CHAPTER 1
“Have you kissed him yet?”
“That’s none of your business.”
The questioner was a short, intense brunette in her late twenties named Iris Sparks, co-proprietor of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau. The respondent, if the refusal to provide any actual information in her response could be characterised as a response, was Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, the other co-proprietor, a tall, elegant blonde. The two of them were returning to their Mayfair office from lunch on a cold, rainy day in November, and Iris’s curiosity was eating at her.
“It is very much my business,” she said. “My two best friends have started dating each other, in part because of my efforts to bring them together…”
“You can’t have two best friends,” Gwen pointed out.
“Fine. My best female friend is now dating my best male friend—”
“Which of us do you like more?”
“That’s not a fair question.”
“Oh, and prying into my love life is.”
“Aha! You said ‘love’!”
“Solely as a hypothetical description.”
Each of them to the casual observer, particularly to the casual male observer, was striking, but the pair of them with their sharp difference in height were doubly so. Adding to the overall picture was their animation in conversation while simultaneously taking in the world around them, Gwen almost compulsively observing details of the expressions of the people they passed by, a habit left over from her time in the sanatorium; Iris as always on the lookout for potential attackers, a habit left over from her time in military intelligence during the war. If the casual male observer were to meet those gazes, he would quickly look away from the intensity of the combined scrutiny and move on, though not without casting one regretful backward glance of admiration.
“Still, it’s hypothetically more than you were willing to call it last month,” continued Iris. “So, have you kissed him yet? Or, allowing for him to have taken the initiative, has he kissed you?”
“What has he told you?”
“Sally won’t say a word. He is being a perfect gentleman about it.”
“Then why should I be any different?”
“Because we are women,” said Iris. “And women are required to discuss matters of the heart with their closest female friends.”
“Who made that rule?”
“We did. The Secret Society of Women Who Are Still Dating. You must have missed that meeting.”
“Was it a close vote?”
“Not at all. So spill it, sister, or I shall be forced to write you up for a violation.”
They turned off Oxford Street, heading towards the office building that contained The Right Sort in two rooms on the top storey. The lot just before it contained the steel framework of another office building being constructed on what had been a pile of rubble left when a doodlebug buzzed its way through a bevy of barrage balloons to land smack in the middle of Mayfair.
When they had first opened their office, the rubble next door was still there, as it was in the lots on the other side and to the rear of their building. One crew began clearing it in mid-May, then another arrived in September to excavate a large rectangular hole. When they were done, the steel men came on the scene. They were a cheery bunch, happy to be putting up an ordinary office framework rather than building battleships or assembling barracks and hangars across the country. Now they were gone, and several enormous stacks of bricks on pallets had been brought in on lorries and forklifted onto the muddy grounds surrounding the building-to-be, awaiting the hods and trowels.
The two women stopped to examine the site, which was notable for its lack of activity.
“There is a distinct absence of bricklaying happening right now,” observed Gwen. “Do they take their tea earlier than the rest of us?”
“There was a lightning strike by the bricklayers this morning,” said Iris. “Someone got fired without cause, or hired without joining the union, I’m not sure which, but the shop steward sent everyone home until it’s resolved. So it will be quieter on the street today for a change.”
“I’m going to miss the steelworkers,” said Gwen. “They had a party over at the Five Hats to celebrate the end of the job. They invited me to join them, would you believe it?”
“Oh, you should have come,” said Iris. “It was great fun.”
“You went?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“They asked me. They had all been paid, and who am I to turn down a free drink from some well-muscled gents?”
“Does Archie know?”
“He does not.”
“Is that a good thing?” asked Gwen, sounding worried. “When one is dating a gangster, straying from the fold could be troublesome.”
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