ Allie asked, while affecting to look completely uninterested.
Irene shrugged, but Daisy said, ‘Sonny someone. He only started a few months ago. Terry knows him; he’s in the basement.’
Which, Allie knew, meant that he worked in the storage areas in the very bowels of the store.
On Sonny Someone’s plate sat two pies, a scotch egg and a sausage roll, all liberally covered with tomato sauce. He cut enthusiastically into a pie, speared a lump of pale pastry with his fork and shovelled it into his mouth. After at least ten seconds of purposeful chewing he swallowed, then waved at Allie again. Suddenly aware she’d been staring, she whipped her gaze away.
‘I think he fancies you,’ Irene said, and smirked.
Allie went pink. ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’
‘What? You could do worse,’ Irene said. ‘Or would it not be the thing to take a Maori boy home?’
Mostly because she wasn’t sure of the answer to that question herself, Allie replied sharply, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never asked.’
Sometimes Irene got on her nerves with her worldlywise attitude and the things she came out with, things most other people would only ever think. Usually, though, she was good fun, big-hearted and generous. Too generous at times: Allie wondered how many people knew that Irene was having a ‘flirtation’ with Vincent Reynolds, floorwalker and head of furnishings. If it was any of her business, Allie thought, she’d be telling Irene she’d soon come a cropper, and probably lose her job—and possibly her husband as well. She couldn’t understand what Irene saw in Vincent Reynolds: he was oily and had a nasty little moustache that he clearly thought made him look like Errol Flynn. And he was old, at least forty. And married.
In retaliation she said to Irene, ‘Did you and Martin have a nice weekend?’
Irene faked a yawn, raising a manicured hand to her mouth. ‘Same as usual. Martin read the
Herald
all Saturday morning, then spent the afternoon in the garden. Yesterday
we went to his mother’s house for afternoon tea and that bloody little dog of hers shed hairs all over my new black wool skirt.’
‘You didn’t go out?’ Louise asked.
Irene rolled her eyes. ‘I wanted to. I wanted to go dancing, but Martin was too tired so we stayed in and listened to the radio. How being an accountant can make you so exhausted I don’t know. Why, did you?’
Louise nodded. ‘On Saturday. Mum said she’d take Susan for the whole night, so we made the most of it and went to the Peter Pan.’
‘Good band?’ Allie asked.
‘Very. We danced until they kicked us out. God, my feet were sore. I wore my new platforms and they gave me blisters and poor old Rob just about had to carry me home.’
Daisy turned her teacup around in its saucer. ‘Your mum babysits for you a lot, doesn’t she? That must be a big help.’
‘Oh, it is. Well, I couldn’t work if she didn’t, could I?’
Allie said, ‘How are the savings going? Have you got your deposit yet?’
Louise was married to Rob, a motor mechanic, and they had one child, Susan, who was three years old and the cutest little thing Allie had ever seen. With her shiny chestnut hair and brown button eyes, Susan looked just like a miniature version of Louise. Rob and Louise were saving hard to buy their own home, which was why Louise had returned to work after her mother had offered to mind Susan during the week.
‘Nearly,’ Louise said. ‘Another six months and I think we might actually have enough.’
Irene drummed her red fingernails on the table, as if to imply that saving for a house was one of the most boring things a person could possibly do. ‘Has your mother-in-law stopped giving you a hard time yet?’
‘What, the Wicked Witch of the West?’ Louise muttered.
They all laughed. Rob’s mother was on at Louise constantly about how a woman’s place was in the home—especially a woman with a child—and think how confusing it must be for poor little Susan and how did Rob’s work shirts get ironed if no one was at home to do them? Louise insisted that she’d pointed out dozens of times that Rob wore overalls to work, and that poor little Susan was as happy as a sandboy with her other grandmother, and if anyone was suffering it was her, Louise, because she missed her daughter.
Louise added, ‘Nothing’s changed. I don’t think it ever will. Mind you, Rob’s mum thinks it’s common to eat shop-bought cakes. She’s just that sort of person.’
For a moment the four of them silently pondered the awful notion of not eating shop-bought cakes.
‘Well, they say you can’t choose your relatives,’ Allie said eventually.
‘No, unfortunately, you can’t,’ Louise agreed. She looked at her watch. ‘Oh God, only five minutes left. Is everyone else really busy today?’
‘We’re rushed off our feet,’ Daisy said. ‘We’re mostly doing hats for the queen.’
They nodded. Daisy and the other milliners were flat out making hats for wealthy women to wear to receptions when the queen finally arrived in Auckland in just over a week’s time. Between Christmas shopping and the royal
visit, everyone at Dunbar & Jones was busy, from the office staff on the top floor down to the storemen in the basement.
Allie dug in her handbag for her cigarettes. Irene and Louise did the same: only Daisy didn’t smoke. After they’d lit up, inhaled deeply and relaxed back into their chairs to enjoy a last, peaceful few minutes before returning to work, Allie asked, ‘Is everyone going to the staff picnic?’
‘We are,’ Daisy said. ‘I’ve made a new sundress specially.’
Louise said, ‘So are we. Susan can’t wait. Rob told her Santa Claus will be there. I hope to God he is this year.’
Allie frowned. ‘Is she old enough to know who Santa is?’
‘Crikey, yes,’ Louise replied. ‘She knows
exactly
where presents come from at Christmas time. Santa’s house at the Norf Po, apparently.’
‘And I suppose Mr Max will be Santa again this year,’ Irene said. ‘He needn’t think I’m sitting on his knee.’
I bet you would if you could, Allie thought, still smarting slightly.
Irene read her mind and laughed. ‘Look at him, though, he’s fifty if he’s a day! His heart would give out!’
Louise, who believed very strongly in the sanctity of marriage and knew about Irene and Vincent Reynolds, looked disapproving.
‘He’s forty-eight, actually,’ Daisy said. ‘Terry told me.’
‘And how would Terry know?’ Irene asked.
Daisy just smiled, comfortable in her conviction that her beloved fiancé, who was only a year older than her, knew everything.
‘Apparently he really enjoys it, Mr Max,’ Louise said,
‘handing out presents to all the kids. It’s very generous of Dunbar & Jones, isn’t it?’
Irene slid the ashtray closer and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’m off to the loo, then it’s back to the salt mines.’
On their way out they met Vincent Reynolds coming in. His hair was immaculately pomaded and as black as nugget, and his moustache bracketed his top lip like a set of spare eyebrows. He slowed as he passed Irene and gave her a long, greasy wink. She simpered and Allie looked away, annoyed at the stab of envy in her stomach. But Vince Reynolds was repulsive and Allie wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot barge pole. It was more that Irene, of whom she was genuinely fond, already had a perfectly nice husband, and it wasn’t right that she was, well, dallying.
Allie hurried down the two flights of stairs to the first floor where she worked. Before nine in the morning and after five at night, when the store was empty, she rode on the escalator because it was such fun, but during opening hours staff were supposed to use the stairway behind the scenes at the rear of the store that zigzagged from the third floor all the way down to the basement. Mr Beaumont believed that, ideally, sales assistants should only be seen standing at their counters, ready and politely waiting to be of help, not tripping about as if they owned the place. But unlike the grand marble public stairs that ran from the ground floor to the second floor on the south-western side of the building, and had views of Wyndham Street below, the staff stairs were narrow, wooden and somewhat rickety. And as customers never went up to the third floor anyway, and Mr Max and Mr Beaumont had their offices on the first
floor just off the foyer outside the White Room, the staff stairs had never been refurbished. They did make a very satisfying, echoey racket, however, if you ran down them fast enough.
Allie loved the store at Christmas. Last year, her first Christmas at Dunbar & Jones, had been an exciting and magical time, not least because of the magnificent decorations that went up halfway through December. She adored their glittering promise of everything to come. At home they always had a real tree with a handful of shiny shop-bought balls, stars and tinsel, plus the decorations she and her sisters had made when they were little. The latter were getting very tatty now—Allie’s cotton-wool Santa had lost one of his eyes and the paint was flaking off his red hat—but they were the most cherished of the lot, unpacked every year with squeals of delight and cries of ‘Oh, look, remember this one?’, and put carefully away again when the tree came down. Allie always felt sorry for the tree, lying outside on the back lawn, unloved and unwanted, going brown with its needles falling off until her father got around to disposing of it.