She was sitting in her large drawing-room, surrounded by patterns of stuff, lists, and catalogues and all the paraphernalia that float about when a wedding is being arranged. I sat bolt upright on a chair rising out of a sea of tissue-paper, and told her that I had practically spent my life handing round trays.
‘What is your name?’ she inquired at the end of the interview.
‘Plover, madam,’ I answered, making a bad-smell-under-the-nose face.
She seemed quite impressed by this, so my hours of hunting through the telephone book had not been wasted.
‘Do you wish me to wear mai black or mai blue, madam?’
‘Black, please, with a cap, of course. Well, that’s all, Plover, I shall expect you here on Tuesday at five o’clock then.’
As I was going down the stairs a very pretty dark girl passed me on her way up and raised her eyebrows at me in disinterested inquiry. She had a large diamond on her engagement finger, so I supposed she was the bride-to-be. She looked a bit sulky, and not particularly happy – per haps it was a mariage de convenance.
Mrs Drew was my more immediate concern, however, so I ceased to be Plover and prepared to do battle in Edgware Road. I had not worn my uniform for some time, and I had forgotten just how dirty and weather-beaten it was. I retrieved it from where it was lying in a crimpled ball at the bottom of a drawer and ironed it and tried to sponge off some of the worst hall-marks of drudgery. I had had to cook in it when I was a ‘general’, covering the frills with a large gingham apron which I removed at the last minute so as to be able to transform myself from cook to parlour-maid when I had to take in the dishes.
I went along to Edgware Road in my blue as I wanted to keep the black to be Plover in. Mrs Drew was out when I arrived, but she had told the porter to let me in, and had left a long rambling note for me on the kitchen table. The menu for dinner was written out, interspersed with such remarks as: ‘When the baker comes, please order one large white and one small brown or wholemeal if he has it, or currant ditto.’ ‘Do not use best butter. Marg. and lard in cupboard.’ ‘Can you stuff duck at both ends? If so, do.’
She had evidently changed her mind again about the grapefruit, for the dinner was to start with soup after all. Fried fish came next, with a shrimp sauce, and then the duck, with vegetables. ‘Trifle,’ said the list after that, ‘with a dash of sherry, which is behind dustbin under sink.’ I thought I had better make it at once if it was to get cold by dinner-time. Mrs Drew seemed to have bought the provisions more or less efficiently, though there was much too much of some things and not enough of others. Milk was rather short, so I had to make a stodgy trifle that was more sponge-cake than custard. I added quite a lot of the rather acid-smelling cooking sherry to pep it up a bit and put it into the refrigerator.
I was getting on quite nicely with the other things when Mrs Drew came to disturb my peace, staggering in under armfuls of flowers and parcels. She was an untidy little woman with wisps of hair escaping from under her hat, and only one glove.
‘Dropped my other one in the shops somewhere,’ she said; ‘wasn’t it stupid of me? I went back to look for it, but it was so difficult to remember where I’d been that, of course, I never found it. I think I’ve got everything now for the dinner – flowers, sweets, almonds. What’s in this box, I wonder? I don’t remember buying any biscuits or anything. Oh, no, of course, that must be my shoes.’
‘Excuse me, madam,’ I said, removing them from where she had laid them down on the fish.
‘Thank you so much. Are you getting on all right, Miss – er? I shan’t be in your way if I just arrange these flowers, shall I?’
It was not for me to say that I was in the middle of peeling vegetables in the sink, so I had to take them out and start on something else. For the next few minutes we bumped around together in the small kitchen, she chatting disjointedly about the dinner and me interjecting ‘Pardon’ or ‘Excuse me’ at intervals. After a bit I got tired of knocking into her and having to reach across or round her every time I wanted something out of the cupboard. I had heard enough to satisfy my curiosity about the people who were coming. The guests of honour, apparently, were her husband’s boss and his wife, on whom Mrs Drew was desperately anxious to make an impression, and there was another married couple, a sister, thrown in to make weight. I went away to lay the table, and when I came back she had finished her flowers and was on her knees in front of the open oven, poking at the duck with a dubious finger. ‘Which end did you stuff it?’ she asked.
‘You told me to stuff it both ends, madam,’ I said righteously.
‘Oh, did I? So I did. That’s splendid. I do hope it’s going to be enough for six people. What do you think?’
I didn’t think it was nearly big enough myself, but there wasn’t much point in adding to her anxiety by saying so, so I said, ‘Ample, madam, excuse me,’ and pushed her gently aside to baste the puny bird.
She went off at last to dress, and I started the familiar panic, suddenly realizing that, as usual, I had left myself too little time to get things done. Mrs Drew didn’t help by flying in in her negligee to say: ‘Oh dear, you’ve put out the white mats and I wanted the green. Didn’t I tell you? Well, never mind. Or have you got time to change them?’ I found it impossible to take things calmly with her flapping around, and soon we were both rushing about like a couple of clucking hens, working each other up into a state. Mr Drew came in in the middle of it all. He was a large, helpless sort of man, with a funny little baby face stuck up on top of his lumbering body, and a surprisingly thin high voice. His wife shooed him off to change, and after a bit he came into the kitchen with a half-bottle of sherry, just one grade higher than the stuff I had put into the trifle. He poured it out with great care into six glasses and carried them proudly into the drawing-room on a tray. I didn’t know what they were going to drink at dinner – I had put wine glasses out on spec – so I went in to ask him if I was to open any bottles of anything.
‘Here is the wine,’ he said proudly, handing me a bottle of Empire Burgundy.
‘You devils,’ I thought, carrying it away at arm’s length.
I took a pretty gloomy view of this dinner party altogether. The host and hostess were each as nervous and anxious as the other. He was pacing the floor fingering his tie, and she kept darting into the kitchen to ask futile questions. I took an even more gloomy view when I took out the trifle to see whether it had got properly cold. The thing was tepid! Even the dish was still faintly warm. I put my hand into the frig and, if anything, it was warmer in there than in the kitchen.
‘Madam,’ I said despairingly as Mrs Drew came poking in again in a trailing chiffon dress, ‘your frig is out of order and the trifle hasn’t got cold.’
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she gasped, ‘didn’t I tell you? It’s been wrong for days and the man simply will not come. I keep ringing them up. Oh dear, oh dear, of course, it never occurred to me about the trifle, I thought you made it cold.’
‘Well, madam, custard must be made hot, you know,’ I pointed out, keeping my temper and my manners with difficulty.
‘Yes, yes, of course. I never thought of that. How very dreadful it all is. Couldn’t you put it out on the windowsill to cool?’
Well, it was her picnic, so I balanced it precariously on the narrow ledge and she went out, rather pleased with herself, but going into a terrified scuttle as the front-door bell rang.
I didn’t imagine that the two people whom I admitted were the guests of honour, as they looked more like a pair of nervous ducks than anything else. I asked the sister whether she would like to go to the bedroom and she shook her head, after throwing a scared glance at her husband, who just stood with his toes turned in, making a pinched mouth of shyness. I opened the drawing-room door.
‘Mr and Mrs Mottershead,’ I announced, and shooed them firmly in.
The guests of honour were a little late, which was all to the good, as it gave the carrots a few more minutes in which to become less rock-li
ke. When they did arrive I saw at once that they were not at all the sort of people to appreciate Empire wine and tepid trifle. ‘Why have you come here in your fat opulence?’ I wondered. Mr Garrow had probably been dragged here by his wife to fulfil some overdue politeness, and his red-veined face was sulky with annoyance as he followed his wife into the drawing-room.
‘Dinner is served!’ I announced afterwards, giving the carrots up as a bad job, and the embarrassed spasms of conversation broke off with relief as the party trooped into the dining-room with much shuffling of feet and ‘After you’s’ at the door. After more shuffling they somehow all got seated, not at all in the places that Mrs Drew had intended, but she was not really clear about it in her mind anyway.
As usual, I was too busy to notice much of the social side of the dinner, but I could see that it was one of the saddest parties ever, and my food had turned out dreary and unappetizing, as if in sympathy with the general atmosphere. When I got as far as Mr Garrow with my reluctant chant of: ‘Will you take wine?’ he nearly had a stroke at the sight of the bottle. I think he thought that he would be offered something else, for I saw his eyes follow me incredulously as I filled up the last glass and went out to get my duck.
By the end of the next course Mr Garrow’s conversation had dwindled from monosyllables to grunts, and his wife was struggling gallantly to keep it going. When it was time for the sweet my brain had gone as feathery as Mrs Drew’s, and I couldn’t for the life of me think what I had done with the trifle. It suddenly came back to me, and I fished it indoors, skimming off the black specks of soot as well as I could. Mr Garrow didn’t miss much by refusing it. His eyes looked rather agonized, and I think his stomach was troubling him.
After coffee the ladies withdrew to talk about servants, and the gentlemen followed soon after as there was no port over which they could linger, and Mr Garrow’s stomach was in no state to encourage jovial camaraderie. I was crashing away at the washing up when I heard someone come softly into the kitchen and close the door behind them. I hoped it was Mrs Drew with my pay, but when I turned round I was surprised to see Mr Garrow standing in a conspiratorial attitude with his finger to his lips.
‘For God’s sake,’ he croaked, ‘I must have a drink. Have you got anything?’
Poor man, he looked a wreck. Boredom and indigestion had played havoc with him. He was welcome to the remains of the cooking sherry, so I fished it out from behind the dustbin and, putting the bottle to his lips, he gulped it down at one draught. His eyebrows shot up as the stuff hit his stomach and his purple face became tinged with green.
‘My God! What the devil –?’ His stomach now told him it was time for him to leave, and leave hurriedly. He stumbled from the room, a broken man.
Plover was resurrected in a week’s time, and, wearing her black, with hair scraped unbecomingly backwards, she trotted off to Mrs Elkington’s. It was evidently going to be a large party, judging by the number of waitresses and barmen who were surging about in the basement. I was shown where to leave my coat, and put on the cap that I had bought for the occasion. I had made the great mistake of not trying it on at home, so I was not prepared for the awful vision that gazed at me from the mirror when I tied it round my head. A little farther back, perhaps, more like a halo and less of that visor effect – that was better. I was just going to powder my nose when I heard cries of: ‘Where are all these girls? Rose, Lilian, Plover – where is this Plover?’
I popped out into the passage and met a fat, harassed butler with a list in his hand.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Ai’m Plover,’ I replied, smoothing my apron.
‘Oh, you’re Plover, are you? I’ve been looking for you. Your job is to hand round trays of cocktails, which you’ll collect at the bar, see? Walking through the two rooms and filling up same place. Right now you can carry some glasses up from that pantry there to the bar on the landing.’
I went into the pantry, where a maid with a face like a pig was loading glasses on to a tray.
‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘did you know your cap was slipping off? Let me pull it down for you before you lose it.’ She rushed at me, and before I could stop her had converted my halo into a visor again. I felt an awful fool, and knew I looked it, but I couldn’t very well wear it the way I wanted if people were going to come and pull it forward all the time.
Finding a tray, I started to stack glasses on to it, and when it was full, carried it carefully upstairs, wondering what would happen in the not unlikely event of my dropping the whole lot. I arrived safely on the first floor landing, a large square expanse with buffet tables round three sides of it. Three or four waiters were making champagne cocktails as fast as they could go, and I longed for one. I wouldn’t have minded a marron glacé either; a huge bowl of them was right under my nose as I unloaded my glasses at one end of the bar, and I could easily have pinched one without anybody seeing, but ‘No,’ I said to myself, ‘Plover would never do a thing like that.’ Would Plover be above making friends with one of the barmen so that he would save her a cocktail when the party was over? I thought she might descend to it in her off moments, so I smiled seductively at the nearest one, a thin, pale youth with a protuberant Adam’s apple. He stared through me unseeingly, so I tried again, and this time he just gave me a brief smile for civility’s sake – a mere twitch of the lips. Poor Plover, spurned and humiliated! I hadn’t realized that I looked quite so frightful in that cap. I pushed it up a bit surreptitiously as I went downstairs, but it had fallen over my eyes again by the time I got back to the pantry, so the pig-girl had nothing to complain of. I pushed it up again when she went out, but it was no good. I would have to put up with looking like a 1920 tennis player and give up the idea of a cocktail.
I carried up two more trayloads, and then somebody told me to get some cocktails and take my place in one of the two big reception rooms leading out of each other, as the guests were due to arrive at any minute. The family were already standing uneasily about in new dresses and wondering whether they had invited people for the right day. I thought they looked as if they needed a drink, so I advanced carefully towards them over the parquet with my tray. Mrs Elkington was looking queenly in blue velvet with an excess of orchids.
‘Have I time for a drink I wonder before we have to start receiving people? Why don’t you have one, John? You look as if you needed it.’
John, I supposed, was her husband, a nondescript, nervous little man. He had to clear his throat twice before he could start to answer.
Their daughter, the girl I had met the other day on the stairs, broke in: ‘Well, I’m going to have one, I feel terrible. How about you, Aunt Madge?’ I gave her and Aunt Madge a cocktail and Uncle somebody thought it was a good idea, too. I looked round for the fiancé, but there was nobody in the room that I’d have had for any money. He couldn’t have come yet, unless – oh dear, could it be this square little turkey-cock with red hair, who was even now making free with his arm about the lovely girl’s waist? No wonder she felt terrible and looked sulky – who wouldn’t? I grudgingly offered him a drink, and he took it in a pink and podgy hand. I couldn’t think what to do now, so I copied one or two of the other waitresses and took up my stand by the wall, wearing an impersonal face. The fat butler appeared from the landing and said: ‘The first guests are arriving, madam.’
Mother, father, daughter, and fiancé ranged themselves by the door, and in a minute or two the butler started to announce people in a quite unnecessarily loud voice.
‘Mrs Boggan and Miss Kathleen Boggan!’ he yelled, and two rather dusty-looking people shuffled in and were greeted effusively, though it was obvious that nobody knew who they were. The Boggans were well in advance of the main body of the guests, and they looked as if they wanted to go home again, but Aunt Madge and I came to the rescue simultaneously, I with my drink and she with her mauve hair and much-lifted face. She chatted to them about nothing in particular, and after a bit people started to arrive thick and fast. The
re was soon quite a crowd in the rooms, and I was rather scared of venturing among them with my tray, but one of the waitresses passed by me and said: ‘You got to circulate, see?’
I had to leave my wall and pick my way carefully through the crowd, offering drinks here and there, and feeling as if I ought to be crying, ‘Chocolates! Cigarettes!’ I loaded on some more cocktails at the bar and started off all over again. It was really very amusing hearing snatches of conversation and observing people from under my cap, which was well down over my eyes by now.
‘My dear, have you ever?’ I heard one smart deb say to another. ‘That horrid little man. How Ann could have –’
‘I know; it can’t be love. If you ask me it’s a question of anything to get away from that mother of hers. They fight like hell, you know.’ I wanted to hear more, but a large male was clicking his fingers at me a few yards away, so I had to go and give him and his lady-friend a drink. She gazed up at him with adoring eyes as he handed it her with an air.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she said as if he had bought it for her. ‘Thank me, not him, he ain’t done anything,’ I thought as I moved away.
I was doing good work. My cocktails went rapidly, and I had to go back to the bar for more before I had got through the two rooms. I didn’t know what to do with the dirty glasses that I had collected on my way. I asked a woman who was standing on the stairs directing people to the cloak-room, and she said: ‘Couldn’t say, I’m sure. Ladies’ cloak-room, madam? Up the stairs and first on the right, if you please.’ They didn’t want them at the bar and I obviously couldn’t carry them down the stairs as guests were still flowing steadily up.
I felt a bit lost; I didn’t like to ask the barman who had turned me down, so I tried the next one along, who was bald and kind-looking. He jerked a thumb towards a small door leading out of the hall that I hadn’t noticed before. I went through it and nearly fell down a long flight of stairs on the other side. One glass shot off the tray and bumped to the bottom where it broke with a noise like a plate-glass window.
One Pair of Hands Page 17