by Maggie Ford
She would dearly have liked to ask how he expected to keep his wife from knowing and what would happen when she did find out, as she was bound to eventually. Nevertheless, she would keep her eyes open and an ear to the ground. But she could see trouble brewing, even so.
By indulging the girl he was treading on shaky ground. Long ago she too had noticed the resemblance to his deceased child. It took only half an eye to see that what he was doing – trying to recreate one to replace the child he had lost – was tantamount to disaster. It could only bring trouble. But if trouble did arise from it, she would make sure she was there to help.
* * *
‘I’ll leave you with Mr Deel then, my dear.’
As Doctor Lowe withdrew from his study, Ellie smiled at the young man. His name was Michael. His surname was spelled differently from the English way, his father being Dutch. His mother was English, he’d told her when she’d first been introduced to him some four weeks ago.
Doctor Lowe had kept going on about her diction and how it would be so nice if she could learn to speak correctly. She’d tried, but her heart hadn’t been in it, still disturbed, as she was, by what she’d been through at his hands.
It had had to be done and she’d been in the most capable hands, he being solely concerned for her safety and wellbeing; but it hadn’t made it any less traumatic. For several days she hadn’t been able to look at him. He was being so kind, and came into her room when the house was quiet to sit by her bed and talk to her – of his work, his student days, his childhood; it was like a proper father speaking, but she couldn’t feel easy with him.
He would go to the window to stand there silently, having exhausted all talk but reluctant to leave. He’d sometimes glance about the room at this and that, everything in here her own stuff, Chambers resigned to remaining in the other room with her belongings.
The day before she was to get up, he had idly glanced at some bits of paper she’d been drawing on to occupy herself while being confined to her bedroom under this pretext of having caught a bout of ’flu.
‘What are these?’ he’d enquired. She had already asked if she could have some paper to draw on. She watched him scan her simple sketches: the view from her window, her own face as seen in the bit of mirror over the washstand, some bits from memory – cats, dogs, horses, carts, people.
‘They are quite good,’ he’d said. ‘You’ve quite a talent.’
She knew that. Ronnie Sharp had told her that time she’d gone to see his family. She was aching to see him again, but this awful business had intervened and she wondered if he had more or less put her aside.
‘I think,’ Doctor Lowe had said slowly, as he put the drawings back on the side of the washstand, ‘it might be good if someone showed you how to draw even better – perhaps even learn to paint.’
‘I ain’t never painted,’ she told him. ‘Couldn’t afford paints.’
‘Then we shall provide you with a box of paints and you can use my study when I am not using it. I will give you a key so you’ll not be disturbed. After you have completed your duties, of course,’ he’d concluded in a more formal tone, remembering his position.
‘What if the mistress finds me in there, wasting me time?’ she asked, still slightly taken aback by his offer.
‘She never goes into my study,’ he told her. ‘If she needs me, then she rings for Chambers to inform me.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘We seldom see each other except for meals. There was a time we’d relax together in the sitting room, but not since the loss of our daughter. These days my good wife prefers her own room.’
His chubby features had dropped a little. They now brightened again.
‘To this business of painting: it so happens that I know of someone who might help you – the son of an acquaintance of mine. He is quite a good artist, though he studied to become a doctor like his father. I will ask him. He may also care to help with your English at the same time – teach you how to speak more nicely than you do at present.’
‘Why do you want me to speak better?’ she’d asked and he had looked at her for a moment before speaking. When he did, very quietly, she had heard a catch in his throat, his voice wavering a little. ‘You must try to understand. You know that we lost our only child.’
Yes, she knew, but she’d let him continue.
‘Forgive me, my dear, but I fear that, despite my better judgement, perhaps, I find that having you here does ease the pain of my loss. I hesitate to admit that I have a foolish need to keep her memory alive. Your being here has helped. My dearest wish was to have given her all the things she would have wanted, but I feel in retrospect that I was too busy in my work to give her the attention she should have had. Now it’s too late…’
He broke off then began again. ‘With you, my dear, I feel that perhaps it is not too late. I have a wish to do for you what I neglected to do for her, but I can do so little, things being what they are. You see, my wife—’
He’d broken off sharply, as if knowing he had said too much. Turning away quickly he didn’t see the brief excitement that crossed Ellie’s expression. By the time he turned back to her, it had been replaced by a sudden feeling of sadness for him, which she knew was genuine, despite her elation.
‘I do apologize,’ he’d said hurriedly.
‘No, please don’t,’ she’d answered.
‘Will you promise not to repeat to anyone what I have just told you?’ he had begged, so pathetically that she had reached out and touched his arm.
‘Cross me heart,’ she’d said simply, making a concentrated effort to put the aitch in the word ‘heart’.
That had been four weeks ago. He’d not referred to it again, nor had she, realizing that sleeping dogs should be left to lie. She saw Michael Deel on Tuesday evenings for about an hour and a half. Tuesdays were easier, the heavier work of the weekend having subsided a little before the build-up to the next weekend began. Ellie, Florrie, Rose and Mrs Jenkins could relax in the evenings, sitting around the kitchen fire reading, chatting, knitting or sewing, using the area in place of the servants’ hall most larger establishments provided.
At eight o’clock Chambers would get up to go and answer the front-door bell’s jangle and show the visitor up to Doctor Lowe’s study. She’d come back down to throw herself testily on to her chair to pick up whatever she’d been doing and almost always pass some testy remark that Mr Deel must have something very private to do with the master to come so regularly. Her surmise was inevitably cut short by Mrs Jenkins telling her sharply that, whatever it was, it was none of her business, and that tittle-tattle and idle conjecture didn’t go down well in this house.
Shortly afterwards, Ellie would casually get up from the chair where she’d been reading, with all pretence of going off to her room. It was exciting in a way to skitter along to Doctor Lowe’s study, eyes darting about in case she was seen.
Doctor Lowe and her tutor would be there and as she entered, so Doctor Lowe would leave. For perhaps half an hour Michael Deel would help to improve her diction accompanied by chuckles and giggles at her pathetic attempts to get it right. The rest of the time – perhaps an hour and a half, which seemed to simply fly by – she’d sketch and paint in watercolour under his expert tuition, he pointing out little faults, better ways of doing things.
She looked forward to Tuesday evenings. They helped to dim the unpleasant, lingering memory of what had happened to her recently, though it dimmed none of her bitterness towards her father.
Drawing always helped her to lose herself. Alone in her room she’d sketch endlessly, her pencil moving at ever faster speed, often until what she had drawn became overlaid with increasingly wild and heavy strokes, as her feelings of humiliation, hatred and revenge came creeping back.
When working about the house, her thoughts concentrating on jobs to be done, it wasn’t so bad; but once she was alone, her mind began to seethe. Her only relief from it seemed to be to immerse herself in sketching, sometimes little landscapes she’d seen
in books or rough portraits of those around her – that was, until things in her head made her practically obliterate them. These she never showed to Doctor Lowe. Naturally he wanted to know how she was progressing. After all, he was paying for her tuition, for which not only was she thankful but also aware of a feeling of satisfaction. But if he had seen these other sketches, he would have been shocked. She shocked herself sometimes.
This evening, having finished her half-hour elocution lesson with the painful effort to pronounce words correctly, as out came pencils and paper and the box of paints Doctor Lowe had provided for her, the interest of both pupil and tutor perked up considerably.
‘You know,’ he remarked as he helped her get the correct perspective of the country cottage she was sketching ready for painting, ‘you could go a long way once you’ve mastered a few more techniques. You have exceptional talent, Miss Jay.’
She wished he wouldn’t keep calling her Miss Jay. It sounded so formal. She pursed her lips and studied the drawing. ‘I won’t ever be that good.’
‘I’m sure you will be,’ he said absently, falling silent to study the picture as, having now finished the sketching, she began mixing colours, applying a blue wash for the sky, several greens for fields and a rough suggestion of trees and bushes, and greys for the lane that would be filled in later, before she began on the cottage itself. It wasn’t a large scene. The background work had taken some five or ten minutes before he spoke again.
‘You’ve a fantastic insight into how things feel. Good artists need that, and you have got it.’
‘What do you mean – feel?’ she asked, paintbrush poised over her work as she studied what she’d done so far. ‘Cottages don’t feel.’
‘What I mean is…’ For a moment he seemed lost. ‘How can I put it? It’s like…’ Again he paused, then pointed to the several bricks on the cottage wall she was colouring in. ‘Look, you see these? Anyone can paint a brick. It’s oblong, it’s brownish, it sits straight in a wall. But it’s more than mere brick – it has life in it, and you see that life, Miss Jay… Ellie.’
Her eyes widened at this sudden use of her Christian name, but he had his eyes trained on the cottage she was painting. His voice rose in a burst of enthusiasm.
‘Don’t you realize what you’re doing? You’re not painting every brick brown; you’re instinctively adding different tints, touches of blue and ochre and umber – as if you feel what they are like: the texture, the roughness, the imperfections of brick. It’s the only way I can describe it. Often something like that has to be taught, shown. You’re doing it instinctively.’
‘All I’m doing is painting!’ she said, a little irked by the observation interrupting the flow of her brush. All she wanted to do was paint, not to be told the blessed ins and outs of what it all meant.
‘No, don’t you see what I mean, Ellie? You are those bricks.’ He looked at her and noticed the pursing of her lips in confusion. ‘Let me explain if I can. When I am painting, say, a horse, you know this soft part of the head?’ – he touched his temples. ‘When I am painting the head and my brush begins to perfect that part of the animal, I actually sense the brush against my own temple. Do you see what I mean?’
‘I think so,’ she said hesitantly. In fact, she had grasped what he was getting at. Her own temples seemed to sense something as he spoke.
‘And what you feel is sympathy for the thing you are painting. You are one with what you are making on plain paper with a bit of paint. It becomes real to you.’
‘Yes I see it,’ she cried, and he laughed.
‘Everything you paint will feel like that to you, Ellie: an animal, a human being, whatever – a leg, an arm; you’ll sense those brush strokes on the exact area on yourself, like this.’ To her surprise, he had reached out and put a hand lightly on her upper arm, letting it slip over the material of her sleeve. He stopped, realizing what he was doing. She in turn felt her breath go for an instant and the warmth of the touch reached her flesh. Instinctively she stepped back.
‘Ellie… Miss Jay,’ he gasped. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’ Ellie lifted her head and shrugged. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘I was carried away – trying to explain.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said sharply. ‘Look, let’s get on with this. The time’s nearly up.’
He took out his fob watch, as if looking for something to distract him. ‘So it is. We might as well leave this to dry and have a go at it next week.’
Ellie nodded, but something inside her had stirred. The pupil-tutor relationship might very well be in jeopardy, and did she want that just now?
Eleven
Without her sister to talk to, Dora was feeling utterly lost.
As a personal maid to Mrs Lowe she saw little of the other servants, giving her a sense of somehow being a prisoner, despite Mrs Lowe’s kindness towards her.
The mistress could be demanding, if in a gentle way, and although she was always giving her little things – embroidered handkerchiefs, a ribbon for her hair, a modest little brooch – Dora suspected it was more to keep her at her side than from natural generosity.
‘You know your position is a privileged one, Dora – much envied,’ she had reminded her when she’d once shown signs of discontent by saying how she missed Ellie’s company. ‘You have only to look in the “Wanted” column in the newspapers to see that. Only those with excellent qualifications are invited to interviews for such a position as yours.’
‘It’s just that I’m not even to talk to her,’ Dora had insisted.
She saw the woman’s chubby lips purse irritably. ‘I’ve taken you on as my personal maid and, I hope, companion, Dora, despite your tender years, and have taken great pains to teach you, because I can see great potential in you. You could go far in a position such as you now have.’
‘Yes, madam,’ Dora had obligingly agreed, too timid to mention Ellie again. She didn’t want to jeopardize her job. She had all a girl could want – more than most servants got: comfort, little treats, the regard of her mistress, and a wage that had recently been increased. It had come to her ears that Ellie hadn’t received any increase in her wages, even though she had apparently wheedled her way into the master’s good books so that he’d even provided a tutor once a week to help bring out her artistic talent.
‘Your sister’s made sure she’s landed on her feet orright,’ Florrie had whispered to her out of everyone’s hearing when they’d passed on the stairs just after Ellie had got up from her bout of ’flu.
‘She never did it deliberately,’ Dora offered defensively, but Florrie gave a derisory sniff.
‘I reckon you both worked it well if you ask me, ’er with the master and you with the mistress, and not been ’ere but a couple of months.’
Dora had gone on her way without replying to that. She’d felt hurt, but she supposed they had both, in fact, landed on their feet. She ought to have been grateful after what had lain in front of them after losing their mother. She was – if only she could just have been with Ellie now and again.
‘One in your position does not associate with the lower servants,’ Mrs Lowe had told her, leaving her to wonder if this was such a good thing.
* * *
This Sunday was Ellie’s first day off in four weeks. Dora had had her day off a few days before. Ellie had seen her from the landing window as she was dusting the ornaments on the narrow sideboard.
The poor thing, dressed up in a sombre cream summer blouse and beige skirt, short beige jacket, cream gloves and a light-coloured straw boater, had looked quite the young lady as she’d left the house – only just turned thirteen – but lonely. Ellie hadn’t even seen her on her birthday; nor had Dora seen her on hers.
She’d looked up as Ellie tapped frantically on the pane. There was a lost look on her face. Ellie threw up the lower sash window and leaned out.
‘You orright?’ She automatically spoke nicely these days, but at this moment it seemed more appropriate not to.
Dora’s face lit up. ‘I’m fine. How are you?’ She spoke correctly and Ellie suddenly felt a pang of longing for the old days when such things hadn’t mattered.
‘I miss seeing you,’ she called in a stage whisper.
‘Me too.’ That was more like it. But the light in her face had faded.
‘Where you going?’
‘I don’t know. Walk round the shops, I suppose; have a bit of lunch somewhere, I suppose.’
It sounded such a lonely idea: a thirteen-year-old all on her own looking around the shops to while away the time that should have been a pleasure, until it was time to come back here.
‘Tell you what,’ she hissed down to her; ‘go and see Mrs Sharp, our old neighbour. She’ll make you welcome. She might even give you a bit of dinner and you’ll have a nice time. If you can, take her in a bunch of flowers. She’d appreciate that. When I have my day off on Sunday, I’m going to pay her a visit too.’
She was looking forward to calling on them then. Hopefully Ronnie Sharp would be there. ‘And see if you can find anything out about Dad,’ she’d reminded her on an afterthought. ‘Ask her—’
‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’
Ellie had broken off and spun round to see Mrs Lowe standing behind her. ‘What are you doing?’ she’d repeated, her plump little figure almost trembling with fury.
‘I was just passing the time of day with my sister, that’s all,’ Ellie had returned none too politely. If there was anyone she detested more than her own father, it was this woman.
‘I have explained to Dora that a lady’s maid never associates herself with the lower servants and I would beg you to remember this.’
‘It is her day off, madam,’ Ellie had reminded her coldly. ‘She can choose who she wants to speak to on her day off.’
Mrs Lowe’s lips had tightened. ‘I do not like your attitude, young woman. Nor servants leaning out of windows in my house yelling into the street like fishwives. I shall see about this. Now close the window and get back to work!’