A Countess Below Stairs (3 page)

And hence this agency, which up to now had spelled nothing but disaster and whose latest offering had just been admitted to the housekeeper’s room.

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Anna had curtsied - she had curtsied deeply - and now stood before them with clasped hands, awaiting her fate. And as they studied her, the butler and the housekeeper sighed.

Neither of them would have found it easy to describe the characteristics of a housemaid, but they knew instinctively that despite her navy coat and skirt, her high-necked blouse and drab straw boater, this girl had none of them.

The entry on ‘Slavonic Painting’ in his Encyclopaedia of World Art gave Proom a head start on Mrs Bassenthwaite in accounting for the long, lustrous eyes framed in thick lashes the colour of sunflower seeds. It threw light, too, on the suppliant pose of the narrow, supple hands, the air of having simultaneously swallowed the sins of the world and a lighted candle which emanated from the new housemaid. The saints on Russian icons, Proom knew, were apt to carry on like that. There, however, the religious motif suddenly came to an end. Though Anna had attempted to skewer her hair back into a demure knot, glossy tendrils had escaped from behind her strangulated ears, and the bridge of her attenuated Tartar nose was disconcertingly dusted with freckles.

‘Your name is Anna Grazinsky?’ said Proom, consulting the paper from the agency, already aware that he was playing for time. ‘And you are of Russian nationality?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I see here that you have no previous experience of housework?’

‘No, sir. But I will work very hard and I will learn.’

Proom sighed and glanced at Mrs Bassenthwaite who lightly shook her head. For the girl’s accent, with its rolling ‘r’s and lilting intensity, quite failed to disguise her educated voice, as did the shabby coat and skirt the grace of her movements. ‘Inexperienced’ was bad; foreign’ was worse… but a ladyl This time the agency had gone too far.

‘I’m afraid you may not understand how hard you would be expected to work,’ said Proom, still somehow hoping to avoid his fate. ‘We are taking on temporary staff for a period of intense cleaning and refurbishment prior to the Earl of Westerholme’s return. During this time no formal training would be given and you would be expected to make yourself useful anywhere: in the kitchens, the scullery, even outside.’

‘Like a tweeny?’ enquired Anna, gazing at him out of rapt, tea-coloured eyes.

Tweenies had loomed large in the English novels of her childhood: romantic, oppressed figures second only to Charles Kingsley’s little chimney sweeps in their power to evoke sympathy and tears.

Proom and Mrs Bassenthwaite exchanged glances. Neither of them felt equal to explaining to Anna that nothing so mundane as a tweeny would have been allowed within miles of Mersham, these unfortunates being confined to lowly middle class households employing only a housemaid and cook.

‘I really think, Miss Grazinsky,’ said Mrs Bassenthwaite, leaning forward, ‘that you would do better to look for a different type of employment. A governess, perhaps.’

Anna stood before them, silent. It was not, however, a passive silence, reminding Proom inexorably of a puppy he had once owned not asking to be taken for a walk. ! ‘I promise I will work,’ she said at last. ‘Most truly, I promise it.’

The butler and the housekeeper held steady. If there is one thing dreaded by all experienced servants, it is a gently-bred female below stairs.

Then Anna Grazinsky produced a single word. ‘Please?’ she said.

Mrs Bassenthwaite looked at Proom. After all, they were only taking her on as a temporary measure. She nodded and Proom said, ‘Very well. You can have a month’s trial. Your salary will be twelve and six a week -and there’s no need to keep on curtsying’.’

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Anna had been dreading a dormitory shared with the other maids who would despise her, but she was assigned a little attic tucked under the domes and urns and chimneys that adorned Mersham’s roof. It was stuffy with its one small window, but scrupulously clean, containing an iron bed, a chair, a deal chest and a rag rug on the floor. A brown print dress and two starched aprons were laid out for her with a white mob cap. Another uniform, black alpaca with a frilled muslin cap and apron, hung behind the door for ‘best’.

She unpacked quickly, placing Selina Strickland’s tome on the chair beside her bed. It was very hot there, under the roof, and very silent. And suddenly, standing in the tiny room, sealed off from the body of the house and the world she had once known, she felt so bereft and

homesick that tears sprang to her eyes.

Her father’s well-remembered voice came to save her. ‘When you’re sad, my Little Star, go out of doors. It’s always better underneath the open sky.’

She went over to the window and pushed it open. If she pulled herself up she could actually climb out on to the ledge that ran behind the balustrade…

A moment later she was standing there, one arm round a stone warrior and sure enough it was better, it was good … Mersham’s roof, glistening in the sunshine, was a gay and insouciant world of its own with its copper domes and weathervanes, its sculptured knights at arms. The view was breathtaking. Facing her was the long avenue of limes, the gatehouse, and beyond it, the village with its simple, grey church and trim houses clustered round the green. On her left were the walled gardens and the topiary; to her right, if she craned round her warrior, she saw a landscape out of an Italian dream: a blue lake curving away behind the house, a grassy hill topped by a white temple, an obelisk floating above the trees … She could smell freshly cut grass, the blossoming limes, and hear, in the distance, a woman calling her chickens home.

‘One could be happy here,’ thought Anna. Standing there, on the roof of his house, watching the honey-hued stone change colour with the shadows of the clouds that raced across the high, light sky, Anna Grazinsky addressed the absent and unknown earl: ‘I will make your house very beautiful for you,’ she said. ‘I promise. You will see!’

Then she climbed down into the room again and picked up the brown print dress. It was too large, but the apron would hold it in and she’d manage for now. The cap, though, was a problem. Whatever angle she put it on, it slipped drunkenly, if not unbecomingly, over her ‘But first I will go and wash,’ decided Anna, for she had grown hot and grubby on the roof - and set off to search for a bathroom.

It was a foolish and unproductive quest. Since the lovely Palladian house had first been built, in 1712, there had been many improvements - but a bathroom on the servants’ floor was not among them.

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Rather more servants than usual had gathered in the kitchen for a quick cup of tea as Anna came downstairs. For, of course, news of her foreignness, her general unsuitability, her gaffe about the ‘tweeny’ had spread like wildfire.

The kitchen at Mersham was a huge room, high and vaulted, with a battleship of a range, a gigantic dresser full of gleaming pewter and a wooden table large enough to be a skating rink. Standing at the table now, crumbling pastry like small rain through her deft, plump fingers was Mrs Park, the soft-voiced, gentle countrywoman who had replaced the chef, Signor Manotti. The fact that she was in every way unworthy to succeed so great a man was Mrs Park’s continuing despair. No cook ever had less ‘temperament’ or more skill. Unable to pronounce the French names of the exquisite dishes she sent to the table, she could never believe she was not failing some culinary god with her Englishness, her simplicity, her female sex. Everyone loved her and she had made of the kitchen, so often a, forbidden and defended fortress, the place where all the servants came to rest.

Beside Mrs Park sat the first footman, James, one of the few who had returned from the war. Under the guidance of Mr Proom, whom he revered, James had worked himself up from lamp boy to his present eminence. He had started life as a scrawny and undersized Cockney and it was Proom, seeing in the lad a real potential for self-development, who had brought him a pamphlet describing the body building exercises used by the current Mr Universe. Since then, James had never looked back. The state of his gastrocnemius and the progress of his wondrously swelling biceps were matters of continuing concern to the maids, who bore with fortitude the knowledge that the real glories - the fanning of his trapezius across the small of his back, the powerful arch of his gluteus maximus - were, for reasons of propriety, forever lost to them.

Next to James sat Louise, the head housemaid and below her the under housemaids, buxom giggly Peggy and her younger sister, Pearl. Sid, the second footman sat opposite James; Florence, the ancient scullery maid was filling her bucket by the boiler; Win, the simple-minded kitchen girl who nevertheless understood Mrs Park’s lightest word, was perched humbly on a stool near the foot of the table. Even Proom, who habitually took tea in the housekeeper’s room, had lingered by the dresser, busy with a list.

Light footsteps were heard coming down the flagged stone corridor and Anna appeared in the doorway.

Louise, the pert and acerbacious head housemaid, was the first to see her.

‘Here comes the tweeny!’ she said.

‘Now Louise,’ admonished Mrs Park gently, removing her hands from the bowl of pastry. ‘Come in, dear, and have a cup of tea.’

But Louise’s gibe had in any case fallen flat. Anna smiled with pleasure, came forward to curtsy to Mrs Park and, when bidden to sit down, slipped into a place below Win’s at the very foot of the table.

The servants exchanged glances. Whatever was going to be wrong with the new housemaid, it had to be admitted that it wasn’t snobbery or ‘side’.

The next day Anna began to work. It was work such as she had not known existed: not as a nursing orderly in the hospital in Petersburg, not as a waitress in the transit camp in Constantinople. Between the myriad, airless, servants’ attics tucked away beneath the balustrades and statuary, and the kitchens, pantries and cellars that ran like catacombs under the body of the house, was a world which knew nothing of either. Here were the great state rooms: the famous library, the picture gallery with its Van Dykes and Titians, the gold salon and the music room. It was to the spring cleaning of these rooms, shuttered and shrouded during the war, that Proom had assigned Anna.

‘She won’t last two days,’ prophesied Louise, the ginger-haired and prickly head housemaid. ‘You’ll see, she’ll be back in London with her tail between her legs before the week’s out.’

But Peggy and her sister Pearl were not so sure. There’d been a sort of look about the Russian girl.

That first day Anna rose at five-thirty, snatched a piece of bread and jam in the servants’ hall, and by six, clutching her housemaid’s bag, had followed Louise, Peggy and James, loaded with buckets, stepladders, druggets and mops, up to the library.

Mersham’s library was world-famous. Its satinwood bookcases, its pedestal desk and writing tables were made by Chippendale and reckoned to be among bis finest work. A sumptuous, moss green Aubusson stretched to the windows of the south terrace and on the barrel-vaulted ceiling the Muses swam most dec-oratively.

‘Oh, what a beautiful room!’ exclaimed Anna, only to get a sour look from Louise, who was briskly pouring soda into a bucket.

‘ere,’ she said, handing Anna a bucket of steaming water and a cloth. ‘Start on this geyser, and don’t drip!’

‘This geyser’ was Milton in old age, whose marble head stared thoughtfully and somewhat snottily from a plinth between the windows. When Anna had rinsed and dried the poet’s face, the convolutions of his wig and the lacework on his Puritan collar, she moved on to Hercules resting - unnecessarily, she could not help feeling - on a slain lion, whose mane had most horribly collected the dust. Next came the overmantel depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno.

‘Better wring your cloth out harder for those,’ advised Louise, looking with disgust at the tortured souls writhing in agony across the chimney breast. ‘Bloomin’ sculpture! I hate the stuff.’

By this time Anna’s water was black with dirt and she had carefully to carry her bucket down a long parquet corridor, across the blue John and jasper tiles of the great hall, down the service stairs and through a green baize door into the scullery where Florence, the ancient scullery maid, filled it for her. She was crossing the great hall again when Fate dealt her an undeserved blow in the form of Baskerville. who discovered her with yelps of joy in a place where it was meet and right for her to be and padded passionately after her into the library. Nor could James, trying to dismantle the chandeliers, or Louise, cleaning the windows, prevent him from lying like a felled ox across the foot of the stepladder on which Anna, scrubbing Plato, Aristotle and Cicero in a niche above the door, was precariously perched with her bucket.

By lunchtime Anna’s back ached and her hands were sore but she persevered and she kept - though this was harder - silence. It was late in the afternoon when, moving a silver photograph frame to safety, she found herself staring for the first time at the long-awaited earl.

The photograph, taken just before the war, showed, two young men standing on the steps that led to the front door. The older was strikingly handsome with regular features, springing hair and an easy smile. The other, who was hardly more than a boy, was slighter, darker, and had turned half-away as though looking at a landscape visible to him alone.

‘That’s Lord George, the one that was killed,’ said Peggy, coming over to her and pointing at the older of the two. ‘He was a smasher! My, didn’t we half have to run for it when he was around!’

‘And this is the new earl?’ queried Anna. ‘His brother?’

‘That’s right. Mr Rupert, he was then. He’s much quieter like. Got a lovely smile, though.’

‘He looks nice, I think,’ said Anna, and stepping over the recumbent Baskerville, she began to scrub the cold and protuberent stomach of Frederick the Great.

Just before it was time to pack up for the day, Proom appeared silently as was his wont and took Louise aside.