‘Then don’t, please,’ said Drew. ‘Let me come to you for a trial month and I’ll find out the difficulties for myself.’ He felt a pang of guilt. The word ‘trial’ implied that he would be willing to stay longer than a month. Well, perhaps he could manage a little longer, especially now he felt she was in real need of help. He added firmly: ‘You leave it all to me.’
‘Do you mean you’re determined to come?’
Was he persecuting her? He looked at her anxiously. She now returned his glance, and surely her eyes looked hopefully expectant? She wanted him to insist.
He said: ‘Absolutely determined.’
‘Oh, well, then. That’s decided.’ She sounded relieved, if not actually pleased. ‘We must fix your salary.’
She then named a figure which surprised him by its lowness; he could not believe Jane would even have considered it. But he hadn’t Jane’s qualifications as a secretary. And Miss Whitecliff had spoken of having to economize. He accepted eagerly – on which, she appeared to become conscience-stricken: ‘Oh, no, it isn’t enough. Not as much as— And a man expects to get more than a woman.’
‘This man doesn’t,’ said Drew. ‘We’ll consider it settled. I shall be your secretary, your companion – and perhaps I can even help a little with the housekeeping.’
‘Oh, that would be wonderful. But one couldn’t expect it of a man.’
‘You wait and see. Anyway, tomorrow you shall have China tea and anything else you fancy. Remember I can walk up and down the hill and get what you need. Now may I go for my suitcase?’
‘You’ll come at once?’
‘If that’s all right?’
‘Well, yes. It’s all decided, isn’t it?’
There was something odd about the way she stressed the word and she was again avoiding his eyes. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said firmly. ‘And this evening we’ll have some music.’
She relaxed. ‘Oh, that will be delightful.’
He rose to go and stopped her as she moved towards the bell. ‘No need to have me shown out. I’m one of the family now.’
She then came to the front door with him and when he looked back, after closing the gate, she was still there smiling.
He strode along Chestnut Avenue feeling triumphant. He had the right to return to that marvellous house, the perfect house in the perfect town for his novel. And for the first time in his life he would be earning – if not, admittedly, much. Of course it was a ludicrous job to have got himself, but really quite a good joke. All that troubled him was a definite uneasiness about Miss Whitecliff.
Her mention of having to economize had worried him. But surely she couldn’t be really poor if she lived in such a large, well-kept house with two maids. What troubled him far more was that he wasn’t certain she was … well, one hundred per cent right in the head. Would a completely sane woman allow maids of even fifty years’ standing to give her Indian tea when she preferred China? Besides, just occasionally … He pulled himself up. It had only been occasionally that she’d seemed strange. Most of the time – all the time before tea had been served – she’d been both normal and delightful. Really, he quite adored her already, and longed to see that she got a great deal of good food. It positively hurt him to remember how thin she was.
Somehow those fiendish maids would have to be coped with. Actually, he’d quite liked the look of Annie. Perhaps Lizzie, described as ‘worse’, was fiend-in-chief.
He stopped at the post office and wrote a postcard to Richard, giving his address and saying: ‘Got the job. Jane will describe my surroundings which are eminently suitable for me. Will write fully in a few days.’ He then bought a packet of chocolate and ate it exuberantly, walking along the sea front. Judging by tea, it would be as well to spoil his appetite for dinner.
He had already given up his room at the hotel, having intended to leave Whitesea at once if he didn’t get the job. All he had to do was pay his bill, collect his suitcase, and ask the desk clerk to telephone for a taxi. He sat waiting for it in the lounge, where all the crones now beamed on him. He no longer disliked them but still thought their feet should be better shod. Miss Whitecliff had worn thick grey silk stockings and kid shoes trimmed with cut steel buckles. The fact that her feet looked about half a yard long merely added to their elegance.
It was dusk by the time he was again ringing the bell at White Turrets. He now felt more pleasurably excited than nervous. He also felt amused – at himself. Was he not the young governess of some old novel, arriving at a mysterious house?
‘Here I am again,’ he said ingratiatingly, when Annie opened the door.
She didn’t get as far as returning his smile but her tone was respectfully pleasant. ‘Yes, sir. Your room is ready. Let me take your case.’ When he said he would carry it himself she merely said: ‘As you wish, sir,’ and led him across the hall. The banisters of the staircase were giant carved wooden tulips. On reaching the first floor, she showed him into a front room and snapped the lights on. Dinner, she informed him, would be ready in half an hour.
Left alone, he looked around delightedly. Here the wallpaper was entirely covered with roses, life-size, in clusters of three. All the draperies were shell pink, the furniture white; everything seemed shiningly new. He had been a little disappointed to learn from Miss Whitecliff that the house had been frequently re-decorated, but it now occurred to him that any genuine Edwardian interior would be over fifty years old and therefore faded and shabby. He was far nearer to the true atmosphere of the period in this house, which was really an apostolic succession of houses.
The pink silk eiderdown was raised into a strange hill, caused, he found, by a stone hot-water bottle. He could well believe the bed needed airing, for the room felt both cold and damp. The grate did not look as if it could remember a fire and there was no other form of heating available. Life at White Turrets was going to be spartan as regards climate as well as food.
There was a knock on his door. He called ‘Come in’ but no one came, so he opened the door. A large copper can of hot water had arrived. He carried it to the white washstand and surveyed the equipment of rose-sprigged pottery: jug of cold water, basin, sponge bowl, soap dish, and a curious vase – intended for toothbrushes? Below, a mammoth slop pail was flanked by two chamber pots. It was all just a little alarming.
He lifted out the jug of cold water and poured the hot water into the basin, added too much cold water, crashed the jug into the soap dish (thank God, it didn’t break), kicked over the copper can (thank God, it was empty), failed to find any soap (thank God, he’d brought some). Having at last washed his hands, he wondered what he was supposed to do with the water in the basin. Did one leave it where it was or pour it into the slop pail? After considering the heavy pottery in relation to the lightweight Annie, he decided to pour – with disastrous results. He sopped up the flood as well as he could and wrung out his towel. All this to wash only his hands. Pray heaven he could in future use the bathroom.
After his bout with the washstand he unpacked hastily, and had barely finished when a gong sounded. As he went out on to the landing, Miss Whitecliff came from her room, which was next door to his. She now wore mauve, and her velvet head-band was purple. The dress – long, loose, girdled, and heavily embroidered with grapes – suggested no period known to him. Would it be the artistic, as opposed to the fashionable, style of her girlhood? It had, he thought, as he followed her downstairs, an affinity with the giant tulip banisters.
‘The fiends seem quite pleased about your arrival,’ she whispered, before they entered the dining-room. ‘I asked them to make a special effort tonight.’
Judging by the table, they had done so; it gleamed with silver and cut-glass set out on a damask cloth. In the centre was a nine-vased épergne, highly decorative in its own right – which was just as well as it contained no flowers. Above it hung a beaten-brass electrical fitting from which descended a foot-deep red silk frill. In the outer darkness, Annie hovered.
Soup arrived; it looked
like weak tea and tasted like weak Bovril. Next came two unusually small frilled cutlets leaning against a little hill of mashed potatoes. The entrée dish in which they were served would have accommodated ten times as much. He made his cutlet last as long as he could and accepted a second helping of mashed potatoes. Choosing a moment when Annie was absent Miss Whitecliff said:
‘Lizzie couldn’t manage a pudding at such short notice but one understands there’s to be a savoury.’ Two sardines on toast were shortly placed in front of him.
‘One doesn’t often use tinned food,” said Miss Whitecliff.
‘My mother greatly disapproved of it. But even she made an exception for sardines.’
None had been served to Miss Whitecliff. Drew asked if she wasn’t having any.
She looked surprised. ‘Oh, I never take savouries. My mother considered them unsuitable for women.’
The meal concluded. Drew, his appetite stimulated by the tastiness of the sardines, felt hungrier than when he had begun, but Miss Whitecliff obviously thought he had done quite well.
As she led the way from the dining-room she murmured smilingly: ‘That was a better dinner than I expected.’
‘And so beautifully served,’ said Drew, hoping Annie might hear him. He had been fascinated by the little black and white figure moving around swiftly and silently.
The dining-room, heated by a gas stove, had been reasonably warm. The drawing-room was cold by comparison. For a while he stood by the small fire, vainly hoping for coffee. At last he walked manfully to the piano. Now for Melicent and Albion Whitecliff.
At first he wondered which he disliked most. But after doing his best with half a dozen songs, enthusiastically encouraged by Miss Whitecliff, he decided that Melicent was his least favourite. The music, consisting mainly of chords and arpeggios repeated in various parts of the piano, was merely feeble; the verses were both feeble and objectionable. Melicent constantly incited her ‘lover’ to go and get killed in battle, making it plain she would prefer him gloriously dead to ignobly alive. And she seemed unprepared to allow him even a chance of survival, for when she did refer to a possible return it was always a return on a ‘bier’.
Drew learned, in a snatch of conversation between songs, that Albion himself had not been sent off to any war. But Miss Whitecliff’s three brothers had all been killed in 1914. Had Melicent taken that as well as her lyrics indicated she would?
At last, after responding to encores for nearly two hours, he closed the piano. His hands were tired and his pleasant but quite untrained voice was becoming hoarse.
‘I can’t thank you enough,’ said Miss Whitecliff.
She was sitting in the cosy-corner. He joined her there and looked at the portraits let into the back of it.
‘I call this my memory corner,’ she told him. ‘Here we all are: Father, Mother, my three brothers and myself. They are paintings on opaline – from photographs taken in 1906, the year this house was built.’
She could then have been only in her early ’teens, yet she still looked surprisingly like the portrait, and the fact that in it, as now, she wore her hair looped over a ribbon, stressed the resemblance. But there was a cruel difference between the thinness of youth and the thinness of age. And her expression in the portrait was untroubled; now, unless she was smiling, it was faintly agonized – or was that putting it too strongly?
Perhaps lost, bewildered expressed it better. He had never seen anyone look … so undecided.
He asked her questions about the family and was glad to hear that her elder brother had achieved marriage before his early death; the great-niece mentioned in the afternoon was his grandchild. ‘A beautiful girl – but one is a little nervous of her.’ The younger brothers, children in the portraits, had been killed while still under twenty.
‘You’re like your father,’ he told her, studying Albion’s delicate features.
‘I’m very proud to be. Dear Father … he could have been successful in so many professions had his health permitted him to adopt one. There was a time when he hoped to be an architect – indeed, he was his own architect for this house.
‘But he was never strong – a constant anxiety to us. We were fortunate to keep him as long as we did.’
He had, Drew learned, managed to reach the age of sixty-nine, owing to his wife’s unremitting care. Her portrait showed her to have been a dark, heavily handsome woman whose jaw would have made two of her husband’s.
‘Never did I think she would survive his loss,’ said Miss Whitecliff. ‘But she did – for thirty years, though she said she only lived from day to day, waiting to join him. Dear, brave Mother.’
He led the conversation back to times when the whole family had been alive, and was told of picnics and parties, a concert of the Whitecliff’ songs – ‘Madame Ada Warburton came down to sing them – such a rich contralto.’ It was a pleasure to see his employer so happily animated but it was getting late and he was thankful when the chime of the gilt clock brought this to her notice.
‘Eleven! The evening has flown! We must go to bed.’
‘Let me make you some tea,’ said Drew, now painfully hungry. If he could get to the kitchen he would look for something to eat.
‘Oh, no thank you. I never have anything at night.’
He then asked if he might make some tea for himself and perhaps find a biscuit.
Her eyes became tragic. ‘I’m afraid we never have biscuits. My mother thought them bad for the teeth. I can’t think of anything we could find.’
‘Let’s look, anyway,’ said Drew. ‘I might even manage one of those cakes we left at tea.’
She brightened. ‘Yes, you could have one of those – I shouldn’t think Lizzie would need them. We mustn’t take anything she’s counting on.”
‘If we do, I’ll go shopping tomorrow.’ In any case, he’d go shopping. Unstale bread and unrancid butter at least were coming into this house.
She led him through a dim, cold passage and switched on the solitary light which dangled from the kitchen ceiling. The old range was a little like the one at Dome House, but it was fireless and there were no armchairs in front of it; only two deal chairs by the bare scrubbed table.
‘Don’t they ever have a fire?’ he asked.
‘Yes, once a week – to heat the bath water. Oh, dear!’
She had noticed his dismayed expression. ‘Are you like my great-niece, who expects a daily bath? My mother considered that quite dangerous. So weakening!’
He said he might manage with fewer baths. ‘But don’t Annie and Lizzie need a fire?’ The kitchen felt cold as a cellar.
‘Oh, no, they cook by gas.’
He eyed the ancient cooker with respect, surprised that such an antique was still in active service. ‘But don’t they feel cold?’
‘One doesn’t think so. They’re always so busy. Now, where would those cakes be?’
He followed her into a stone-slabbed larder which appeared to be empty except for two bottles of milk. Delighted to see them he said: ‘Never mind the cakes. We’ll have bread and milk.’
Miss Whitecliff looked doubtful. ‘Lizzie planned a rice pudding for tomorrow.’
‘Well, the milkrnan will call, won’t he? If not, I’ll get the milk.’ He had now found the earthenware bread-jar and taken out half a loaf. Its staleness would not matter for bread and milk. He went back to the kitchen, got a saucepan and two bowls, and measured out the milk.
‘Oh, my dear boy, none for me! Well, perhaps just a very little. It’s years since I had bread and milk.’
He found the bread knife, spoons, sugar, matches. She made only the vaguest attempt to help and obviously had no idea where anything was kept. But while he watched over the heating milk she managed to discover a large tray.
‘Do we need that?’ he asked.
‘Why, yes – to carry the bowls to the dining-room.’
‘Can’t we have it here?’
‘Here?’ She looked astounded, but raised no objection when he se
t the bowls out on the scrubbed table and drew up the deal chairs. Once they began to eat she seemed little less ravenous than Drew felt.
‘One was hungrier than one knew,’ she said, tilting her bowl to get the last of the milk. ‘Well, this has been an adventure. I only hope Lizzie won’t be angry.”
‘We’ve left her plenty of milk for breakfast,’ said Drew, carrying the surplus milk back to the larder. ‘By the way, have you never thought of having a refrigerator?’
She looked faintly shocked. ‘Oh, no – my mother very greatly disapproved of them. She thought all food should be fresh.’
‘But—’ No, it was too late at night to start a campaign against her mother’s prejudices. He located the scullery, put the bowls in the stone sink and filled the saucepan with water; then steered Miss Whitecliff upstairs. When they reached the landing she said: ‘Annie will call you at eight o’clock, with your hot water.’
‘Please may I take it to the bathroom – and which is the bathroom?’
‘That door – and that door.’
He guessed from her air of embarrassment that she did not mean there were two bathrooms.
She opened her bedroom door and put the light on. He saw an empty fireplace and said: ‘Dear Miss Whitecliff, oughtn’t you to have some heat in your bedroom? Why not a gas fire?’
‘In a bedroom? My mother considered that highly dangerous. I confess one does sometimes miss the pleasant coal fire we had in here when she was alive, but one can’t pamper oneself to that extent unless one’s ill. I do hope you’ve everything you need in your room. It was my room until my father died and I moved into Mother’s. She didn’t like to be alone. Goodnight, Mr Carrington. I have so enjoyed our evening.’
‘So have I,’ said Drew and meant it. Yet he wondered, while undressing in his cold, rosy room, just how long he could stand life at White Turrets. He was not particularly worried about the living conditions; he could improve them or weather them. What really disturbed him was that, while he was more and more charmed by his employer, he was less and less sure she was mentally normal. In fact, he was quite sure she wasn’t; not all the time, anyway. But he wasn’t going to think about that tonight.