‘My parents and my brother,’ said Miss Glennie.
I knew better than to ask about the brother, for when the photographs stop with a young man in uniform one knows exactly what it means.
‘And are your parents… gone to their rest?’ I said. It was Grant’s phrase and I had not employed it before.
‘No,’ said Miss Glennie, her face tightening.
‘My mistake,’ I said. ‘Awfully sorry.’ And since there is nothing much to say after one has suggested that a person’s entire family is dead and been corrected, I bade her goodnight and withdrew. Well, what did she expect? I asked myself crossly as I returned to my own room. She should have a snap of them all white of hair and gnarled of knuckle at their cottage gate if she wanted people to know they were still living.
‘Ah, there ye are,’ said a gruff voice as I turned the last corner. The sound of it was startling in this place where femininity reigned. It was Anderson the handyman.
‘Here to see me off the premises?’ I said.
‘Just to give ye a lift wi’ yer bags, miss,’ he said, and his eyes, it is true, were kindly enough. He might be Miss Shanks’s servant but he was not, I thought, her henchman.
‘Lots of coming and going, eh?’ I said. Anderson raised his eyes to heaven and whistled. Meanwhile I opened my suitcase, standing with my back to him and hoping to cover my movements. I took out Jeanne Beauclerc’s case and immediately sat my hat on top of it. I opened my wardrobe, extracted the small bag and dropped my mackintosh over it. Thus I tried to hide the initials, which had winked at me in the lamplight.
‘And now I just need to throw some things in here,’ I said, nodding at my own case.
‘I’ll go down and get your trunk,’ he said. ‘I thought ye were packed and ready.’
‘Oh, I don’t have a trunk,’ I said, flinging open drawers and tossing underclothes into the open suitcase. Anderson looked everywhere except at the flying stockings and vests. I scraped the heap of brushes, papers, cigarettes and powder tins in on top and shut the lid, stuffing in the escaping corners of garments until the latch caught and I could lock it.
He lifted it without effort and made a move towards the larger of Jeanne Beauclerc’s cases too.
‘I’ll take those, Anderson,’ I said, working my hands in under the hat and coat and grasping the handles.
‘Away,’ said Anderson. ‘I’ll manage them fine. One under ma oxter and the other in ma hand.’
‘No, no, really, I insist,’ I said.
‘I’m mebbes nearly seventy but I’m no’ that clapped out just yet,’ he said, setting his jaw at a mulish angle.
‘Oh God,’ I said – which shocked him more than my proposal to carry my own bags – and lifted the hat and coat. He was looking me right in the eye as he tucked the overnight case under one arm, but he glanced down as he grasped the other handle and his eyes widened. J.A.deV.B. glinted unmistakably there. I considered for just a second trying to convince him that these were the initials of my maiden name, but the notion passed without making its way as far as my lips.
‘You must be wondering about that, Anderson,’ I said. But he surprised me.
‘I keep my head down and my trap shut,’ he said. ‘This job comes wi’ a house and there’s a fine big stretch o’ garden.’
Now my eyes flashed. What did he keep his head down to avoid seeing? What did he keep his trap shut about? Before I could ask him, we were disturbed by the sound of someone approaching. Not Miss Shanks for once, I thought, even before the figure appeared at the bend in the passageway. It was Miss Barclay, holding herself very rigid and with a thin smile of untold meanness on her mouth. She held out a brown envelope to me.
‘One day’s pay, Miss Gilver,’ she said. ‘So there’ll be no need for you to come back for anything once you’ve gone.’ She glanced at Anderson and I was surprised and delighted to see that he had turned the case, so that its initials were hidden against his corduroyed leg.
‘Miss,’ he said, giving a nod.
Miss Barclay gave exactly the same nod back to him and, with her mouth even tighter and yet even more amused by it all, she left us.
I followed Anderson in silence to the side door, where he loaded my bags onto a small handcart, lit a lantern which swung from a pole at its prow and started pushing it up the drive.
‘It’s a jolly long way,’ I said, trotting after him.
‘Safer than the cliff steps, though but,’ said Anderson.
‘And it’ll give us a nice chance for a chat,’ I said, hopefully.
‘We’ve got space for ten chickens and we can fatten a pig,’ said Anderson, returning to his previous topic. ‘And there’s a good apple tree and a fine patch o’ rhubarb and brambles all over the bank.’
‘And I would do nothing to put any of that in danger of being snatched away,’ I said. ‘If you have anything to tell me I shall think of some way to make it seem I found out from an entirely different quarter, you have my word.’
‘Oh, it’s no’ that,’ said Anderson. We had emerged from the drive now and were making our way along the top road towards the row of villas. ‘Just if St C.’s gets shut down what’s to become of Maidie and me? Our laddie has six o’ a family in a two-room house and our lass is in service. I dinnae fancy the Parish – would you? – so I keep my head down.’
‘And your trap shut, yes,’ I said. So whatever it was would close St Columba’s down, would it, if it ever came to light?
‘Anyway, nae harm done,’ said Anderson.
‘I’m not sure Mademoiselle Beauclerc would agree with you,’ I said, crisply. ‘Or Miss Lipscott.’
‘Eh?’ said Anderson. ‘They’re off an’ out o’ it. They’re all right now.’ I made the mistake of looking as interested as I felt in this cryptic remark and by the light of his lantern he saw me. He shut his mouth as though he meant never to open it again in his life and put his head down like a bull, pointing the way with his lowered brow. I got not another syllable until he lifted his cap at the door of the Crown and said farewell.
The landlady of the Crown was in her dressing gown and curling papers with vanishing cream in a thick layer all over her face, but she had me sign the guestbook without making too much of a murmur – after I named a lordly new rate for the same room in which I had spent that first night – and she unbent so far as first to shout for her husband to carry my cases and then to ask me if I had had my tea or would I like a drop of soup brought up to me.
‘The parlour fire’s banked for the night, madam,’ she said, ‘so you’ll be cosier in your bedroom with the gas on.’
It seemed a long time since dinner with those silly little girls but I rejected the offer. I know that the leftover soup from a Scotswoman’s kitchen is not for the fainthearted, given its starting point of rib-sticking heft and the nature of the inevitable barley which works away long after the actual cooking is done, so that sometimes second- or (I have heard tell of it) third-day soup can be just as easily eaten with a fork as with a spoon.
A door across the landing cracked open as the landlord – hastily bundled into his trousers over his nightshirt – set my bags down inside the door of my room and in the space I saw the gleam of more vanishing cream and the wink of the landing light glancing off spectacle lenses. The landlord stumped off to the back stairs.
‘Can I help you?’ I said with cold grandeur, at which the convalescent widow opened her door and attempted to stare me down.
‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘He left this morning.’
‘I do not have the pleasure of understanding you,’ I replied.
‘Oh, very dignified,’ she said, ‘with your chin in the air and your head high!’ Her lip had curled. ‘I wouldn’t live that grubby, scrabbling life of yours for a king’s ransom.’