Bryce Courtenay: The Potato Factory

It was in books that Mary discovered a world beyond any of her possible imaginings – Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels which she especially liked and read many times, quoting often from it to Mr Bishop; Thackeray, Macaulay, an excellent English translation of Cervantes' wondrously mad Don Quixote, Jane Austen and Fanny Burney. All these and a host of others she devoured with a great thirst for knowledge.

While reading became her abiding passion, Mary did not connect the lives of the people she read about in books with her own. Her earlier life had been difficult and the people about her for the most part poverty-stricken, dulled and witless from lack of proper sustenance and the absence of any education. That is, apart from the kind needed to survive among thieves, scoundrels and villains. From a young age she knew the world to be a wicked place and had learned to defend the small space she occupied in it with her teeth and nails.

However, the human mind has the fortunate capacity to forget pain and misery. Mary had been in the protected environment of a domestic servant in a big house from the age of eleven, so by the age of twenty she had all but buried the turmoil of her younger years. The sheltered life she now led meant she had gained little additional experience of the adult world other than the hurriedly taken copulative embraces thrust upon her by two of her past masters and the infinitely more pleasant, though inexperienced, couplings with the young master of the last employer.

Mary did not regard these hasty assignations as the same act of fornication she had observed against the walls in alleys or on the dark stairwells of shared lodgings or in the nesting midnight rooms, occupied by three destitute families, in which she and her father had been reduced to living in the years before she'd entered domestic service.

Some unknown affliction in childhood had rendered Mary sterile, not that she even equated the hasty love-making with her betters with the act of childbirth. Despite the presence of children in the houses in which she'd served, if she'd thought about it at all, she would perhaps have concluded that the idle rich had their children conveniently delivered by a stork, the evidence of this being ever present on the nursery wall. That the better classes should employ the same vile animal instincts which had been such a familiar aspect of her childhood would have seemed to her unthinkable.

In fact, Mary was both streetwise and naive all at once. While she longed for romance she knew in her heart that it was not intended for her kind, that doing it in some privacy with a clean and half-decent someone was the best she could hope for. Her body developed into a very desirable womanliness, and she would often feel the ache to use it other than by the deployment of her probing and urgent fingers.

Her moment came one morning at Shepherd Market in nearby Mayfair where she had been sent by Mrs Hodge to purchase the master's luncheon sole, Billingsgate being too far to walk and the coachman out with the mistress of the house all morning.

'Take the one wif the clearest eyes, lovey.' The young man pointed to a fish which lay upon a block of ice slightly to one side. 'That one! See the eyes, clear as a gypsy's crystal.'

Mary turned towards the voice and its owner smiled, showing two missing front teeth with the eye tooth on either side framing the gap and capped with gold. It was a smile devoid of any calculation, though mischievous enough.

Mary found herself smiling back, even though more prudent behaviour was called for from a servant girl in a nice house involved in a casual meeting with a strange man. She found herself immediately taken by the flash young man standing beside her and her heart beat in quite the strangest manner.

The possessor of these two astonishing gold teeth was flash in other ways too and wore a fancy corduroy waistcoat with a watch chain. His ankle boots, below a fashionable pair of breeches, were stitched with patterns of hearts and roses. His cloth coat with contrasting plush lapels was clean and carried large expensive pearl buttons and was cut to the back into heavily braided calf-clingers with an artful line of buttons at their extremity. On his head he wore a beaver-napped top hat that looked to be in excellent order, its nap neatly brushed and shining.

'Name o' Bob Marley, pleased to meetcha,' he'd said in a single breath, giving her another big grin which caused his incisor teeth to once more gleam and flash. 'Honoured to make yer acquaintance, Miss…?'

Mary had observed that he hadn't once taken his eyes away from her face and unlike most men with whom she had the slightest passing acquaintance, hadn't allowed his eyes to wander over those parts of her anatomy which usually brought a glazed look into their eyes and a gravel tone in their voices. His smile was ingenuous, quite open and impossible to resist.

'Mary,' she said simply. 'Them's lovely teeth,' she added, smiling.

Bob Marley jabbed a finger at his mouth, 'Like 'em does ya? Eighteen carat, that is! Pure gold, can't get none better!'

Bob Marley cast his eyes over Mary's firm breasts and trim waist, and in an unabashed voiced declared, 'What a corker! Care for a drop o' ruin?' He indicated the public house with a toss of his head. 'Come on then, I'll buy ya a taste o' whatever's yer fancy, gin is it, or a pint o' best beer?'

Mary, though sorely tempted, could not accept his invitation for fear of upsetting Mrs Hodge by being late and returning to the house with the smell of strong spirits on her breath. She was not accustomed to drink, though on the rare occasions when, on a public holiday, she'd ventured out with Mrs Hodge, she'd found gin left her very excited in a physical sort of way.

'I'll not be seen with a costermonger,' she said tartly, this seeming the best way to end a relationship where she was already beginning to feel at a distinct disadvantage. She noted too that her breasts were heaving and she was finding it difficult to breathe.

Bob Marley drew back with an exaggerated expression of hurt. Cocking his head to one side, his mouth turned down at the corner, he looked down at his chest as though closely examining his apparel. 'Costermonger? Not bleedin' likely, lovey.' He patted a velvet lapel. 'This is me disguise. I'm what ya might call an hoperator, I do a bit o' this and a bit o' that, finding' a bit 'ere and disposin' of it over there, if ya knows what I mean?'

'Oh, a tout?' Mary shot back, bringing her fingers to her lips as she tried to contain her laughter.

'Well not exactly that neiver, jus'… well… er,' he smiled his golden smile, 'an hoperator!' He seemed disinclined to further discuss the subject of his occupation.

'Well, what 'bout yer place, then?' Bob Marley said cheekily tugging on his watch chain and taking Mary by the elbow.

'Who do you think I am? I ain't no dollymop! Shame on you, Bob Marley!' Mary pulled her arm away from him. But then she laughed, enchanted by the young rogue standing beside her. 'You can walk me 'ome and no touchin', that's all I'll promise for now.'

By the time they reached the house in Chelsea Mary was completely smitten by the young rogue. She kept him waiting in the lane at the back of the house while she unlocked the stout door set into the kitchen garden wall, whereupon she went directly into the kitchen to deliver the sole to Mrs Hodge, who, predictably, scolded her for the time she had taken on her errand.

Mary's heart pounded in her breast as she returned down the garden path to open the garden door and let Bob Marley within the precincts of the kitchen garden. Quickly locking the door behind him, she led him into the laundry.

Now, with less than half an hour having passed, fat Mrs Hodge stood over Mary's half-naked body having hysterics and crying out in alarm at the astonishing gymnastics taking place on a pile of dirty linen at her feet.