Mrs. Fisher, like Miss Palmer, was very sorry. She had not realized how tiring she would find the weekly journey. Since it did not appear to her possible that she should give up her weekends with her child, the obvious alternative was to give up her job.
She gave it up.
“There’s no such thing as work, nowadays,” commented Lady Catherine — although presumably with an unspoken exception in favour of her own labours. “Any excuse serves. No one sticks to anything.”
She frenziedly sought another secretary. Several young women applied for the post, but Lady Catherine drew so terrifying a picture of her ideal that most of them wisely withdrew.
Miss Cram held her ground.
She was older than most of the others, owning to thirty-six, and with superb testimonials.
“And you won’t fail me?” said Lady Catherine suspiciously. “You won’t leave?”
“I hope not,” said Miss Cram, startled.
“You must do more than hope not. I’m thoroughly tired of people who take up a job of work and then prance off because their mother is dying, or their child wants them. The work comes first,” said Lady Catherine, saying more than she meant in her determination that all should be clear.
“Well,” said Miss Cram, looking rather pale, I do see what you mean, of course, and I certainly hope I should never let you down in any way. But I think perhaps I ought to mention that although I’m perfectly strong, I do occasionally — very, very occasionally — get the most fearful bilious attacks. And if I did get one — I don’t at all see why I should — but if I did, I’m afraid it would mean—”
“That will do,” said Lady Catherine, rising. “The thin end of the wedge, Miss Cram. I’ve heard it all before. Any excuse, and you’ll throw your hand in. I needn’t detain you further, thanks.”
The search for a secretary who, besides all the usual qualifications, should see plainly the necessity for putting her work first, and her private concerns last, continued.
At last Lady Catherine found Miss Giles. She was twenty-eight — neither too young nor too old — as intelligent as Miss Palmer, as energetic as Mrs. Fisher, as well equipped as Miss Cram, and appeared more whole-heartedly devoted to her work than any of them.
Lady Catherine’s book was brought to a triumphant close, the proofs read, re-read, and corrected, the press-cuttings — in due course — collected and pasted into a large album.
For three and a half years, Miss Giles was secretarial perfection.
With frightful suddenness, the blow fell.
Miss Giles, taking — at the date most convenient to her employer — her summer holiday, wrote and said that she had been obliged to visit the doctor, and that he had ordered her a complete rest in the country. She was, he considered, on the verge of a breakdown.
“Of all the flimsy excuses! That girl is in perfect health — perfect. Besides, any woman is more or less on the verge of a breakdown, at any moment, always. They can stave it off if they want to. It’s a question of whether they want to or not, that’s all,” cried Lady Catherine frantically.
Miss Giles, rather rashly returning to put her work in order for her successor, was met by this speech, and many another to the same effect.
“Do you mean to tell me,” said her employer passionately, “that you don’t know this health business is a mere excuse? You’re all alike — you get tired of work.”
Miss Giles drew a long breath.
“I will tell you the truth,” she cried clearly and resolutely. “I dare say you’d rather I told you the truth?”
“I don’t care whether — Yes, tell me the truth. If you can.”
“Certainly I can. When I was on my holiday I met a man. An unmarried man. The first one I’ve really had a chance of talking to for years and years. He’s living in lodgings — he’s a schoolmaster — and it’s perfectly obvious that he’s looking for a wife. He likes me, and if he goes on meeting me every day, he’ll almost certainly ask me to marry him. On the other hand, if he doesn’t see me again, he’ll quite certainly ask somebody else.”
“Then he can’t be in love with you,” snapped Lady Catherine.
“In love with me!” rudely echoed Miss Giles. “Of course he isn’t in love with me, any more than I am with him. What do you take me for? I’m thirty-one, not eighteen. There aren’t enough men to go round, and a woman in a whole-time job like mine isn’t likely to meet those that there are, and still less likely to attract them. My only chance is to be on the spot and not take my eye off him for one second. I quite understand that it’s undignified, degrading, anything you like.”
“And what do you suppose a man — any man — thinks of a woman who plants herself on his doorstep in order that she may, as you so revoltingly express it, not take her eye off him for one second?”
“I had no difficulty in getting the doctor to say that I needed a complete rest in the country. As you say yourself, it’s the case with almost all women, almost all the time. I can put that across as easily as anything, it’s so nearly quite true.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you, an intelligent — a hitherto intelligent — woman, able to maintain herself in comfort, free and independent — you deliberately prefer to go and be some man’s unpaid housekeeper — a man whom you don’t even pretend to love?”
Miss Giles — the transformed-for-the-worse Miss Giles — nodded her head.
“I do,” she said simply. “I’m just not intelligent enough, you see. I can maintain myself, all right, but only by being under somebody’s orders. I can’t start a business of my own — I’ve neither the capital nor the ability — I’m not artistically gifted, I can’t become a writer, or an actress, or a painter — and I’m not sufficiently well educated to try for any really big administrative post. What’s left? Jobs like yours.”
“And very good jobs too,” said Lady Catherine heatedly. “You get a large salary, a reasonable amount of time to yourself, and there’s no reason in the world why you shouldn’t hold the post for ever! I wonder how many women would thankfully—”
“Yes,” said Miss Giles, interrupting again.
“They would. I quite agree. But not if they saw a chance of getting a home, and a husband to keep them.”
“I have never heard a more shameless, disgusting, and entirely silly observation.”
“Theoretically,” said Miss Giles coldly, “I’m inclined to agree with you. I suppose the truth often sounds like that. Probably that’s why it so seldom gets told.”
“My dear,” said Lady Catherine to her friends, when appealing to them once more for help in finding a secretary, “my dear, they’re all alike. Always ready to throw up a job the moment it suits their own convenience to do so. Selfish, lazy, and quite unscrupulous.”
“It’s too bad,” said her friends, sounding deeply concerned — although five minutes later forgetting all about it.
“The last one I had — Miss Giles — let me down completely. She was the worst of them all. But there it is — they’re all alike.”
The quest went on.
Secretaries came, and secretaries went. Miss Giles, however, was the only one ever to tell the truth about her reasons for leaving.
Lady Catherine always said that Miss Giles had been the worst of the lot.
VICTIMS
1
“ADA,” said Miss Fletcher solemnly, “he’s asked me to go to the pictures again to-night.”
“Mabel, I never,” returned her sister — not exactly absent-mindedly, but as one who has heard the same thing before.
So she had.
Major Trimmer had lodged with the Misses Fletcher for the past three months, and had several times taken Mabel to the pictures. At first, he had suggested that Ada should come too, but this had been immediately and definitely squashed by the younger sister.
“Ada doesn’t really care about going to the pictures, thanks all the same, Major. She’s one who likes a nice book and the fireside, when her work’s done, being on her fe
et so much. Now I’m quite different, I like a bit of life. Many’s the time I’ve asked Ada to come along out on the Front and listen to the band, and go and have a look at the pier when it’s crowded with visitors in the summer. But she doesn’t care about it.” On the whole this was fairly true.
Ada didn’t much want to go out with Mabel, who walked too fast for her, and after cooking most of the day, and giving the girl a hand with the washing-up, it was a relief to kick off her shoes and sink down into the wicker-armchair in the basement sitting-room reserved by the sisters for their own use.
But that was in the summer, when they counted on having a ceaseless succession of lodgers and the house was full — over-full, Ada considered, when it came to the ironing-board laid over the bath with a mattress on it, and the first-floor-fronts squeezing four children and two grown-ups into two beds and a cot. In the winter, when things were slack, and not more than three or four people to cook for, it was different. She’d have enjoyed a visit to the pictures then.
Sometimes she and Mabel did go. They had not done so since the advent of Major Fletcher. He had arrived just after Christmas, and it was now the end of March.
It seemed that his doctor had recommended him to try the air of St. Bray, for insomnia. It was, the Major amusingly told his landladies, the well-polished windows and the clean doorstep of No. 6 that had caused him to select it from amongst all the other houses along the Front that also bore the announcement: Apartments.
“The reward of virtue,” Mabel always replied to this. It was really the virtue of Dolly — the girl — who polished the windows and cleaned the step, but the reward was certainly the Misses Fletcher’s, and particularly Mabel’s.
To have a lodger at all, in the winter, was a piece of luck, and the Major seemed almost too good to be true. He had the ground-floor front sitting-room, and the first front bedroom, he settled up his bill every Saturday morning punctually, he never disputed “extras,” he was quite content to have cold supper twice a week, he never, unlike many elderly gentlemen, tried to waste the girl’s time with Nonsense or Worse, and he was always in his room by ten o’clock every night, and the light out twenty minutes later.
In addition to all this virtue, the Major, in the opinion of his landladies, possessed charm. Always a pleasant word, or a joke, or a compliment to Ada’s cooking, and — as the weeks went on — he and Mabel took to holding quite lengthy conversations, at first about such subjects as the Royal Family, politics, and the effects of St. Bray upon the Major’s insomnia, and later on, more personal topics — the chance of a good summer season, and the difference that this would make to the hard-working Misses Fletcher — and then, actually, the Major’s nephew in the Air Force, and his young unmarried nieces. Eventually he showed their photographs to Mabel, and that of their mother, his only surviving near relative.
Mabel admitted to Ada afterwards that the young people were well enough, but that she hadn’t cared much for the look of the sister — it was a hard sort of face, she couldn’t help feeling — although naturally she hadn’t told the Major this.
The next stage had been the Major’s invitations to the pictures, and with the acceptance of these, it became definitely established that he was Mabel’s friend. Ada didn’t mind.
She knew well the difference between Mabel’s status and her own.
No. 6 Ocean Parade was Mabel’s house, bought with Mabel’s savings and the furniture in it practically all belonged to Mabel. It had been left her by her last case, an old lady, and had enabled her to retire from nursing and set up in lodgings for herself.
Ada had no savings at all. She had kept house for a widowed uncle, and when the uncle had unexpectedly married again, at the age of sixty-six, he had considered Ada’s fifteen years of service handsomely repaid by a cuckoo-clock and a five-pound note. It was then that Mabel had come forward and offered Ada a home with her.
She was to live in Mabel’s house, use Mabel’s furniture, eat Mabel’s food and, in return, do the cooking for Mabel’s lodgers. Ada was an excellent cook, and that was more than could be said for any servant nowadays. She accepted the offer — indeed, she could hardly have done otherwise, for she was getting on towards sixty, and it wouldn’t be too easy to find a post she could undertake — and came to No. 6. She had been there four years, and the arrangement was succeeding better than one might have expected.
Mabel’s temper, of course, was something chronic — it always had been, even as a girl — but Ada had become accustomed to it, and could stolidly go on rolling pastry or scouring saucepans, whilst Mabel screamed at her. Occasionally she screamed back, but not often.
Since the advent of Major Trimmer, however, screaming had miraculously disappeared from life in the basement of No. 6.
Mabel was becoming quite different.
Even her looks were improving. She had always been handsome, and young-looking for her years, and now, she and Ada agreed, she might easily have passed for forty. She had bought a bottle of stuff for her hair, that gave a wonderful glitter to it, almost like brass, and had had a new dress made by a woman who charged amazingly low prices because she was a widow with two delicate children and had to make her living and theirs.
“He’s asked me to go to the pictures again to-night.” Mabel’s tone was frankly triumphant.
No wonder.
Neither of the sisters had, so far, admitted it aloud to one another, but it was really beginning to look rather as though the Major was in earnest. And why not?
He was getting on — he owned to sixty-one, but the Misses Fletcher were both quite certain that he was older than that — and he wouldn’t want to remain in furnished apartments for ever.
He possessed the greatest, most wonderful asset in the world — a settled income, for which he was not obliged to work.
Why shouldn’t he buy a nice little house, somewhere near London — he had said he liked Putney, and knew it well — and settle there, with a sensible middle-aged wife to look after him?
Ada didn’t dare say a word about it to Mabel openly, but she couldn’t help looking at her with a significant smile when Mabel marched into the kitchen just before starting for the picture-house with her escort wearing a spray of pink carnations and maidenhair fern pinned into the front of her green artifical silk jumper.
No need to ask where they’d come from!
The proud, self-conscious, incredulous expression on her face would have made it quite clear, even if Ada had not known perfectly well that Mabel would as soon have jumped off the end of the pier into the sea as have spent money on buying flowers.
“Well,” said Ada rallyingly, “have a good time and behave yourself. What’s on, this week?”
“That fellow that gets such a salary,” said Mabel. “You know, I read you in the Sunday picture-paper.”
Ada nodded. She had forgotten the name of the film-star, but she remembered the exclamations of Mabel and herself over the figures quoted in the paper and the resentment of both at the inequalities of life.
“Don’t wait up, Ada, without you want to. I’ve got the key. Leave the kettle on, for a nice cup of hot tea when I get back. If you go up to bed don’t forget to roll back the rug, and put the cat out before you go, and see that the girl has her light out. I’ll not have her burning my gas just so that she may read some silly story in bed, instead of getting her sleep while she can, and coming down sharp at quarter-past six in the morning.
“All right,” said Ada, not listening to a word.
Mabel swept a last look round the kitchen.
“Is that — Ada, whatever to goodness is that?”
Mabel’s finger pointed accusingly at a loaded plate, standing uncovered on the window-ledge.
“Do you mean to tell me that you meant that for the girl’s supper?”
“It’s all right, Mabel,” said Ada feebly.
“All right! I should think it was all right, giving away about a quarter of a pound of good cheese and half a loaf of bread. And I suppose tha
t jam’s for her, too? If ever there was a soft one, Ada! I do really think you’re a perfect fool.”
“It isn’t such a lot, really,” Ada protested.
Her sister, without any reply, snatched up a knife, cut the bread and the cheese in half, wiped the knife on a piece of newspaper, scraped away the jam from the plate, and transferred it to a saucer. She held the knife under the kitchen-tap, and wiped it dry before speaking.
“You’d ruin that girl in a week, if I’d let you,” she remarked. “Now mind, directly she’s down from turning back the beds she’s to clear up in the sitting-room and in here, and then have her supper and straight off to bed. Don’t encourage her to start gossiping and chattering, whatever you do.”
“Oh, all right.”
Ada felt that on the whole, thanks to Major Trimmer and the carnations, she’d been let off lightly.
“Ta ta, Mabel.”
“‘Bye,” said Mabel quite amiably, and she pounded up the stairs to the front hall, to set forth in state from the front door with the Major. Ada unconsciously exhaled a sigh, expressive of relief from tension and all her movements became slower, as she padded about the kitchen on her flat, tired feet.
Presently the maid, Dolly, came running downstairs.
“In here, Dolly,” shouted Ada.
Dolly came in.
She was a neat, cheerful little thing, only twenty, and the best servant they had ever had. She had come to them at eighteen and Mabel had trained her. She was honest and obedient and quick at her work. Ada had no fault to find with her but Mabel said she was a chatterbox, and also resented the size of her appetite.
“There’s your supper, Dolly. And you can have that saucer of jam, if you like.”
“Thank you, miss.”
Dolly spread a sheet of newspaper over a corner of the kitchen table and sat down to her meal. Ada had brewed a pot of strong black tea, and now poured out two large cupfuls and joined her. There was never any time of the day or night when Ada was not ready for a cup of strong tea.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 574