by Maggie Wadey
Agnes learns that, during the week, she will be catering for three – the lady herself, her younger son, Geoffrey, and an elderly uncle – plus five staff (Agnes included); for seven or eight members of the family most weekends; and for the occasional house party that may go up to twenty. The guests will sometimes include three children under five, Mrs Minchin’s grandchildren, the children of her daughters. Her elder son, William, a captain in the British Army, is sometimes home from England and likes to bring friends with him – there may sometimes be up to a dozen young gentlemen in the house, hunting and attending balls, and this requires the cook to be on duty into the small hours in order to provide them with breakfast. Dancing is hungry work. Agnes knows this from personal experience, but even her brothers, even Dan, is perfectly capable of cutting himself some bread and cheese when he’s walked home from the dance in Carney.
Agnes wonders how she’ll get on with the present cook whose job it will presumably be to train her before leaving. She’s dumbstruck to learn that it’s Mrs Minchin who’ll be her teacher. Indeed, the ‘present’ cook is already gone.
In the following months Mrs Minchin will come into the kitchen as the stable-yard clock strikes ten, every morning except Sunday, when she walks on Geoffrey’s arm to the Church of Saint John at Loughan. She will take off her rings – all nine of them – and place them in a little china dish, shaped like a rose, on the windowsill. Then, rolling up her sleeves, she will proceed to teach Agnes the difference between frying and sautéing, roasting and baking.
All the confidence Agnes had when applying for the job evaporates: her hands shake, she drops things, she seems unable to take in her instructions. During the second week she breaks a dish and hides it, a deceit she could most probably have got away with. But, having not slept, she goes to Mrs Minchin and confesses. After that, everything flows naturally and easily. Agnes opens up. She softens, as if regaining her innocence under Mrs Minchin’s benign influence.
Mrs Minchin isn’t a snob. She’s interested to hear what Agnes has learned about cooking at home and at the convent, and Agnes is proud to show off her skill with boxty and colcannon and tripe. Mrs Minchin is familiar with these things but she’s always keen to learn new tricks. She doesn’t treat her girls as inferior at all – which goes some way to make up for the fact that she doesn’t pay them either. That’s to say, the job is ‘all found’, with a small amount of cash – twelve and sixpence in Agnes’s case – provided monthly for personal items like clothes and sweets.
Agnes is quick to notice that money isn’t wasted, either in the kitchen or on Mrs Minchin’s person. Mr Minchin is never mentioned though he’s referred to in the long, ambiguous glance Mrs Minchin gives his portrait which hangs on the dining- room wall and would be more than enough to put Agnes off her food. Agnes, of course, does not eat in the dining room. Like Mr Minchin, the previous cook isn’t mentioned. But Agnes learns from the housemaid that she suffered a heart attack whilst lifting a muslin-wrapped boiled pudding from the saucepan. She fell to the floor clutching the pudding like a dead baby to her breast.
‘Did she die of it?’ Agnes asks.
‘No, she did not!’ replies the housemaid. ‘But she was a changed woman.’
‘How was she changed?’ asks Agnes, anxiously.
‘Well in the first place, didn’t she have a terrible pudding-shaped burn on her breast and her showing it to anyone she thought might like a look? And in the second, she took to cursing something terrible,’ says Violet, with a little squawk. ‘Pardon me, but morning, noon and night it was “feck this” and “Jeysus that”. She had to go. Even the mistress thought so and she loved that woman. By which I mean to say she loved the food she made, as didn’t we all. But her cursing was enough to curdle the milk.’
A little flight of steps mounts out of the kitchen into a bed-sitting room which is Agnes’s exclusive territory. The rug, the curtains and the bed with its white cotton sheets are all her own. The room’s only window looks down into the kitchen itself, but a second door opens on to a landing which links with the servants’ quarters and there’s a window here overlooking the stable yard. A pleasant smell of hay and horse droppings is wafted in. On a little tower standing directly opposite there’s a two-faced clock with only one face working. Every time it strikes the hour a fan of white doves unfurls from the stable roof. When Mrs Minchin first showed Agnes her room she pointed out that she’d be able to lock both doors if she wished. She said this with no particular emphasis, but it served to remind Agnes there were men sleeping in this house who were neither her father nor her brothers.
The back of the house is a labyrinth of dark corridors and damp, pokey little rooms. These are the servants’ quarters, and the sculleries and the cloakrooms where generations of Minchin boots and galoshes have been stashed away on wooden racks, and riding crops and waterproofs are hung on rusty hooks on the whitewashed walls. In winter, the whole house – except for those areas immediately around the big fireplaces – is damp. The mirrors and glassed paintings on the walls fog over, and ferns of ice grow across the inside of the windows. In spring, all the carpets are taken out and laid face down on the lawn to have the chalky mould brushed from their undersides. In the servants’ quarters, the bare stone floors are ice-cold and, even at noon, waist-deep in shadow. This is because the windows in these rooms are set halfway up the walls and when Agnes asks why, she’s told ‘So the gentry won’t be disturbed by the sight of us working our bollocks off.’
Violet tut-tuts. ‘It’s so you won’t gawp at the gentry going about their business,’ she says.
Seamus, the butler laughs. ‘Business! Is that what you’re calling it? Keep your eyes peeled, Aggie, and you’ll learn a thing or two.’
Agnes is a surprise to the staff at Busherstown. They are struck by her seriousness and self-possession. Their first instinct is to tease, their second to be circumspect, and in the pause they discover she has both a temper and a sense of humour. Or, if not a sense of humour, exactly, a sense of fun. If one of the men tries to get away with a coarse remark she turns very chilly. No, she has to be the one to see something rude implied in an innocent look or gesture. Seamus is quick to manipulate this little conceit in her. It tickles him to set the bait – it might be an arrangement of chicken giblets on the board, or the stage-managed sounds made as he pulls his wet galoshes off at the door – then to watch the secret, knowing grin that makes her bunch her mouth up to one side until the laughter is squeezed up into her eyes and Seamus, with a quick wink at the others, gets the chance to say, oh, very surprised and indignant, ‘What’s the big joke, Aggie?’
Not that Agnes spends much time with the others. She might join them for a cup of tea in the staff sitting room if she feels like it, only she rarely does. She prefers her own little kingdom of kitchen, pantry and bedroom. The pantry is cold and the bedroom dark, but the kitchen has large windows which face west so it’s always bright and warm – too warm, at times. She’s no sooner arrived than she sets about reforming her predecessor’s slack habits: outdoor boots off before anyone steps into the scullery, every utensil used for milk or butter to be scalded before and after use, hands to be scrubbed before handling any of the food, raw or cooked. She’s her mother’s daughter, with new scope for her perfectionism. She prepares the work surfaces in her kitchen as if getting ready for surgery, and scrubs them down afterwards in the same spirit.
All this naturally affords the rest of the staff much amusement, especially if something goes wrong and she loses her temper. If mayonnaise or soufflé is on the menu, Violet learns not to go near for fear of a tongue-lashing. But as far as the others are concerned, it’s pure comedy. And even Agnes isn’t all sound and fury. The new cook – she’s quickly given this title and sometimes, ironically, ‘Madam’ – is also known for her habit in quieter moments of sitting on the step at the open door with her feet planted square, her skirt dropped between her knees and arms akimbo, cooling off. Beside the door there’s a rosemary bush planted
on a box of sand. Agnes takes the leaves and rolls them between her fingers, dreaming and sniffing the lovely, unfamiliar scent.
This is what fills her few moments of relaxation. In these vaguer, looser moods her eyes cloud over and her inner world fills with majestic, slow-moving forms and shadows, and great shimmering plains of light towards which she is moving without ever quite arriving, but with her own self, suffused in warmth, somehow being the centre and the meaning of it all. Sometimes she lifts her hand up to the sun and sees the bones outlined in rose-coloured blood. Her abiding memory of this place will be the scent of rosemary and the light. It will be recalled to her one spring day sitting on a hillside in Cyprus above the Mediterranean. She’ll make the same gesture, crushing wild rosemary between her fingers and sniffing the scent.
In a lobby between the dining room and the pantry is a mahogany dresser. Here, in two wide, shallow drawers, the Minchin silver is kept. It’s laid with all reverence inside protective layers of green felt. Silver. The only person allowed to touch it is Seamus. It’s no part of Agnes’s job to lay the table but there’s nothing to prevent her watching the thrice-daily ritual of laying the table and the twice-daily ritual of laying the tea trays. Seamus has been performing these routines for the past thirty-five years. His dark, blotched hands with prominent veins and long, sensitive fingers seem to act blind, like feelers.
In the dining room where the windows go from floor to ceiling Agnes hovers at Seamus’s elbow, discreet enough for him to forget she’s there watching his every move as he takes the knives, forks and spoons out of the felt, eyeing each piece as it flashes light before being laid meekly in place. Seamus lays the table in total silence. There’s no clashing of knives, no tinkle of spoons. Silence and a single flash of light, like a man preparing for a duel. Agnes notices everything – the tiny bone-handled knives for bread and butter, and soup spoons as big as ladles – she picks up on everything: watching, listening, learning. Sometimes she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.
It’s not just the preparation of food, the laying of the table, but Mrs Minchin’s person: her lace cuffs, her custom of making herself presentable for tea and changing for dinner, her manner with the servants, her quiet voice, her quiet footsteps and gentle gestures, her scent, fresh and delicate always, as is her breath and her skin, even when, heads touching, she and Agnes lean close in the creation of a sauce or a pudding. And Agnes knows, because Violet has told her, that even Mrs Minchin’s underwear – shabby though it may be – is ironed, including the straps of her camisole and the silk gusset of her knickers. This information gets stored away in Agnes’s mind along with the correct way to wear jewellery: if the clasp of your pearls is diamond then it’s permissible to wear it turned round to the front of your throat, and: never wear gold and silver together. More than anything else, however, it’s Mrs Minchin’s way of speaking that fascinates Agnes: soft as dewfall, with the authority of iron.
Mrs Minchin’s younger son, Geoffrey, is what the staff call ‘a bit queer’. It’s one of their great entertainments to watch him wander through the garden with his hair smarmed down, chewing on the corner of a lavender-scented handkerchief, followed by his mother’s black pug, Oscar. As he walks Geoffrey talks to himself, or to the dog, and it does no good to remind Seamus and Violet that Saint Francis talked to the birds. Oscar is not a bird. The dog takes a fancy to Agnes, though God knows why since she can’t bear him snorting and wheezing as he waddles after her down into the orchard. There he’s content and noses peacefully around amongst the scratching chicken whilst Agnes picks over the windfalls. The gardener says of Oscar, ‘That dog hasn’t even the manners to cover his arse.’
This same gardener, middle-aged and boney, with the restless eyes and body of a much younger man, describes his employer and Agnes as ‘book cooks’, squeezing so much contempt into those two short words Agnes can’t believe Mrs Minchin allows it. But apparently it amuses her.
‘It would do you no harm, Michael,’ she says, ‘to have your nose in a book once in a while instead of in the muck-heap.’
This remark has a double meaning because Michael is a famous gossip. Every morning Michael comes to the back door with a basket of vegetables for the table.
‘What the heck is that?’ Agnes asks when presented with a bunch of fat, anaemic-looking stems.
‘Look it up in one of your books!’ the man, retorts, giving her a furtive once-over as he steps away, adding, with a snort, ‘It’ll make your piss smell like poison.’
Agnes takes down a grease-splattered Mrs Beeton from the shelf and hefts it over to the kitchen table. She leafs through the illustrations until she finds it: asparagus, for which there is no better recipe than ‘boiled and dressed with butter’.
The village of Moneygall is an odd, glowering sort of place with one straight-as-a-die, windy main street and a grim atmosphere. There’s hardly ever anyone about. Years later, Agnes was to liken it to those one-horse places in Westerns where everybody’s hiding behind shutters before the outlaws hit town. On the rare occasions their paths cross Agnes doesn’t go unnoticed by the young men of Moneygall but, not only are they slow on the draw, they put her down as unapproachable. They’re right.
Twice a week Seamus puts on his chauffeur’s cap and drives Mrs Minchin and Agnes to Moneygall to the butcher’s shop where Agnes is shown the various cuts and taught how to judge a good piece of beef. The butcher offers up slabs of meat for their inspection. Agnes attributes his not quite genial decorum to Mrs Minchin’s presence, but it’s just as likely her own manner. Partly because she always wears her navy-blue costume for these outings she holds her body fastidiously away from the blood and sawdust on the counter, jutting her face forward. A little crease of concentration appears between her eyebrows. As the butcher pats and prods at the raw red flesh with thick meaty fingers the usual little comedy of suggestiveness and po-faced denial is played out. When they get back into the car, Mrs Minchin pats the back of Agnes’s hand and with a smile murmurs, ‘Good girl.’
Agnes isn’t quite sure why. It makes her feel halfway between one of her employer’s daughters and her dog. But Mrs Minchin never asks her anything about herself, not one thing, so maybe she’s closer to dog than daughter. In fact, something in this young woman prohibits intimacy. Had Agnes actually been one of her daughters, she would have asked, ‘Darling, is something troubling you?’ But Agnes isn’t her daughter. They speak of other things, and the names of Tom and Nancy and the others, the beauty of her mother’s garden and the death of their dear old donkey, all these are sealed up inside Agnes’s head like dreams. Sometimes she stays on in town to buy cheap ready-made dresses and Pond’s face cream. Then she walks back to Busher’s Castle alone.
Mrs Minchin comes into the kitchen one day to turn everything upside down and back to front. The only eye in her head is the brown one and she keeps clapping her hands together to underline her points. The butter is to have more salt in it, there are to be lightly scrambled eggs and grilled bacon (streaky but not smoked) for breakfast – which will now be served any time between seven and ten o’clock – and there are to be no onions or other root vegetables with dinner. Mrs Minchin’s elder son, William, is coming home. For an indefinite period. It’s always an ‘indefinite period’ with William who complains that, as a soldier he must submit to rules every minute of his waking life and he’s damned if he’s going to do the same when he’s at home.
‘Now just you wait!’ says Violet, nudging Agnes in the ribs, and her laugh turns to a gasp.
William is a captain in the British Army, stationed in Gloucestershire where, fortunately – the kind of fortune William takes as his due – a distant cousin is master to an excellent hunt. Hunting forms the basis of all William’s friendships and, since he’s coming home with three other young gentlemen, the horses must immediately be brought up to par. As Agnes stirs the fruit for the barmbrack she hears the sound of horses’ hooves crossing the yard. Some minutes later comes the hollow drumming of their fee
t across the pasture, fading away as they are ridden up towards the open moorland.
William is blonde, a term Agnes associates with women, but nothing else will do. His hair slicks down over one cheek and his mouth is held tight against his teeth in a childish show of determination. But he’s older than Agnes expected – thirty at least – and treats his mother with distant amusement, polite, but without affection. Mrs Minchin does her best to interest William in what’s been happening on the demesne. She wants him to take a look at ‘the books’. She refers to this in a cheerful tone of voice Agnes recognises as false – as no doubt her son does, too. He groans, but follows her into the library and the door closes after them. It’s an open secret amongst the staff that what Mrs Minchin conveys to William during their brief closeting in the library is not good news. Indeed, as the ‘hungry thirties’ progress, the news goes from bad to worse.
Agnes had once overheard a brief exchange between Mrs Minchin and her younger daughter, the one living in England:
‘Wouldn’t it be better to have British staff?’ the young woman had asked. ‘They’re vastly superior and you’ve none of that Catholic nonsense to deal with.’
‘No one could be better than Agnes,’ Mrs Minchin replied. ‘Besides, all that is in the past.’ Adding in a very bitter tone, ‘Isn’t it the British government we’re at war with now?’
When Agnes, somewhat alarmed, asked Seamus what the heck this meant, Seamus replied, ‘Sure, the Brits can’t even look after their own. But then, aren’t these poor critters the black sheep of the family due to their Irish half being English and their English half being Irish?’