The Winds Of Heaven

by Monica Dickens

  "Yes'm. Thank you very much." Phyllis turned and bolted out of the door. She heard creaking shoes on the stairs and knew that it was Goldie, coming with the hot-water bottles.

  The next day, Phyllis wore the dashing red cardigan under the bib of her apron.

  'Where d'you get that?" Ellen pounced on her at breakfast, 'That's a fancy item for a chit like you."

  "I bought it then," Phyllis said defiantly.

  "That you never did, of that I'm sure," declared the cook, bringing the fat, brown teapot to the kitchen table. "On your salary? Who do you think you are?"

  "Knocked it off, did you?" Ted, the barman, who claimed to have worked in a West End hotel, was an unpleasing sight in the morning, with his oil-matted hair uncombed, and his mouth full of bread.

  "I did not!" Phyllis hoped that she was not going to cry. She had cried once before in the kitchen, and knew how they would mock.

  Goldie removed the top of her boiled egg suspiciously, as if she expected to find it bad. She and the cook were the only ones who had eggs. "Perhaps someone gave it to her," she suggested. She had looked through Louises drawers, to see what the poor lady had to put on her back, and had seen the cherry-red cardigan. She knew where Phyllis had got it, but wanted to hear it from the girl's own lips.

  "Well, and if they did?"

  "Who did? Who gave it you? One of Them?" Ellen jerked her head toward the swing-door that led to the dining room. "What a cheek! Who was it?"

  "Who was what? What's going on?" Mrs. Peace, one of the daily women, came through from the scullery in her coat and hat, with the large leather shopping bag that came to work with her every day, and often went home with rolls or cake inside— "Can't be served up again. Too good for the pigs."

  "What's the trouble now?" she said, afraid of missing something.

  "Young Phyll's been toadying round the guests, that's what," the cook said, resting the fat arm that held her knife on the table. "I'll lay I know who it was. It was that Mrs. Bickford, or whatever she calls herself. She's as soppy as they come. Give her last penny to a blind beggar." She spoke with more disdain than admiration. The cook had no patience with anybody who did not know how to look out for Number One.

  Goldie nodded sagely, and Ellen blew out her pasty cheeks. "Well, what a sauce! Why should she favor Phyllis over the rest of us? I always said the upstairs maids get all the pickings. Where do we come in, I'd like to know?"

  "You mind your tongue, miss," Goldie said sharply. "I've seen you tee-heeing round a guest—oh, ever so sweet—when they were packed up to go and you couldn't wait to get your great red hands on the tip."

  Mrs. Peace sat down heavily, with a sigh of relief for her varicose veins, and accepted the cup of tea which the cook poured for her. "Well, I never." She would sit now and savor this affair for quite a long time before she took off her outdoor clothes and went to work.

  "I'll not stand for it," Ellen announced, getting up. "I'll go to Mrs. V."

  "You'll go to the dining room and get your tables cleared and laid up for lunch, that's where you'll go," Goldie told her. "And Phyllis, you get on upstairs. It's laundry day, and you'll be caught before the man comes like you were last time. Ted,

  I heard Mr. V. calling round the place for you ten minutes back. What's that burning, Mrs. Ellis?"

  "My potatoes, I dare say." The cook got up with a sigh. "No peace for the wicked."

  Having disposed of everybody, Goldie poured herself another cup of tea, and sat with Mrs. Peace to enjoy it at leisure, as was her right as queen of the kitchen.

  Ellen went into the dining room, made a face at the crumb-littered tables and crumpled napkins, and went straight out of the other door to find Sybil.

  Sybil was very nice to Louise about the cardigan. "I know you meant it kindly, Lou," she said, "and it was generous of you when you're not so flush yourself. Phyllis is rather pathetic, but I do wish you wouldn't do things like that. It upsets the others and God knows I have enough trouble with them already."

  Louise felt foolish. She had been pleased with herself for her benevolence, although she was beginning to regret the beautiful cardigan, and to wonder what she would say at Christinas when Eva asked why she did not wear it.

  "You'll have to take it back, I'm afraid," Sybil said. "That's the only thing that will satisfy them."

  "I can't do that. I gave it to her."

  "Well, tell her to hide it then, or something. If she hadn't been such an idiot, she wouldn't have paraded round in it. But do something, for God's sake, before they all march out on me with the week end coming."

  Embarrassed, Louise told Phyllis to hide the fatal cardigan until she could take it home, but Phyllis had already taken it off and hidden it under her mattress.

  "I've given it back," she announced in the kitchen at lunch, and the others nodded their heads triumphantly. Only Goldie, who had looked in Louise's drawers again, knew that she had not returned it.

  After six weeks at Driffield Court, Louise had read all the

  readable novels that had been left behind by the summer guests. It was too cold to take her favorite walk down the narrow, winding lane to the sea, and she did not feel like taking bus rides round the island by herself. She had done it last year and there seemed no point in going to the same places again. She went once to Godshill, and walked about, hoping to see J. B. Priestley, but a woman in a sweetshop told her he was not there, so she sheltered under a yew tree from the chilly rain, and caught the bus home again. It had at least passed the afternoon.

  She wrote to her daughters that she was very happy, but time hung heavily. One could not sit and talk in the lounge all day among the old magazines, and often there was no one to talk to, except the Colonel, who was so gentle and humble and anxious to please that he fell over himself to agree with everything you said, however futile.

  Sybil was busy in the hotel most of the day, or out on her affairs about the neighborhood. Miss Dott and Mrs. Arbuthnot were out all day, and on Sundays they played golf. Mrs. Mad-dox seldom wanted to talk, and when she did, her conversation, unlike the Colonel's, was devoted to proving Louise wrong on every point that was raised. Johnny had caught another cold, and was forced to lie in bed and be nursed by Goldie. Ruth Garnham, now quite resigned to staying, was closeted in her room with the clacking typewriter, emerging only for meals, looking as if she had smoked too much.

  Coming in one evening to warm her hands by the fire in the lounge, Miss Dott found Louise looking listlessly through the advertisements for houses in a three-year-old copy of Country Ufe.

  "At a loose end?" Miss Dott asked briskly. She was never idle herself, and it disturbed her to see someone else unoccupied. "There isn't much to do here in the winter, is there, unless you have a career, like Edith and me." They always called the shop their career. They took it very seriously. "It's different for you

  ladies of leisure, of course. I'm surprised you don't start some knitting, or some embroidery/'

  "I can't embroider," Louise said, "though I made a patchwork quilt once. It fell to bits at the laundry. I don't knit very well, either/'

  "And you the mother of three bonny daughters? I'm surprised. You could knit. It's simple. The patterns tell you exactly what to do, and I could help you. I'm a great knitter. Make all my own woollies. You go into Ryde and get a pattern and some wool, and I'll start you off. What shall you make?"

  "I could make some little things for my youngest daughter, perhaps. She's going to have a baby, you know, and I don't suppose she's got anything yet."

  "Capital! Just the ticket, Granny. It will set you up no end. You know what they say about idle hands." Miss Dott rubbed her own firm hands vigorously before the fire, and gave a short laugh of pleasure at having organized somebody into doing something.

  Louise went to Ryde the next day. Sybil ran after her as she was going down the hotel drive to the bus stop on the main road. "If you're going into town, be a love and pick up a couple of chickens for me. They'll be ready at the butcher's
. And the station's just rung up to say there's a parcel there for me. You might collect it, to save me going in. Oh, and if you see any decent cakes knocking around, buy a few. Mrs. Ellis has all those extra people for dinner, and Goldie's got the pip." Sybil never let anybody go to Ryde without giving them some errand. If anyone was so bold as to sail the sea for Portsmouth, they usually found themselves spending half the day hunting for some shop which sold something that Sybil absolutely must have, but whose whereabouts she had been unable to explain coherently.

  Louise staggered to the bus stop in the town with her bag of wool, some cakes, the chickens, which were moistening the bottom of the parcel, and a bulky package, for which she had

  had to pay three and ninepence at the station. She hoped that she could get it back from Sybil Sybil was far from mean, but casual about money.

  The bus would not stop at the hotel drive. It insisted on stopping a hundred yards down the road, as though it thought that if you could afford to stay at Driffield Court, it would do you good to walk. By the time Louise reached the drive gates, the parcels were heavier and more awkward than ever. She flung everything but her bag of wool and needles down in the hedge for someone else to collect. In the drive, she found George, sawing a dead branch off a tree.

  "I got some things in Ryde for Sybil, and I've left them by the gate/' she said. "Perhaps someone could fetch them/*

  "It's going to rain," George muttered, sawing with a set jaw. He was wearing a pair of corduroy trousers and a thick turtle-neck sweater. He looked more like a retired prize-fighter than ever. "I should have thought you could have carried them down the drive/' he said. He was always very rude to Louise.

  "I couldn't. They were too heavy/'

  "So you thought I might as well carry them? Well, I'm busy. They've probably been pinched by now, anyway."

  "Look here, George," Louise thought that it was time she made a stand. "I know you don't like me being here, and you think Sybil's an idiot to let me have the room so cheaply, but I don't see why you always have to be so rude."

  George turned and looked at her as if she were a gnat, the big saw hanging ominously from his hand. "Don't get excited," he said, in his toneless, muttering voice. "I'm not rude. It's Sybil's affair if she wants to clutter up the place with all her hangers-on/'

  Louise turned on her heel and marched up the drive, boiling with rage. She would have liked to say: I'll go tomorrow, but she had nowhere to go to. How would Miriam like it, or Eva, or Anne, if she suddenly turned up on their doorstep when they thought she was safely in the Isle of Wight for the winter?

  "Oh, dear/' Miss Dott said. "You shouldn't have chosen such a complicated pattern. However, we'll have a bash, as they say/' She cast on the stitches for Louise, and explained the tactics of a matinee coat as patiently as if Louise herself were the baby.

  Louise was glad of the knitting, although it often tormented her. She sat in the lounge in the afternoons, hoping that someone would come in soon and light the fire, clicking away at the intricate mass of greying white wool—"Pink or blue would have been more dainty," Miss Dott had said—and holding it up now and again to see if it was beginning to look like what it was meant to be. Often, when Miss Dott came home, she had to unpick all the work that Louise had done to pick up the dropped stitches.

  Sometimes, after dinner, when there was no one amusing in the bar, Sybil would play backgammon with Louise. "Let's have a game tonight, Lou/' she would say at tea time, and Louise would sit in the lounge with the board and counters set out on the card table, wondering whether Sybil was going to come, or whether she should go up and get her knitting.

  Sometimes Sybil did not come. Sometimes she came in late, when Louise had given up hope, and cried: "Oh, Lou darling, I forgot all about you. I got involved with somebody. What a beast I am/'

  "It doesn't matter," Louise would say, feeling Mrs. Maddox jeering silendyfrom the high-backed chair. "I didn't want to play, anyway."

  "That's good," Sybil said easily. "Come and have a drink instead. You're going to bed? Oh, you old fogey. I could stay up all night. Well, bye-bye, love. See you in the morning."

  At week ends, Sybil had less time for Louise than ever. There were usually extra people staying, and dinner parties and lunches for popple who could not find enough food for themselves or their guests at home. Sunday lunch at Sybil's was a popular pastime. Goldie and Phyllis both had to help in the dining room, and the lunches often went on until after three

  o'clock, leaving the harassed staff hardly time to turn round before the Sunday teas began.

  When the hotel was full, Sybil was vivaciously on hand for everyone's pleasure. Unlike George, who was seldom seen at week ends, Sybil was everywhere about the hotel; in the bar, the dining room, the lounges, fraternizing exuberantly with all comers, ladling out the informal camaraderie that gave the hotel its free-and-easy attraction.

  Mrs. Maddox and Mrs. Arbuthnot, who could have become a vinegary character without the sweetening influence of Miss Dott, often complained that Sybil neglected the regulars for the fly-by-nights. At week ends, Mrs. Maddox retired into her shell like an ancient turtle. She brooded all day in her corner of the lounge, her fierce ebony stick beside her at an angle designed to trip anyone who came near.

  On Thursday night, Sybil went to Louise's room in some embarrassment, which was unusual for her. Her jolly, coarse-featured face wore a small frown under its fuzz of hair, from which all the life and natural oils had long ago been bleached.

  "Lou," she said. "I hate to ask you this, but Fm in a bit of a fix for tomorrow/'

  Louise looked up from her letter.

  "I'm a bit pushed for rooms, darling/' Sybil went on. "I've some Americans booked, and now they want to bring another couple with them, and honestly, I haven't got a decent room to give them. I want them to get a good impression. They're at the Embassy, and you know how those sort of people spread the glad word around."

  "You want this room? Well, of course, Sybil. I don't mind at all. I feel bad about having it, anyway. Where do you want me to go?"

  "That's the point. There's only that horrid little room on the third floor where the roof leaks sometimes. Let's just pray it won't rain."

  "I'll put my umbrella up," Louise said. "I don't mind at all." She could not afford to mind. She could only hope that die

  Americans were only staying for the week end and that Sybil would not forget to move her back to her pleasant room.

  Goldie helped her to move her things. Goldie was put out. "I don't hold with it, and I told her ladyship as much," she said, thrusting clothes down into a suitcase as if she were pressing out wine. "I don't approve of having my regulars disturbed for these easy come, easy go characters. But she won't listen to me. You know how she is about Americans. Dollar conscious. Americans! I know them. The drinking waters too hot, and the bath water's too cold, and empty whisky bottles in the wardrobes when they're gone."

  The Americans arrived in an enormous Embassy car, with a pile of bags and golf clubs that stood about on the steps all morning waiting for someone to take them in. On Saturday afternoon they set out to do the island. Sybil went with them, abandoning her other week enders. She never could resist the lure of Americans. They personified for her all that was best in life—large cars, quick drinking, extravagant spending, and a conviction that the world was not meant to be wept for but to enjoy.

  All the lounges were used at tea time, but the regular guests kept to their own room, drawn together in an introverted group, like soldiers eyeing the new draft.

  "Quite taken up with them, hasn't she?" Mrs. Arbuthnot said, as a noise of laughter and banging doors heralded the return of Sybil and the Americans. "Now I suppose we shall never get our tea, till they've been served. I sometimes wonder, Dotty, whether we wouldn't be wiser to look for a place of our own."

  "Don't be so impulsive, Edith," Miss Dott said. "You know it suits us very well here. It solves all our problems. Now you never hear good Mrs. Bickford complain, and she
has to wait her turn like the rest of us."

  Louise murmured something. It was embarrassing to be lauded in public, especially by Miss Dott, who did not mean it.

  Ellen flounced in eventually, took an affronted look round,

  and sent one of the extra waitresses In to give the old fossils their tea. No tips to be had among that lot. They would probably not even see her right when they finally packed up their traps and left. Although 111 be gone long before them, thought Ellen, slouching off to get lemon for the Americans, and what they would think was cream, although it was only the top of the milk.

  By Sunday afternoon, the staff were all as bad tempered as Ellen. It had been a hectic week end, and was not over yet, with the sun being so inconsiderate as to shine brightly enough to bring people out for a run in the car and a hotel tea.

  Last night, Sybil and the Americans had not come to dinner until nine o'clock, and had kept the barman up until long after closing time, which, he boasted next morning, he was going to make known to the proper authorities. Goldie had gone to bed at midnight and risen before six. There had been ham sandwiches asked for at dear knows what hour last night, and all the breakfast trays to carry up to the rooms this morning. Goldie, usually as resilient as a tough piece of steak, was feeling her age. She vented her fatigue on Phyllis, who could do nothing right, and had dropped the last of the tartare sauce on the dining-room carpet last night.

  There was a crowd for Sunday lunch, with hungry parties waiting in the bar until they could get a table. Sybil always told the waitresses never to hustle the first batch of eaters. "People have a right to enjoy their meal in peace," she said, but the staff knew that she liked to keep the others spending money in the bar within the limits of their endurance. She knew the exact moment when a man would not order one more drink, and would leave the hotel if he did not get some food. She would then miraculously produce a table in the dining room for him and he would forget the long wait in his gratification at being especially favored.

  Johnny, who was a Catholic, had taken Louise to /church in his battered little car, which made a noise like a lawn mower. It was a long time since Louise had been able to go to Mass,