Sequence of Events (part two)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sequence of Events

Chapter One

A Personal Choice

 

 

ii.

 

 

This alleged Mrs. Chamberlain had drawn Freda to a crossroads.

At her door she was arrested, the thought of Phillip causing her hand on the key to lock. She found herself turning it in a stealthy, silent way.

Because he might be there, waiting for her.

She had no idea what Phillip’s telegram had meant.

The bungalow proved dark, and empty as it soon would be, when for nonpayment of rent she had been put on the street. Or…nothing so dramatic as a postcard from America passing her father’s door unchecked, she would ask Dolores’s help, grown hardened to it. For her stepmother had known it must come to this.

Freda would find herself a woman near thirty, on the lookout for a means of running from home. She had run before, but at six years younger, her mother’s legacy still hers to spend, her prospects unclouded by Phillip Murchisons. She dropped her purse and walked into the kitchen to pick up the newspaper, lying on the breakfast table where she’d left it.

And noticed now, how many offices gave for a telephone the identical three-digit exchange. Mrs. Chamberlain was not a kindly grey-coifed widow, lacking only the help of a maid-companion…

She was an employment agency’s fiction.

 

The antechamber had been furnished with a sofa, a standing ashtray, an armchair. It smelt different to a city bus, in that an odor of paint edged that of a recent fire, nuancing those of churning human traffic—camphor, wool, tobacco, hair, sweat, scent, and feet, all brought to pungency by the fact that everyone in the room was wet, and every seat was taken.

A girl slumped on the sofa between two older applicants, and at her glance up, Freda smiled. Her straying eyes caught the sparkle of rain on the girl’s shabby boucle. The smile diminished; belatedly, she felt the implications of this face. The girl’s had altered to a narrow hostility.

But a man in the chair patted an armrest. “Sit here, doll.”

He added, with an angry jauntiness, belied by something beseeching in his eyes, “Nobody getting called.”

“Yeah, not today. Watch em.”

Freda said: “I have an appointment with Mrs. Chamberlain.”

The girl laughed and dropped her jaw, chomping her gum with a will to offend.

“Listen to you! Where’d you learn to talk like that?” This from a slurring blonde, who had said the other thing as well. She pushed a palm against the girl’s shoulder.

“Outta work, you,” the girl said, speaking to Freda.

“Don’t rag on her, honey.” The third woman, hunched over the ashtray, stubbed out her cigarette and lit the next. “People can have reasons.”

 

 

2

 

 

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A Personal Choice

Sequence of Events (part three)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Stephanie Foster, 2017, 2021, 2026)