Park Lane (6 page)

‘You must succeed, and if—’ yes, she’ll say it, and mean it too – ‘if you do not, I shall tell Mother.’ But Edward isn’t looking at her. How odd, a maid – Grace it is – has slipped in without knocking and Edward is watching her move across the room holding a tray as if it were a cushion with a crown on it. The girl lifts her head and Edward beams at her as though he is the sun itself, and the maid blushes. Bea feels a jab of annoyance.

‘You’re not listening to me,’ she continues, but he doesn’t move.

‘Edward,’ she growls at him.

‘Yes, Bea-Bea, but if I do succeed, then what on earth do I do with myself? I haven’t the patience for fishing. Despite Mother’s misfounded beliefs, I am a poor horseman, and in any case, like
you, feel saddened by those foxes; they’re rather elegant, don’t you think? As for shooting, well, if I didn’t miss anyhow, I’d only try to. And I can hardly become a suffragette. All that’s left to me, it seems, are the vices.’

‘Well, find another vice, then. And not alcohol. Why, why …’ She’s hesitating about what she’s going to say, shocking herself with the very words, but if it will save Edward, then, Beatrice, you cannot be such a prude. ‘How about a married woman, Edward? I thought all you young bucks did that sort of thing.’

As a look of astonishment grows on his face it breaks into laughter, and so does Bea. As she laughs she continues, ‘I mean it, Edward. It’s a better place to pass your time.’

‘Edward!’

Oh God, thinks Bea, and the two of them spin around to face the door to see the petite figure that is Mother, all the more formidable for being immaculately dressed even though she has just come up from the country.

‘My dearest boy, what a lovely surprise. Oh, how I missed you at Beauhurst. Now, I want you to tell me and your sister everything you’ve been up to. It is always such an unmitigated pleasure to hear.’

Mother is unfailingly predictable in her bias. This, too, is what Bea has always told Edward: don’t worry about the fact that she adores you and simply does what she must with me, she’s straight out of Dickens. He laughs at this and, no doubt, if she catches his eye now, he will laugh again. Bea is careful. If they roar together, Mother will suspect that they have been up to something and will not let it rest until she has extracted an answer, and Edward does not look on good enough form to deceive well under the pressure of Mother. So Bea keeps her eyes away as her brother proceeds to nurture their mother’s mistaken belief that he could not, in a thousand years, do anything to upset her.

5

ALL OF DOWNSTAIRS EXCEPT THE KITCHEN MAIDS AND
the boot boy are lined up, as usual, for breakfast on either side of the long table. Mr Bellows, and what’s left of his red hair, is at the top. To his right is Mussyur Fouray, chef’s hat still on even though he’s at table, and taking up a good two seats with the size of him. Then there’s Summers in his two rows of chauffeur’s brass buttons, though his chest could fit three, and James and Joseph: James first, because he’s first footman, then Joseph as second. James is as dark as Joseph is fair and their gold-braided tailcoats are as dark as their breeches are pale, though how they keep them clean is beyond Grace.

To Mr Bellows’ right is Mrs Wainwright, all grey hair and cheekbones, and not an ounce spare on her. Next is Miss Suthers, mouth as ever locked in her lady’s-maid pinch. Then come the three little maids in a row: Susan, Mary and Grace, all dressed for the morning in their flower-print frocks and mob caps. That puts Susan staring at the gap between Summers and James, and Mary between James and Joseph, and Mary can’t see a man but look at him in that way of hers. This makes Grace feel uncomfortable, and Joseph’s the only man she has to look at. Though how she’s to look at him is beyond her, for he’ll sneak a wink the moment he reckons nobody is watching and she’ll blush all over. Thank
the Lord it’s not often that nobody’s casting an eye around, for meals are times to work out what everybody’s up to, the top of the table all speaking with such plums in their mouths there’s no telling where any of them were born. Even lower down the table, growing closer to Grace, everybody has their Park Lane voice, which might as well be a different language to the one they grew up speaking. Some evenings, especially on Saturdays, if Mary’s been out with Lord-knows-who she goes out with, she falls back into the voice she grew up with. I don’t have a care in the world when I talk like this, Grace. But Mary also makes out she’s in good spirits.

Today, as usual, they’re talking of upstairs, the boot boy and the kitchen maids on their separate table at the far end of the room trying to listen as best they can over the clatter of knives and forks. And a din it is, for they eat quick as they can to get something inside before the bells start ringing. Bea keeps glancing up at the bell board on the wall above Mr Bellows’ head.

‘Deaf now?’ says Susan who has seen her looking up. ‘A housemaid who can’t hear, that’s all we need.’

Susan’s tongue’s as sharp as her face and she’s taken against Grace. Not right from the start, a few days in. Mary explained: first housemaids must always be wanting to go up to lady’s maid or housekeeper. The only person upstairs who might be needing a lady’s maid of her own is Miss Beatrice, though for now, whoever hears the bell goes to her. But sometimes Miss Beatrice does ask for one or the other of them, and Grace can’t say she’s not pleased when it’s her, even if she’s surprised at herself with the thought. Keep your head down, Mary tells her, and your mouth shut. If Susan has a whiff that you’ve a decent head on your shoulders she’ll be trying even harder to knock it off.

Always the most dangerous, them that’s near the top but not quite there.

Mrs Wainwright silences Susan. ‘Grace, you’ll hear the bell, I’d stick to your plate.’ There’s silence again for a second then James,
who, even though he’s above Joseph and should have some dignity about him, can never keep his mouth shut when he should, leans forward and goes back to yesterday.

‘I’m sure she noticed.’

‘It’s Lady Masters to you, or you’ll find yourself changing places with Joseph.’

James drops his eyes. ‘Yes, Mr Bellows.’

Joseph’s not saying a word. He had a right dressing down yesterday for the state he was in when he came back from the cart. Grace wants to rub his cheeks, put some colour back into them. There’s more not said around this table than’s spoken out loud. Still, now Grace wants to know something and the question rushes up on her and out of her mouth before she’s had a chance to hold it back.

‘How’d sh—her ladyship know it?

‘Those cigarettes of Miss Celeste’s. From Turkey, or wherever’s you’ll have it. Stink like a public house where no one’s opened the window for a week.’

‘James …’

‘Yes, Mr Bellows.’ And James quickly glances up at Summers and his buttons and back again, as if he’s expecting to be told off by him, too.

‘That’s daft!’ Susan cuts in again. ‘There’ll be hundreds who smoke them.’

Mrs Wainwright is looking very hard at Miss Suthers and Miss Suthers is looking straight back across at Mrs Wainwright. A lady’s maid is as close as you can get to upstairs but there’s not a word on Miss Suther’s lips, it’s all in her eyes, saying it clear. Don’t forget what’s said while I am doing her ladyship’s hair, and a dozen other things beside. Then Miss Beatrice’s bell snaps the silence, and the table lets their breath out. ‘Earlier than usual,’ mutters Susan, two mouthfuls into her toast, but she is up to brush the crumbs off her pinny quick as a hare. ‘For me, I think.’

Grace feels resentment rising in her, then checks herself. Is that what’s become of her ambitions, and so quick? She can’t let herself
be jealous of a maid’s work. Not when she’s supposed to be a secretary. And not with what her family need her to send home.

Grace started with answering the advertisements in
The Times
in her best handwriting, learnt with Miss Sand, and paid for by Ma’s sister, Aunt Ethel. She was a schoolteacher, and so mindful of reading and writing, said Ma, that you’d’ve thought there wasn’t any other talent in the world. Aunt Ethel, not being married herself, had always helped Ma with the five of them. Bit of money as she could, here and there.

Five is the sign of a happy marriage, Ma used to say, eyes pale above the dark circles under them, but she didn’t want the same for her daughters. Don’t you do this, Grace. Waste it all in some man’s kitchen, she’d say, while she went at the mixing bowl, her arm a mill wheel, pasting the eggs and flour. My daughters are going to see better than the inside of an oven. Even though back then there was still a maid to rattle the coal into it.

So Grace and Michael sat side by side in Miss Sand’s parlour, willing the fire to burn higher, though with a half-dozen of them in that tiny parlour they might as well have been sitting around the funnel of one of Da’s engines.

Miss Sand’s, where they went when they grew out of school at twelve. The rest of the class were half a dozen girls, with fathers in the professions, who’d been told not to mix with Grace and Michael. When they were all let outside, the girls just turned their backs. Not good enough, railwayman’s children, even if Da was an engineer and hardly a navvy – and it was at Miss Sand’s that Michael started to change.

Michael was the only boy. Some days there’d be a crowd of lads his age on the street a few doors down from Miss Sand’s. The jeering didn’t bother him, he just walked straight on the same side of the road as the crowd to shield Grace from it. More of a reader than a talker, he was, and Miss Sand found the books to lend him from her friends.

While Michael learnt Latin, Grace learnt shorthand and typing. Miss Sand worked through the book with her and, after Michael went to London, she blindfolded Grace as she sat down to type and timed her. First-class secretary, she said, any man would be lucky to have you in his office.

My hope’s with you, said Ma as she put Grace on the bus to the railway station, the day after the New Year. By which Ma meant send back all you can of that good salary you should have in an office. My investment, said Ma, for even though Michael was clerking – now that, Da said, is a career – it would be a while before he was making good money.

Where he was boarding, women weren’t allowed. Not that you should be in the same building as men, said Ma, even if they are gentlemen. If there is such a thing as a gentleman, because in the railways she’s not sure of that. She stopped as she said this and looked hard across the room at somewhere altogether different for a moment or two, then was quiet. So Grace went to another boarding house, three to a room and ladies only, though Grace soon saw that what was meant by ladies was broad as a river. Ma didn’t know that. All right and proper, she had said to Grace as she put her on the train. You two keep an eye on each other down there, promise me that.

Grace sent off Miss Sand’s reference with the letters. Invitations to interview came by return. She’d turned up the next day, scrubbed clean and shining, in gloves and a hat. The interviewers smiled as she came into the room. Their faces fell as she started to speak.

‘We’ll write if we need you to come back.’

In one interview a gentleman looked her gently in the eye and spoke slowly, as if she didn’t understand English.

Grace had a month in hand if she eked out the pennies, holding on until the boarding-house meal in the evening. Before each interview just a slice of bread to stop the stomach hollering. Halfway through the third week she moved on to another section
in the newspaper. No letter this time about her typing skills, instead the character-only reference Miss Sand had given her. It wasn’t what she’d come here for, nor where she wanted to end up. Grace knows there’s more to her than service, for all those back home who said she had a nerve to set her mind further than Carlisle.

She had been too nervous to notice the size of the house on Park Lane. She was so focused on finding the tradesmen’s entrance, she can’t even remember now who it was who let her in, just the sitting in Mrs Wainwright’s housekeeper’s office. Mrs, but no ring on her finger, and kind as she was in the interview, since Grace started Mrs Wainwright has become a wall with no door.

Were the servants fed here, Grace wondered, but it was Mrs Wainwright who was doing the asking.

‘You’re old for a junior housemaid.’

‘I can learn quick, mam.’

‘That is extremely clear, but have you ever scrubbed a floor? Laid a grate?’

‘Yes.’ Grace thought of Ma – You’ll do better than this, but best know how – and kept her smile up. Not quite three weeks and she missed home. Missed the rain, the chill, even her little sisters. Even now she still wakes in the night thinking she can hear them all those hundreds of miles away.

‘I don’t know who this Miss Sand is,’ said Mrs Wainwright, ‘but she writes a good letter. Mary will show you your room and you’ll share with her. Even though she’s younger I am afraid she’ll be above you, for she’s been here a good while. I’d give her the sense of that if I were you.’

‘Thank you, mam, thank you.’

‘Don’t gush. Thank me if we keep you on. And, Grace …’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ll have to learn to speak more clearly. However, keep quiet and you’ll do well. When you’re a housekeeper you can raise your voice.’

Grace bought a single sheet of notepaper, an envelope and a stamp on the way back to the boarding house to pack her bags. The dining room was empty and she sat down at the table to write a letter to her parents. It wasn’t long. All that needed to be said could fit in a sentence or two, any more and she might get herself in a muddle. She folded the paper, fiddled it into the envelope and stamped it. She was paid up until the end of the week and she wasn’t going to be seeing a penny back, not after they’d ordered her food, she’d been told, or could have let the bed out to another young woman. Grace didn’t bother pointing out that there were two beds empty on the top floor. There were no goodbyes – all the boarders were out at work – so she left her door key on the sideboard and closed the front door behind her. She passed a pillar box on her way back to Mrs Wainwright.