‘Pardon, sir? I didn’t quite catch. A – what?’
‘Adonis. Good-looking chap, you know. Good God!’ (aside to Clare) ‘don’t they give these girls any education?’
‘Oh, him,’ I said, ignoring this slight on one of the most famous girls’ schools in London, ‘that was only the lift man in his Sundays. He’s no oil-painting.’
The thing was getting a bit laboured. I hoped they’d soon get sick of it, but they were determined to give me a break on my last evening.
Frances again: ‘I’m sure I saw you with a red-haired man at the “Odeon” last week. Honestly,’ looking round the table, ‘I was sitting just behind them. If you’re not engaged to him, Monica, you certainly ought to be.’
‘Miss Frances! May you be forgiven. My friend’s a married man. His wife’s away at the moment so I’m simply keeping him warm.’ I rounded this off with a daring wink, and felt that I had done enough. I wanted to take away the pie and see whether they had left any kidneys for me.
Mrs Vaughan thought I had gone a bit too far with my last remark and hastily turned the conversation away from me before I could pollute anyone’s mind, so I was able to escape gladly to the kitchen. Not one single kidney! Really, I thought, people are gross. Greed is only pardonable in those one loves very dearly or in oneself.
After dinner I was yelled for from the drawing-room to go and say good-bye to the younger members of the family whom I wouldn’t see tomorrow. Nurse had drifted away with Peter during the afternoon without so much as a nod to me. To her I was one of those things that one hopes to exterminate by pretending they are not there.
I sidled in, wiping my hands on my apron, and when I saw them all sitting there, the picture of a family happy in the old-fashioned way, that is rare enough nowadays, my heart quite warmed to them and I could almost have wished that I was staying on amid this nice contented atmosphere. Almost, but not quite.
Clare was sitting on her father’s knee, busily engaged in pattering the top of his bald head with lipstick. Her husband was dropping pipe-ash over a photograph album that he was looking at with Clare, who was being roared at by her father: ‘For God’s sake, why can no woman ever look at photographs without putting sticky fingers all over them?’ Clare’s husband had decided that she was, after all, quite fetching and was absent-mindedly stroking the back of her neck while he noisily appreciated the humour of his father-in-law.
Mrs Vaughan was darning socks. This was a complicated business, as she couldn’t darn without her glasses, and for some unknown reason she couldn’t talk if she had them on. To darn without talking would have been agony, but on the other hand, in view of the pile of socks in her basket she didn’t feel justified in talking without darning. The result was a complicated exercise of taking the glasses off, losing them, finding them, and putting them on, losing her needle, dropping the sock, picking everything up, and just getting ready to attack a hole, and then thinking of something to say and starting the whole thing over again.
‘There you are, Monica,’ she said, removing the encumbrance once more, ‘they just want to say good-bye before you go.’
It had undoubtedly been her suggestion, but they all shook me dutifully by my red and rather sodden hand – I had just been washing up – and wished me luck.
My last morning dawned in a grey drizzle of rain, but nothing could damp my spirits on this auspicious occasion of ‘positively my last appearance in this or any other country’ as cook-general. I walked through the streets under my father’s umbrella, unchastened by the thought of what he would say when he found I had taken it without asking.
An impulsive and short-lived consideration for Mrs Hopper made me have a sketchy round-up of some of the dirt and mess that was my legacy to her. I cooked a large breakfast for Mr Vaughan as a token of my goodwill, and he lingered over it and, rushing off to the office in a hurry, forgot to say good-bye to me. His wife, when she realized this, was across the hall and out of the front door like a bullet. She caught him waiting for the lift, and I heard him complaining slightly, like a small boy who has been told to go and wash his hands. He stumped back to the kitchen and blurted out, ‘Good-bye, Monica, it’s been so nice having you with us,’ at the top of his voice, as if he were addressing a large crowd behind my left shoulder, and hurried away again.
‘What, no tip?’ I thought as the lift gates rattled and crashed.
Mrs Vaughan made me ashamed of my graspingness by presenting me before I left with a most beautiful pair of bedroom slippers made of white rabbit fur that had been bought for Frances but discovered to be too small.
Mrs Hopper arrived at twelve o’clock, and was established in the kitchen in a black dress and a black full-length apron that sported a great many pink cabbage-roses but no waistline. She had a curious way of accompanying all her actions with a sotto voce running commentary of spoken thoughts. I left her making an apple pie, and could hear it going on in the distance while I took leave of my mistress in the hall.
‘Three ounces of butter – weigh it out – that’s right. Now, let me see, I must have six ounces of flour; here’s the bin, it looks as if it could do with a clean. How much sugar? Sugar, sugar, where are you, sugar? This must be it; the supply seems rather low. I’ll put it all in. Apples – one, two, three, four, five, six; will that be sufficient, I wonder?’ and so on as a background for the kind and solicitous remarks that Mrs Vaughan was pouring into my undeserving ear.
‘Now, be sure to come and see us when you’re passing and tell us how you’re getting on.’ (This was probably what Miss Nitchin had been told, too.) ‘Take care of yourself. Tell your mother from me that you ought to go on an acid-free diet; do you all the good in the world. I used to say the same thing to Maud, but she never paid any attention.’
‘Oh, you will give her my love when she comes back, won’t you, madam?’
‘Of course. She ought to be back next week. It’s wonderful that her mother’s so much better. Maud won’t have so much to do for her any longer. Well, good-bye, and be sure – Oh dear,’ as a crash came from the kitchen followed by a feeble wailing. ‘I believe that’s Mrs Hopper in trouble already, I’d better go and see. Good-bye again.’ She rushed away, so I had to call ‘Good-bye, madam,’ after her. I knew the timbre of every crash and clatter that could be got out of that kitchen, and this one was only the old familiar story of the oven shelf being pulled out too far and falling to the ground, sometimes accompanied (as in this case) by a pie-dish that had been standing on it.
I shut the front door behind me on poor Mrs Vaughan at the start of a fresh saga of contretemps. The people who deserve perfect service never seem to get it; I suppose because they are too indulgent. It seems hard when one thinks of the cantankerous devils whose staff hop round them with the immaculate efficiency of terror.
It seemed funny to be swanking out of the flats by way of the lift and the main entrance instead of clattering down the iron staircase at the back. It was the epitome of my glorious freedom and as such gave me a terrific thrill.
Returning to the family bosom, I found it heaving sighs of relief at the ending of what they had written off as a period of strange and regrettable madness. I began to realize what they had to put up with from me, in the way of exhausted and moody silences, or occasionally hysterical scenes of rage and tears.
‘Oh, well, she can’t help it, poor fool, she’s tired,’ or ‘Don’t tease Monica, she’s not herself tonight,’ they said good-naturedly, pitying me in my lunacy. It really was a little hard on them that the only repercussions they felt from my being a cook should have been such unpleasant ones. I determined to be a little ray of sunshine in future, tripping about the house, scattering joy and gladness on all who crossed my path. On this nauseating vision I fell asleep and slept, off and on, for about a week, only waking to open my mouth for food and drink and to scrub myself frenziedly in hot baths. I was haunted by the thought that the smell of the kitchen still hung about me, as if domestic service were loth to let me go from its clutches.
At last I began to feel a bit more pure, and I rose from bed and bath a new woman.
I found that quite a lot of money had accumulated in the bank as the result of earning wages that I had had neither the time nor the energy to spend, and in my desire to live in a way as far as possible removed from what I had been through I went out and spent the whole lot in a very short time on the adornment of my person.
I broke out in no uncertain way in a search for the fun that I had missed for so long. With the strident cacophony of gaiety I tried to drown the cold little voice inside me which soon began to mutter disparaging remarks.
‘Isn’t all this just leading back to the same point of boredom from which you tried to escape before? And when you get there,’ it seemed to say, ‘then – what?’
Monica Dickens, 1940
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Published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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First published by Michael Joseph in 1939
Copyright © Monica Dickens 1939
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