A Liverpool Lass (45 page)

‘Yes?’

‘Well, if you were discovered by someone, taking a
close look at something which the family didn’t want seen, it would be far worse for you than for me. I mean a maid can always get lost, no one would imagine I was snooping, but a cousin ...’

‘I see what you mean,’ George said, looking relieved. ‘Well, if I’m invited I’ll go, but if not I leave it to you, Lilac.’

The maids had been told to arrive at the house in Abercromby Square no later than seven o’clock, which meant leaving Rodney Street at a quarter to the hour. The girls were excited, giggly. They wore their best blacks, starched white blouses with high collars, and did their hair either piled on top or tied back and fastened with narrow black ribbon.

Lilac, because a party was a bit of excitement when you didn’t get out much, chose to pile her hair up on top, with a black velvet band round it. She had not previously arranged her hair so and received several compliments.

‘You look charming,’ Dr Matteson said, meeting her crossing the hall. ‘It’s much prettier than the modern hairstyles, I like a girl to look like a girl, not like a boy.’

‘Cor, get you,’ said the garden-boy. ‘Can I ’ave your autygraph, Lady Muck?’

‘I say, quite the little belle of the ball,’ next door’s handyman said. ‘Goin’ dancin’ wiv the toffs at the Pally?’

Lilac sniffed and checked that her hair was still neat. Despite the doctor’s strictures she longed to have a fashionable bob but Mrs Matteson said that one’s hair was one’s crowning glory and anyway, unless you could also wear the new skirts with their dropped waistline, the fringes, the flowerpot hats, then bobbed hair would probably just look silly.

‘We’re going to a party,’ she said grandly. ‘At Abercromby Square.’

The handyman guffawed. The October gales which had only just begun to ease had brought the leaves tumbling down and a sudden gust whirled a pile of them into the air. The girls shrieked and clutched their skirts and Polly advised the handyman to button his lip and mind his manners just as Tom Hedges, in his employer’s new Wolseley, drew up alongside them. Whilst they were still clutching their coats around them he leaned across and cranked down the window on the passenger side.

‘Here we are, gels, you’re goin’ to the party in style! Polly love, come and sit by the driver so’s I can give you a squeeze.’ He grinned at them, then got out of the driving seat and came round to open the back door, bowing as though they were all ladies ‘with five ’undred a year,’ as Madge put it.

Polly got into the front passenger seat and Madge, Lilac and Emily got into the back. There was plenty of room on the wide leather seat and they appreciated every moment of the short journey, luxuriating in the comfort of it.

‘Wish we had a motor,’ Lilac said with a sigh. ‘But Mrs Matteson says it’s not worth it, not with the doctor’s practice being mainly in the city. Now if he was a country doctor ...’

‘If he was a country doctor he wouldn’t be able to afford a motor,’ Emily pointed out sensibly. ‘But he’s a fashionable city doctor with patients who won’t go to anyone else because they know he’s the best, and they get charged according. In fact, if he didn’t do so much work at the free clinic, he’d probably be able to afford two motors.’

‘One for each foot,’ Madge said, giggling. ‘Ooh, ain’t it comfortable, though? Better than the tram!’

‘Too quick,’ Lilac sighed as the car drew up, not in Abercromby Square, but in Bedford Street North. ‘We’re here already ... oh, what a shame, I could have sat here for hours.’

‘Here we are, your Highness,’ Tom said, turning round to grin at his passengers. ‘You’re bound for the corner house, so you’ll go in the back way, through that little brown gate, down the steps and into the kitchen. You can’t miss it.’

The house was even larger seen from here than it had appeared from Abercromby Square. The windows were a blaze of light, the curtains looped back, though from where they stood, in a small group on the pavement, they could only see the upper windows over the high wall.

‘Well, gels, off we go!’ Polly said. She led the way across the pavement and in through the gate. ‘No loiterin’, ladies, no stoppin’ or starin’, we’re ’ere to work our bloody fingers to the bone!’

The gate led them into a tiny back yard from which a flight of steps descended to the door of the basement kitchen. It stood wide open, sounds of great busyness and smells of good food greeting them as they descended cautiously into the warmth and noise from the fresh autumn evening.

Polly was first down the steps and into the kitchen. She rattled on the door as she passed but did not pause to see if she had been heard.

‘We’ve arrived, Mr Lumsden,’ she said cheerfully, above the clatter of preparation as the live-in staff loaded trays and trolleys with food, crockery and cutlery. ‘Where’ll we put our coats?’

It was an unforgettable evening. Used to the quiet
dinner parties and the At Homes given by a childless, elderly couple, the girls had come to believe that the jazz age had passed Liverpool by. Now they saw that it had not.

Taking coats was their first task. They stood in the wide hall as the butler greeted guests and passed them into the main reception room. Those who had coats took them off and the Rodney Street girls carried them into a small cloakroom, put them on coat-hangers, and slid the hangers onto long wooden stands provided specially for the purpose.

And when the coats were removed, what a dazzling display was revealed! High-heeled shoes in silver, gold, scarlet and blue. Dresses with dropped waists, fringes, low necks, no sleeves. Pretty, bouncy girls with boys’ figures, bobbed hair, bangles and beads.

‘They’re wearing
make up
,’ Lilac hissed to Madge at one stage. ‘And the pretty one in the scarlet and white dress who keeps shrieking and grabbing the men because her heels are so high – she’s not wearing a petticoat. And did you see those earrings?’

Madge could only nod, wide-eyed. Even Polly, thought to be sophisticated, with her young man a chauffeur – chauffeurs were known for a tendency to use the back seats of their cars as places to despoil their ladyfriends – was stunned by this sudden introduction to the younger set.

‘I’d like to know where they buy their knickers,’ she muttered darkly as one bright young thing came down the stairs so rapidly that her short skirt flared out, revealing chubby knees in shiny silk stockings, garters and what looked remarkably like bare skin. ‘I’ve heard as ’ow flesh-coloured knickers is all the rage, but they looked like invisible knickers to me, an’ them I ’ave
not
seen in Blacklers! Tell you what, gels, they’re
fast!
’

‘Where’s the lady of the house?’ Lilac asked presently, when the steady stream of guests had dwindled to a trickle. ‘They all seem to be very young.’

‘Mrs Allan’s in the main reception room, greeting her guests,’ the butler said, overhearing. He was a tall man with a roman nose which looked like the prow of a ship. ‘Run along, girls, you’ll be wanted to set out the supper presently, and take round the trays.’

Back to the kitchen the girls went, to be handed big, heavy silver salvers laden with glasses.

‘Go to the ballroom,’ someone told them. ‘A tall man with a blond moustache will fill the glasses for you in the ante-room, then you carry the trays round and guests will help themselves.’

I’ll see her now, Lilac thought triumphantly. I’ll see the woman who might be my mother!

Two minutes later, she knew it was not to be that simple. There were probably a couple of hundred people in the ballroom, and a great many of them had donned small, black masks and were talking very loudly, laughing, flirting and moving about constantly. You had to be very careful or you would get trodden on, knocked down – and your tray of drinks would bite the dust.

But Lilac was slim, strong and quick. She glided around the floor, with half an eye on the dancers and the rest on the guests. At first, she thought that no one noticed her at all, which suited her well in one way though not in another. She was accustomed to being whistled after, smiled at, spoken to, but these people did no such thing. She was a servant and as such, more a part of the furniture than a person.

Soon however, she began to enjoy herself. It was fun to inch one’s way through the crush towards a young man with an empty glass, offer him a full one, slip
away towards a girl with a sulky mouth and unnaturally pink cheeks, watch her take the fresh glass, raise it to her lips ... and go on your way once more, heading for the pretty girl in scarlet who was twiddling her long string of beads round one slim, red-tipped index finger and eyeing the young men with an overt hunger which Lilac found more shocking than the weary suggestions made to passing sailors by the whores on the docks.

When her tray was empty she was able to stand for a moment and watch the dancers. She thought their gyrations very ugly and probably wicked, too – the women’s bodies in their brief, silky dresses which left knees, upper breasts and shoulders bare, were clasped far too close to the men’s black evening suits.

‘Hey ... you, with the yaller hair! Fetch us a drink!’ A thick-lipped, oily-haired young man shouted at her, then leaned over and tapped her tray. ‘This is supposed to be kept full, or are you so stupid you hadn’t noticed it was empty?’

Lilac, hating him, muttered an excuse and returned her empty glasses to the kitchen, then loitered as slowly as she dared to the ante-room for the refills. She thought what fun it would be to tip the tray of drinks all over that unpleasant person, but by the time she returned to the ballroom he was dancing again, hanging all over a short, square girl with a sequinned pink dress and bulging, myopic eyes. He had either forgotten his champagne or got a glass from someone else.

‘Look lively, girl ... they’ll be going in for supper in a moment, get back to the kitchen, someone will tell you what to do next.’

That was one of the real servants, a tight-lipped elderly woman who had nevertheless astonished the girls from Rodney Street with the speed and efficiency with which she dispensed drinks.

‘All right, I’m coming,’ Lilac muttered to her disappearing back. Honest to God, some people wanted slaves, not servants, and the servants themselves were worst of all!

And then, for what seemed like hours, she was truly on the go. Carrying silver salvers laden with every imaginable sort of food from the kitchen to the supper room, serving the salads and the dozens and dozens of different delicacies, fetching and carrying for the chef, an enormous man in a tall white hat who was very gracious to the guests but who shouted and hit out at the maids if they did not at once do his bidding.

But the speed slowed as the guests’ plates and glasses were filled at last and they took their places round the tiny tables set out in the supper-room. The tight-lipped one gestured to the maids to leave the room and took them back to the kitchen.

‘There’s sangwidges,’ she said grudgingly. ‘And there’s tea in the big urn. Best get some down you ... we’ll be serving the desserts in twenty minutes or so.’

The sandwiches were very good when you were young and hungry, even if they did not measure up to lobster patties and smoked salmon on brown bread, two of the delicacies Lilac had eyed with interest. They contained nice things – cheese and lettuce, ham and pickle, egg and tomato. And the tea was served in large white pottery mugs and went down a treat, Polly said, when you’d been run off your feet all evening and were thirsty enough to drain a ditch dry.

‘It’s a dry night, though windy,’ someone remarked as they ate. ‘That means some of ’em will go onto the terrace and even into the back garden.’ The woman who spoke was smart in her blacks, but she had a coarse way with her, Lilac considered. ‘Ha, Ned’ll be
moanin’ tomorrer about his flattened chrysanthemums and ruined dahlias.’

‘The men like to smoke,’ the housekeeper said. ‘Some of the ladies, too. The mistress likes a cigarette – she’s very modern, Mrs Allan.’

‘I don’t like the smell of it,’ Polly remarked, helping herself to another sandwich and speaking rather thickly through her first bite. ‘When they smoke in the motor, it’s awful, really horrid.’

‘Oh, well.’ One of the menservants stretched out and took a packet of cigarettes off the sideboard behind him. ‘I’m off into the yard for a puff. Anyone coming?’

‘I’d like to ... to tidy myself up a bit,’ Lilac said shyly. She knew everyone would assume that this was a euphemism for using the lavatory and so it proved.

‘Oh, right. Straight out of here, down the corridor, turn left, first door on your right,’ the tight-lipped one said. ‘Don’t be long!’

Lilac hurried out of the kitchen, her heart bumping beneath her starched white blouse. What should she do, now that she was, for a moment, free to take a look around? Mrs Allan must be with her guests down in the supper room, her husband too. Other staff were in the kitchens ... but what could she discover in the bedrooms? What tiny clue to her past?

She glanced into the first door she reached; a pantry, stone-floored, with shelves from floor to ceiling. The next door hid a cloakroom with staff coats, hats and boots. She ignored the rest but went through into the house itself. And here she had a piece of luck. A girl, tall, fair-haired, stood in the hall looking the picture of misery. When she saw Lilac, however, she brightened.

‘Oh, hello ... do you work here? Some clumsy idiot trod on me whilst we were dancing and tore one of my floating panels and it’s a brand-new dress ... could
you put a stitch in it for me? It wouldn’t take you a minute.’

She smiled beguilingly. Lilac, smiling back, thought that here was a real young lady, not one of the brash creatures who had ignored her all evening. The girl’s skirt was a reasonable length, her shoulders covered, albeit only with light gauze, and she had a breezy, bright sort of beauty which needed no help from powder and paint.

‘I’ll do my best,’ Lilac said now. ‘Umm ...’

‘The things are upstairs, in Godmother’s dressing room,’ the girl said. ‘I’m Sarah Kingsley, Mrs Allan’s goddaughter. I’m twenty-one, old enough for Godmother’s parties now, my father believes. Though I don’t think he realises quite how modern Mrs Allan is,’ she added thoughtfully.