The Governess (4 page)

Mr Thackerton, having left as was his custom a minute’s pause after the family had entered and taken their places, came striding in.

He marched, heavy-footed, to the top of the long table where on the thick green cloth that covered it at this hour there had been placed the large family Bible, opened at the page he was to read from. His arrival at the head of the table was the signal for all to kneel while he recited the Lord’s Prayer, to which they all in their different ways murmured accompaniment.

Miss Unwin, with as usual her eyes only half-closed so that she could keep a watch on little Pelham, was able to detect across the width of the cloth-covered table that Joseph’s voice this morning was noticeably louder and clearer, almost as loud indeed as the Master’s at the table’s head.

A reading from the Bible followed. Next Mr Thackerton was accustomed to intone a short prayer commending them all to their duties for the day. He finished, as usual, by closing the Good Book with a resounding bang as much as to say ‘That’s that’. At once the servants got to their feet and filed out to start again on the duties to which they had been so firmly directed. The family waited for them to have gone and then Pelham’s mother and grandfather wished him good morning. His father seldom remembered.

It was while they were all moving across to the breakfast-room
and its laid table that Miss Unwin was greeted directly by Joseph.

‘Good morning, miss,’ he said, putting himself in her path as she followed the others and even for a moment sticking his thumbs into the pockets of his white uniform in a cocksure parody of Mr Thackerton’s customary stance.

‘Good morning, Joseph,’ Miss Unwin replied, loudly and clearly.

She looked straight back at him, her expression as devoid of feeling as she could make it. He smiled, the long teeth curving between the pale lips of his large-featured face.

Miss Unwin resolved then that, before the day was out, she would have done something to see that this triumph was shortlived.

She took the first step to achieving that end when she went in the afternoon to read to Mrs Thackerton senior. Generally, few words were exchanged on these occasions. Mrs Thackerton often would do no more than extend a thin hand towards the book they were working their way through. Then, fighting off the torpid heat of the blinds-darkened room, it would be Miss Unwin’s duty to read steadily on until asked to stop. Yet sometimes Mrs Thackerton liked a little undemanding talk. She would ask how Pelham’s lessons were progressing, comment in mildly shocked tones on the weather, or boast feebly that she had gone for a whole week without having had to summon the doctor.

So Miss Unwin acted quickly now to forestall the long, bone-thin fingers pointing towards the book.

‘Did you hear about poor little Pelham and his sugar-mice?’ she asked, making the question as casual as she could.

‘No. No, I hear nothing of what goes on in the house.’

Miss Unwin gave her a quick glance in the gloom, and was struck not for the first time by the thought of how young ‘old Mrs Thackerton’ really was. Though her face was lined there was hardly a grey strand in her pale golden hair. She must be no older than her husband, vigorous in his mid-fifties. Yet, seldom moving away from the special, Paris-imported invalid sofa where she now lay, she had all the appearance of someone almost old enough to be his mother, even of someone indeed not long for this world.

Would she have enough force to deal with the affair of the stolen sugar-mice, now that it had been brought to her notice?

Concisely as she could, Miss Unwin retailed the whole history. Certainly her hearer seemed to take it all in. But how would she respond?

The response, when it came, was unexpected.

‘You say that you made Pelham go without his treat for so many nights?’

‘Why, yes. He must learn to accept the setbacks of life, after all.’

It seemed to be Mrs Thackerton’s turn to be surprised.

‘Yes. Yes, I know that he ought to. But… But … Well, he has not been prepared to accept setbacks very much up to now. His previous governess had to be sent away, you know, because he was so wilful and she could not control him. Is he not disobedient with you?’

‘Well, I see to it that he is not. He is a good-hearted little fellow once he understands how things must be.’

Mrs Thackerton, careworn on her French sofa, sighed deeply.

‘If only I could have been as firm as that with Arthur,’ she said, as much to herself as to Miss Unwin.

She turned her head then.

‘We had no governess for him, you know,’ she said. ‘Mr Thackerton was not so prosperous in the days before he was able to use the invention for making steam-moulded hats.’

Miss Unwin murmured something in acknowledgement of the confidence she was being favoured with. She would rather have pushed forward with her scheme to persuade Mrs Thackerton to deal with Joseph. But she saw that this was not the moment.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Thackerton murmured on, her eyes fixed now on the slumbering fire that was making the room so oppressive. ‘Yes, Arthur was always a troublesome boy. He was a trouble at home, and he was a trouble at Eton when he went away to school. He was fast there. He was fast at Oxford, and I sadly fear he is fast yet.’

Miss Unwin sat still as she could on her low chair near the
window and turned her mind away from the whole conversation. She had heard more than she should.

A silence fell. The coals settled in the grate. Outside in the sun a pigeon cooed and cooed and cooed.

At last Miss Unwin thought she might venture to speak again. Perhaps firmly changing the subject back to what she had wanted to discuss in the first place would obliterate in Mrs Thackerton’s mind that indiscretion of hers.

‘I had occasion to tell Mrs Arthur about Joseph last night,’ she said, ‘and I am very much afraid that she does not intend to take up the matter with him. Do you think that you could see him?’

‘See him? You mean speak to him? Dismiss Joseph myself?’

Mrs Thackerton raised her thin hands in dismay.

‘No, no, my dear girl,’ she said. ‘You are asking too much. You know that the affairs of the house are out of my keeping. Oh, I have my set of keys still. I am Mr Thackerton’s wife after all. But Mrs Arthur has the keys that are used. She orders everything now. I cannot do it. I cannot.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ Miss Unwin answered, a little desperately. ‘But it truly seems that Mrs Arthur is unwilling even to speak to Joseph. So, if you could …’

But Mrs Thackerton shook her head.

‘You are right, my dear. Joseph’s misdemeanours should not go unchecked, and I admire you for your courage in attempting to see that they do not. But there are things that I can no longer do. Many, many things. And to speak to Joseph is one of them. It would be beyond me, beyond me altogether.’

‘Yes, I see,’ Miss Unwin replied.

She felt suddenly very much alone. Was there no one in this house she could rely upon? Was there, at best, only dear, cheerful, willing but incapable Vilkins on her side? And could she succeed in doing what must be her duty if all were so set against her?

Yes, she could. She must.

‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘I can see that such a task is beyond you, Mrs Thackerton, and since Mrs Arthur will not take it up there is only one thing I can do. I shall have to go to Mr Thackerton himself.’

It was a brave boast. But had she realised that in carrying it out she would come to place herself in a situation that held for her far more dangers than all the hostility of the house could bring to bear, would she have spoken with so much determination?

Late that evening Miss Unwin was listening from near the top of the stairs for Henry, down below, to take in to Mr Thackerton in the library his nightly whisky and seltzer. She had decided that this last quiet hour of the day would be the time when, if ever, the Master of the house would be disposed to give his grandson’s governess a hearing.

If she still did not know a great deal about the servants under the roof of No 3 Northumberland Gardens, she had long before taken care to find out as much as she could about the man whose word in the house was law. His lightest shaft of anger could, she knew, send her sliding down from her hardly won position as swiftly as if she had landed on a long snake on the board game that was little Pelham’s favourite.

Of all she had learned about Mr Thackerton one thing stood out: he was terribly quick to look down on anyone lower than himself in the social scale. Miss Unwin thought she knew why. Mr Thackerton’s beginnings had not been all that high. They were by no means as utterly low as her own, but they had been low enough. His father had been a hatter, owner of a business that provided no more than modest comforts, but shortly after Mr Thackerton himself had inherited the concern the remarkable invention that produced Thackerton’s Patent Steam-moulded Hats had been introduced. From then on progress had been extraordinary and now Thackerton hats put all their rivals to shame. Advertisements for them were to be seen everywhere, plastered on every poster-covered wall, blazoned on the sides of horse-buses, boldly inserted in half a dozen varieties of fancy type in every magazine and newspaper.

The Thackerton family had soon moved from the mild prosperity of Lambeth across the stinking waters of the Thames (which had nevertheless somehow washed away all traces of humble origins) to the dignity and massive respectability of Bayswater.

All this piecemeal gathered information had made Miss Unwin certain that if Mr Thackerton was to be approached at all on the matter of Joseph and the stolen sugar-mice it would have to be done at the most propitious moment.

So now she listened for Henry to enter the library carrying in his white-gloved hands the silver salver on which there would be resting a tumbler, the whisky decanter and the seltzer siphon. She would wait, she had decided, until he came out and then for three minutes more. At that point, if she had guessed correctly, Mr Thackerton would be moderately at ease but not so much so that an interruption would be furiously resented.

She had had to give herself a long vigil. There were some occasions, she knew, when Mr Thackerton received a visitor in the library and his nightcap was postponed. This visitor was a confidential clerk from the firm’s London office, one Ephraim Brattle, a young man of singularly dour appearance, black-haired, with a set round face that reminded her of nothing so much as the front of a steam locomotive so strongly determined was its expression. It was his task to go from London to the works in Lancashire with whatever orders were necessary, leaving by the first train from Euston Station having slept the night in a spare servants’ bedroom. His interviews in the library might be short or might be long, so Miss Unwin had had to station herself at her chosen post well in advance.

It seemed, however, that this was not one of Ephraim Brattle’s nights. At quarter to eleven, exact to the minute, she heard Henry knock on the library door below and enter.

He was inside for barely two minutes. Miss Unwin saw in her mind’s eye the whisky and the seltzer poured into the tumbler, the tumbler set down beside Mr Thackerton and Henry quietly leaving with the salver. From the moment she heard him close the heavy door of the library behind him she began to count the seconds. Up to sixty. Then up to sixty again and then once more.

At last, her calculated three minutes up, she drew back her shoulders and set off down the stairs. At the tall library door she paused for an instant. On the far side she heard Mr Thackerton’s little dry cough.

Was she asking for trouble? Would she irritate to fury the person who held over her something approaching powers of life or death, or at least of an aspiring life and an existence of deadly poverty? Was she risking all this simply for a point of petty principle?

Then, no, she told herself. This was not petty. For one thing Joseph had clearly done wrong, considerable wrong though on a trifling material scale. He ought not to escape without paying some penalty. But, as important, if he were allowed to go scot-free, her own position in the house would rapidly become impossible.

She knocked at the gleamingly polished door. Two raps, not sharp, but not timid at all.

She heard Mr Thackerton call out ‘Come in.’ Was there already a note of anger in his voice? Well, if there was she must do her best to dispel it.

She entered.

‘Miss Unwin!’

The whole room, which she had been inside only once before, was formidably impressive. Round its walls in tall glass-fronted bookcases volume upon calf-bound volume was ranged. Miss Unwin had never seen any one of them taken outside the library, but nevertheless, even bought by the yard as they may well have been, the impact of so many books, of so much stored learning, was awesome. Then, a more blatant piece of splendour, down the middle of the big room there ran a magnificent table, wide and well-polished, its legs ornately carved. On it there was a shining array of every article a man of substance might be thought to need in his library. There were three enormous silver inkwells. There were two large wooden racks holding thick wads of heavy cream-laid notepaper and envelopes. Two smaller racks, though not much smaller, held pens, a full dozen in each, and little leather-bound penwipers. There were four blotting-pads, all unblemished by any ink-stain, their corners rich in gold-tooled leather, and scattered here and there as well were half a dozen little attendant semi-circular blotters with dark rosewood handles. There was a large and ornate brass letter-scales. There were two fine Italian-work paper-knives, one at each of the table’s ends.

But the crown of the whole was the object that stood at the centre. Mrs Arthur, when she had shown the new governess over the house – drawing-room, morning-room, library, billiard-room, dining-room, breakfast-room – had been at particular pains to draw attention to it. It was a Testimonial. A noble piece of jeweller’s work in silver and modelled plaster, it stood some two or three feet high. Its theme was Industry and Endeavour, illustrated in various figures mounting up to the silver representation of the machine – it was called the Thackerton Tube – that had been the making of the steam-moulded hat. At the base of the whole a large silver plate proclaimed that it had been presented to Mr William Thackerton on the occasion of his twentieth year as Sole Proprietor of the firm, subscribed for by its managers, the clerks in its office and the hands at its works.