Gladys thinks that of everyone who works at the factory, Kate Andrews is the most interesting.
Carol, of course, Gladys has known for most of her life. There's Edith and Vera, both victims of this war, and Lorna, whose ghosts are much older. There's Betty, who's at times painfully straightforward and direct. But Kate, Gladys finds, is much harder to read.
Its not that Kate is unfriendly, or hard to talk to. They've had nights out, and nights in, and countless shifts together; they've battled thieves and cheating fiancés; they've sung and danced and drunk together; and yet Gladys finds that when she thinks about it, she hardly knows Kate at all. She doesn't know where she grew up, or what she was good at at school, or how she filled her days before she came to VicMu and made things that kill people.
Whenever Kate mentions home, it's her father she speaks of. She's full of Psalms and Bible verses, but they come stilted, as if from someone else's mouth. She wears no cross, and Gladys has never heard her mention attending church. In fact, her voice, which could make anyone even the direst unbeliever repent, is often raised in prayer and hymn, but it's with Leon's jazz that Kate comes most alive.
She is happy to moon with Gladys over the latest dreamboat, and giggling discuss the merits of this man or that. The way Kate dances, at the dance or in the boarding house, lacks practice and form, but no-one watching her would notice. And there are no shortage of uniformed admirers waiting to mark her card and dance a dance with the redhead in their arms. Yet Kate's most common dance partners are not handsome soldiers but the other girls from the boarding house and factory. And always, at some point, Kate will turn and smile and hold her hand out to Betty and twirl her friend away from everyone else.
Oftentimes, Gladys wonders about the locket Lorna found, and the suspicion it raised in her. Lorna clearly doesn't think it was found on the sidewalk, and Gladys doesn't either.
There's something special about Kate, that much is easily spotted. The other girls like her, accepted her easily as one of their own, unlike Gladys herself. The patrons of the bar and the band all crowd around her, praising and discussing her latest performance in adoring voices. And then there's poor Betty, who is clearly taken with the girl. Her features have slowly been becoming less and less guarded as the weeks have worn on, and Gladys can see that her feelings are rising, getting closer and closer to spilling out, uncontrollable and untamed. Gladys knows that Betty's feelings should shock her, should disgust her, but they don't, somehow. As Betty stands in the bar, watching Kate, Gladys wishes, just for a moment that a gaze like that would be turned, however briefly, on her.
Sometimes Betty catches her watching. She seems to realise that Gladys sees beneath her surface and then Betty will flush, and look away, and change the sentence. Then sometimes, Gladys catches Kate looking at Betty, and feels again that she is intruding on something intensely private. But then Kate will look away, look up at Gladys, and won't flush or look down or change the topic, and Gladys wonders whether she saw anything at all.
Late at night, as Gladys pins and sets her hair, she wonders what Kate's routine is. Gladys wonders, but supposes she will never know. Kate has barriers Gladys cannot breach, and that, she thinks, is how it was always meant to be.