Griselda recalled her hostess’s words: ‘You don’t know how much Louise will do for you.’ To have Louise about one, would, she thought, be charming and beautiful. It was the first luxury she had really desired.
‘Hadn’t you better help Mrs Hatch first? She’ll have to be down to receive people, I expect.’
‘No one outside the house party will be here until nine. Mrs Hatch particularly wanted me to help you.’ Louise smiled delightfully.
‘Thank you.’ There was a silly pause. Griselda had placed her handbag on the bed. ‘I must tell you I’ve never met a lady’s maid.’
‘I’m not exactly a lady’s maid.’
Griselda blushed. ‘I’m so sorry. Mrs Hatch—’
Louise waved away her apologies. ‘We’ll have to learn from one another. About each other, I mean.’
They were standing in the middle of the floor, looking at each other, about three feet apart.
‘Are you coming to the dance?’
Louise shook her head. ‘Political dances are not my thing. Not that kind of dance. Therefore I’m not asked.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Various things. But now it is time that I help people to dress.’
‘For dances you don’t go to?’
‘And for some I do.’
‘Do you like the work?’
‘I have a certain natural apptitude, I think,’ Louise answered solemnly. ‘And little alternative. I am destitute and unqualified. But I don’t give satisfaction, I’m afraid.’
‘I think that Mrs Hatch might be hard to please. From what little I’ve seen of her, of course.’
‘It’s I who am hard to please. At least, harder to please than Mrs Hatch.’ Again she smiled.
‘I see.’
‘Shall we begin?’
Louise helped Griselda remove her jacket, and pulled her jumper swiftly over her head.
‘I expect you would like a bath?’
‘I’m afraid of the machine.’
‘I’ll try to protect you from it.’ Louise began to operate the formidable equipment, while Griselda removed her remaining garments.
In a remarkably short space of time Louise was announcing that the bath was ready. ‘Hot,’ she added. ‘And deep. We’ve won. It’s a beautiful bath.’ She stared for a moment at Griselda’s naked body. The steam of the bathroom had made her face glisten very slightly, despite the careful make-up. ‘Given the right dress, you will be the belle of the ball,’ she said.
For the second time that evening Griselda felt herself blush; this time, it seemed, all over her body, making her look absurd.
‘Fortunately,’ she replied, ‘I have exactly the right dress.’
Likewise the bath was the right temperature, the right depth, accompanied with the right accessories, a new cake of heavily scented soap and a huge white bath towel. Griselda entered it, letting the water rise above her shoulders.
‘Which dress?’
Griselda shouted back. ‘The taffeta.’ It was wonderful.
Louise appeared in the bathroom door, which Griselda had left open. ‘Your dress is good. Really good.’ Griselda felt flattered and pleased that Louise did not seem surprised, she whose taste, it was obvious, was unapproachably high.
‘I told you it was.’
Louise was withdrawing to the bedroom, but Griselda stopped her.
‘Come and talk to me.’ She had never spoken like that before. ‘Or is it too hot and steamy?’
Louise shook her head and sat on the bath stool, an inappropriate throne.
‘Undo the collar of your dress. Make yourself comfortable.’
Louise shook her head again. ‘My dress must be worn severely.’
‘It becomes you.’
‘I have no wish to look like everyone else. It is one thing about my life here that it enables me not to. Soon even nuns and nurses will be wearing little cotton frocks from Marks and Spencer.’
Griselda remembered what Kynaston had said about the photograph of Doris. She thought for a moment.
‘Cotton frocks are comfortable.’
‘But do they appeal to the senses? Are those who wear them satisfied?’
‘Does what one wears affect that?’
‘Very much indeed. One’s body needs to be always conscious of its clothes. One reason why there are so many more unsatisfied women than there used to be, is that they have forgotten that.’
‘I fear my clothes are very commonplace. Except that dress.’
‘I will help you to do better if you like.’
‘Thank you. But I have very little money.’
‘That matters more than it should, but less than you think.’
‘Then I should like you to help me.’
‘Of course there are limits to what I can do. But if you are seriously interested, I might later introduce you to Hugo Raunds. He lives entirely for clothes. He designed this dress. You’ve probably heard of him. As it happens, his father, Sir Travis, is coming tonight. Not that all this matters much, as I’ll be leaving here at any moment, and that will be that.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘I shall try to find someone amenable to my ways.’
Griselda began to fill the bath with strongly smelling soap.
‘I know so little of life. Oh, curse.’
A sud had entered one of her eyes. Louise rose and carefully removed it with a handkerchief, which she took from a pocket in the skirt of her dress. It was a silk handkerchief and soothing: though the pain remained, therapeutic in sensation, but curing nothing; probably, in fact, Griselda feared, damaging slightly the conjunctiva. Louise had resumed her seat. She was wiping her large glasses on the handkerchief.
After thanking Louise, Griselda continued: ‘All I know comes from books. It’s a wonder I keep my end up as well as I do.’
‘Books are better, I think, most of the time,’ replied Louise. ‘The more you know of life outside them, the less it’s like them. But there’s one problem that you have to solve if you’re to go on profiting from books, and books won’t help you much to solve it.’
‘And that is?’
‘The problem of finding someone, even one single person, you can endure life with. To me it’s acute.’
Inadvertently Griselda knocked the large slippery cake of soap on to the floor, where it slid out of sight.
‘I always thought that difficulty was peculiar to me,’ said Griselda.
Louise had laid her glasses on the stool and was groping for the soap.
‘Please stop,’ cried Griselda. ‘I should be getting out anyway. It was selfish of me to ask you to sit in all this steam.’
Louise returned the soap to its lair and resumed her glasses.
‘I’m not all that short-sighted,’ she remarked. ‘Though I am, of course, a little short-sighted I don’t have to wear glasses. It’s just that glasses suit me. We may as well get something from modern inventions.’
Griselda was out and towelling.
She found that Louise had laid out new underclothes for her.
She submitted to being dressed by Louise, to having Louise brush her short hair, even to being made up by Louise; all with a strange remote pleasure, possibly recalled from childhood, though certainly not consciously, for Griselda could recall little of her childhood that was pleasant, except books.
It all took a long time, and as they worked, they talked.
The remarks they exchanged became shorter and rapider; varied with occasional longer passages such as in normal converse no one listens to. They began, without any feeling of guilt, to talk about the people in the house.