‘Now you really must get a board, Molly-moo,’ I said. ‘Or that table will be kindling by the time you’re done.’ Millie giggled and wiped her cheek, leaving a smear of blood there, then went to the scullery to fetch one.
9
Lollie was in brighter spirits by the evening. The police had given permission for the funeral arrangements to proceed on the understanding that cremation was out of the question; the will was to be read the next day, allowing Lollie thereafter to begin to make plans for her widowhood; and as for her state of lonely isolation, Great Aunt Gertrude was on her way. How exactly the old lady expected to get from Inverness to Edinburgh, when the nation was at a standstill and strike officials were stopping motorcars left and right to check that they were not carrying blackleg goods, was unclear. It seemed she had left home without maid or chauffeur, but with a full tank of petrol, two cans in the dicky and an unshakeable belief that her long lifetime of getting exactly what she wanted when she wanted it would hold good, whatever pickets, blockades and rioting gangs might be doing to disrupt the lives of lesser mortals than she.
Downstairs, Mr Faulds was safely back in the bosom of the household after Mrs Hepburn’s selfless dash to the police station to gather him home, and the amazing news of their tryst (which, to give the two principals their due, they did not attempt to rise above but instead acknowledged with throat-clearings and jaw-scratchings on the butler’s side and with blushing smiles from his beloved) gave a larky air to the servants’ hall which an uninformed guest would have found quite appalling.
Miss Rossiter’s position as a newcomer was most welcome, as it conferred upon her the opportunity to sit rather quietly in the midst of the party (and a party it almost was) watching faces, chasing down glances and listening to anything which was not quite being said. The rest of the servants were gathered around the piano, beer glasses in hand, singing an endless selection of popular melodies from the music halls, and rather saltier ones than Mr Faulds had hinted were in their repertoire too: even as far as something apparently called ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ in which each verse was worse than the last.
‘You certainly have been practising, Mattie,’ said Mr Faulds when the hall boy had got through a complicated run of trills in the lead-in to a love song.
‘Aye, I have,’ said Mattie, ‘but it’s more fun to play out loud and no’ fret that I’m gonny disturb anybody.’ He pressed down the loud pedal and fairly banged the notes out of the thing, and Clara and Phyllis pressed their hands together under their hearts, fluttered their eyelids and began singing.
‘Oh Cupid, your harp had
me fooled at the start as
it told me his love was for keeps,
but he’s scarpered…’
‘Take the man’s part, Mr Faulds,’ said Mrs Hepburn when the girls had got through the first verse and the others had joined them for the chorus (Oh, pluck my heart out now, why don’t you, for everything else you could pluck is away), but Mr Faulds shook his head and held his hands up, protesting.
‘I’m no singer,’ he said, ‘and John knows this one.’ John straightened up and cleared his throat.
‘Forgive me, my maiden,
you are most mistaken,
if you’re telling me
that you languish forsaken,’
he sang in a fair approximation of the most affected music-hall swain. All he needed was a straw boater on the back of his head and a cane to twirl.
‘Oh, pierce me through the heart, why don’t you?
For everything else is torn in two,’
sang the company. I wondered if Millie, carolling away merrily, understood the import of this lyric, if anyone did, and I found myself sharing a little sympathy with the only member of our number who was not lifting his voice in song; Harry, hunched over his latest strike bulletin, scowling at the din.
‘I’m worried that mistress will hear them,’ I said to him, going to sit on the next seat to his at the long table. ‘It doesn’t seem right.’
‘She won’t,’ said Harry, ‘she’ll either be in her boudoir or in that wee parlour at the back. As long as they pipe down before she goes to her bedroom,’ he pointed straight up with his thumb, ‘we’ll be all right. And anyway, do her some good for a change to see the world getting on without a care when she’s miserable.’
This was remarkably callous, I thought, and I could not let it pass unchallenged.
‘What has she done to deserve such scorn?’ I said.
He had the grace to look uncomfortable as he answered.
‘Not her in particular, miss,’ he said. ‘Just her sort. People like her in general, I mean.’
‘Oh Harry,’ I said, ‘there is no such thing as people in general. Everyone is someone very particular.’
He argued on – his sort will always argue on – but I had stopped listening because a thought which had been nudging gently against me all day now struck me square. Everyone had agreed that no one could open a locked and bolted door without being heard by those in the rooms nearby. Miss Rossiter, however, was not where she should have been that night, close by the sub-basement door. And Mrs Hepburn and Mr Faulds – who ought to have been asleep, one beside each of the other doors – had been cavorting together. Now, had Mrs Hepburn said where they were? I concentrated hard to bring the memory of the conversation back to mind, and I was almost certain that she had used the phrase ‘I was with him’. Yes, she had said, ‘I was with him,’ definitely not ‘He was with me,’ which meant that her room, above mine, was empty. I sat back.
Of course that still left Phyllis and Clara who would hear the back door, but then Phyllis had come into that seventeen pounds somehow, and perhaps Clara was an unusually deep sleeper and Phyllis knew it – had not Phyllis complained of how Clara snored? – but how could Phyllis know that Mrs Hepburn was at the front of the house, tucked in with Mr Faulds under the red chenille bedspread, and that I was four flights up on Lollie’s chaise?
‘Are you all right, Miss Rossiter?’ said Harry, who had stopped talking quite some time ago.
‘Fine, Harry,’ I said. ‘I think, though, that I shall say goodnight.’ I needed at least notes if not diagrams for this.
Despite the lusty singing and the glasses of beer which were going strong when I left the room, I had not been in bed long when I heard the party dispersing. Indeed, Harry, Stanley, John and Mattie leaving by the kitchen door sounded like an army on manoeuvres. Mr Faulds locked up after them and shot the bolts with his usual gusto and then I heard Mrs Hepburn enter her room above my head. Mr Faulds and the girls descending the stairs on the other side of the wall was enough to make the water tremble in my bedside glass and, when he secured the sub-basement door, once again the bolts going home rang out all around and above like a hammer on an anvil. I shook my head. No one could possibly have breached this citadel without someone knowing.
Mr Faulds strode away and there was silence, except for the sound of Mrs Hepburn moving around in her stockinged feet, then I heard someone scamper down towards me from the kitchen level. I sprang out of bed and opened my door a crack. Clara was rounding the corner of the passage with her shoes in one hand and a candle in the other, unguarded and guttering.
‘Oh! Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘You nearly made me jump out my skin.’