The Glove Counter, by Winifred Sallis
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
The kid gloves had gone out at four shillings when they should have been fourteen. Mabel Illingworth knew it was not her mistake the moment Miss Crale laid the sales docket on the glass counter, because she remembered the price ticket Mr Thackray had written on Tuesday, with the one left off the front in his own fussy little hand. She had charged exactly what the ticket said. She always did.
‘Explain this,’ said Miss Crale.
Mabel looked up. Across the floor Mr Thackray had become very interested in a drawer of handkerchiefs. His ears had gone the colour of tinned salmon. The other girls on Haberdashery had stopped folding, and the silence was so complete that she could hear the cash railway whirring overhead, carrying somebody else’s money to the office.
‘I charged what was on Mr Thackray’s ticket, Miss Crale.’
‘Mr Thackray says he priced them correctly.’
‘Then Mr Thackray,’ said Mabel, and stopped. The word she wanted was liar. It sat on her tongue like a hot coal. But she was nineteen, and her wages paid for her mother’s coal and her brother’s boots, and girls who called the floorwalker a liar were not kept on at Lockwood’s.
‘The ten shillings will come out of your wages,’ said Miss Crale, ‘to impress upon you the importance of care.’
Mabel said nothing. She went back to folding, and her fingers worked sharp and fast, every crease a small blow. Ten shillings. She thought of the ticket, which she had dropped in the bin under the counter, which had been emptied on Tuesday night, which was now ash in some furnace under the town. She thought of Mr Thackray’s pink ears and his wife and his three children in Ilkley, whose photograph he showed to customers, and she hoped, quite clearly and without shame, that his train would be late every morning for a year.
At six o’clock he held the staff door for her. ‘Bad luck, Miss Illingworth,’ he murmured.
She walked past him into the rain as if he were a coat stand.
How does the writer show Mabel’s thoughts and feelings about the way she is treated?
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You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.