‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you sometime if you like.’ I had correctly interpreted Phyllis’s wistful tone.
‘Oh, Miss Rossiter, would you really? Would you do me for my day out? Not to go and see my ma and fa because my fa would kill us both but every other week I go to the dancing with my pal and she aye tells me I look like a milkmaid.’
I scrutinised her face as we passed under a lamp in the kitchen passageway, and wished I had made Grant instruct me in the mysteries of the kohl pencil and lash black, but I had hardly foreseen the respectable Mrs Balfour needing such attentions. Could I remember it from the times Grant had insisted on painting it onto me? (For the disposition of power between ‘mistress’ and Miss Abbott had its reflection in my bedroom at home.)
That first evening in the servants’ hall was a perfect admixture of comfort, tiredness and boredom, and if one can get these three ingredients in proper proportion nothing is nicer; to be too tired to mind that one is bored and too comfortable to mind that one is tired makes for an evening of guilty pleasure that comes my way rather seldom. Mrs Hepburn and I occupied the armchairs once more, with Mr Faulds joining us between bursts of duty in the dining room; Mattie, Harry and John played gin rummy; Clara was nowhere to be seen – busy upstairs with the dinner guests, I supposed, as was Stanley – but the other girls sat sewing and chatting until the dirty plates began to come down again, then Millie and Eldry returned to the scullery with groans and yawns and Mrs Hepburn sauntered after them to supervise and plan for the following day.
Phyllis immediately took up Mrs Hepburn’s place in the armchair; I was fast beginning to see that these soft chairs were the prize of the servants’ hall and that no amount of time was too short to make it worth claiming one whenever all of one’s seniors had left the room.
‘So have you met master then?’ she said softly to me. The lads at their card-game were not listening. I nodded, trying not to perk up too visibly. ‘And what did you think of him?’ I took a while before I answered.
‘He seemed very nice,’ I said. ‘Very friendly. But I did wonder…’
‘Oh, he’s friendly all right,’ said Phyllis. ‘Just make sure you lock your door tonight, that’s all.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘One of those, is he?’ I felt a thrill of sophistication as I said this and Phyllis nodded, her eyelids half-closed and her tongue exploring her cheek in a triumphal show of ennui.
‘And who goes in to light his fire of a morning?’ I said. ‘Not you, dear, is it? I hope not.’
‘He’s never bothered me – thank goodness,’ Phyllis said. ‘Not in that way.’
‘But Miss Abbott?’ I said. She nodded.
‘And Mr Faulds can say what he likes about that baronet in North Berwick being a step up,’ she said, ‘but we all know why Maggie didn’t work her notice.’
‘Forgive me prying, dear,’ I wriggled forward in my chair and spoke even more softly to her, ‘but when you said he didn’t bother you in that way, what did you…’
‘I’m on notice,’ said Phyllis, ‘for giving him cheek. I’m on my last warning and if I don’t behave I’ll be out on my ear with no character.’
‘Well, I like that!’ I said. ‘For sticking up for your chums? For telling him to leave the others alone?’
‘No…’ said Phyllis, slowly. ‘It’s a funny thing, Miss Rossiter, but I can’t even remember what it was that riled him up so, what it was I’m supposed to have said or done.’ She shook her head. ‘He must have made me so angry I had some kind of a brainstorm. Well, it would be like him.’
‘Right then,’ said Mr Faulds’s voice, making us both jump. He was standing in the doorway, cradling a Schweppes bottle in his arms like a sleeping baby. ‘This is nearly empty,’ he said. ‘We’ll finish it off down here to let me send it back for filling. But not tonight.’ He flicked the central light off from the switch plate by the door, setting off a chorus of tutting and injured sighs.
‘You might have let us finish the hand, Mr Faulds,’ said John.
‘You can get up early and finish it in the morning if you’ve a mind,’ replied the butler.
‘Oh, Mr Faulds,’ said Phyllis, ‘what about our sing-song?’ She nodded towards the far end of the room where, in the corner by the window, there was a small and rather battered piano.
‘That’s right,’ said Mattie, jumping up and trotting towards it. ‘You promised, Mr Faulds. And it’s my turn to play. I’ve been practising two hours a day, every day.’
‘Mattie MacGibney!’ said Phyllis, staring at him with her eyes crossed in a comical way. ‘When do you ever get two spare hours a day to practise without bothering anyone? Don’t tell such fibs.’ Mattie blushed and mumbled an apology. ‘We usually have songs at the piano on a Sunday, Miss Rossiter,’ said Phyllis, turning to me, ‘but we were all upside down yesterday with Maggie and everything and we missed it. We go to pieces when it’s Mr Faulds’s Sunday off sometimes.’
The butler gave her a fond smile but said nothing. Mattie was on the piano stool now, twirling himself around on his tiptoes to get the thing to the correct height for his slight frame. Mr Faulds stood with his hand still up at the switch, half frowning and half smiling at Phyllis.
‘Not tonight, Phyllis,’ he said, jerking his thumb upwards. ‘Master’s sitting on in the dining room with the port and you know how the sound carries.’
‘Any road,’ I said, ‘who wants hymns of a Monday night, really?’
‘Oh, it’s not hymns,’ said Phyllis.
‘Anything but!’ John put in.
‘Now, now,’ said Mr Faulds, ‘you’ll be giving Miss Rossiter the wrong idea of us all.’
‘Mr Faulds was on the music halls,’ said Mattie. He had stopped twirling round and was hanging on to the edges of the stool waiting for his head to stop spinning.
‘For a while, Fanny,’ said the butler, ‘in my distant youth, and I know a good lot of songs, but I’m careful what ones I pass on to the youngsters. “Boiled Beef and Carrots” kind of thing. And “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor”. None of the ripe stuff.’ He winked at me and I tried a wordly smirk back at him even though I had never been in a music hall to hear any of the other songs that he might be suppressing.
‘Aye, there’s an iron fist of censorship, right enough,’ said Harry, to a chorus of groans and a raspberry from John. ‘Mattie and me know a wheen of good songs too.’ He lay back in his chair and broke out in a confident baritone, sending the words straight up in the air towards the ceiling and the dining room above. ‘The people’s flag is deepest red, it shrouded oft our martyred-’
‘Quiet!’ As lusty as Harry’s voice was, Mr Faulds drowned him out, all that projecting from his diaphragm to the back row of the upper circle, I supposed. ‘Now, come on, lads, and don’t keep me waiting, Stanley’s off down the garden already.’
Harry stood up grinning and he and the other two filed out, looking sleepy enough to convince one that they welcomed bedtime really. Mr Faulds gathered up the pack of cards once they had gone, shuffled them efficiently and slapped them down onto the chimneypiece with a wink for Phyllis and me, then he followed the lads out of the room.
‘They sleep upstairs in the carriage house,’ Phyllis told me. ‘So Mr Faulds has to lock the back door behind them at night. He’s always chivvying them away to their beds so he can get to his. Mind you, he’s not usually as sharp as all this – it’s not ten yet.’ She shrugged. ‘But if he’s at them he’ll come back and start on at me, so I’d better shift myself.’ She yawned extravagantly and stretched her arms above her head. ‘You can suit yourself,’ she said, ‘but Mr Faulds puts the lamps off when he turns in, so…’
I was well used to creeping around with a candle but my night’s work was far from over and I could not afford to linger. I shared a few words with Mrs Hepburn who was standing in the doorway of the larder just outside her kitchen, marking off orders for the morning on a slate, and popped my head into the scullery to say goodnight to Eldry and Millie, who had got as far as scrubbing out the sinks with sand and sluicing the floor and who looked pleased to be paid the attention. I called up a soft greeting to Clara who was coming down from the dining room at last, white in face and slow of step with tiredness, then I retired. As I stood splashing my face in my little washroom – with a candle, in fact, since it turned out that the electricity which surged so luxuriously around the rest of the house had not yet reached that corner – I could see Mattie’s pale hair gleaming in the moonlight as the three boys made their way down the garden and could hear Mr Faulds locking up the back kitchen door above my head and trying the handles. A few minutes later, as I sidled out into the passageway with my nightdress over my shoulder, he was coming along the corridor towards the sub-basement door.