Wait Till I Tell You
Page 21
‘And move! And bend! And stretch!’ sang the voice at the centre of the house, unsexed as a parrot. Mary walked up the right flank of the outside staircase up to the façade and looked in through the ballroom window.
Accompanied by a piano, the old men and women in nightwear or loose combinations of cotton followed the gestures of the strong fit body, wielding a smart black cane, that called to them. In their movements they gave hints of what they saw, like quiet flightless birds. They did not dance or exercise so much as talk with their hands, their necks, their knees, remembering longer, more abandoned, gestures they had once made.
The room smelled of powder and pads, and the unkind reek of setting lotion. The hairdresser had been that morning to see to the hair of the women. His visit was less to do with appearance than appearances. The old men hid in the smoking room when the hairdresser came, in order to set up their own evil pong.
It was while the perms and sets and demiwaves were taking shape on a Thursday that Mary was able to join Mr Charteris in the pantry.
He had won her with his golden tongue.
‘You’re new,’ he said. ‘I always show the new maids the ropes.’
She knew better than to correct his words. A number of them, being old, spoke like old people couldn’t help but do. She’d a lot of time for old people. She’d worked in several homes before, though none as exclusive – meaning expensive – as this. Some of them paid their own bills, others got paid for by children, not without a grumble at the end of the month.
Mr Charteris had arrangements, and that was all Mary had heard, though she had heard one old trout call him a ‘scholarship boy’ and then whinny with the pleasure being unpleasant gives to those who do not fight it.
Mr Charteris continued: ‘Any difficulties at all with the other girls, come straight to me. Don’t waste your time going to Mrs How’s Yer Father or troubling old Oojamaflip.’ He twisted the stud under his bow tie and then levelled off its ends. ‘There’s nothing I can’t tell you about the house. Nothing at all. Man and boy I’ve been here, starting in the carpenter’s yard on crackbacked chairs and coming right through till I got where I am now.’
Mary was unsure what a person might want to know about a house, and where exactly Mr Charteris had got to.
‘God, it must be old if you’ve been here all along,’ she said, and was delighted when he laughed. He had assertive teeth, every one his own.
‘I followed on after only five others like myself. That’s not many butlers over the two-seventy-odd years. Not that the earlier ones could rightly be called butlers.’
Mary, who understood from the television that butlers were men who stood still, sneered, and talked posh, asked, ‘The work can’t have been hard, though?’
Mr Charteris considered the mornings of his life when he, at much the age of this girl, had collaborated in the daily launch of the house, cleaned, polished, dazzling, rebegun, all on the sweat of eight men and sixteen girls, repeating with their bodies actions of the most tedious and exhausting kind in order to give a context to the ease of others, like men blowing bottles from the burning roots of their lungs just to hold scent that would waft off an earlobe unnoticed in the breeze.
‘I’ve had a woman in every room of the house,’ said Mr Charteris to Mary.
He revisited the house in the way he preferred in his mind, through the oxters and ribbons and stays and mouthings of the Roses, Daisys, Rubys, Violets, Marias and Elizas who had been drawn by him into each room’s mystery, so that he understood the attic through Hetty’s red hair and startling milky snores, the music room through the stifled tears and later laughter of Lavender as he lowered the music stool slowly beneath her by swivelling the mahogany discs at either side within her skirts, the ballroom by the chilly biting of Daphne as they pushed together inside the curtains, the kitchen through the blissful humming of Euphemia’s skin under his mouth, and later through the regrettable harrying of his own late wife.
‘Every room?’ said Mary, not interested, nor paying attention, really, not having listened, as people often do not to the old. She just couldn’t help, being a trained geriatric nurse, running with the feeble thread. When she found it attached to a cunning rope she was caught by her own decency, the first snare.
Knowing well the sunshine it is to be needed, even by someone who means little, and sensing his distinct, perhaps unrepeatable, advantage, Mr Charteris said to Mary, relying on her tenderness and on his own undimmed brown eyes, ‘Every room, my dear, except the pantry.’
These afternoons, the little treats of food given privately, the counterfeit tasks undertaken by Mr Charteris in the aftermath of his making good that late omission, went on beyond the one time it would in principle have taken. Who could say whether Mary had not learned from the old man, just before he sank, the radiant satisfaction of domestic habit, that it was not she who escaped from regulation and certainty into the life of the back of the house, into invented duties and words that were as plain and mysterious as the low windows giving out on to the deeps of the park where no one went any more, or not so that it was known?
The back stairs of the house were cool even in this heat. The service lift creaked on its cables down past the stone stairs to Francis, where he stood with the laundry hamper poised on its mobile ramp, ready to load. He pushed the creaking thing in to the lift, and pulled on the cables, calling upwards, ‘All yours, Mary.’
He heard her tug and brake on the cables, and ran up the stone stairs to her, ready to pull out the hamper and help her roll it to the laundry room on the pallet on casters that stood ready in the top corridor. The floors were timber, not lino, up here.
‘Come and help me sort it if you can spare the time,’ said Mary. ‘It’s beautiful work.’
He supposed at first that she spoke that way on account of having a vocation, as he supposed a nurse must.
But the work was beautiful today in the laundry room, its high brief windows letting light in from both sides of the roof, the shelves and wooden floor smelling of dry lavender and lavender wax. Mary and Francis pulled out sleeve after heavy sleeve of laundered white sheet.
‘We could do the laundry here if it was brought up to date. There’s the room, but no machines. They’d cost. But Lord knows what you cost.’
‘It’s not rightly me. I drive the van. They wash the sheets.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘You look well today, Mary,’ said Francis, certain he would not be misunderstood. ‘You always look well. It must be encouraging for the residents.’
‘Thanks,’ said Mary. ‘All I am is alive.’
Outside two pigeons skirmished in a lead gutter, the green and pink off their breasts firing through the old glass, their exalted cooing boastful.
‘I’ve a grandmother living at home with me and my friend at the moment. She works with papers. Lately there have been complaints that she’s losing her grip. I don’t think she is. I think she’s being tactful.’
‘Tactful?’ Mary pushed a pile of sheets to the back of a shelf. It moved with a toppling weight over the papered shelf and then settled against the white wall. ‘Who to?’
‘In case my friend and I want a bit of space.’
‘Do you now?’
‘Well, we wouldn’t mind space. She covers everything with bits of paper. And she brings home worshippers of whatever denomination has irritated her recently.’
‘Irritated her?’
‘By keeping a messy churchyard. Or, if she can get in, an untidy church. They tend to be rural. She reaches those by bus.’
‘She brings them home?’
‘Yes, you know. After she’s tidied up the place of worship, she attends a service or two and then lures them home. They sit and talk. She draws them out. They frequently return. We’ve made a number of friends.’
‘So she is active and sociable?’
Francis did not like the sound of those words. They described human traits with a functional tongue.
�
��I love her. When I say we could do with a bit more space, that’s all I mean. She takes up a certain amount of room. I want her with us, unless she wants to be away herself. How do I find out what she wants? I don’t believe her work is slipping. I don’t see it. I’ve only my mother’s word for it. Chuck me those draw sheets and I’ll go up the steps.’
‘You want to know what she wants?’
‘I want to know what she wants.’
‘Bring her here to look. It’s one of the best. The place is beautiful. She could fill her whole room – they get a room to themselves, you know – with pieces of paper. She could have visitors. At least between certain hours. Not in the evening. They get a bath when they want, as long as it’s twice a week and they don’t use bath oil. That ups the fractures and that looks bad. They don’t have shepherd’s pie every single day. Sister doesn’t always open their letters. The toilets have emergency bells that get an annual service. There’s a weekly hairdresser. There are socials.’
‘It sounds great,’ said Francis, his heart flat.
‘Yes,’ said Mary, ‘and it’s not free either.’
Francis’s grandmother replaced the telephone. She enjoyed the fact that her daughter Kay did not recognise her when she called up in the voice of a learned and exasperated historian or an angry man of letters who had made allowances for an old woman long enough.
Indexing had at last lost its charm for Lavender Maclehose. She had it in mind to get away, and to use the part of her savings she had not earmarked for these two dear good boys. There was the funeral account tidied up, with the undertaker at last convinced about her plan of having confetti and mimosa – whatever the time of year – and making sure that six dozen pink roses were left behind in the vestry for the cleaner.
‘I’m home,’ called her grandson. ‘Do you fancy a cig while I cut a lettuce?’
‘Delicious,’ said his grandmother, hoping it would do for whatever he had said. So much of her time now was spent day-dreaming. She had it planned. It would be soon. Her knowledge of rural buses would help.
It was still light in the small garden. Francis cut a pale crinkled lettuce. It left a woody boss, weeping milk. He lit his grandmother’s cigarette and looked at the gardens beyond, the wigwams of runner beans with their red flowers, the tipsy roses and tired children refusing to leave their darkening climbing frames.
‘Don’t ever think you must leave unless it’s what you want,’ he said to his grandmother. ‘We’ve all the room in the world here for you, you know that. Pretend I haven’t said this.’
Pat had brought the perfect dinner for the three of them off the last shift. They sat in the silvery narrow garden. There was cold soup made out of herbs and cream, a cheese the size of a flat iron, and two slices of a kind of berry cake. They burned a khaki candle to keep off the gnats. It was an old citronella candle from the ironmongery where Francis had once worked. They had enough nails for life.
Lavender had taken care not to tidy up in any depth before she ran away. She said goodnight to Pat and to Francis in her usual brusque fashion, even remembering to cross the bedroom floor again and again as she did most nights.
When she was sure they were asleep, she took her grip and left the two letters on the kitchen counter, beside the kettle. One for her daughter, one for the two men.
She closed the door with a dog-owner’s stealth.
The street was drenched with dew and lamplight as she walked down it and out towards the bypass.
It was too early for milkfloats, too late for country buses. She walked more quickly than she had for years. With no one to watch her, she was again young as she made her way to the road that led to the house she had known before Kay was born, the house where she had worked so hard she vowed to work with her brain only, ever after, so that she had worked nights to become a housekeeper of books, a spring-cleaner of the alphabet.
She was on her way back to the house that she had come to miss as you miss the use of your young body, the house she was ready to reinhabit at the end. She dreamed as she made her way along the awakening road of working again at the dusting and ceaseless polishing of wood, the testing of the fine furniture to see it was all in working order so that others might use it, others who did not know that on the piano stool where sat little Miss Veronica there had only that morning been a spin and a flurry at the heart of a whirl of petticoats scented with nothing more rare than lavender wax.
Acknowledgements
The following stories first appeared elsewhere:
‘Shredding the Icebergs’, New Scottish Writing, Ed. Harry Ritchie (Bloomsbury, 1996)
‘Carla’s Face’, Flamingo Scottish Short Stories (Flamingo, 1995)
‘The Only Only’, New Writing 3, Eds. Andrew Motion and Candice Rodd (Minerva in association with the British Council, 1994)
‘Those American Thoughts’, New Scottish Writing 1997 (Flamingo, 1997)
‘On the Shingle’, 20 Under 35, Ed. Peter Straus (Sceptre, 1988)
‘Wally Dugs’, The Devil and Dr Tuberose: Scottish Short Stories, 1991 (HarperCollins, 1991)
‘Homesickness’, Storia 4 Green (Pandora, 1990)
‘The Buttercoat’, Independent on Sunday (June 1997)
‘A Revolution in China’, New Writing 5, Eds. Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (Vintage in association with the British Council, 1996)
‘Sweetie Rationing’, Soho Square 2, Ed. Ian Hamilton (Bloomsbury, 1989)
‘A Jeely Piece’, Looking for the Spark (HarperCollins, 1994)
‘Seven Magpies’, New Writing 4, Eds. A. S. Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst (Vintage in association with the British Council, 1995)
‘Strawberries’, A Roomful of Birds: Scottish Short Stories 1990 (Collins, 1990)
‘White Goods’, Observer (6 August 1989)
‘Advent Windows’, City Limits (15–29 December 1988)
‘On the Seventh Day of Christmas’, Observer (1 January 1995)
‘Being a People Person’, Revenge, Ed. Kate Saunders (Virago, 1990)
‘With Every Tick of the Heart’, The Catch, Ed. Peter Ayrton (Serpent’s Tail, 1997)
‘Pass the Parcel’, Femmes de Sícle, Ed. Joan Smith (Chatto & Windus, 1992)
‘Change of Use’, A Bloomsbury Quid (Bloomsbury, 1996)
Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize, A Little Stranger (1989), Debatable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent surgery that cut off her eyelids and harvested tendons from her leg to hold up what remained. Her most recent book is her critically-acclaimed memoir, What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness.
By the Same Author
A Case of Knives
A Little Stranger
Debatable Land
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
First published in Great Britain 1997
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Candia McWilliam 1997
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