Everything in Its Place

Ruth Haddow was waiting at the head of the cold line with the Sick Club book under one arm, as if she had known you would come with the other half of it. She did not unfold her arms until you had said the word Wednesday.

“She told me,” said Ruth. “At the back door of Crane House, with the washing in. The sale was agreed. Harborline. The works would shut in the spring and the flats would go up on the packing floor.” She looked along the empty trestles. “I told no one. I’m not proud. If I’d told Peggy she’d have told the hut, and the hut would have told the town, and Hollis would have known exactly who’d told me.”

“So you went to law instead.”

“I went to a tribunal clerk on Thursday afternoon. I’d a form half filled by supper.” She took a folded sheet from her apron pocket and spread it on the nearest trestle. It was a petition, forty signatures, torn across the middle and mended with brown tape. TO THE PROPRIETOR: THAT WOMEN’S PACKING BE REGRADED AS SKILLED WORK. “Iris took it up on Tuesday. He tore it in front of her. Said women’s wages were pin money. Said it kindly.”

You looked at the tape. It had been applied with great care, a strip at a time, by someone who had refused to let a thing end in two pieces.

“You’ll want to know where I was,” said Ruth. “At home, with my daughter’s sums and a cold supper. I’d a reason to hate him, and I knew that stair better than he did. I wasn’t on it.”

“Liberal, Marxist, radical,” murmured Jonah, nodding at the petition. “Three feminisms, and she’s the one who actually filed the form.”

“I don’t mind what it’s called,” said Ruth Haddow. “I mind who reads it.”