by Helen Slavin
* * *
I didn’t put the lights on again when I arrived home. I walked from college in the end because the stars were out and the frost was coming. I liked the sharpness, the cold clean of my breathing as I moved through the streets. I made a pot of tea and opened the window to sit out on the top of the pergola below. I had some scanned documents in my bag, a few pictures and a couple of the original work ledgers I wanted to really go over.
I knew there were stories of doom and drudgery waiting there for me, the lost history of the laundresses, but I didn’t feel like an unhappy ending that night. I left my coat on and dug out an old pair of gloves from the back of a kitchen drawer, some hideous fleecy things I bought last winter. As I sat out there, my tea cooling fast, I realised that I might not be able to do this once the real hard frosts arrived. The wooden struts might be slippery. I didn’t want to skid off the end of the construction and land headfirst in the hammock. I would have to sit in the window, possibly on the sill.
I thought about Martha on the roof terrace and the night in the library and wondered what memories she would have that she might wish to erase. I thought of Mrs Milligan and the memories she would archive forever.
I thought, a very clear thought, one complete and crisp idea. ‘Something has to be done about all this.’
But, at that point, I did not know what.
Rusu desu
Nobody is home
It was a grey week grinding towards Halloween. I had expected some backlash from the thwarted Tierney but all was silence. I had been hard at work on several projects that I wasn’t, strictly speaking, paid to pursue.
I was paid to stack books and smile beneficently at Mrs Wild as she ordered large print soft porn. It was due solely to Mrs Atkinson’s kindness that I was allowed to uncover the hidden history of the laundresses of Kite House. I had expected woe. But as the pieces began to fall into place, those places were more nuanced.
Tragedy: a fatal brawl between two of the grooms at a harvest home over the favours of a housemaid. Vice: the kitchen maid stealing the silverware to finance a new life with the footman, and ultimately abandoned and shamed in the local newspaper. Evil (class motivated and socially sanctioned): another girl, separated from her bastard child and put into the laundry to pull herself together had stolen a baby from the village and been sent to the asylum.
You would not have thought they had time enough away from the starching of napkins.
I had been sifting through the Kite House photographs and the ledger, trying to put names to the faces. The gardeners, grouped by a greenhouse with their wheelbarrows, had been easy as they were listed by rank in the payroll. The laundresses proved more difficult. They were equal, none stood above another in the ledger except alphabetically. Then I uncovered a portrait of the entire Kite House domestic staff, done up in best bib and whitest tucker, posed in sombre ranks in front of the house.
I scanned it, sectioned it, enlarged the laundresses. Now familiar faces looked out. Miss Haughty but Naughty with the hint of a smirk and the rest of her sisters in starch; but the woman from the far left of the laundresses portrait was not there. I scanned and enlarged the original image of the lost girl’s face and picked my way back over the staff portrait with the magnifying lens. She was not hidden in another row of servants. She had not worked her way through the ranks of housemaids. She had not been blurred or faded out of the edges by sun or time. She was simply not there.
The date was clear on the back, stuck on a tiny label in browned-off ink; Kite House, Domestic Staff – Christmas 1891. A light flicked on red in my head, even as I flicked back through the ledger. The name jumped out at me from July 1889, Mary-Ann Penny from Totnes. I checked and double checked. Early December in 1890 she vanished from Mrs Mason’s household ledger. I riffled through the red box to find another portrait. Christmas 1889, spotted with mildew, the edges fading out so that the figures placed there looked like ghosts.
Yes. There at the back on the right, the last laundress standing beside…It was Henry, the first of the gardeners.
The face. She was Mary-Ann Penny, looking out from the portrait at the far left, standing by the dolly tub, the line sheets a billowed blur behind her where the wind and the camera had clashed in capturing the scene. Mary-Ann Penny. It felt as if she gazed out and knew that one day, far into the future, I would pull her from the darkness and look back at her. She would tell me more than all the other laundresses put together.
* * *
I began with a three-week search of the register of births and deaths and the burial records, starting from the date she vanished from the ledger. Nothing. If she was dead by 1891, she had not died locally. There was a possibility that she had left and travelled home to Totnes, so I ran up a phone bill chatting with and emailing their archivist. I travelled down there on two consecutive weekends to sift through their records, drink tea from their staffroom and scoff their biscuits. Whirring my way around their microfiche collection, I called up the census taken in 1891 and although there were still Pennys in Totnes then, a couple of younger brothers and her father, there was no-sign of Mary-Ann. But I knew she was there somewhere. I just needed to find the lines to read between.
Back in my basement hideout at the library there didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to do this. I trawled the internet for information whenever I could, anxious that the path I had been following was going to close up on me if I didn’t keep with it. I could see me having to cut myself off later and losing the way.
As the weeks chugged on I stayed later and later, pulling out more and more documents and hogging all the computer terminal time in the archive. Mrs Atkinson always seemed to come, coat on, to throw me out just when it felt I was on the verge of finding Mary-Ann, and the next morning I could never seem to find my place. The loophole in time eluded me; it did not feel the same.
Eventually I found some relatives of Mary-Ann working at a big house near Totnes prior to 1889 and amongst that information I unearthed a house party attended by Viscount Breck of Kite House and his wife, Beatrice.
The house, Brakers Meet, sat above the town and was owned by a man called Hazard. Clearly a man of hedonistic and epicurean taste, he had kept records of handwritten programmes drawn up for the evening entertainments at his house parties. They were part of a permanent exhibition in the house, which was now open to the public.
I ought to have missed them entirely, not thinking that Mary-Ann Penny might be hidden amongst them but there she was, her name Googled to the surface on a site illustrating the Brakers Meet exhibits:
* * *
– A MidSummer Night’s June at Brakers Meet – To feature for your enlightenment and entertainment:
– The Lady Lily at the pianoforte with a cacophony of Clementi –
– Colonel Whitside and his Prestidigitation –
– Readings from the Golden Lectern –
– a –
– Selection from Persuasion –
– by Miss Jane Austen –
– the latter to be read by Mary-Ann Penny –
* * *
Was this my laundress? A well-bred young lady seen fit to read Austen in polite company? I scrolled around some of the online selections of the Hazard artefacts. Other evenings listed her again, reading Dickens and Eliot from her Golden Lectern alongside the more exalted-sounding pianists and prestidigitators.
Then, just as swiftly, she vanished again.
Issho ni ikimasho o ka?
Shall we go together?
The next day Mrs Atkinson was tied up in a conference being held in County Hall. They were going to discuss the way forward for County Information Systems, which is what the Powers That Be call the library now. Mrs Atkinson didn’t tell us then, but the only idea they had was to close up all the picturesque old sandstone library buildings and sell them off to developers—a contract supposedly to be put out for tender but in reality neatly folded into Tripp Tierney Associates’ back pocket. Then they were going
to build a state of the art library, or to give it its official title, ‘County Information Systems Centre’, in the city.
It was the kind of idea the council often had, ideas full of grandeur and hot air. Knock this down and build that. Sell this. Redevelop that. They weren’t so much interested in the ‘centralisation of resources’ (I read the mission statement later) as they were in playing Lego with the locals. That’s how we ended up with the new migraine-inducing shopping centre and the leisure complex that turns swimming into an orienteering exercise.
Mrs Atkinson was rallying her forces to show them that her library and its fellows in the other small satellite towns were a vital community network. She was putting together what amounted to the defence in a murder trial, and she knew if she didn’t get it right she’d be doomed. Divorced and out of the job she loved. Divorced, in fact, from the library.
I was married or at least engaged to the archive by then. I began the day scanning a more informal series of photos I’d unearthed of the Travellers who visited town. We had an extensive collection because at the fin de siècle, Viscount Breck’s wife Beatrice had formed a penchant for photography, with a particular interest in what she called ‘the Romani’. The little hobby she’d taken up to fill in the gaps between house parties and charity work became a document of the Travellers’ history.
After an hour I began to be able to trace the faces as they aged through the photographs. By half past ten I was putting together the family groups, the Kirchers, Pikes and Herons, and beginning to wonder about them. I saw the different family homes, the wagons and trailers and hard work. I loved the accident of it, that Lady Breck in her genteel pursuit had accidentally captured the truth.
Going back over the stacks and folders from recent days, I riffled out the images that had fixed themselves into my mind. I placed them together but the arrangement didn’t fit. I shuffled, switched, and suddenly it seemed I was standing in their light. An old woman watched me from a Kircher family campfire and the boundaries of the photos blurred into each other, girls dancing, men beside a fire working metal. Yes; it was the same stylistic sense I’d noticed before. The use of light, the informal poses. It was Lady Breck who’d been chronicling the town.
A clang resounded, startled me into the present.
‘Sorry.’ Harvey, apologising from the corridor, picking up the folded legs of the collapsible display board.
It felt as if I had drawn back the curtain of time and stood on the edge of their lives. Now I had to know more—which Kircher, which Pike—and by one-thirty I was rifling Mrs Atkinson’s desk for the key to the written archives.
There’s a room at the far end of the corridor that shakes when the buses pass. If you could look up through the ceiling you’d see the edge of Massey Street where they’ve just started redeveloping some rundown Victorian terraces. As I stood, doing my fingertip search of the archives I could feel the vibration from the machinery, feel the changes being wrought. It was three o’clock when I found Lady Breck’s journals.
She had a lot of time for writing journals, Lady Breck. After all, she had teams of people carrying out the everyday duties of life. The first one I unearthed that day was a collection of menus and place cards. They seemed interesting enough from a culinary viewpoint. Aspic and potages and all that copper-kettled palaver; hot-house peaches, custards and blancmange for the high-ups. Wild duck, no doubt shot on their estate, unless the cook happened to frequent the newly opened Queens Park and bumped a few of them off around the boating lake.
Since I was hiding and in no hurry I was also neglectful. I put each menu to one side, sifted through the beautifully written place cards. Lord Buttermere…Mrs Lionel Irving… Capt. Thom. Whitside…Lady Lily Strand-Fforbes. Names that meant nothing to me, names that had eaten cold roast pheasant and country fruit cake at a shooting party in 1885.
I put them to one side without turning them over. It was only when a draught fluttered them to the floor that I was shown the other side, the not-quite-so-correct handwriting, the abbreviations, the personal code of who was who at the dinner table. Plays violin as if the guts were still extant in the cat!!!!!!! she had written beside Lord Buttermere. Capt. Thom. Whitside was ‘dashing’, as only a captain could be.
I spent the latter part of the afternoon schmoozing my way through the autumn 1885-88 dinners and ‘at homes’ of Lady Beatrice Breck. It was not hard to measure the perimeter of their social circle. A few names, such as Capt. Whitside, cropped up regularly and others were bussed in, to be judged on the back of a menu and never heard of again.
Brays like a donkey she said of one. Ate the leg of lamb entire to himself. With a row of exclamation marks.
After 1888 the notes began to spill into marbled notebooks.
* * *
Have become adept at the brewing of tea, much to Courtley’s chagrin. He considers it an affront that I have decided to take an active hand in the garden, and resented my ascent of the stepladder this morning to oil the mechanism that opens the windows in the pineapple house. Rather enjoyed his bottled fury and fuelled it further by brewing the eleven o’clock tea in the Bothy. He arrived to find me already stirring the leaves and setting out the pot beakers. He drank the tea, chewing at his pipe between mouthfuls, uncertain whether manners dictate that it was wrong for the lady of the house to be brewing tea for a servant or more wrong still that in order for the social situation to be righted, a man should brew said tea for a woman. Courtley may puff his cheeks all he likes. It is my garden and I shall dig in it.
* * *
Evening—
Courtley laughs the longest in his blessed bothy. He has complained to Breck and henceforth I am banished.
Boring dinner with Whitside lingering forever like old smoke and kippers. He mentioned to Breck that he has his sights set on some pink and white debutante. The man is like a pike prowling for minnow.
I thought of the laundresses cleaning all the table linen and everyone’s smalls. I wondered what secrets they could see in the stains and the dirt they were faced with. Of course they would not have had much time to think, with the copper boiling endlessly, the steam, the sweat, the hard work before them.
I thought of them all the way back to the flat that night. I thought about them again as I filled my own washing machine, did my own ironing. By then it was late and I was tired and fell into bed.
And didn’t escape them. In the dream I felt grass underfoot; opened my dream eyes to see them all busy just beyond me. The men metal-working, the children being herded to tasks, a girl struggling to carry an infant sibling across the camp. Laughter. Shouts. A woman singing. I was searching, I knew it, each face looking back at me as if I wasn’t a stranger and then at last I found her, but the camera flashed, the powder igniting and I raised my hand against the white light of it. Woke up.
It was early and springlike as I headed to work. It had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d delved into the first of Lady Breck’s journals and already, as the sun rose over the town, I felt I was heading to meet up with an old friend. Lady Breck had a title and privilege but she’d taken time and care to step away from the enforced idleness of her class. She was curious about the Romany community. She was interested in how people lived. In her journals, private, intimate, not for public consumption, she was unswervingly honest, not only about the people she met but about herself. She was a woman at home with her failings; her notes, respectful and observant, giving tantalising views of the Roma clans. The feuding Kirchers versus the battling Pikes, the politics of the Herons marrying into the Keets.
Lady Breck’s passion and curiosity made me want to know more, to use her eyes to look back through time, and that is why I surprised Mrs Atkinson.
I had thought I was early but it seemed Mrs Atkinson had been earlier still. She was slumped on her desk. She didn’t have her white gloves on. Her arms were flung out, all angles, elbows and shoulders as if perhaps she’d fallen from the ceiling and landed there. There was a scent in the
air, something fragrant but woody, as if in stepping into the room I had crushed pine cones under foot. Mrs Atkinson was silent until suddenly a weary sigh escaped. I stepped back from the doorway in case she moved, in case she saw me.
My vision saw two slices. One through the gap between door and jamb, the other, at the farthest edge where the door angled open. I saw her hands reach upwards towards her face but I could not see her face, only the way her bottom curved into the back of the creaky swivel seat. I saw her foot as it slid off its shoe and curled itself around the splayed spindles of the chair, the toes furling and unfurling, catlike. Creak of chair, unzipping of handbag. The foot slid back into the shoe and the chair creaked forwards, into business. Slithering papers, the tilt of the back of her neck, a hand reaching up to grapple and fiddle with the hairline there. The clackle of her glasses as she put them on. She looked over them at me as I made my presence known in the doorway.
‘Ruby?’ she didn’t give away the fact that she wanted to know how long I had been there and what had I seen. I did my best to look oblivious. In the past, I have interfered so perhaps you’ll call me hypocritical, but there is a difference between interfering in an underhanded and possibly criminal way and standing in a doorway with a sympathetic look waiting for someone to humiliate themselves before you. I vote for underhanded and criminal every time.
‘I’ve been going over Lady Breck’s journals and the Traveller photos she took…I wonder if there’s any room for us to do an exhibition…in time for the October Fair, perhaps… I don’t know how the council feels about Travellers…’