The Factory Girl. Nancy Carson

Nellie, so you don’t have to account to me for what you did. If you still love her, all well and good. If you don’t, you don’t. I’m looking no further than that. I like you, Billy – a lot – but I don’t intend to compete with her, so don’t expect me to. If you still want her, have her. That’s all right by me.’ Already she had learnt never to declare her true feelings this early in the game.

      ‘One thing I like about you, Henzey, is that you’ve got your head screwed on good an’ proper. Anybody would think you were as old as me.’ He put his arm round her again and gave her a hug.

      Yes, this was the way to handle Billy: pretend to be indifferent, then offer him some bait and keep repeating the process. He was not going to be easy to manage, that much she could already discern, but the challenge made him all the more interesting.

      Within a few minutes, warmed and breathing hard after the steep climb, they reached the village church. Some way beyond the church lay the churchyard, and from its high vantage point they could see the countryside laid out before them for miles. Billy suggested they have a look at the inscriptions on the gravestones; they held a fascination for him, he said. As they ambled through, noting the names and the dates, making little comments about them, Henzey conjured up images of those people all those years ago whose names and dates of death she read; images of their homes, their families, habits, fears, loves, heartbreaks. They had lived and breathed, had been flesh and blood, and now they were all but forgotten. How had they lived? What mark had they made on their community? How had their lives affected those who came later? Had they been happy?

      This last question was the most important. For to live and be unhappy made living pointless. For a few moments she pondered whether happiness was God given, or whether you have to strive for it. Indeed, she felt she knew the answer. Already she had seen enough of life to know that people often make their own happiness and their own unhappiness. It’s up to each of us to make ourselves and each other happy, she told herself. Nobody can do it for us. And if we turn out to be unhappy, usually we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

      She did not communicate these thoughts to Billy. They were deep, and she did not know him well enough to speak of such things. He would probably be inclined to think she was mad. Besides, he was one of those elements likely to influence her future happiness. It all depended on her. It all depended on whether she made the right decisions, when the time came, to ensure her own future happiness.

      From inside the church they could hear children’s voices singing.

      ‘Sunday school,’ Henzey said with a smile. ‘Don’t they sound angelic?’

      They moved on, looking at the gravestones. Henzey’s feet were getting colder and wetter all the time. She shivered, and Billy laughed.

      ‘What’s so funny?’

      ‘I bet when you agreed to come out with me for a Sunday afternoon spin you didn’t reckon on spending it in a soaking wet churchyard.’

      She chuckled. ‘Oh, anything for a lark.’ She looked around her at the rain, still falling, splashing off the graves. She listened to it trickling down the drainpipe of the church and exiting over a drain. ‘I’d like to come here again some time, Billy. You remember I said I like drawing and painting?…Well, I’d love to do some water-colours of this place. Look at the view. Would you bring me back one day when the weather picks up? You know, if…’ If they continued to see each other, was what she wanted to say, but the words would not come out.

      ‘’Course I would. That’d be interesting for me as well. I’ve never known anybody before who paints seriously.’

      Suddenly the wind whipped up and the rain became torrential. Billy suggested they shelter inside the church till it eased off. As they entered quietly, one or two of the children turned round to look at them. Their Sunday school was just drawing to a close and the teacher was telling them to say their prayers every night when they went to bed, and that she would see them all again next Sunday afternoon. Henzey and Billy sat in a back pew while they filed down the aisle on their way out. Those children whose parents could afford to buy them raincoats, donned them. Henzey smiled at each of them and waved goodbye as they departed.

      It was a gesture that touched Billy. There was a warmth in this Henzey Kite he’d never witnessed in anybody else. She seemed the essence of kindness and affability. In the same situation, Nellie would have glowered at the children. She would have been impatient for them to be out of her sight. This girl beside him was so very different. As the Sunday school teacher closed the door behind her, Billy put his arm around Henzey’s shoulder and drew her to him. When she looked up at him, her eyes bright, her face wet from the rain, he kissed her full on the lips, tenderly, gently.

      Oh, it was a delicious first kiss and long-awaited, but she was suddenly struck by the realisation that they were inside a church and should respect its sanctity, so she broke away.

      ‘What’s wrong?’

      ‘We shouldn’t, Billy. Not in church.’ She feared the heavenly host might see and hear, and wreak immediate vengeance. ‘It isn’t right.’

      ‘Well, it ain’t wrong either.’

      He kissed her again, defiantly, more ardently this time. Every time, as she tried to pull away, laughing and uttering feeble excuses, his mouth followed hers till she resigned herself to his kisses and enjoyed them the more. She shut her mind to the sanctity of the church and, when he eased her down so that she was lying on the pew, she was surprised, both at his forwardness and her own passiveness, for she offered no further resistance. His caresses were mesmerising. She was unable to resist. Indeed she did not want to resist. He unbuttoned her wet coat as he kneeled between the pews on a hassock, his lips still on hers. She felt his hand slip inside her coat to her waist, her hip. Her arms were around his neck, then she held his face as she heard herself sigh with pleasure at his touch. He kissed her wet eyelids, her flushed cheeks, her forehead, and then again touched her lips with his own, as gently as a butterfly settling on a flower. Then, to her horror, he thrust his tongue into her mouth, and she tasted him with some shock…But it was not so bad…It was quite nice really…In fact it made her feel all weak inside, and so much closer to him. Jack Harper had never kissed her like this.

      But they were in a church. The door was unlocked, open to anybody. The world could have walked in. The vicar might come in. God, what if the vicar walked in and saw her wantonly draped over his pew? There must be some law against this. At the thought of divine retribution she struggled and managed to sit up.

      Billy ran his hand through his hair, for want of something to do with it, and smiled. ‘Blimey, you don’t ’alf kiss nice, Henzey. I got really carried away there.’

      Feelings of guilt swept over her; not guilt for kissing Billy; not guilt for merely enjoying it. The guilt was for enjoying it inside a church; for the possibility of being caught.

      ‘I think we should go outside, Billy…’

      With a smile he conceded, stood up and pulled his coat to. As Henzey also stood up and faced him, he drew her to him and kissed her again, lingering over the sensuality of her lips, so soft, so accommodating. They shuffled out of the pew, he took her hand and they moved towards the main door of the church, then walked out into the rain looking hungrily into each other’s eyes. Henzey leaned against one of the sandstone buttresses. Her arms went round his neck again as the rain teemed down, running in rivulets down her face, which was upturned to receive more delicious kisses.

      She allowed his hands to wander inside her coat again, fleetingly over her bottom, her thighs. Willingly she would have lain in the soaking grass with him, but when he felt her breasts, even though her heart pounded, she deftly moved his probing hand away in case he might think her cheap. His right thigh docked between hers in another sortie, and she sighed, inducing him to kiss her even more passionately. The rain drenching their faces did not matter, nor did their cold feet in the wet grass. Even the wind blowing and gusting so rudely was intrusive. But, to Billy’s surprise and disappointment, Henzey broke off their embrace and moved away from the buttress.

      ‘My God!’ she sighed. ‘To think Nellie’s had