by D. J. Taylor
This glut of information—Sarah the parlourmaid, Mrs. Wates the cook, Lady Bamber’s visits—served to depress Esther’s spirits, for the protocols of which they spoke seemed altogether beyond her understanding. Yet they awakened in her a curiosity about her new situation which she was anxious to satisfy.
“Who is Mr. Dixey?”
“Mr. Dixey? Why…Mr. Dixey is the squire. Owns all the land hereabouts.” He swept his arm over the plain visible beyond the hedge. “But you mustn’t fear about him. Regular recluse he is. Shuts himself up in his room for weeks on end. Or wanders about the grounds as if there were no one there but himself.”
Young as she was, Esther had distinct ideas as to how gentlemen should manage their estates. “Don’t he take no interest in the place then?”
“Not he! There’s an agent to manage it, you know. They say he has lost ever so much money, but that’s not footman’s business. Old Randall would know, I daresay. He and the master is very thick, sometimes.”
But Esther was still puzzling over the notion of a squire who took no interest in his land. “But what does he care about then?”
“Oh, he’s a great naturalist, you know. There’s a stuffed bear in his study and cases full of eggs and such things, and none of the maids likes it a bit. I shouldn’t care to go in there myself after dark, when the lamps are out. Here! We’re coming to the house right enough.”
She saw that the hedge path whose line they had been following for the past half hour had now begun to descend through high banks of summer foliage, knots and clumps of tall trees beyond which outbuildings and stable yards could now be glimpsed. After the heat of the level path, this downward progress was very pleasant to her: there were great outcrops of swollen ferns that seemed to conceal sunless woodland glades, dense interiors far below the tree canopy. The effect of this new landscape, and of William, who continued to talk of Mr. Dixey’s dogs, of a great hound he had bred for the chase in Europe, four feet high, of all kinds of things both strange and familiar, was to produce in her a sense of dissociation, so that she might have been walking into some magical faery land altogether detached from the world she knew. The sensation was such that she clutched anxiously at the rough cloth of her dress and the pointing of her calico jacket as if to reassure herself that some vestige of the old world had come with her.
But it was so: the man at her side was simply another servant from the hall; her mother’s books were in the bundle that he carried; the railway station lay three miles down the path behind her. There was no mystery, except that she comprehended that a certain part of her life—the life of nagging women in suburban villas, her mother’s cottage and her brothers and sisters—was at an end, and that a new one whose lineaments she could barely discern was about to begin. Humbled by this realisation, she found herself taking a sharp, obtrusive interest in the unfamiliar territory into which they now passed, in the curve of the tall poplar trees that hung over the path and the plumes of smoke rising from unseen chimneys in the middle distance.
“What are those sheds beyond the stable yard? There seem a great many of them.”
“Them? That’s where Mr. Dixey keeps his dogs. You’ll hear them in a moment, I daresay, as we go past. But it’s not a place to linger. Jack Barclay, as was footman before me, lost his place on account of interfering with the master’s dogs. But look here, it’s past eight, and Mrs. Wates is just the sort to make trouble over a lost half hour. You had better say the train was late.”
Esther knew that this was a falsehood, and was troubled on that score, but she consented to nod her head. They came eventually, by way of certain vegetable gardens and glasshouses, into a little cramped square, its surface made of bare earth stamped flat, abutting the back parts of the house. Here a stout, red-faced woman with bare, mottled arms stood shaking out a tablecloth while contriving to suggest by the attitude in which she stood that this arrangement was not to her satisfaction.
“So you are Spalding, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
“But it is half past eight. You were to have been here on the hour.”
“The train was late, Mrs. Wates,” William cheerfully interjected. “Indeed it was.”
“And you taking the girl idling out of her way, no doubt, William Latch. Well, it can’t be helped. You had better come inside.”
Meekly, Esther passed behind her into a long, low kitchen, its air made stifling by the heat of the range and the log fire that burned at its further end. She had an impression of squat, heavy furniture, a cat darting suddenly away from the hearth, muted light spilling from the half-shuttered windows. Standing on the flagged floor, the bundle silently returned to her grasp, she became aware of several persons seated around a vast mahogany table, all eyeing her with a profound curiosity. A grey-headed old man who had been reading aloud from the Bible stopped halfway through the verse, slotted his finger in the page and looked at her open-mouthed. A woman with a lined face, glistening black hair and an air of authority brought her hands, both of which had been extended onto her chair-arms, sharply together. A thin girl in a maid’s dress and a lace cap bobbed up from her seat and then sat down again. Somewhere in the near distance a bell rang. And so Esther came to her new home.
(II)
Esther awoke in a room suffused with light: light that poured through the open window a yard or so from her head, bounced and reflected off the coverings of her bed and made bright patterns on the bare, distempered walls beyond. For a moment, half unconscious, she was unable to recollect where she was: a stump of candle, half melted upon a metal saucer at her bedside, seemed a thing of horror; the noise of birdsong from beyond the window jangled alarmingly in her ears. Gradually these apparitions passed, and she became aware of her surroundings. She lay in a narrow bed, with a second bed jammed hard against its side—the arrangement leaving a gap of no more than a foot between the adjoining walls—in an attic room with a sloping ceiling and a low beam from which someone had hung a nosegay of withered flowers. A sound—not the birdsong from beyond the window, nor yet the noise of her own breathing, to which she had become keenly alert—disturbed her, and with a start she sat upright against the bolster. Sarah the parlourmaid, whose quarters she had been bidden to share, loomed half-dressed in the space between the end of the beds and the door posts, washing her face and torso in a basinful of water.
“Gracious,” she remarked, acknowledging Esther’s presence with a shrug of her bare shoulder. “In my last place the housekeeper would have been ashamed to have two girls squeezed together in a room where there’s no space to swing a cat. I declare we shall smother each other in the night without knowing.”
“I’m very sorry to be a trouble to you.”
“Oh it’s no trouble. Indeed it’s a pleasure to have company. I have been alone up here for a month, and the last kitchenmaid was a mouse.” Finishing her ablutions, she turned towards Esther and began to dry herself with a morsel of towel. “But, Esther, why did you quarrel with the cook last evening? Everyone remarked it, and she is sure to mention it to Mr. Randall.”
In her curiosity at Sarah’s conversation, and the novelty of her situation, Esther had forgotten the events of the previous night. Now a fount of remembered bitterness welled up inside her, and she gripped the edge of the bedspread with her hands.
“It was she that quarrelled with me! To expect a girl to set to work on the instant peeling potatoes, with no dress to change into on account of a donkey cart that never came.”
“I don’t doubt that you’re right, but you must see it from her point of view. Cooks are cooks, you know. And now she’ll have her revenge, you mark my words. Why, you’ll spend a morning sanding saucepans if she has her way.”
Judging her to be a friendly girl, Esther climbed out of the narrow bed and began to put on her own clothes. Her good opinion of Sarah was confirmed a moment later when the latter said, “Look, it is only six o’clock. I have not to boil the kettle until half past. Let us go downstairs, and I
can show you about the place before Mrs. Wates is afoot. She is very bad in the mornings, you know, and rarely shows herself before eight.”
They went silently along the passages of the upper part of the house to the back staircase. Here all was quiet. A mouse ran over the uppermost step and disappeared into the wainscot. Down below them, in the hallway, they heard a door close.
“That will be Mr. Randall. They say there are nights when he never goes to bed at all.”
“Why should he do that?” Esther wondered.
“Oh, he is a sly one, always poking about the place and turning up when you least expect him. How many of you are there at home, Esther?”
“Why, my mother and my four brothers and sisters. My father’s dead.”
“Now, you see, there’s another reason why you must be civil to Mrs. Wates. Even if she does wear a moustache and drink gin out of her teacup.”
Presently, talking all the while in subdued voices, they came through the back part of the house to the servants’ quarters. Whether or not the retreating figure seen from the stairwell had been Mr. Randall, the kitchen was empty. A fragment of the fire still glowed in the grate, and Sarah busied herself with its reconstruction. She had quick, agile movements but moved uncertainly on her feet, Esther noticed, on one occasion coming within an instant of toppling into the hearth.
“I have got a stiffness in my leg,” she admitted, when Esther commented on this. “Indeed, at my last place the footmen used to call me dot-and-carry.”
“If they did, then that was very cruel of them,” Esther burst out.
“Cruel? Then I have known crueller things than that. But look, here are the knife drawers and the pots for the vegetables. The meat safes are in the back cupboard. If you wish to redeem yourself with Mrs. Wates, then you must give her your beer. We are allowed a pint each at lunchtime and dinner. And if she sends you to the far orchard for apples, say that the distance is too great and she should send the keeper’s boy instead. She’ll respect you for that.”
“You are very kind,” Esther said, blushing.
“No, not kind. But you should know these things, and there are others that will grudge you the telling.”
In this way Esther and Sarah became very intimate. Indeed, by the time that the servants’ breakfast things were laid out on the table and Esther, under Sarah’s direction, had a crock of porridge boiling on the range, she had acquired a substantial stock of information bearing on her new position. Thus:
Mrs. Wates, the cook, drank.
Mrs. Finnie, the housekeeper, was a tartar. Mrs. Finnie had got Sarah her place, but perhaps she might find that she preferred a place that Mrs. F. had not got her.
Mr. Randall, the butler, was a God-fearing man and the elder of a dissenting chapel nearby. “Indeed, we are given sermons morning, noon and night. And he has such a down upon the maids.” A girl couldn’t look at a young man without Mr. Randall finding out and making himself objectionable.
Margaret Lane, the housemaid, was a goose. “It is unkind to say so, I know, but indeed she is. Why only last week Jem Raikes, Mr. Dixey’s gamekeeper, was with us at tea, and to quiz her he said that he had shot a seraph that happened to be flying across Easton Wood, and she believed every word.”
As for William, Sarah informed her, “He is a nice fellow, but he don’t mean anything. Why, he and I kept company for three months last winter and were ready to have the banns put up in church, but it came to naught.”
Esther, wondering about William and what tasks he might be engaged upon that morning, found herself interrogated by Mrs. Wates, who, coming down to breakfast in a bad temper and seeing her stirring the porridge, wished instantly to know if it had been made according to her exact specifications. Having managed to satisfy her in this, Esther had hoped to escape to the scullery (this she had been given to understand was her private domain) and the peeling of the luncheon vegetables, but Mrs. Wates called her back.
“Now, Esther,” she began. “I trust that you are truly sorry for your wilfulness yesterday evening?”
It was on the edge of Esther’s tongue to tell the red-faced cook that she was not sorry, but she resolved to curb her temper. “Indeed I am, ma’am, very sorry.”
“Very well. Then we shall say no more about it. I like all my girls to be hardworking girls. Are you a hardworking girl, Esther?”
“I hope I am, ma’am.”
“Well we have been without a kitchenmaid for a month, and there is much to be done. You had better leave those vegetables for Margaret and come with me.”
The consequence was that, as Sarah had foreseen, Esther spent the morning at the scullery table cleaning a quantity of saucepans greater than it seemed probable that any single kitchen could accommodate. They were copper saucepans of the previous century, whose interiors required scouring with chains and whose surfaces must be burnished until they shone. And yet Esther did not repine, for it seemed to her that there was much in her mind that she wished to consider. The scullery window looked out onto the earthen square, and she stood, as if rooted to the spot, gazing out at the patch of grass beyond, where two small boys—the sons of the keeper, whose cottage lay hard by—played with a dog and threw quoits at a peg in the ground. The sunlight fell over the long table, burning off the copper and the bundles of knives, and she was not displeased to be drawn back to her work, which now seemed to her a consuming thing of great seriousness and importance.
At eleven, very red-faced and perspiring, Sarah fetched her a cup of tea.
“You have quite melted Mrs. Wates’s heart. What do you think? I just overheard her telling Mr. Randall that she thought you were a hard worker after all.”
“Gracious, Sarah, you look tired. What have you been doing?”
“Oh, it is Mrs. Finnie. She always gives me disagreeable jobs. Just now I have been beating out carpets on the lawn.”
A little later Margaret Lane, the housemaid, stole into the scullery to prepare the vegetables. She was a small, dark-haired girl with a face like a doll’s, disposed, in the light of Esther’s treatment of Mrs. Wates, to regard her with some awe.
“I declare,” she said, giving a nervous little glance at Esther’s strong arms as they moved over the copper, “that you are so fierce I quite expect to be eaten.”
“But I am not fierce at all,” Esther said, putting down the saucepan she was scouring. “Indeed I am not. And I am sorry you are to do my work.”
“Oh, it is nothing,” Margaret replied meekly. “This is not a big establishment, you know, and we’re all girls together. There are some houses where the parlourmaid won’t speak to the housemaid. But we are not like that here.”
Watching the girl as she sat peeling vegetables, with her brow furrowed in concentration, Esther thought that she would like to talk to her, but Margaret seemed reluctant to speak further.
The servants dined at one. Mr. Dixey, being an old-fashioned man, had his dinner sent up at four. There were guests at the hall but twice in the week, the other servants said. Seated at the lower end of the table, between Sarah and Margaret, her plate filled with beefsteak pie and greenstuff, Esther let her mind wander over the events of the previous day: her arrival at Easton, Sarah, William, the light burning through the bedroom window. William was absent from the table, having accompanied Mr. Dixey into Watton in the gig. Before the meal began, she listened wonderingly as Mr. Randall, hands clasped in front of his face, offered up an extemporaneous prayer.
“Oh Lord, we’re all sinners here. I’m a sinner. Sarah and Margaret, Esther, who has just joined us, they’re sinners too. Protect us, dear Lord, from the wrong that we do, and the wrong that is done to us, and bring us all to your table that we may eat with you in safety, and lead us to your eternal rock that is cleft for us that we may shelter there in comfort. Amen.”
After luncheon, Mr. Randall took himself to his parlour to smoke his pipe and, it was thought, to sleep. Mrs. Wates was driven into Easton in a dogcart by one of the gamekeeper’s sons. Margaret
was summoned to an upper chamber by Mrs. Finnie to sort linen. (“It’s a precious hard time she’ll have of it,” Sarah explained to Esther, “with the old cat always finding fault.”) Left to themselves, the two girls cleared away the lunch things and brought in fresh logs for the fire from the timber store in the yard.
“You must not think that anything happens here,” Sarah told her, “for it does not. I never knew a duller house.”
“Oh, but it is very beautiful,” the other replied. “I think I should like to walk in the woods for hours at a time if I had the chance.”
“Well, perhaps you shall. Look, there is a whole hour until Mrs. Wates comes back. Let us go to the orchard. It is my favourite place.”
And so they walked past the kitchen garden and the glasshouses along a dusty path where the grass grew six feet high against the hedges to a sad little half-acre apple orchard, very ragged and overgrown, where last year’s fruit lay rotting beneath the trees.
“Why is there no one to pick it?” Esther asked.
“Because there’s no men left to work on the estate, you know. Mr. Dixey discharged them all last Michaelmas quarter day. They say he is pressed for money.”
Esther made no comment. Of the resources required to finance a gentleman’s estate, she knew nothing. Lady Bamber lived in a villa of the kind that Esther had seen on the station road, and bullied her servant. But Lady Bamber, she knew, was the widow of a naval commander, lived on three hundred pounds a year and had no property. The Dixeys, she had been led to believe, were an old county family. This paradox had the effect of quickening her interest in the solitary files of apple trees, some of them so choked with foliage that it was impossible to pass between them. Turning to Sarah, in search of further information, she found the other girl seated on a tree stump with her apron drawn up to her face.