‘I can’t think where she got the thing,’ she said. ‘Or why. It certainly wasn’t part of her trousseau because we’ve all been instrumental in that and we shouldn’t have let in such an abomination.’
‘It was pretty frightful,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it was an old thing she kept for the country.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Sha-sha. ‘She did have a crêpe-de-Chine just like that, you know, countless ages ago. It was pale green and fearfully baggy, but we didn’t seem to notice then how ugly she looked.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Perhaps in a few years we shall look back at ourselves now and think: Ugh! what frights we were.’
I tend to think this at the end of each day as I take off the clothes I put on that morning, and I felt more sure than I could politely say that Sha-sha would certainly look back with a shudder upon her current hat, sitting on her pretty head like a monstrous toadstool. One thing was clear: she had no troubling suspicions about the pictures. At that moment, the men began to arrive and the Duffys’ butler came to summon us down to luncheon.
While the stair and hall were thronging with ladies coming down and gentlemen removing coats I slipped unobtrusively away to my work. It would be an exaggeration to say my heart was thumping as I closed the baize door behind me and crept down the stairs – stairs which resounded rather startlingly to my tread no matter how stealthily I moved – but I did feel my pulse thrum a little. I hoped, though, that if my face was red or, worse, my neck blotchy it would be taken as a sign of high emotion and not nerves.
Once arrived at the end of the basement passageway, I set off along it lurching blindly with a handkerchief pressed to my mouth. I even sniffed, but it echoed too much in the empty passage for me to do it twice.
The upper servants were sure to be in the dining room or at their own luncheon, I told myself, and I was much more likely to meet with some mouse-like creature of the kitchens who would be so unnerved by my sudden appearance that she would not have time to question my story until I was gone. Then, even if she reported my strange behaviour to the housekeeper, cook or terrifying butler, they would most likely squash it for fear of showing her any credence and would certainly not carry a tale from the likes of her all the way to ears of the family.
I was half right. It was a kitchen maid – or might have been a scullery maid, for I am insufficiently familiar with the distinctions to tell – who rounded a corner and came upon me blundering towards her, but far from being the timorous child of my imaginings, she was a lusty individual of squat girth, turned-up nose, wide smile, and an air of bustling self-sufficiency: in short Mrs Tiggywinkle in human form, with an Irish accent and no sign of being unequal to meeting me.
‘Lord, madam,’ she said, hitching a tin pail comfortably on to one ample hip and staring. ‘What have you gone and landed up down here for?’
I fluttered my handkerchief and mumbled vaguely, hoping to convey enough distress to explain how lost I was. Mrs Tiggywinkle put down her pail of kitchen scraps and, wiping her hands first, took me in a competent grip and began to propel me back the way I had come. I had expected a seat and a glass of water at least, giving me time to work up my little speech, and so, seeing my opportunity passing much more quickly than I anticipated, I thought I had better quit mumbling and dabbing and get on with it.
‘I do apologize,’ I said. ‘Quite the last thing you need on a day like this, silly women drifting into your kitchen when you’re busy with all these guests.’ She looked at me as though I had gone mad but could hardly say anything. ‘Are you still short-handed?’ I blurted out. She stared at me even more intently then, thinking, I suppose, that I must be a member of the family she had failed at first to recognize for why else would I ask such a thing?
‘Or have I got it wrong?’ I said. ‘I thought that one of your -’ I could hardly say ‘colleagues’ – ‘that one of the maids left. I mean, died. And I was thinking how awful for you if she was a particular chum.’
‘Miss Cara died, madam,’ said the girl in a patient and rather tender voice, clearly having decided that I was some lunatic cousin let out for the day to come to the service.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I had heard in the village – in Gatehouse, you know – that one of the Edinburgh families in the cottages had brought their maid from town and that she had died. I don’t know what made me think it was the Duffys.’ We had reached the bottom of the stairs by which I had descended, and just then the door at the top opened and we both heard the voice of the butler coldly telling someone we could not see to stop sniffing and behave herself.
‘Jesus!’ said Mrs Tiggywinkle, clearly as intimidated by the man as I was.
‘Don’t let him find me!’ I hissed and this spurred her to action. She opened a door and shoved me inside before coming in herself and leaning against it to listen. We heard a veritable army of footsteps descend the stairs over our heads as the butler and footmen trooped down from the dining room, then we could hear the butler’s voice demanding to know why a bucket of peelings was sitting in the passageway and where Mary had got to this time.
Mary, as I took her to be, leaned back against the door and let out her breath in a low whistle. We were in a little store room, utterly empty and seemingly without purpose, but I knew from my own housekeeper at Gilverton that the ability to keep a few rooms completely bare was a matter of pride, being a sign of a well-run household where detritus was not allowed to gather. An empty attic is, I believe, the pinnacle of housekeeperly excellence.
‘What must you think of me?’ I said, deciding to abandon my show of feminine confusion and throw myself on her as an ally now that the ice was broken. ‘But that man always looks at me as though I were something the cat brought in and I just simply can’t face him today.’
‘Nice to have the choice, madam,’ said Mary, feelingly, and my frankness had clearly made her feel quite on a level since she took a tin out of her apron pocket and, having wrested it open with difficulty, lit a cigarette.
‘Still,’ I said, refusing her offer of another, ‘I’m glad it’s not one of your friends who died after all. I can’t think where I got the idea.’
‘No more can I,’ said Mary. ‘They never take any of us down to these “cottages”.’ She made the word ooze with scorn. ‘And we’re all fine here. Peggy, Rose, Nan, Jean, Dilly, Margaret and me. What did she die of?’
I was caught off-guard by this, but righted myself quick enough, I think.
‘Went swimming in the sea and drowned herself on her afternoon off,’ I said. Mary and I both tutted and shook our heads.
‘Accident, was it?’ she said, with a last deep suck on her cigarette. I nodded. ‘Accident,’ she said again. ‘Probably in trouble and trying to put it right, don’t you think, madam?’ We shared a look, then she pinched out her cigarette carefully between callused finger and thumb before putting it back in the tin and into her apron pocket again.
‘Well, then.’ This with an air of finality.
‘Indeed,’ I agreed, handing over the half-crown I had ready in my glove for the purpose. Mary checked up and down the passage before slipping out and making her way back to her abandoned pail and the ticking-off to come. I slipped out after her and climbed the stairs again, knowing that at least a frosty look if not a whispered interrogation from Hugh should meet my belated entrance, but knowing too that just as Mary had her half-crown in her pocket I should have Alec’s glance of expectation, an expectation I would certainly satisfy as soon as we had a chance to talk.
Luncheon was purgatory. Had the minister of the morning been there, he would have been convinced of the existence of that Popish venue well before the pudding and been lost to Presbyterianism for ever. The food was cold and depressing owing, I expect, to the upper servants having been at the service and to a feeling that nothing today should be too enjoyable. This was not the worst of it, however. Alec, if you can believe it, had been sat next to Clemence, a placing so monstrously, squirmingly, wrong that no one else at the table could drag their eyes or their minds from it. On Alec’s other side Lena sat, stony-faced, although whether this was a performance of grief or because she had underestimated how shocking her seating plan was and was toughing it out I could not tell. Mr Duffy looked stricken. Grey and shaking, he sat without eating a morsel and stopped his neighbours on either side from doing so either, it seeming bestial for them to stuff away while he just sat there. This reluctance to eat spread out around the table, and the servants kept coming back into the room and then stopping, shuffling in the doorway, not knowing what to do and unable to catch the eye of either of the Duffys to help. The sight of the butler half-reaching for a plate and then stopping himself and smoothing his hair instead, that classic gesture of awkwardness, made me want to weep.