‘So did I,’ said Winnie. ‘Where’s Ralph?’
‘Still asleep.’ Mrs Clay avoided Winnie’s eye. ‘I didn’t like to disturb him.’
The stove was dead. Usually it stayed in, overnight, but not until this hour in the morning. Now it was cold and Mrs Clay was standing there, doing nothing
‘Oh Lord, Winnie,’ she said. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘Get the kindling,’ said Winnie. The house was stirring; she could hear footsteps on the floors above, the hiss of the pipes. Mrs Spooner must have left for work without any breakfast. The other lodgers would soon be gathering in the parlour, and Lettie would be down for her father’s tray. Winnie’s head spun as she tried to catch up with herself. Her bladder was bursting.
‘He’s so dear,’ said Mrs Clay. She was kneeling at the stove, scrunching up newspaper. Who did she mean, the boy or Mr Turk?
Winnie sniffed the milk and poured it into a jug. At this rate, the porridge wouldn’t be ready for at least half an hour. Should she run up to the parlour and tell Mrs O’Malley and Mr Flyte that breakfast would be late? She was still wearing her nightdress but Mrs O’Malley was too ga-ga to notice and Mr Flyte couldn’t see it anyway.
‘Don’t you agree?’ asked Mrs Clay, looking up at her.
Winnie was about to reply when she heard a noise outside the window. Both women paused, cocking their heads. It was a rumbling noise. Men shouted to each other, out in the street.
Winnie went to the window. She could see the legs of the dray horse, standing outside. Men were heaving sacks and emptying them down the coal-hole.
Astonished, the two women looked at each other. ‘Did you order any coal?’ asked Winnie.
Mrs Clay shook her head. The thunder echoed as the loads hit the empty floor of the coal cellar.
‘They must have come to the wrong house,’ said Winnie.
Mrs Clay didn’t reply. The thunder grew muffled as the cellar started filling up. Mrs Clay turned back to the stove. She sat there, gazing at the grate.
‘I told him we were short,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean him to do this.’ She pushed the hair off her face, but still she didn’t move.
The thunder continued. Sack after sack was being emptied; the cellar was filling up. Winnie, too, was filled by a warm and unfamiliar sensation. Somebody was looking after them. So what if there was rationing? Mr Turk had sorted that out, and it was not her place to enquire even if she understood the first thing about it. And she was included in his generosity, for now she could heat up the copper with solid lumps of coal, not half-slack, she could work up a good boil for the washing and then she could dry the clothes in the warm-as-toast kitchen, she could light all the fires in the bedrooms all through the summer if the lodgers fancied it, she could even light a fire in her own bedroom because Mrs Clay wouldn’t mind, she minded nothing nowadays, she didn’t even notice, and they were all going to live a fine and careless life like the people in Penny Pictorial magazine.
Mrs Clay swung round. Her face was streaked with soot. ‘You do like him, Winnie?’ she asked urgently. ‘Tell me you like him!’
*
Mrs Clay was as skittish as a filly all morning. It was funny, thought Winnie: the woman was filled with energy and yet she never actually did anything. She moved restlessly about the house, picking things up and putting them down. She stood, transfixed by her own reflection in the hall mirror. A long period was spent in the bathroom; three times Mr Spooner crept down the stairs, and up again.
Ralph kept to his bedroom. If Winnie had the time she would have worried about him but she was run off her feet. With neither of them helping, Winnie had to clean the rooms on her own. She didn’t mind – her heart went out to the boy – but it would be a scramble to get it all done before the laundry arrived.
In his room, Mr Flyte sensed something was up.
‘What strange and foreign presence stirs in the House of Usher?’ he said.
‘Pardon?’ Winnie tipped his cigarette butts into her bucket.
‘What’s afoot, Winnie? I rely on you to keep me informed.’
‘I can’t say, sir.’
‘Oh, don’t be loyal. Would she be loyal to you?’
Winnie stared at him. ‘Of course she would.’ In fact, now she thought of it, she wasn’t so sure.
‘Routine’s shot to pieces,’ he chuckled. ‘Everything’s arse over tit. Actually, I’m rather enjoying it.’ Alwyne lit another cigarette, and she had just emptied his ashtray. ‘We’re slaves to routine, and know why we have it? To keep women like you in your place. But where does it get you? A room gets dusted, but then you have to do it all over again the next day. And who really cares?’
Not you, she thought. You couldn’t tell anyway. She looked at Mr Flyte as he sat in his armchair. He certainly had a routine. The daily explosion of coughing in the bathroom at eight o’clock. The daily trip to the Albion saloon bar after supper, on the dot of nine. It was warmer today, he wore no socks with his bedroom slippers. She could see the veins on his ankles.
‘What are you thinking, Winnie?’
Wouldn’t you like to know, she thought.
‘There are advantages to being blind,’ he said. ‘I’m learning every day. There’s the before and there’s the after. The before is to do with memory, but the after is learning everything afresh. Not just this room, the stairs, things with which I was unfamiliar. You, Winnie. Your face that I’ll never see.’
Winnie turned away and busied herself with the dusting.
‘People I knew before, of course, I’ll remember. But they’ve stopped in time. It’s as if they’ve died. But with you it’s different. I don’t know what you look like. What’s interesting, Winnie, is without that distraction I can see into your heart. For faces can be distracting – my goodness yes, I’ve certainly come a cropper in that department. But with all that nonsense stripped away, I can see into the heart of things. Into your heart, Winnie.’
Winnie paused. Outside, a train rattled past.
‘So what am I thinking then?’ she asked.
He smiled. ‘You tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking that before the laundry comes I should’ve turned the sheets sides to middle.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘What on earth’s that?’
‘You cut them down the middle and you sew them up again the other way round.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
Because people like you wear them out, she thought. Really, he wasn’t that clever. ‘With the not-so-worn bit in the middle,’ she said patiently. Mrs Clay should be helping her but Mrs Clay had disappeared on a mysterious errand, ten guesses where. ‘I haven’t finished them yet.’ At least she might come back with a nice bit of meat for supper. ‘And I’ve got to fix the tulle on Lettie’s dress. I promised Mrs Spooner. See, Lettie’s being taken to Kennington this afternoon, to dance for the limbless men.’
‘The limbless men?’
‘There’s a rest home there. By the gasworks.’
Alwyne Flyte leaned forward. The smoke wreathed up between his fingers. ‘Is that what you’re really thinking, Winnie?’
She blushed. There was something soft and insistent in his voice. Today he wore his black spectacles. She preferred not to see his eyes. Now they were hidden, Mr Flyte seemed as mysterious as she must be to him. Could he really see into her heart? He sat there, his back to the window, his face in shadow.
Suddenly, Winnie felt a surge of rebellion. It was such an unfamiliar feeling that it took her by surprise. Why should Mrs Clay have the only claims to passion, drifting around the house with that dreamy smile and never helping with the work? Mr Flyte was right: Mrs Clay had no interest in her maid, Winnie was just a useful pair of hands. But Winnie, too, had powerful feelings. She, too, was a woman, if anyone could be bothered to find out. Which they never would, unless they were blind.
The laughter welled up. Winnie clamped her mouth tight.
‘Come on, Winnie.’ His voice was coaxing. ‘There’s more to life than sewing, isn’t there? Tell me your secrets, I’ve got bugger all else to think about.’
‘But you said you knew.’
‘I want to hear you tell them to me.’
All right, thought Winnie. Let’s see how clever you are.
The heat rose up in her face. Her heart thumped. Later she couldn’t believe she had done it – what had seized her? Later, when she thought about it, her knees went weak and she had to lean against the wall.
For she put down her bucket and cloth. Right there, in the middle of the room, she slid her hand down the front of her apron. Her eyes remained fixed on the bearded man sitting in the armchair. I’ll show you, she thought. She slid her hand down, behind the shield of her apron, and cupped her breast. With her finger, she felt the nipple through the cloth. She stroked it. The warmth spread through her body. And all the time she watched him. This is what I do in the dark, she told him soundlessly. He was there in the dark with her, it was his domain. They were in it together.
Mr Flyte didn’t move. His blindness excited her. He had no idea what she was doing and just for once, for this short moment in her life, Winnie had a man in her power. A sharp, animal scent rose from her armpits.
Winnie pulled out her hand. She picked up her bucket and cloths, her broom, her dustpan and brush – she fumbled with them, the brush fell on the floor, the broom keeled over – but she finally collected them together and bolted from the room.
*
The meat arrived on a daily basis now – plump lamb chops, nestling together like married couples; a moist crimson topside, marbled with fat; a leg of veal. Eithne Clay no longer bothered to send an order. She waited for the butcher’s boy to deliver the parcel, the blood seeping through the paper, the string no doubt tied by Neville Turk’s own hands. She unpicked the knot with a shiver of intimacy. The dog was not forgotten. Each delivery was accompanied by a package of bones, which Brutus took away one by one and ate under the parlour table, cracking them like masonry and leaving a scattering of splinters. The dog had long since surrendered to the butcher; he needed no wooing now and pulled at the lead when passing the shop.
If the lodgers were surprised by their good fortune they kept quiet about it. Theirs was not to reason why, and instinct told them to keep their silence. They too had gone hungry, and if others suffered it was Mr Asquith’s fault for getting them into the war in the first place. Patriotic fervour had long since evaporated; nowadays it was every man for himself. All day they looked forward to supper and sniffed the air as the hour approached. Gone were the days of glutinous barley stews, of pease-pudding pasties that weighed like lead, of boiled tripe whose rubbery fibres got caught in Mrs O’Malley’s dentures. Each night they ate meat fit for Buckingham Palace. If Mrs Clay’s cooking left something to be desired they were in no position to complain. There was even bacon for breakfast.
The change in their landlady’s spirits also lifted the atmosphere. It had been a gruelling spring, with chronic shortages and terrible news from the Front. At Palmerston Road, however, piano music wafted up the stairwell and jugs of roses exhaled a scent that made their heads swim. Mrs Clay hummed under her breath; she leapt up the stairs like a girl. Her room, always slovenly, could be glimpsed through the doorway in a state of more spectacular chaos. She set forth on her errands dressed up in her best, her maroon hat nodding with feathers. If romance was in the air, there were no clues as to who might be the cause of this transformation. No gentleman callers came to the house; in fact, apart from tradesmen, few visitors ever came to the house at all. Nor were the lodgers, by and large, overly burdened with curiosity. They were content to reap the benefits.
And then, one day in late April, they were told a startling piece of news. Mr Turk, the local butcher, was coming to cook them dinner.
*
Winnie nearly dropped the eggs. ‘He’s what?’
‘He asked me how I cooked the meat and I told him,’ said Mrs Clay casually. ‘He nearly had a fit when I told him I boiled the chops. So he said he’d come round and show me how to do it. Show you too, Winnie. Isn’t he kind?’
‘He’s going to cook for everybody?’
Eithne nodded. In fact Neville had suggested a dinner à deux, taken in the back parlour, but she had told him she always ate with her son and the lodgers in the front room.
‘Where’s your privacy?’ he had asked.
‘It would be a shame to leave them out of it. They’ve little enough in their lives.’
He had smiled at her – a smile that melted her bone marrow. ‘You’re a real softie, you are.’
In fact, she had simply wanted to include her son. Ralph hadn’t met the butcher, to her knowledge, since that incident in the back room. Since then, Mr Turk’s name had not been mentioned between them. Two months had passed, long enough for that painful scene to be buried and forgotten. During this time she had been particularly tender with her son, spending time with him, helping him collate his stamp collection and even accompanying him to his book-keeping class in Vauxhall. It was time that he met Neville again, and under more favourable circumstances. How could Ralph fail to be charmed by a man who cooked him dinner? And they would have time to talk, in the civilised surroundings of a meal. He could get to know Neville and see what an admirable man he was, and realise how much they were in his debt.
Besides, she wanted Neville in her home, sitting at her table. She ached with longing for it. She wanted to see him amongst her familiar objects, the shock of him sitting there, eating off her china. She wanted him to move into her world and alter the room with his presence. How would he behave with the lodgers? What would they think of him? What would she think of him?
*
‘Leave it to me,’ Neville said. ‘You don’t do a dicky-bird.’
He had arrived on the dot of six. Winnie had spent all afternoon cleaning the kitchen and scrubbing the pans, as if for a royal visit. There was indeed something of the potentate about Neville; he was accompanied by one of the boys from the shop who, like a page, carried the supplies for his master. Neville stood, surveying the kitchen. Eithne lowered her eyes in confusion; he seemed both strange to her, and intensely familiar. His thick black hair shone in the lamplight; he wore a tweed suit and yellow cravat. His presence filled the room; he made her feel fragile and diminished, her arms hanging uselessly.
‘Can’t I do anything to help?’ she asked.
But Neville was gazing at the range. He shook his head wonderingly, as if gazing at an ancient monument. ‘Can’t believe you still cook on one of those.’
‘It does us all right,’ she said. ‘And thank you again for the coal.’
Winnie’s presence constrained her. This man – she had sat beside him in the hansom cab, their thighs touching; she had felt his body pressing against hers as they danced the foxtrot. His breath had brushed her face.
But today Neville was brisk, a man with a job to do. He took off his jacket, donned his apron and rolled up his sleeves. Eithne glanced at his arms. They were packed with muscle and matted with hair. She looked at his strong hands. He could strangle me she thought: he could strangle me like a rag doll.
‘Aberdeen Angus,’ he said, pulling out a bloodstained package, wrapped in cloth. ‘These are your rump steaks, tastier than fillet, cut from a five-year-old steer from the best pasture in Craigievar, you won’t find anything finer. Supplier’s a good friend of mine, kept it for me. Secret’s in the hanging.’ He unwrapped the cloth. Just for a moment, standing there in his apron, Neville resembled a small boy – boastful, yet strangely defenceless. Eithne, moved, wanted to put her arms around him and say You don’t have to impress me, my dearest. I’d go to the ends of the earth for you.
She smothered her mouth. For a mad moment, she thought she had spoken out loud.
‘I’ve soaked it in a marinade.’ Neville tapped the side of his nose. ‘My secret recipe. Juniper berries, vinegar, mixed herbs, port wine.’
‘Not so secret now,’ she said.
He grinned. ‘Aha, but it’s our secret.’
Her heart lurched. She swung round to Winnie, who was standing there like a dolt. ‘Winnie, have you checked the chairs? You might need some more.’ She turned to Neville. ‘It’s a full house tonight. You should be honoured. Even the Spooners are joining us.’
‘Not Mr Spooner,’ said Winnie.
‘What’s up with Mr Spooner?’ asked Neville.
‘God knows!’ Eithne laughed, heartlessly. Winnie shot her a look but she ignored it. ‘Run up, Winnie, and check the table.’
Winnie didn’t move. Eithne thought: what’s the matter with the girl?
*
Winnie stood still. She felt the warmth seeping between her legs. She should have realised, what with having stomach pains all morning. And now a trail of blood was trickling down the inside of her thigh.
The problem was that her pile of rags lay on the dresser. They had been drying on the clotheshorse, in front of the stove, but she had hastily moved them aside before Mr Turk’s arrival. How could she fetch them without Mrs Clay realising the reason? Yet if she carried away the whole pile of washing, the butcher might notice that it included six pairs of Mrs Clay’s drawers. Either way, there was the possibility of embarrassment. Though Winnie was a plain-spoken girl in many respects, in this matter she was painfully shy. It stemmed from having no mother, and growing up in a houseful of boys.
‘Winnie!’
Mrs Clay glared at her. Winnie darted to the dresser. Grabbing the pile of washing, she hurried out.
*
Ralph arrived late, and took his seat without a word. The parlour had a festive air. Outside it was still light, but the candles had been lit in the candelabra, eight of them and all brand new. The table had been spread with a clean cloth and even the napkins had been washed and ironed – ironed – before being rolled up again in their holders. The cooking smells were intoxicating; Brutus stood in the doorway, strings of saliva hanging from his mouth.
In The Dark Page 7