The Ladies of the House

by Molly McGrann

  It was gone eleven o’clock when Arthur finally walked through the door. He was drunk. She realized that straight off. He swayed and caught the wall. His suit jacket was buttoned wrong. He took her in: the dress, the lips, nylon stockings making a mystery of her legs. She was half afraid of what he might say – the shoes, too, were new and squeezed her feet.

  He leered a bit. ‘Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes,’ he said.

  Then she was in his arms – it was real, it was happening, nothing had changed between them.

  *

  All weekend Flavia smiled. She looked pretty when she smiled. Marie was happy, too, or at least she didn’t cry as much as she usually did when Arthur was home. Flavia served him fish pie on Saturday night, ham with parsley sauce for Sunday lunch. He was putting on weight; she wondered what he ate in London. He ate out, is what she thought, sharing a flat as he did with a friend – she could never keep track of who was who – and being unable to cook himself.

  He read the newspaper, listened to ‘Tampico’. He put Marie on his knee and pronounced her wet. Flavia was mortified but still she smiled. Time went too fast – before she knew it, Sunday lunch had been eaten and he wanted his suit.

  As he straightened his tie by the door, Flavia finally dared to ask him, why not stay? One more night. It was a nice day. She would pack a picnic supper and they could take Marie to the bank of the Ise to see the boats. It would cap a perfect weekend, to have Arthur’s head in her lap and the baby at play by her side. Flavia had dreamed just such a scene as she cooked lunch and again as she washed up, while Arthur had his nap. The sun shone into the kitchen and Flavia had been full of hope.

  She asked him. It wasn’t so hard as she thought, to get the words out.

  He paused. He looked at her. She had Marie in her arms and the baby stared back at him: her face his face. Marie wrinkled her brow like she would howl, but she didn’t – not a sound. They waited, Flavia and Marie, to hear what he would say. Flavia never asked anything of him. She did things the way he wanted them done, as best she could. That was her way. It was the only way she knew. Where she was from, men did not behave like this, gone from home all week, working in a city far away. No, the men were there with the family; the family was a clan, the clans led by men. Family living, like that, was deeply intimate. A routine could be established; a wife could anticipate her husband’s needs, feeling him as one with sea legs feels the boat sway. A wife could be heroic, seen to be performing small miracles every day. Nearness bred such intimacy, and therein the exchange was made: what they held between them and passed back and forth, sometimes carefully, more often not. What made them cling.

  Arthur smiled, thanked her for lunch, and told her that it was impossible for him to stay. He had business in London that he must attend to.

  His words had the force of physical blows – they nearly knocked her down. Oh, the drag of it, the baby who would not sleep properly, eat properly, who could not do a thing for herself, who only made more work and more work, and the husband who was never home, who did not ask, when he walked through the door at the end of the week, how she was. Was she tired? Was she well? Did she need anything? He did not ask. She had never been so tired. She could not think straight, could not half organize herself to accomplish those simple household tasks she was required to undertake. The front step had not been scrubbed, nor the walk swept, no spring flowers planted or the shrubs clipped. Put the baby in the dresser and close the drawer, she had thought one day when she could not bear it another minute. The baby would be safe in there and no one could hear her scream. Flavia placed her so gently inside, the drawer lined with a blanket, and eased it closed except for a crack. Fine. The stunned silence – the relief! Then the baby started. Flavia had not even got her dust cloth in hand before the baby started. The dusting would have to wait; the baby was in her arms again and Flavia was roughly patting her back. She didn’t want to hurt the baby and yet she did want to hurt the baby. She wanted to hurt the baby just a little bit. She pinched her experimentally. The baby stopped and looked at Flavia. Flavia smiled: she knew, the baby knew, what Flavia was up to. The baby held her breath, going purple in the face, and then she screamed. Flavia, with the wailing baby hot on her breast, looked around the room at the dust, the crumbs, the ceiling cobwebs drifting in the draught she had failed to stop up. There were mice, rats and squirrels to contend with; woodlice, in their armour, advancing from the cupboards where they mingled with earwigs in the mildew and damp. There was nothing she could do but hold that baby.

  Over and again Flavia repeated the moment in other ways: she needed the toilet but the baby wept and would not be put down; she thought she would perish if she did not eat her lunch but the baby had wind. A pot overboiled. A cake burned. A bed sheet scorched when the iron overturned in her hurry to pick up the crying baby.

  That Sunday, she held onto the doorframe and turned the other cheek for a kiss. The baby squirmed between them. Arthur patted Marie on the head. When he had gone, Flavia did not pinch the baby. She did nothing. She felt nothing.

  She felt like nothing.

  10

  The lustre that once set those rooms alight had waned; silk curtains hung in ample tatters and strings; papered walls half-stripped, their raiment on the floor. Dirty windows – a long time since anything had been polished. Tarnish showed the pattern in the silver tea set still laid out in the dining room, dead flies in the sugar bowl. The telly was on in the drawing room all day and night now, for the drawing room had become a sickroom, when Sal was well enough to come downstairs, and there was an oxygen tank that hissed in one corner.

  ‘Did you know that?’ Rita asked her one afternoon as they sat together, Sal wrapped up on the chesterfield. Her hairless head bobbed when she lifted it from the pillow – such a weight to bear, now that she was skin and bones.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘How much this house could be worth.’

  ‘It’s not for sale. It’s not worth anything if it’s not for sale.’

  ‘You’d be rich if you sold it.’

  ‘He would never allow it,’ Sal whispered, like Arthur Gillies was in the other room and not in his grave.

  ‘To hell with him,’ Rita said. ‘It’s your house. He said he would give it you, didn’t he? Didn’t he promise? Mr Wye would have us all out on our backsides otherwise.’

  Sal just shook her head.

  When Arthur was tired, it was Sal who made him a cup of tea and arranged the cushions to support his back; when he caught a cold, Sal put him to bed with a hot toddy; when he sat down in a puddle, having overstepped the kerb, she did not laugh, just told the maid to wash and dry and press his clothes. She did everything to soothe him when he was cross, brewing a rum punch she knew he liked, playing ‘Tampico’ until the record wore out. Every week she prepared mutton in an old-fashioned way, with a thin slice cut the length of the leg, stuffed with herbs and butter, the slice replaced and the whole thing bound up with string and roasted and served as Sunday lunch late on a Tuesday night with potatoes and greens. On her hip she bore a scar, the ring of a dog bite from when she was a brat, but Rita always imagined the scar was where Arthur Gillies sank his teeth into Sal night after night. When it rained, she said the scar ached like the teeth were still inside. The day Sal died, morphine flooding her veins, she cried out in pain – she said it was like the dog hung there still, his jaw locked tight.

  Sal had worked for Arthur Gillies practically all her life, from when she was very young, the most beautiful girl, but unrefined. If it weren’t for Arthur she would have been a miner’s wife, same as everyone else in Kiveton.

  She’d had a decent enough upbringing, but mean and grey. The room she shared with her sisters was just another small room in a narrow terraced house, the hairbrush and comb on the dresser for all to use, two good dresses between three girls, nothing shop-bought except their shoes and stockings. Their father and brothers went down the pit, and so did their uncles and cousins, even the distant ones from
out of the area who came to live in the pit bathhouse.

  There was coal scum in every kettle of water. Black streaks in the bath and bowls, obstinate stains, as if the porcelain were scorched. Coal gritting the floorboards, crunching subtly under foot – Sal was always sweeping up; there seemed no end to it. That was life.

  She went about her business in Kiveton, such as it was, until one day Arthur saw her at a bus stop and stopped his car, a smart convertible, the one he kept in a London garage full of other expensive sports cars. Mrs Peabody’s cocker spaniel was sitting on the wall behind the bus stop with an intelligent look on its face, waiting, like Sal, for the bus. Arthur whistled. Sal took in at a glance his flattened nose and chalk-stripe suit, the bold yellow tie, its gleaming silk bright as new gold.

  Arthur said, ‘I was whistling at the dog.’ He looked at her again, more carefully. ‘Where are you going, love?’ When Sal answered, ‘Home,’ he said, ‘I mean in life. Are you married? Have you got a boyfriend? Because I can take you away from here.’ He could talk like that, like a big shot. When he was doing business, that’s how he talked.

  Sal got in the car.

  Mrs Peabody’s cocker spaniel trotted onto the bus like it did every day for the ride home from town, where the butcher had given a bone, the greengrocer a carrot, the confectioner a bowl of water with a sherbet sweet fizzing at its bottom. Sal thought, ‘Never again will I have to sit beside that greedy old dog.’ The wind tangled her hair but her thoughts were clear: I won’t be back, except for weddings and funerals.

  As it was, once she embarked on her career she wasn’t to be included in those, either. She never returned, not once, declaring London to be her soul’s home. Sal knew Kiveton like the back of her hand, every street name and the way each one ran, seaming into each other like a body with all its creases and scars. She knew who and what; knew all that – the life she’d always had until she suddenly didn’t – but she never went back. She didn’t have the kind of mother who could forgive her multitude of sins: leaving without saying goodbye, just like that, with a brilliantly dressed, ugly man, to become, at his urging – the word could not even be said.

  Sal pulled the car door shut and felt the leather seat unclench itself to take her weight. She forgot all about the groceries spoiling in a paper bag in the sun, the insinuating dog with its human eyes. Her family and friends would wonder where she was. Arthur handed her a scarf from his glove compartment. Knotting the scarf under her chin as she had seen women in pictures do – glamorous women, film stars and socialites and Vogue models – Sal already felt different. She was another girl. She was on her way to London in a fancy sports car.

  On the quiet roads they talked, first in a general manner, politely, revealing more as the miles passed. Near London, Arthur told her that he had a friend waiting. Did she want to meet his friend? Sal said yes. He wanted to be sure that she understood. Yes, yes, yes. She never said no. Arthur drove her to a grand house somewhere in the middle of London – Mayfair, he said, but Mayfair meant nothing to her then – and took her inside and introduced her around. It was all a blur to Sal. Then he led her to a bedroom, lavishly furnished, where she met his friend. She slept with three more men as the night went on and the experience was not unpleasant; the men were kind to her, if ardent. She wasn’t a virgin, but she was only nineteen and girls from Kiveton weren’t fast.

  Going to bed with Arthur was different. He took off his nice shirt and ordered her into the bath, then bathed her himself – he always liked to bathe her while the maid changed the bed. He was strong-looking, with a barrel chest and a thick covering of hair. He washed her well, soaping her all over. She had never been washed by a man before. He told her what to wear, how to style her hair, the exact shade of red lipstick he preferred. She looked wonderful in bed, he said. She looked wonderful everywhere. She would have anything she wanted.

  When he left her in the morning, she was bereft. It hurt like that at first, just to be apart. She went downstairs and found three girls already seated round the kitchen table, wearing silk kimonos, two of them in curlers. One was especially tiny, her red hair pulled back with a ribbon. She smiled at Sal. There was the smell of cooked breakfast and Sal was offered a plate of bacon, sausage and eggs.

  ‘There’s bread, if you fancy a bit of toast.’

  ‘Just a cup of tea will do me,’ said Sal.

  ‘Mr Gillies doesn’t want people to think he don’t feed us properly. He likes a bit of meat on our bones.’

  Sal rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t slept. She had no appetite, feeling as she did. Love made her stomach churn; she thought she would be sick. Those girls – they did what she had done. That’s what they did.

  ‘I’m Minnie,’ the smallest one said. ‘Short for Miniature.’

  ‘I’m Louise.’

  ‘And I’m Ava.’ They smiled at her and tucked into their breakfasts.

  Sal laughed, and then she cried. She couldn’t say why she was crying – she was in love! But she cried all day, off and on, first at the kitchen table, then upstairs in what would be her room, face down on the bed. Louise came in at three o’clock, unwinding her curlers, and told her she’d better stop before Mr Gillies saw the state of her. Sadness was bad for business. Minnie made up a cold flannel for her swollen eyes. Ava lent a dress and some stockings and a necklace made of green stones. There was a dressing gown – a purple silk kimono – and a pile of clean linen by her bed, as well as other things they said she would need: talc, a toothbrush, a large box of condoms. No scent, they told her; high-class call girls, such as they were, never left a trail.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Minnie said. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘It’s just, I was only waiting for the bus,’ Sal wailed.

  ‘The bus! They laughed. It was just like Mr Gillies, they said. When he saw what he wanted, he had to have it, and he expected no less than he asked for.

  ‘What was he doing in Kiveton?’ Louise wondered.

  ‘You know him. Always looking for new girls,’ Ava said.

  ‘Is that right?’ said Sal.

  ‘Oh, he’s gone on you,’ Minnie said, patting Sal. ‘I’ve never seen him so gone on a girl before.’

  They were coy as to whether they had slept with him; no one seemed to want to admit that she had not. Sal thought that if he were just there with her, she would feel better. She could do the work – she could do anything. That’s how he made her feel.

  Ava said not to worry, Mr Gillies was always about. He went round the houses in the evening, every single house, and there were already twelve. Then he went out. Like clockwork, he was. He stayed up all hours of the night – he loved the nightclub scene, the Hambone and the Cosmopolitan and the Colony Room. Sometimes he took a girl with him on his jaunts, just to show her off. Sal would soon see that they had got the good end of the stick when it came to these things. Minnie knew; she had worked as a hostess in Soho for Big Frank, a legendary Maltese. She said it was lovely working for Mr Gillies, even if she personally feared the man – not that he’d ever hit her, like some. It was just his way.

  Frightening, he was.

  Was he?

  Oh, but he was nice enough, Ava said quickly. She had come to London to get on the stage – she never meant to be a call girl, only she’d been turfed out by an auntie meant to look after her. Her auntie only wanted the bit of money Ava’s family sent along for her keep. ‘I turned up at her door and she invited me in for a cup of tea, said she’d show me my room in a minute and did I have the thirty pound Mum gave me? Straight into her pinny pocket! She waited for me to drink up and then she said, “Right, off you go,” and showed me out. She said I had to make it on my own like she did. I was only sixteen – that was two years ago. My auntie lost the job she had during the war. She got trained as a machinist but now it’s the men doing everything again. Put me to the test, I’m as good as any man, says my auntie to the foreman, but he wasn’t having it.’ Ava added, ‘I have a face for the stage. You want a bit of dram
a, to be an actress, and I’ve got that with this big chin of mine and my curly hair. Naturally curly hair, but they’re not the right kind of curls so I straighten them out with the iron and then curl them up the right way.’

  Louise’s fellow had died in the war. She got sad when she said it and turned away, but she was soon smiling again and daubing on the mascara. She had eyes like a French actress. She thought she’d like to marry a farmer.

  ‘Not me,’ said Minnie. ‘I’m holding out for a rich man.’ Minnie was eighteen but she looked twelve – that was not eating enough, she said, having to go begging for her supper. Her parents were dead, and there were always ones that took advantage. She gave them a knowing look and then she laughed.

  The doorbell rang. It was half past five. Minnie told them to shush. They arranged themselves on chairs around the sitting room – they called it the drawing room – before Ava opened the door to John, who seemed to know everyone. He handed over his hat and coat and she led him upstairs. Then came Frederick for Louise and, not long after that, Mr Fisher for Minnie.

  Before she went up, Minnie said to Sal, ‘When you do it, don’t feel it. Show it, but don’t feel it.’ She didn’t need to say. The doorbell rang. Sal opened the door.

  *

  At first Sal thought she was pulling a fast one on everyone who worked from nine to five, the poor sods. She really thought it was better her way, working just at night, billed as London’s Bettie Page for her jet-black, extra-sharp bob. She slept late, then bathed for hours, long scented soaks that kept her limber. She oiled her skin and polished her nails. She did no washing-up. Her clothes and shoes and her evening wardrobe came from the best shops and they were well chosen, suggesting a taste not necessarily her own. Where she came from, there was no such thing as taste. What there was to buy in the shops, that was it, that was what you got: the same things everyone else had, bought with money that had been saved up, and the shops themselves were rather less exalted. But Arthur Gillies – he had accounts all over town, in Harrods and Peter Jones and the rest, and Sal simply had to walk in the door and say who she was. They were expecting her. They had things ready: elegant, expensive things put to one side that Arthur paid for.