by Cathy Kelly
The courtyard had stables at one end with arched doorways and horseshoes hung for luck all over the place. Jodi wanted to look everywhere, but she wanted to go inside too.
At the kitchen door there was another interminable wait while Aggie fiddled with the keys again. And then the door was open and they were inside.
‘Holy smoke, it’s an awful mess,’ said Aggie, sighing as they went in.
Jodi and Izzie exchanged a grin. Aggie had never been the most imaginative person in school, Izzie thought and clearly, nothing had changed. All she saw was dust and cobwebs, while Jodi and Izzie saw history right in front of them.
‘If you want to leave me the keys, Aggie, I’ll lock up and bring them back to you in a couple of hours,’ Izzie said.
‘Well, OK,’ said Aggie grudgingly. ‘I have a lot to do.’
Izzie nodded as if this was indeed the case, although she didn’t think so. The phone hadn’t rung once when they were with Aggie in the office. Business didn’t appear to be too brisk at Winters & Sons.
‘Of course, you’re busy,’ Izzie said briskly. God, the fibs she was telling. ‘I’ll take care of this. And thank you so much. You have no idea what this means to us.’
With Aggie gone, they could look to their hearts’ content. Izzie almost didn’t know where to start. She walked around the big kitchen with the huge old Aga and recalled Gran once telling someone about cooking on such a beast. Apparently, it was difficult to learn the vagaries of the giant Aga, and a total nightmare trying to relight it when it went out.
In one part of the kitchen were bells hung high on the wall with names for each room: library, drawing room, study, bedroom one, bedroom two, etc. There were three rows of bells and Izzie imagined staff rushing off at high speed when one rang.
To the right of the kitchen was a huge scullery with two vast sinks and lots of old wooden crates still lying on the floor. There were newspapers on the floor too, dropped carelessly there as if mopping up a spill. Behind the door they found the source of the newspapers, piles and piles of carefully tied-up news print. There must be years worth there, Izzie thought.
It was a dark room with only a tiny light and in her mind’s eye she could see a girl, her hands raw from scrubbing potatoes or peeling mounds of vegetables. Until now, Izzie had never thought of herself as a particularly psychic person but here, in this old house, the sense of the generations who’d worked their fingers to the bone seemed to permeate the very walls.
‘Izzie, look – back stairs,’ came Jodi’s voice. ‘Come on.’
She left the scullery and went out into a little hall. There were plain stone flags on the floor and it was cold, freezing even in the heat of a warm spring day. There were lots of little doors off it and she quickly opened some of them, finding a boot room with old footwear standing dusty and covered with the film of age, and another room with nothing in it but shelves of empty bottles and jars, along with a strange contraption shaped like a sideways barrel on a wooden frame with a big handle on one side. It was a butter churn, she realised, delighted with herself for recognising it. Gran had talked about making butter when she was a child: the fun of separating fresh milk into cream and skimmed milk, and then the hours of winding away with the churn until the magical moment came and the golden butter began to appear like little knobs in the milk.
‘Are you coming?’ said Jodi.
They ran up the narrow stairs and came out via a small door into a large airy corridor. It was a different world, the difference between downstairs and upstairs. Izzie tried to take it all in.
The walls were palest green, covered with silken wallpaper that almost looked as if someone had painted exotic birds on by hand. With their wings spread as they flew, the little birds were rainbow-bright: acid yellows, crimson reds and electric blues. Beneath their feet was a wooden floor covered with a long, threadbare carpet. Even though it was old, it had clearly once been very beautiful with an intricate architectural design along the edges and huge old roses tumbling over each other in the middle.
Jodi half ran down to big double doors at the other end of the hallway and pushed them open. Izzie followed her and they found themselves in a light, airy sitting room with huge sash windows and heavy silk curtains. The original furniture was still there, some draped in off-white Holland covers. A pair of gilded chairs sat in front of a beautiful fireplace, a vision of white marble with delicately chiselled Roman goddesses frolicking around the edges. Izzie guessed this must be the lady of the house’s personal salon. Here, her ladyship could sit and amuse herself, in sharp contrast to the women toiling downstairs in the scullery.
Next were bedrooms, two huge ones, for the master and mistress: his with a small dressing room and masculine bookshelves on the walls; hers with an enormous four-poster bed as centrepiece. Izzie recognised Indian carvings on the heavy bedposts, but the crimson and golden hangings had been badly attacked by moths and they hung in threads around it. It was such a shame. The wardrobes and the other furniture didn’t match the Indian bed. The wardrobes were vast 1930s style, with simple lines and doors hanging open, smelling musty. There was candle grease on the small bamboo table beside the bed and Izzie had a sudden vision of the last of the Lochravens as a little old lady getting into bed on her own, with a candle to save money on electricity. Jodi had told her that Isabelle Lochraven had been ninety-five when she died. She’d never married and had lived here in the house all her life. Izzie knew her grandmother must remember Isabelle from a long time ago because Isabelle had been a young woman when Lily worked in Rathnaree, yet Izzie was quite sure the two hadn’t met after that, even though they were of similar vintage. They must have shared many memories, but the servant/mistress divide was so great that even in old age they’d never thought to breach it.
Izzie thought back to her childhood in Tamarin. She couldn’t recall hearing anything about the Lochraven family, apart from the odd reported sighting of Isabelle driving into town in one of her ancient cars. She was a danger on the roads, everyone said. Drove as though she owned the road, which a long time ago she had.
What a sad way to live, Izzie thought, touched with empathy for these people. They had so much and yet, because of their position, they cut themselves off from the people around them. They were part of the country and yet not part of it. How sad.
On the next floor up were children’s rooms and a giant nursery, painted bright yellow with all sorts of old-fashioned children’s toys lying in disrepair on the floor. There were cross-faced dolls with hard china heads and little wigs; a tricycle that must be at least a hundred years old, with its paint nearly all chipped off; and little books from another age, Kipling and Noddy in tattered covers.
Further along the corridor was another door that led up to the servants’ quarters in the attics via a narrow and winding staircase. Here were the maids’ bedrooms: tiny little box rooms separated by paper-thin walls. Some had iron bedsteads, but only one had a small fireplace. Perhaps with their tiny windows, the attic rooms weren’t as cold as the rest of the house, but with so many chimneys it seemed heartless that these maids, after a day stoking the Lochravens’ fires, would climb the stairs to shiver under the eaves.
Again, she began to get an understanding of why her grandmother resented the Lochravens. For a woman as proud and intelligent as Lily, it must have been hard to have to serve these people with their sense of right and privilege. Lily, who thought that respect should be earned, would have found it hard to admire people who thought themselves entitled by virtue of their aristocratic blood. They lived in the pretty gilded salon and dined on fine china, while their servants were denied any comfort whatsoever.
Finally, she went downstairs. The main stairs were grand and at least six foot wide, carved out of the palest white marble with a vein of grey running through them. On either side was a solid brass stair rail. There was a huge hall at the bottom, with a pattern picked out in black-and-white Victorian floor tiles and ornamental columns topped by pots of dusty earth now s
at on top of them with no trace remaining of the ferns that once must have been planted there. An ornate grandfather clock stood against one wall and the mounted heads of several stags stared down at her through dusty eyes that hadn’t gleamed with life for many decades.
‘Here it is,’ cried Jodi. She’d found the room from her precious photograph: the room in which the glamorous men and women had posed for the picture marking Lady Irene’s birthday. Without the sepia mystique of the photograph, the room looked sad and tired, for all its elegant proportions and huge windows and the giant fireplace with the club fender exactly as they’d seen it in the photo.
But there was no fire in the grate. The tables with the beautiful arrangements of flowers were gone, nor was there the sense of music in the background or the feeling of laughing people enjoying themselves, holding up crystal tumblers to the camera.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ breathed Jodi, enchanted.
And Izzie wondered exactly what was wrong with her, because all she felt was sadness in this place. Maybe she lacked the archaeology gene. Or maybe she was a lot more like her grandmother than she knew. She didn’t long to be in this grand house playing at being a lady, with servants running up and down the back stairs every time she rang a bell.
There was too much unbalance here. As if something had kept Rathnaree going unnaturally and, now that the cycle was over, all that was left was this beautiful, sad shell which had witnessed so much. Many people had lived their lives out in the house, yet the only stories people heard about Rathnaree concerned the wealthy people who’d lived here. The poor people of Tamarin who’d served them had been forgotten. That felt wrong to Izzie.
‘It’s a pity we don’t know more about the people who worked here,’ she said. ‘That’s the interesting story, isn’t it?’
‘I agree, both stories are interesting,’ Jodie said, surprising her. ‘It’s like there were two separate worlds here, independent and yet linking up: the aristocrats, and the servants. Two different stories at the same time, how interesting is that! Oh, I’m so glad we got to come in here. Thank you, Izzie, for arranging it.’
‘You’re going to work on it, then – the history from both sides?’ Izzie asked.
Jodi nodded. ‘I love uncovering the past, don’t you?’ she said happily. ‘It teaches us about ourselves: that’s what they told us in college, anyway.’
Izzie stood in front of the big fireplace the way the people in Jodi’s sepia-tinted photograph had stood and tried to imagine herself back in their world. She’d read a novel about time travel once, where a woman from the twentieth century had been whisked back to the seventeenth. The idea had fascinated Izzie. What would she bring to the past if she was transported back to 1936 right now? Would her wisdom be of any use then? Or would she find that, instead of her bringing superior modern knowledge into the past, the past would turn out to be her teacher?
FOURTEEN
When she was older, Lily found that the seasons reminded her of different parts of her life. Spring was always Tamarin, when the bare trees were dotted with pouting acid-green buds of new life, and the fields changed from heavy umber to palest green dotted with velvety new lambs on shaky legs. Autumn was Rathnaree, when the staff toiled to get the great house ready for winter and when Sir Henry invited cronies to shoot or fish with him. Outside, the woods came alight with the russets and pale golds of autumn, while inside, apple logs burned in the grates and the kitchen steamed up with cooking for the parties of gentlemen.
But summer: summer would always be London during the war when the sun shone more brightly than ever before, and life was lived with far greater passion and ferocity than she’d imagined possible.
May 1944 was one of the hottest Mays on record, and on the rare occasions when they weren’t working, Lily, Diana and Maisie loved to sit on the tiny balcony on the third floor of the nurses’ home on Cubitt Street, faded and frayed cushions behind them, letting the heat sink into their tired bones.
They didn’t get too many opportunities to sit in the sun: time off was at a premium for third-year nursing students and Matron was an ardent believer in the mantra of the Devil making work for idle hands.
She would have been scandalised if she had seen them sitting on the balcony with their stockings off and their feet deliciously bare to the sun. But it had been a hard week, Lily thought, leaning back, and what Matron didn’t know, couldn’t harm her. In the delivery ward, Lily had been involved in the births of seventeen babies in that week alone.
She deserved a rest. That evening, she and the girls were going out to tea in Lyons Corner House, and afterwards to the Odeon to see Gaslight. She loved going to the cinema and immersing herself in the fantasy world onscreen. Joan Crawford was still her favourite film star, but she could see the lure of Ingrid Bergman. Maisie, who was prone to flights of imagination, said Lily had the same eyes as Ingrid.
‘Mysterious,’ Maisie insisted. ‘Like you’re thinking of a special man, somewhere.’
‘When she looks like that, she’s thinking of what’s for dinner,’ laughed Diana, who was much more prosaic and, like all of them, thought about food quite a lot.
Lily remembered the huge surplus of food at home, fresh eggs every day and her mother’s fragrant bread. She’d never realised how lucky she’d been. Now, the shortages had even spread to Ireland, where flour was in short supply. ‘We’re all eating black bread at the moment,’ her mother had written in her last letter. ‘Tastes like turf to my mind. Lady Irene’s got very thin on account of it.’
As the afternoon sun warmed her face, Lily wondered how she had ever lived anywhere other than here. It wasn’t just food that made her think back to Tamarin and Rathnaree: her mother working hard, never seeing anything but the bloody Lochraven family, never thinking of more. Lily herself had seen so much now – she’d helped in theatre when the hospital was short-staffed and had stayed standing despite the stench of discarded splints and dressings from men wounded overseas. She’d spent many nights in the basement during air-raids, comforting patients while trying to remain calm herself, telling them it would be fine, that the hospital had never taken a direct hit and wouldn’t now, when she knew no such thing.
She’d delivered two babies all by herself, and had felt a surge of pride when she’d heard that the Queen said she was glad Buckingham Palace had been bombed so now she could look the East End in the eye. Lily liked the Queen: she cared, keeping the little princesses in London despite the bombing. They were on rationing too, which was only right. Lily would have bet her last shilling that, if the Lochravens had been running the country, they’d still be eating plover’s eggs and lobster thermidor.
‘Is it bad not to want to go home?’ she asked Maisie.
‘Depends on what there is to go home to,’ Maisie said pragmatically. ‘There’s nothing for me to go home to, ‘cept Terry’s wife, and she won’t be welcoming me with open arms.’ Maisie’s mother had been killed during the Blitz as she’d opened the front door of her flat to rush for the Underground. Only her brother, Terry, was left of their small family, and he’d married a year ago when his girlfriend, a platinum blonde named Ruby, became pregnant. Ruby and Maisie didn’t see eye to eye.
‘Yes, sorry,’ said Lily, angry with herself for thinking out loud. ‘But when the war’s over, what then?’
‘You got listening privileges in the War Office, then?’ Maisie asked. ‘How’d you know it’s going to be over?’
‘It can’t go on for ever.’
‘Says who?’ Maisie found her cigarettes and lit one.
‘Tea’s ready, girls.’ Diana put three cups of tea down beside them, then swung her long legs down so the sun could warm them.
‘Thanks.’
‘Thanks, Diana.’ Lily sipped her tea, still wrinkling her nose at the first taste. She missed sugar, but had decided it was far better to save her coupons for actual tea.
Diana had given up coffee altogether. ‘I can’t bear the taste of Camp,’ she’d said, shudderi
ng at even the notion of the coffee substitute. She’d told them once about drinking delicious pre-war coffee in Juan Les Pins in the South of France where she’d gone with her parents and sister, Sybil, and stayed in a fabulous villa with its own swimming pool and blue-and-white umbrellas to shelter one from the sun.
‘Lily’s going all maudlin on us, Di,’ said Maisie. ‘Wants to know what we’re going to do after.’
Diana’s perfect nose wrinkled. ‘Darling, heaven knows. Daddy will want me to get married, I suppose, so I’ll be off his hands, like Sybil. That’s what he thinks war is about – defending the country so your daughters can still get married in the family chapel.’
‘You never said you had a chapel.’ Maisie sat up. ‘I thought Sybil was getting married in an ordinary church.’
‘It’s only a small one,’ Diana said apologetically. ‘Lots of people have them. Not just us.’
‘Keep your knickers on, Princess,’ Maisie sighed. ‘I’ve never seen a house with a chapel before. Christ Almighty, I s’pose I’ll have to be on my best behaviour for this bloody wedding.’
You’re not the only one, Lily thought. She still felt unsure about attending Diana’s sister’s wedding. It was easy to forget that Diana came from another world, the world of privilege. She shared their room and they saw her asleep with her mouth open, and had watched her cram a cheese sandwich into her face after a twelve-hour shift when they’d not had a second to stop for a bite. But her family would be another matter. They’d already met Sybil, who was everything Diana was not: proud, sulky and keen to maintain the class divide.
Unlike Maisie, who was dying to see ‘how the other half lived’, Lily – who already knew exactly how they lived – was dreading the wedding. To Diana, she was a friend. To the Beltons, with their private chapel and grand house in London and pre-war holidays on the Riviera, she would be a servant girl. The war might have changed many things, but it hadn’t changed that much.