‘Well, let’s not dwell on such things unduly,’ said Mr Faulds, addressing us all. ‘I’m sure that Superintendent Hardy and Mr Ettrick between them will see mistress right and she’ll do right by us too. But if any of you does have something to say to Mr Hardy when he returns, you should say it, and God forgive you for not saying it straight away on Monday like you know you should have.’ He shot a look at me as though to see if that would satisfy me. I gave a tight smile and a suggestion of a nod. ‘Now, it’s Friday tomorrow,’ he said. He dabbed up a few scone crumbs with his finger, chewed them daintily and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘And it should have been Maggie’s day off.’
‘Oh, can I have it, Mr Faulds?’ said Phyllis. ‘It’s not fair having a rotten old Tuesday for my free afternoon. Let me swap it, and I’ll do Great Aunt Goitre and not complain – promise.’
‘You’re doing her anyway,’ said Clara. ‘It’s your turn.’
‘I’ve decided that Miss Rossiter should step into Maggie’s free days,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Sorry, Phyllis. Fanny, if that’s all right with you.’
I could not have been more delighted, for Alec would be here by the following day and a free afternoon was more than I could have hoped for to spend with him. We had not arranged how to meet but later that evening, with the greatest imaginable fuss and uproar, Mrs Lambert-Leslie finally arrived. Mr Faulds went out to meet the lady, Stanley helping to ferry a great many bags and boxes up the front steps, Clara – caught on the hop – rushed upstairs with the water jug and hot bottle for her bedroom, Lollie rang down to ask if that was Great Aunt Gertrude arriving, Phyllis sped to her side to say that it was and her passenger got out of the motorcar, let himself in at the area steps and pushed a note for Miss Rossiter through the letter box. Miss Rossiter was in the servants’ hall at the time and saw the three sets of legs come down with the note and go up again: one pair of legs in grey flannel bags and town brogues, four liver and white legs with soft fringes, and another four, long, smooth, beloved, spotted legs which brought a lump to my throat as I glimpsed them.
‘Damned fellow brought his dogs,’ Great Aunt Gertrude was saying, as I stepped into Lollie’s boudoir with a tea tray, ‘all the way from Perthshire with two tails whipping in my face. Pretty little spaniel and a Dalmatian bitch with even less sense than most. Tea?’ she enquired, seeing me. I nodded and bobbed. ‘Oh well, why not,’ she said, ‘as long as there’s a drink on its way soon. And I smelled ham when I came in. Run down and get Mrs Hepburn to cut me a sandwich, would you, girl? And one for my niece. I don’t like this peaky look of hers.’
No one, I thought, could describe Mrs Lambert-Leslie as having a peaky look. She was a large pink person, with plain features gathered all together in the middle of her face and a great deal of cheek and jowl and forehead around them. Her hair was white and fluffed up into a fan-shape at the front, leaving a sparse little bun, very neglected, at the back, just above her collar. It was not an attempt at a fashionable hairstyle which had gone woefully wrong, nor even a relic of some earlier arrangement which had survived and mutated as one often sees in ladies of a certain age. It was inexplicable and could only have been carried off by a woman of titanic self-confidence. Great Aunt Gertrude, needless to say, managed.
‘Who was it who gave you the lift anyway?’ said Lollie, and I was interested to hear that her voice was calm and sounded neither flat nor suspiciously animated. The doctor must have mixed up a magic potion out of his bag which had dulled her down and picked her up and left her in the middle. ‘You didn’t just stand by the side of the road and wave your stick, did you?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ said Great Aunt Gertrude with a shout of laughter, ‘but no. He’s Millicent Osborne’s sister Daphne’s grandson. Dorset. Good family. Although there was something about him… I forget what now… came into an estate somehow that wasn’t quite the thing. But it’s a neat enough place. Of course, I only saw the drive and the hall, but you can tell a lot from gravel, I always say. And he’s not married. So I’ve invited him for dinner. You were too young last time of course, but you can’t hang about now. Here – girl! What are you standing there for? Sandwich, sandwich. And you can take the smaller of the two bags with the straps on downstairs with you. All that’s for washing.’
I glanced at Lollie again as I left to see how well she was standing up to this extraordinary person and her outlandish suggestion, but either the doctor’s powders were potent ones or she was too used to her aunt to be shocked by anything, for she gave me a mild smile to send me on my way and turned back to listen to the report of the journey which was just beginning.
I half expected a timorous knock or two on my door that night or the following morning, as one or other of the junior staff wrestled with their consciences and decided to give up their secrets. I even made sure that I was busy in the little laundry room so that I might not miss the knock when it came, and listened intently whenever I heard a pair of feet descend to the sub-basement. There was a great deal of traffic up and down for, as well as the usual commerce of the house and the extra burden of our exacting guest, Mr Hardy had indeed returned and all the servants trooped up to be grilled by him once more.
All I got for my pains, in the end, was a pile of rather limp underclothes – Lollie’s (I drew the line at ‘the smaller of’ Great Aunt Gertrude’s strapped bags which was not much smaller and was stuffed to bursting) – as well as a crick in my neck and very sore knuckles from scrubbing wet cloth between them. There was presumably some knack to this which Grant had neglected to pass on to me, but I consoled myself that dishpan hands, as they call them in the cold cream advertisements, were an authentic touch for Miss Rossiter and I should take them out on my free afternoon with pride.
After luncheon – haddock and egg pie, fried potatoes and pickled beetroot followed by steamed ginger sponge and custard – I tidied my hair, put on a cameo brooch and a pair of fine stockings, jammed my copious notes into Miss Rossiter’s best bag and left by the area door, to meet Alec – as his letter had suggested and as was most fitting for a lady’s maid on her free afternoon – under the Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens.
I set off with head high and heart stout, but by the time I had crossed George Street – the spine of the New Town – and was descending again, my footsteps had started to falter as I imagined what I might see when I emerged onto Princes Street, with who knew what gangs gathered there and what scuffles brewing.
There were indeed a dozen or so men standing arm in arm at the top of the steps which led down to Waverley station, with perhaps a dozen more marching up and down in front of them carrying signs on sticks. Three policemen stood in the road, very still, simply watching, but they had their whistles between their teeth: even at this distance I could see the glint of the chains which fastened them to their breast pockets.
And how could three policemen stand still in the carriageway on Edinburgh’s busiest thoroughfare on a Friday afternoon? Quite simply because aside from the little tableau they made with the pickets and the sign wavers, Princes Street was empty. Oh, the shops were lighted and open and there were customers going in and out, but very few, and they walked quickly with their heads down and their voices low and, besides, the pavement with its window displays and awnings and tempting doorways, which would draw the eye on any other shopping street but this one, is always – even on ordinary days – belittled by the great broad flat road and, on its other side, the green sweep of gardens falling away and then rising up to the jagged skyline of the Old Town and the hulk of the Castle Rock. Today, with the road deserted, tramlines still, bus stops unpeopled, rabble of motor lorries and taxicabs and horse carts gone like ghosts when the lamp snaps on, a handful of shoppers scurrying in and out with their parcels were like sandhoppers on the tideline against the expanse of emptiness behind them, and so the emptiness was all one could see and all one could hear was the silence.