She had harboured feelings of resentment against him ever since she’d learned that Mammy was eyeing him up as a potential husband. She didn’t jump to conclusions, like Babs, or dismiss him as a fool but none the less she considered him too weak to be worthy of a woman like her mother. When she thought about Mr Peabody – which wasn’t often – Polly thought of a man who had never been young, who, stuffy and prissy and lacking conviction, was already trapped in perpetual middle age. She had lied only to flatter him and to please Mammy, had stated ‘absolutely’ that she thought that rent-collecting was a manly occupation. She did not really consider it so, any more than she considered clerking a manly occupation or set any store by the neat brown suits and trilby hats of the young surveyors who frequented the Burgh Hall offices or by the navy blue three-pieces of pompous burgh councillors who confused their petty power with masculine appeal. When she tried to tally up the qualities that made a man what a man should be, Polly inclined towards the boys who lived close to the edge; not the dumb or lazy but those hearty young males who flooded out of shipyard gates or poured, running, from under the steelworks’ towering gantries, their faces grimed but not grim and who, if unemployment caught up with them, joined the back of the dole queue with the same gruff optimism with which they had squared up to wage-slavery.
