The Second-last Woman in England (36 page)

This birthday she had not bothered with the quotes. Instead she had come out to be by herself. She had come to the private garden.

The bench was cold. The coldness seeped up through her coat and through her dress and over her entire body. Beneath her feet the grass smelt damp and earthy. There had been a frost every morning this week, despite it being April, and it looked like there’d be another tomorrow. She shivered and wondered what time it was; whether it was too early to return to the house. They would notice if she got back too soon.

Except that she knew that no one would notice what time the nanny got back from her night off.

She got up off the bench and crossed the lawn, finding her way back to the gate and lifting the heavy latch silently as though someone in one of the houses might hear her.

‘Oy! What’s your game, then?’

Jean jumped as a tall figure loomed out of the shadows.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ added the figure, a man, and Jean realised it was the young constable she’d run into weeks back.

‘What do you mean by jumping out at me like that?’ she replied indignantly. ‘Almost give me a turn.’

‘I though you was a burglar or something, didn’t I?’ He eyed her suspiciously. ‘What you doin’ in them gardens, anyway, this time of night?’

‘Praying,’ Jean replied.

‘Oh.’ He seemed uncertain how to reply to this. ‘This your street, then?’ he said instead and Jean nodded. ‘Looks pretty quiet, don’t it?’ he added.

Jean gazed down the length of Athelstan Gardens and could see no one. She shivered slightly and hoped he didn’t notice.

‘It’s usually pretty quiet, I s’pose.’

‘Ha! You wouldn’t believe what goes on behind them curtains. Believe me, I seen it every night—husbands walkin’ out on their wives, kids runnin’ away from home, husbands comin’ home and findin’ their wives in bed with the fella next-door, housewives knockin’ back a bottle of sherry during the day then laying into the kids—or their husbands. You wouldn’t believe it.’

Jean took a second look at the rows of discreetly painted front doors and elegant wrought iron railings and tried to imagine the chaos behind each door that he had just described.

‘Well, that’s as may be, but it ain’t like that in the household I live in, I tell can you that.’

‘Oh, I ain’t saying they’re all like it. Just some, that’s all.’

Jean nodded noncommittally. What he had just described—well, it sounded more like Stepney than South Ken. He was just showing off. Trying to impress her.

‘What’s it like, then, livin’ with these posh people?’ and he jerked his head at the silent row of houses opposite.

‘Oh, they’re very well-to-do. Mr Wallis is in business. Very important, he is. A big shipping firm. Empire and Colonial.’

‘Oh.’ The policeman nodded without much interest.

‘Mrs Wallis goes to lunch and the hairdresser most days, and the theatre and all these cocktail evenings and big charity dos and what-have-you. She’s ever so elegant. And her brother works at the Palace.’

She paused. Now it was she who was showing off.

‘How they treat you, then?’ he said. ‘Being a servant.’

‘I ain’t a servant. I’m the nanny. It’s hardly the same thing. And anyway, they treat me like one of the family.’

She studied his profile in the moonlight. He had a boy’s face, the features still soft, a rash of acne on his cheek, his chin inexpertly shaved. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

‘Do you have a gun, then?’ she said, and he turned and stared at her.

‘A gun? Course I don’t have a gun!’

‘But they teach you how to use one?’

‘We’re coppers, not squaddies. What do we need with a gun? This ain’t Chicago, is it?’

She said nothing in reply to this. Then, ‘Well, I gotta get back. They worry if I’m out late. Like I said, they treat me like one of the family.’

He walked with her a short way up the street, then he paused, bathed in a circle of light from the streetlamp.

‘That your house, then?’ He peered up at it. ‘We did a call to that house a while back. Sure it was that one. I never forget a house we get called out to. Likely as not you end up back there, sooner or later.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Jean. ‘Not this house.’

Chapter Twenty-four

MAY 1953

On the last Tuesday in May a van drew up outside the house at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning and two men got out. It was the half-term holiday and the children were both at home, so Jean joined Anne at her bedroom window and watched. The two men stood in the street and stretched and scratched themselves as though they had driven some considerable distance. As the address on their van indicated they had come from Fulham their stretching seemed excessive.

One of the two men, the younger, reached for a cigarette and lit it then offered the packet to the second man. Only once both cigarettes had been lit and half smoked did either of the men survey the street in which they found themselves. A discussion broke out, a delivery chit on a clipboard was retrieved from the van’s cab and studied. Fingers were pointed and at last the two men appeared to reach a decision. They dropped their cigarettes on the pavement, crushed them underfoot and went up to the Wallises’ front gate.

‘Nanny, what do you think it is?’ demanded Anne.

Downstairs the front door bell rang and Anne unfastened her bedroom window and, after a brief struggle, opened it.

‘They’re delivering something,’ Jean replied, and Anne groaned and rolled her eyes.

‘
Obviously
they’re delivering something—but what?’

She leaned precariously out of the window, the way she had done on that very first day in the drawing room last September, only now she was two storeys up and if she fell from this height she probably would not survive. Through the open window they could hear the two men deep in discussion with Mrs Thompson.

‘I don’t care what you’re delivering. You’re not comin’ in ’ere with your muddy shoes. You’ll take ’em off before you come in or you ain’t comin’ in at all.’

‘Suits me, missus,’ said the younger of the two men with a shrug. ‘We’ll be only too happy to leave it ’ere on the doorstep, won’t we, Ted? Fifteen of these we gotta deliver today.’

Anne leaned out even further, but by the time she had done so the discussion about footwear appeared to have been concluded and a compromise reached as both men had returned to their van and were even now opening up the doors at the back. But at this point, agonisingly, they paused for another cigarette break and Anne kicked impatiently at the wall beneath the window-sill with the toes of her shoes as she waited. After an excruciating delay they resumed their unloading, one disappearing inside the back of the van, the other waiting on the street outside.

And what they unloaded was a box. A large cardboard box, square or perhaps oblong in shape and large enough that it took both of them to heave it out and ease it onto a little two-wheeled trolley. The box was obviously very heavy indeed as the two men puffed and panted as they pulled it through the gate and hitched it up over the first step.

‘Careful!’ said the elder man as the younger man pushed a little too vigorously.

Clearly Anne could not be expected to stand by and watch, so she left the window and ran out of her room. Jean followed at a more sedate pace in time to see Anne run smack into Julius who was emerging from his own bedroom.

‘Did you see? Something’s being delivered,’ she gasped breathlessly.

Julius regarded them both wearily and appeared less than impressed.

‘Oh that, yes,’ he replied, off-handedly. ‘I’m well aware of that.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re just saying that.’

‘Am I? All right then, I shan’t tell you,’ and he turned and went with a shrug back into his bedroom.

Anne stood in an apparent agony of indecision, then turned and noticed Jean standing in her bedroom doorway. Anne scowled at her as though Jean had no right to be watching her and Jean smiled back.

‘All right,’ Anne declared, marching into Julius’s room. ‘What is it, then?’

Jean followed, two steps behind.

Julius was sitting at his desk, apparently studying. He sighed at her question and laboriously closed his book.

‘
Ob
viously,’ he began, drawing out the moment, ‘it’s a television set. They’re getting it in time for the Coronation. Surely you knew?’

A television! thought Jean. Of course: the Coronation Day party. A few weeks ago Mr and Mrs Wallis had begun making arrangements for a party on the day of the Coronation—a list of attendees, the merits of various caterers, a possible menu of food items, had all been discussed at length. Mr Wallis, she remembered, had been curiously excited by the idea of a party. But then Mr Paget had come around and words had been spoken and Mrs Wallis had stormed out. There had been no mention of the party since.

Anne actually gasped. Then she scowled.

‘Anyway, I already knew that,’ she said. ‘We both knew, didn’t we, Nanny?’

‘No, you didn’t,’ sighed Julius. ‘Anyway, I don’t know why you’re wetting your knickers. It’s just television. It’s hardly something to get excited about. In fact,’ and now he turned around and solemnly laid down his pen, ‘it’s actually a very bad thing. Television heralds the end of all cultural and intellectual endeavour, Anne, my girl. It’s the thin end of the wedge for civilisation as we know it,’ and he fixed her with a disapproving look.

‘But now we shall be able to watch Aunt Felicity!’ Anne replied as all the manifold implications of Television began to formulate in her mind.

Julius raised a shocked eyebrow. ‘And why on earth should we want to do that?’

But Anne, it was apparent, was in heaven. Television had arrived at number 83 Athelstan Gardens, and in time for the Coronation! Nothing would ever be the same again.

The television set was positioned, not without much straining and cursing on the part of the two delivery men, in the drawing room on the first floor.

Television came in a large mahogany case with its own little doors that locked with a small gold key so that it was a separate piece of furniture like the cocktail cabinet. Television came with a lead and a plug which you had to wire up with a screwdriver by following a complicated diagram, and by this stage the delivery men were halfway back to Fulham, so that you had to do such things on your own. Mr Wallis was at work, so Julius wired the plug. Mrs Wallis, recently returned from a hair appointment, smoked and watched through narrowed eyes.

‘Careful it doesn’t blow up,’ she observed. Jean, standing in the doorway, jumped back in alarm and Julius scoffed.

Television had to be plugged into the wall, which meant unplugging the lamp standard and this meant moving the lamp to another corner of the room, where it fell over each time you opened the drawing room door. The lamp was banished to the breakfast room. Television had a silver knob on the front which you pulled out to turn it on. Then it hissed and crackled and onto the screen came a strange grey and white grid with a circle in the middle and the letters ‘BBC’ in black at the bottom.

‘That’s the test card,’ explained Julius, who, for one so contemptuous of it, appeared to know a great deal about Television.

‘What does it do?’ asked Anne.

‘Nothing, obviously,’ was the reply.

‘Well, what’s it for then?’ she demanded.

‘It’s a piece of card that appears on one’s screen when there are no programmes scheduled. If one can see the test card, then one’s television is working properly, you see. Test. Card.’

‘Well, I think it’s a stupid idea.’

‘Don’t tease your sister, Julius,’ said Mrs Wallis.

‘Well, now. I wonder when the programs start?’ said Julius, sitting back on his haunches and studying the test card as though a schedule for that evening’s programmes could be seen there.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Mrs Wallis. ‘Nanny, the children needn’t think they are going to be allowed to sit here all day staring at this thing.’

‘No, that would never do …’ said Jean, wondering how you
did
know when the programmes started …?

‘Their father purchased the television strictly so that we could all watch the Coronation in some comfort, and not have to wait for endless hours behind a barrier in Park Lane—or worse, go to some other person’s house to watch it on their set. Please turn it off now, Julius, and close the doors.’

Julius did as his mother bid, closing the doors with some ceremony as though it were the final curtain coming down at the end of a successful West End production. Then they all stood in silence and stared at this new addition to the family.