Drawing the Line

by Judith Cutler

  ‘I told you,’ I said firmly, as, arms akimbo, I surveyed it, ‘this kitchen’s a health hazard. I bet if the English Heritage people saw it –’

  ‘Not the Gestapo! Spare me!’

  ‘What we’ll do is this. We’ll decide when we’re going to stop. And we’ll work flat out till then. But then we do stop. Full stop. Let’s just see how much we can get done. Bottles in this sack, so they can go to the bottle bank –’

  ‘How on earth does that work?’ he asked, with a delighted grin.

  He wasn’t so keen when he heard the explanation.

  ‘We’ll clear this table altogether, shall we, so if we unearth any china, and it’s worth repairing, I can sort it out. The rest we put in this sack. Paper rubbish in that. Food – yuck – in that.’

  He nodded. ‘What time shall we finish? Noon? Oh, all right. Twelve-thirty. Then what?’

  ‘I suppose we stop for lunch.’

  We’d both earned the champagne by the time we’d finished. No, stopped. It’d take another three or four long sessions to get the whole kitchen anything like clean. Then it’d need decorators. After a Chow Mein Pot Noodle, I looked at my watch.

  ‘You don’t have to go yet! You haven’t had your free trip round the house yet. You only saw a bit of it the other day. Come on – cock the old snook at the Gestapo.’

  ‘These people may be fierce,’ I said, not joking at all, ‘but they’re trying to save beautiful and important things. The Gestapo were bad through and through.’ Half one of my unfinished GCSE projects said so. ‘So you should find another nickname for them.’

  ‘Goody Two-Shoes, eh? All right. Let’s look at some of the naughty bits. See if they’ll shock you. No fainting, now – my back isn’t up to carrying damsels downstairs. Mind you,’ he continued, ‘I was always more interested in carrying damsels upstairs. Now, the library first. Do you know, they won’t even let me have keys to the bookcases? Good job I’d already taken some of my favourites. Not that I have much time for reading, these days.’

  ‘What would you read if you did?’ I managed to ask. Naughty bits? Damsels? My palms were sweating.

  ‘These?’ He looked about him. ‘Well, I don’t know that I would – most of this stuff’s in Latin or Greek, you know. And it’s too heavy to take to the bog with you. Or the bath. Imagine taking great tomes like that when you took your ablutions.’ He roared with laughter.

  I peered at the leather-bound volumes. There wasn’t much to get excited about, from my point of view, histories of Rome jostling with estate rolls. But there were some old-looking, possibly first edition Fieldings, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews: what a pity he hadn’t retrieved those! Yes, and a row of Fanny Burneys, Evelina included. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the truth about my name, but I remembered Griff’s dictum.

  Lord Elham was restless. ‘You can pay a fiver to see this any day of the week. Let me show you my nursery. And the schoolroom. It’s right over my present quarters. God knows why they wouldn’t let me have that floor too.’

  Perhaps they thought he had enough as it was.

  ‘Come on. Let’s sneak up a servants’ staircase. I know you’ll enjoy that.’

  I did.

  The nursery hadn’t been prettied up with Victorian toys like those you see in National Trust properties. It was a gloomy little room, with some empty bookshelves, a cupboard and little else. No artistically placed dolls’ houses and ancient prams. Compared with the child’s bedrooms I’d occupied, the wallpaper was dreary, and I’d bet the paintwork oozed nice toxic lead. Still, Lord Elham wasn’t exactly a young man: perhaps children’s wallpaper wasn’t available when he was growing up. And with no children.

  ‘Didn’t you ever feel like doing this up for your own children?’ I heard myself asking.

  ‘Good God, no!’ His laugh was as explosive as Titus’s yesterday. ‘I – I say, look at all this stuff in here,’ he interrupted himself, squatting by the cupboard. ‘You seem to know about these things – must be worth a mint, eh?’ He fished out jigsaws, board games, a child’s loom – goodness, it still had some moth-eaten wool on it. ‘Meant to make a scarf with that. See – I was trying to weave a gun in there. The Gunners, see. Arsenal. No team down here to support, you see.’

  A normal little boy. ‘Did you ever get to see them?

  ‘One of my godparents was a director. Best seats – met the players.’ He reeled off a list of names than meant nothing to me.

  I was on my knees beside him. Chess and draughts. Guns. A modelling kit. A John Bull printing set. Ah! A Stieff teddy bear, still with his button in his ear.

  I held him out. ‘He’s a real collector’s item.’

  ‘Good God. Old Edward. Good job the Gestapo didn’t get hold of him. He’s coming down with me. Come on, time for some more champers. What are you doing?’

  ‘Putting all this stuff away.’

  ‘Oh, leave it for the bloody Gestapo. No, it all belongs to the vultures, doesn’t it? The bloody Trust,’ he explained. ‘But Edward – he belongs to me!’

  I stayed where I was, putting everything away as neatly as I could, until I heard him calling, ‘Lena? Where the hell are you? Champers time!’

  ‘Can’t I see the schoolroom first?’

  ‘Why not? Here you are. This is where my nanny and then the governess slept.’

  ‘That sounds really Victorian!’ So was the room. You wouldn’t have needed to remind its occupant that she was one of the lower orders. The room screamed it.

  ‘Suppose it was. Anyway, normal enough after that. Prep school. Eton. Cambridge. For a bit,’ he added with an impish smile. ‘Soon as I’d got my hands on the old man’s dosh, Cambridge went hang. Pity, I suppose. Still, it wouldn’t have done to become a desiccated old academic. Ever met any of the buggers?’

  Tell him about the Oxford scholar I’d met? No, keep schtum.

  ‘Talk about narrow-minded.’ His voice changing, he added, ‘Single-minded, too, I suppose. Sometimes I wish I’d had something to focus on.’ He looked around the room. ‘Not much of a place, is it? No wonder none of the governesses stayed very long.’

  The schoolroom was more interesting. Someone had taken the trouble to frame photographs and sketches. The curtains were what caught my eye, not just because they looked newer than everything else in the room. I’d never seen a design anything like it, strong shapes that looked like Japanese letters printed in a deep orange on a lemony ground. I took a corner and held it out.

  ‘My goodness! Look at the time. We’ll miss Neighbours!’

  ‘These curtains –’

  ‘Another time, another time.’ He was out of the door by now.

  I sprinted after him. ‘But what are the naughty bits you talked about?’

  ‘Look, I’m worried about Harold –’

  I’d never got used to Griff’s habit of an after-lunch nap, but I’d come to expect it. After all, he wasn’t a young man. But to see Lord Elham dozing off irritated me. He was only in his fifties, and hadn’t exactly exerted himself in our kitchen-cleaning activities. Perhaps it was the booze. I’d had one glass only – well, I was driving – and he’d had the rest of the bottle. Half of me was tempted to grab the egg cup again and go. He probably wouldn’t miss it. But whatever else Griff had taught me over the last couple of years, he’d dinned into me the importance of good manners. And I knew that sneaking off without saying thank you was not good manners at all. Especially with an egg cup worth three or four hundred.

  I mooched back to the kitchen, putting my gloves on. I might as well make myself useful. I took them off again. Lord Elham didn’t want a clean kitchen, and wouldn’t thank me for my efforts. All this was simply a response to some button in me that the sight of so much dirt was pressing. If only I could remember what it was.

  I wandered over to the pile of china I’d thought worth salvaging. By some miracle most of it was simply dirty. Well, what were sinks for? I turned the hot tap, holding a hand out hopefully. Nothing. OK, there was a tri
ckle from the cold tap, but that was useless, especially without Fairy Liquid or whatever. Useless. So I loaded as much as I thought safe to carry into a filthy washing up bowl, and set off for the official part of the house and the ladies’ loos I’d used the other day. Plenty of hot water, some of the vultures’ fine toilet soap, and three sinks side by side: soaking, washing, rinsing. Perfect.

  ‘Who the devil told you you could wander round my house?’ Lord Elham’s pale, flabby cheeks were puce, and quivering with rage.

  ‘You did,’ I said.

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Just before your nap. You told me to amuse myself. So I did. By rescuing some of your china. There’s a couple of dessert dishes here I reckon are two hundred years old. Probably more.’

  Iris had a cat who used to fix you when you had fish scraps. Lord Elham looked so much like Araminta I nearly laughed.

  ‘Really? Worth a bob or two?’

  ‘Probably. And this game pie dish – look at those gorgeous colours.’

  ‘And all you were doing was washing up?’

  ‘No hot water in the kitchen. Nor any soap. So I used the ladies’ loo. Anyway, now you’re awake, maybe we could talk a bit more about your past. That’s what I’m here for, after all.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Not until after Countdown.’

  ‘In that case, I’d best be off,’ I said firmly. ‘Now, I shall be busy tomorrow and Thursday – but maybe we could meet again on Friday?’

  ‘So today’s Tuesday, is it? Well, well.’ He set off towards his wing, ushering me and my bowlful of goodies along the corridors and through the security door.

  ‘How did you know the code?’

  ‘You showed me the other day.’ True. He looked a bit puzzled, sheepish, even. ‘Sometimes do things I shouldn’t when I’ve had a drop. You won’t tell anyone, will you? Promise?’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I said promptly. ‘Now where shall I put these? It’s a shame to put nice clean stuff back in that filthy kitchen.’ While he bit his lip, considering, I added, ‘If you do any more sorting out in there, you will remember the system, won’t you? A different sort of rubbish in each sack.’

  ‘Me? Oh, yes. Yes. Different sort of rubbish in each sack. But that’s not rubbish.’ He pointed at the washing up bowl.

  ‘No, not rubbish at all. Where shall I put it?’

  ‘But you’re to take it with you. And that egg cup thing: that’s yours. I gave it to you. Everything else – you’re going to flog it, Lena – flog the lot. And bring along some more bubbly, remember.’

  ‘That lot’ll buy you a lot of bubbly. But you’ll have to wait. It takes time to sell things. Sometimes months. Tell you what, give me some paper and I’ll make a list of everything I’ve taken. Each time I see you I’ll tell you what I’ve sold and how much I’ve – how much it sold for.’

  ‘For free?’ He was sharper than I’d expected.

  ‘Would you want me to take some commission? Ten per cent’s usual –’

  He looked at his watch again. ‘Ten – fifteen – twenty. Take what you like. So long as you remember my bubbly.’

  ‘A different colour?’ The car hire clerk looked at me as if in all his fifty-something years he’d never heard anyone talking so much gibberish.

  ‘That’s right. I need a different colour car. Any colour except silver. Red? Green? Black? Come on, you must have Kas in different colours. Kas as in Ka,’ I explained, before he could embark on a long discussion involving Nissans and Skodas and what have you. What I didn’t explain was that I thought I’d been tailed from Bossingham by a metallic blue Ford Focus. Knowing the roads round Ashford quite well, I’d managed to shake it off in Stanhope, the sort of council estate I knew all too well. There had to be some advantage in driving bottom of the range rental cars, and changing them when you felt like it had to be one of them.

  ‘We have a black one. Green Nissans, if you’d rather have green.’

  ‘A green Nissan would be fine.’

  I signed a new set of paperwork and took the keys. ‘I’d better empty the car first. The Ka, that is.’ Bloody Ford – they must have known the name’d cause this sort of confusion.

  The guy sighed. Shaking his head, he followed me into the car park. If he’d thought me touched before, the sight of me tenderly ferrying an old enamel washing up bowl apparently full of scraps of lined foolscap paper from one vehicle to another must have had him reaching for the phone to summon the men in white coats. As for his expression when I pulled a ginger wig over my thatch, goodness knows. I was too busy checking that no one else was interested in my activities.

  ‘It’s all a bit cloak and dagger,’ Marcus said, serving dollops of rather runny lasagne. ‘A bit paranoid.’

  ‘I think Lina’s being sensible,’ Tony objected.

  ‘If you’d had people drive at you in an attempt to burgle your house, you might be a bit paranoid,’ I added, deciding not to mention the tail. Perhaps I was being paranoid. ‘Which reminds me, how was the shop? Any problems?’

  ‘Apart from dropping asleep with boredom? It’s about time you and Griff started to sell on the Internet, Lina – that’s the future.’

  ‘Did you sell anything?’

  ‘A set of sherry glasses – for the marked price. And I persuaded them to take the decanter, too. There wasn’t a price on that, so I invented one. A hundred and ten.’

  I nearly choked. ‘The price was for the whole lot,’ I said. ‘And rather steep, as I recall. Earning your keep and cooking the supper – Marcus, you’re an angel.’

  He flushed deeply and shuffled in his seat. What on earth had I said?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Battle and Wye. Griff always used to say it sounded like a philosophical question. In fact, they’re two villages hosting fairs that we’ve always done because they’re in our area. Battle’s where William the Bastard won his battle – get it? Wye’s just a pretty village with some lovely old houses just down the road from Bredeham. I did the first on Tuesday, selling not a lot but enough to cover our expenses, and Wye on Wednesday, selling some high quality glass and one or two restored items, pointing out to the punters exactly what work I’d done. One woman pounced on the egg cup, practically drooling, but blenched at the price, hardly surprising since five hundred and fifty pounds would have bought twice over the stuff on one or two other stalls. OK, I was being optimistic, but that was the price in the latest trade mag.

  ‘What’s its provenance?’ she asked.

  Not that was something I hadn’t thought about. I could hardly tell her the truth, in case Lord Elham’s vultures got to hear about his selling off not the family silver but the family blue and white ware. I rattled off the technical stuff, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  ‘In other words, you don’t know,’ she said, putting it down and patting it a tender farewell.

  The pat settled it. She loved it. ‘In other words,’ I corrected her gently, ‘I do know, but the person selling it’s asked for confidentiality. I’m just selling it on commission,’ I lied. He’d said it was mine and mine it was. What was the term Griff used? ‘Gentlefolk fallen on hard times.’

  You could almost see the picture forming in her brain: Darby and Joan beside a cold and empty hearth selling off their inheritance. She picked it up again.

  ‘There’s one identical in the Miller’s Guide,’ I said. ‘Guide price six hundred. Mind you,’ I added fairly, ‘I think that was at auction. That always bumps the price up a bit.’

  ‘So what would your best be?’

  ‘Their best would be five hundred. Look, I’ll throw in a silver spoon to eat your egg with.’ And so the deal was done. I’d have to ask Griff’s advice about the paperwork later, because she was fishing out her chequebook. Just in time I got her to make out her cheque to me, not the business. I wasn’t at all sure where that would leave me tax-wise, probably no better off. But at least I could claim the champagne as a legitimate expense, now. What a good job I’d kept all the r
eceipts.

  ‘A microwave? What on earth do I want with a microwave?’ Lord Elham peered with something like distaste at it, still nestling in its box.

  I’d kept my word to myself, popping into Comet for one that was small and foolproof. It was now almost lunchtime on Friday, and I was about to test it.

  ‘You can heat up ready-meals in it.’ I showed him the haul I’d picked up from Sainsbury’s. ‘I won’t say they’re the most nutritious food available, but if you never eat anything except Pot Noodles, you’ll end up with scurvy or beri-beri or something.’ Iris had been big on vitamins but vague as to the consequences of ignoring them.

  ‘But that means going out all the time: I can get Pot Noodles by the box.’

  ‘You’ve got a freezer under your fridge. You could pack a lot of ready meals in there. And places like Tesco and Sainsbury’s actually deliver these days.’ But I could see he wasn’t convinced.

  On the other hand, he enjoyed the chicken tikka masala I heated up. He was casting covetous eyes at my Goan prawn curry, but I polished it off briskly. After all, it might not be good for him to tackle too much meat after such a low everything diet. As for the mineral water I’d also bought, it was clear from the revolted glances he threw at it that only one person was going to drink it.

  I made another assault on the kitchen while he watched Neighbours. This time it wasn’t Harold he was worried about but Lou. My worries were more to do with the build-up of black sacks: he could do with his own private bottle bank and a special refuse collection. Meanwhile, I stowed everything in an outhouse, full of rusted farm implements, a bonanza for a specialist, or even a country life museum. Now the floor was relatively clear, I thought he might be tempted to have a go himself: it wasn’t nearly as daunting as when we’d started.

  He seemed impressed, but not enthusiastic when I showed him. ‘Not a lot of point in looking at the house today,’ he grumbled. ‘Full of day-tripping council tenants.’