Wait Till I Tell You (27 page)

She heard the stomp and waltz of the polishing machine start up on the ballroom floor above. Along the kitchen ceiling ran wiring and pipes that made abrupt changes of direction. From hooks along the wall hung clutches of keys. A plastic fire extinguisher in a glass case sat above its predecessor, a heavy metal torpedo that said on its side ‘Last Date of Service: June 1956’.

She heard a rustle in the pantry.

In there, the baleful wedges of wholesale cheese lay plastic-sealed and piled on the slate shelf. Mary reached in her hand behind one and pulled out the humane mousetrap. The creature inside flustered between its perspex chambers.

How humane was it to take the humane mousetrap to the outhouse where the cats had their hideout? She carried the fretful snack and tipped it out in front of the cat she considered to be the idlest. That way, it was fairer.

Two slow frivolous bats of its paw later, the cat was happily prolonging this small local torment.

From the back door, the kitchen looked as it could have almost any Thursday afternoon of the century as Mr Charteris had by now often described it to her.

Mr Charteris polished away, his apron black, his extensible cuff-restrainers glistening, the cup of tea neglected. His hair was white as salt, his face of a kind that is no longer trained into being – unremarkable features withheld by years of emulative mimicry into an expression of checked emotion and impersonal superiority. But his eyes were a disturbingly self-willed brown, where one might have expected self-effacing blue.

Looking out from the other kitchen door facing the gates at the front of the house and up the outer stairway to the terrace, Mary saw today’s afternoon beginning. Two of the older ladies were wheeled out, a sunshade set above them, a tea tray brought. No bell had woken the after-lunch sleepers, but the windows began to show movement behind themselves; a few blinds were raised. In the main rooms, between the grave, flattened, central columns of the pediment, there was the sound of dance music, a raised voice, an insistent hard tapping.

Among the trees on the lawn, figures dressed just like Mary moved between chairs and benches, recliners covered with rugs where still bodies lay, stirring them, sometimes with a word, sometimes a touch. They seemed to be competing with one another to awaken a sleeper. Over some of the bodies, the overalled men and women shrugged vehemently, like cricketers loosening up. It was as though there were two teams, one ghoulishly dedicated to fun and activity, the other to repose. In the wide green of the afternoon, somnolence had the worst of it for the time being but could well show form later. The classical enclosure of the park suggested an eventual triumph of sleep.

The gates in front of the house’s wide face implied a fixed modesty that must prevail in the end. The house would shut itself away, a fading beauty needing sleep in order to reawaken refreshed.

Driving the laundry van in at the gates, Francis Mullard changed down at the turning off the main road, felt the cattle grid under the wheels, slowed again on turning into the asphalted back drive, and wondered if the grid kept the old folks in, too. In the back of the van the sheets were cold and heavy inside the hampers. The van had been parked in the underground car-park of the laundry, where it never got warm, even in a summer like this one.

Francis’s own grandmother was living at home with them at present. Her very active ways had knocked them for six at first, but now they were used to her walking miles in the night over their heads and bringing alarmed or desperate or boring strangers back to the house from her random samplings of different places and acts of worship.

Gran had forced Francis and Pat to get out much more.

They could not endure her pity at the start of their rare coincidental weekends off, when they were prepared to settle in to two days of doing nothing much, and she ran them through her commitments. She was a freelance indexer of historical works, and a self-appointed tidier of graves and churches, so the kitchen and living room were convenient spaces for setting out the details of a reign, a battle, a marriage or a plot.

The rubbish bin and waste-paper baskets overflowed with the things Francis’s grandmother had found unfitting in church or cemetery, gloves or cans or inspirational paperbacks, silver-paper horseshoes and ballpoint pens.

‘Don’t put down that pot!’ Gran shrieked to Pat, as he tried to fetch Francis’s tea in the morning. ‘You could unsettle the Anabaptists!’

While they were out at work, Pat at the restaurant and Francis driving the laundry around, Gran covered any space there was with 3 x 5” index cards and blue post-its. Both Francis and Pat worked shifts, so they never knew if the other had even attempted to release some space from the formation of battle at Oudenarde, the machinations of the Cabal or Ironbridge Telford’s gazetted surviving works. When they got in they either fetched something to eat and took it up to bed, or rushed out, feeling illicit and safe. Very rarely, they shared a precarious feast with Francis’s grandmother.

In a way, Gran had brought back the cramped romantic first days of their love, when they had nothing to hide because no one would have believed even if they’d written it out loud all over the bathroom mirror. They were such good friends, friends from their perambulators, more like brothers. This was the line still adopted by Francis’s mother, Kay, who hoovered between the feet of her husband as he sat in his chair, and always baked double to freeze half in case of sudden guests.

It was fortunate that Francis had always loved Pat, since there’d been no sudden guest, ever, within a cherry’s spit of their house.

Sometimes at night Pat would make a meal for Francis and Gran, picking his way between the bits of information on paper and the birds’ nests of ecclesiastical leavings. He would recreate what he had served in the restaurant earlier. Although he wasn’t yet a chef, he had the curiosity and steady hands for it; he worked so hard it was really only a matter of time before he got the promotion. He was at the stage now when you did the one thing over and over till you could do it in your sleep – if you got any, that was. It seemed oddly miniature to him to concoct meals just for Francis and his grandmother, an eccentric hobby nothing much to do with work. Himself, he ate through the pores all day and could barely stand food at the end of it. He ate smoke and drank water. When he saw Francis’s thickening waist, he was proud of it.

‘I made that,’ he’d say to Gran, who would reply, ‘Much to be proud of there,’ and join Pat outside the lean-to for a cig after whatever rich meal the boy had made.

All very comfortable, until just recently, when Kay had started on about the calls she was getting from dissatisfied authors.

‘They say Mother’s having them on. Either that, or she’s losing her accuracy,’ she said to Pat, whom she’d rung at the restaurant, sure of getting a better hearing than she would from her own son. ‘You can’t do work for other people and be inaccurate. They plain don’t like it. It shows them up.’

‘Perhaps she means to,’ said Pat, which was no more than what he thought.

‘She’s always been scrupulous about her research. She even stores her thoughts alphabetically. If you ask about the car you don’t have to wait as long as if you ask her about Francis. And if I ask about you there’s a slightly longer wait while she locates P.’

‘She’s maybe tired of sorting other people’s words.’

‘If you like it, it’s not the sort of thing you go off,’ said Kay. ‘I should know, I’ve never cared a fig for it and still don’t.’

Since she was not Pat’s mother, he was not as irked by her angle as Francis would have been.

He approached Francis.

‘Do you think your grandmother’s losing it?’ he asked.

‘Nope. She may have a project on, though.’ Francis had walked back from the depot where he had left the van. He was determined to do something about it before he had to change his waist size for good. He’d give Pat a surprise.

‘Try one of these. Red pepper straws. A bit of Gruyère and several dozen eggs.’ Pat had made them specially, but pretended he’d brought them from work. Gran was upstairs working on an overcrowded letter ‘V’ in a work on the history of lenses and their effect on art history, whose author was at that moment enjoying some of Pat’s cheese straws brought home by his wife in her handbag, after a business lunch.

‘What type of project?’ asked Pat.

‘I think she’s trying to get sent to a home.’

‘No one does that. It’s lonely, and it costs all you’ve got, no matter how much you’ve got. The body only gives out when it’s cried all it can and spent all there is.’

‘
You
say that,’ said Francis, kissing him. ‘But I think she’s being tactful. That’s why my mother’s so tactless she could perform amputations with
her
afterthoughts. Because her mother’s so tactful she makes everyone believe she’s the one at fault, not them.’

‘But no one wants to go into a home. Have you seen inside one? Home is what they’re not. They can’t call them what they are. Asylum is a lovely word in every way compared with what they are.’

‘Maybe she’s got some idea of going to a place where she can think it all out and then just lie down and float off.
I
don’t know.’

‘Bed’s that place,’ said Pat, who hated being alone and could not sort through his memories for very long without meeting Francis there, and fearing the day when they would not be within reach of one another.

‘And move! And bend! And stretch!’ sang the voice at the centre of the house, unsexed as a parrot. Mary walked up the right flank of the outside staircase up to the façade and looked in through the ballroom window.

Accompanied by a piano, the old men and women in nightwear or loose combinations of cotton followed the gestures of the strong fit body, wielding a smart black cane, that called to them. In their movements they gave hints of what they saw, like quiet flightless birds. They did not dance or exercise so much as talk with their hands, their necks, their knees, remembering longer, more abandoned, gestures they had once made.

The room smelled of powder and pads, and the unkind reek of setting lotion. The hairdresser had been that morning to see to the hair of the women. His visit was less to do with appearance than appearances. The old men hid in the smoking room when the hairdresser came, in order to set up their own evil pong.

It was while the perms and sets and demiwaves were taking shape on a Thursday that Mary was able to join Mr Charteris in the pantry.

He had won her with his golden tongue.

‘You’re new,’ he said. ‘I always show the new maids the ropes.’

She knew better than to correct his words. A number of them, being old, spoke like old people couldn’t help but do. She’d a lot of time for old people. She’d worked in several homes before, though none as exclusive – meaning expensive – as this. Some of them paid their own bills, others got paid for by children, not without a grumble at the end of the month.

Mr Charteris had arrangements, and that was all Mary had heard, though she had heard one old trout call him a ‘scholarship boy’ and then whinny with the pleasure being unpleasant gives to those who do not fight it.

Mr Charteris continued: ‘Any difficulties at all with the other girls, come straight to me. Don’t waste your time going to Mrs How’s Yer Father or troubling old Oojamaflip.’ He twisted the stud under his bow tie and then levelled off its ends. ‘There’s nothing I can’t tell you about the house. Nothing at all. Man and boy I’ve been here, starting in the carpenter’s yard on crackbacked chairs and coming right through till I got where I am now.’

Mary was unsure what a person might want to know about a house, and where exactly Mr Charteris had got to.

‘God, it must be old if
you’ve
been here all along,’ she said, and was delighted when he laughed. He had assertive teeth, every one his own.

‘I followed on after only five others like myself. That’s not many butlers over the two-seventy-odd years. Not that the earlier ones could rightly be called butlers.’

Mary, who understood from the television that butlers were men who stood still, sneered, and talked posh, asked, ‘The work can’t have been hard, though?’

Mr Charteris considered the mornings of his life when he, at much the age of this girl, had collaborated in the daily launch of the house, cleaned, polished, dazzling, rebegun, all on the sweat of eight men and sixteen girls, repeating with their bodies actions of the most tedious and exhausting kind in order to give a context to the ease of others, like men blowing bottles from the burning roots of their lungs just to hold scent that would waft off an earlobe unnoticed in the breeze.

‘I’ve had a woman in every room of the house,’ said Mr Charteris to Mary.

He revisited the house in the way he preferred in his mind, through the oxters and ribbons and stays and mouthings of the Roses, Daisys, Rubys, Violets, Marias and Elizas who had been drawn by him into each room’s mystery, so that he understood the attic through Hetty’s red hair and startling milky snores, the music room through the stifled tears and later laughter of Lavender as he lowered the music stool slowly beneath her by swivelling the mahogany discs at either side within her skirts, the ballroom by the chilly biting of Daphne as they pushed together inside the curtains, the kitchen through the blissful humming of Euphemia’s skin under his mouth, and later through the regrettable harrying of his own late wife.