Your Sterling Service
An In Service short story
Sandra Antonelli
Published by Sandra Antonelli, 2018.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
YOUR STERLING SERVICE
First edition. November 13, 2018.
Copyright © 2018 Sandra Antonelli.
Written by Sandra Antonelli.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Your Sterling Service
Further Reading: At Your Service
Also By Sandra Antonelli
To Megan Whalen Turner, for encouraging my adolescent story-telling from way back when, to now.
Your Sterling Service
Boredom was the assassin of a man’s body, mind, and soul. The infinitesimal particle of soul Kitt imagined he possessed gasped for breath. Boredom was worse than paperwork. Paperwork made him want to gouge a screwdriver into his brain, yet the tediousness of paperwork had an outcome whereas boredom was hellish nothingness. He despised doing nothing. Soon, his iota of soul would emit a death rattle of ennui.
When the car had rolled, the air bag performed as it had been designed to, and Kitt had walked away from the mangled Bentley, bruised, cuts on his arms and legs, one retina severely detached. He was alive and home amid unpacked boxes and personal belongings, Seated nose-down, his chin and forehead rested against the padded edges of what was, essentially, a massage chair, and doing nothing for 50 minutes of every hour was slowly killing him.
He’d been sitting this way, sleeping this way, for the last two days, with five listless, exasperatingly dull, coffee-less days to go. Yes, recovery time post-vitrectomy was important, keeping his head still was important, particularly if he wanted to maintain sight in both eyes. Being able to see was rather essential to his work and Kitt wanted to keep his job—and finish the one he’d started in Rome, despite Tilly having been assigned to complete business.
Kitt adjusted his knees on the positioning chair Bryce had hired for him, lifted his head slightly, settled his face back into the hole, and regulated his breathing, focusing his attention on something other than eons of looming tedium. Although his left eye felt scratchy, he followed the floral pattern on the Persian rug and began to count the knots of the fringed end near the entry to the kitchen. It was a very pretty rug. Not much of it was visible amid the packing boxes, but the blues, creams, and the small bit of green in the rug matched the walls and flower sprigs on the pillows that dotted the window seat in the sitting room. Mrs Valentine, the woman he’d rented the recently renovated flat from last week, had fine taste in colour and fine hazel eyes in a shade similar to the green in the rug, walls and pillows.
Over the noisy, agonal breathing of his tiny dying soul, came the soft sound of his landlady opening the door to the flat she was renovating below. Hazel-eyed Mrs Valentine would be up shortly, to tell him she was about to recommence removing ceiling plaster downstairs. She’d say she hoped she didn’t disturb him too much, to which he’d reply she would not, even though she disturbed him in a most inconvenient manner.
Briefly, Kitt considered the idea of moving, but the pros of living in Maresfield Gardens outweighed the cons of an irritating landlady. He resumed counting the fringe knots on the rug and waited to be disturbed.
In a moment or two the door buzzer rang. “Christ,” he muttered and spat out a few choice filthy words. The landlady was not the answer to boredom he was looking for. Gingerly, he lifted his head and disengaged from the chair. Just as gingerly he walked, nose down, eyes on the floor. He reached the door, and opened it a little to the woman on the other side. The scent of cinnamon wafted in from the landing. Mrs Valentine smelled like cinnamon. How wonderful. Kitt bit his molars together.
Mae looked at her new tenant. He held the door half-shut, mouth turned-down, cold, blue-grey eyes glancing up at her once before fixing back on the polished wood beneath his bare feet. The morning they’d met she’d thought he’d looked hard and stern, but that had been before a recent car accident had battered his face and sent him for surgery on his left eye. He’d worn an eyepatch the day he’d returned from hospital. The patch had given him a craggy, belligerent appearance, and this morning the man looked positively brutal. Shaggy, somewhat gingery dark blonde hair stuck out at the front his forehead, one tuft a rhino horn accentuating the red crescent indentation above his eyebrows. “Good morning, Major Kitt,” she said.
Her barefoot new tenant heaved a disgruntled sigh. “Something you need?” His sullen attention stayed on his feet. Or maybe he was looking at her shoes.
Mae glanced down at her Doc Marten Mary-Janes. White plaster dust coated the black toes, and there was a smear of it on the messenger bag she wore cross-wise too. The bag was beginning to dig into her right shoulder. “Eye giving you a bit of bother this morning?”
“No. What gave you that idea?”
“Perhaps it was all the swearing I heard before you opened the door.”
“Was I swearing?” His exhale was a thinly-cloaked impatient sigh. He pulled at the neckline of his grey tee and shoved a hand into a side pocket of his jogging bottoms.
She glanced at her dusty shoes again. “Well, it’s possible my ears are full of plaster dust. At any rate, I’ll be filling them with more soon enough. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to give you these to thank you for your patience while I grind and make a racket beneath you.” Jaysus, that came out a bit bawdy, but lost in his own misery and gloom he’d missed it—or he had no sense of humour at all. Whatever the case, Mae held the tray under his line of sight and pulled back a corner of the aluminium.
“Are those...Chelsea Buns?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Where did you get them?”
“I baked them.”
“You baked them?”
“Yes.”
“You baked them for me?” he said, a clear note of annoyance in his voice.
“Yes, I was feeling compassionate this morning.”
“If you were truly compassionate you would have brought coffee.”
“I’d ask if you were feeling sorry for yourself, but you don’t strike me as the sort of man who ever feels sorry for anything. Hasn’t anyone ever done something nice for you before?”
“Not without wanting something in return. What is it you want, Mrs Valentine?”
“Oh, you are prickly.”
“I prefer to think of myself as surly.”
“Yes, perhaps that is a better word.” Why had she bothered trying to be considerate? Before he’d signed the lease, the man told her that his work could be sensitive and his privacy was essential, which she should have realised meant she was to leave him the hell alone. Mae thrust out the Chelsea buns and was a little surprised when he took them. She opened the flap on the messenger bag she’d overstuffed and pulled out the old Thermos Caspar had always used. “Here is where my compassion ends,” she said, shoving the insulated container beneath his nose. “Your coffee.”
Her new tenant exhaled once more, but the sound was tinged with amusement rather than testiness. His head came up and he smiled, and what a smile it was. He’d smiled pleasantly when they’d first met, and again when he’d moved in, but seeing this smile, this genuine smile he’d kept hidden behind his spiky privacy was a little arresting and, somehow, dangerous. It made her wonder what else her new tenant kept hidden.
“Forgive me.” He took the Thermos. “I apologise, Mrs Valentine. I am feeling sorry for myself. I’m spending my days with my face stuck in the hole of that...thing, that chair behind me.” He turned and looked at a blue-padded massage chair
to the left of boxes dotting the sitting room behind him. “Perhaps I didn’t explain it well enough when you were here the other afternoon, when the chair was delivered. The vitreous gel was removed from the inside of my left eye for retinal re-attachment an—”
Mae made a face and held up a hand. “I don’t think I want to know that part.”
“Right then. Post-op recovery means I sit in that chair. All day. I can get up out of that chair for ten minutes every hour, to eat, shower, that sort of thing, but I need to keep my nose pointed down so my eye heals properly. That’s the pattern of my life for the next five days and I don’t do well trapped indoors.”
“You really need coffee, don’t you?”
“You have no idea.”
“No, no, I have a very good idea.”
Chelsea buns in hand, he laughed and stepped back, pushing the door open. “Do come in. Join me for a cup. I have cups in here somewhere. I also have a lovely Chemex coffee maker I’ve yet to unearth.”
Mae crossed the threshold, and gazed around the flat. The man had not unpacked a thing. Boxes stretched from the entry to the kitchen. A suitcase sat open on the window seat, clothes jumbled to the right and left of the green pillows. Two small plastic bags, tops neatly tied, were full of takeaway containers. The lid of a pizza box was ajar, the half-eaten pizza inside visible. An ice bucket, green bottles drained of Heineken, and a half-empty bottle of some American bourbon stood behind the rubbish on the little table near the big bay window. She frowned.
And he noticed.
“I can assure you I do not normally live like a university student,” he said, placing the buns and coffee on the table.
“That is quite heartening to know.”
“Your relief is, shall I say, palpable. Would you mind looking in the box near the bookcase, the one on top of the side table? I believe you’ll find Minton or Aynsley china in there.”
Mae set her bag beside the door and stepped around high and low cardboard containers until she reached the bookcase. “Isn’t there someone looking in on while you recover?” She found the box he’d indicated, opened it, and began to unwrap pieces of a vintage blue and white Minton with a gilt edge.
“No. At my previous residence I had employed a very surly Scotsman, a man even more surly than I am, but he’s left me in the lurch and retired. And my colleague hasn’t been ‘round yet today.”
“Or yesterday.” She crumpled wrapping paper, searching for a cup and finding a milk jug. She dropped the paper next to the other refuse on the table. “Or the day before by the looks of it. How old is this pizza?”
“I don’t think I care for the way you’re ridiculing my breakfast and lunch.”
“You’re living exactly like a university student. Don’t you have a mother, a girlfriend or boyfriend who can stop by to visit and help out a bit?”
“Not at the moment.”
“How my heart weeps for you.”
“Yes, I can hear the sobbing from here. Please, Mrs Valentine, the coffee. If my watch is correct I have seven minutes left of being upright.”
Mae found a lump that felt like a cup and began to remove the paper.
“I understand you were a butler, Mrs Valentine.”
She turned. Above the crumpling of unwrapping china, he’d moved. Her new tenant stood right behind her, and she and looked up at him, cup in hand, feeling her eyebrows rumple her forehead as she looked at a face she found both ugly and handsome. “How did you...how did you know that?”
“I checked up on you.” He went to the table.
“Did you now?” China cup dangling from a finger, she crossed her arms, lips pursing.
Kitt drew away the towel he’d left over the back of the lone dining chair at the table and looked at Mrs Valentine’s very pretty mouth. He liked the way she looked in the shapeless, paint-spattered coveralls she wore with her silly Mary-Janes, liked her blonde hair in a tidy French braid, the way she played with the gold wedding band she wore on a chain around her neck, and the way the crow’s feet at her eyes crinkled when she squinted at him. God damn it, she was annoying, and he reminded himself about birds and certain things birds didn’t do in their nests. Shitting in his own nest was a mistake he’d made before, when he was young, arrogant, and very, very stupid. While he may have still been arrogant, he wasn’t stupid. It was not a mistake he’d make again. This is where he wanted to, and was going to, live. “It seemed reasonable,” he said, tossing the towel onto a box. “You have my references, my employment history, my banking details. You know all about me. I wanted to know a little about you. I checked you out. Property owners check out prospective tenants. I thought it only fair I check out a prospective landlady.”
She stopped squinting, chuckled and came to the table where she set down the cup down and reached for the thermos, suddenly sounding Irish. “Oh Jaysus, you spoke with Mr Stephens next door.”
“Yes.” Indeed, Stephens, the film actor living in the flat below her home, had told him many things about Mrs Mae Valentine, but Bryce had told him even more. She sounded slightly Irish, because she was Irish, despite her refined English accent. Kitt knew she was five years his senior. Her husband, a Sicilian master gardener, had died over a decade ago, and she spoke five different languages. She also owned six properties in three very desirable areas around London, and had spent twenty-some odd years as the butler for a member of the Danish Royal Family before moving on to an Italian pasta magnate. In his line of work, it was standard operating procedure to evaluate the neighbourhood and neighbours in a new location before moving in. It was a safe thing to do. Bryce had checked out Stephens too, as well as Masterton, the tenant who had resided in the flat Mrs Valentine was renovating downstairs. It was the downstairs renovation that pegged this converted Edwardian suitable as a new residence.
She wore a dry smile. “I’m sure Mr Stephens told you I’m a humourless, lonely, childless widow still pining for her dead husband. Or did you engage in that idle chatter that men have about middle-aged women, the ‘bet she was a real looker when she was younger,’ shite?”
“A bit of both. You’re not humourless, you’ll always be a looker, and Stephens is an arse.”
She snorted. “There no need to flatter me. You can have the coffee.” She paused suddenly. “I must apologise. It is not my usual habit to make offhand remarks about my tenants. I’m embarrassed. Mr Stephens is a very good tenant, a property owner’s dream.”
“As I hope to be, Mrs Valentine.”
She pulled the cup from the thermos top. “Mae. Call me Mae. Yes, I was a butler. Like your surly Scot, I retired.”
“He was nearly eighty. You’re too young to have retired.” Kitt watched Mae unscrew the lid of the old blue-green metal flask and pour steaming black brew into the china cup. The aroma of coffee drifted up when she handed him the Minton. It had been too long since he’d had anything resembling a decent cup of coffee, and it might have been euphoric recall, but the smell of this coffee was something almost holy. He breathed in the perfume.
She said, “I’m young enough to enjoy my retirement from service, and old enough to know it was time to retire before I was surly and almost-eighty, and you are gazing at that cup like a man dying of thirst.”
“Am I?”
“It’s not instant, if that’s what worries you. May I sit?” she gestured to the chair where the towel had been.
“My manners have deserted me entirely. Please, make yourself comfortable amid the university student squalor.”
Chuckling, she had a seat, watched him drink, and poured her own cup.
Kitt went on standing, savouring being upright nearly as much as the cocoa and citrus overtones of the coffee rolling across his tongue. The coffee was a godsend and it triggered two incredibly ridiculous thoughts: the attractive woman drinking coffee from a metal Thermos cup was the proverbial Irish pot-o-gold and he’d just had some kind of life-changing moment. “Again,” he said after swallowing the coffee and absurd ideas, “I apologise for my
appalling manners and behaviour earlier. It is not the first time I’ve been told I’m unpleasant before coffee.”
“Yes, you were a prick.” She reached for the Chelsea buns on the table, peeled back the foil on the tray and slid it toward him.
“Are you always so honest?”
“I am.”
“Good. I like honesty. You’re not one to suffer fools. I like that too.”
“I suffer pricks even less gladly. Have a Chelsea bun.”
Kitt laughed heartily and took a bun. It was still warm. “I think I like you, Mae.”
“I’m on the fence about you.”
He laughed again. “Yes, I see I’ll have to earn your trust.”
She nodded and drank coffee. “Well, tell me about yourself.”
“I’d rather not.”
She handed him a napkin she’d found under one of the takeaway containers. “Afraid I’ll be disappointed?”
“I’m not interesting enough to be a disappointment to anyone.”
“Except your mother?”
“Now, why would you say that?”
“That’s what my mam told my brother, he’s a priest—yes, I know an Irish priest, what a cliché. When he joined the Army, Mam said, ‘What a disappointment ya are, Sean. I thought ya had more sense, bein’ an arrogant, educated, Jesuit!’ I don’t think he ever recovered from disappointing our mother. Were you in the Army or Royal Marines, Major Kitt?”
“Army.”
“How long? My brother spent twenty years as an Army Chaplain and a few more with UN Protection Forces. Sean loved it until the kidnappings and massacres in Bosnia. Struggles with it still, doesn’t talk about his time in the Army or with the UNPROFOR.”
“I’d rather not discuss my time in the military either. I see no purpose in talking about the past.”
She pressed her lips together for a second. “I am sorry if I brought up unpleasant memories. With Sean’s PTSD, I ought to know better, I ought to be more sensitive. I hope I didn’t pry.”
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