After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘I do apologize,’ I said. ‘Quite the last thing you need on a day like this, silly women drifting into your kitchen when you’re busy with all these guests.’ She looked at me as though I had gone mad but could hardly say anything. ‘Are you still short-handed?’ I blurted out. She stared at me even more intently then, thinking, I suppose, that I must be a member of the family she had failed at first to recognize for why else would I ask such a thing?

  ‘Or have I got it wrong?’ I said. ‘I thought that one of your –’ I could hardly say ‘colleagues’ – ‘that one of the maids left. I mean, died. And I was thinking how awful for you if she was a particular chum.’

  ‘Miss Cara died, madam,’ said the girl in a patient and rather tender voice, clearly having decided that I was some lunatic cousin let out for the day to come to the service.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘I had heard in the village – in Gatehouse, you know – that one of the Edinburgh families in the cottages had brought their maid from town and that she had died. I don’t know what made me think it was the Duffys.’ We had reached the bottom of the stairs by which I had descended, and just then the door at the top opened and we both heard the voice of the butler coldly telling someone we could not see to stop sniffing and behave herself.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Mrs Tiggywinkle, clearly as intimidated by the man as I was.

  ‘Don’t let him find me!’ I hissed and this spurred her to action. She opened a door and shoved me inside before coming in herself and leaning against it to listen. We heard a veritable army of footsteps descend the stairs over our heads as the butler and footmen trooped down from the dining room, then we could hear the butler’s voice demanding to know why a bucket of peelings was sitting in the passageway and where Mary had got to this time.

  Mary, as I took her to be, leaned back against the door and let out her breath in a low whistle. We were in a little store room, utterly empty and seemingly without purpose, but I knew from my own housekeeper at Gilverton that the ability to keep a few rooms completely bare was a matter of pride, being a sign of a well-run household where detritus was not allowed to gather. An empty attic is, I believe, the pinnacle of housekeeperly excellence.

  ‘What must you think of me?’ I said, deciding to abandon my show of feminine confusion and throw myself on her as an ally now that the ice was broken. ‘But that man always looks at me as though I were something the cat brought in and I just simply can’t face him today.’

  ‘Nice to have the choice, madam,’ said Mary, feelingly, and my frankness had clearly made her feel quite on a level since she took a tin out of her apron pocket and, having wrested it open with difficulty, lit a cigarette.

  ‘Still,’ I said, refusing her offer of another, ‘I’m glad it’s not one of your friends who died after all. I can’t think where I got the idea.’

  ‘No more can I,’ said Mary. ‘They never take any of us down to these “cottages”.’ She made the word ooze with scorn. ‘And we’re all fine here. Peggy, Rose, Nan, Jean, Dilly, Margaret and me. What did she die of?’

  I was caught off-guard by this, but righted myself quick enough, I think.

  ‘Went swimming in the sea and drowned herself on her afternoon off,’ I said. Mary and I both tutted and shook our heads.

  ‘Accident, was it?’ she said, with a last deep suck on her cigarette. I nodded. ‘Accident,’ she said again. ‘Probably in trouble and trying to put it right, don’t you think, madam?’ We shared a look, then she pinched out her cigarette carefully between callused finger and thumb before putting it back in the tin and into her apron pocket again.

  ‘Well, then.’ This with an air of finality.

  ‘Indeed,’ I agreed, handing over the half-crown I had ready in my glove for the purpose. Mary checked up and down the passage before slipping out and making her way back to her abandoned pail and the ticking-off to come. I slipped out after her and climbed the stairs again, knowing that at least a frosty look if not a whispered interrogation from Hugh should meet my belated entrance, but knowing too that just as Mary had her half-crown in her pocket I should have Alec’s glance of expectation, an expectation I would certainly satisfy as soon as we had a chance to talk.

  Luncheon was purgatory. Had the minister of the morning been there, he would have been convinced of the existence of that Popish venue well before the pudding and been lost to Presbyterianism for ever. The food was cold and depressing owing, I expect, to the upper servants having been at the service and to a feeling that nothing today should be too enjoyable. This was not the worst of it, however. Alec, if you can believe it, had been sat next to Clemence, a placing so monstrously, squirmingly, wrong that no one else at the table could drag their eyes or their minds from it. On Alec’s other side Lena sat, stony-faced, although whether this was a performance of grief or because she had underestimated how shocking her seating plan was and was toughing it out I could not tell. Mr Duffy looked stricken. Grey and shaking, he sat without eating a morsel and stopped his neighbours on either side from doing so either, it seeming bestial for them to stuff away while he just sat there. This reluctance to eat spread out around the table, and the servants kept coming back into the room and then stopping, shuffling in the doorway, not knowing what to do and unable to catch the eye of either of the Duffys to help. The sight of the butler half-reaching for a plate and then stopping himself and smoothing his hair instead, that classic gesture of awkwardness, made me want to weep.

  And then just when one thought it could get no worse, Clemence laughed. Not a huge laugh, but a giggle which just happened to fall into a momentary pool of perfect silence. Mr Duffy’s head jerked up and he sent a look of pure hatred down the table, the kind of look which in my boys’ weekly papers is depicted as a thick black dotted line. Clemence did not notice and Mrs Duffy stared back at him coldly until his eyelids drooped and he bowed his head again.

  Two things were clear: everyone would be desperate to leave as soon as they could after rising, and since we could not all leave at once, one’s best hope was to get right in at the off. But, since Hugh was far too stiff to make the first move and was impervious enough to ‘atmosphere’ to bear it, I foresaw a long wait amongst dwindling numbers before I could escape. A plan occurred, however, and I put it into motion at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘Alec Osborne has just told me,’ I whispered to Hugh, ‘that he fears he’ll keel over if he doesn’t get some fresh air. And he wonders if you and I would go with him.’ Hugh, bless him, actually took steps backwards, physically recoiled, and I could not resist going on, although I knew it was cruel, ‘Shall I come with you, or will you and he go alone?’

  Poor Hugh may still have been babbling: ‘You, Dandy, you go, you two go without me,’ when, having collected Alec with a whispered ‘Come on!’, I descended the front steps and set off.

  We walked through the streets in the growing damp of a chilly afternoon – there is nowhere in the world like Edinburgh for making the same cheerless ordeal out of any time of the day or season of the year, even early May. Our obvious mourning clothes matched all too well the deliberation of our pace and the down-turned gravity of both face and voice as I told Alec all that I had learned. Mary’s evidence could not be talked away, and he did not try.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ he said at last. ‘It was Cara. Splendid work, Dandy.’ This had a bitterness I had not heard in him before, but which was only too easily understood. I could imagine what he felt to find out that his pretty angel of a fiancee had killed herself trying to get rid of a baby that was not his. Whether there was still only sorrow at her death or a sneaking relief beginning to grow that he had avoided marriage to such a girl, his heart must be heavy with some mixture of grief and guilt.

  I felt it most grievously myself that we still did not know what had happened to the jewels and so despite all my muck-raking Daisy and Silas were exactly where they had started. And there they would stay, I was sure, since the only way out of it depended on me. Oh yes, I had been
all set, that morning, to blackmail – let us call it what it was – to blackmail Lena into silence. Now, though, I felt that had I the nerve to go through with it, I should never be able to look myself in the glass again. And anyway I had not the nerve, I knew.

  We were there. Alec looked up as I laid my hand on the gates of the Municipal Cemetery and pushed them open, then bowed his head again while we traversed a network of paths to the back corner where some newly filled plots sat in a row. There were five recent enough. Five, packed so close that there was barely a strip of flat ground between them and they looked more like the furrows of a ploughed field than graves. Three of them had flowers upon them, some florists’ wreaths as well as little hand-picked posies.

  ‘So it must be one of these two,’ I said, looking first at one and then at the other of the two graves which lay quite unmarked. ‘Oh, Cara.’ I felt a huge bulge of tears revolve somewhere inside me, but bit down hard on my lip to hold them.

  ‘You’re sure,’ said Alec. It may have been a question.

  ‘When I was speaking to Mrs Tig – to Mary just now,’ I said, ‘she pinched out her cigarette in her fingertips and didn’t feel a thing. And I thought, those are kitchen maid’s hands, you know, tough as boots. Not scrubbed raw, as Dr Milne said. With bits of metal pot-scourer under her nails. Kitchen maids don’t have nails to get things stuck under.’ Somehow that seemed the worst thing of all, imagining Lena taking her still-warm hands and setting about them with a scourer to add a convincing little touch to the tale.

  ‘How do you know this is the place?’ said Alec.

  ‘Dr Milne told me it was in town,’ I said. ‘Then I just telephoned around, pretended I was organizing a little marker of some kind. It’s the sort of thing a kind employer might do – Hugh has done in the past – although not Lena admittedly. I had to gamble that in fact no marker was already arranged.’

  ‘And was one?’ said Alec, his voice beginning to sound gruff.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Apparently not.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  There then began a curious stretch of calm that was yet as tiring as any time I have ever endured. The case was closed, I believed, but one might almost have said that other parties disagreed. Had I believed in fate, I might have blamed myself for tempting it with that first nightmare served up to Dr Milne. Had I believed in ghosts, of course, I should have blamed Cara herself for her determined, beseeching presence. Perhaps though it was only the weather, a spell of heavy warmth both day and night; liquid weather, although no rain actually fell. It was as if a flood was held in the sky by a single trembling membrane, pressing dull headaches down upon all beneath it, seeping just enough vapour for one’s clothes to be always limp and one’s hair lank and oppressive against one’s neck.

  In the heat each night as I slept, short and furious dreams of Cara raged through me and then wrenched me up and out, leaving me flailing under a soaked sheet listening to the blood thunder in my ears. Night after night I willed my leaden arms and legs back to life, rose, splashed my face and changed my nightie, then lay back down in the cooling damp of my bed, hoping to slip into a gentler sleep without her finding me.

  At last the month dragged to a close and I began to look forward to the return of the children for the summer – ‘look forward’, that is, in the sense of knowing that it was sure to happen and had to be prepared for. By and by, it came to me that if I made my final report to Daisy, if my part in the affair could be tied in pink tape and filed, then the dreams might stop. There was a twinge of shame each time I considered how I was shirking my duty to tell Daisy that I had failed. And failed I had, for all thoughts of applying pressure to Lena had wilted and died in me in the Municipal Cemetery weeks before. Admittedly, if Daisy had contacted me in a sudden panic, if Lena had renewed her vague threats, I might have found courage enough in my outrage to do something. But Lena was either biding her good time or had abandoned the plan after Cara’s death or perhaps was to return to extortion only after a proper period of mourning, if such a ludicrous clash of sensibilities were possible.

  So one morning, dry-eyed and sick from weariness, and with Cara’s stark face still behind my eyelids whenever I shut them, I sat down at my desk intending to report my failure and return my fee. As it turned out, however, I wrote something quite different, looking detachedly but with interest at what poured from my pen, and grateful once again not to believe in the spirits by which I might otherwise have felt invaded.

  My letter was short on detail, extremely long on mystery. In effect, I told Daisy nothing, or nothing much: only that I firmly believed Lena would not be in touch again – I was less sure than this in reality, of course, but I hoped to excuse the terseness of my note with a suggestion that things were dealt with – but, I went on, if there were a renewal of Lena’s hints, a fresh round of her not-quite-stated demands, Daisy was to say the following: ‘I know you took no servant to the cottage.’ I assured her that if she said just that, ‘I know you took no servant to the cottage,’ Lena would immediately and for ever desist.

  Calling Bunty, I set off to the post box at the farm road-end where I dropped in the envelope, with high hopes that I should now have seen the last of the nightmares. Or perhaps my imminent plunge into family life for the summer would effect the necessary jolt. That very night, of course, I dreamed of Cara again, horribly, sickeningly, until I rose and went to the pitcher, peeling off my nightie as I walked. So one last tremor then, caused by writing the letter, but the boys would be here in the morning, in less than five hours I saw from squinting at my mantel clock in the grey light, and my life would resume its course.

  For one day it looked as though that might be true. The boys, collected from the station by Hugh, clattered into the house with the greatest possible confusion that two boys, two trunks, five excited dogs and as many excited servants might be imagined to produce, so it was just as well that their mother merely waved and smiled from the perimeter, adding nothing to the mayhem. They cantered upstairs to hug Nanny and inspect the nursery for the slightest changes, startlingly tall as they passed me, and before I had had a chance to organize their newly angular faces in my mind and remove the image of the round cheeks and sweet curls which I always substitute for reality, they were back, charging out of the house still in their grey shorts and black shoes to go and see the ponies, with Hugh marching after them, bellowing that they must not upset the poor beasts and must change into boots that instant.

  ‘Tomato sandwiches, Mrs Tilling,’ I said. She would have made tomato sandwiches without being told, of course; it was not so much an instruction as a blessing in code.

  ‘They have been ripening on my kitchen windowsill since Sunday, madam,’ said Mrs Tilling. ‘And will I make cheese scones? And which do you think between a chocolate cake and a walnut cake? Or perhaps . . .?’

  ‘Both,’ I said, as we knew I would.

  ‘This tea is quite good,’ said Donald with his head tipped back and his lips tucked in to stop cake crumbs spraying as he spoke. Teddy, a year younger and thus less able to control himself, exploded into giggles although, to be fair, he did catch most of the scattering mouthful in his napkin and Bunty soon snuffled up the rest. ‘Quite good’ was clearly to be the phrase of the summer. They always brought one home with them; a word or two whose repetition was the last thing in wit, which Hugh would become unbearably irritated by and begin to hand out punishments for before the week was out. Last year every picnic, walk and party we arranged had been agreed to by the boys ‘if I’m spared’ and although it made me smile to hear them repeat this dainty phrase, it drove Hugh wild with rage and produced more than one slippering.

  Teddy took another huge mouthful of cake and a slurp of tea and leaned against me comfortably.

  ‘It’s quite good to be home, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘It’s quite good to have you home, Teddy Bear. And you, dear,’ to Donald, who closed his eyes at me slowly like a cat.

  Almost enough becoming domesticity to c
hoke on, then, but it did not work. I awoke drenched and shaking that night as usual, half-forgetting the details of the nightmare and glad of it. I crept through the silent house to the nursery wing without knowing why. I make little pretence of rampant maternal passion and have always found chocolate box displays sickening both in myself and on the few occasions when I witnessed them in my own mother. Besides, mine are boys which means that already, at ten and eleven, they are lost to me. Still there I was, standing at the end of Donald’s bed, shivering slightly, listening to his breathing and that of Teddy in the bed behind me, no idea what had drawn me there. They kept pace with one another, breathing in and out in perfect time, and I wondered if it was because they were brothers or if it came from sleeping in the same room and if so whether at school a dormitory full of little boys breathed in and out in time all night. These musings, aimless as they were, drifting around and through me like smoke, nevertheless seemed to give me whatever I had come for because the dream slipped off me at last and the sick rumbling it had left behind quieted, the thoughts dissolving before I had even thought them.

  All three of us were breathing in time now, and I could have stood there for ever, I think, although the hard floor began to make my bare feet ache. I thought of curling into an armchair but, imagining their scorn in the morning to find their mother mooning over them like a lovesick cow, I gathered myself and returned to my room.

  Alec stood at the front of the church in his wedding clothes, Hugh as his best man and six bridesmaids in pale green crêpe-de-Chine. The cadaverous minister from the memorial service was on his hands and knees shouting down into the floor of the altar, shouting to Cara to come out, telling her everyone was waiting. Her father sat in mourning in the front row with his hands clenched on his knees and we, the rest of the congregation, pretended not to hear the scuffle and gasp of a struggle going on under our feet. ‘Help me,’ screamed Cara’s voice. ‘Somebody help me.’