Park Lane

by Frances Osborne

  To Mr Bellows’ right is Mrs Wainwright, all grey hair and cheekbones, and not an ounce spare on her. Next is Miss Suthers, mouth as ever locked in her lady’s-maid pinch. Then come the three little maids in a row: Susan, Mary and Grace, all dressed for the morning in their flower-print frocks and mob caps. That puts Susan staring at the gap between Summers and James, and Mary between James and Joseph, and Mary can’t see a man but look at him in that way of hers. This makes Grace feel uncomfortable, and Joseph’s the only man she has to look at. Though how she’s to look at him is beyond her, for he’ll sneak a wink the moment he reckons nobody is watching and she’ll blush all over. Thank the Lord it’s not often that nobody’s casting an eye around, for meals are times to work out what everybody’s up to, the top of the table all speaking with such plums in their mouths there’s no telling where any of them were born. Even lower down the table, growing closer to Grace, everybody has their Park Lane voice, which might as well be a different language to the one they grew up speaking. Some evenings, especially on Saturdays, if Mary’s been out with Lord-knows-who she goes out with, she falls back into the voice she grew up with. I don’t have a care in the world when I talk like this, Grace. But Mary also makes out she’s in good spirits.

  Today, as usual, they’re talking of upstairs, the boot boy and the kitchen maids on their separate table at the far end of the room trying to listen as best they can over the clatter of knives and forks. And a din it is, for they eat quick as they can to get something inside before the bells start ringing. Bea keeps glancing up at the bell board on the wall above Mr Bellows’ head.

  ‘Deaf now?’ says Susan who has seen her looking up. ‘A housemaid who can’t hear, that’s all we need.’

  Susan’s tongue’s as sharp as her face and she’s taken against Grace. Not right from the start, a few days in. Mary explained: first housemaids must always be wanting to go up to lady’s maid or housekeeper. The only person upstairs who might be needing a lady’s maid of her own is Miss Beatrice, though for now, whoever hears the bell goes to her. But sometimes Miss Beatrice does ask for one or the other of them, and Grace can’t say she’s not pleased when it’s her, even if she’s surprised at herself with the thought. Keep your head down, Mary tells her, and your mouth shut. If Susan has a whiff that you’ve a decent head on your shoulders she’ll be trying even harder to knock it off.

  Always the most dangerous, them that’s near the top but not quite there.

  Mrs Wainwright silences Susan. ‘Grace, you’ll hear the bell, I’d stick to your plate.’ There’s silence again for a second then James, who, even though he’s above Joseph and should have some dignity about him, can never keep his mouth shut when he should, leans forward and goes back to yesterday.

  ‘I’m sure she noticed.’

  ‘It’s Lady Masters to you, or you’ll find yourself changing places with Joseph.’

  James drops his eyes. ‘Yes, Mr Bellows.’

  Joseph’s not saying a word. He had a right dressing down yesterday for the state he was in when he came back from the cart. Grace wants to rub his cheeks, put some colour back into them. There’s more not said around this table than’s spoken out loud. Still, now Grace wants to know something and the question rushes up on her and out of her mouth before she’s had a chance to hold it back.

  ‘How’d sh—her ladyship know it?

  ‘Those cigarettes of Miss Celeste’s. From Turkey, or wherever’s you’ll have it. Stink like a public house where no one’s opened the window for a week.’

  ‘James …’

  ‘Yes, Mr Bellows.’ And James quickly glances up at Summers and his buttons and back again, as if he’s expecting to be told off by him, too.

  ‘That’s daft!’ Susan cuts in again. ‘There’ll be hundreds who smoke them.’

  Mrs Wainwright is looking very hard at Miss Suthers and Miss Suthers is looking straight back across at Mrs Wainwright. A lady’s maid is as close as you can get to upstairs but there’s not a word on Miss Suther’s lips, it’s all in her eyes, saying it clear. Don’t forget what’s said while I am doing her ladyship’s hair, and a dozen other things beside. Then Miss Beatrice’s bell snaps the silence, and the table lets their breath out. ‘Earlier than usual,’ mutters Susan, two mouthfuls into her toast, but she is up to brush the crumbs off her pinny quick as a hare. ‘For me, I think.’

  Grace feels resentment rising in her, then checks herself. Is that what’s become of her ambitions, and so quick? She can’t let herself be jealous of a maid’s work. Not when she’s supposed to be a secretary. And not with what her family need her to send home.

  Grace started with answering the advertisements in The Times in her best handwriting, learnt with Miss Sand, and paid for by Ma’s sister, Aunt Ethel. She was a schoolteacher, and so mindful of reading and writing, said Ma, that you’d’ve thought there wasn’t any other talent in the world. Aunt Ethel, not being married herself, had always helped Ma with the five of them. Bit of money as she could, here and there.

  Five is the sign of a happy marriage, Ma used to say, eyes pale above the dark circles under them, but she didn’t want the same for her daughters. Don’t you do this, Grace. Waste it all in some man’s kitchen, she’d say, while she went at the mixing bowl, her arm a mill wheel, pasting the eggs and flour. My daughters are going to see better than the inside of an oven. Even though back then there was still a maid to rattle the coal into it.

  So Grace and Michael sat side by side in Miss Sand’s parlour, willing the fire to burn higher, though with a half-dozen of them in that tiny parlour they might as well have been sitting around the funnel of one of Da’s engines.

  Miss Sand’s, where they went when they grew out of school at twelve. The rest of the class were half a dozen girls, with fathers in the professions, who’d been told not to mix with Grace and Michael. When they were all let outside, the girls just turned their backs. Not good enough, railwayman’s children, even if Da was an engineer and hardly a navvy – and it was at Miss Sand’s that Michael started to change.

  Michael was the only boy. Some days there’d be a crowd of lads his age on the street a few doors down from Miss Sand’s. The jeering didn’t bother him, he just walked straight on the same side of the road as the crowd to shield Grace from it. More of a reader than a talker, he was, and Miss Sand found the books to lend him from her friends.

  While Michael learnt Latin, Grace learnt shorthand and typing. Miss Sand worked through the book with her and, after Michael went to London, she blindfolded Grace as she sat down to type and timed her. First-class secretary, she said, any man would be lucky to have you in his office.

  My hope’s with you, said Ma as she put Grace on the bus to the railway station, the day after the New Year. By which Ma meant send back all you can of that good salary you should have in an office. My investment, said Ma, for even though Michael was clerking – now that, Da said, is a career – it would be a while before he was making good money.

  Where he was boarding, women weren’t allowed. Not that you should be in the same building as men, said Ma, even if they are gentlemen. If there is such a thing as a gentleman, because in the railways she’s not sure of that. She stopped as she said this and looked hard across the room at somewhere altogether different for a moment or two, then was quiet. So Grace went to another boarding house, three to a room and ladies only, though Grace soon saw that what was meant by ladies was broad as a river. Ma didn’t know that. All right and proper, she had said to Grace as she put her on the train. You two keep an eye on each other down there, promise me that.

  Grace sent off Miss Sand’s reference with the letters. Invitations to interview came by return. She’d turned up the next day, scrubbed clean and shining, in gloves and a hat. The interviewers smiled as she came into the room. Their faces fell as she started to speak.

  ‘We’ll write if we need you to come back.’

  In one interview a gentleman looked her gently in the eye and spoke slowly, as if she didn’t unders
tand English.

  Grace had a month in hand if she eked out the pennies, holding on until the boarding-house meal in the evening. Before each interview just a slice of bread to stop the stomach hollering. Halfway through the third week she moved on to another section in the newspaper. No letter this time about her typing skills, instead the character-only reference Miss Sand had given her. It wasn’t what she’d come here for, nor where she wanted to end up. Grace knows there’s more to her than service, for all those back home who said she had a nerve to set her mind further than Carlisle.

  She had been too nervous to notice the size of the house on Park Lane. She was so focused on finding the tradesmen’s entrance, she can’t even remember now who it was who let her in, just the sitting in Mrs Wainwright’s housekeeper’s office. Mrs, but no ring on her finger, and kind as she was in the interview, since Grace started Mrs Wainwright has become a wall with no door.

  Were the servants fed here, Grace wondered, but it was Mrs Wainwright who was doing the asking.

  ‘You’re old for a junior housemaid.’

  ‘I can learn quick, mam.’

  ‘That is extremely clear, but have you ever scrubbed a floor? Laid a grate?’

  ‘Yes.’ Grace thought of Ma – You’ll do better than this, but best know how – and kept her smile up. Not quite three weeks and she missed home. Missed the rain, the chill, even her little sisters. Even now she still wakes in the night thinking she can hear them all those hundreds of miles away.

  ‘I don’t know who this Miss Sand is,’ said Mrs Wainwright, ‘but she writes a good letter. Mary will show you your room and you’ll share with her. Even though she’s younger I am afraid she’ll be above you, for she’s been here a good while. I’d give her the sense of that if I were you.’

  ‘Thank you, mam, thank you.’

  ‘Don’t gush. Thank me if we keep you on. And, Grace …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’ll have to learn to speak more clearly. However, keep quiet and you’ll do well. When you’re a housekeeper you can raise your voice.’

  Grace bought a single sheet of notepaper, an envelope and a stamp on the way back to the boarding house to pack her bags. The dining room was empty and she sat down at the table to write a letter to her parents. It wasn’t long. All that needed to be said could fit in a sentence or two, any more and she might get herself in a muddle. She folded the paper, fiddled it into the envelope and stamped it. She was paid up until the end of the week and she wasn’t going to be seeing a penny back, not after they’d ordered her food, she’d been told, or could have let the bed out to another young woman. Grace didn’t bother pointing out that there were two beds empty on the top floor. There were no goodbyes – all the boarders were out at work – so she left her door key on the sideboard and closed the front door behind her. She passed a pillar box on her way back to Mrs Wainwright.

  It’s three in the afternoon and they’ve only an hour off today, too much to do for any longer. The dance is a month away but the invitations have just gone out and so they must, says Mrs Wainwright, start to prepare. Grace doesn’t point out that the house is spotless enough for royalty every day of the week.

  Mary wants to go for a walk. She’d rather, she says, that Grace came with her, good for Grace, too. ‘That’s living like a princess to see all that green across the road, asking for a visit.’ Grace doesn’t want to go out. She sits on her bed where the mattress dips, snug between the mounds on either side. Boots off, feet on the edge of the mattress, her fists are on her knees. Her thumbs press into the sides of her forefingers, twisting the near-translucent paper that she is squeezing between them. A neat script is inked across the page. Not a smudge, Ma never smudges, never let Grace either, one blob spread in the wrong page and she’d send Grace back to the kitchen table to do her lessons again, whatever the cost of the paper.

  After Grace had finished her homework, Ma would give her an apron and a pair of old leather gloves to wear – you don’t want skivvy’s hands, Grace, you won’t get into an office like that. That’s my life’s work, Grace, Ma’d say. She has a funny smile, Ma, all bright and shiny so’s you can’t tell whether she’s teasing.

  The letter came two days ago and Grace slipped it straight into her pocket. For two days it’s been in her drawer, burning a hole in her clothes. How can you not read a letter somebody has written you?

  When you’re only going to make the lie worse.

  5th February, 1914

  Dear Grace,

  How happy your letter made us. It is wonderful news and makes everything worthwhile. A private secretary is grand. Is board still taken out if you are living with the family? Still, it’s certainty, isn’t it. How much can you send home? Twenty-five shillings a month I expect, with what you must be earning! Or thirty, if you’re careful. If we can we’ll put it by up here.

  My Grace, what sort of man is he you are working for? If he bothers you in any way, you must leave, promise me that. It’ll all be fine if your name’s still good and a girl can lose her name by being bothered. Does he have a wife and children in the house? A housemaid, too? You mustn’t let them ask you to do even light dusting. Or that will be the start of it.

  Don’t go out after dark unless you must. Miss Sand says she can send you some books for the evenings.

  Your father and I are glad you go to church with Michael on Sundays.

  With my love,

  Your Mother

  I’m proud of you, girl. Best love, Da.

  Thirty shillings a month. That’s as much as she earns and half again.

  Grace pushes so hard on her thumbs that the paper begins to tear.

  6

  BEA IS LYING ON HER BED WITH JOHN’S VOICE FILLING the room. She didn’t hit her head, he is saying, just slumped … shaken … carried her back … I’m so sorry.

  ‘Sorry for what, John? You’ve been a hero,’ says a female voice.

  ‘Oh, I can’t imagine being that.’

  More female voices are saying that what she needs is rest, and she wonders how many of them are in the room. Thank God you found her, John … But until she’s better … She’s fine … Thought you said earlier you had to go back up to town … Don’t get into trouble … We’ll cable you. A few minutes later she hears his footsteps leave the room, in that oh so measured pace.

  Only they’re not John’s footsteps, it’s a servant knocking at the door, and she’s not down in the country at Beauhurst, she’s in Park Lane. Her room is empty; she must have fallen asleep again after ringing the bell, if it can be called sleep when your dreams are memories, not good ones at that. Oh, Beatrice, it’s February, she tells herself. That’s two months, and you still can’t get that man out of your head.

  They’d been down at Beauhurst, Bea had invited a crowd for a few days and they were in the drawing room with the dregs of coffee after lunch. Bea was sitting on one of the window seats with John, looking over his shoulder as he made cartoons of their friends around the room. Halfway through one of Edie, he put his pencil down and turned around to look at Bea. Let’s go for a walk, he whispered, his eyes full of something he wanted to say. Yes, she replied, her heart in her mouth. She stood up, excused herself from the room on the grounds of needing a nap, and near dashed upstairs to change into a walking dress. She pulled a couple out on to the bed but they looked such passion-killers, so she took a coat better suited to Mayfair than the country, but at least she looked like the girl of someone’s dreams.

  She met him at the gate to the walled nursery garden and he led her away up into the woods and pine air, their feet sinking into the dead leaves underneath as they walked. For five beautiful minutes they walked hand in hand until they came to the curved white lovers’ seat by the little waterfall. They sat on either side of the bench, leaning across the divider so that their noses were almost brushing. John took her hand again, and squeezed it.

  ‘Beatrice,’ he said, ‘I’ve something I want to say to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she re
plied, wondering why he was saying and not asking.

  ‘Beatrice, I can’t marry you.’

  She remembers feeling as though she were a stone that would sink into the earth if she didn’t stand. So she did, and moved away from him, she thinks, and then she fell.

  It is Susan who comes into Bea’s room in Park Lane. Good Lord, Bea isn’t sure she’s up to Susan this early. Right now she’d like a tender hand, not one that looks as though it would sooner whip your face.

  She has pointed this out to Mother, who pooh-poohed her. ‘She’s first housemaid. If anyone should help you dress it should be her. At least she’s honest; it’s such a bore when servants steal. You feel you never know where you’ve put something and that you must be going insane. Then there’s the residue of guilt for God knows what becomes of them without a reference. Really, I don’t mind a rocky countenance if you can find things where you set them down last.’

  It isn’t, thinks Bea, Mother who has to have her scalp jabbed by the Woman with Iron Fingers. Mind you, with Suthers as a benchmark, Mother would be unlikely to notice.

  Susan is fast. Bea will give her that, and Bea is still ahead of the others when she comes down to breakfast. She noses her way along the sideboard of poached eggs, kidneys and half a dozen other offerings. She takes nothing. At the end the newspapers lie folded like fallen dominoes. She takes one and makes for a chair, not seeing Joseph until he slides it in behind her.

  ‘Miss Beatrice?’

  ‘Oh, coffee, please. And maybe toast.’

  He nods, and vanishes.

  The usual silversmith’s window of sugar shakers and coffee pots squat on the white tablecloth in front of her. She pushes both them and the empty place settings next to her out to the side and spreads the newspaper flat.

  The announcement is easy to find:

  Mrs Pankhurst, who has returned to England in order to resume her work for the vote, has taken up residence at Campden Hill Square, where she will address a public open-air meeting tonight, at 8.30.