‘I may be gone from here, soon. Tonight, even,’ she says at length, her tone betraying no dismay at the prospect.
‘What are you talking about?’ Sophie Bell asks, finishing her inspection and slumping into a chair. With a sweep of her arm, she pushes away a pile of peas to be podded, so that she can spread her bosom, her mottled arms, across the table top.
‘I think I am dismissed. The vicar’s wife is speaking to him on my behalf, but I doubt she’ll convince him,’ says Cat. The housekeeper gapes.
‘But… what for, for Christ’s sake? What ’ave you done, you minx?’
‘I… go out in the night. I don’t sleep. I go out into Thatcham, and places. And now he has found me out in this. So I am dismissed.’ She shrugs, as if the future were not suddenly an amorphous thing, shapeless and menacing and empty. No reference for a dismissed servant. No further positions for her, with this last chance spent.
‘Cat Morley… Cat Morley…’ Mrs Bell says her name as if it is a very curse to be uttered in disbelief, in extremis. Her sliver eyes are wider than ever before. ‘How could you be so stupid? And you so bright?’ she asks, and this is so far from what Cat expected, so far from the scorn and the derision, that at first she can’t think how to reply.
‘I… I love a man,’ she says at last, pausing with the pick buried deep in the salt, stuck fast there. She jabbed it too hard, drove it too deep. Mrs Bell shakes her head.
‘A man! What good is a man? You had everything here!’ Cat wrestles mutely with the pick. Flies circle the stuffy room, and Mrs Bell seems, for once, to be robbed of words.
‘What everything? Truly? What have I here but every day the same, like I am not a person at all but a machine? And to be told that this is my lot, and I should be happy for it while others have it that they can lie around and… and… press flowers all the livelong day!’ she cries, her voice shaking treacherously.
‘What everything? A bed! In a clean, warm house… three meals a day and an income – employers that don’t beat you, but tolerate your lip when it gets away from you! That’s what everything!’ Mrs Bell says. ‘Is that not enough for you, when countless thousands would wish to be so fortunate?’
‘No,’ Cat tells her solemnly. ‘It is not enough. I can’t abide it. I can’t.’ She waits, and watches; but the housekeeper merely stares ahead, then down at her chapped and ruined hands, and does not speak. Cat takes a slow breath. ‘If I am gone by tonight, I wanted to say I’m sorry about your boy. About you losing him. And I’m sorry you lost your husband too. I’m sorry if I… scorned you, for being a good servant. You are everything you should be. I am the one with no place in any of it, as you’ve been telling me from the start,’ she says, in a measured tone.
‘Don’t give me contrition, girl. It don’t suit you,’ Sophie Bell replies, but the whip-crack tone of her voice has gone slack, has lost all its sting, and wanders instead like her gaze around the room; unravelling like a loose thread from a hem.
Robin emerges just a quarter of an hour later. Hester is in her room, but she hears the study door open and then close with a soft, resolute thump. There had been voices, low and muffled, the entire time the theosophist was in with her husband. Mostly Robin’s, as far as she could tell, with a few loaded pauses; a few hesitant, barely audible words in Albert’s voice. Even through the floor she could sense his uncertainty. And yet she knows, as she hears the theosophist’s footsteps go first into the parlour, and then along the hall to the bottom of the stairs, that he will have got his way. For whatever is Robin’s way is now Albert’s way as well. She sits at her dressing table with her powder puff in her fingertips, poised by her cheek. She had been about to repair the damage her tears had done, but had caught her own eye in the mirror, and halted. Her eyes are puffy, and below them her cheeks seem more sunken and drawn than ever before. Her hair is flat and lifeless, and in the bleak light from the window it has no lustre at all. She is a dull creature indeed, she thinks. No wonder Albert should prefer his fairies, his beautiful theosophist. The powder puff trembles a little, sending a scatter of fine, pale dust down onto the mahogany table top.
Robin’s footsteps on the stairs make her heart jolt. His walk is so instantly recognisable – he makes no effort to be subtle, to tread quietly. He bangs about like a thoughtless child… but no. Hester can no longer think of him as childlike – however unruly his hair, however quick his grin. He knocks respectfully at the door, and she does not answer.
‘Hester? Mrs Canning?’ he calls. She hears the mocking way in which he interchanges these two forms of address, as if it is up to him to choose which one to use, appropriate or no. ‘Hetty? I have good news,’ he says; and though her pulse beats hard inside her head, she still does not reply. In the mirror she sees her lips pinch tightly together, a grim line that makes her even less lovely. There is a long pause, and then he chuckles. ‘I shan’t huff, or puff, or blow your house down… but I have it from Albert that Cat can stay on. There – doesn’t that cheer you up? He has some… conditions to this, which she’s not going to like, but I did my best. At least she’s not to be cast out into the world without means. Hester? Aren’t you going to thank me?’ he asks. No! she cries silently, suddenly sure that whatever the reason he has done this thing, it is in his own interests. ‘Very well. Perhaps you are resting. Perhaps you are sulking. Either way, I shall see you at dinner, Mrs Canning; and thanks to me there will be a maid to serve it to us.’
His footsteps drift idly away, back down the stairs, and Hester breathes again, and tries to be relieved that Cat is not to go. But even this makes her uneasy, because it is his doing and he proclaims it to be on her behalf. Her head is aching, a tight band of pain around her skull. Slowly, she rises, and lies down on the bed. She had meant to think, to plan, but her mind is both full and empty, and she can make no sense of her thoughts, nor find anything in her experience or education to inform her how to act in this alien situation. And neither can she sleep. So she merely lies, in dread of the dinner hour.
Before dinner, and at a crucial point in its preparation, Mrs Bell is summoned under protest to go upstairs and be addressed by the vicar and his wife.
‘Watch those pies, Cat – another five minutes to brown the crusts is all they want,’ she says as she waddles from the room. Cat stares steadily at the doorway once the fat housekeeper has gone through it, and tries to guess what it might mean. The whole house is loaded with tension, paused in anticipation like a clock wound too tight. Perhaps it is only the heat, but perhaps not. Cat watches the pies, and finishes scrubbing the carrots in a bucket of water, and fetches the cream for dessert from the well; and on her return to the kitchen Mrs Bell is back, and will not look her in the eye, and snaps:
‘Never you mind!’ when Cat asks what the summons was about. A while later, she speaks again. ‘You’re to put their food on the dresser when you take it up. Don’t take it to the table – they’ll serve themselves. The vicar… the vicar don’t want you too close to him,’ she says heavily, her voice laden with disapproval as she passes on this injunction.
‘What does he think – that I’ll infect him with something?’ Cat asks, incredulously.
‘How should I know what the man thinks? Just mind what he says and be thankful you’re still here!’ says Mrs Bell.
So Cat serves dinner with a feeling of angry suspicion to make her hands clumsy. She glares at them as she puts each dish on the dresser, but only Robin Durrant will look at her, and he smiles and thanks her with ostentatious ease. Hester’s eyes are fixed with a kind of desperation at the precise centre of the white tablecloth, and the vicar gazes around him with a serenity that seems wholly out of place, wholly disconnected from the room. Afterwards, when all is cleared away and she has been out for a cigarette, keeping close to the eaves of the house as a few bloated raindrops begin to fall, Cat returns to the kitchen to find Mrs Bell standing with her hands in the pockets of her apron and a look on her face that Cat has never seen before. She pulls up short. Something in that look tells her to run, but she ignores it.