by Anne Doughty
‘What d’you think’s happened, June? Granda says they used to be very well off. Were they?’ Clare asked as she sipped her tea.
‘Oh aye, Clarey. I remember before the war the big parties there useta be. And whatever was left over, should it be smoked salmon or Irish ham, or meringue pie or trifle, it was shared out for the indoor and outdoor staff to take home. You wouldn’t see the likes of that these days even if you could get the stuff. Every wee bit there is left goes into the larder or that big fridge the Missus got back in 1940 before everything got so scarce.’
She reached forward and refilled Clare’s teacup, cast an eye out of the kitchen window to make sure her three girls were busy with the jobs she’d given them.
‘Here, dear, have another wee scone. Isn’t it nice to see a bit of white flour again?’
‘Lovely scones, June. John always says he can’t understand why he’s not fat as you’re such a good cook.’
June tossed her head and made a dismissive remark, but Clare knew she was pleased. She was sure June and John must be a very happy couple. Although they both worked hard, she’d never heard either of them complain about the long hours up at the house or the jobs waiting to be done by whoever got back home first, except in a light-hearted way.
‘I think the beginning of it was when William and Adeline were killed over in London. Oh dear, that was a terrible shock. Old Mr Richardson went roun’ lookin’ like a ghost for months. He was just devastated. I think William was his favourite, an’ he was a very clever man. He’d just got into Stormont like the father an’ they had him in Economic Development or suchlike. He wasn’t the boss but he was gettin’ that way. I think he was the one kept the family right with their money, the investments and so on, for they haven’t all that big an amount of land, not in these parts anyway, though there’s more down in Fermanagh.’
June gave a complicated explanation of the Fermanagh connections of the Richardsons, which Clare found difficult to follow, and then returned to the fortunes of Drumsollen.
‘Not only was William gone, leavin’ his son to be educated the expensive way these people think fit, but Edward, William’s older brother loses his wife and kinda goes off the rails. They say he drank his way through a fortune before he met this widow with a daughter and a bit of money of her own. He farms out Caledon way and is a great horsey man. Hunts and trains showjumpers. Always back and forth to Dublin. They say if it weren’t for the wife, he’d have to sit on an egg less and it’s her father pays for their boy’s education. As well as the girl, Virginia her name is, they’ve a boy Edward would be a couple o’ years younger than Andrew. Have you ever met young Andrew?’ she threw out, as she stood up and had another look out at her girls.
To her amazement, Clare found herself blushing. She was terribly grateful when June opened the window and asked her elder daughter if they’d finished doing the vegetables.
‘June, it’s nearly your supper time and I’m keeping you back,’ Clare said, recovering herself. She stood up and carried their empty cups to the sink. ‘Yes, I’ve met him twice,’ she went on. ‘The first time he mended my bike down by the gates and the second time was up at Stormont, of all places. I was visiting with my cousin and he’d taken his grandfather up to some meeting or other. We all went to look at the view from Scrabo Tower while he was waiting for him. We had a lovely afternoon.’
‘Aye ye woud that. Sure Andrew’s good company. He coud talk to anyone, high or low. Whether it was the Queen herself or the old char woman, it’s all the same to Andrew. Just like his father. Doesn’t go down well with the Missus. That’s why we don’t see much of him, more’s the pity. I suppose travelling is expensive. That’s her excuse anyway.’
The door opened and the three girls appeared. The eldest, Helen, carried a bowl of water full of peeled potatoes. The next, Jennifer, had a dish of chopped cabbage and the youngest, Caroline, carried a black kitten with large blue eyes.
June stood back, her hands on her hips, and laughed.
‘Are we going to have Kitty for supper then?’ she said, picking up the youngest child. ‘Didn’t I tell you to bring the supper in till we get it on the stove for Daddy comin’?’
The child laughed and threw her spare arm round her mother’s neck, while hanging on firmly to the kitten with the other.
‘Hope I haven’t kept John’s supper back,’ Clare said smiling. ‘Tell him it was my fault.’ She thanked June for the tea and scones and for her company.
‘Sure it was a pleasure to see you, Clarey, an’ I’ll not ferget what you told me. I’ll maybe hear something woud be a help to you. Now wait a wee minit. Take yer hurry, as the sayin’ is,’ she insisted, as she lowered the child to the floor and took a paper bag from the kitchen drawer.
‘Take a few wee scones for you an’ Robert. Tell him I was askin’ for him. An’ I’m sure somethin’ will turn up,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Never fear, Clarey. I’ll keep my ears open an’ so will John,’ she said cheerfully, as she put the potatoes into a saucepan and set them to boil.
‘I’d not be one bit surprised if somethin’ didn’t just fall inta yer lap.’
John Wiley always thought there was a touch of the fortune teller about his wife, but when he arrived back from Drumsollen House a few nights after Clare’s visit and heard a Saturday job had appeared for her, he reckoned it was little short of miraculous.
‘Now draw over an’ eat your meal like a good man. Sure ye can take a run down to the forge when ye’ve had it an’ tell her the good news yerself,’ June said, as she took a covered plate from the oven and put it on the table in front of him. ‘Eat up now, for ye must be starvin’ an’ it’s late. Was it the car again?’
John nodded sharply as he tucked in to his meal. As Old Man Richardson often said, the car, like himself, was getting on in years. These older models needed much more attention to keep them going.
‘So tell us what happened, June,’ he said, as he hungrily lowered bacon and cabbage with forkfuls of mashed potato. ‘All I heerd in the course o’ the day was that aul’ Martha Robinson had handed in her cards, an’ you’d spoken for a girl for Saturdays. I can’t see how that’s come about atall.’
June laughed heartily and nodded as she put the kettle to boil.
‘Ye coud have knocked me down wi’ a feather when the Missus came into the kitchen. You’d know somethin’ was well amiss fer she niver sets foot beyond the end of the carpets. The long an’ the short of it was, Martha’s been goin’ to the tent mission at Lisnadill, this great evangelist chap they’re all takin’ about. Martha’s got religion. An’ she’s got it bad. So the first thing she does is give up comin’ to the house on a Sunday to do the lunch. It’ll be doun on her knees mornin’ and night from now on.’
‘Aye, but that’s Sundays,’ said John looking puzzled.
‘It is indeed. But the Missus is no fool. She knows fine well that you’ll not get anyone to come an’ work like Martha did, so she comes askin’ can I make a meal on Saturday she can heat up on Sunday.’
June made the tea and continued.
‘So I says to her, “Well, maybe if I had some help meself on a Saturday I coud do a dinner. But what about the rest of Martha’s work?” An’ I told her all the jobs Martha did while the Sunday dinner was cookin’ an’ in the afternoon forby. “What about them?”, says I.’
John watched as she poured him a mug of tea, a slow smile on his lips. He’d seen what was coming, but he’d not spoil her story.
‘I suppose we could get a girl in on Saturday to relieve you and do Martha’s jobs,’ she says to me. ‘Then you could make a casserole or a meat pudding, or something of that kind for Sunday.’
June grinned, poured herself a cup of tea and stood with her back to the stove drinking it.
‘So I shook my head an’ says, “Ach, sure gettin’ a girl on a Saturday will be desperit hard. Ye’ll hardly get one for less than fifteen shilling.”’
John laughed and finished his tea.
‘
She wouldn’t have liked that.’
‘No, not one bit. But by the time I’d finished she’d agreed to think about twelve and sixpence if only I coud find someone.’
John came and put his arm round her, gave her a kiss and a hug.
‘Yer a great girl, June. Ye’ve a head on yer shoulders an’ I don’ know where I’d be wi’out ye. An’ I’m as pleased for wee Clarey as I woud be if it were one of our own.’
‘Ach, it’s great to be able to do a good turn. Away down now, like a good man an’ tell her. Say, we may leave it a fortnight so I can make sure she’ll get her twelve and six. By then the Missus’ll be gettin’ real worried so there’ll be no bother about it at all.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
On the last Saturday in September, a glorious autumn morning, the sun melting the rime of frost on the long grass by the roadside, Clare cycled halfway into Armagh and parked her bicycle against the low wall where Andrew Richardson had once found it with subsiding tyres.
Her pause was only momentary. She opened the gates, wheeled her bicycle through, closed them behind her and pedalled slowly up the steep gravel drive that wove its way around the side of the smoothly contoured hill that all but concealed the house itself from those who passed by on the road beyond.
Both June and John had made sure she knew exactly where to turn off the driveway and on to the narrow path that led to the back of the house, where to leave her bicycle out of sight and where to find the stone steps leading down to the biggest of the basement rooms from which June Wiley now ran the entire establishment.
She passed tall, dusty windows protected by thick iron bars and found the heavy wooden door to the basement. She closed it behind her and stepped cautiously down the stone steps that dropped steeply into a long, empty corridor. The sunlight threw bands of heavy shadow down the peeling, whitewashed walls and across the bare, echoing wooden floor which ran past all the basement rooms.
Clare felt like an intruder. She was grateful that her flat school shoes made no sound in the echoing space, her silent step penetrating the defences of a different world and moving her apprehensively towards an unknown objective.
‘Good girl yerself,’ said June, as Clare came into the big kitchen and took off her coat. ‘Yer in good time,’ she added, glancing up at the enormous clock which hung on the discoloured walls. ‘I’ll show you roun’ down here. If we’re lucky an’ they’re out this afternoon I can show you the big rooms. You’ll have to go up to do the beds, but use the back stairs an’ don’t stop to look roun’ ye,’ she warned. ‘At all costs don’t let anyone see you. I don’t understan’ the woman at all, but she’d like to pretend this house is run by itself. She can’t stan’ seein’ “staff” as she calls them, especially if its young ones. She can just about say a civil word to me because she knows she has to,’ she added, as she handed Clare a well-starched white apron, thin with age, and a cap that reminded her of Miss Muffet in a long-gone picture book.
The day passed slowly, though Clare was neither bored nor troubled by the tasks to be done. She remembered other first days in her life and wondered if the strange extension in time was because everything was so new. Perhaps it made you more aware of each separate experience, the first time you changed the sheets on the huge four-poster bed in the south guest room, the first time you carpet swept the threadbare rugs in the upstairs corridor, the first time you cleaned windows with June’s own strange-smelling mixture of water, methylated spirit and vinegar.
John had told her how lovely the gardens had been before the war. She studied the dim outlines of paths and walkways as she polished the old window glass, so thickened in places it distorted the pattern of trees and shrubs which lay beyond, creating an impressionistic picture of colour and shape. There’d been a rose garden and a white garden and beyond both a pleasure garden with a little fountain and a pergola covered in scented honeysuckle. The flowers had gone during the war, replaced at first by plantings of potatoes and vegetables. After the war, as labour got even scarcer, the plots were grassed over or left to the buttercups and foxgloves. Some rose beds at the front of the house did survive. ‘For the benefit of visitors,’ said John wryly.
Clare wondered if Mr Richardson still kept up his interest in new varieties of garden plants or whether that too had gone with the economies the last years had brought. As she worked her way round to the windows on the south front, she found her answer. Looking down through the cracked and green-stained panes of an ancient conservatory, she could see a prolific vine clinging to the walls of the house. Opposite, on a wooden work bench, where tools and bowls of compost sat ready to use, there was a blaze of bright colour from rows of plants arranged in order of height against the outer glass wall.
‘Clare’s Delight,’ she whispered to herself, as she began to dust.
She smiled as she thought of her window boxes, just beginning to show the sad effects of the chilly nights. But they were still in bloom, amongst them the fuchsias propagated from the one precious cutting she always referred to as ‘John Wiley’s ill-gotten gains’. With the seedlings of lobelia and alyssum Granny Hamilton had given her and cuttings from a pink geranium of Uncle Jack’s, the window boxes had been a delight all summer. It was such a pity the perennials would soon have to be repotted and go back to the window sills for the winter. She imagined Mr Richardson walking into his conservatory and seeing his precious plants in bloom even when there was snow on the ground outside.
She paused, intrigued by the vase of fine china flowers she’d picked up as she dusted her way along the mantelpiece. The house was so full of objects. Every possible surface was covered with them, so she couldn’t dust or carpet sweep without moving something.
There were souvenirs from foreign travels, pieces of decorated brass and copper with swirling patterns and Arabic inscriptions, polished wood trays inlayed with mother of pearl and collections of exotic seashells. Other souvenirs came from nearer home. A collection of individual cups and saucers, all different, very prettily patterned and decorated in gold, small plates and vases in Belleek ware, china mugs with ‘A present from Dublin’ or ‘A present from Galway’. Then there were things made from wood, a Dutch windmill with sails that turned, a lacquered Saint Bernard dog complete with brandy barrel, a miniature cuckoo clock on a stand, a bowl of carved flowers painted in bright colours, an icon with Christ’s figure outlined in gold.
Just getting to the windows to clean them meant moving small writing tables, chairs with ladder backs, rotating bookcases and stools with worn tapestry seats, all beautiful pieces of furniture, the wood smooth, its colour mellowed by time. After dusting and polishing them, she’d felt quite upset to find modern magazine racks with shiny, black wooden legs and round, red plastic feet in some of the bedrooms.
‘This is Andrew’s real home’, she said, wondering which one of the many bedrooms he might have occupied as a little boy, before that ill-fated journey taking him to prep-school in England. Did he still have a room of his own, she asked herself, or was he given whichever one was currently available, when he visited?
How ironic that she should now be spending a whole day each week in the place where he so longed to be. But it would have to remain her secret. She’d tell him all the news of Drumsollen that was likely to come her way via John Wiley, just as she had done over the last year, but she’d not mention her job. It would be too unkind if he were feeling particularly homesick. Besides, it might be really painful for him to know she could see and touch the objects that had meaning for him when he himself was so far away.
She felt sad when she thought about Andrew and his love of Drumsollen. It was bad enough to have lost one’s parents, but it must be even harder to feel there was nowhere you belonged, nowhere you felt free to be yourself and do what you wanted to do. She had never forgotten those awful weeks in Belfast with no place of her own, no bedroom to run to when the tears wouldn’t stop, no orchard to hide in when everything went wrong, no kitchen to clean when action would ease the tensi
on of anxiety, or the weariness of waiting upon events.
She wondered if there was anywhere Andrew could be himself. Cambridge, probably. But he hardly ever wrote about his studies. From what he had said his great-aunt in Norfolk sounded like a very sympathetic lady. But his Ulster family was more problematic. He was clearly fond of his grandfather and he wrote cheerfully of his cousins, Virginia and Edward, in Caledon, but when he had to visit his aunts in Fermanagh and Cavan he was clearly uneasy. His postcard from Dublin gave away the real distress of coping with his grandmother’s sister, a woman who seemed even more unbending in her approach to him than his grandmother herself.
‘Moved around like a parcel,’ she said aloud, as she moved a stack of boys’ annuals from in front of a bookcase, so she could run the Ewbank across the threadbare carpet and pick up the fluff that had fallen from it when she’d dusted.
‘You look real tired, Clarey,’ said June kindly, when Clare came back into the kitchen in the late afternoon.
‘More stairs than at the Grange,’ she replied, laughing. ‘I feel as if I’ve walked miles.’
She collapsed gratefully at the enormous scrubbed table where once half a dozen maids sat to prepare vegetables, or pastry, when the Richardsons had a shooting party or weekend guests.
‘Here, have a cup of tea.’
June poured her a cup and passed her the milk.
‘You can clean the silver when you’ve had a break. That’ll give you a sit down while I start this casserole for tomorrow.’
Clare shivered and sipped her tea gratefully. Despite having worked so hard, she’d got thoroughly cold in the unheated rooms. The warmth of the kitchen was so comforting. She was so tired, she could just lay her head down on the table and go to sleep on the spot.