Pretty soon after that I began to wilt, and it was unfortunate that I had to do it while dancing with a hot-blooded gentleman of South American extraction. I suddenly felt like death and drooped on his shoulder, hooking myself on with my chin to save myself from falling like a log. He thought this was the Invitation to the Waltz and got very Trans-Atlantic. His passionate grip had the advantage of supporting me and keeping me on my feet, so I could just bear it until the end of the dance released me from his greasy clutches. I staggered to a chair and said: ‘I really ought to go home. I’m rather tired, I’ve been working so hard all day.’ No one knew what at, they were the sort of people who would have raised their eyebrows and laughed uncomfortably if they had known they were entertaining a cook-general.
‘I weel take you ’ome,’ said Black Pedro instantly, and I had to choose between this very repulsive prospect and going on to a night club with the others. A good look at Pedro decided me. We all got into taxis and I found myself walking as though in my sleep into a dim and airless haunt of gaiety six times as sordid as any basement that ever smelt of greens.
I sat down at a corner table with the rest, and soon they all got up to dance. Pedro asked me and I shook my head, which suddenly weighed ten stone so that I had to put my arms on to the table and drop it on to them.
The band was playing ‘Boom, boom, zinca boom, zinca boom!’ or was it in my head? No, because there was a bee there, singing … singing, to the boom, zinca boom … Ees the matter? said Pedro from the other side of London. Boom said the bee, said the boom, said the … you eell? I am swimming in waves of rhythm … I am sinking … boom, zinca boom, sinking boom, sinking …
My heart woke me by dropping out of my breast with a crash. I was instantly conscious of a strong and unfamiliar smell, and raising my head slightly, I saw with surprise that a fat white hand with crimson nails was attached to one of my elbows like a growth.
‘I’ve brought you some aspirin, dear, make you feel better. Just the ticket when you’ve passed out,’ said a hoarse voice in my ear. I was bolt upright now and fully conscious of where I was.
Pedro had disappeared, and the others, I suppose, were still dancing somewhere on the dim and faraway sea of the dance floor. I was alone at the table except for a raddled but motherly creature, who had for the moment abandoned her duties of ‘hostess’ to minister to what she thought was a Dead Drunk.
My one thought was to escape, I couldn’t even thank her. I pushed her away and, leaping to my feet, made for the door, followed by the delighted sniggers of the band, who had evidently been watching the whole comedy of my disgrace.
This episode, with the consequent necessity for apologies to my hostess, whom I have never seen since, and the death-like Hangover that enveloped me all the next day, discouraged me from much more sociability. I had to attend an occasional dinner party, and there were one or two rather pathetic incidents, such as the time when I went fast asleep with my head pillowed on the shoulder of a High Court judge, and once when I lost all chance of success with a French Count who discovered, when he kissed my hand, that it smelt strongly of that well-known perfume, ‘Bouquet des Oignons’.
I had got into the state of thinking that life was bounded by gas-stoves and grease, and saw no reason to imagine that it could ever hold anything more for me. This melancholy thought made me sour and disagreeable during the few hours I spent at home, and by no means a ray of sunshine at the Vaughans’. My sulky apathy was beginning to tell on even my mistress’s nerves, though she never ticked me off. I noticed her once or twice checking an impatient exclamation at my incompetence, but she was far too kind ever to suggest ‘making a change’, however trying I was, quite apart from the fact that she knew that the species ‘Cook-General’ was comparatively rare. The poor woman’s flat was in a terrible state. The smuts and dust of London, which always get the upper hand unless resisted with methodical zeal, had consolidated their position, undeterred by my feeble opposition with dirty dusters and brushes clogged with fluff.
Once when Mr Vaughan had his glasses on he caught sight of his tarnished golf cups, and he also discovered that the mustard and pepper pots had reverted to their former condition of emptiness. I was just on my way in with the joint and two veg., but I waited outside the door until he had finished saying: ‘Really, dearest, why don’t you speak to her? You put up with anything; it’s thoroughly bad for a lazy girl like that.’
There was a pause, presumably for Mrs Vaughan to tap her head significantly, and I heard her murmur something about ‘Poor thing … can’t help it’.
The first of December is a date that is engraved on my memory, for it was the day on which I woke at last to the realization of a New Dawn. I can’t understand why it didn’t happen before; I can only suppose that it was this sort of trance of fatigue that I was in that made me accept my dreary lot for so long. It was certainly not curiosity any longer or interest in seeing Life in the Raw. I had found out all I wanted to know about kitchen affairs, and a great deal too much about the squalor attached thereto.
It was while I was washing up after lunch, always one of the lowest spots of the day, that I suddenly saw the light.
Something seemed to click in my brain. The curtain of fog went up with a rush, and it became all at once crystal clear and filled with the dazzling white light of reason.
‘This is no sort of life for a girl!’ The words rang in my head like a bugle call. The back-door bell rang, too, and the baker was quite startled by the joyous reception I gave him. I almost embraced him in my new-found lightness of heart. It didn’t matter that he was one of the most drooping and depressed-looking creatures who ever walked this earth; I bubbled at him, hardly knowing what I was saying.
‘I’m going! I’m leaving! For ever, I mean. A new day has dawned. I can’t stand it any longer. Oh, baker, baker, congratulate me, I’m so happy!’
I seized him by the hand, and he suffered it to be pumped up and down, saying gloomily ‘What a song and dance about getting the sack, I must say.’
‘Sack? What are you talking about? I’ve fired myself this time. I’m walking on air, I tell you. I’m going to Live, Laugh, and Love! Can you waltz?’
‘I did used to in me younger days …’ he said hesitatingly, but with a sparkle of something almost like wistful gaiety beginning to gleam in his eye.
To the strains of the ‘Blue Danube’, panting and gasping as we whirled and bumped, we were rounding the table for the third time when our progress was impeded by a solid body which had stepped in through the door just in time to make a collision inevitable.
‘Monica!’ said Nurse in a choking, scandalized voice as she picked herself up out of the coal-bucket, ‘Get on with your work, and don’t make yourself cheap with the tradesmen.’
She had got so used to my pretending to her to be more or less deaf and dumb, as I had for the last week or two so as to save myself the trouble of talking to her, that she was quite startled by the spate of words that now escaped me. She retreated before them into the hall, protesting feebly, and fending me off with upraised hands. She backed straight into the drawing-room, and I heard her say: ‘I’m afraid Monica has gone out of her mind. Shall I dial 999?’
I pushed the baker out of the back door, and just had time to seize a carrot and be discovered chopping it with sane and meticulous accuracy when Mrs Vaughan came running in.
‘Nurse said –’ she began, and then stopped and looked at me wonderingly. ‘Is anything the matter, Monica? You look quite flushed.’
‘I don’t feel quite the thing, ’m,’ I mumbled. ‘Vertigo. Mother says I ought to take a rest – go away or something. “Monica,” she said to me last night, “You’re over-taxing your strength. You’ll kill yourself if you go on like this.” I never was strong from a child, you know, madam.’
Illness had got me out of the Chilford House job without acrimony, so I thought I had better fall back on it again this time.
I rather wished I hadn’t, for Mrs Vaughan, tho
ugh secretly rejoicing at the opportunity to get rid of me without hurting my feelings, was terribly concerned about my health. She insisted on feeling the back of my neck, which she declared was stinging hot and showed I had a temperature. I managed to convince her that I could hold together until she found someone to replace me. I tried to strike a note of wilting but courageous suffering, which was difficult when the only thing wrong with me was a fever of delirious joy.
Distressed, she went away to ring up all the agencies she knew, and I, feeling rather a cad, decided to prepare a very special dinner to salve my conscience.
Mrs Vaughan went out to follow up one or two likely trails, throwing parting injunctions at me ‘not to overdo it’ and to ‘take two aspirins in a glass of hot milk’.
She didn’t get back till after six, by which time an exotic chicken dish was simmering itself to a rich perfection in the oven. She found me in the drawing-room, whither I had gone in response to a roar from Mr Vaughan: ‘Curse this infernal machine! Monica! Come and get this damned number for me before I –’
The whole trouble was that the poor darling’s fingers were too fat and stubby to fit into the holes of the dial. He had tried yelling: ‘Operator, operator!’ into the mouth-piece, and been maddened by the penetrating and impersonal ‘burr-r-r-r’ that mocked him in answer. By the time I came to his rescue he had forgotten what number he was trying to get. When he eventually found it, after much hunting through a jumble of papers in his pocket-book, I decided not to dial it, but to dial ‘O’ and let him ask them for it. I thought it would be good for ‘O’s’ patronizing smugness to listen to a sample of his extensive vocabulary.
His wife came in when he was in the middle of it, so with a final shout of ‘I shall write to The Times!’ he gave it up and decided to write a postcard instead.
I left them as I thought she might want to tell him about me, for women will never learn that if there is one subject that bores a man more than any other it is the servant problem in his own house.
She came into the kitchen quite soon and said: ‘Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that we’re going out to dinner; you can go home when you like. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’
I could have cried, had it not been for the spring of happiness that was still bubbling inside me. ‘The chicken, madam!’ I cried, agonized. ‘A special dish. And the zabaglione!’
‘Oh dear, I didn’t think you would have started yet. I had said roasted, hadn’t I? We can’t very well get out of going to the Welds’ now, I asked them if they’d have us. Wouldn’t it keep till tomorrow? We could have it heated up … Oh, by the way, talking of tomorrow, I think I’ve found somebody. She’s going to come in during the morning to see the place, and I’ll get you to show her what’s what. I expect your mother would like you to go away as soon as possible, wouldn’t she? Where are you thinking of going?’
‘Skegness,’ I said at random and thought afterwards that it might be a bit too bracing at this time of year, so added ‘or Hove’ as an afterthought.
The timid creature who arrived the next morning as my possible successor was called Mrs Hopper. She crept about the place with Mrs Vaughan, clearing her throat nervously when addressed, her forehead puckered anxiously under a green cloche hat.
‘And now,’ said Mrs Vaughan in the hall, ‘if you really think you’d like to come to us I’ll take you to the kitchen. Monica can explain things there to you better than I can. I’m afraid I’m no cook.’
I was spared the trouble, however, as they came in together and Mrs Vaughan, having nothing better to do, stayed and conducted the tour of the kitchen herself. I was able to go on peeling potatoes while she rattled off details of our domestic routine. She knew all about cooking and housework in theory, anyway. It was one of the many accomplishments of her extraordinarily versatile brain that she could discourse at length on the principle of any subject under the sun, unhindered by the fact that she would be unable to carry it out in practice. I had heard her telling Mr Vaughan how to play golf when he came home tired and discouraged on a Sunday evening, and really, though perhaps a little tactless, it was very sound text-book advice. She could give instruction, too, on how to drive a car, with illustrations of road signals, though apparently the only time she had ever taken the wheel had been the last day on this earth for two chickens and a baby pig.
When she had finished she left us, and Mrs Hopper, bewildered and docile, accepted her suggestion that she should stay and have a cup of tea with me.
We didn’t get on particularly well together, I’m afraid, as I was feeling excited and rather distrait, and she was one of the most painfully self-conscious women who ever crooked a little finger over a kitchen cup. She was desperately anxious to make it clear that she was a cook-general only from necessity and not from station.
‘Just a temporary thing this is for me,’ she said, nibbling genteelly at a small crumb of bread; ‘it’s never been my lot to serve, you know.’
I was in no mood to tell her such things as: ‘Everyone that humbleth himself shall be exalted’, which is what she would have liked to hear, or to paint a rose-tinted picture of domestic service for her encouragement. I sat silent, thinking, and she, though slightly daunted by my churlishness, cleared her throat a bit and tried to keep the conversation going.
‘Of course, I wouldn’t really be doing this sort of thing at all,’ she pursued, ‘were it not for certain unhappy circumstances. Poor Mr Hopper was taken from me all too soon; he wasn’t able to provide for me as he would have wished.’
I was uncertain whether this meant that one ought to express sympathy for Mr Hopper’s demise or for his incarceration, so I let it pass, and his wife became even more convinced of my uncouthness and began to show a desire to leave, but an inability to make the move. I was called away to open the front door to Clare, who had come to lunch to help dispose of last night’s chicken, and when I got back to the kitchen I found that Mrs Hopper had hopped it. We hadn’t arranged what time she should arrive the next day, so I ran out of the back door in the hope of catching her on the outside staircase. I was just in time to see the top of her hat, like an inverted pudding basin, descending spirally to the street below. I yelled at her with no result, so I gave it up and leant against the railing thinking about life.
Watching the green blob becoming smaller and smaller made me wonder what I should think of my year and a half of servitude when its memories had diminished too. I was still too near to it at the moment to regard it as anything but a most depressing chapter of my life, and I wondered whether I should ever find myself in the position of people who talk about their school days as the happiest days of their life with no idea of being untruthful. They forget the misery that they may have suffered – that agony of spirit that nearly all children and very young people know and no grown-up can understand, because they have already forgotten.
Our memories are merciful; they store up details of happiness much more readily than details of sorrow. We, however, respond ungratefully by indulging our innate passion for self-torture by turning remembrance into regret. In the end the memory of something perfect becomes even sadder than the memory of despair, for we torment ourselves with the thought that it can never be quite the same again.
When the first agony of a real sorrow has faded, though the sorrow may remain, natural resilience makes the mental picture of oneself in the throes of it fade too. Happiness is so easy to picture that one dwells almost morbidly on some lovely memory, harping on the fact that it is gone, exaggerating, imagining, comparing the present unfavourably, until there you are in floods of tears and almost ready for the gas-oven.
‘Ah, well,’ I said, turning to go in, ‘c’est la vie.’
‘Ho, yes, we had one but it died,’ said the grocer’s boy, rounding the last turn of the staircase and handing me half a pound of prunes and a packet of soap-flakes.
Although I hadn’t been at the Vaughans’ more than about ten weeks it was long enough to make me quite an institution
. They were a very die-hard family, hating change, and when it came to the point they thought they were sorry to see me go, and felt quite tender towards me.
There happened to be a family dinner on that last evening and I was quite drawn into the conversation, almost as if I had been sitting at the table with them instead of running round it with the steak-and-kidney pudding.
It is a curious game that people like to play sometimes, drawing out the maid (baiting the butler in some houses), in order to get amusement out of the screamingly funny idea that she may have some sort of a human life of her own. Nice people like the Vaughans laugh with you, others laugh at you; but it comes to the same thing in the end. Once you get used to the idea of being suddenly hauled out from the oblivion of servitude into the spotlight of attention, and expected to provide entertainment until they just as suddenly tire of you, and intimate that you have said your piece, it’s quite an easy game to play. You have to humour them by saying amusing and slightly outrageous things so that they can retail them to their friends, or ‘dine out’ on quotations from your conversation.
Frances started it this evening. She was feeling arch tonight, which was unusual for her, so she said: ‘I believe I know why Monica’s leaving; that young man of hers has come up to the scratch at last!’
I smiled politely, waiting to see whether they wanted to play or whether they were going to start talking about something else. I was quite ready to oblige, but I wasn’t going to waste any energy. Clare took it up.
‘Has he proposed? How thrilling! What did he say and where did he do it?’
This was the cue for me to become side-splittingly unconventional.
‘What a thing to say, Miss Clare!’ I said, handing her husband the potatoes from the wrong side, ‘you know I don’t care for men.’
‘What about that Adonis I saw you talking to outside the lift the other day?’ asked Mr Vaughan with his mouth full of pie.
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