A Little Death (7 page)

But it didn’t make no sense to me. Because if Jenny never did it, who did? To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to think about it too much, what happened, so I finished up saying to myself, well, it must have been an accident. But I suppose it was daft, really, because how could a thing like that be an accident? Even if something had fallen out of the sky—there were no big trees anywhere near, but I suppose it could have come off the
top of the privy, a stone or something—and hit Master Freddie on the head, why didn’t they find it there with him, whatever it was? One thing which I did think was that there might have been something there, but Mrs. Mattie took it away or had it cleared off or something. Not that I’m saying she would have done that, but just that she might have moved something, perhaps because she didn’t know, or… I don’t know. It was a long time ago and it wasn’t all fingerprints and detectives in those days, not like now. I don’t know what the family thought of it. To this day, I’ve never heard Miss Georgina speak one word about it. My thought is that she’s never talked about it to anyone, not even Master Edmund. But what’s the good of he and she talking about it? It’s not going to bring Master Freddie back, is it?

It was different at Dennys after that. It had been a happy house, but it all began to go down and bad after Master Freddie died. Mr. Lomax arrived the day after and we were all lined up in the drive for him, same as usual. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so unhappy as he did that day. When me and Ellen were upstairs in our little room that night she said to me, ‘He’s taken to drink.’

I was horrified; ‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’ ‘I can see it, it’s like a hand that’s laid hold of him.’ I said, ‘You want to stop reading silly books,’ because it was so fanciful I thought she must have got it out of a book, not that I ever saw her read one. Well, that was just the start of it, the two of us falling out. We were like cat and dog all summer after that. That particular summer it was
so
hot, and what with our dresses and stockings and stays, and you had all your heavy hair nailed up on your head with great steel pins, nothing felt right. You were just sticky and pricky all day long. And where me and Ellen had to sleep, the room was just under the
roof and it was like the fiery furnace. But being in service wasn’t a rest-cure, like it is nowadays, and you had to do your day’s work even if you never got one wink of sleep because you were being boiled in your bed.

It made me feel wicked to hear Ellen going on about William, so I used to pretend to be asleep. Ellen used to say to me, ‘I don’t know how you do it, Ada. When you get into bed, you just die.’ The hot weather went on well into October—this would have been, oh, four, five months after Master Freddie died and we were getting back to normal. If you want to call it normal, because it wasn’t.

Anyway, there was one day, mid-October, when we had to wash the china and glass. Not the stuff they used for eating and drinking, this was all the fancy things from the big cabinets. A lot of wealthy people had that sort of thing in those days and they were so valuable they had to be taken out one at a time to be washed. Well, William had to bring them to me, I washed them, and then I gave them to Ellen and she made them shine. We were in the scullery with the door wide open and I had my hands in the sink—which was nice for me, to have my hands in the cool water—and Ellen kept going over and whooshing the back door to and fro to give us a bit of a draught. Trouble was, there was all these wasps that kept coming in as well. I think there must have been a nest somewhere. The kitchen maid put out all these traps for them, glass jars and bowls with water in them and a scrape of honey, so the wasp would go in after it and drown. I was standing there, washing away, surrounded by all these horrible things buzzing and dying, keeping my arms right in to my sides so I wouldn’t get near them. We worked away until we had a lot of china clean and we were waiting for William to come and take it all back. Ellen said, ‘There’s no room here,
I’m going to start taking them back,’ hoping she’d run into William, of course. Well, there wasn’t any room, so off she went.

I wasn’t going to give up the chance of a rest, so I was standing there with my eyes shut and my hands in the water, when I heard William come in. I had my back to the kitchen door, but I still knew who it was. I wasn’t going to look round, not for anything, so I grabbed hold of this big porcelain thing and starting washing it; it only needed a splash of water, but I was going at it so hard I must have come close to rubbing off the colour. I could
feel
him standing there behind me. I thought: What’s the matter, why doesn’t he say something? But he never spoke, he just came right beside me and leaned up against the draining board. He was next to me, looking straight at me in complete silence. I can remember it as if it was yesterday—probably better than yesterday, my memory nowadays—but I can tell you this: in all my life I’ve never felt so uncomfortable as I did at that moment.

To be honest, I was scared to move. I had this great heavy ornament in my hands, for all I knew it was worth hundreds of pounds, even one chip against the stone sink would ruin it. I wasn’t going to move towards him, but there were all those wasps on the other side of me, so I didn’t know what to do. Still he never said anything, but then I felt his hand come out and touch the back of my neck and the shock of it made me give a little jump. Oh! like that. I didn’t know if I liked it or not, all I could think was, whatever he does, I must not drop this vase. If I hadn’t been so silly I’d have let it down gently, but I was flustered, I got sort of fixed on it, if you know what I mean. Then William kissed the back of my neck, just under my hair.

I thought my wrists were going to snap. The only
thing in my mind was, I’ve got to put this vase down if it’s the last thing I do. I said to him, ‘Excuse me,’ but it came out like a whisper.

He said, ‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ so I tried again, but it didn’t come out no better. Then, quick as a flash, he had the vase out of my hands, put it down on the side and gave me a kiss, a real kiss, on the mouth, with his arms round, the lot. Well, I just stood there, I didn’t kiss him back, didn’t know how to. The first time I saw them do that at the pictures, he bent her right back, they had all the music and everything, and I noticed, oh look, she’s got her eyes closed. I thought, well, I got that wrong, I never had mine closed. Because I was staring at all the wooden racks for the plates to dry on, that were behind William’s head, I remember that.

Then we heard Ellen in the corridor, so he let go of me and shot out the back and off down the yard. Ellen said, ‘I never saw William, did he come in here?’ I just stared at her like I was feeble-minded. ‘Ada, close your mouth, you’ll catch a fly.’

William gave me more than one kiss when no one was about, after that. It was amazing we got away with it, considering how they treated us. If anyone had seen, they’d have said I was leading him on—well, I wasn’t exactly trying hard to stop him, was I? No more than what’s normal, anyway. I should think they’d sooner have shot all us girls than let the menservants come up to our rooms. But I never invited him, don’t think I did that.

I’d only gone up to my room in the first place because I felt sick from something I ate. In that weather, food goes rotten as soon as you look at it, especially meat—it was the middle of the afternoon, but Mrs. Mattie told me to go and lie down: ‘You might as well, you’re not doing us any good down here.’ To this day I don’t know
how William knew where I was—or how he had the nerve, come to that—and I certainly don’t know how he found out which was my room and Ellen’s, but he did. It did cross my mind afterwards that he might have been up there before, not for Ellen, but for somebody else, I mean, I think that probably was true, but of course I never asked him.

I’ve never told this to a single soul, but who’s to care if I tell it now? Isn’t it funny how something can matter so much and then not at all? Well, I’d seen my brothers running around, of course, and I knew boys were made different from girls in certain places, but I’d never seen a grown man before and I had no idea… I shut my eyes quick enough, I can tell you! I should have found it out the proper way, in marriage. But it made me think no woman would get married if they knew that was in store for them—so perhaps it’s as well they don’t know, or there’d be no children born.

There I was, lying down on the bed—Ellen’s bed, as it happened—when I heard the door open. I couldn’t believe it when I saw William standing there. He hadn’t so much as tapped on the door, and there he was right next to the bed like a magic trick. That room was so small that once you opened the door you almost did fall on to the bed, so he was very close to me. I huddled myself up quick the furthest I could from him: ‘What did you come up here for?’

‘Keep your voice down, someone’ll hear you.’

‘And it’ll be my job gone if they do. What are you doing here?’

‘I must say, Miss Ada, you don’t seem very pleased to see me.’

‘I’m not! Did anyone see you going up the stairs?’

‘Not a soul. You have a charming room.’ Trying to
talk all smart, like that. ‘Well, now I’m here, aren’t you going to offer me a seat?’

Well, I was so scared of someone coming up and finding us, I couldn’t think straight. As I say, it was more than my life was worth if he got caught in my room. I suppose if I’d been more calm about it, if I’d told him to go… Maybe I did tell him to go, I don’t really remember, just that I was petrified at the thought of Mrs. Mattie coming up and finding him there. But I never offered myself to him, nothing like that. I didn’t even know what it meant, offering yourself to a man. He came and sat down on the bed. I don’t think he said anything, just started kissing me. I was so frantic for him to leave I’d have agreed to anything he wanted, only it wasn’t really a matter of that because I didn’t know what he was doing. Well, when he was finished doing it, I said to him, ‘Don’t you ever come up here again, I’m not having that again.’

But he wasn’t listening, he was fussing with his clothes: ‘I’d better go, it wouldn’t do for anyone to see me.’

I said, ‘You should have thought of that before you come up here. If anyone sees you, say you came up to fetch something. Don’t say anything about me, whatever you do.’

When he’d gone, I just lay there—it all happened so fast, I wouldn’t have believed it, except it felt sore where he’d been and the tops of my legs were sticky. I remember wondering if it would be a liberty to take off my dress and stays—I still had everything on, neither of us took any of our clothes off. Better with your boots on, that’s what they used to say, didn’t they? It was funny, I never thought how daft it was to worry about taking my dress off when a man had been doing
that
to me not five minutes earlier. But in the end I thought: I’m
going to suffocate if I don’t do something, so I took everything off down to my petticoat, then I got the drop of water we had left in the ewer and lay down and tipped it over my face and neck. And I just lay there looking up at my and Ellen’s little bit of sky. It made me feel wicked, lying there with only my underclothes on. I thought: I’m doing this because I’m a bad girl now. Otherwise I wouldn’t be lying here like this.

How
do
flies manage to walk upside down on the ceiling? That’s the only place they
can
walk in this house. It’s all the space that’s left.

Other chaps’ sisters were different. I used to watch them with their sisters, the other chaps. Most girls seemed to be chaps’ sisters, that was how you met them, on the whole. Sometimes they put the fellow down in company, embarrassed him by talking about some childhood thing when he’d forgotten it, or wished he had. Georgina never did that. No, it wasn’t that, too much the other way, if anything. Like looking into a magic looking glass that reflected you the way you wanted to be, rather than the way you were. There, that’s used up my stock of clever talk; I’m no good at that, things being like other things. Except that I’ve often thought that my sister’s mind is rather like one of Heath Robinson’s machines: you pull a string and expect a bucket of coal, but instead you get a boiled egg or a whack on the head with a shovel. A miracle of jerry-building. All the bits work after a fashion, but you never quite know what’s coming next.

Going out with Georgie was always an adventure. I remember the first time we ever went anywhere in London together, it would have been just after she was married, we took a trip on the Underground and they’d just installed an escalator at Earl’s Court, it was the first one
they’d built. No one had ever seen moving stairs before, so there was quite a crowd. There was a man with a wooden leg riding on them, all by himself, he’d go up and then walk down, then back up again on the escalator, and Georgie took one look at him and said, ‘Do you suppose it’s eaten his leg?’ And of course no one wanted to ride on it after that, so we had it all to ourselves, we went up and down a few times until we got the knack of stepping on and off. It turned out the man with the wooden leg was employed by the railway company; they thought people would be afraid of a moving staircase so they hired this man to ride on it to show people how easy it was. But all this is whitewash, you know, the old whitewash on the wall. That was a song they sang in the First War:
Wash me in the water that you wash your dirty daughter in, and I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall.

I’ve always admired courage in others and Georgie has great courage. I still admire her for it, in spite of everything. At night I pray to God to make me brave, but each morning I wake up with the same feeling of dread like a stone inside my stomach. I’m not sure, any longer, why I pray. Habit, partly. But I suppose if one is praying, one is making some sort of effort… but then again, why on earth should God listen to the prayers of a man like me?

Isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? There’s a certain type of woman—they’re usually servants, like that cook at Dennys—who will respond to absolutely any crisis by dishing out tea and sandwiches. Ada got into a frightful habit of that during the last war. It was bad enough being woken up night after night by Hitler, without Ada thrusting piles of beige bread under our noses at three A.M. Edmund used to keep the gin bottle under his bed, because Ada makes quite the filthiest tea you can possibly imagine. Edmund always says that any mouse who tried to trot on it would end up full fathoms five before it had time to shake its tail.