by Kate Morton
She looks at me a moment. ‘Yes?’ Blinks. ‘Do I know you?’
The landlady is still watching. She has climbed up the first few stairs to keep me in her sights. I glance quickly at her then back at Miss Starling.
‘My name is Grace. Grace Reeves. I knew you at Riverton Manor?’
Realisation lights her face. ‘Grace. Of course. How lovely to see you.’ The in-between voice that used to set her apart amongst the staff at Riverton. She smiles, stands aside, and gestures for me to come in.
I have not thought this far ahead. The idea of visiting at all came to me rather suddenly.
Miss Starling is standing in a little sitting room, waiting for me to sit so that she may do so.
She offers a cup of tea and it seems impolite to refuse. When she disappears into what I presume is a kitchenette, I allow my gaze to tiptoe over the room. It is lighter than the hall, and her windows, I notice, like the flat itself, are scrupulously clean. She has made the best of a modest situation.
She returns with a tray. Teapot, sugar bowl, two cups.
‘What a lovely surprise,’ she says. In her gaze is the question she is too polite to ask.
‘I’ve come to ask a favour,’ I say.
She nods. ‘What is it?’
‘You know shorthand?’
‘Of course,’ she says, frowning a little. ‘Pitman’s and Gregg’s.’
It is the last opportunity I have to back out, to leave. I could tell her I made a mistake, put back my teacup and head for the door. Hurry down the stairs, into the street, and never return. But then I would never know. And I must. ‘Would you read something for me?’ I hear myself say. ‘Tell me what it says?’
‘Of course.’
I hand her the note. Hold my breath, hoping I have made the right decision.
Her pale eyes scan, line by line, excruciatingly slowly it seems. Finally she clears her throat. ‘It says, Thank you for your help in the unfortunate film affair. How would I have got on without you? T was none too pleased… I’m sure you can imagine. I haven’t told him everything, certainly not about our visit to that dreadful place. He doesn’t take kindly to secrets. I know I can count on you, my trusted Grace, more like a sister than a maid.’ She looks up at me. ‘Does that make sense to you?’
I nod, I am unable to speak. More like a sister. A sister. I am suddenly in two places at once: here in Lucy Starling’s modest sitting room, and far and long ago in the Riverton nursery, gazing longingly from the bookcase at two girls with matching hair and matching bows. Matching secrets.
Miss Starling returns the note but makes no further comment on its contents. I realise, suddenly, that it may have raised suspicions, with its talk of unfortunate affairs and keeping secrets.
‘It’s part of a game,’ I say quickly, then slower, luxuriating in the falsehood. ‘A game we sometimes play.’
‘How nice,’ says Miss Starling, smiling unconcernedly. She is a secretary and is used to learning and forgetting the confidences of others.
We finish our tea chatting about London and the old days at Riverton. I am surprised to hear that Miss Starling was always nervous when she had to come downstairs. That she found Mr Hamilton more imposing than Mr Frederick. We both laugh when I tell her we were as nervous as she.
‘Of me?’ she says, patting the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Of all the funny things.’
When I stand to leave, she asks me to come again and I tell her I will. I mean it too. I wonder why I have not done so sooner: she is a kind person and neither of us has other contacts in London. She walks me to the door and we say goodbye.
As I turn to leave, I see something on her reading table. Lean closer to make sure.
A theatre programme.
I’d have thought nothing of it, only the name is familiar.
‘Princess Ida?’ I say.
‘Yes.’ Her own gaze drops to the table. ‘I went last week.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was enormous fun,’ she says. ‘You really must go if you have the chance.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I had planned to.’
‘Now that I think of it,’ she says, ‘it’s really quite a coincidence you should come today.’
‘A coincidence?’ Coldness spreading beneath my skin.
‘You’ll never guess who I went to the theatre with.’
Oh, but I fear I will.
‘Alfred Steeple. You remember Alfred? From Riverton?’
‘Yes,’ I seem to say.
‘It was really quite unexpected. He had a spare ticket. Someone cancelled on him at the last minute. He said he was all set to go alone and then he remembered I was in London. We ran into each other over a year ago and he still remembered my address. So we went together; it was a shame to waste a ticket, you know what they cost these days.’
Do I imagine the pink that spreads under her pale, freckled cheeks, makes her seem gauche and girlish, despite being at least ten years older than I?
Somehow I manage to nod goodbye as she closes the door behind me. In the distance a car horn sounds.
Alfred, my Alfred, took another woman to the theatre. Laughed with her, bought her supper, walked her home.
I start down the stairs.
While I was looking for him, searching the streets, he was here, asking Miss Starling to accompany him instead. Giving her the ticket intended for me.
I stop, lean against the wall. Close my eyes and clench my fists. I cannot rid my mind of this image: the two of them, arm in arm, smiling as they relive the evening’s events. Just as I had dreamt Alfred and I would. It is unbearable.
A noise close by. I open my eyes. The landlady is standing at the bottom of the stairs, gnarled hand resting on the banister, spectacled eyes trained on me. And on her unkind face an expression of inexplicable satisfaction. Of course he went with her, her expression says, what would he want with the likes of you when he could have someone like Lucy Starling? You’ve got too big for your boots, aimed too high. You should’ve listened to your mother and minded your place.
I want to slap her cruel face.
I hurry down the remaining stairs, brush past the old woman and into the street.
And I vow never to see Miss Lucy Starling again.
Hannah and Teddy are arguing about the war. It seems everyone across London is arguing about the war these days. Enough time has passed and, though the grief has not gone, will never go, distance is allowing people a more critical eye.
Hannah is making poppies out of red tissue paper and black wire, and I am helping. But my mind is not on my work. I am still afflicted with thoughts of Alfred and Lucy Starling. I am bewildered and I am cross, but most of all I am hurt that he could transfer his affections so easily. I have written him another letter, but I am yet to hear back. In the meantime, I feel strangely empty; at night, in my darkened room, I have been subject to the odd rush of tears. It is easier by day, I am better able to put such emotions aside, affix my servant’s mask and try to be the best lady’s maid I can. And I must. For without Alfred, Hannah is all I have.
The poppies are Hannah’s new cause. It’s to do with the poppies on Flanders fields, she says. The poppies in a poem by a Canadian medical officer who did not survive the war. It’s how we’re going to remember the war dead this year.
Teddy thinks it unnecessary. He believes those who died at war made a worthy sacrifice but that it is time to move on.
‘It wasn’t a sacrifice,’ Hannah says, finishing another poppy, ‘it was a waste. Their lives were wasted.’ Those who died and those who came back; the living dead, who sit on the street corners with bottles of liquor and beggars’ hats.
‘Sacrifice, waste, same thing,’ says Teddy. ‘You are being pedantic.’
Hannah says he is being obtuse. She doesn’t look up as she adds that he would do well to wear a poppy himself. It might help stop the trouble in the factories.
There have been strikes lately in the Luxtons’ factories. They started after Llo
yd George ennobled Simion for services during the war. It seems a lot of their factory workers were in the war themselves, or lost fathers and brothers, and don’t think too much of Simion’s war record. There is not a lot of love lost for folks like Simion and Teddy who are seen to have made money off the deaths of others.
Teddy doesn’t answer Hannah, or not fully. He mutters something about folks being ungrateful and how they should be pleased to have a job in these times, but he does pick up a poppy, twirling it by its black wire stem. He is quiet for a while, pretending absorption in the newspaper. Hannah and I continue to twist red tissue paper to bind the petals onto stems.
Teddy folds his newspaper and tosses it onto the table beside. He stands and straightens his jacket. He is off to the club, he says. He comes to Hannah’s side and threads the poppy lightly into her hair. She can wear it for him, he says, it suits her better than it does him. Teddy bends and kisses her cheek, and then he strides across the room. As he reaches the door, he hesitates as if he’s remembered something, and he turns.
‘There’s one sure way to lay the war to rest,’ he says, ‘and that’s to replace the lives that were lost with new ones.’
It is Hannah’s turn not to answer. She stiffens, but not so that anyone would notice who wasn’t looking for the reaction. She does not look at me. Her fingers reach up and slip Teddy’s poppy from her hair.
Hannah has still not fallen. It is a continuing bone of contention between them. She and I do not discuss it and I do not know her feelings on the matter. In the beginning I wondered whether she was somehow preventing herself falling with some remedy or another. But I have seen nothing to support that. Perhaps she is just one of those women not disposed to falling. The lucky ones, my mother used to say.
In the autumn of 1921, an attempt is made on me. A friend of Deborah’s, Lady Pemberton-Brown, corners me at a country weekend and offers me a position. She begins by admiring my needlepoint then tells me that a good lady’s maid is hard to find these days and she would very much like me to come and work for her.
I am flattered: it is the first time my services have been sought. The Pemberton-Browns live at Glenfield Hall and are one of the oldest and grandest families in all of England. Mr Hamilton used to tell us stories about Glenfield, the household against which every other English butler compared his own.
I thank her for her kind words but tell her I couldn’t possibly leave my current position. She tells me to think about it. Says she will come and see me again the next day in case I change my mind.
And she does. All smiles and flattery.
I say no, again. More firmly this time. I tell her that I know my place, I know where I belong. With whom, to whom.
Weeks later, when we are back at number seventeen, Hannah finds out about Lady Pemberton-Brown. She calls me to the drawing room one morning and I know as soon as I enter that she is not pleased, although I don’t yet know why. She is pacing.
‘Can you imagine, Grace, what it’s like to find out in the middle of a luncheon, with seven other women intent on making me look a fool, that an attempt has been made on my lady’s maid?’
I inhale; am caught unawares.
‘To be sitting amid a group of women and to have them start on about it, laughing if you please, acting all surprise that I didn’t know. That such a thing could happen right under my nose. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am-’
‘I should think so. I need to be able to trust you, Grace. I thought I could, after all this time, after all we’ve been through together…’
I have still not heard from Alfred. Weariness and worry lend my voice a jagged edge. ‘I told Lady Pemberton-Brown no, ma’am. I didn’t think to mention it because I didn’t think to accept.’
Hannah stops, looks at me, exhales. She sits on the edge of the lounge and shakes her head. She smiles feebly. ‘Oh, Grace. I’m sorry. How perfectly beastly of me. I don’t know what’s come over me, behaving like this.’ She seems paler than usual.
She rests her forehead lightly in one of her hands and says nothing for a minute. When she lifts her head she looks straight at me and speaks in a low, quivering voice. ‘It’s just so different to how I thought it would be, Grace.’
She appears so feeble I am immediately sorry for having spoken sternly to her. ‘What is, ma’am?’
‘Everything.’ She gestures half-heartedly. ‘This. This room. This house. London. My life.’ She looks at me. ‘I feel so ill-equipped. Sometimes I try to trace back through my mind to see where I made the first wrong choice.’ Her gaze drifts toward the window. ‘I feel like Hannah Hartford, the real one, ran off to live her real life and left me here to fill her place.’ After a moment she turns back to me. ‘Do you remember last year, Grace, when I saw the spiritualist?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Tremors of misgiving.
‘She didn’t read for me in the end.’
Relief, short-lived as she continues.
‘She couldn’t. Wouldn’t. She intended to: sat me down, had me draw a card. But when I gave it to her she slid it back, reshuffled and had me draw again. I could tell by her face it was the same card I chose, and I knew which one it was. The death card.’ Hannah stands and paces across the room. ‘She didn’t want to tell me, not at first. She tried my palm instead, wouldn’t read that either. She said she didn’t know what it meant, that it was foggy, her vision was foggy, but she said one thing was sure.’ Hannah turns to face me. ‘She said death was hanging around me and I was to watch my step. Death past or death future, she couldn’t tell, but there was a darkness.’
It takes all the conviction I can muster to tell her she’s not to let it bother her, that it was just as likely a ploy to get more money from her, to make sure she came back for further readings. After all, it’s a safe bet in London these days that everyone’s lost someone they love, especially those seeking the services of a spiritualist. But Hannah shakes her head impatiently.
‘I know what it meant. I worked it out myself. I’ve been reading about it. It was a metaphorical death. Sometimes the cards speak in metaphors. It’s me. I’m dead on the inside; I’ve felt it for a long time. As if I died and everything that’s happening is someone else’s strange and awful dream.’
I don’t know what to say. I assure her she isn’t dead. That everything is real.
She smiles sadly. ‘Ah then. That’s worse. If this is real life, I have nothing.’
For once I know the perfect thing to say. More like a sister than a maid. ‘You have me, ma’am.’
She meets my eyes then and takes my hand. Seizes it, almost roughly. ‘Don’t leave me, Grace, please don’t leave me.’
‘I won’t, ma’am,’ I say, touched by her solemnity. ‘I never will.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
And I kept my word. For better and for worse.
RESURRECTION
Darkness. Stillness. Shadowy figures. This is not London; this is not the morning room at number seventeen Grosvenor Square. Hannah is vanished. For now.
‘Welcome home.’ A voice in the dark, someone leaning over me.
I blink. And again, slowly.
I know the voice. It is Sylvia, and I am suddenly old, tired.
Even my eyelids are perished. Dysfunctional. Like a faded pair of Roman blinds with worn-out cords.
‘You’ve been asleep for a long time. You gave us quite a scare. How do you feel?’
Displaced. Left over. Out of time.
‘Would you like a glass of water?’
I must nod, because a straw is in my mouth. I sip. Lukewarm water. Familiar.
I am unaccountably sad. No, not unaccountably. I am sad because the scales have tipped and I know what’s coming.
It is Saturday again. A week has passed since the spring fair. Since my episode, as it is now known. I am in my room, in my bed. The curtains are open and the sun is shimmering in off the heath. It is morning and there are birds. I am expecting a vi
sitor. Sylvia has been and prepared me. I am propped like Miss Polly’s dolly against a stack of pillows. The top sheet she has folded over neatly to form a wide smooth strip beneath my hands. She is determined to make me presentable and I have little will to resist. God help me, I have even let her make me over.
There is a knock.
Ursula leans her head around the door, checks that I am awake, smiles. Her hair is pulled back today to reveal her face. It is a small round face to which I am unaccountably drawn.
She is beside the bed now, head inclined, looking down at me. Those large dark eyes: eyes that belong in an oil painting.
‘How are you?’ she says, as everybody says.
‘Much better. Thank you for coming.’
She shakes her head rapidly from side to side; don’t be silly, her gesture says. ‘I’d have come earlier. I didn’t know until yesterday, when I called.’
‘It’s as well you didn’t. I’ve been in rather large demand. My daughter has been installed since it happened. I gave her quite a scare.’
‘I know. I saw her in the foyer.’ She smiles conspiratorially. ‘She told me not to excite you.’
‘God forbid.’
She sits on the chair near my pillows, rests her carry bag on the floor beside.
‘The film,’ I say. ‘Tell me how your film is coming along.’
‘It’s almost ready,’ she says. ‘The final edit’s done and we’ve almost finished the post-sound and the soundtrack.’
‘Soundtrack,’ I say. Of course they are to have a soundtrack. Tragedy should always play out against music. ‘What sort?’
‘There are a few songs from the twenties,’ she says, ‘dance songs mainly, and some piano. Sad, beautiful, romantic piano, Tori Amos-style.’
I must look blank, for she continues, scrabbling for musicians more my vintage.
‘There’s some Debussy, some Prokofiev.’
‘Chopin?’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘Chopin? No. Should there be?’ Her face falls. ‘You’re not going to tell me one of the girls was a Chopin nut, are you?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It was their brother-David-who played Chopin.’