Because of the advice handed out by Bridget and Betsy, she had begun to look at prices, both in shops and at the market, and was beginning to realise that if she bought chops, potatoes and vegetables she could make herself a good hot meal for a fraction of the cost that she would be charged even in the cheapest eating house.
It had been cold in the shop but it was even colder out on the pavement, perched on a chair. Hester was wearing the black skirt and white blouse which Miss Deakin had grudgingly provided and she found, to her annoyance, that the nippy little wind which came gusting along the pavement lifted her skirt from time to time, so that she was forced to hold it down with one hand while she wielded her cloth with the other. What was more, she was speedily becoming so cold that she could not feel her hands or feet, and realised that when she returned to the shop her chilblains would begin to throb and itch. I’d best fetch my coat and gloves before I do any more, Hester decided, scrambling off the chair. She had already washed the panes fairly thoroughly; now they needed a good hard rub with a soft, dry cloth.
Betsy usually came in at nine o’clock, even on a Monday, since it was always the junior assistant’s job to clean through on this day, and whilst Hester was struggling into her coat she heard the shop door-bell clang and saw Betsy swinging the door closed behind her. ‘Mornin’, Miss Deakin, mornin’ Hest …’ Betsy was beginning, when a shriek from Miss Deakin interrupted her.
‘Miss Fleming,
how
many times have I told you to take your muddy boots off before you come into this shop? I won’t have you trekking mud on to me nice clean floors.’
Betsy came to a guilty halt and was beginning to tug her boots off when Miss Deakin, with an angry exclamation, rounded on Hester. ‘As for you, Miss Elliott, I told you to clean the windows and look at ’em! Just how do you to intend to get them clean when they’s thick with ice? You stupid, stupid girl, no one can’t see a thing through that!’
Hester glanced towards the windows and was horrified by what she saw. Because she had not immediately dried the panes, the water had turned to ice, making the windows opaque. ‘Oh Lord, I’m most awfully sorry, Miss Deakin,’ Hester said penitently. ‘The trouble was, I was getting too cold to hold the cloth, and …’
‘I don’t want to hear no excuses, I just want me windows properly cleaned so’s the customers can see through ’em,’ Miss Deakin said spitefully. ‘Just you get out there and clear that ice and don’t let me hear no excuses, you stupid, foolish …’ The opening of the door cut the words off short and even in her distress Hester thought it downright comical how Miss Deakin’s vicious and strident voice suddenly dropped to a coo as she addressed the tall, well-built woman who had entered. ‘… Good morning, madam, how may we help you?’
Relieved to find Miss Deakin’s attention elsewhere, Hester jerked her head at Betsy and the two of them left the shop and stood surveying the iced-up windows with some dismay. ‘What’ll I do?’ Hester said at last. ‘If I get another wet cloth, would that work, do you think? I suppose the old devil’s right and it only happened because I left the windows to fetch my coat. Oh dear, she’ll probably sack me for this – or take off half my wages.’
‘No she won’t,’ Betsy said decidedly. ‘It weren’t your fault, queen, it’s happened to me more’n once. When you get a really cold wind, like we’ve got today, you shouldn’t attempt to do the windows because they’ll freeze up, sure as I’m standin’ here in me muddy boots!’
Hester looked down at Betsy’s feet and could not help smiling. The boots were on all right, but scarcely
in the conventional fashion. Betsy’s right foot was halfway in and her left had only descended as far as the ankle. She looked extremely uncomfortable and, following Hester’s glance, grinned and bent to straighten the boots and tug them up her calves. ‘Thanks, Betsy,’ Hester said gratefully. ‘What’ll I do, though? She’s right about one thing, you can’t so much as get a glimpse of her window display through all this ice.’
‘We’ll both work on them, but first we’ll have to heat up some water in the back kitchen,’ Betsy informed her friend. ‘We’ll have to do it a little at a time – you go first with a hot cloth and just clear about a square foot and I’ll come behind you with the drying duster. It’ll take a while, but at least it’ll clear the windows eventually. And if old Deakin tries to blame you again, I’ll say as how it were her fault for making you do the windows in such freezing weather. I bet she was nagging you to get them done, weren’t she?’
‘Yes, she was. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be another black mark against me,’ Hester said gloomily. ‘Right, we’d better get started immediately. Oh, how I hate this icy weather! I used to grumble about the heat in India but what wouldn’t I give for some bright, hot sunshine this minute!’
That evening, Hester bought a lamb chop, three potatoes and half a pound of carrots from the stalls on Great Homer Street and took them down to the shared kitchen. She had not thought about cooking utensils until she saw that there were no communal saucepans but, fortunately, Bridget was before her, cooking bacon, egg and chips on the stove, and offered to lend her a pan for her potatoes and carrots. ‘You can use me frying pan to fry your
chop when I’ve done with it,’ she offered. ‘No need to add dripping, ’cos there’ll be plenty of fat left over from me bacon.’ She grinned up at Hester. ‘I’m celebratin’! Ask me why!’
‘Why are you celebrating?’ Hester said, busily peeling her potatoes and scraping the carrots, then popping them into Bridget’s small saucepan. ‘I don’t feel much like celebrating myself since I hadn’t bargained on having to buy pans as well as food.’
‘I’m celebratin’ because I’ve got me a really good job, a live-in job,’ Bridget said exultantly. ‘A pal of mine, another girl from Dublin, put me in the way of it. I’m to be housemaid at one of the big houses on Rodney Street. It’s owned by a doctor and I’m to keep the surgery clean as well as working in the house. The money’s ever so good and of course it’s all found, even uniforms.’
Hester felt her heart sink; Bridget was the only real friend she had made in the house, though the Maskells were pleasant enough. ‘Oh, Bridget, I’ll miss you dreadfully!’ she exclaimed. ‘I wonder who will come in your place? I do try to be friendly towards the other girls but they don’t really like me, do they?’
‘It isn’t that they don’t like you, they feel you’re a – a cut above the rest of us,’ Bridget explained awkwardly. ‘I know you aren’t, you’re one of us really, but you don’t talk like the rest of us, and you’re – you’re fussy about always lookin’ neat and having clean nails and that, so – so they think you despise them, not t’other way around.’
‘I wouldn’t keep my job if I went around with dirty nails,’ Hester said, with a wry smile. ‘I do try to sound the same as they do, but it’s awfully hard, like learning a foreign language. Still, now that I’m
cooking my own food in the kitchen, perhaps they’ll be a bit friendlier. Or perhaps whoever takes your place will be as nice as you, Bridget.’
‘She’ll be Irish, I’m sure o’ that,’ Bridget said, grinning. ‘I’ve already put the word around, amongst me pals, as there’s goin’ to be a bed free here. An’ tell you what, Hester, you can have me pots ’n’ pans! I shan’t be wantin’ ’em when I move to Rodney Street.’
‘I’ll pay you for them,’ Hester said eagerly. ‘You are good, Bridget, but I won’t see you lose by it.’
To this, Bridget replied with a snort, assuring Hester that the pans had been bought off the second-hand stalls in Paddy’s market and were not worth more than a few coppers. ‘Besides, you never know, I might lose the job after a few weeks and be glad of me pans back,’ she said, when Hester begged her to name a price, ‘so we’ll call it a loan, all right?’
Bridget’s new job started the following Monday, and for the rest of the week she did her best to teach Hester some simple cookery, though marvelling that anyone could reach the age of eighteen without knowing how to boil a potato or fry a chop. Hester cut herself bread and cheese each morning for her lunch break and, following Betsy’s advice, asked Miss Deakin for permission to boil a kettle and make herself a hot drink to accompany her carry-out. ‘I thought you went to a dining room for your lunch,’ Miss Deakin had said. ‘The kitchen’s crowded enough wi’ me and Miss Fleming tryin’ to get ourselves a bite, lerralone addin’ you to the mix.’ But when Hester pointed out that, on the wage Miss Deakin paid, she could no longer afford such luxuries, the manageress gave way and agreed that Hester might eat her sandwich and have a cup of
tea in the back kitchen, provided she did so after Betsy had finished her own meal.
The weather continued extremely cold and on the Sunday following the ice incident Hester decided to hover around the Shaw Street house in an attempt to find out at which school Lonnie was now a pupil. It was a rainy day, the rain occasionally giving way to sleet, so Hester’s only disguise was a headscarf pulled well forward over her face, and a large black umbrella. She thought that if she did not get too near the house she was unlikely to be spotted, and accordingly stood at the nearest tram stop, keeping her eyes on the ground, but still glancing furtively towards the house at any sign of life.
Presently, her vigil was rewarded; Miss Hetherington-Smith, magnificently clad in a long fur coat with a small violet toque perched on her iron-grey hair, came sweeping out of the front door. She said something over her shoulder to someone Hester could not see and erected a dark-blue umbrella before crossing the pavement and climbing into the Bentley, assisted by the chauffeur. He took the umbrella, shook it free of raindrops and placed it tenderly on the floor of the car, then climbed behind the wheel and drove off. Hester was slightly surprised to see that the big car was not facing towards St Augustine’s Church, but assumed that he would turn left twice and arrive outside the church door so that his passenger might alight without having to cross the road.
It was odd that neither Lonnie nor Miss Hutchinson had accompanied Miss Hetherington-Smith, but having thought the matter over Hester imagined that either one or both of them might have a cold, or some such
thing. She was surprised that Miss Hetherington-Smith had not insisted upon her companion’s accompanying her and was in the very act of crossing the road to go to the house when the front door opened once more and Miss Hutchinson emerged. She was clad, as usual, in black and glanced cautiously round her before setting off in the direction of St Augustine’s. On the spur of the moment, Hester decided not to approach her. Miss Hutchinson had seemed sympathetic to her plight in the past, but she was a weak woman and the weak are capable of inflicting considerable damage, albeit by accident, so Hester kept her counsel and continued to wait. Only when she was sure that both ladies would be occupied with morning service did she gingerly approach that forbidding front door. She missed Lonnie very much and even the thought of seeing the child once more gave a lift to her spirits. Ruefully, she remembered how unhappy she had been in the Shaw Street house and thought that now, if she could turn back the clock, she would appreciate a great many things which she had once taken for granted. There was Lonnie’s companionship, the friendliness of the servants, the warm beds and comfortably banked up fires, and of course the three square meals a day which she had to neither prepare nor pay for.
Set against this was the spite and malevolence of Miss Hetherington-Smith herself, but Hester had scarcely escaped from such enmity since Miss Deakin showed every sign of being exactly the same.
Arriving outside the door of Number 127, Hester hesitated again. She had been forbidden to approach the house, but how was Miss Hetherington-Smith to know that she had done so? With Miss Hutchinson out of the way she felt sure that no one else would
carry tales. Yet she still hesitated. She had not, after all, intended to call there when she had set out earlier in the day. She had hoped that one of the maidservants, preferably Mollie, would come out to post a letter or merely to get some air whilst the ladies were out of the way. Then she would approach the maid and ask how she could contact Miss Lonnie.
I could still continue to wait about, she told herself rather unconvincingly, even as her hand reached up and hovered over the bell-push. I need not actually ring the bell, make the whole thing official …
Almost of its own volition, however, her finger pressed the bell and moments later she heard footsteps approaching the door, which opened to reveal Fletcher. He started to say that he was very sorry, but Miss Hetherington-Smith was at church, then stopped short, recognising her as she smiled up at him. ‘Miss Elliott! My goodness, for a moment … but you’d best come in, you’re soaked to the skin!’ He stood back. Hester took a step towards him, then hesitated.
‘I was forbidden the house, you know, Mr Fletcher, and the last thing I want is to get you – or anyone else – into trouble, but I’d give a great deal to see Miss Lonnie,’ she said rather breathlessly. ‘I watched your mistress and her companion leaving the house a short while ago, but I didn’t see Miss Lonnie. Is she not well? I’ve been awfully worried about her, to tell you the truth. She’s an independent little person, but she is only eight, after all, and a long way from the land of her birth, and from her father, too.’
‘I don’t think Miss Hetherington-Smith would consider dismissing
me
for inviting a young lady into the house in such inclement weather,’ Fletcher
said reprovingly, a slight frown marring his brow. ‘Do come in, miss … I can see you and meself had best have a bit of a talk, like.’
Hester obeyed and presently the two of them had descended to the basement, where Fletcher took her straight into the staff living room. It was deserted, the entire staff presumably either having a day off or helping to prepare the Sunday dinner, so Fletcher sat her down in one fireside chair by the glowing hearth and took the other himself, then gazed anxiously across at her. ‘Now, miss, tell me how you’ve been getting along! You say you’ve been worried about Miss Leonora … well, I don’t say you aren’t right to worry but I can tell you, the girls and meself have been worried about
you
, and with far more reason. I was that shocked when we found out what had happened … but young Mollie insisted that you were bound to get a good job somewhere where you’d be treated decent, and seeing as how we’d no idea how to find you there weren’t much we could do.’ His eyes travelled over her thin coat, soaked headscarf and pale, anxious face. ‘You look worn out, miss, and none too stout either.’